Jul 26, 2011 5 min read

Idioms are for the birds.

An idiom – in case you don’t have a degree in English or a proclivity towards the pedantic things in life – is a common saying or phrase that means something other than what it really says.

?Take, for example, saying that something is “for the birds.” In the literal sense, it doesn’t make any, well, sense. But that’s the beauty of the idiom; it gives meaning to an otherwise random phrase: to say something is for the birds is to say it is worthless. (One would assume that something worthless, like stale bread, would be left for the birds to eat.)

There’s plenty of common ones – “Birds of a feather flock together,” “Quit cold turkey,” “Back to square one,” “Beat around the bush” and “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” – that, taken literally, mean something completely different than the meaning we’ve come to associate with them. They’re peculiar, they’re odd, they’re fun as all get out. (Whoops, there was another one. I better quit while I’m ahead…shoot, uh, call it quits…wait, I mean call it a night, er, crud. This is harder than it looks. I better just cut my losses before I get any more carried away.)

So, outside the intrinsic value of knowing your parts of speech, why am I taking you on this tour of linguistic eccentricities? Because my beautiful wife Heidi butchers them on a consistent basis, with often humorous results.

In her petite yet capable hands, a common idiom like “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” gets mixed in with another fowl-centric phrase, “Keep your ducks in a row,” to produce a new gem: “Don’t keep all your ducks in one basket.” (This is good advice, since you would not want to clean the bottom of that basket. Still, it is unclear if we are to count these ducks before they hatch.)

It’s not because she’s not smart – she’s smart as a whip – it’s just this and other Heidi-isms are often an innocent mixture of two tangentially or phonetically related sayings. In fact, they can slip by if you’re not paying close attention, but you’re in luck, dear reader, that I always pay attention to what my wife says. (And not always just for column topic fodder.)

Oftentimes these neologisms come out of the blue in the course of seemingly innocuous conversation, and I have to stop her in mid-thought to go back and ask, “wait, wait, what did you just say?” (If a slip of the tongue goes unnoticed, does it make a sound?)

For example, when trying to describe a particularly hectic event recently, she melded together “hustle bustle” with “all the hub bub” to ask me what all “the hubble bubble” was all about. Smash cut to me: “Wait, what?”

(Of course, if you ask me, Hubble Bubble sounds like a great marketing idea for NASA to produce a line of chewing gum. We’ll get that shuttle program funded and back in operation in no time!)

Other times, Heidi’s versions of idioms just take the original meaning a step or two – or 20 – further. Take an instance where you, if you particularly dislike something, might say that you wouldn’t “touch it with a 10-foot pole.” Heidi will borrow from the unrelated “whole 10 yards” to offer up that she wouldn’t touch it with a “nine yard pole.” That’s nearly three times as much distance she wants than you would’ve asked for. Talk about an improvement.

(And no, Smarty Pants Reader, that’s not how much distance she’s going to keep me at for writing this column.)

While many husbands might shudder at ostensibly making fun of their wives in print, I’m not digging my own grave or putting my foot in my mouth, because when I point out her mangled versions, Heidi laughs just about as hard as I do while we try to figure out what combination of real sayings she’s stitched together to make her Frankenstein phrase. (No, really; I’m not pulling your leg here.)

A recent puzzler she came up with was “the ship and shebang.” At first we couldn’t figure out for the life of us what phrase she was trying to say; we were drawing a blank – in the dark. How about you? Can you make heads or tails of it and determine what two common phrases could combine to create “the ship and shebang”? (Your guess may be as good as mine.) The answer is at the end of the column, but no cheating; you’ve got to get it fair and square.

All kidding aside, common idioms are great, and I might be going out on a limb here, but if my back is to the wall, a regular ol’ idiom can’t hold a candle to a Heidi-ism.

If you guessed “the whole shebang” and “the kit and caboodle,” you win a prize. The prize is Brandon Szuminsky’s email address: bszuminsky@heraldstandard.com. If you didn’t get it, don’t cry over spilled milk.