(Hoping image of John Cleese as Sir Lancelot can be considered fair use. In its own particular idiom of course.)

Greetings Otterites!

I was cruising on my way home from the salt mines with Mrs. Martin and was struggling to come up with a topic for Martin Monday. As you know, while Robert and Francis do quite a bit more prep for their posts (and the quality shows in the effort). I pretty much just wing mine on the way home from work on Mondays. That’s when a bolt from the blue struck and I thought I would slap out a few paragraphs on one of my favorite literary devices, the idiom.

An idiom is a construction of words that means something beyond the established definition of the words in use or is simply a particular way of speaking or writing that can be thought of as a unique style. For example, I don’t actually work in a salt mine, so that can be thought of as an idiom for expressing fatigue with a regular job.

The wonderful thing about idioms is that we use them extensively in daily language without consideration that we might not be understood. When I wrote “salt mines” and “bolt from the blue”, you as the reader understood what I meant, even though a literal reading of those phrases would be very confusing.

My father has been gone since 2013, and for some reason the things he used to say stick with me more than almost any other memory. Maybe everybody’s dad was full of idioms like the ones my dad used. My favorite was when you asked him about cars that were particularly unreliable (remember I’m GenX, I was a youngster in the 1970’s, the age of shoddy) he’d say “you’d have to tape a quarter to that piece of shit to make it worth rolling into the Ohio River.” I don’t think he ever said the words Republican, Democrat or politician. He’d say sons of bitches instead. That was his style, his idiom.

Of course, we here at S&O have our own particular idiom, smushing together profanity, innuendo, a dose of Monty Python, a smidge of Star Trek, and unnecessary formality for a wonderous stew of language and style. We think developing our own style of podcasting was an important ingredient in hopefully entertaining you and making ourselves stand out in the tidal wave of podcasts out there.

I’d love for Robert and Francis to comment further with this one, as I know it will tickle their fancies (did it again). Francis I’m sure will want to run with this one (damn, there’s another one). Time to go Otterites, but hopefully I’ve got you thinking about this amazing feature of language and thought. Communicating in idioms seems bizarre on the surface, yet it works and we’d be nearly unable to make ourselves understood without it.