Metaphorical Phrases

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If someone says "pull your socks up" although i kind of know the meaning behind it, but I still *see* someone pulling their socks up. Or, if someone says "a chip on your shoulder" I'd *see* a chip (food) on someones shoulder. Although I know some basic metaphor language some doesn't make sense at all. Do you guys do this?!

Though many (NT) people think that people with ASD get tricked by any metaphors etc. I just memorise those that I hear/read in conjunction with their meanings. I do alright most of the time, but if somebody uses an unexpected metaphor, or one that I've never heard, I get confused. I like to learn the historical or cultural significance of metaphors to understand why it is used.

Most folks are vaguely aware of the "chip on the shoulder" thing, but yes....there are MANY expressions that have obscure origins- but folks still use the expression with out even knowing the original literal meaning.

It does help to know origins.

For example: "give it the whole nine yards".

WTF?

When I was a teen decades ago I figured that that phrase must come from some sport. Yardage is vital in football. But the quantity nine has no special meaning for yards in football, nor in any sport I knew about. Even word experts who authored books were stumped. One language book I read said "you would think that the phrase would come from either sports, or from the tailoring/fabric industry. But in neither does the number nine have any special meaning. So the origin of the expression is a mystery".

Finally recently I learned something new to me: that in the WWII the bullet belts that fed the machine guns in the ball turrets of the big flying fortress bombers were...nine yards long. So its now easy to imagine that in the heat of battle- if you switched from fending off many targets coming from many directions- to keeping your gun on that one fighter coming straight at your plane- you would give that one enemy your.... "whole nine yards".

WOW! Makes perfect sense now!

I've never heard the socks up thing. I've heard pull your bootstraps up.

My brother in law is English so sometimes he is confused by things that we say in the family and we are confused by things he says. It's totally not just an autism thing- it's a world thing. And yeah really we all just memorize them and don't realize it. They are not intuitive.

Idioms are in our language (and all languages) for a reason: they provide an illustrative and "folksy" way to concretize abstract concepts--and to provide a way for children to understand adult concepts.

The problem is, obviously, that we don't know the actual origins of many idioms, unless we were "there" at the time the idiom was formulated (i.e., many idioms come from a previous time, when the sayings were absolutely clear and immediately applicable). Fortunately, now, we have the Internet, so we could solve this problem more readily.

That "give it the whole nine yards" idiom never bothered me, despite the fact that I didn't know the origin. I just knew the meaning from context. But not knowing the origin really rankles some people, for understandable reasons.

Without idioms, frankly, language wouldn't be rich.

idioms aren't tricky for me either, however, it do always like to find out what the reason is behind the phrase. What gets me every time is sarcasm...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/books ... rigin.html

I used to get stuck on phrases like this, and still do sometimes. I see what I think is the literal meaning ('apple of my eye' isn't a great visual!) but have learnt what it means. It takes me longer to get there than most people but it's just a memory test, much like my 'stock phrases' for various social situations.

Thanks for your explanations guys!