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
