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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday! My name is Emilee O’Leary and in 2016 I’ve now accrued 16,024 miles in a plane and I believe if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday, I dive into the idiom “pie in the sky” and how the using idioms and clichés can limit our ability to have original conversations.
Fun Fact
Lately I’ve been noticing that some people are misusing the terms idiom and cliché, particularly in calling something a cliché when they mean idiom and vice versa. So before I explain the idiom I chose for this episode’s title, I want to make sure we all understand the difference.
An idiom is a group of words established as having meaning not deducible from those individual words. Pie in the sky is an idiom. It’s raining cats and dogs is an idiom. Cat’s out of the bag is an idiom. It might not be immediately apparent why the idiom means what it does, but there’s a story behind each one, a legend of sorts, that morphs the phrase into what it is today. I believe idioms are most useful when trying to quickly relay more abstract concepts without having to say a lot. But it has the negative side effect of lacking proper translation between cultures and between languages.
A cliché is a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought. Clichés are like… It is what it is. Or… A vote for an independent party is a vote for the candidate you least prefer. Or… one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. If you are particularly cynical, or hold to some rigid Ecclesiastical notions, it wouldn’t be long before nearly everything that leaves a person’s mouth is a cliché. But the aspect to cliché that is important to remember is that it is a phrase that is overused.
I chose pie in the sky for this episode title because it has a fanciful connotation while also possessing a sort of dark history. The origin of the phrase comes from a radical song called The Preacher and the Slave written by a labor activist in the early 1900s. The song is highly critical of the Salvation Army, whose primary focus seemed to be on the salvation of souls rather than feeding the hungry.
The verse from the song goes like this:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.
Nowadays, we use this idiom is when referring to something that is pleasant to think about, but the reality of which is unlikely to be realized. Interesting reappropriation of the phrase, huh? Just a couple things to keep in mind as I get into the core of why I bring up this idiom today.
Pie in the Sky
Part of the process in obtaining my B.A. in English required me to endure writing workshops. It took me a long time to really understand the benefit workshops provide, but it slowly broke me out of a lot of bad writing habits.
The idea of writing workshops is basically that everyone in the class writes a story and provides a copy to everyone else in the class. Before the next class meets, we were to read a certain number of the stories, write notes about them, and be prepared to discuss them in class in order to help the author edit and improve their story. In the course of the discussion, in addition to basic edits for grammar and word usage, people would highlight words or phrases that are overused or that sound out of character.
These writing workshops were the contributing factor in helping me to learn the value of constructive criticism and learn how to take direction or advice without taking offense to everything that is told to me. My peers helped me to take a step back from my own work, look at it objectively, and use the input of others in order to improve upon what I’d written. It turned out to be tremendously beneficial to hear how my characters were perceived by others, where my plot fell apart, and then even where my classmates thought my strengths were.
Clichés were a particularly hard concept for me to grasp and even harder to learn how to avoid. I’ll be frank, my high school English classes did not prepare me for college. Most of what I learned about the English language I taught to myself through my obsession with writing, but because I was self-taught I didn’t grasp the ideas of clichés or plagiarism before I was in the thick of creative writing classes.
Ever since I learned about what plagiarism was, I’ve had this ingrained fear of being accused of copying someone else’s words or ideas. It’s a fear because I love to read and I love to talk about what I read, so I always run this chance of failing to properly attribute an idea to the person who formulated it. I would never want to take credit where it is due elsewhere.
I have never been accused of plagiarism, just to be clear, but I realized that I’ve often been on the cusp of it. Interestingly, I find that the times I am closest to plagiarizing someone else’s work is when I haven’t taken the time to think through something for myself. Whether I’m writing about my understanding of a political policy or I’m developing a new fictional story, my inspiration will come from something I’ve been immersing myself in lately. Inspiration is a good thing, but unless I use that inspiration to develop my own idea about a particular topic, all I’m doing is regurgitating facts and repeating what everyone else says.
As I mentioned in my fun fact, I’ve been encountering the situation lately where people are using the terms idiom and cliché almost interchangeably. Sometimes there is a fine line, because an idiom can be cliché, but a cliché is not always an idiom. To reiterate, clichés are phrases or opinions that are overused, whereas an idiom is a phrase that has a meaning that is not immediately discernable by the words used. So using an idiom can be cliché if it is overused.
Plagiarism, idioms and clichés put us at risk of being unoriginal. Being original, in every generation, seems like a challenge because of how much has already been said and accomplished. But what personality tests like Myers Briggs or assessments like StrengthsFinder teach us is that every generation possess individuals. We are all individuals, comprised of a unique set of traits that cause us to look at the world through a different lens than our neighbor. And this is why I adamantly and unashamedly reduce the usage of both idioms and clichés in my own work and call it out in others as well. Not because I don’t like the concept, but that I believe every person is capable of delivering a unique point of view that doesn’t need to rely on a commonly used phrase.
Having the same belief as another person isn’t a bad thing, but for two people with different personalities to articulate the same argument in the same way is disappointing. The morphology of our culture, particularly now with the explosion of social media and the accessibility of the Internet, proves that the status quo is no longer adequate. We don’t have the luxury of reusing or recycling arguments and ideas and expect to still have a relevant voice. We live in an era when we can leave a restaurant and post a review on Google Plus three seconds later tearing the wait staff to shreds or find a litany of options for whatever we’re looking for within a ten-mile radius with a couple swipes of our finger. When YouTube can launch a child into stardom or Facebook can rally behind bullied kids.
I started down this road a couple weeks ago when a friend told me about a strong desire she had to start a business. Due to recent financial troubles, her assessment was that she was not in a place to start a business using her own capital, nor would she be able to find a bank that would give her a decent loan. After listing off several roadblocks, and seeming to get more depressed by her limitations, she waved a hand in the air and said, “Whatever, you know? For me, starting a business is just like a pie in the sky sort of thing.”
It struck me later, after I’d left the conversation, how limiting it is to our psyche to use idioms in order to convey what we observe or feel. Like I said in my fun fact, I get the fact that idioms can convey something rather complex in fewer words, and so I think my deeper concern is that we rely on these phrases in order to avoid having discussions. When my friend used pie in the sky to explain how she felt about the situation, it effectively ended the conversation about her desire to start a business.
Here’s what I learned.
I far from expect society to totally drop the use of clichés and idioms, but just as I’ve learned to be original with the way I write plots and characters, using my own voice to deliver a story in a new way to readers, I am also learning how to sever my reliance on idioms and clichés in the way I talk about important things in life.
In the example of my friend, I circled back to the discussion at a later date and revisited this dream she has about starting a business. I explained to her what I knew about the origin of the phrase pie in the sky and the contrast I see between us, in middle class 2016 America, and the radical who composed the song The Preacher and the Slave. While personal financial troubles are nothing to laugh about, whether it’s now or a hundred years ago, there is a greater opportunity to rise out of those financial troubles in this generation and achieve what you want.
My challenge to myself, lately, has been to have idiom-free and cliché-free conversations. It may seem odd for that to be a real challenge to oneself, but this is what I’ve seen as a result.
First, I don’t fall back phrases that end up saying something I don’t mean. Idioms and clichés often carry baggage or connotations to different people or subcultures that can end up meaning something very different to them than what I intended. It’s not even a conscious effort to be politically correct, but more a desire to demonstrate to someone else that I’m thinking critically about them and their situation.
Second, in the course of seeking original thoughts to express to someone about their situation, I end up learning about what they’re interested in and how to think more abstractly about topics I’m unfamiliar with. It doesn’t make me an expert in their field or interest, but it draws awareness to something new and I become more informed. Too often it seems that we would rather fly through a conversation and give our friends and loved ones generic solutions for their very real personal obstacles when each person is unique and each person’s situation is unique because of their individual uniqueness, which means even the solution to their problem can be unique!
After this episode, you are all probably going to tell me that my use of the word unique is a cliché.
When old arguments are reused on me, I can feel myself shut down and ignore the help being offered to me. My hope is that by having conversations free of idioms and clichés, I can better recognize in my friends and in myself when I am relying on excuses or relying on old cookie-cutter solutions and thus blocking original ideas.
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