Peedeebee
Member
- Joined
- Sep 21, 2015
- Member Type
- Teacher (Other)
- Native Language
- English
- Home Country
- Great Britain
- Current Location
- Great Britain
It was the running thread about peeves (in general discussions forum) which made me think of this. I think you'll enjoy it.
When I came to South Yorkshire as a student decades ago, I learned some South Yorkshire idioms. My favourite is that in South Yorkshire, if the opening hours of a shop are 10am till 4pm, you will hear, " Open ten while four, love." While means until.
(Love is a normal address to a stranger or a friend, to and from any gender. (And it is pronounced with the vowel matching the "u" in "butcher".) )
So imagine my predicament when I walked into the college early one day, as someone was mopping the floors, and the floors were glistening and wet. She said, "Don't walk on that while it's dry, love."
What was I to do? The floor was wet right across the corridor..
Back to the Modern Languages teacher. He used to give us Idiom tests as well as vocabulary tests. So we all learned phrases like "mit dem Bus" (on the bus) without difficulty.
And as an aside, there used to be a book for teachers in England called Grammar for Writing. In the section on idioms, nearly all the idioms were metaphors, and nearly all those metaphors were more like proverbs.
It's an uphill struggle!
When I came to South Yorkshire as a student decades ago, I learned some South Yorkshire idioms. My favourite is that in South Yorkshire, if the opening hours of a shop are 10am till 4pm, you will hear, " Open ten while four, love." While means until.
(Love is a normal address to a stranger or a friend, to and from any gender. (And it is pronounced with the vowel matching the "u" in "butcher".) )
So imagine my predicament when I walked into the college early one day, as someone was mopping the floors, and the floors were glistening and wet. She said, "Don't walk on that while it's dry, love."
What was I to do? The floor was wet right across the corridor..
Back to the Modern Languages teacher. He used to give us Idiom tests as well as vocabulary tests. So we all learned phrases like "mit dem Bus" (on the bus) without difficulty.
And as an aside, there used to be a book for teachers in England called Grammar for Writing. In the section on idioms, nearly all the idioms were metaphors, and nearly all those metaphors were more like proverbs.
It's an uphill struggle!
