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Some idioms feel like they've been with us forever. We're used to saying it’s “raining cats and dogs”, we feel like “a fish out of water” or stop “pulling my leg”. But others have emerged relatively recently, such as “Groundhog Day”, “first world problems” or “computer says no”...

On Radio 4's Word of Mouth, Michael Rosen is joined by Gareth Carrol, Senior Lecturer in Psycholinguistics and author of Jumping Sharks and Dropping Mics: Modern Idioms and Where They Come From. He sheds light on the surprising origins of some of these modern-day phrases, from the world of sport to the internet to TV and film.

Metaphors are not dissimilar to idioms in that they express non-literal meanings, says Gareth. They’re important in terms of how we think and talk about the world. For example, we have a metaphorical idea that life is like a journey. That leads us to say things like I’m taking a new path or he’s taken a wrong turn or we’ve come to a crossroads. These phrases express the underlying metaphor, but not in a specific, fixed way.

Idioms are different because they are fixed phrases, Gareth explains: “They’re lexically specific combinations of words that we can’t really change.” For example, with the idiom play with fire, the “fire” is metaphorical – it stands for something risky or dangerous – but it’s part of a specific phrase. We can’t change it to play with acid, for example. “The sort of fixed nature of idioms is really important,” says the psycholinguist.

With modern idioms, finding their origin is easier

It can be really difficult to find the root of famous idioms. Often, they reflect iconic or symbolic actions that are no longer common knowledge. A good example might be bury the hatchet. We all know it means "to make peace”, but most of us won’t know why. The answer? Native Americans would literally bury their weapons at the end of a conflict.

And with lots of idioms, no one is actually certain where they came from. If we go back 500 years or so, we know phrases like kick the bucket were common parlance, but we can’t necessarily nail down their provenance.

“This is one of the interesting things about the modern idioms,” says Gareth. “We have a much clearer idea of when they were first used and we can track that with much more accuracy, simply because we have such good records of everything these days.”

So, where do our modern idioms come from?

• Boxing has given us throw in the towel (give up), on the ropes (near defeat), ducking and diving (evading a difficult situation) and below the belt (unfair).

• To move the goalposts (change the rules or requirements mid process), comes from football.

• American sports have also contributed: ballpark figure (estimate), play hardball (act ruthlessly) and slam dunk (categorical victory).

• Park the bus is a phrase that all football fans will be familiar with. When José Mourinho first entered English football as Chelsea manager, he complained about an opposition team being incredibly defensive: “As we say in Portugal, they brought the bus and they left the bus in front of the goal”. A variation of the phrase stuck and is now commonly used to describe defensive play. And it’s used in other contexts too. “You might talk about a politician parking the bus if they’re set to defend their position at all costs,” says Gareth.

• It was Manchester United’s manager Sir Alex Ferguson who first coined the phrase squeaky bum time during the final stages of a closely run Premiership title race. It refers to the sound made when nervously squirming around in a plastic seat in the last, tense moments of a game, or towards the end of a nail-biting season.

• Breaking the internet is now a phrase that people use to mean “something that causes such a stir online that, metaphorically, so many people rush to a website that it threatens to bring it down,” explains Gareth.

• The idea of something going viral is very much in our vocabulary now.

• The concept of first world problems – things that we complain about but that actually, compared to other parts of the world, may well be relatively minor – started life as a Twitter hashtag.

• OK boomer is a phrase that emerged on platforms like TikTok, Twitter and Reddit as an ironic reply from millennials to some of the perceived criticisms of the older generation. It came to prominence in 2019 when a young, female New Zealand MP, who was giving a speech about climate change, used it to shut down heckles from older, male members of parliament.

Idioms can be produced by politics

• Dead catting or the dead cat strategy might be deployed by politicians who are getting lots of negative attention. It means to do something showy or ostentatious, like announcing a new policy, as way of distraction. “The story goes that this was invented as a tactic by Linton Crosby, who was quite a successful political strategist,” says Gareth. “He suggested that if you were to walk into a dinner party and throw a dead cat on the table everyone would immediately stop whatever they were talking about and pay attention to the dead cat, so it’s really just a way of completely stopping a negative conversation and diverting attention away from it.”

Not one to be interpreted literally.