What is an idiom and what makes it different to a metaphor?
Metaphors are not dissimilar to idioms in that they express non-literal meanings, says . They’re important in terms of how we think and talk about the world. For example, we have a metaphorical idea that life is like a journey. That leads us to say things like I’m taking a new path or he’s taken a wrong turn or we’ve come to a crossroads. These phrases express the underlying metaphor, but not in a specific, fixed way.
Idioms are different because they are fixed phrases, explains: “They’re lexically specific combinations of words that we can’t really change.” For example, with the idiom play with fire, the “fire” is metaphorical – it stands for something risky or dangerous – but it’s part of a specific phrase. We can’t change it to play with acid, for example. “The sort of fixed nature of idioms is really important,” says the psycholinguist.
Plenty of idioms kicking about today emerged from the world of sport
• Boxing has given us throw in the towel (give up), on the ropes (near defeat), ducking and diving (evading a difficult situation) and below the belt (unfair).
• To move the goalposts (change the rules or requirements mid process), comes from football.
• American sports have also contributed: ballpark figure (estimate), play hardball (act ruthlessly) and slam dunk (categorical victory).
• Park the bus is a phrase that all football fans will be familiar with. When José Mourinho first entered English football as Chelsea manager, he complained about an opposition team being incredibly defensive: “As we say in Portugal, they brought the bus and they left the bus in front of the goal”. A variation of the phrase stuck and is now commonly used to describe defensive play. And it’s used in other contexts too. “You might talk about a politician parking the bus if they’re set to defend their position at all costs,” says .
• It was Manchester United’s manager Sir Alex Ferguson who first coined the phrase squeaky bum time during the final stages of a closely run Premiership title race. It refers to the sound made when nervously squirming around in a plastic seat in the last, tense moments of a game, or towards the end of a nail-biting season.
Films have been another fruitful source of idioms
• All singing, all dancing is used to describe something with lots of bells and whistles (to use another idiom). But it was originally a very literal strapline on a poster for a 1929 movie called The Broadway Melody. “That was one that was used originally very literally and over time acquired a broader meaning,”
• If you find yourself stuck doing the same thing repeatedly, you might utter the idiom Groundhog Day. The 1993 film, about a guy who’s stuck living the same day over and over again, almost instantly became a euphemism for a monotonous situation.
The phrase is now “completely embedded in the language,” We all understand it to mean something boring and repetitive, even if we have never heard of the original movie – or have a clue what a groundhog actually is!
The rise of the internet has led to lots of new phrases and idioms
• Breaking the internet is now a phrase that people use to mean “something that causes such a stir online that, metaphorically, so many people rush to a website that it threatens to bring it down,”• The idea of something going viral is very much in our vocabulary now.
• The concept of first world problems – things that we complain about but that actually, compared to other parts of the world, may well be relatively minor – started life as a Twitter hashtag.
• OK boomer is a phrase that emerged on platforms like TikTok, Twitter and Reddit as an ironic reply from millennials to some of the perceived criticisms of the older generation. It came to prominence in 2019 when a young, female New Zealand MP, who was giving a speech about climate change, used it to shut down heckles from older, male members of parliament.
Idioms can be produced by politics
• Dead catting or the dead cat strategy might be deployed by politicians who are getting lots of negative attention. It means to do something showy or ostentatious, like announcing a new policy, as way of distraction. “The story goes that this was invented as a tactic by Linton Crosby, who was quite a successful political strategist,”. “He suggested that if you were to walk into a dinner party and throw a dead cat on the table everyone would immediately stop whatever they were talking about and pay attention to the dead cat, so it’s really just a way of completely stopping a negative conversation and diverting attention away from it.”
Not one to be interpreted literally.
