Straight Talk

Recently I was trying to give my daughter directions to a church she wanted to visit. She wondered, "How far away is it, Dad?" "Um, maybe 10 miles altogether. Six miles as the crow flies." "What on earth does that mean?" "Well," I said. "It's what the distance would be if you could travel directly as a straight line, without any turns or bumps in the road. You know, the way it looks if you were a crow." Satisfied, she continued, "But does it have to be a crow?" I answered, "It doesn't have to be a crow. Any bird will do. It's just an expression people use."

"An expression older people use," she said with a wry smile.

Why Do We Say What We Say?

I grew up on a farm where colloquial expressions abounded. When we worked in the barn and Dad told me to hand him "that doohicky over there," I immediately knew what he meant. Words like "skeedaddle" (leave quickly) and "dipsy-doodle" (a swift spinning movement) were part of our daily vocabulary.

Some old sayings are easy to understand. "Make hay while the sun shines" means "take advantage of the opportunity while you can." "We have bigger fish to fry" means "something more important takes priority." A "rule of thumb" hails back to the days when rough measurements were calculated by the distance from the end of the thumb to the first joint (approximately one inch), just as we call 12 inches a "foot." After years of inflation, "a dime a dozen" may have outgrown its usefulness as a metaphor. (Can you buy anything for a dime these days?) "Pull out all the stops" comes from the way an organist would pull out the stops above the keyboard so a pipe organ could belt out a louder sound. Customers in English inns would drop a coin into a box on the wall "To Insure Promptness" by those who served, so today we call it a "tip."

Other expressions are hard to figure out. Why say, "That boy is the spittin' image of his daddy"? Did boys of an earlier generation try to spit like their fathers did? Why say someone is "dressed to the nines"? It probably started when people said in Old English, "She's dressed to the eyne (eyes)"—completely covered in fancy clothes. When our family set out toward a place that was far away and hard to find, Dad used to say, "We have to go around Robin Hood's barn to get there." I have no idea how that one originated! Nor have I figured out why we say someone is "a shoe-in" to win a contest or get a job.

Important Words to Understand

How well are we communicating the words and values of the Bible to the next generation? Do they see the Bible as God's roadmap for their journey, the moral compass to guide their decisions, the clear and sure message of salvation? Or do we make Scripture sound like a literary curiosity—a collection of quaint, out-dated sayings that are hard to understand and irrelevant to contemporary life?

People fall into cults for a variety of reasons, but there are two main factors involved: (1) they are searching for truth, and cults claim to have the answers; (2) they are hungry for love, and cult members give them personal attention. Cults offer poisonous substitutes for the nourishing diet of truth and love a healthy church provides. The best defense is "speaking the truth in love" within the context of an authentic Christian community (Ephesians 4:16-32).

If we are well-versed in Scripture and growing in the love of God, we will "not be carried away by the error of lawless men and fall from our secure position" (2 Peter 3:17). And we'll avoid being deceived by misguided beliefs that are as crooked as a dog's hind leg.