I was eight when I stumbled across my first idiom.
It made absolutely no sense.
‘What does this mean,’ I held up the picture book, ‘Why does it say she’s a bee when she’s not?’
‘It says she’s busy as a bee, dear’, my mother rolled her eyes, sighing ‘Don’t you learn anything at school?’
This opened a whole new can of worms to me.
I started comparing things to insects every chance I got. I would crawl at a “snail’s pace” to school, I would come home and “worm my way out” of piano practices and math tutors. I would get “butterflies in my stomach” when I had to present a project, and be “merry as a cricket” when it was over. I spent afternoons staring “bug-eyed” at the television screen, and my dog wasn’t merely gentle, he “wouldn’t hurt a flea”.
Idioms fascinated me. I developed the odd idea that everyone in my life had some sort of buggy alter ego, one that reduced them to a single idea I could fit into an ecosystem where everyone got along, where everything was just right; and it was this belief that drew me to figures of speech like a moth to a flame. I started picturing people I knew as insects, cartoon-like and playing their parts in my life like the characters in my tv shows. There was my mother, the social butterfly, flashing bright colours and flitting out the door with a swish of her glittering wings. My father, stuck at home with me and buzzing, angry as a hornet. Some days I made the mistake of pestering him to play with me, whining down the stairs ‘Dad! Daaaaad! Come play with meeeeee I’m so booooored!’ to which he would yell back, stingers sharp, ‘For Pete’s sake, don’t you ever just shut up?’
I “bugged” him, which was confusing. The entire time I had been constructing my insect world, I’d forgotten to make a spot for me. Where would I go? What would I do? Was I nothing more than “the bug that bugged people”? I began to think that this whole second world thing was a bad idea. Everything was getting too complicated, and it was getting hard to think over the sounds of flapping wings and buzzing and chirping and swishing.
