I had a student write a paper about Snapchat last week, and I had to ask what it meant to put a "filter" on a picture--part of a growing body of evidence that the older I get, the more I don't know what my students are saying. Then I talked to the whole class about audience awareness, and how if you're writing to an audience who is unfamiliar with your topic, you have to explain more than usual. For example, the sentence, "he made an offensive tweet" would have been pretty meaningless thirteen years ago. Then I got this idea:

I really get a kick out of words or phrases that either no longer mean anything, or in the case of "tweet," mean something completely different today. Some people think it's weird that the president tweets; I think it's weird and kind fascinating that people can even say, "The president tweets" and we know that doesn't mean he's taken to chirping like a bird of some kind.

There's also Facebook's effect on language. I like how "friend" became a verb ("he friended me"), and more ominously, people started "defriending" each other. It sounds so awful: Defriend. ::cue suspenseful music::

Do you have any favorite phrases or words that mean something completely different today?

-Bill

I always loved watching Law & Order with my dad, and for some reason, a lot of my cartoon ideas take place in a court room. I blame this on him also letting me watch the Three Stooges' Disorder in the Court at such a young age.

When we say, "better to let sleeping dogs lie," it means when you are thinking of broaching a topic that may cause more problems by talking about it or dealing with it directly, sometimes it's better to just let it be and ignore it (lest you wake up the angry dog). However, I never hear "lie" to mean sleep, so when I've heard it, I usually think of "lie" as in "to utter a falsehood." This idiom draws attention to the "lay" vs. "lie" grammar point: In prescriptive grammar, you should say, "I need to lie down," since it's intransitive. Some old school grammarians will say you cannot say "I need to lay down" since "lay" is traditionally transitive, meaning you need to have an object: "I need to lay down some bricks" or "I need to lay tiles." Still, plenty of people say, "I need to lay down for a nap" and everyone knows there are no bricks or tiles involved. I think the real solution is never let your English teachers hear you talk about napping.

I didn't mean to start debating the use of lay vs. lie. Perhaps I should have let sleeping dogs lay down.

-Bill

I used to live and work in the Flint area when I taught at the University of Michigan-Flint, and there are so many things I miss from that time. Most of all, I miss my friends that I made there and wish I could visit them more easily, but I also miss the little things. There were so many wonderful restaurants. My favorites were Bangkok Peppers, Grill of India, Taboon's. I heard good things about Badawest, but sadly, I never got to try it even though my students all said it was the best Lebanese food. There was also the Korean market that we still stop by whenever we're in the area to buy sweet potato noodles and kim and ddeok and... oh! I have to stop!

One practical thing I missed was low-cost high-speed internet. I remember paying $40 a month for AT&T, and now I pay 50% more for a lower speed. Sometimes I tell myself, "This is ridiculous! I don't need the Internet! I will just cancel it and go to my local library!" but then the bill comes in the mail and I grudgingly pay it, and that makes me think of this:

When something "costs an arm and a leg," it just means it's very expensive. I remember any time I shared this idiom with my students, they always laughed and pantomimed pulling off their arms and legs. "Yeah, well sometimes you really want something," I'd say,  "but it really is that expensive! So what do you do?"

Do you have any other idioms you'd like to see drawn that have to do with costs and money (or arms and legs for that matter)?

Have a good one, and don't pay an arm and a leg if you can avoid it!

-Bill

My Facebook page recently reached over 1,000 likes, and so as a thank you, I thought of an idiom with the word "thousand" in it:

The phrase apparently originated at the turn of the 20th century and came to mean that pictures can sometimes "say" far more than words. I wanted to play on this idea, so I didn't put any words in the second picture. What do you think they're each saying or thinking?

Can you think of any other idioms with the word "thousand" in it?

Hope your day goes well. Good luck out there!

-Bill

This is one of my favorite idioms and one I have to explain to students a lot:

A person who can "play by ear" is a person who can imitate and play a song without reading the music for it. In conversation, it has come to mean, "let's improvise" or "let's see how it goes" or quite literally, "let's not plan out every detail ahead of time and instead react to changes in circumstance in the moment as they happen." For example, when Miami Heat player Dwayne Wade dislocated his shoulder in a game against the Rockets in 2007, President Pat Riley said he wanted to "limit Wade's minutes to about 20 a game." Wade was not fully healed, so Riley said:
"He's not back yet... He's going to need seven games. He's going to need whatever time it is. We'll have to play it by ear."

​In other words, the player wasn't fully healed, and Riley couldn't speak too soon about when he would be able to play a full game.

​-Bill

Source: Nance, R. (2007, April 10) Wade rejoins Shaq as playoffs loom; Heat didn't lose a step without star guard, USA Today, Sports pp. 3C.

This expression came up in class last week. During a complicated explanation, I asked the class to bear with me ("be patient with me"), and then I asked them what that phrase meant, and they only knew about the animal bear:

It actually comes from the meaning of the word "bear" which means "to carry." I think the idea is to carry the burden of the communication encounter (when things aren't clear, the load gets pretty heavy on the part of the listener). 

Let's all bear with each other!

-Bill

I apologized to a friend the other day for flaking on him, and then I drew this cartoon. The phrasal verb "to flake on" generally means to cancel meeting someone with rather dubious or strange reasons, or it could mean behaving in a very strange, dodgy manner or being noncommittal in a strange and unexplained way.

The funny thing is I'm pretty sure getting flaked on metaphorically feels just as annoying as it would if someone were pouring corn flakes on your head.

Sorry, Glen!

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill

P.S. If any of you reading this want to see a cartoon of your favorite idiom or expression, let me know by sending me an email. I will do my best to accommodate, and I enjoy a challenge.

I encountered this one at the CMU English Language Institute's Annual Poetry Contest:

If someone says this and they are not handing you a bottle of glue, then they probably just want you to stay wherever you are and not leave.

-Bill

I looked across the table at the butter dish the other day, and this is what popped into my head:

For my non-native English speakers, when you "butter someone up," it means you do nice things for them or say nice and sweet things to them in the hope that they will do what you want. For example, you might compliment your boss on his hat or agree to read some pages from his new young adult novel so that you can get a promotion or be put on a nice committee.

Good luck persuading people today, but be careful because butter stains!

-Bill

I found this cartoon from a few months ago when I had a bad cold. I was almost as frustrated as the guy in the picture:

Have a good one, and remember not to touch the T-zone!

-Bill

I had a student in the spring who made a joke of inviting me to dinner with the class, and he even correctly used the expression, "dinner is on me." As he was explaining it to the other students, they started laughing about dinner being "on" someone like dinner can be "on" a table. I had to capture this idea:

Have a good one, and don't literally have dinner be on you!

Something funny happened the other day that made me think about the ideal mindset for language learning. I was joking with a student about going out and buying a jalopy.

"What is a jalopy?"
"Oh, it's an old, beat up car that's practically worthless."
"Oh. We have a word for this. We get it from English. We call it 'sick crab.'"
"Sick crab?"
"Yeah. It's an English word."
"Oh. Hmmm... I guess those are English words, but they don't mean that in English."
"You don't know this English vocabulary?"
"No, I know it, I would just never use it that way."

Meanwhile, in my brain, the following conversation is playing out...

"They call a jalopy a sick crab?"

"Why?"

"I don't know. A lot of English words get borrowed and then re-purposed so that they don't quite make sense. Maybe it's like that?"

"That doesn't make any sense."

"It could make some sense. I mean, does it make any more sense than 'buying a lemon?'"

"I guess..."

"I mean, maybe if you sat down to a fine crab dinner and then it turned out the crab you ate was a sick crab, and then you're like, 'Oh man, I ate a sick crab. I'm so sick now!' Maybe it's like that?"

Finally, one of them offers a dictionary that shows the spelling.

"Oh! Scrap!" (The word 'scrap' has only one syllable, but thanks to epenthesis, some ESL learners may insert a vowel to break up the [skr] cluster, resulting in two syllables, or 'sick crab'.)

We all laughed at the misunderstanding, but it made me think about the mindset we need for language learning. Sometimes, when learning a language, we might get frustrated with expressions that make no sense or with grammar rules that aren't consistent or with native speakers whose handwriting is too hard to read or with people speaking too fast. Nevertheless, sometimes we just have to roll with the punches, accept whatever language facts we run across, and just not fight it. 

I notice this with children learning their first language--my three-year-old readily accepts almost any new vocabulary I teach him, and then he quickly busies himself with using it in new contexts. Sometimes I hear him using words he must have heard in a movie or in a conversation he was eavesdropping on. There is this kind of appreciation and welcoming of the new and foreign that we often see fade as we get older.

I guess what I'm saying is, sure, it's silly to think of sick crabs and jalopies (or lemons!), but sometimes we just have to run with it if we're learning another language and not get too embarrassed when we get it all wrong.

-Bill

Ray Stantz was my favorite Ghostbuster as a kid, and I never forgot that scene where he "chose" the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. Just like Ray in that scene, these images just kind of pop into my head when I stop to think about certain expressions and phrases in English.

Anyway, so a week ago, as I sat down to a particularly delicious looking pizza dinner, I said, "I'm going to go to town on this pizza!" and then I stopped to think about what my ESL students might think when they hear phrases like this. This was the image that popped into my head:

I drew more comics as I thought of more English expressions, and so I decided to make a section of my website devoted to these little sketches. I hope you get a kick out of them--but not a literal one involving a foot. Gosh, these things just creep up on you. Oh man! Creeping idioms! Like Night of the Living Dead or something... Okay, I'll stop.

If you have any expressions that you think would make a funny comic, drop me a message and I might try my hand at it, so to speak (or literally).

-Bill