On Idiomatic Expression
Idiomatic expression of ideas, emotions, and experiences are found all over the place, from the streets to coffee shops and the scripts of a cashier or bus driver. Certain phrases are specific to a corner shop or a school hallway, or to the way someone calls after a friend who is leaving, or in formal settings. where hearing something that usually sounds unremarkable at home, in a new location, reveals how colloquial it is. The words themselves barely change, because language is malleable with finite combinations, but the meaning of the words change with the order and situation in which they are used.
I do not normally “hunt” for idioms. I do, however, notice their usage as they appear in conversations and announcements, in the way a group of friends shortens a story or the way a parent warns a child. Public forums and groups are especially interesting to observe, with the more niche ones compressing longer thoughts into things familiar enough that no one stops to parse it, yet specific enough that it could fly over the heads of those not privy to those forms of expression. While traveling the world, places like airports and grocery store lines expose the distinct expectations of existing in certain spaces as a “native,” often marking the moment I remember that I am not from here. Or that I am, or that the others are from where I am from, depending on which expression is instinctive and which one I have to work to catch. Increasingly, and even more so today, communication between cultures and locations has caused both the blending and connection of idiosyncratic tendencies in speech, action, and expectations in interaction. My interest resides in the automatic understanding or the slight delay that comes in the transmission of information within and between groups of people.
Idioms drift into my own writing from time to time, though I rarely lean on them for structure. I tend to notice them the same way I notice tone or physical detail: in passing, holistically, and retrospectively. They reveal how a community arranges its thoughts and routes experience into a shared shorthand while also acknowledging the way that phrases carry the atmosphere of dramatized memory. The literal wording falls flat if taken alone, but the emotional contour remains intact as long as the person on the other side shares some part of the same background, or at least an understanding of it. I have realized that this is not a limitation of language, but reflects the internal logic of the spaces that shaped the idioms in the first place. A strange sentence without context becomes perfectly reasonable once you understand the habits and histories that gave it shape. The more I pay attention to how I write and how people speak, the clearer it becomes that idiomatic expression is a record of how groups of people think.
I pay attention to idioms because they reveal that conversations rely on mutual understanding. In thinking about writing as a craft, they influence the curvature of a sentence, the pacing of a thought, and the way a line lands on the ear. Studying these differences sharpens my sense of what a sentence leaves for the reader and assists in more effectively enunciating all parts of my prose. Idioms are a way cultures condense intent, humor, restraint, or nostalgia into a few words, and they leave traces of a place and its people, traces that reveal how meaning travels between those who have and continue to converse with each other across time and space.