Idioms? You Betcha

These are weapons of understanding. Do not underestimate them.

The old lady at the Fargo, North Dakota, thrift store counter looked like a grandma. She wore her glasses with a chain like a grandma, and tucked in her nice white blouse into her tan pants like a grandma.

She quietly folded the shirts I was buying and started to tuck them into a plastic bag, only for it to slide away from her on the counter.

No big deal, right?

Then I realized: I speak her language, fluently.

To me, words are the notes of music in three dimensions. They’re shapes that waver and morph and clinch together again in arcs that dip and soar with the flow of a sentence.

This is why I hate to learn languages. Mind you, I love to use languages. I just hate to learn them, to be a linguistic cripple, to use basic words to ask for inexact things.

I’ve spent more than two-thirds of my life in the north-central US. I was raised on the quirks and twitches of the English used here. I know the accents and phrases and word usages — the flourishes of language that show you’re not a stranger, the little things that speak to hearts and makes locals react almost instinctively.

I didn’t realize how much I missed that knowledge.

Now I’m back. No, really, I’m BACK. I’m swinging idioms left and right, breaking out the clichés and laying down the accent — flattening down consonants, squelching final syllables, and rounding vowels.

The thrift store grandma grabbed for the plastic bag before it fell over the counter’s edge.

Go time.

“We’ll, that’s sure being squirrelly, isn’t it,” I said.

She laughed.

“It sure is,” she said, with a smile.

Squirrelly.

It felt good.