BLITHERING IDIOMS

by James Lincoln Warren

Blithering – Senselessly discursive or talkative, babbling; esp. of a person, used chiefly as an intensive adjective, with the meaning ‘consummate’ (freq. in blithering idiot); also more widely = despicable, contemptible.

Idiom – A form of expression, grammatical construction, phrase, etc., peculiar to a language; a peculiarity of phraseology approved by the usage of a language, and often having a signification other than its grammatical or logical one.

—Oxford English Dictionary

Skillful use of idiom is key to good fiction. Idioms provide atmosphere and can be used to engage the reader by invoking familiar things, setting the stage and dressing the set. The idiomatic speech of a character can illustrate him much more effectively than bald description can. But danger lurks.

One of the dangerous aspects of popular expressions is the tendency of people to pick up on them without having any comprehension of what they literally mean—the colloquial applications are derived from context rather than from cognition. This can also lead to alterations in the expressions that are essentially meaningless in any literal sense, but get picked up nevertheless and enter the language as common expressions. Here are a few of them.

There will be hell to pay.

Exactly what does it mean to pay hell? Is hell the coin or the recipient? The answer is neither, because hell has nothing to do with the original expression, which was, “There will be the devil to pay.”

The use of “devil” as a description of something difficult to accomplish goes back to at least the 18th century, as in, “He had a devil of a time.” In this sense, it means one is encountering the worst of all possible circumstances, analogous to running into Old Nick himself.

“To pay” is an obsolete verb meaning to apply pitch or tar, dating from the early 17th c. In the days of sail, the slats of wood that made up a ship’s hull (called “strakes”) were separated by seams that had to be sealed to prevent leakage. The longest such seam, hence the most difficult to seal, ran from stem to stern just below the bilge line (the widest breadth of a ship). It was accordingly named “the devil”. To “pay the devil” meant to be lowered over the side and made to apply pitch to the seam. Because the sailor performing this task would be out of sight from the main deck, it was a particularly hazardous job and was sometimes assigned as a form of discipline. Therefore, committing an error with grave consequences would mean that “there would be the devil to pay” as far as putting the errant person in danger. This is also the origin of the phrase “between the devil and the deep blue sea”, which is equivalent more or less to “between a rock and a hard place.”1

So you can’t pay hell at all.

Pushing the envelope.

This always makes me envision an dog pushing an unopened letter around on the floor with his nose, but the cats will do.

An envelope in mathematics is the intersection of a variety of curves—in a more general sense, it is anything that surrounds something else. Engineers use graphs of envelopes to display operating parameters. For example, you might have a graph that shows pressure measured against temperature for lubricating oil inside an engine. Anything that falls inside the envelope is within the design specifications and shows safe operation; anything outside represents some kind of danger or malfunction, like the red line on a tachometer or oil pressure gauge on your car. This is particularly true in aviation, where envelopes are even used to show safe landing and launching conditions. Operating beyond the envelope is flatly dangerous. But it is sometimes possible to operate near the extremes of the envelope safely, as long as the time spent there is short, thereby limiting the risk.

In any case, operating in conditions near the edges of the envelope means taking big chances. This called pushing the edge of the envelope, where the verb “pushing” is used in the same sense as “approaching”, as in, “He’s pushing 80 if he’s a day.”

So it’s not the envelope that’s being pushed around at all, but its edge that is being approached.

“AAA doesn’t set the bar. They are the bar.”

I heard this on a TV ad for car insurance. It was meant to convey that AAA is the company by which all other auto insurance companies should be measured. Now I love AAA, even though I don’t have their insurance, because they have bailed me out of many difficulties on the road over the last forty years. But this was one of the most stupid things I’ve ever heard.

To set the bar means to establish a standard, to set something to aim at. The expression first appeared in the 1970s. Not surprisingly, it comes from the field and track event of high jumping, where the athlete’s object is to clear a bar measuring the height of his jump. But here’s the rub: the bar itself is a barrier that one is supposed to overcome. If AAA is the bar, then they’re the thing you have to overcome to get your claim paid. Come to think of it, it might just be true, but it surely isn’t good advertising.

Hoist on his own petard.

The correct phrase is “hoist with his own petard.” It comes from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, act III scene iv.

A petard is a kind of bomb that was used to blow down castle walls. To be hoist with your own petard was to be thrown up into the air by an explosion that you caused yourself with a device you intended to hurt others with. You can’t be hoist up in the air on the bomb—there wouldn’t be enough of you left.

I think that’ll do for now. But I have many others I’m saving for a rainy day.

1. The OED says “Hence various writers derive the phrase ‘the devil to pay and no pitch hot’; but this is prob. only a secondary and humorous application of ‘the devil to pay’.” I usually bow to the OED, but in this case, I have to go with the “various writers” instead. Nautical slang is one of the richest veins of English-language idioms there is. [↩]