Like searching for an idiom in the proverbial haystack

Recently, I've been doing quite a bit of research into idioms. It's lots of fun, just because idioms are the fun end of language, but it's also quite challenging from a corpus perspective, because idioms are slippery suckers!

In general, idioms pose two key problems for a corpus researcher:

1 Separating the figurative from the literal: so, for example, trying to get stats on how common the idiom 'an own goal' is – as in The PM scored a bit of a political own goal yesterday – you realize you also have a whole load of cites from football reporting about actual own goals. There's no real way of doing this apart from trawling through a sample of corpus lines to make a rough judgement about the percentage of figurative vs literal uses.

2 Dealing with variation: while a few idioms are completely fixed, most allow for a bit of variation and some are so variable as to be almost impossible to pin down.  For example, you might start off with "frighten the life out of someone" … then you realize that the verb scare is common too and actually there are some examples of terrify … then you look some more and find examples for frighten/ scare the (living/ absolute) shit /crap /hell /fuck /heck /daylights /piss /bejesus* out of someone! (*various spellings) All of which I only uncovered by trying out different search patterns, allowing for alternative verbs and gaps for things that get scared out of you.

[lemma="frighten|scare|terrify"][word="the"][]{1,2}[word="out"][word="of"]

Of course though, the more flexible you make your search, the more 'noise' you get – i.e. examples that aren't of the target idiom – so it's a bit of a balancing act with lots of trial and error.

Then yesterday, a chance comment in a TV programme threw up a whole new issue that I'd never considered – the use of the term 'the proverbial' which is kind of an idiom within an idiom! I scurried off to a corpus to check it out and found that:

It's mostly used before or within a complete idiom (often before a key noun). And notice it doesn't have to be what we'd typically think of as a proverb, it can go with any fixed, idiomatic expression, I think as a way of the speaker acknowledging that what they're saying is a bit of a cliché. (Click on the image to enlarge).

 

Perhaps more interestingly though, it can also be used to replace a key word within an idiom. This often seems to be a way for the speaker to avoid a taboo word (shown in red) – and so be polite – but not always (words in green):

 

It's a fabulous linguistic quirk and lots of fun to play around with, but wow, how the proverbial do you go about explaining that one to a poor learner?!

Lexical layers 3: idiolect and finding your voice

Ever since I started getting interested in language, I've been intrigued by variation. For my undergraduate dissertation, I looked into differences between the way men and women use language. My MA dissertation looked at the effects of speaker age on the type of language we use – I found some surprising similarities between the youngest (teens) and oldest (70+) age groups.  Then when I recently dipped into the study of Forensic Linguistics, I read a lot about the concept of idiolect and how each individual's language use is shaped by a whole host of factors. This might include their gender and age, their social, cultural, educational and professional background, their social and political attitudes, where they grew up and have lived through their life and of course, their L1 and influences from other languages they speak.

Over time, we all acquire a slightly different set of vocabulary and we develop our own preferences about words and phrases we use and don't use, where, when and to whom. Some of those choices are quite conscious and considered, especially when it comes to sensitive areas like swearing and taboo or culturally sensitive topics. A lot of our choices though are largely unconscious. For example, do you mostly say thank you, thanks, ta or cheers? Or maybe something else altogether? Does it depend on the context or the person you're speaking to? Are there any of these that aren't within your personal idiolect? Personally, I'm not much of a cheers person. As a carefully-spoken, middle-class, middle-aged woman, it always feels a bit awkward to me. However, just occasionally, if I'm trying to sound a bit less posh and a bit more blokey, say speaking to a builder or a white van man, I sometimes slip in a "cheers, mate!" - always reverting slightly towards the London accent I grew up with. That might sound a bit patronizing, but in fact, it's a perfectly normal reaction and even has a technical name; accommodation (or more specifically convergence). But that's getting away from my point …

What does all this have to do with language learners? Let me give you a couple of examples. When I was at school my French teacher (an L1 French speaker) would sometimes exclaim in class when we were stuck on a question – "That's easy peasy, lemon squeezy!" We'd all laugh, in part, because it just sounded funny in her fairly strong French accent, but also because it's typically a childish expression you wouldn't expect a teacher to use.  Of course, she was well aware of what she was doing, it was a conscious choice to deflate a slightly tense atmosphere and it worked a treat.

My second example is of a student I taught several years ago. He was a late-teen, German L1 student visiting the UK. His English was good (B2+), he was keen to pick up spoken expressions and he would regularly use cheers to mean thank you. He (mostly) used it appropriately, but there was something about his accent and very precise articulation that made him sound like a very posh public school-boy clinking a champagne glass. I had to stifle a laugh every time he said it just because it sounded so incongruous.

Developing your own voice in a second language is tricky and no one wants to sound silly, but at the same time, we don't want learners to get overly self-conscious and never attempt to use new language. The good news, as I mentioned in my first post, is that a lot of basic, high-frequency language is, almost by definition, fairly safe and neutral which makes getting started relatively uncomplicated. It's as students progress and are increasingly exposed to a range of authentic language that more caution is needed. A quirky expression picked up from an online video that might be appropriate for the middle-aged male presenter in his local North London pub with his mates isn't necessarily going to sound right coming from a 20-something young woman on the other side of the world who drops it in with the American English she learnt at school!

That's not to say that we should be shielding students from all but the blandest, 'standard' English. Far from it! We should though be actively exploring the layers of meaning that the language they meet might hold. That doesn't necessarily have to involve explaining in detail all the possible subtle nuances of meaning and usage of a particular word, but at least flagging up language that students need to be careful about using. Emphasizing that they need to really get to know a word or expression, who typically uses it and when before they try it out for themselves. Synonyms can't just be substituted because they 'mean the same'. The language of journalism is intentionally colourful to draw in readers and may not work in a formal essay or a work email. The latest edgy youth slang will sound comical from a middle-aged mum. People generally use idioms for effect, to be playful or humorous, to play down the seriousness of a situation or to exaggerate it – writing "Hitler had a bee in his bonnet about the Jews" in a school essay (yes, that's a real example from a real student essay!) doesn't work on all kinds of levels!

In this series of posts, I've tried to move from the more obvious, broad-brush, outer layers of meaning, with basic distinctions of register and genre, down to the subtler, more difficult-to-define nuances of individual usage. These aren't issues that will crop up in every vocab set with every class, but if we don't explain this stuff where it is relevant, we're only telling half the story and we're seriously short-changing our students.

Idioms: a post of two halves (Part 2)

In the first part of this post, I mulled over how useful (or not) it is to teach the more colourful end of the idiomatic spectrum (of the raining cats and dogs variety). My thoughts were prompted by a Twitter chat last week about teaching lexical chunks. As we bantered to and fro in 140-character bursts though, I was struck by how many idioms we employed ourselves to get our points across. Now admittedly, we were trying to outdo each other in seeing how many idioms we could shoehorn into the discussion. Nevertheless, I still found myself using them even when I wasn’t consciously trying to. And it got me thinking about the role of idioms in communication via social media.  

Part 2: Are idioms more prevalent in social media?

Let me start off by saying I haven’t done any kind of research into this, but my linguist’s intuition tells me that it could just be the case. Journalists and other writers who want to make a quick impact on their audience have long understood the power of a well-placed idiom:

They’re colourful: idioms generally conjure up vivid images (think of those cats and dogs falling from the sky), which makes them more salient than other types of language, they jump out at the reader, they paint a picture and may even raise a smile. When you’re trying to stand out amongst the jumble on someone’s newsfeed, that’s exactly what you want.

They’re much more than the sum of their parts: as I said in the first part of this post, an idiom often carries a whole load of connotational baggage along with it. Sometimes they just add a bit of emphasis, but frequently they say a lot more besides. Say, you wanted to describe someone who isn’t ‘normal’, each of these idioms might tell quite a different story:

off his rocker
has a screw loose
has lost the plot
a few sandwiches short of a picnic
mad as a box of frogs
a bit off the wall

... and of course, they say all that extra stuff in well under 140 characters!

They appeal to a shared culture: because idioms tend to be quite culturally-bound, when we use them, we’re saying something like “see, we have the same cultural background”, whether that’s quite broadly or as part of a sub-culture. At the extreme end, idioms are even created out of quotes from popular culture (apparently called snowclones; thanks to Hugh Dellar for that nugget), think “what have xxx ever done for us” (from Monty Python) or even the title of this post (which for those of you who don’t know comes from British football punditry). It’s probably also one of the reasons why idioms are so beloved of soap opera scriptwriters; by cramming the characters’ speech full of idioms, we’re perhaps inclined to think they’re “just like us”.

All those characteristics make idioms perfect for getting across a message concisely but with impact when space is limited. I’ve been keeping an eye on my Twitter and Facebook feeds over the past week and it’s difficult to say whether there are really a lot of idioms or whether I’m just noticing them. I was struck a few days ago though when I was trying to follow a Facebook thread in French and found myself struggling, not just because my French is a bit rusty, but because it was full of idioms I’d never come across. I learnt that “nous ne sommes pas sortis de l’auberge” (which Facebook rather unhelpfully translated word-for-word as “we haven’t left the hostel”!) apparently means something like “we’re not out of the woods yet”.

You just know you’re going to be spotting idioms everywhere now, don’t you? ...

Idioms: a post of two halves (Part 1)

The other evening I’d fallen into the trap of having a quick flick through social media while I was half-watching something on TV and I stumbled across an #ELTChinwag discussion on Twitter which I couldn’t resist adding my twopenn’orth to. The discussion was about the Lexical Approach in ELT, but I came in on a thread about teaching idioms. It got me thinking on two slightly different paths:

Part 1: Teaching idioms

A contributor to the discussion made the following comment:

“one concern that we could focus too much on idiomatic lang. Most learners will prob be speaking with NNspeakers in future.”

It struck a chord as it goes to the heart of the arguments I’ve been having with editors for some years now about teaching ‘idioms’ (clarification of what I mean by that coming up), how useful they are in general and especially whether they have a place in the fairly restricted kind of format of vocabulary activity in many published materials (i.e. in a slot-filling type of context where students match them to their ‘meaning’ in a rather simplistic way).

Now before I go any further, I should clarify what I mean by an idiom. Of course, the term ‘idiom’ can be interpreted very broadly to refer to almost any fixed (or semi-fixed) chunk of language, in which case, it covers all kinds of expressions like in a moment, all the time, of course, all kinds of, etc. At the other end of the scale, it’s also frequently used to refer to the kind of colourful expressions of the ‘raining cats and dogs’ variety where it’s impossible to work out the meaning of the overall expression from the sum of its parts. And then there’s everything in-between which arguably forms a cline from the mundane and unremarkable, to the very salient and much more marked.

As someone who spends most of my working life playing around with vocabulary, it would be strange indeed if I wasn’t a big proponent of the former, ‘fixed phrase’ type of idiom. They’re absolutely essential for communication, almost no matter who you want to communicate with. What’s more, they provide learners with incredibly useful pre-formed chunks they can use to cut down the processing load required to create utterances completely from scratch every time.

Once in a blue moon?

The other end of the scale, that seems to be so beloved of coursebook publishers, I believe needs treating with more caution. The more colourful idioms (once in a blue moon, every dog has its day, have a bee in your bonnet, etc.) are particularly marked; that is they aren’t standard, neutral language that will go unnoticed, they stand out to the reader/listener and, perhaps most importantly, they do so because they often have lots of cultural associations and connotations tied up with them. Take a look at the selection of idioms below that roughly mean ‘annoy/irritate’ – who would you expect to use them and in what context? What do they tell you about the speaker and/or their intended listener? Which would the speaker use to talk about their own feelings and which about others? Which would you use?

get on sb’s nerves
get on sb’s tits
get up sb’s nose
rub sb up the wrong way
try sb’s patience
ruffle sb’s feathers
wind sb up
piss sb off
drive sb to distraction
drive sb round the bend
annoy the f**k out of sb

I could probably write a whole blog post about each one!

We all have our own idiolects, the words and phrases we use based on our background (social, cultural, regional, educational, etc.) our age, gender, etc. And we use different language based on the context, our mood and who we’re talking to. As native speakers, we weigh up our language choices all the time and (mostly) choose expressions that are just right from the context. We often couldn’t say exactly why a particular expression just fits, but our accumulated (largely subconscious) understanding of language comes into play.

Explaining all that to a learner, especially one from a very different cultural background, can be very difficult and advising them as to when, how or whether to use the expression for themselves is almost impossible. Of course, that’s true of all kinds of language (whether it’s slang or literary or whatever), but I think idioms are particularly tricky.

I’m not saying that we should avoid these idioms altogether, I’m just not sure that teaching whole sets of them apparently for productive use is terribly helpful. If they come up in a text, they can form an interesting point of discussion and help learners make sense of the same idiom if it crops up again – you wouldn’t be able to make head nor tail of this blog post if you didn’t know a few idioms! -  but that’s a whole different kettle of fish from the type of activity where the learner simply has to match, well, a whole different kettle of fish to say ‘something completely different’, then try to use it in a sentence or worse still, a dialogue!

I’m not saying that as language teachers (or materials writers) we should dictate what language is and isn’t appropriate for our students to learn/use, but neither is it fair to teach language of this kind in a way that doesn’t fully explain its possible impact, leaving our students to make potentially very awkward or embarrassing faux pas when speaking to native speakers or alternatively, just elicit blank looks from other non-native speakers.

As I’ve rambled on quite long enough, I’ll break off here and come back to the other thought I had about the role of idioms in social media another day …