Confusing and Annoying Idioms....

Post Reply New Topic

I grew up in a home full of them! I always had to ask what they meant and often took them literally. The most confusing ones for me as a child were :

"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.

"Don't point a finger at someone because you have three pointing back at you". I remember looking at my hand and being able to see that there was three pointing back at me, but I didn't understand why that was said. My mother had to explain to me that it means to not point a finger in judgement because we should be more concerned with ourselves.

This is one I didn't understand until I was in my twenties :
"It's like the pot calling the kettle black". I heard it means to not judge. What I DON'T understand about this is why use the color black because not all pots and kettles are black. Can someone explain to me why the color lack is used? Does it have to do with cookware being burnt?

Also, what idioms do you find the most confusing?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pot_ca ... nd_origins

Okay, thank you. I figured it may have had something to do with soot, but wasn't so sure.

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

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.


"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.



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.

_________________________________

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"

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

________________

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'm interested to know now, what do they mean about not understanding idioms.

Do they mean that you just take it literally, or do they mean that you have learnt what it is used for but that you find it illogical or ridiculous, so don't understand them from that point of view?

There are probably lots of idioms that I don't understand, but there are some I do because I learned but I can't see the connection to what it's supposed to mean.

Last edited by whirlingmind on 06 Dec 2012, 10:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

This reminds me of a related expression: "Pull the other one, it has bells on." Where? Pull the other what? I know now they mean "You're pulling my leg, pull the other leg because it has bells on it" but the other leg never has bells, so why say it in the first place?

people say whatever enters their minds, and there are many people who instigate phrases that are estimated by me to be banal, yet somehow others are drawn to those phrases, and imbue them with validity simply by their unrefined endorsement.

any people that talk about "bells" on either of my legs i would dismiss summarily as hallucinatory idiots.

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.

I HATE that too:"I COULD care less".

And folks have been using that since atleast I was a child in the mid 20th centurey..

If they said "I could care...." then THAT would make sense ( implying that I could do something but I choose not to - ie 'to care'). But, as you said, saying "I could care less" implies that you do in fact care a great deal!


Most of the above expressions (even as a child) I got both the connotation and the denotation. What grownups were using them to mean and was not bothered by the litereal imagery of "raining cats and dogs" and what not.

Though "the pot calling .." was a bit problematic. Having grown up in the mid 20th centurey with electric or gas ranges that did not soot up the pots and kettles I never even saw a black peice of cookware until my mom got into the iron chef fad.

But I ( and many grown ups I work with are still bothered by this expression) did have an issue with "having your cake and eating it too."

As a child I couldnt imagine anyway of "having" a cake without eating it.

But as I got older I figured that it must be refering to those big visually stunning wedding type cakes. Maybe some folks long to keep them to "have" them as visual momentos.

Ofcourse there are such things as cameras. You can take a snapshsot before you chow down.

So I dunno.




Then there is the expression "give it the whole nine yards".

What does "nine yards" mean.

Even the experts who write books about words would write that the origin of the expression "is a mystery".

I sounds like a sports expression. American football is all about gaining yardage- but the number nine has no special meaning in the game.

Nor does '9' mean anythign in any other yard-obsessed sport like track and field, nor soccer, nor rugby, nor lacrosse, nor anything.

But recently FINNALLY i did learn where the expression came from!
I saw a show about world war two flying fortress bombers. The belts of bullets that feed the guns of the ball turret gunners on the big planes were- nine yards long.

"That messerschmidt on our tail...give it the whole nine yards!"

Pretty cool!

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.

EDIT: As evidence, I would ask the OP (and anyone else that cares to) to take a look at the progression of this thread. She asked, but asked here, among her autistic peers, but didn't ask whoever used the idiom of the pot and kettle, and why they were black, but once she got the answer, had no trouble at all understanding it.

I am still amused by Wilbur the Pig's reaction to a lamb in Charlotte's Web when it told him "Pigs mean less than nothing to me", and Wilbur had to know how anything can be less than nothing because nothing is the lowest you can go, and if something were really less than nothing, then nothing would be something even if it was only a little bit of something.

And of course saying "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less" also bugs me a lot. If you could care less then doesn't it mean you do care even if it's only a little?

"Needless to say (insert needless thing here)" ...If something is needless to say, then why say it?

When I was younger there was this cute commercial for cheese where a little boy says to his friend that his mom puts cheese on his food because he had "a hollow leg". Before then I'd never heard that saying before, and in the ad the two boys are about as confused by it as I was. The boy's friend asked which leg was it and he said "I think my right one feels funny". Of course I now know it's an expression for someone who eats so much it's hard to believe where the food all really goes.

"Hit the ceiling" I used to imagine someone actually jumping up so high they hit their head on the ceiling. One time I heard someone on TV say someone LITERALLY hit the ceiling, "literally" being one of the most misused and overused words in the English language, which is also annoying because the man obviously did not hit the ceiling the way I used to imagine it. I really hate it when people misuse that word, and of course, "ironic". For years I was confused about what ironic really meant even when I read about it in English class because it said to mean the opposite of what you say and my own teacher said that wasn't what it really meant!

However, I'm really a sucker for reading and learning about how old sayings and expressions and where they originally come from. For example the word "spinster" for single women that I and most women hate goes back to pioneer days when women who used spinning wheels were usually not married. I used to think it came from spiders since male spiders usually seem more elusive than the females. But I like spiders.

The original spinsters were actually really cool. The women deemed too old to get married set up communal houses and spun wool for a living. Wool was expensive so they were paid well, and apart from living expenses they could keep & spend their own money. And they had a lot of freedom as they weren't controlled by a husband or father. They were the first independent career women!

I take it to mean they could care less if they tried to care less. Therefore they don't even care enough to try to care less.

Most likely it is a "baby-talk" contraction of the original "I could not care less"

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."

The pot calling kettle black used to confuse me as well and I saw it was used in an argument or drama. Now I know it just means accusing someone of doing something you are guilty of doing yourself. Or it can mean you complain about something someone does you do yourself. it's another way of calling someone a hypocrite. This is my simple definition of it.

"Couldn't care less" baffles me because why can they not care less? I know it means they don't care. I am sure it baffles lot of people too so they say "I could care less."


"Get off your high horse" I had no idea what this meant and I thought it was something people say in an argument when they don't like what you say. But no it means you think less of others who don't do what you do and you are self righteous about it and think you are better than everyone. People say this to people who have a holier than thou attitude and I hear it a lot in the parenting forums. I just see lot of insecurity so when a parent questions why other parents don't do this or that, other parents get defensive about it because how dare they ask them questions about their parenting or how dare they post what they do with their own kids or their own time. So the unsecured parents accuse them of being on their high horse.

There are still lot of expressions out there I don't understand and there are some I enjoy because they give me funny pictures in my head like "get off your high horse." I picture a person being on a horse and they are being told to get off it. I also love it when people are humorous about it when they say something like "be careful on that horse, you don't want to fall off." I would rather say "How is the view up there?"

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