Idioms in Context: When Literal Choices Are Defensible but Wrong
In a vocabulary test, students match four underlined idioms to their meanings. The sentences are: (1) 'The manager put up with the delay.' (2) 'The team's plan fell through at the last minute.' (3) 'She let the cat out of the bag about the surprise party.' (4) 'He broke down during the speech.' The options for each are: (1) tolerated / displayed / accommodated / postponed; (2) collapsed / descended / improved / was announced; (3) revealed the secret / released an animal / caused confusion / made a mistake; (4) lost control emotionally / stopped working / dismantled / spoke loudly. One student scores 1 out of 4, choosing 'tolerated' for (1), 'descended' for (2), 'released an animal' for (3), and 'stopped working' for (4). The teacher must decide whether any of these choices can be defended and how to teach context as a tie-breaker.
1. Analyse each student choice against the sentence context. Which choices are plausible but still wrong, and why?
Read the worked answer
- (1) 'tolerated' is correct. 'Put up with' is a fixed phrasal verb meaning 'endure' or 'tolerate'. The object 'the delay' and the subject 'the manager' fit that meaning. The student earns 1 mark here.
- (2) 'descended' is plausible only if you read 'fell' literally. But 'fell through' is a phrasal verb meaning 'failed' or 'collapsed'. The context - 'the team's plan' and 'at the last minute' - signals failure, not downward movement. 'Collapsed' is the correct option; 'descended' is wrong.
- **(3) 'released an animal' is the literal reading of 'let the cat out'. But the phrase 'out of the bag' and the context 'about the surprise party' signal disclosure of a secret. The correct meaning is 'revealed the secret'; the literal choice is wrong.
- (4) 'stopped working' is a legitimate sense of 'broke down' for machines or vehicles. But the subject is 'he', and the phrase 'during the speech' points to a human emotional collapse. 'Lost control emotionally' is correct; 'stopped working' is contextually wrong.
The student has one correct answer and three literal or wrong-sense choices. The mark is 1/4.
2. The student protests that idioms are arbitrary and cannot be worked out. Explain the balance between arbitrary idiom meaning and contextual clues, using two examples from the test.
Read the worked answer
The student is half right: idiom meanings are conventional, not compositional. You cannot deduce 'tolerate' from 'put up' + 'with' by logic alone, and 'let the cat out of the bag' cannot be decoded word by word. Idioms have to be learned as chunks.
But context is a powerful tie-breaker. In (1), the manager and the delay make 'tolerate' the only sensible meaning; 'accommodated' would require a different structure, such as 'put up the guests'. In (4), 'broke down' has several dictionary senses, but the human subject and the speech situation select the emotional sense rather than the mechanical one.
The practical lesson is: learn the idiom as a whole, then use the surrounding words - subject, object, and situation - to choose among its possible senses. Arbitrary origin does not mean arbitrary use in context.
3. Design a one-line context clue for one idiom from the test to show how a reader could infer meaning without knowing the idiom.
Read the worked answer
'Although the manager disliked the constant delays, he put up with them because the supplier was the only one available.'
The concessive 'although' and the reason 'the only one available' imply that the manager endured something unpleasant rather than welcomed it. A reader who did not know 'put up with' could infer reluctant tolerance from those contextual signals.