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 kids are in Taekwondo, and so I'm naturally embarrassed about how poorly I can high-kick along with them, so I've taken to practicing in my spare time. Early in the wee morning hours, I set one of my cartoons to scan, so why not practice high-kicks while it processes? I kick a few times, and then wind up for an even bigger one while "You're the best around" plays in my head. Meanwhile, my cat, Mr. F, is so intrigued by the sound of the scanner that he crosses the living room floor (through the path of my kick) to go sniffing around it. Luckily, I was paying attention, but I have no doubt I could have really hurt/killed him if I hadn't stopped myself.

This led to this cartoon:

How so many cats survive is beyond me, but "curiosity killed the cat" is a classic idiom for the dangers of being too curious. Sometimes it's better to let sleeping dogs lie... ;)

Do you have any other favorite idioms involving cats?

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill

My composition students have begun a new unit (one class on analyzing rhetoric and another producing a persuasive essay). One of the things we talked about was appeals to emotion, how you don't want to be too cold, but you also don't want to be too emotional and heavy-handed about it:

According to the OED,  early uses from the 1600's alluded to stories like Moses' hands being heavy from holding them up during battle, so it used to mean clumsy as from exhaustion. Today, at least when I've heard it, it has come to mean an over-the-top quality like being overly emotional. See Jim Gaffigan's commentary on Sarah McLachlan's animal shelter videos:

While it's possible to be a little too heavy-handed, it's also possible to be a little too emotionless:

So with using emotional appeals, you really have to toe the line (maybe this will be a future cartoon). Sometimes you're writing in an academic context where a cold, emotionless approach is favored, but you might also be writing a letter to the editor or friend and need to show your emotions on an issue so no one thinks you're a robot.

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill

From a very young age, whenever my dad experienced difficulties, he said, "Kid, sometimes you have to grin and bear it." This was apparently fatherly wisdom passed down from his father. My dad always said it as if the meaning was self-evident, but as a child, I always took it to mean you should grin but be tough like a bear.

I may not have understood the meaning exactly right, but if you bear your burdens, that certainly does make you tough.

Can you think of any other idioms involving bears?

Have a good one and good luck out there!

-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.

When I was a kid, I remember thinking "I'll fight you with my bare hands!" meant that your hands were strong like a bear. Anyway, my four-year-old son came up to me the other day and vowed to fight me with his bare hands and I remembered how I understood this phrase as a kid:

Be careful out there!

-Bill

Spelling mistakes used to bother me a lot and get under my skin, but now I just try to see the humor in it and remind students to re-read their papers slowly. Here is my stock advice that is programmed by a macro to populate a Word comment bubble:
Please spellcheck your essay before submitting it. Try to read through your document slowly by using your finger or the eraser-side of a pencil to slow down your reading. This will help you read more slowly and catch mistakes.

Below is an old cartoon I made a couple years ago based on a typo I found in set of chess instructions. I was so tickled by the image of the shrimp's cousin scuttling across a chess board that I simply had to draw it. I tried to capture a look of defiance on the prawn's face, as if to say, "No, I'm not moving back. Haven't you read the rules?"

Still, I'm thankful for inadvertently funny spelling errors. Without them, grading would be made a little less funny (very easy to do that), and I would never think thoughts like this:

Bonus: A story about my first encounter with a prawn!

Here is an old cartoon (for me) but a new cartoon for you. I was teaching the passive voice a while back, and I had to make this point via the white board in response to a very frustrated grammar student asking, "Why can't I say, 'The soup is tasting John'?":

That's why you can't say "the soup is tasting John"! Okay, so it really looks like the soup is eating John (maybe he's a really aggressive taster?), but the point is these two sentences are not equivalent although they may seem like it to students who haven't learned how to use passive voice yet.

Students are also resistant to using it at first and will mark it wrong on a test because they learn that stative verbs cannot take a progressive form. For example, we cannot say "He is being a lawyer now" or "I am seeing a bird out the window now." This sentence ("The soup is being tasted by John") is the passive form of "John is tasting the soup." It is not the copula "is" in the progressive form.

Anyway, have a good one, and don't let any soup taste you!

-Bill

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

TL;DR: Student's new writing practices put them at risk for plagiarism, but it can be helped!

I was having my students practice paraphrasing sentences from an academic article, and so I thought I would make it really meta and have them paraphrase an article about international students paraphrasing.

Here is the paragraph they used which is from page 116 of Introna and Hayes (2011) (which happens to be a very informative article on the issues involved in using plagiarism detection software):

I took the underlined sentence and had them try to paraphrase it. Many of them didn't know the phrasal verb "draw upon" and told me the meaning was to draw and color, so in my head, I was thinking like this:

I had to explain about the old meaning of "draw," which survives in their dresser drawer (not like actually lives in there--it's an old meaning that is fossilized in "dresser drawer").

I can remember when I wrote papers in college, I used the text fragment strategy. Since this is becoming a dominant strategy used by students, rather than viciously cling to the old note card system*, I say go with it and offer these words of caution (if these steps are not followed, there is a BIG risk for accidental plagiarism):

1. When you copy text from another source and paste it into your paper, put quotes around it and add bibliographic citation information IMMEDIATELY  (e.g. author last name and year if using APA). Even if you will paraphrase it later, still put quotes in case you get distracted and forget. Every semester I tell them about how when I was "seventeen and crazy," one time I put the quotes around my source fragments, but I didn't give the bibliographic information (author and page number) since I reasoned that it would take too much time ("I'll go back later and add the citations"). In the end, I spent over 2 hours re-finding all of my source locations. This seems insane to me now, but with my age has come wisdom. Remember, young people are still very smart, but their impatience makes them reckless (am I actually referring to young people as a "them"? Oh dear!).
   
2. Not putting quotation and citation information puts you at risk for plagiarizing because you might forget where the information came from! One of the saddest [#firstworldproblem] things about my seventeen-and-crazy story is that I had to delete some of my quotations because I couldn't find where the page number was (I highlighted it, but I highlighted many other portions of the text).
3. Think of writing your research paper as cleaning your kitchen or house: It will be much more time efficient if you clean up (cite!) as you go.
4. Read over your quotations and consider paraphrasing them (remove the quotation marks but keep the bibliographic information!)
   

For those of you who may not know what Introna and Hayes are talking about with text fragments, I'll give a brief description of how I went about writing my research papers:

1. First, find good quotations.
2. Copy them.
3. Paste them into a document.
4. Add quotation marks.
5. Add bibliographic information (author, date, page)
6. Repeat steps 1-5 until you have "enough" information (this is obviously subjective)
   
7. Begin writing your own ideas and connecting them to the quotations you have added.
8. When the quotations are not particularly striking, keep the citation but change the wording and paraphrase it. I like to keep the quotation and write my paraphrase below it so I can see that it is in fact different from the original.

Regarding Step 7, this is something I recommend for my ESL students. When teaching native speakers, we tell them to read the source, understand it, and then look away from the source and write what can be remembered from the gist of it. This sounds practical, but for a non-native with a less-than-native vocabulary, it may be very difficult to find other words. Many of my good students (read: conscientious and hardworking) who have plagiarized insist they did not copy and paste but that they typed every word. I like to take this at face value and assume the student is actually telling the truth. The most likely explanation (in my mind, anyway): The students have no other vocabulary to "fall back on" so to speak, so along with the idea (the gist), they get the exact wording stuck in their heads, and they cannot separate this idea from the wording. Therefore, I tell my students to stare the source text in the face and write their paraphrase below it until they can SEE that it is using different vocabulary and grammar.

Soon I will write about paraphrase strategies for ESL students since the "read it and then look away and write your summary/paraphrase" strategy does not work for non-natives.

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill

*Comments on the "Note Card Method": When I was in high school, I was required to use note cards for research papers. I loved my high school English teachers, but I hated this approach. It was incredibly frustrating, time-consuming, and unnecessary. I hope no one still does this.

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

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