Idioms of Idiots

Do you ever say something and people look at you like you’re crazy? Not because you are crazy, but because you just responded with “sploosh” and a peculiar hand movement to them saying something innocuous like “can you put sunscreen on my back?”. Every social circle has its own little things unique to it – and language is probably one of the more fascinating deviations. Just as there are certain things I would never say around my family, there are certain phrases I’m more likely to use. The same goes for certain friends. I could make up (or heaven forbid, research) where these linguistic peculiarities come from and say something profound about it, or I could just entertain myself with some of the more unique developments I have experienced.

“The nurses are singing”

When I was younger, we had a physical copy of a newspaper delivered to our house every Sunday. You know you’re getting old when the thing you used to do as a child no longer exists. Anyway, I loved to read it while eating my breakfast, it made me feel fancy and adult. Why don’t I do this now that I am a fancy adult you say, because reading stories on my iPad interspersed with Facebook notifications, ads for bikini body challenges and battery warning reminders just doesn’t have quite the same feel to it. I can’t recall what year it was, but my sister and I were barely teenagers, so let’s say it was around 2002. The lift-out magazine had an opinion piece that perfectly described a situation that happened in our family quite regularly. My sister, bless her, has an amazing skill where she occasionally listens to something you say, immediately forgets it, and then repeats it thirty seconds later as if it was her own original thought. She is completely oblivious to you saying the thing first, it’s both amusing and frustrating. We all do it of course, but my sister does it enough that it became a sticking point.

In the article the author describes a family movie where, for no apparent reason, a bunch of nurses burst into song mid-scene. In shock and bemusement, one after another the members of his family say aloud ‘huh - the nurses are singing’, without realising someone before them has already pointed out the obvious. This event gave name to an otherwise hard to explain human curiosity, whereby anytime someone repeated something another had just said, the phrase ‘the nurses are signing’ would be trotted out to indicate, ‘yes, thank you dingbat, I just said that’. His article spoke to exactly what I am writing about right now, certain phrases that become adopted to just one particular group of people, how meta. And so a random journalists family curiosity became our own family curiosity. I have on more than one occasion said to someone outside my immediate family, ‘the nurses are singing’, and then promptly been added to their mental list of people to avoid in the future.

"And then I had a meat grinder …"

My dear sister isn’t the only one with peculiar communication skills. I have inherited a terrible, if amusing, family trait from my Nan. For most of my childhood it was a well-established joke that Nan had a knack of saying the wrong thing, at the wrong time, all while not realising it. Imagine my horror when I discovered that this was how I was to take after her, not with fantastic croquet skills, or Christmas cake baking abilities, but with a talent for shocking and offending accidentally and occasionally obliviously. You’ve probably seen it happen to others, something hilarious is said which out of context and in isolation is awkward and embarrassing, and so by a cruel twist of fate it is said exactly as the room goes silent. I have this skill in spades. I have been caught making lewd jokes that sound worse than they are to close friends in front of senior pastors, giving seemingly inappropriate advice to small children by their parents and saying sexist comments, that were actually sarcastic, in the office.

The best example of this though is the one my family has chosen to name this skill after. At my 21^st birthday party, late in the evening, around a campfire we were discussing the fine upstanding adult I had become – this included laughing about my horrendous skill for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. By way of example, I explained to the group that what would usually happen is I would be saying something completely fine, but that sounds awkward out of context like, “and then I had a meat grinder coming out of my butt”, and then the room would go silent. Except I never got to the part of explaining the room going silent, because of course,  the entire camp ground felly stunningly silent right as I said the awkward phrase and the forty odd guests in the vicinity erupted into fits of laughter, howls of shock and incredulous questions of how, why, what and when. The phenomena of saying the wrong thing, at the wrong time is now affectionately known to my family as a ‘meat grinder moment’, but I refuse to explain it in public, lest the moment occur in the act of describing it.