Besotted By Idioms and This “Perfect” Language

This lady from Manila gets moved by thunder and spectacle. Or perhaps I am plain easy to please. During an earlier blogging period, a pro writer (Cliff Burns of Beautiful Desolation) blew me away when he injected the idiom “no quarter given bloodbath” on one of his compositions. Dazzled yet barely grasping its absolute meaning, I tried to use it every chance I could – unmindful that I might have been doing injustice to the expression and appalling my reader at the same time.

Idiomatic expressions fascinate me, more so in the not so distant past – in advance of my enlightenment that they’d long been deemed clichés or worn-out articulations according to “The Writer’s Constitution.” The first official post of this blog [I deleted the real initial ones, shh..] was “Idiomatic Nut” in which I gathered a few expressions and pieced them together to come up with coherent sentences. Some examples are as follows:

Don’t talk turkey or you’ll be the talk of the town.

Smart Alec rubs Smarty Pants up the wrong way and becomes a punching bag.

How do you like them apples? Though one bad apple hit rock bottom and gone pear shaped.

A fish out of water drops in the bucket and ends up a flash in the pan.

Cool, huh… No? Anyway, if you wish to see the whole post, click here:  https://justmarj.wordpress.com/2010/11/13/idiomatic-nut/

Caution: I’d merely striven for jocosity. Don’t believe a word of it. 🙂

Is that a Cloud Seven or a Cloud Nine, or just a Cloud on the Horizon?

Well, I found doing that quite fun then; I find it quite fun up to this day. Meaning – I’ve done it again. Take a look at the ones I just came up with:

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire – and it’s bringing down the house.

Beating a dead horse is the height of stupidity.

Find the guts to bite the bullet then have it ram down your throat.

Come hell or high water, don’t get caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Throw your weight around till you’re blue in the face.

If it’s cut and dried, it doesn’t hold water because it’s running on empty.

Grab the bull by the horns and drop dead in its track.

Bad hair day = Dead man walking

Lay all your cards on the table, put two and two together, then play with fire.

Big Honcho and Queen of Hearts are raising Cain and peeping Tom. It runs in the family.

Beyond the shadow of a doubt, the kiss of death is when you don’t hold your breath.

Enough, enough… I know. That’s how hog-wild I am concerning this language. English is an epic fragment of my enjoyment, not to mention it serves as the focal point of my bread and butter – teaching English, that is. I even get a thrill whenever my boss shoves me into a room with more than half a dozen students inside to train. I love being in charge of a group class; even if our subject matter gets down to the intricacies of grammar. Er, that reminds me, I’m far from being done with my own copy and study of Cambridge’s “Advanced Grammar in Use” – because yours truly is a never-ending work in progress with respect to that discipline.

You see, prepositions (is it really “on my list” than “in my list”?) and perfect tenses are among my grammatical debilities. In my earlier years, simple past had been sufficient for me to refer to finished actions; I didn’t want to have to do with any grammar jargon that has got the word “perfect” in it – like past perfect simple or  future perfect progressive tense. Yikes. But ever since making the decision to spend my remaining productive years as an ESL instructor, I’ve rolled up my sleeves getting acquainted with the various conjugations of sentence construction.

Let me illustrate (before capping this post):

Simple past:

The schmoe acted like a jerk.

Present perfect progressive:

The schmoe has been acting like a complete jerk.

Past perfect progressive:

The schmoe had been acting like an unmitigated jerk for some time.

Future perfect progressive:

The schmoe will have been behaving that way for ages by the time I get the urge to choke him into a state of comma, I mean coma.

See what I mean? Dauntingly convoluted, don’t you think? 🙂

Now you’d better not mention to me the issue of spelling and punctuation.

Mama Mia Que Horror

Busy me. But peak season is about to wrap up in our academy soon which will supposedly provide me more allowance to read and write. In a dash though, the weekend has given me time to respond to somebody’s weird words in her blog.

Sometimes, misplaced hubris can reach across from the huge (Asian) land of bodies emitting air of unexplainable pungent funk. For instance: this overrated female blogger who has a penchant for calling her fellow blogger names (e.g., additionally soliciting backup from her community after naming directly her nemesis, that is – another female blogger, who had thought her writing skill was amateurish) this time poked her nose on something that had absolutely nothing to do with her. She did it probably because she felt so strongly about this male blogger who happened to be the subject of a previous post of mine. She had, in fact, written blog posts in her site about an undeclared love and bond she secretly shares with him.

In this age of single-click links, what you put out in the ether is subject for perusal and interpretation. If mrs. siddharta thought her passion could be hidden behind codes and vagueness that readers surely won’t get it, she should have done some considerable thinking first. Furthermore, instead of mr. “european” blogger getting upset (for the reason a few people could read between the lines), it would be better to just take those entries down. Again, just take them down. Very simple. Because for a married woman to pine for a married man, it’s a double gobbling Que Horror.

Anyway, Asian female blogger must be patting herself on the back these days for branding herself a “sweet” angel and me the opposite. Not to mention making fun of my 5’1 frame.

Frankly, I don’t know what her real husband was thinking when he carelessly released their most recent photos on the internet. Because as soon as I saw them, I went “Mama Mia!” Why get caught without upper chest support when gravity and time have already started pulling some major tissues down? And surely if she had time to call me names for being forthright on my own site, she could also allot some to jump on a treadmill to slough off all those massive pounds. Hey Prissy gurl, go a little easy as well on your favorite whopper McSandwiches, ok?

I’m removing her from my bookmark anyway. Mr. blogger jestingly called her a genius. Hunting for a good read, I kind of believed him and occasionally opened her blog in search of a single incandescent piece. So far all I’ve seen are dead serious, pedestrian entries – not to mention corny poems. Let me give you an example:

Holes! Holes!

Holes left and right

Now where’s my froggy

Who hops on them quickly

There you are!

Oh Jumpy, Jumpy!

Do come to mommy

So I can give you salami.

Now call me shallow if I botched up in my interpretation of her poems although I swear they basically look that way.

Poetry can be technical, too, according to her. I guess we’d better shape it into a diamond. After all, the value of the art is priceless. Which made me come up with a short one – dedicated to her. The title: “If Big-bodied Hubby Finds Out.”

*

Black

And blue

Plus a big bruise too

Are what will show through

When your heart

Yearns

Two

*

Look, my past blog posts are just that – past. Except for my writings about the important people in my life, I want to put the insignificant ones behind me. But if you wish to drag them still, be my guest. Just make sure to air what you have to say right here – if you want to get my attention – since I choose to be more discriminating in click opening blogs. You know I don’t aim for likability or to belong to any blogging community; it’s more essential for me to maintain an outlet for my real thoughts and feelings. This is my blog. You can likewise do whatever you want with yours.

Besides, nobody in this blogland could be pure enough to carry a license preaching others about kindness. Your previous blog posts disclose you’re not that sweet Miss P you claim to be.