Idio(t)ms

Like spelling, idioms are just kind of fundamentally bizarre.  Unlike spelling, they're bizarre by definition: Merriam-Webster tells us an idiom is "a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words."  Now, this isn't to say they're entirely nonsensical.  It's just that most of them originate from some quirk of language so antiquated or context-specific that they might as well be entirely nonsensical.

As a result, they're frequently the butt of both hilarity and ire for people learning a new language.  If you tell a non-Francophone that someone is breaking your feet, they're more likely to be seriously concerned for your safety and the other person's sanity than they are to sympathise with you over that person being kind of irritating.  I can only imagine what English, possibly the most convoluted language in the world, is like for folks picking it up in adulthood.    I mean, my family and I have enough issues with English idioms, and we're all native speakers, college graduates, and proud bookworms.

Take "getting on like a house afire."  PLEASE take it!  It makes no freaking sense, and I'll have you know I take nonsense personally.  A couple of years ago, my girlfriend's house burned down in the middle of winter, and, to understate wildly, it was not a fun experience.  It was scary, inconvenient, expensive, frustrating, confusing, depressing, and involved far more of my girlfriend running around in two feet of snow in her bathrobe than is even remotely ideal.  

I have been told this is a fairly common house-afire experience.  So why on earth does getting on like a house afire mean really hitting it off with someone?  Furthermore, why does "really hitting it off with someone" mean, well, really hitting it off with them!?  Isn't this language due for some phrases for rapidly befriending a new acquaintance that don't sound more like incidents of violent mayhem?  Maybe I'm really strange for this, but somehow I don't find that friendship carries connotations of heavy property damage or personal injury.

Not all, of course, are so obnoxiously counterintuitive.  They just kind of blend into the background, lying in wait until some peculiarity of speech or typography allows their weirdness to leap out at you and drag your brain, struggling weakly, back to their screwed-up idiom-y lairs.  "Happy as a clam," for example, has been stalking me for most of my life all but undetected - I'd occasionally catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye, or get this creeping feeling that something bizarre had just come out of someone's mouth, but it  bided its time until last Thursday.

That, dear reader, is when I saw The Sign.  It holds a place of honour in the front window of a home décor shop specialising in whimsical kitsch, and it reads, in a retro sort of typography I'm willing to bet some graphic designer had fun with, "We're happy as clams!"

Except that, thanks to the quirky typography, the "as" is underlined and in cursive, unlike any of the rest of the words, so that it reads "we're happy as clams!"

I think today I'll go into that shop, simply to see if, behind that sign, there sits an aquarium full of contented mollusks that used to be human but, all things considered, far prefer the shellfish life.  Given the current rates of unemployment, I can't say I'd blame them.