Wednesday, December 14, 2011

The Problem with Idioms

I had recently been crafting a report when it occurred to me that I could make my point by playing around with some wording. What I can say… even report writing deserves its kicks! I was trying to capture the idea that there are major cultural shifts needed in Atlantic Canada if we are going to find ourselves in a better socio-economic situation. Thinking about one of the cultural changes needed, I kept going back to the thought that we actually “need to reinvent the wheel”.

I have recently come across several interesting ventures and enterprises that have as a goal, to make an existing system better; reinventing a system, if you will.

From there, I started wondering how often the innovation on an old premise or idea (or a tweak – see this article by Malcolm Gladwell about the genius of Steve Jobs) was squashed by someone saying “don’t reinvent the wheel”. It’s a phrase that I have heard often, and I’m sure you have too.

So off to Wikipedia I went, to scroll through a list of English idioms:

Reinventing the wheel
Rocking the boat (usually used with a negative connotation, of course)
You can’t teach old dog new tricks
Don’t count your chickens before they hatch

…and on and on it goes

Sure, I’m being selective here. There may be some idioms that encourage risk-taking and optimism, but I don’t sense that they have permeated the language and culture to the same extent.

These cutesy phrases seem harmless, but they are not. They set standards and expectation. They make us risk-averse. They scare us.

So go ahead and rock the boat, my friends.

I’ll have your back.



1 comments:

Will Kriski (Potato Strong) said...

I live in Sackville, NB and they are mostly against shale gas and even wind power so it's going to Amherst and other areas. Lots of people cutting wood and driving trucks. I moved from Calgary and am doing remote IT contract and now mobile app development so I'm not currently depdendent on the local economy.

With the current economic climate and globalization, people need to be more entrepreneurial instead of wondering how to get hired by some company out there.

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