I is for Idioms

Prior to actually giving you a suggestion, has anyone ever said, "Don't mind, eh (not minding will be the subject of a whole new post)? This is just loud thinking?" And have you wondered whether this means that this person has found a way to increase the volume on their thoughts without actually voicing them? I know I frequently have! I'm then tempted to ask if when they whisper about colleagues behind their backs, they call it soft thinking.

Loud thinking, for those of you who are wondering, is just another way of saying thinking aloud. The problem is that many Hinglish speakers translate back and forth between English and their mother tongues, so the nuanced difference between thinking aloud (ie vocalizing thoughts) and increasing the volume of one's thoughts (loud thinking) is often lost in translation.

Language used idiomatically often suffer from this fate because the words do not literally mean what the expression is trying to convey. For instance, 'coming along for the ride' might become 'coming for a drive' and 'all of a sudden' could become 'all on a sudden.'

Of course, literal translations also take place in reverse. So an idiom from another language might directly be translated to English. For instance, 'He's eating my head' is a frequently used idiom which is supposed to connote frustration but may connote numerous other things depending on your perspective. I think this is a literal translation of the Hindi phrase 'mera sar kha raha hai.'

Odd though it may sound, one must admit that translated idioms can add a lot of colour to conversations especially when one person is a Hinglish speaker and the other is not!