Hi there.
Are you baffled by British English idioms?
Have you ever wondered why someone is "going cold turkey" or what
"the elephant in the room" is?
Well, you're not alone.
Stay with us because we're diving into the world of English idioms
which involve animals today.
But guess what?
By the end of this lesson, you'll not only understand these idioms when
native speakers use them, but you may be able to use them yourself too.
I’ll explain each idiom, giving you the vocabulary and real world examples and
then if you stay until the end; we have a special quiz to help you consolidate
your skills in these English idioms.
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So, do you recognise any of these idioms that I’m about to cover?
They are:-
To go cold turkey
To let the cat out of the bag
The elephant in the room
To get someone’s goat and
Hold your horses.
If you hear someone say ‘I’m going to go cold turkey’, what do they mean?
A ‘turkey’, T U R K E Y is a bird, a big bird.
And some people say it's not the most attractive looking bird!
Poor turkeys!
Also ‘poor turkeys’ because they are what we like to eat traditionally
as our Christmas Dinner in the UK - and what the Americans
traditionally eat at Thanksgiving.
It’s a bird rather like a chicken, but much bigger.
So what does this ‘go cold turkey’ idiom actually mean?
Well, surprisingly, it means ‘to withdraw from something’ and in
the sense of withdrawing from a drug that you’re addicted to.
So someone who has stopped smoking cigarettes might say ‘I tried nicotine
patches, but I found for me, the best way to stop smoking was to go cold turkey’.
By that, they would mean that they just stopped smoking all together
and they didn’t use any substitute like nicotine patches or vapes.
They went ‘cold turkey’ - straight off cigarettes to nothing.
And ‘cold turkey’ is certainly a thing if you come off certain drugs - heroin
comes to mind, though I don’t have any experience of someone doing this.
So why do we say this?
Well, like most of our idioms today, It’s one of those ‘lost in time’ origins.
Perhaps we say it because if you come off a serious drug like heroin or
morphine, you experience feeling cold and perhaps you get ‘goose bumps’.
That means when your arm or your skin goes ‘bumpy’ because you’re cold and your
arm hairs are trying to stand on end.
Possibly that’s the origin.
And people use ‘to go cold turkey’ to talk about stopping all kinds of
things, not necessarily things that are as addictive as cigarettes or heroin.
‘I had to come off social media.
And I just went cold turkey’.
Or ‘Boots the Chemist have stopped stocking my favourite lipstick!
I’m having to go cold turkey until I can find another shop which sells it!’.
So that’s ‘to go cold turkey’.
You’d never guess that meaning from the words if you didn’t know, would you?!
When we say, 'To let the cat out of the bag,' what do you think we mean?
And why would you put your cat in a bag anyway?
I don’t know the answer to that second question, but ‘to let the cat out of the
bag’ means ‘to tell a secret’, to tell something that you shouldn’t be telling.
A ‘secret’, S E C R E T is information that only one or two people know - and
which has some impact, some importance.
If you tell it, it’s not a secret any more and you’ve ‘let the cat out of the bag’.
Again, I have no idea and nor does anyone else seem to have, how this phrase, this
idiom came about . But I guess that if you were to put a cat in a bag - sounds
a bit cruel to me - and then you ‘let it out’, it would be pretty impossible
to get that cat back into the bag!
Any cat would strongly object - and I wouldn’t blame them either.
And so a secret once told, cannot be untold.
And a ‘cat let out of a bag’ can’t be put back into the bag.
There’s a sense with this phrase that the person telling the secret took
a chance, took a risk - and perhaps shouldn’t have been telling it.
More examples?
‘Her boss let the cat out of the bag that she was leaving the company’.
Or ‘She let the cat out of the bag that her mother was getting married’.
Secrets that once told cannot be untold - that’s ‘to let the cat out of the bag’.
Have you ever heard the phrase 'The elephant in the room'?
This is a relatively modern idiom, I think and I’ve mentioned
this one before in the podcast.
An elephant, E L E P H A N T - is one of the biggest animals on earth,
They live in Africa mainly - and are grey, roam in herds and have
a very long nose called ‘a trunk’.
I think probably that lets you know what an elephant is!
And when we refer to something as ‘the elephant in the room’ - well, even in
the largest room in your house, you would notice the presence of an elephant!
So the point of the phrase, ‘the elephant in the room’ - we mean ‘the obvious
big thing that no one is talking about.
The thing that you cannot fail to notice - but about which nobody
speaks!’ Examples that you might hear?
‘The elephant in the room is that she’s the one doing all the complaining, but
he’s the one who pays for everything!’ Or perhaps ‘The elephant in the room is
that there’s a general election next year - and the government is motivated to pursue
policies which please its supporters’.
Or ‘The elephant in the room, is that my cousin is much older than
her husband and her health is not good.’ So the ‘elephant in the room’
is the thing that nobody’s talking about, but which is really obvious.
What about the next idiom ‘To get someone’s goat’?
You might hear ‘It really gets my goat that she speaks like that’.
Or ‘It really gets my goat when there are lots of adverts on social media’.
A goat, G O A T?
Well, this is another animal that you can eat - I think they do in other
countries, but more commonly you drink its milk and you eat cheese, made from
goat’s milk - particularly nice, I think.
So a goat is a smaller animal - it still has hooves and horns - and
a face a bit like a sheep.
And if you think of the zodiac sign ‘Capricorn’ - that’s a goat.
So if someone says ‘That really gets my goat’ - the verb I guess being ‘to get
someone’s goat’ - it doesn’t mean that you go and fetch a real goat from up the road.
No, if something ‘gets your goat’, it means that ‘it makes you angry,
makes you irritable and cross’.
Again if you’re curious about the origin - it’s frustrating!
We're really not sure!
But this saying ‘That really got my goat’ is known to most English
speakers and they’ll interpret that as ‘That really annoyed me’.
Other words for ‘to annoy’, A N N O Y ? ‘That really infuriated me’ perhaps.
Lots of things might make you grumpy!
They ‘get your goat’!
Last one for today ‘Hold your horses’.
A horse, H O R S E is of course another animal.
Imagine an old fashioned Western movie, with cowboys in it - John Wayne?
That’s a really old actor!
Or to bring it up slightly more up to date, The Revenant perhaps?
Or The Magnificent Seven, though that’s quite old too, isn’t it?
What is the animal that they all ride?
The horse, of course.
It’s an animal, a horse that you put reins on.
In my very short time of going horse riding, I learned just what a lot
of character horses have and just how difficult they can be to handle.
The riding stables I went to with my son just before the pandemic - every horse
in there was naughty in a different way.
So ‘holding your horse’ means controlling it with its reins, R E I N S - those
are the leather straps used to contain horses, constrain horses, even.
And ‘holding your horse’ might mean while you’re sitting on its back - or
more likely it means holding the reins while you’re standing next
to the horse, especially when the horse is wanting to pull away.
So we use this phrase ‘hold your horses’ meaning ‘Not so quick, slow down’.
As though your ‘horses are wanting to gallop away’, but there’s good
reason not to be in such a hurry.
So although there may be no horses in the situation, we might still
say ‘Hold your horses’, ‘slow down!
Examples then?
‘Hold your horses.
We need to decide on a route before we set off!’.
Or ‘Hold your horses!
Don’t be in such a rush to spend your money!’
Does that give you a feel for each of these idioms?
How about a little quiz to check your understanding?
I’ll give you a situation and you need to choose which one of these five
idioms you might use in this situation.
Again the five idioms are:-
To go cold turkey, To let the cat out of the bag, The elephant in the room, To
get someone’s goat and Hold your horses.
Ready?
Let's see if you can match the right idiom to each situation.
1.
Everyone knows that my auntie has had another relationship while
she’s been married to my uncle.
But everyone pretends it didn’t happen.
2.
I’ve really got to stop eating so much chocolate.
What do you think is the best approach?
3.
I get really cross when other drivers on the road put me in
danger with their bad driving.
4.
Don’t be in such a rush to pull all the wallpaper off your wall.
We need to decide how we’re going to decorate it first!
5.
Oh my goodness - she told me a big secret yesterday - and I’m not
sure she’s meant to have told it!
That’s it!
How did you do?
If you want to hear those sentences again, pause the podcast here and go back.
Otherwise, here are the answers!
1.
Everyone knows that my auntie has had another relationship while
she’s been married to my uncle.
But everyone pretends it didn’t happen.
Well, that’s ‘an elephant in the room’.
2.
I’ve really got to stop eating so much chocolate.
What do you think is the best approach?
Well, here maybe you could say ‘Go cold turkey!’
3.
I get really cross when other drivers on the road put me in
danger with their bad driving.
You could say ‘Bad drivers get my goat!’
4.
Don’t be in such a rush to pull all the wallpaper off your wall.
We need to decide how we’re going to decorate it first!
I might say here ‘Hold your horses!’
5.
Oh my goodness - she told me a big secret yesterday - and I don’t
think she’s meant to have told it!
Another way of putting this ‘She’s really let the cat out of the bag’!
Hopefully that’s helped you remember these idioms.
And don’t forget we love emails from you - so get in touch if you’ve any special
requests on topics you’d like me to cover!
Enough for now.
Have a lovely day.
Speak to you again soon.
Goodbye.
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