I bet you can’t
go a day without using an idiom. What? An idiom, what the heck is
that? Well here is an example of one to explain it. Going forward,
which means from now on do this or that thing. So it would be used
like this. Going forward, lunch will be from 1 to 2 for all
staff. In his book Jumping
Sharks and Dropping Mics: Modern idioms and where they come from, Dr.
Gareth Carrol a Senior Lecturer in Psycholinguistics at the
University of Birmingham in the UK dives into the world of idioms and
explains them and their origins. Dr. Carrol welcome and thanks for
doing a Candid Conversation.
Dr.
Carrol.: Thanks for having me! I always enjoy talking about idioms
and, as you say, we all use them all the time, so it’s a fun topic
to investigate.
Cliff
T.: I heard speaking about idioms on a podcast recently and I thought
that is interesting. The idea that we use idioms pretty much on a
daily basis was a surprise to me and I must admit I never really
thought about them until now. One that drives me nuts to this day is
going forward. I had a boss who was famous for using that idiom
almost daily. I bet being a person who looks at these things really
causes you to notice idioms more than most people.
Dr.
Carrol.: Yes, absolutely. I’ve been studying idioms as a part of a
wider set of what linguists call “formulaic phrases” for about 10
years now, so I’m pretty well-attuned to them. I’m not sure I
personally would call “going forward” an idiom, but it’s
definitely a formulaic phrase that people say (and most people
understand) but that can seem quite cliched and over-used.
Cliff
T.: Why idioms what got you interested in doing a book about them?
Dr.
Carrol.: It was a bit of an accident really. I did my Masters degree
in Nottingham, UK about 10 years ago and one of the classes I took
included some material on formulaic phrases and idioms, and how we
make sense of them from a psycholinguistic point of view. I found it
really interesting and when it came time to do a PhD, started
thinking about ways to investigate this. Once I then started teaching
I taught a class where I asked students to think about idioms that
they used in their daily life, and it occurred to me that there are
plenty of “modern” idioms that have entered the language in the
recent past that we might want to pay attention to. The book came
from there really.
Cliff
T.: Has writing the book caused you to notice idioms more often?
Dr.
Carrol.: Oh definitely. It’s always nice when I hear one of the
idioms from the book being used “in the wild”, as it proves that
they actually are idioms that are in common use! It’s a funny mix
though. As you said at the start, we all use idioms on a regular
basis, so we speak idiomatically a lot, but individual idioms might
be quite rare. Think of a phrase like “raining cats and dogs”.
Everyone knows what means (at least in the UK they would), but I
can’t think of the last time I actually heard anyone use it (I’m
not sure I ever have!)
Cliff
T.: Jumping Sharks and Dropping Mics these two are very famous
idioms, I have used them myself. Another that also is a favorite of
mine is knowing is half the battle. Which of course means knowing
what’s going on is half the challenge. That brings me to my next
question what are idioms meant to do, why do we use them?
Dr.
Carrol.: So this raises two really interesting questions about how we
use language. First, why do we use “non-literal” language at all,
like idioms, metaphors, and other figures of speech? Idioms like
“kick the bucket” or “jump the shark” are obviously
figurative, in the sense that they aren’t supposed to be
interpreted literally. It turns out that metaphor is a really
pervasive part of how we think and therefore how we structure our
language. Even your example from before – going forward – would
be an example of a metaphor, as it thinks about time passing as if it
is movement through physical space. So speaking “non-literally”
and drawing comparisons between things is a key part of how we
communicate. The second question is, why do we speak in such a
formulaic way? We could be infinitely creative and come up with
colorful new metaphors each time we wanted to speak, but that would
be exhausting! So using well-established phrases makes communication
easier and more efficient, and also helps to establish a sense of
group solidarity: if we all use the same phrases, we clearly all
belong to the same “team”.
Cliff
T.: Dr. Carrol this book sounds like it was quite the challenge
considering the vast number of idioms out there. How did you go
about selecting the idioms you wanted to use for Jumping Sharks?
Dr
Carrol: There are already lots of good books and websites out there
that give lists of idioms. Generally, these are phrases that have
been in the language for a long time (phrases like “kick the
bucket” go back hundreds of years). I wanted my focus to be modern
idioms, so I focused on phrases that have come into English in
perhaps the last 50 years or so, and specifically from sources like
TV, movies, internet, etc. One big advantage here is that we can
track these much more accurately, from first printed usage, to how
they have come to be used in print and online. For example, we know
that “jump the shark” relates back to an episode of Happy Days
(where one of the main characters, Fonzie, jumped over a shark on a
pair of water skis), and we know the first time this phrase was used,
in the 1980s. Other phrases we can trace back to specific movies,
such as “Groundhog Day”, so we have a really clear idea of when
they first emerged and how they have developed since.
Cliff
T.: Is there a proper way or time to use an idiom?
Dr.
Carrol.: I think all idioms are to a degree context-specific. So the
example I keep using – “kick the bucket” – is quite a
tongue-in-cheek way of saying “die”. Obviously you wouldn’t
expect a doctor to come out and break bad news to someone by telling
them that their loved one had “kicked the bucket”. So there are
certainly what we would call “pragmatic” rules that tell us when
it might be appropriate to use different idioms. We tend to have lots
of idioms for death and sex, for instance, that vary in terms of
their formality, what kind of company you might use them in, etc.
Cliff
T.: I have to ask what do you do as a Pyscholinguist?
Dr.
Carrol.: I have one foot in linguistics and one foot in psychology,
so a good way to think about it is that I was originally a linguist,
interested in studying language and how it works, and became
interested in the tools that people use in psychology research to
understand how we process language, i.e. how our brains make sense of
language in real time. I do a lot of experimental work where I set up
studies and record how people read a piece of text (usually
containing idioms!) to see what factors make this easier or harder,
then use this to work out what must be happening in the brain for
them to make sense of what they’ve read. It’s a lot of fun!
Cliff
T.: What got you interested in linguistics?
Dr.
Carrol.: I originally went to university to study French and had to
take linguistics at the same time, but quickly became much more
interested in that side of things. So it was not entirely planned,
but I always loved studying English language at school and it came
very naturally to me. My mother was an English teacher too, which
probably helped.
Cliff
T.: Will there be a sequel to the book?
Dr.
Carrol.: I hope so. I’ve already started gathering a new list of
idioms so I’ll need to wait until I have enough to make it worth
writing. Since there are new phrases emerging all the time, hopefully
it’s an ongoing project!
Cliff
T.: Where can people find Jumping Sharks and Dropping Mics?
Dr.
Carrol.: You can find out more about the book on my
website(www.modern-idioms.com/books)
or Twitter (@Modern_Idioms), and there are links on there to various
places you can buy it. You should hopefully also be able to order it
through your local bookshop, or via the usual online retailers.
Cliff
T.: Dr. Carrol it’s been interesting and fun to speak with you
about this interesting form of language today, thanks for taking the
time to do a Candid Conversations interview.
Dr.
Carrol.: Thanks a lot!
Dr.
Gareth Carol is a Psycholinguist and Senior Lecturer Department of
English Language and Linguistics Birmingham University in Birmingham
England.
His
book Jumping Sharks and Dropping Mics can be found on most books
selling sites like Amazon in fact here is the link to it. No need to tell you where he wrote us from, that is
pretty self evident. By the way you can do a Candid Conversations
interview, all it takes is an email to
candidconversations@hotmail.com
and don’t forget there is a YouTube channel as well. Zoomed in
video interviews and other content is available for viewing. Click
over and take a look. See you soon and thanks for coming by.
Cliff
T
