A free Reference Guide to American English Idioms

     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Idioms are important in speechwriting. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines an idiom as carrying a figurative or non-literal meaning:

 

“an expression in the usage of a language that has a meaning that cannot be understood from the combined meanings of its elements (such as up in the air for ‘undecided’) or in its grammatically atypical use of words (such as give way for ‘retreat’).”

 

Having a dictionary or reference guide for idioms is very useful. There is a free 133 page pdf e-book by the Office of English Language Programs at the United States Department of State from 2010 titled IN THE LOOP: A Reference Guide to American English Idioms. You can download it either here or here.

 

The book cover was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.

  

Don’t just bring an empty plate when you are invited for dinner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a humorous blog post by Laurie Smale on September 22, 2025 titled Magic Minute Quirky Aussie Custom. He begins by stating an idiom:

 

“Just about every Australian newcomer I’ve met has been thrown by the perplexing Aussie request to ‘bring a plate’ when invited to an informal gathering among friends.”

There is an explanation at the Australian National University web page containing Bring a Plate in Meanings and origins of Australian words and idioms:

 

“An invitation to bring a plate of food to share at a social gathering or fundraiser. There are many stories of new arrivals in Australia being bamboozled by the instruction to bring a plate. As the locals know, a plate alone will not do. In earlier days the request was often ladies a plate, sometimes followed by gentlemen a donation. First recorded in the 1920s.”

 

And the Wikipedia page for a potluck says that:

 

“Other names for a ‘potluck’ include: potluck dinner, pitch-in, shared lunch, spread, faith supper, carry-in dinner, covered-dish-supper, fuddle, Jacob's Join, bring a plate, pot-providence and fellowship meal.”

 

Carrie Newcomer has an August 28, 2023 YouTube video of her song Potluck.

 

A related idiom is discussed by Martha Barnett at A Way with Words on June 14, 2013 in an article titled Ring the doorbell with your elbow. Why your elbow? Because both your hands are full!

 

An image of an Alberta potluck came from Wikimedia Commons. 

  

When life gives you lemons, should you just make lemonade?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an optimistic proverbial phrase, with its own Wikipedia page, that says: 

 

“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”

 

But at the Smarter & Harder web site on March 16, 2022 Sam has an article titled When life gives you lemons, DON’T make lemonade, and he lists four things to do instead:

 

1)  Find out if you like lemons

2)  Leave the lemons where they are and bail

3)  Make life take the lemons back

4)  Make an Arnold Palmer [half lemonade & half iced tea]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As shown above, you can buy a premixed, tall can of Arnold Palmer. Further, there are at least two other things you could do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One is to use those lemons to make a Lemon Battery.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another is to save those lemons for later by preserving them in a jar with salt. There is a recipe by Julia Moskin at Cooking New York Times for making Preserved Lemons. And there is an article by Zaynab Issa at Bon Appetit on February 8, 2023 titled 17 Salty-tangy preserved lemon recipes to use up the whole jar.

 

Last but not least, on March 8, 2023 Dave Kellett published a Sheldon comic strip with the proverbial title and the following text:

 

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade!

 

But to do that, you gotta buy a pound of sugar. Oh, and a pitcher. Get a pitcher while you’re there. And also one of those lemon-squeezy things. And water, of course.

 

When life gives you lemons, your troubles have only begun!

 

Images of lemons and a jar of preserved lemons came from Wikimedia Commons.   

 

Consumer Product Safety Commission recalls ten-foot poles that you couldn’t touch a person with

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You probably have heard the idiom that:

 

“I wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole.”

 

On February 16, 2023 the U. S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has an article about a product recall titled KLIM recalls backcountry probes due to risk of severe injury or death. These KLIM A300 folding probes are 118” long (almost ten feet). They consist of seven ~17” sections that are supposed to be assembled to form a rigid pole which can be pushed into the snow (as shown above) to locate (touch) someone buried by an avalanche.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The probe design is similar to, but much taller than that for a folding cane used by blind persons, as shown above. Reportedly the probes can fail to operate properly when deployed by rescuers.

 

Images of avalanche probing and a folding cane came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

In their New York criminal trial for tax fraud, Trump’s attorneys tried to throw both their CFO and their former accounting firm under the bus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

During the recent trial for criminal tax fraud, attorneys for the Trump Organization tried to blame Allen Weisselberg, their own Chief Financial Officer (CFO), since he already had entered guilty pleas. They also tried to shift blame to their former accounting firm, Mazars – saying they should have caught the fraud. (On February 18, 2022 I blogged about how Donald Trump’s Organization got fired by his accountants). An article by Matthew Chapman at Salon on December 2, 2022 is titled Trump Org lawyers throw Allen Weisselberg under the bus after he spilled the beans at trial.

 

But the jury didn’t think any of that was credible. There were 17 counts. Another article by Kara Scannell and Lauren de Valle at CNN on December 7, 2022 reported Trump Organization found guilty on all counts of criminal tax fraud.

 

Merriam-Webster has yet another article on Where does the expression ‘throw someone under the bus’ come from? Their thesaurus explains that ‘spill the beans’ means to make known information previously kept secret.  

 

I created an ‘under the bus’ cartoon from modified versions of this bus  at Openclipart and this man at Wikimedia Commons.  

 

Make sure you understand an idiom before you use it

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s Dilbert cartoon is titled Eat Our Own Dog Food, and has the following dialogue between his Pointy-Haired Boss (PHB) and Dilbert:

 

PHB:      We need to eat our own dog food.

Dilbert: You mean we need to use our company’s

               products as if we were customers?

PHB:       I’m not sure what I mean. I once heard our CEO say

                the dog food thing and I liked how wise it sounded.

Dilbert: It means we should use our own products.

PHB:      That doesn’t sound right. Why would we use our products

               when we can use good ones?

Dilbert: Because…it will make our products better over time.

PHB:      To be honest it made more sense

               when I thought it meant dog food.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wikipedia has an article on Eating your own dog food, which suggests a better phrase would be Drinking Our Own Champagne. When using an idiom, you also need to get the spelling right. On April 19, 2010 I blogged about Right out of the shoot? Another type of YAKWIRM! It should be the rodeo inspired phrase ‘Right out of the chute.’

 

The image of a dog food sign by Carol M. Highsmith came from the Library of Congress, and an image of a champagne bottle came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

The last straw is the straw that breaks the camel’s back

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Idioms sometimes have changed significantly. The Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms explains the last straw as follows:

 

“The last (or final) straw -

A further difficulty or annoyance, typically minor in itself but coming on top of a whole series of difficulties, that makes a situation unbearable.

The full version of this is the proverb the last straw breaks the camel’s back. The modern form is traceable to Charles Dickens in Dombey and Son (1848), but earlier versions are recorded, including a mid 17 th-century reference to the last feather breaking a horse’s back.”

 

The Meriam-Webster dictionary has a similar explanation. Another explanation at The Phrase Finder has some more details. Both the animal and the object were changed from the original version for that idiom.

 

Ninety years ago there was a Marx brothers comedy film titled Horse Feathers. Meriam-Webster says that horsefeathers just means nonsense or balderdash. But The Phrase Finder says that compound word is a euphemism for horsesh*t.

 

The cartoon came from page 1 of the February 21, 1912 issue of Punch magazine found at the Internet Archive.

 

Eight idioms in a comic strip

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The September 1, 2021 Sheldon comic by Dave Kellet opened with Arthur, the talking duck, spouting the dialogue shown above. (I added the arrows). Then he added six more idioms: what’s shakin’, what’s bakin’, what’s movin’, what’s groovin’, how’s it goin’, and how’s it hangin’.

Up the creek without an idiom

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few days ago I was flipping TV channels and heard right-wing political commentator Dinesh D’Souza botch a common idiom by saying something like:

 

“Biden is riding in the canoe, but I don’t think he’s manning the oars.”

 

When I Googled that, I found an earlier variant at Proof Positive:

 

“It’s clear that Biden is in the canoe, but he’s not the one controlling the oars.”

 

That statement is unintentionally hilarious because, as shown above, canoes usually have paddles rather than oars, and the common idiom is Up the Creek without a Paddle. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s usually best to get specific and Call a spade a spade.

 

Images of a canoe paddle and spade were adapted from Wikimedia Commons.

 

Homophones – cue and queue

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a homophone as:

“One of two or more words pronounced alike but different in meaning or derivation or spelling (such as to, too, and two).”

The homophone queue showed up in a blog post on October 7, 2019 at Fearless Presentations titled Body Language in Public Speaking. The first paragraph said:

“Body language in public speaking is the nonverbal queues that your movements make during communication. Presenters often focus on what they are going to say and their visual aids. However, we often overlook an important part of the speech — body language. In public speaking, if you look poised and confident, your audience will believe you are poised and confident.”

In the Merriam-Webster dictionary a queue is defined as:

“A waiting line especially of persons or vehicles.”

As shown above, that blog post probably meant to say a cue, like Senator Josh Lee shaking his fist. When you watch a queue, you often will see body language cues like frowning and folded arms, indicating people really don’t like standing there.

Back on August 13, 2015 I blogged about Should you "take a queue" or "take a cue"? 

Later in that blog post they dragged out a myth, which I blogged about way back on July 25, 2009 in a post titled Bullfighting the Mehrabian Myth.   

I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck

In communication details like spelling and grammar are important. This week I received another pair of phishing emails that immediately revealed their fraud via simple mistakes in spelling or grammar.

One was a bogus ‘PayPal’ alert, with a salutation that misspelled customer!

The other was a 'Microsoft’ account update with an extra "will’ – a glaring departure from English grammar.

The 1939 turnip truck image for illustrating that idiom came from the Library of Congress.

UPDATE July 14, 2018

I got another phony PayPal email warning me "your account was opened form another devices." LOL!

Literally blowing smoke

Until last month I had assumed that the phrase “blowing smoke up your behind” was figurative (meaning insincere compliments) rather than literal. Then on the new books shelf at my friendly local public library I found a book by Lydia King and Nate Pedersen titled Quackery: A brief history of the worst ways to cure everything. On pages 88 and 89 was a section titled Blowing Smoke Up Your Arse which described how in 18th century London tobacco smoke enemas were used to try and resuscitate drowned people. The article was illustrated by a photograph of a kit from the Wellcome Collection (with a bellows as shown above) and a captioned diagram showing the parts and how they were assembled. I have added another Wellcome Collection illustration of the assembled device (which coyly omits the nozzle). There was an organization known as The Institution for Affording Immediate Relief to Persons Apparently Dead from Drowning (which later became the Royal Humane Society). There even is a four-minute YouTube video titled Tobacco resuscitation kit: a smoke enema to save your life? It describes the theoretical basis of four humours.

There also was a magazine article by Sterling Haynes on Tobacco Smoke Enemas in the December 2012 issue of the BC Medical Journal (on pages 496 and 497). He said that in 1811 English scientist Ben Brodie discovered that nicotine was toxic to the heart, so smoke enemas soon became unfashionable. Via PubMed I found another article titled A history of the medicinal use of tobacco 1492 – 1860 by Grace G. Stewart in the July 1967 issue of Medical History (pages 228 to 268) with a better description (page 244) of how blowing smoke went from literal to figurative:

“Dr. (Daniel) Legare put the final touch upon the practice of injecting smoke into a patient’s intestinal canal to resuscitate the apparently drowned, when he presented his inaugural dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania in 1805, recording the results of his experiments upon animals with the rectal insufflation of tobacco smoke and demonstrating thereby that this mode of procedure was of no value as a means of resuscitation. The discontinuance of the practice of using tobacco smoke for this particular purpose did not mean that physicians abandoned the practice for other purposes, however, for it was continued until 1860 and possibly later.”

‘In play’ is a stale old phrase from sports. Instead try something else like ‘up for grabs.’

On March 3 at her Speechwriter-Ghostwriter blog Jane Genova posted that President Trump Blows It With Over-Used Buzzphrase ‘Witch Hunt.’ I thought that was a hilarious example of ‘the pot calling the kettle black’ because she has recently used the phrase ‘in play’ in her post titles once a month:

March 7th - Law School Deans – How Many Jobs Are In Play?

February 20th - Uber – Its Business and Brand Could Be In Play

January 3rd - Megyn Kelly aka Megawattage Pivots to NBC – Fox News Brand In Play

‘Up for grabs’ is an obvious alternative for ‘in play.’ The day after her January 3 post I blogged about her Tired sports jargon – please don’t say pivot when another word would be better. Then on January 7 she blogged about “Pivot” “Deep Dive” “Disrupt,” et al. – Buzzwords Belonging in Graveyard. Her use of et al. also belongs in the graveyard, since it should refer to names rather than things (where et cetera belongs).

It’s easy to get ‘stuck in a rut’ of overused words or idioms. Back in graduate school I picked up the five-dollar word deleterious (harmful often in a subtle or unexpected way) from my thesis advisor. Remember that Mark Twain said:

“Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.”

Every day or two I look at Alltop Speaking. Jane’s post titles show up there in the feed from Speaking Pro Central. My pointing to her as a bad example just is like ‘shooting fish in a barrel.’

The volleyball game image is from Wikimedia Commons.

Should you “take a queue” or a “take a cue”?

The idiom “take a cue from” means:

“to use someone else's behavior or reactions as a guide to one's own.”

An August 10th blog post at Ethos3  titled Lazy Tips for Design  by Sunday Avery fumbled it in the following section:

“Think Kid’s Book

Have you ever seen a presentation that looks minimal, contemporary, and sleek? It probably followed this design principle, which takes a queue from children’s books by only including a short amount of text and single object of focus per slide.”

On February 14, 2014 I blogged about a particular version of that design principle in a post titled Assertion-Evidence PowerPoint slides are a visual alternative to bullet point lists.

When you look up queue in Merriam-Webster you will find that one meaning is:

“a waiting line especially of persons or vehicles”

but that’s the second one listed in the full definition. The first is:

“a braid of hair usually worn hanging at the back of the head.”

The image of a queue came from a 1908 Puck magazine at the Library of Congress. 

Right out of the shoot? Another type of YAKWIRM!

Earlier this month in her blog Jane Atkinson asked If Content is King, Are you Royalty? In that post she said that:

“Marcus Buckingham is a great example. He knew right out of the shoot how to be engaging and funny on top of great content.”

As far as I know “right out of the chute” is rodeo slang meaning at the beginning of a ride. I’m not sure what “right out of the shoot” means. It could refer either to firearms or photos. However, when I Googled those phrases I got 163,000 hits for “right out of the chute” and 192,000 hits for “right out of the shoot.”

“Right out of the shoot” is a mondegreen, which happens when a phrase (like a song lyric) is misheard or misinterpreted in a way that gives it a new meaning. Last November I came up with YAKWIRM, a long acronym for You All Know What I Really Meant. Then it referred to typographical errors, but it can equally well apply to mondegreens.

At the end of each verse of the Credence Clearwater Revival song Bad Moon Rising the lyrics actually say that: “There’s a bad moon on the rise.” Many people instead heard: “There’s a bathroom on the right,” and in concerts John Fogerty sometimes sang it that way just for grins.

Stand & Deliver!: The Importance of Context for Idioms

In my previous post I referred to Steve Adubato’s web site titled "Stand & Deliver" http://www.stand-deliver.com/home.asp He started his company with that name in 1999. Variations of that phrase have been used as the title for several books about speaking and presentations.

In 2006 there was Jocelin Kagin’s, "Stand & Deliver: your guide to dynamic presentations".
In 2002 there was Philip Khan-Panni’s "Stand and Deliver: leave them stirred, not shaken" (a sly reference to the fictional secret agent James Bond and his martinis).

Of course, "Stand and Deliver" also was the title of a 1988 movie about Jaime Escalante teaching calculus to students in East LA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_and_Deliver

However, if you mention the phrase "stand and deliver" to an audience of Englishmen as being related to public speaking you may expect to be greeted by peals of derisive laughter. That phrase also has a VERY different older meaning related to highway robbery (or "income redistribution"). Stand means to come to a stop, and deliver means to hand over your wallet or purse. The phrase uttered by a highwayman typically was "stand and deliver - your money or your life".

Can you find the meaning for an entire phrase? Sure! Go to a library and look in a dictionary of idioms. The McGraw Hill Dictionary of American Idioms says that "stand and deliver" means "to give up something to someone who demands it (originally used by highway robbers asking for passengers valuables)"