Business Writing for Idioms
by Mannie Sherberg
When Cardinal center fielder Jim Edmonds catches a ball, we don’t think there’s anything strange about it. After all, baseballs are catchable. Similarly, when patrons at Lambert’s Cafe in Sikeston, Mo., catch some of the restaurant’s renowned “throwed rolls,” or when a Venus flytrap plant catches an insect, we don’t shake our heads in wonder. After all, rolls and flying insects are catchable.
But how about catching a cold? Or a joke? Or an airplane? There may be nothing strange about saying “Jim Edmonds caught three fly balls last night,” but there’s something decidedly strange about saying “Suzie Sniffles caught three colds last winter.” It may make perfect sense to say “Tom Tubby caught twelve throwed rolls” or “My Venus flytrap caught my pet fly, Freddie.” But, when you think about it, it makes no sense at all to say “I gave up being a comedian because nobody caught my jokes” or “Instead of driving, I caught the shuttle to Chicago.”
Strictly speaking, the verb “catch” applies to seizing or gripping or capturing things—physical objects—that are small enough to be restrained in the hands or in a trap. But you can’t seize or grip a cold. You can’t get your hands around a joke, and you can’t snare the shuttle to Chicago in a trap. So why do we use “catch” in all these cases? Why do we say “Sorry, but I didn’t catch your name” or “I caught a hint of sarcasm in his remarks” or “I caught a whiff of perfume”?
The answer to all these questions is: I don’t know. That doesn’t mean I’m an ignoramus. It simply means that this is a column about idioms. Phrases like “catch a cold” and “catch a joke” and “catch a plane” are all idioms. And the definition of “idiom” is: a common expression that can’t be explained logically or that, when thought about, doesn’t make sense. English is full of idioms—thousands upon thousands of them: strike a bargain, hold your tongue, kick the bucket, put up a fight, in full swing, thrown for a loss, down in the mouth, grab a bite, and on and on.
For writers, idioms of this sort are nothing to worry about. We all use them all the time, and unless we learned English as a second language, there’s a good chance we all use them correctly. We may not be able to explain a phrase like “put up a fight”—it’s easy to explain “put up a picture,” but how in the world does anyone “put up” a fight? But we still know what the phrase means and when to use it. Idioms of this kind rarely cause problems for writers.
But there’s another kind of idiom that can cause problems. This second kind of idiom means “the characteristic ways in which a language says things.” Every language on the planet has its own ways of saying certain things; when transferred to other languages, these “ways of saying things” sound downright weird. In English, for instance, we never put the main verb at the end of a sentence. We’d never write “Barnaby Brat at the teacher a spitball threw.” But that would be a perfectly acceptable sentence in Latin, because Latin sentences frequently put the main verb at the end.
One way to recognize idioms of this sort is to ask: Can they be precisely translated into another language without losing their meaning? If the answer’s no, they’re idioms. Take the French term: amour propre. Translated into English, that means “love own”—which makes no sense at all. That’s why it’s usually translated into English as “self-esteem” or “self-respect.” Of course, in French, “self-esteem” and “self-respect” make no sense at all. So they’d be translated as “love own.”
Idioms not only separate English from other languages, they separate American English from other Englishes. In Walt Disney’s movie The Parent Trap, a young British girl pretending to be an American gives herself away when she says, “You gave me a fright.” No American who grew up in this country would ever say that, because it’s not idiomatic American English. An American would say, “You scared me.”
(By the way, if you were alert, you noticed a glaring example of a senseless idiom in the previous paragraph: “gives herself away.” Literally, “gives herself away” means “gives ownership of herself to someone else”—or, in practical terms, submits voluntarily to a life of slavery. But that’s not the way we use the phrase. We use it to mean something that the words themselves don’t mean: “to disclose a secret about oneself.” Why should three words that literally mean something else be used in that way? Because that’s the way English—and every other language—works. Languages are like people: each of them has its own personality. Idioms are what give one language a different personality from another. The idioms themselves are no more explainable than the fact that your personality is different from mine.)
Do idioms ever get writers into trouble? Foreign-born users of American English who are still struggling to master the language frequently have difficulty with American idioms. They write things like “arrive in handy” for “come in handy” or “allowed him down” for “let him down.” But even native-born users of English sometimes run into trouble with idioms. Whenever you write a sentence that sounds a little strange or off-key, you’ve probably written something that isn’t idiomatic—isn’t characteristic of the way we say things in American English. When that happens, you have no choice but to take the sentence apart, find the un-idiomatic expression, and make it idiomatic.
An example will make the point. Sloppy writers often write things like “I have no opinion of that.” That sounds weird because, in that sentence, “opinion of” is not an American idiom. The phrase should be “opinion about” or “opinion on.” On the other hand, we do sometimes say “opinion of”—when we use “opinion” to mean “estimation” or “valuation.” Thus, it would be idiomatic to say “I have a low opinion of cheaters”— but not “I have a low opinion about cheaters.” The idiom changes when the meaning of the word “opinion” changes. When opinion means “belief” or “judgment,” we say “opinion about”; when opinion means “valuation” or “feeling,” we say “opinion of.”
That’s why it would be idiomatic to say, “If you want my opinion of Candidate X, I’ll give it to you in one word: He’s a jerk.” It would also be idiomatic to say, “If you want my opinion on what to do about Social Security, it’ll take me at least an hour to spell it out.” The question is: Are you using “opinion” to mean “what you think about something” or are you using it to mean “the way you feel about something”? Different meanings of “opinion” require different idioms. (If distinctions like these confuse you, any good dictionary will set you straight.)
Is there a lesson in all of this? Yes. If you’re going to write idiomatically, you must read aloud what you’ve written—with emphasis on the word “aloud.” Listen to the sound of your writing. If anything you’ve put on paper—or on the computer screen—sounds odd, begin searching for the guilty idiom.
Remember: You may never be able to catch fly balls like Jim Edmonds, but you can sure as heck catch every errant idiom that comes your way. Who knows? If you do that day after day, you may end up with the Grammatical Gold Glove Award.
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