Idioms
There's an English inclination for hook-ness language and how its physicality has come to describe abstract ideas and events:
I fell for the joke hook, line and sinker.
I attended a party that was off the hook.
I hooked up with an old flame; next morning my phone was ringing off the hook.
I'm interested in this subset of the storytelling toolbox: the idiom. Imagine telling a foreign speaker how you're on the hook for $200 in text messages. The phone company doesn't literally have a fishing hook in your mouth; it's just a more potent way to say it.
Yet hook terms are more than synonym or metaphor: they're manufactured sayings relevant to our time, our place, our culture. And they're changing.
So I started noticing these hook phrases everywhere: in the news, on blogs, urban dictionaries, Twitter. A student gets the internet hooked up in her dorm. Her friend hooks her up with a deal on a new mobile phone. It's easy to imagine a fisherman losing all his gear, or two people ensnared by love, or an addict caught on the 'hook' of heroin, but how did these hook idioms grow so prevalent? Where did they come from? And where are they going? How far will today's idioms stray and how much hook-ness will they maintain?
I'm imagining a world where the language of hook morphs to meet new cultural climates, where people generate new hook idioms to better tell the stories of their particular topical culture, sub-culture, time and place. These are hook idioms evolving.
Jeff Werner is applying his education and experience in art galleries and museums, professional writing, working with sustainable systems in South East Asia, and bicycle racing in Canada to a new life and career of design in Vancouver.
Jeff Werner