ducks in a row

Early on in my writing career -  which, to be honest, hasn’t been all that long, give or take a few years, or 365 trips around the sun -  a close friend of mine, who happens to be a very good writer in his own right, gave me some advice worth its weight in gold:

“At the end of the day,” he said, “avoid clichés like the plague.”

My friend is not one to beat around the bush; he calls a spade a spade, he knows the ropes, and he’s been in the business for donkey’s years.

Of course, his advice is easier said than done; our language is jam-packed with clichés and idioms that we use without giving them much thought at all. But maybe we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater; maybe clichés are a bit of a double-edged sword? Perhaps sometimes a cliché is just the ticket to get our point across. And while we search for novel ways to replace a cliché, we are really just pointlessly attempting to reinvent the wheel.

On Mother’s Day, I texted a friend of mine - “I hope your men spoil you rotten!” - and then I stopped and thought about what I had just written. Gross. The image of a piece of rotten fruit flashed through my head, and I quickly realized that there is probably more than one way to skin a cat; I could have expressed my sentiments differently.

It got me thinking about some of the other common phrases that are a little gruesome or, at the very least, not appealing. There was a bald eagle flying over our house recently, and my husband commented, “Just keep your eyes peeled.” I ran into a friend with young children at the park; “Wow,” I said, “they are growing like weeds.” After a particularly filling dinner, one of our children exclaimed, “I am stuffed to the gills.” Which is, of course, slightly better than going belly-up, a term that is derived from the position of your dead goldfish.

But there are a few that are truly the cream of the crop of unpleasant descriptions and origins:  

·       Drinking the Kool-Aid has little to do with the sugary drink we enjoyed as children; it is a reference to the 1978 event at Jonestown, Guyana, in which hundreds of members of the Peoples Temple, a Californian cult, committed suicide by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.

·       Bite the bullet, an idiomatic way of saying to have courage and force your way through a difficult situation, originates from battlefields where, before the invention of anesthetics, soldiers were given a bullet to bite down on to endure the pain of an excruciating procedure.

·       One for the road is a relic from the Middle Ages that refers to the final drink a convict is offered on his way to execution.

But really, these are just the tip of the iceberg.

While we are at it, have you ever wondered how we have come to rely on an egg for a lot more than a sunny-side up breakfast? In fact, the egg is descriptive; you are a hard egg to crack, a good egg, a bad egg, or, should you fall behind, the last one in is a rotten egg. But don’t egg me on; I would hate to be left with egg on my face.

I am not one to put all of my eggs in one basket, so let’s spend a moment talking about animals. While the dog is man’s best friend, in a dog-eat-dog world, it is also possible to work like a dog, be dog tired, or sick as a dog in the dog days of summer.

But hold your horses; let’s give the cat her moment in the sun. We all know that while the cat’s away, the mice will play, but who killed the cat? Curiosity, of course, but not before the cat got your tongue. But don’t let the cat out of the bag; isn’t it all just the cat’s meow?

I could go on until the cows come home.

But we can’t let the animals steal all of the thunder; weather and food definitely take the cake when it comes to interesting expressions that have seeped into our language. And while some expressions may not cut the mustard, others may also be the best thing since sliced bread. And frankly, we can sometimes find ourselves in the calm before the storm or the perfect storm or under the weather. There are many others, but I will save them for a rainy day.

Americans don’t hold a candle to some of the amusing expressions found in other languages. The Japanese say my cheeks are falling off when they have eaten something tasty, and the French exclaim when chicken have teeth to mean that something will never happen. Not all doughnuts have holes is what Italians say to mean things aren’t going quite the way they would like them to go, and in Iceland, they describe an unexpected surprise as the raisin at the end of the hot dog (really? I have never found a raisin at the end of my hot dog - ever! – nor do I think I would ever want to find one there). And last but not least, a phrase that became  popular in England and Australia after the British Prime Minister Robert Gascoyne-Cecil (“Bob”) appointed his nephew Minister for Ireland, and means it’s as simple as when Bob’s your uncle.

But don’t get your knickers in a twist; I am almost done.  My writer friend must be rolling over in his grave, and I bet you are thinking, “Icy certainly didn’t knock it out of the park with this one!”

In fact, you may be thinking that I am somewhere out there in left field, or that I have completely missed the boat, or maybe even that I am not playing with a full deck and I should go cold turkey and think long and hard before I get back in the saddle, but at the risk of leaving no stone unturned, this really won’t be complete until pigs fly, or at the very least until the fat lady sings.

But you made it! And here it is - the raisin at the end of the hotdog!