English Speaking Skills:  For Sure Current Colloquial Phrases

Students have asked me every year for some current good colloquial phrases.  I haven’t been able to provide them easily.  Getting them from current popular media of movies and television shows would mean hours of viewing with the specific purpose of directly listening for them and writing them down right away.  That would be a sure-fire way to eliminate the pleasure of the entertainment.

My dearest Grant would get me books with colloquial phrases whenever he saw them in thrift stores.   No problem at all for me, as a well-read, educated person to easily determine which colloquial phrases were current… most of the time.  That is, some of the time I would be wrong.  In other words, some of the time I would deem a colloquial phrase to be current because I used it as a child.  Or I heard it in a classic movie from the 1930’s 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s….. You get the picture. But nobody, but an older person (older than 30 years old) would understand what the colloquialism meant, except from context.

However, today I am pleased to present several more colloquial phrases – current and popular – gotten from the local  city newspaper.  As you probably know, you can find colloquial phrases in all sections, but especially from the sports section.

• Throwing as though he had turned back the clock 10 years… (In other words, throwing the football as if he were 10 years younger and had the top skill he had 10 years ago)
• Manning provided the spark in a 27-20 victory … (In other words, Manning played and led the team so well that his team won the game with a score of 27 winner to 20 loser)
• … while B.O. did a slow burn on the bench… (In other words, while another player sat out the game on the bench feeling frustrated that he was not playing with his team… and being the hero of his team and fans in the football stadium)
• “Beats me what happens next. The weird science in the crazy trajectory of Denver’s season could make Stephen Hawkins give up and order a pizza, so don’t ask coach Gary Kubiak to explain it.”  (In other words, events have been so unpredictable that the future is impossible to predict.  So many strange things have happened (weird science and crazy trajectory).  So many strange things that even a renown scientist, Stephen Hawkins, who has tried to explain many outer space phenomena using scientific principles —  he would give up and stop trying to explain this sports team’s sequence of events)

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Rerun from Jan 13, 2016