Tuesday 13 March 2018

Colloquial Metaphor

You learn words and phrases, forget where you learned them from, and then sometimes when you use them they turn out to be wrong. My mum deliberately taught me a nursery rhyme wrongly because her version is funnier: "See a penny, pick it up, then all day you'll have a penny". I used to know a woman whos (hippyish) parents had used an inappropriately adult word for her private parts and she got into trouble at school for swearing when she was trying to discuss something intimate.

The English language contains loads of idioms that we all blindly use as though they still make sense: "Flash in the pan", "Keep your powder dry", "Go off half-cocked", "Hoist by your own petard"... I discovered last week, to my surprise, that the phrase "Beaten like a red-headed stepchild" is neither in common use nor suitable for work.

Richard "it's OK they’ve got no soul" B

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