Spilling the Beans

The Longman Dictionary of English Idioms is pretty comprehensive - though the very first idiom I looked up* (the Yorkshire exclamation of disbelief "Give over !") is not included.

The inside of the front cover and the fly leaf carry sections headed"What is an idiom ?", "How to find out what an idiom means" and "How idioms are used". But the very first explanation offered, "What is an idiom ?", might perhaps mislead the reader.

"An idiom" we read, "is a fixed group of words with a special different meaning from the meanings of the separate words. So, to spill the beans is not at all connected with beans; it means 'to tell something that is secret'."

True, but not very well put. To start with, the definition offered is both clumsy and imprecise. What does 'a fixed group of words' mean ? What is a 'special' meaning ? I suppose what they are trying to say is something like 'a sequence or grouping of words that will be familiarly recognised as having a specific meaning of its own independent of its apparent, literal meaning'.

To explain spill the beans in these bare terms is potentially misleading: it is indeed an idiom; but more fundamentally, and before it became an idiom, it was (and is) a metaphor. Many idioms started life as imaginative metaphors, and this fact should perhaps be stressed. But not all metaphors are idioms (all creative writers of verse or prose use metaphor a lot, and it is the 'non-idiomatic' - ie unfamiliar - images that make the writing creative and original). And not all idioms are metaphorical: it is often the strange phrases without any obvious metaphor that puzzle foreigners most, phrases like taking pains or getting by or messing about or just not on. Others, like losing your temper or thin as a rake or close to the wind are 'dead' metaphors whose literal significances are quite irrelevant or even lost to most of us. Yet others are literary allusions, such as once more unto the breach, sour grapes, the promised land or RIP.

Many of the examples in this Dictionary are in fact proverbs, or allusions to proverbs. I haven't looked them up, but I am thinking of such familiar sound-bites as No peace for the wicked; It takes one to know one; the last straw. They are often just comments that assume - or pretend to asume - that the hearer will recognise the allusion.

When does a catchphrase become an idiom, or an idiom become a cliche ? The truth is that it is the current use of the phrase that helps us to classify it. Time changes its use or its perceived quality, and we assign it in due course to another category. Last year's witticism becomes this year's catchphrase and next year's cliche. And categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive: a phrase may belong to four or more such artificial categories: it can be metaphor and slang and idiom and cliche all at the same time.

This is a good book, though it begs the question* of what the notion of 'idiom' should really comprise. But whatever we think we mean by the term, this collection reminds us that metaphor, simile, proverb, catchphrases, slang, cliche and literary allusion are all constantly being stirred into the big linguistic pudding of English speech and writing. Whether sprinkled delicately and judiciously or just bunged in regardless, these characteristic and colourful phrases are the spices that make our language so rich and flavoursome.

These musings of mine are not masquerading as academic analysis: they are just a sort of mental exercise, a kind of cerebral 'jogging'. Not what everyone fancies, but pretty harmless to the onlooker, and perhaps of some value to the practitioner. Yes, it keeps one thinking.

* I have just checked, and found that this this idiom is in the book.

Spilling the Beans