After endless browsing through Netflix streaming for a title to see, I decided to settled with ‘Hot Pursuit.’ I thought Sofia Vergara and Reese Witherspoon would be entertaining for an hour and thirty minutes. It was the most intolerable and annoying one hour and thirty minutes I spent. But at last, there was one part in the movie that was very interesting, especially for English language learners.

I name this part: How colloquial language can bring down one’s career.

In the movie, Rose Cooper, played by Reese Witherspoon, was a righteous police officer. During one of her patrol shift, she followed a group of young and loud students partying. As they were leaving the party, one student shouted: “I got shotgun!”[1] Immediately, Cooper tackled, attacked, handcuffed, and arrested the student on the premise that he carried a weapon. She was demoted to an evidence room clerk as a result of her erroneous arrest.

As an English Language learner, I sympathized with Cooper. I also felt relief. The embarrassment of taking idiomatic language literally is not only the problem of English language learners, but for native speakers as well. The abilities to use and understand idioms are not innate. They are learned and acquired just like learning a second language.

I remembered my first year in college, right after I came to America. We were having a study group in which I shared my experience as an immigrant. I spent over thirty minutes lamenting how life was difficult for immigrant: the new language, new social norm, and new technologies to learn. I concluded that at the end, to survive, we all have to adapt and assimilate. One of the girls in my group nodded continuously and said, “you can say that again.”[2] So I started telling them my experience as an immigrant all over again. Nobody raised a voice to protest or explain.

Recently, at a social gathering with a few of my neighbors, one of my neighbors was sharing her wedding experience. She said if she was to do it all over again she would not have put on “a dog and pony show.”[3] In amazement, I asked excitedly, “Did you really have a dog and a pony at your wedding?” I could feel all eyes were on me. This time, it was explained to me that it was a figurative speech, not really a dog and a pony.

These are two examples of my many idiotic-idioms embarrassment in the course of learning and speaking English. I remembered in a fifth grade classroom, I observed students would spend a unit learning about idioms, and how and when to use them. “To add color to your language,” justified the teacher for teaching the unit. “To save you from lots of embarrassment,” I would have added. It is estimated that there are at least twenty five thousand idioms in the English language. Whew… They should have a full course on teaching idioms. A few days unit will not equip the students the tool to unravel the arbitrary of English idioms.

Here are some examples that I think English language learners should know:

1. Break a leg: Good luck
2. Get out of hand: get out of control
3. Hang in there: Don’t give up
4. No pain, no gain: You have to work hard for what you want
5. Under the weather: Sick
6. Costs an arm and a leg: Very expensive
7. Take a rain check: Postpone a plan
8. When pigs fly: Something will never happen
9. Got up on the wrong side of the bed: Someone is having a bad day
10. Until the cows come home: For a very long time

[1] When three or more people are to ride in a car, one of the non-drivers will often “call” shotgun, meaning that they get the privilege of riding in the passenger seat.

[2] You can say that again: to express strong agreement with what someone has just said.

[3] Dog and pony show: a highly promoted, often over-staged performance, presentation.