Expressions under Wraps

By Steve Carr

Our talented and tolerant editor has learned to send me a reminder before my column is due. I doubt he needs to do that with his other contributors. For that I say I’m sorry and thank you. When I replied to his email prompt, I suggested I’d try to “pull a rabbit out of a hat” for my submission.

I then asked if he’d consider accepting something less magical, more along the lines of a stuffed toy varmint instead of a live rabbit. He politely didn’t respond. I’ve chosen to assume his silence can be equated with acquiescence.

That takes a load off. So mediocrity is my friend this month, unless luck and magic intervene. A week has passed since his reminder. I know better than to hope for a serendipitous find. It’s time to hunt down that varmint.

All this jabber of magic rabbits and varmints and taking the load off reminds me how often I use idioms, whether they be more colloquial, like “chasing down varmints” or mainstream sayings about rabbits in hats. In some educational and writing circles, the use of idioms, trite metaphors, or tropes is frowned upon as being well, trite and lazy. 

But who am I to bow to convention? After all, I prefer fry sauce to ketchup. I contend an apt and well-timed idiom can be effective and even capture a certain colorful panache. And if not today, one day I’ll paint that picture.

I once served on an international board. The small group included folks from Africa, Europe, Asia, and then there was me, Mr. Idaho, USA. Our working language, English, was a second language to everyone on the board but me. Each spoke a wonderfully accented, unnuanced, British form of English.

I admit that I often strained to understand the gentleman from Japan, even while the others seemed to have no problem. Ordinarily, though, we managed to communicate just fine. One day, during a discussion on a particularly thorny issue, I said to the group, “Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.” 

Silence ensued. Blank stares greeted me, and not for the first time. That expression, my statement, meant nothing to them. At least I hadn’t mixed metaphors again, but my intervention was a non-sequitur.

After the awkward pause, our colleague from Italy groaned and threw up his hands in a show of exasperation. My friend from Mali grinned, rolled his eyes with a twinkle and folded his arms.

Our Japanese chairman, always the gentleman, placed his hands on the table and sat quietly. My friend from Germany said, “For güte sake, Stefan, what are you meaning?”

It seemed like a good time for a coffee break. I had inadvertently thrown myself into the briar patch, and by so doing gave myself extra time to think. Upon returning to the table, I was able to sway the group to a solution best suited to my hand.

Idioms, metaphors, and the like are mostly learned on the street, or in my case the potato field or sandlot ballpark, seldom in the classroom. I spent lots of unsupervised hours outdoors. I’ve been told my persistent expressions are often cliché. To that I say, cliché is overused. 

In that faraway boardroom, I learned over the years to keep my expressions under wraps. That is unless I needed to buy a little time to think before pulling a strategic rabbit from my hat.  It was then that those tropes became extra arrows in my quiver.