After careful thought, I decided that the popularity of an idiomatic expression can be contributed to three main factors: familiarity, complexity, and applicability. Familiarity being how well known and recognizable the idiom is. Complexity being how complicated the idiom is compared to its non-idiomatic counterpart. Finally, there’s applicability being how easy or how often an idiomatic expression is used. Without these three factors, I think idioms and idiomatic phrases wouldn’t be as abundant as they currently our in our cultures today.
Familiarity: Avoiding Words We Do Not Know While Creating Connections In the Process
To begin with, let’s pretend you are sitting in an auditorium listening to a public speaker. He speaks very straightforward, only presenting the information he was tasked to give. Practically a robot, he remains disconnected from the crowd from the time he walked on to the stage to the time he exited it. Now imagine a new speaker walking on stage. This man smiles at the crowd and sympathizes with them. He agrees that walking you dog can be “a pain in the neck”, or that gas prices “are getting out of hand these days”. You probably feel more connected to the speaker in this way. Why? Well, The Kenyon Review listed an interesting article by Tony Hoagland called Idiom, Our Funny Valentine: Its Cunning, Its Romance, Its Power in which it stated, “[…] much of idiom’s sizzle comes not from its brand-new freshness, buts its ripe familiarity.” Hoagland continues by describing the Greek meaning of idiom, “one’s own” and how it refers to being our speech. It is how we speak, how we talk, it is ours. Tony also suggested that like chameleons use of color, we use idioms to blend in. That notion I believe fits well with our new friend, the public speaker.
Complexity: The Simplest Is Best!
Moving on from that, idioms are a great way to make things less complicated. Idioms and idiomatic expressions shorten words so that we don’t have too much to carry. For example, the idiomatic phrase “too much to carry” could be switched with the alternative, “as many words to say.” Alternatives for idioms most of the time are longer and don’t give off as much of a flare as the idiom, itself. Not convinced? Look at the alternatives for “Walking on thin ice”. There are plenty of idioms, such as “pushing your luck”, you can use to replace this phrase, but the non-idiomatic alternative would be something along the lines of “performing an action that has a high risk.” Easy alternatives, however, are slang words. You could alternate “to put the whole matter in a nut shell” by saying “to sum it all up” without really losing anything. Except, a lot of idiomatic sayings already use some mild form of slang. It’s almost as if you’d be switching an idiom for an idiom.
Availability: If You Have Nothing Good to Say Than Don’t Say Anything At All
Lastly, there is the applicability of an idiom. Most likely, people won’t use idioms if they cannot use them often. This idea can classify many idioms into sections based on how much they’re used.
The most commonly used phrases are typically idiomatic phrases or sayings that have blended themselves into the main flow of communication. These phrases, if analyzed closely, don’t seem to be idiomatic in nature, but really are. An example of this is the phrase “something along the lines of…” that I used in the last paragraph. You probably knew that I was saying the example would be very similar to the real thing, but you also probably gave it very little thought. Look back now. How does the location of a subject being near various lines have any connection to being similar to something else? Logically it doesn’t work; however, in a connotative way this phrase has melted into the main flow English and is now used freely and quite often without much thought about it.
Slightly less available and freely used is the typical idiom you’d expect. A man named Dr. Heiko Possel listed 50 of these typical idioms on his site, English Language Smart Words. Amongst many of the expressions are “feeling under the weather”, “this is the last straw”, “can’t judge a book by its cover”, and “piece of cake.” Each of the 50 expressions listed are well-known and commonly used. These are the idioms that we often easily identify and single out as idiomatic sayings while also seamlessly integrating into our speech and writing. While these idioms can pop out a little in writing, it is not to the extent that it will damage the integrity of the work.
Lastly are the increasingly unavailable idioms that are too specific, too lengthy, or too unknown to be used in a common setting. These are idioms such as “It’s raining cats and dogs” and “Swimming with the fishes.” Both examples describe events or circumstances that we typically do not face every day. “It’s raining cats and dogs” can only be used when there is heavy downpour around the area. On the other hand, “swimming with the fishes” referrers to death and can be heard the easiest as a cliché line on your typical NCIS crime fighting show. The irony about these idioms is that they are unmistakably obvious idioms, yet are difficult to list because of their rarity and lack of use. These are the expressions I expected to see in my middle school English homework.