October 14 2026 - 1:00pm
What are idioms? We might as well bite the bullet, and call them language in a poetic mode. They’re not exactly clichés, more like clichés that have been forgiven. They can’t be understood literally, but they bring beautifully strange images into the world — a bull in a china shop, a cold shoulder, a damp squib, a dog with two dicks (or tails, if you prefer). They represent language at its most various, characteristic and inventive, and for that reason arouse suspicion, controversy and passionate debate. All the same, it is a surprise to see the University of Oxford, of all places, taking sober action against the use of idioms.
Oxford is, if anywhere can stake this claim, the home of the English language. The institution’s interest in language in general goes back centuries. It gave birth to the Oxford English Dictionary; its flagship degree is called English Language and Literature. It investigates the full extraordinary range of expression and meaning. However, the University’s official style guide has just been issued, warning users off the exploration of that range. Writers should be “mindful” of idioms that could confuse foreign speakers, such as “learn the ropes”, “find your feet” or “blindspots”.
It goes along with slightly more menacing advice not to use gendered terms and, weirdly, not “the elderly” but “older people”. But the stance against idioms is a new development among the busybodies who have been making a habit of sticking their noses in, stirring the pot, setting the cat among the pigeons and other soon-to-be-illegal sentences.
Idioms are an extraordinarily innovative area of language. They drop out of use for no real reason, hanging around in other linguistic cultures. I had never heard anyone say “living in a fool’s paradise” until I went to India, and anyone who says something is “not their cup of tea” has probably learned English as a second language. Other idioms appear from nowhere, and catch on with amazing speed. The person who first called the computer cursor a “mouse” was a genius in the art of metaphor, and it seems to have stuck around long after the disappearance of the fat sliding device with a long lead, or tail. “Clickbait” and “doomscrolling” must have been needed before the terms arrived; and how did we say “ghosting” before dating apps?
They are the life of language, and native or fluent speakers care passionately about them. If you want to see your timeline explode, just wonder out loud whether it should be “all mouth and trousers” or “all mouth and no trousers.” (The answer is the first — I never heard the more logical but less amusing one until I was in my 30s.) All languages have their poetic corner. The English “back of beyond” is enchanting, but effortlessly outdone by the wonderful German equivalent for a dull and remote bit of country: wo sich Fuchs und Hase Gute Nacht sagen, or “where the foxes and the hares say goodnight to each other”.
Among learners of a language, there are few greater joys than failing to distinguish a stroke of linguistic fantasy from a standard idiom. It’s a delight compensating for the disappointment when a Frenchman apologizes for having put a rabbit down — or rather, stood you up (poser un lapin). How enchantingly outrageous it is when an Italian says approvingly that he’s got a full bottle and a drunk wife, too, or, in our terms, has his cake and is eating it.
The officious attempt to simplify language, or to suggest that people studying at the University of Oxford — Oxford! — might be incapable of working out when something is not meant literally, is doomed to failure. Anyone arriving to study will feel much more energized hearing a tutor describe their colleagues as “thick as mince”, an idiom fast replacing two short planks in the popular dictionary. Anyone faced with some HR drone mumbling “when you have grown familiar with the institution’s structures” rather than, vividly, “find your feet” is only going to be discouraged.
After all, many who had the gumption to up sticks and come to Oxford in the first place would no doubt have had their imagination inspired by an English teacher who thoughtlessly said, and then had to explain what he meant: “Send the application in. And Bob’s your uncle.”
Philip Hensher is the author of 11 novels and a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. His new book, A History of the Novel in Britain, will be published by Pelican in September.
PhilipHensher