Watch Your Tongue Raining Glass It was a blue winter day in downtown Montreal, and I was standing among thousands of other shivering people on the city''s main shopping street. We had gathered in solidarity with the Women''s March on Washington, the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president. A local gaggle of the activist group the Raging Grannies sang a homemade ditty to the tune of "Oh! Susanna"--"Women''s power, we''re here to make a stir / Don''t mess around with women''s rights, we roar as well as purr." Cat motifs were in evidence throughout the rally, notably in the form of knitted, pink "pussy hats"--a response to the incoming president''s vulgar boasting about his sexual conquests. What struck me, as I looked around, was the language on the hundreds of cardboard placards. Some were direct and blatant anti-Trump slogans. But many of the signs, like the grannies'' song, used more subtle, idiomatic language to make their point. "Pussy hat" was itself an idiom, and one big sign hoisted by a woman standing a few yards away from me said, "Pussy grabs back.

" Placards reading "Love is power," "The future has no gender" and "Walls won''t divide us" seemed like optimistic attempts to spread new proverbs. "Girls just want to have fundamental rights" was a clear spin-off from the old Cyndi Lauper hit "Girls Just Want to Have Fun." "Post-Truth = Lies" made a terse comment on a recently coined expression, "post-truth." My favorite placard, being waved to and fro in the cold air as the Raging Grannies warbled on, read: "I won''t stop till it rains glass." It was a brilliant play on words. But unless you grasped the meaning of the expression "glass ceiling"--the invisible, powerful barrier that Hillary Clinton had hoped to shatter--the sign would have made no sense. The language play so noticeable on these signs was evidence of hope, I thought. Even at a time of immense concern about the future, hundreds of people at the rally had gone to the trouble of making placards that displayed a frisky, defiant creativity.

Gatherings in other cities brought forth equally inventive signs: "Free Melania," "He shall overcomb," "Keep your tiny hands off my human rights," and so on. The people who invented these expressions and held these signs were refusing to let anxiety or depression override their urge to find words adequate for the challenge. That''s a very human impulse, one with a long and glorious history. Soldiers in the trenches during the First World War scribbled away in damp notebooks. Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps and the Stalinist gulag wrote on whatever materials they could find: scraps of paper, candy wrappers, toilet paper, even stone walls. Human beings are creatures of language. We speak, therefore we are. And when we speak or write, we often resort to idioms.

We use words not just in a factual way--"Don''t let the dog off the leash"--but also in an idiomatic way: "Don''t be a dog in the manger." Idioms are small artifacts of imagination. They encapsulate and sum up aspects of our experience. Whatever genre they fall into--miniature poems, sermons, jokes or warnings--they can keep time in abeyance. Clothes and furnishings, even those from recent years, are regularly consigned to the thrift store or the garbage, but idioms from the distant past still trickle through our lips and ears. Many English expressions that are familiar today ("dog in the manger" among them) were well known in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Language is always evolving, but some of these idioms show an impressive capacity to resist change. Ever since William Shakespeare was a child, long before Samuel de Champlain or the Pilgrim Fathers set off across the Atlantic, a selfish or spiteful person has been said to take a dog-in-the-manger view.

Never a cat in the manger. Never a dog in the stable. Never two dogs in the manger. Not all idioms survive, of course. Technological change has rendered many of them obsolete. It''s only members of a rapidly aging generation who are likely to recall what a "Kodak moment" is, or was. Likewise, the expression "Hold your horses!" made sense in previous centuries, when horses were abundant in cities and a necessity of rural life. A person who offered this advice to the driver of a wagon or cart--or to anyone else--was saying, "Be patient! Slow down!" But to shout "Hold your horses!" in the twenty-first century would be to sound irredeemably old-fashioned.

Linguistic obsolescence can also affect the online realm, where expressions that were up to the minute a few years ago can now seem hopelessly dated. When was the last time you heard anyone announce what they discovered while "web surfing"? Several organizations select a new "word of the year," a choice that often turns out to be not a single word but an idiom. Since 2007 the words of the year as picked by Macquarie Dictionary have included such duds as "phantom vibration syndrome," "googleganger" and "pod slurping." Tech-based vocabulary can have an amazingly short life span. Donkey''s Hind Leg In October 1993, an article in the New York Times stated: "One of the technologies Vice President Al Gore is pushing is the information superhighway, which will link everyone at home or office to everything else--movies and television shows, shopping services, electronic mail and huge collections of data." The American Dialect Society chose "information superhighway" as its word of the year for 1993. The idiom seemed destined for a glamorous future. Not so.

"Information superhighway" shot to prominence but remained in wide use for less than a decade. Then it disappeared. The number of its appearances in a major Canadian newspaper, the Vancouver Sun, traces its fate. "Information superhighway" entered the Sun in 1993, when four articles contained the phrase. In 1994, the expression appeared in sixty articles; the following year, thirty-one. The total kept on falling until 2002, when it wasn''t mentioned at all. The road had run out. Nobody knows which of the idioms introduced or favored by millennials will be alive in the language two or three generations from now.

Predictions are rash. But I''ll "go out on a limb," to adopt an old expression, and say that Inc.com''s 2015 list of "15 Words and Phrases Millennials Use but No One Else Understands" featured several expressions that won''t stick around for long. One of the top items was "hundo p" (one hundred percent). It would be a surprise if that phrase outlasted a couple of the more useful expressions on the list: "Sorry not sorry" (a partial or insincere apology) and "The struggle is real" (serious annoyance). * * * Idioms are, by their nature, acts of fusion. They bring two or more disparate elements together into a single whole. They embrace metaphors, similes, proverbs, analogies--a whole range of imaginative thought.

"Language is not something which could be built up one word at a time," the philosopher Charles Taylor argued in his book The Language Animal. "Each word supposes a whole of language to give it its full force as . an expressive gesture." If that''s the case for individual words, it''s even more so for idioms. Often, on a word-by-word basis, they make no literal sense. I''m using the word literal in a traditional manner. To many people, even today, a statement is "literally" true only if it''s free of all metaphor and exaggeration. But just as the verb "dust" can mean either to clean the dust away or to sprinkle something with dust, "literally" now has a pair of opposite meanings.

In 2011 the Oxford English Dictionary added a new sense to its definition of the word: "Used to indicate that some (frequently conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense." When reporters noticed the change and asked for comment, one of the dictionary''s senior editors, Fiona McPherson, dryly remarked, "It seems to have literally slipped in under the radar." Still, I prefer to maintain the old distinction. Just as I''ve never heard a dog barking in a manger, I have never "literally died laughing." The implications of a phrase like "glass ceiling" have nothing to do with the architectural meaning. Similarly, the walking dead--as far as I''m aware--do not inhabit shopping malls. But when a long commercial building sits nearly empty, most of its stores and restaurants having closed down, the place becomes a "zombie mall." This is a young idiom, one that has not yet reached many dictionaries.

Nonetheless, the New York Times used the expression in a memorable headline in April 2017: "From ''Zombie Malls'' to Bonobos: What America''s Retail Transformation Looks Like." The risk of such headlines is that for some readers, the "wow factor" will be overtaken by the "huh? factor." Every word or phrase depends on context. "Bonobos," in the Times headline, refers not to small, endangered chimpanzees but to an "e-commerce-driven" chain of men''s clothing stores. "Own the school year like a hero" may or may not be a smart expression for Walmart to display in its back-to-school advertising, but when a Walmart store in Indiana brandished the slogan in big capital letters above a gun cabinet, the context was wildly inappropriate. "Walls won''t divide us" is a clear and powerful statement, but its implications are different in North America today than they were in West Berlin during the 1980s. In short, idioms are more.