Idioms Place in Writing

Idioms Place in Writing - Dominic Brunaccioni

Idioms have always interested me as a person and as a writer. Their origins are mysterious, they have so much gravity to them, and each language has their own unique set of idioms. As a writer, though, I hesitate to say they fit well into writing, however interesting they are. I always consider putting idioms into my work, especially my newest play about The Christmas Truce in WW1, where I have--so far at the time of this writing--tried to lace my work with as much British history as I can.

One of my characters, Commander Wyrre, is the antagonist of the play. As an audience member, I heavily dislike seeing villains that are dumb and overplayed. Evil is just as well pursued as good, so I make sure my villains have owned prestige, power, and intelligence. Commander Wyrre is the type of person that beckons respect and an ear to listen to him. He is a commander, after all.

So, as a writer, I feel intelligence goes hand in hand with idioms, as idioms almost have some sort of aura of wisdom to them. The words themselves, however short, are seen as philosophical and prestigious--ironically, Commander Wyrre is also very short in height--but the speaker of the idiom, be it from 1914 or 2020, are also seen as wise for saying them. So it’s a tool I feel would work perfectly for my character, complex as he is.

But I subconsciously feel that there’s a stigma for idioms in writing. Sure, academic papers should never include any type of language that goes outside its necessary boundaries. But for other less rigid types of work, I think many frown about idioms appearing at all. Books and poems to a certain extent, but plays most of all.

I have no definitive idea as to why this exists, after all, I am not a professional playwright whatsoever and cannot speak on behalf of any writer except myself. A possible explanation I’ve come up with is that the way I’ve grown up around writing is influencing how I treat the view of my writing. I was taught that plays are expected to create ideas, not rehash ideas that everyone has heard before. We read Shakespeare for a reason. I agree with this, of course. One would have to be the most mundane and unoriginal writer ever to not believe this. So I believe that the stigma and hesitations I have is that I’m not being original enough, and/or creative enough, by using idioms in my writing.

Everyone knows many idioms by heart. Sure, they are intelligent and powerful sentences, but does my character saying an idiom either make my audience roll their eyes, or connect to my character on a more intellectual level? The implementation isn’t a problem, as many idioms work in almost any situation, especially those with problems needing to be solved, which is the basic foundation of any play. What is my problem is creativity versus uncreativity. I worry my audience would get bored and think I have nothing to say on my own end.

Of course, that isn’t the case with my current draft. Not trying to boast, I really do believe that it has some real promise of originality. But as a constant listener in speeches, debates, plays, movies, papers, and whatever else in between, I’ve learned a valuable lesson. A single sentence can ruin almost anything. It can ruin a whole paragraph, argument, section, stanza, or scene. A whole scene can also ruin a whole play, a play can produce a whole mob of disgruntled fans, and before you know it, a whole play has ruined your whole wallet.

However over-dramatic as that sounds, it can be true. Awkward or out of place sentences can force your audience out of the world you were attempting to siren them into, and once you lose them, it's twice as hard to get them back. If I’m watching a play and a prop clock falls off the wall, I’m going to be looking at that clock for the next 20 minutes, however boring it is. It hasn’t moved; it hasn’t done a single thing in the time span since it fell. But it doesn’t belong, and that’s all I need to focus on. Similarly, if I’m watching a play where a WW1 commander must confront a reality where war has overtaken his life but his soldiers refuse to follow his orders, it would be jarring to hear him say “All’s fair in love and war”.

The meaning of the idiom may be perfect, but the inclusion doesn’t work in my book. So perhaps by researching idioms and implementation of idioms in playwriting, I can personally improve myself as a writer, by learning how to be “creatively unoriginal”. How do you implement a phrase so commonly said by the public that it “wows” them. Is any such way possible?



If I feel this topic to be too bland or uninteresting for me to write, I may approach idioms in a different way. I am also interested in how idioms translate to and from different peoples. Do multilingual and cross cultural idioms exist? Do the multilingual idioms actually equal to each other when translated? Why are some idioms commonplace and others so restrictive to singular cultures? Whatever I choose, idioms will most likely be at the centerpoint. They exemplify the beauty of language, yet are rarely analyzed. Ancient words that are still so unknown. I feel like it's an amazing topic to break into. Can’t wait to write it!

Turkish Time!

Turkish Time! - Dominic Brunaccioni

Hello everyone!

I hope you are all feeling well. Personally, my life feels like its on repeat. I wake up, work out, text friends, play video games, go to bed, and repeat. Honestly, it’s a life that I’m grateful to have, though, because I could be sick and/or dying of a terrible virus instead.

In terms of what’s new for language, I’m progressing more with my Turkish. My Arabic is at a standstill because we apparently “went too fast” as compared to the other classes, so we are doing nothing new while the other Arabic classes play catch-up. So, for Turkish, I finally finalized how my schedule will work. If you have followed my quest to take Turkish, you will know that I will be taking it at Georgetown University next year, through American’s Consortium. 

Taking a look at the schedule I received yesterday, Turkish is six credits at Georgetown, compared to American’s five credit for a language, so I guess I’m getting more bang for my buck. What that actually means, though, is that its a demanding class. I have the class four days a week. Every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I will be at Georgetown University from 9:30 am to 10:45 am. It sounds gross, and I share the same feeling that you may have, but Turkish is what I asked for, and if this is what I asked for, you better bet I’m dedicated to it.

Sure, I have my hesitations, but I planned my whole schedule around the class and made sure that my other classes balanced out the workload. So the schedule part has been done and isn’t as scary as I thought it would be. What is scary is what is in the course description, where the professor writes that “students will need to keep track of two fully dedicated interactive notebooks”. If you know anything about me, I dread interactive notebooks. Glue gets everywhere, I always forget about it, and stuff falls apart. And now I have to worry about two of them. Well, at least it gets my mind off of coronavirus!

Stay safe, and see you next week!

~ Dom