Tiny Stories: Idioms

Atop a bell tower, Faust was only saved from the masked knifeman when the clock finally struck one. 

 The Scarecrow King was never one to show any mercy; still, his second in command was aghast as he forwarded the command to leave no prisoners alive.

The wise farmer would never sell his milk cow to the butcher, no matter the offer. No one-time fee could compensate the income the cow brought him daily. 

As the sugar cookies auditioned for the play, it was apparent that Penelope was not cut out for the role of Annie.

 Ponyo was not a soldier; she let the searing pain overtake her. She barely noticed becoming engulfed in the lake. As she lost consciousness, her friends caught her and rocked her to sleep.

 For this project, I found inspiration in idioms. We use them every day but for the most part we have lost touch with their origins and we don’t really understand what they mean. If we weren’t used to hearing them every day we would realize how silly some of them sound. To further this statement, each story/picture is based on an idiom, the idiom is applied figuratively (as it would be used as an idiom) as well as literally, to show how the phrases themselves are different than what you think while using them. Some idioms are clear, some take some deducing. Some I discovered while looking through lists of idioms, and I hadn’t ever realized before that they were idioms, even though I’d used them in every day conversation.

I use photoshopped images because my own hand cannot get me anywhere near the images that are created in my mind. I also hoped that it would make a nice blend of the real and less real images, because that is how I'm using the idioms, realistically and figuratively.

I saw strong connections between this idea and what Dillard wrote about seeing. Blind people appreciated the world in their ways, through their other senses, and when they first gained sight many things baffled them and they couldn’t make sense of it. Yet, when they began to really understand their surroundings through sight they gained new understanding, such as the girl who realized that men didn’t look like trees. Likewise, I used idioms to make my speech stronger or to make connections with other people-- then I began to realize what I was saying, and some idioms don’t make much sense literally, and that threw me off. I didn’t understand the speech anymore. Yet, when I looked further to find the origin of the phrase, I was often pleasantly surprised at the interesting stories. 

As I was working on this project, several people referred me to a man on the internet who has a series about idioms. He is from Germany and he does not understand the levels of meanings in idioms, he only gets the literal meaning, which as we said can be confusing and funny. He makes fun of the phrases and he, like my project, points out to us that we haven’t thought much about the phrases we use. However, I think he still misses something from not finding out the origin and appreciating that story. Idioms give a lot of color to our language, but they mean a lot more if you understand where they come from and how to properly use them.