
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


Some idioms feel like they've been with us forever. We're used to saying it's 'raining cats and dogs', that we feel like 'a fish out of water' or that someone has been 'pulling our leg'. But other idioms have emerged relatively recently, such as 'Groundhog Day', 'first world problems' or 'computer says no'; we might hear people say that a long-running TV show has finally 'jumped the shark' or that a politician has deployed the 'dead cat strategy'.
Just like new words, new idioms emerge in language all the time, and enter our vocabulary from TV, movies, sport, politics and the Internet. Michael Rosen talks to Gareth Carrol about the surprising origins of some of these modern idioms and why we pepper our speech with so much formulaic language.
Dr Gareth Carrol is Senior Lecturer in Psycholinguistics at the University of Birmingham and is the author of 'Jumping Sharks and Dropping Mics: Modern Idioms and Where They Come From'.
Produced by Mair Bosworth for BBC Audio
By BBC Radio 44.7
5151 ratings
Some idioms feel like they've been with us forever. We're used to saying it's 'raining cats and dogs', that we feel like 'a fish out of water' or that someone has been 'pulling our leg'. But other idioms have emerged relatively recently, such as 'Groundhog Day', 'first world problems' or 'computer says no'; we might hear people say that a long-running TV show has finally 'jumped the shark' or that a politician has deployed the 'dead cat strategy'.
Just like new words, new idioms emerge in language all the time, and enter our vocabulary from TV, movies, sport, politics and the Internet. Michael Rosen talks to Gareth Carrol about the surprising origins of some of these modern idioms and why we pepper our speech with so much formulaic language.
Dr Gareth Carrol is Senior Lecturer in Psycholinguistics at the University of Birmingham and is the author of 'Jumping Sharks and Dropping Mics: Modern Idioms and Where They Come From'.
Produced by Mair Bosworth for BBC Audio

7,617 Listeners

877 Listeners

1,046 Listeners

5,479 Listeners

1,796 Listeners

1,767 Listeners

1,041 Listeners

2,088 Listeners

486 Listeners

46 Listeners

259 Listeners

78 Listeners

416 Listeners

298 Listeners

83 Listeners

71 Listeners

826 Listeners

238 Listeners

160 Listeners

77 Listeners

114 Listeners

139 Listeners

3,145 Listeners

740 Listeners

94 Listeners