Idioms as Birdsongs

The Sacramento Bee ran a piece in today’s paper by reporter Gina Kim on the origin of idioms, which, according to David Simpson, an English professor at UC Davis, is a “very loose term that can mean anything from the colloquial to a metaphor.”

Here’s a snippet from the article:

“‘It’s a way people establish subcultures with each other,’ (Simpson) says. ‘My kids, like totally whatever, are inserting themselves in a certain segment of the youth culture.’ So idioms and slang – such as the term ‘cool,’ which came from the jazz subculture – are born and spread within these groups.' It’s like birds and the slight variations in their songs. ‘I think language is the same,’ Simpson says, ‘just another kind of birdsong.’”

(The idiom “eats like a bird,” is inaccurate, by the way, as most birds eat 25-50 percent of their body weight every day.)

Idioms and slang are not only part of our subculture, but age-related as well. While working for a web-development company in Atlanta, I was reminded just how young my colleagues were when I mentioned I was attending a winding over the weekend. A bright-eyed woman of perhaps 22 turned to me and said, “What’s a wing ding?” Surprised she didn’t know, I asked an older coworker (she was maybe 25) if she knew what it was. “Sure,” she said without hesitation. “It’s a font.”

Ahem. Well, yes, but I was talking about a party…for geezers, apparently.