One fine day I sat in the boardroom listening to a dynamic project manager describe the strategy for the next customer acquisition campaign. Only days earlier she’d told me she was sick to death of enduring meetings with men who couldn’t string together two sentences without spouting sports idioms. “The ball’s in their court,” she mimicked, “and they need to get behind the eight-ball, either go wide or punt! It had better be a grand slam, or we’re on the ropes!”

And while she ran a tight, serious meeting, I had trouble stifling chuckles. She didn’t use a single sports idiom. But she did say that a certain coworker was in the doghouse. The campaign was supposed to have an element of surprise timing, but this coworker had carelessly let the cat out of the bag to a competitor. Project Manager got the information straight from the horse’s mouth and was madder than a wet hen. The coworker had used up one of his nine lives, because just this once she was going to let the sleeping dogs lie. But she would be watching him like a hawk from now on.

She really had a bee in her bonnet.

Idioms and metaphors are so ubiquitous that we rarely pause to wonder how we came up with something as bizarre as “looking a gift horse in the mouth.”  We toss around animal idioms in our everyday language like bulls in a china shop, without ever pausing to consider that they have the power to terrify our concrete-thinking children with autism. Ever tell your child that he has ants in his pants, or that you have butterflies in your stomach or a frog in your throat? You didn’t really put a bug in Aunt Kate’s ear, did you? Or open up a can of worms? Nor did you grab a tiger by the tail, beat a dead horse, or bark up the wrong tree.

My son was quite young when it became obvious to me how endemic idioms are in our conversation, and how baffling he found them. Even today, I catch myself babbling idioms and stop to check if he knows the one I just used. As an adult, he’s learned many idioms, and when he doesn’t know a particular idiom, he can identify it as one, given the context of the sentence.

I’m always looking for inroads to teach our kids language skills, and we know teaching is easier if we can go into it through a child’s  area of interest. Many—not all—children with autism are fascinated with or comforted by animals; if your child or student is, it can be a natural opening for teaching of idioms, metaphors and similes. Knowing the origins of the idiom can help the child “picture” the meaning. Here’s how some common idioms were coined:

“Letting the cat out of the bag” (spilling a secret) and “buying a pig in a poke” (purchasing a fraudulent item) are idiom cousins. Sixteenth-century farmers sold their piglets in open-air markets, holding them in large bags called pokes. Crooked sellers sometimes substituted a cat for the piglet. Prudent buyers would open the bag before buying, thereby “letting the cat out of the bag.” If the buyer neglected to check, the trickery became known as “a pig in a poke.”

“Sick as a dog” didn’t describe Wilhelmina, a delightful neighbor-dog of ours who loved vanilla ice cream with green beans on top. To me, a revolting combination, but nevertheless safe to eat. Many dogs are infamous for eating just about anything whether edible or not, and they often pay the price. The “sick as a dog” idiom dates back at least 500 years.

It doesn’t really “rain cats and dogs,” not even here in Oregon. This idiom arose after the English floods of the 17th and 18th centuries. Torrential downpours left the streets littered with bodies of cats and dogs drowned in the storm, looking as if they had rained from the skies. Use this idiom in the company of a child with autism and you may get responses like “I don’t see anything except falling-down water!” or “They must all be on the ground by now.”

You might be living “high off the hog” whether or not you realize it. This old African-American idiom refers to those who can afford the better cuts of pork, such as ribs and chops, which are from the upper portion of the hog, as opposed to pig’s feet, chitlins and other less delectable parts of the lower portion.

“You’ve really cooked your own goose!” We use this to mean that someone has brought trouble on oneself. It started with a medieval story about a town under siege. To taunt the enemy, the townspeople slung up a goose, symbolizing foolishness. This enraged the attacking army into burning down the whole town, in effect “cooking the goose” and everything else with it.

When I speak to groups, I jot a list to share of every idiom, metaphor, simile, homophone, phrasal verb or pun I hear in the day or so before. The number always startles me. Try keeping a list for a day or two. Consider the imagery those idioms conjure for a child with autism. Then rephrase in concrete language so you can begin teaching that though it may seem strange, sometimes phrases may say one thing but mean something very different. Some kids like to keep a reference log of idioms they hear and learn. I know more than one youngster whose circumscribed interest is idioms.

And every dog has her day, right? Back in the boardroom, our Project Manager wanted to know what she had said during her presentation that made me smile so. I told she sure did have her ducks in a row, except for the fact that chickens standing around in the rain don’t seem to care if they’re wet, so the mad wet hen idiom is a pure nonsense idiom. When I showed her my notes—she had used an idiom about every fourth sentence—she was speechless. She had to think about it. She hadn’t realized . . .

What’s the matter? I asked.

Cat got your tongue?

 

© 2013, 2018 Ellen Notbohm www.ellennotbohm.com

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