Confusing and Annoying Idioms....

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naturalplastic
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06 Dec 2012, 3:29 pm

whirlingmind wrote:

My English language teacher at school used to say "You think you're the best thing since sliced bread - well you're not!" What's so special about sliced bread?!

She also used to say "You're on a very sticky wicket." I still don't know what she meant by that. It was to the class not to me BTW

A "sticky wicket" comes from the game of cricket. They whack balls off of a stick stuck in the ground called a "wicket" ( imagine American baseball in which the ball sits stationary in the strike zone on top of a stick and there is no pitcher to try to strike you out).

I guess sometimes the ball kinda 'sticks' to the wicket.

I guess it means something like "you're behind the 8 ball"(in a bad place)-to use an expression derived from billiards.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 06 Dec 2012, 6:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

whirlingmind
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06 Dec 2012, 3:34 pm

Thanks for explaining. Um I still don't understand! I know what cricket is, (I'm in the UK!) but the second part of your post totally confused me.

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ColdEyesWarmHeart
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06 Dec 2012, 3:44 pm

windtreeman wrote:

Eh, at my assessment, the woman asked a bunch to see my interpretations; I'd heard and asked about most of them before and thus answered accurately, but the last one, I was totally stumped. I sat there for a good three minutes in silence thinking before using physics to explain it, ha.
"A shallow brook babbles the loudest."
When I got back in the car, I asked my Mom if she'd ever heard it and she said no, then I asked what it meant and in less than a second she explained it, and I was like, WHAT THE HECK, it was so obvious. I mean, it was almost literal; shallow and babble...almost self-explanatory. Anyway, here's the online explanation: "People who are loud and talk a lot usually have nothing of substance to say."

I wouldn't have understood that phrase either, I've never heard it before. I would have thought like you that it was the sound of shallow water over pebbles, but with a deep stream you don't hear that sound.

Here we say "an empty vessel makes the most noise" referring to the speaker's head being empty of sense/reason etc. metaphorically, but in physics something that is hollow and is struck reverberates more and sounds louder, literally.

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06 Dec 2012, 4:07 pm

It seems like many of these idioms are either culture bound (like sticky wicket) or refer to technology that is now obsolete (pot calling kettle black). That could be why they don't make sense.

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06 Dec 2012, 5:57 pm

Okay, this is embarrassing, but when I was 7 or 8, there was a line in a popular song that went, "You don't spit into the wind." I wondered why not, so one day when it was especially windy I went outside and spit... :oops: :lol:

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Janissy
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06 Dec 2012, 6:01 pm

Mindsigh wrote:

Since you learned from experience what happens when you spit into the wind, I bet you didn't then tug on Superman's cape. :wink:

naturalplastic
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06 Dec 2012, 6:13 pm

whirlingmind wrote:

Thanks for explaining. Um I still don't understand! I know what cricket is, (I'm in the UK!) but the second part of your post totally confused me.

I just realized that I did misspeak in that post.
I meant to say that "in cricket there is no PITCHER to try to strike you out"( "you' being the batter in either game). Not that there is no "batter to strike you out."

I need to translate cricket into baseball to understand cricket (I barely understand baseball even). But baseball is whats foriegn to you. So I guess you would need the opposite phrasing: "imagine cricket without the wicket- but with a bloke throwing the ball at you while you try to hit it- thats american baseball").

The 8-ball is the ball colored black in pool. The object of 8 ball pool is to sink all of your half of the 16 balls ( the stripped balls, or the solid color ones). And THEN to sink the black ball last as the coup de grace to win the game. BUT if you accidently sink the black ball anytime before that-you automatically loose the game.

So if the white ball (the cue ball that you use to hit the colored balls) lands someplace like near the edge with the black ball blocking it from the rest of the balls on the table (and its your turn to shoot) then you are said to be "behind the eight ball". Which is not a good place to be.

MusicIsLife2Me
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07 Dec 2012, 12:46 am

b9 wrote:

i was never able to adequately deduce the original reasoning behind the verbal formulations of almost all idioms.

MusicIsLife2Me wrote:

"It's raining cats and dogs".

My grandmother had to explain to me that people said this as a way to say that it was raining hard. Before she explained this I went to the window and expected to literally see cats and dogs.

i was always confused as to why anyone would use the idea of cats and dogs to formulate an idiom about heavy rain. it could be equally said "raining cathedrals and bridges", and it would make equal sense (i.e none).
actually there may be one way i can understand it if i think about it in a new way.

if there is an area that has multiple super-cell thunder storms occurring concurrently , and one of the super-cells spawns a tornado, the tornado may suck up the cats and dogs from the yards of the unprepared, and lift them high into the sky whereupon they may be blown into the realms of neighboring storms that are currently raining out with heavy downdrafts.

but i think the origin of the saying predates any knowledge of updrafts and transference wind sheer associated with storms, so i can not determine what drove the author of that saying to use the words they did, and moreover, i can not understand how that saying became understood and adopted world wide. "cats and dogs" is not a valid description of the measure of rainfall as far as i am concerned.

MusicIsLife2Me wrote:

"Don't point a finger at someone because you have three pointing back at you".

"where are they?" i would say as i look around the room. if they told me to look at my hand, then i would see 3 fingers pointing at the palm of my hand that those 3 fingers were on. in addition to this, i see no logical reason to point at someone who already knows that i am talking to them.

MusicIsLife2Me wrote:

Also, what idioms do you find the most confusing?

i do not understand how the phrase "as sick as a dog" intelligently conveys how sick one is.
most dogs i see are well, and so that phrase has no capacity to instill an idea of how sick they are in my mind. i have never been a dog, and it therefore follows that i have never been a sick dog, and so subjective descriptions with references to sick dogs are not able to be processed by me.

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i have heard the term "donkeys years" many times. what is the conversion ratio from donkeys years to human years?

example of usage in australian language:
a: how long has that house been there?
b: it's been there for donkeys years.

i assume that "donkeys years" are longer than "human years" according to the context in which i hear the phrase used.

donkeys do not live for a long time (30 years max?) , so i can only discount any possible durable value in the use of the term "donkeys years"

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when someone says " it happened just in time", i think "well where else could it have happened?"

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people say "i am pulling your leg" when they are not pulling my leg. which leg do they think they are pulling?
i can see that no one is touching my legs, but i know that the phrase means "not being serious" because i was told so. how in hell could someone use a mental idea of their leg being pulled to describe to other people the sentiment of not being serious?. never the less the concept caught on and is now understood worldwide, but still not by me.

-------

I have not heard the one about the donkeys years before, but I have heard "I'm only pulling your leg". I never got that because no one was actually physically pulling my leg. I've heard people say it means that something was meant jokingly, but I never really understood HOW that would indicate if a person is joking or not.

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MusicIsLife2Me
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07 Dec 2012, 1:00 am

I remember an incident in the fourth or fifth grade where I took an idiom literally. All the students in my class had to line up at my teachers desk to hand in our work. When it came to my turn my teacher said, "Step into my office". I thought knocking on her desk would be a good idea because I remember being told that you should knock before entering someones office :lol: Plus, that was my way of playing "pretend" at that very moment. I didn't see that she was simply saying that it was my turn.
I know that probably seems stupid of me.... :oops:
Do children with ASD's usually do these types of things?

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MusicIsLife2Me
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07 Dec 2012, 1:03 am

Also, I remember getting yelled at by my teacher for the above incident.

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kat333
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11 Dec 2012, 12:13 am

ColdEyesWarmHeart wrote:

People used to say "I COULD NOT care less" which makes sense. It is impossible for them to care any less than they do, therefore they do not care at all.

But nowadays it is being mangled into "I COULD care less" which means that it is possible for them to care less than they currently do, therefore they are stating that they actually do care, even if just a tiny amount. They are not completely indifferent like the COULD NOT phrase equates to.

YES! I HATE this. I have to correct people when they say it, I cannot let it go.

yellowtamarin
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11 Dec 2012, 12:52 am

MrXxx wrote:

I'm not sure how "popular" this explanation is going to be but here goes. This my story and I'm sticking to it:

I don't believe for one minute that we have all that much trouble understanding idioms. I don't believe we have any more trouble understanding them than anyone else.

I think we just hear them, don't understand them, and don't ask. Why that is could be for some different reasons.

Maybe we don't want to look stupid because we're already so tired of feeling that way. Maybe we don't understand it and feel like the idiom is being used intentionally to exclude us, and that's why we don't ask.

The point is, once we do ask what the heck something means, we don't usually have that much trouble understanding it. The problem is that we don't ask.

I think the "pros" ought to look into why that is, and quit assuming that we can't understand them.

I'm sure you are at least partly right. Also, I find that most of the time when I ask what an idiom means, I get told what it is trying to convey, but not the connection between the two, or how it came to be. Why? Because they don't know and don't care.

So an NT might hear a phrase, link it to the context/situation within which it was said, and "understand" what it means (or ask). Done. An aspie, on the other hand, might hear the phrase, think about the literal meaning, think "what has that got to do with this situation?", think some more, then think some more, and never ask because they are too busy trying to figure it out themselves. With an idiom that is 100 years old and referring to things that don't even exist anymore, it can be near impossible to try to understand it this way. An NT doesn't care about the deeper understanding so they get by just fine.

I reckon that your typical NT would hear an idiom and automatically just hear the meaning it conveys, and not get caught up in the literal meaning. We do that too, just not as well. E.g. most of us would understand "I'm feeling blue", or "keep an eye out" even though they don't really make literal sense, because we have moved beyond the actual words and just hear the meaning. With more complex idioms, we are more likely to get stuck. (Even with those two "easy" examples, we probably ponder over them on occasion.)

thewhitrbbit
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11 Dec 2012, 1:10 am

I love idioms, they are a really good way to express some things, though I'll admit

"Those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" gave me a bit of trouble.

"A shallow brook babbles the loudest" means that someone who runs their mouth a lot usually has nothing of substance.

Literally, a shallow stream would make a lot of noise because it is a fast flowing, but it wouldn't be a lot of good to you because it prob wouldn't have any fish in it.

Jinks
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11 Dec 2012, 5:21 am

MrXxx wrote:

I found this post interesting. I also think the diagnostic criteria is misleading in a way.

It has always puzzled me a bit to see the idioms thing in the diagnostic criteria. When I was a child and I would first come across phrases like these, I would be puzzled and visualise what was literally being said (like cats and dogs falling from the sky). It made no sense until someone had explained it. However,surely this is the case for all children. No child who is learning language understands when they first hear an idiom like "raining cats and dogs" because it makes no sense. It's one of the things adults find cute about kids - that the first time they hear these things, they don't know what they mean.

yellowtamarin said something similar, but concisely, I think the truth is that autistic people are less good at inferring the meaning of idioms from context than neurotypical people. A neurotypical child might only need to hear the idiom a few times in context before they get what it means. An autistic person will never get it unless it is explained. It is no different to our other difficulties understanding social behaviours which are dependent on context.

However, the diagnostic criteria is worded as if autistic people will continue to not understand idioms even after they have the meaning explained, which is ridiculous (and a little insulting to the intelligence of many autistic people). It may be an appropriate criteria for children, but I am in my 30s so I have come across most commonly-used idioms at this point in my life and filed them in my vocbulary - why would they still cause me difficulties? Language is one of my interests, and I really like idioms and metaphors.

b9
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11 Dec 2012, 7:15 am

Jinks wrote:

....... but concisely, I think the truth is that autistic people are less good at inferring the meaning of idioms from context than neurotypical people.

that is not the case for me. it is only within the framework of a context that i can deduce the meaning of an idiom. idioms are usually not critical to the fundamental understanding of the subject of a sentence, but they are mostly garnishes that serve to embroider an otherwise "standard issue" sentence.

my problem with idioms is that i fail to see how such a tenuous connection of words that are not imaginatively cogent (to me) can be adopted all over the world as a "figure of speech".
it is especially baffling considering almost all idioms were created, and went "viral" long before the internet age.

i had many problems with all types of speech when i was younger, but i have heard almost all the variants of sentences that can ever be said to me in my time, and i am smart enough to have learned how to understand speech, albeit in an alternative way to that which most people understand it.

if you think about it, everything most people say, no matter how careful they are, is based upon a subconscious familiarity with "whole sentences".
they very rarely think of where the words they use come from, and how they individually provide the building blocks to construct their sentence.

i am thankful i have mapped the coastlines of communication in my world, because if i were to try to simply intuit what people mean, i would understand nothing from the world of humans.

take this sentence for example:
"i am going to sydney tomorrow afternoon".
it is easily understood by me, but only because i have learned how to calculate (from experience over time) how to interpret that sentence.

"i am going" implies that they are currently in motion, yet the rest of the sentence implies that they are talking about a future time, and...well if i had not found a way around this when i was a child, then i would be very disabled. the future always trumps the past in sentences such as this.
"i am going to sydney" is trumped by "tomorrow afternoon", and so the "going to sydney" bit is subordinate to the "tommorow afternoon" time frame. i do not know how to explain it.

when people leave out small words that they think are insignificant, then the train of my thought can be potentially derailed.

example: someone says "i thought she was cute". i can insert the word "that" into the sentence to make it understandable to me. ie: "i thought that she was cute"

if someone said to me when i was 9, "i thought she was cute", i would have interpreted that to mean that "in a prior encounter with the girl he is talking about, he spent his time in thought, and she spent her time being 'cute' "

the addition of the word "that" would abort my examination of the meaning of the sentence to the point of a seizure.

anyway i am on the rails to timbuktu, so i will talk elsewhere now if i find a place to do so.

StarTrekker
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12 Dec 2012, 4:15 am

One I never understood was, "They get along like a house on fire". What the heck does that mean? That they get along well because wood houses attract fire easily, or that they get along poorly because fire and wood mixed is a bad idea? It makes no sense to me.

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