Twisted Idioms

Have you ever heard of the phrase "couldn't see the forest for the trees"?

It means that a person is so focused on the tiny details that they fail to see the big picture. For example, maybe someone is trying to use coupons to save money here and there, but always has the air-conditioning on full blast, which is consuming a lot of money. Or some such.

You can twist it the other way, and say "Couldn't see the trees for the forest".

In this case, the idea is that someone only focuses on the big picture, and never checks out the little things. Of course, trees and forest sound so close to each other, that reversing it sounds nearly the same.

I was thinking about some of the phrases that appear in Indian English, much of which sound strange to Americans, but have a better internal logic.

For example, what's the opposite of postpone? For Americans, there isn't a good opposite. You might say "move up". But if "pre" is the opposite of "post", then prepone makes sense.

Yet, we don't use it, and laugh at folks who use it.

How about this one.

We say "this morning", "this evening", "last night". But we say "tomorrow morning", "tomorrow evening", "yesterday morning".

So it seems like we have two axis. One is "yesterday", "today", "tomorrow", and the other is "morning", "afternoon", "evening".

You'd therefore say "today evening", "today morning". And in Indian English, that's what you say. Americans find this odd, but it has more logic to it. "Tomorrow morning", "tomorrow evening" makes sense, right? Why does it become "this morning", "this evening".

The funny thing with all the variants of English is that people prefer their own variant. Thus, many Indians visiting the US prefer to use the English they use in day to day speech, rather than treat American English as a foreign language and speaks that instead. Indeed, some Indians find it distasteful to imitate the American accent (more so than British, I'd say) too closely. Their pals will make fun of them for speaking American-style English with an American accent.

Surprisingly, many folks learn new languages by translating phrases from their native language to the language they are speaking. Thus, phrases like "small small" to mean "very small" appear. They are translations from the original language.

Of course, there are regionalisms of English too. Thus, certain phrases the British use (and even variants within Britain), Australians, southerners. Some folks use "pop" instead of "soda", some even use "coke" (as in cola).

I find the use of language fascinating, especially as spoken by "non-native" speakers for often it reveals the oddness of the language as spoken by natives.