“It’s like déjà vu all over again.” – Yogi Berra
Our language is filled with idioms, common expressions whose meanings are not always the sum of their literal parts. A simple task is “a piece of cake.” When you know you have to put in hard work to get the results you want, it’s “no pain, no gain.” When you regain your energy after being exhausted, you “catch a second wind.” Sometimes, we rely on them so much that we forget how often we include them in conversation. That’s not usually a problem when the people you converse with regularly share a common tongue.
Then I learned that military idioms aren’t as common as we might think, no more so than our volumes of acronyms or habitual swearing.
Not that long ago, I broke it down Barney-style, lamenting how a phrase as seemingly common as “the long pole in the tent” could lead to so much confusion. The harder I tried to limit my use of these idioms, the more I realized how ingrained they were into my patterns of speech. Cutting back on the acronyms and swearing were relatively simple tasks compared to the effort required to eradicate military idioms from my vocabulary. As much as I tried to speak like a “normal” person, three decades of habit were simply too hard to break. As I wrote a year ago, just when I thought I’d finally made some progress, those idioms would comes swooping into my speech like black Chinooks in the night.
In a recent email to colleagues intended to bring them together for a coordination meeting, I informed them were getting together to level the bubbles. “Level the bubbles?” was the immediate response. During a recent discussion on decision-making for the coming fall semester, I suggested we get right of boom with COVID-19 before we commit to any specific course of action. I still get strange looks when I mention the little old lady in tennis shoes, but she exists in every bureaucracy and I’m going to keep talking about her until everyone understands what I mean. And, even if no one understands what I mean when I point out that a mistake is often simply a matter of operator headspace and timing, I think they’ll eventually get the general idea.
So, when I saw a Twitter thread over the weekend exploring this issue, I knew I needed to revisit the topic. These idioms are pervasive in our daily language, so much so that we use them without thinking. Who hasn’t looked at a new initiative or campaign plan as little more than yet another self-licking ice cream cone? Who among us hasn’t reminded an overly confident co-worker that the enemy gets a vote? When was the last time you had to pin the rose on someone or wondered aloud if the juice is worth the squeeze? Ever ask for an explanation from soup to nuts or realized that everything you do comes down to hurry up and wait? Gather the team for an azimuth check? Try to gauge an audience with who’s who in zoo? And we all dread having someone flick the booger, dodging a task that inevitably fell in our own laps.
Try as you might, there’s no escaping the idioms that shape our language. Which is probably why I keep a football bat – as the centerpiece in my office. A reminder of where I came from, it gives the people around me today a glimpse into who I was yesterday and where I came from.
As one of our associate deans once said to me, “You Army guys. You have your own language.” Yes. Yes, we do.
