WNYC‘s morning news host, Soterios Johnson, has changed how he talks about parking. He used to say, “Alternate side of the street parking is suspended for [religious observance, snow removal, or whatever], but you still have to feed the meters.”

Now he says, “…but you still have to pay the meters.”

I don’t know why Soterios (with whom I am on a first-name basis because he comes into my kitchen before I get dressed) made this change. I presume it was suggested by listeners.

I can think of one good reason to change from “feed the meters” to “pay the meters”:

“Feed the meters,” although it is an extremely common American English idiom, could – like most idioms –  be hard for non-native speakers of English to understand.

The meaning might have been fairly self-explanatory in the days of individual parking meters that sat next to your car and “ate” your coins. But sliding your card at a pay station and then putting the receipt on the dashboard doesn’t feel as though you’re feeding anything.

If you were a recent immigrant from Egypt with enough English to make sense of Morning Edition (that is, quite a lot), you could probably figure out in context that “feed the meter” means “pay for parking.” But it might take a moment, by which time Soterios would be halfway into tomorrow’s weather, and you would have missed today’s.

Idioms are great!  They add color to our language. They are often based on metaphors, like “feed the meter” or “learn the ropes,” that give our writing or speech a certain pizazz.

But idioms pose problems when the original context of the metaphor gets lost – which it always does, eventually.

  • Meters don’t have to be fed.
  • Sailors -at least, not the ones serving in navies and merchant marines – don’t have to learn ropes.
  • Carts don’t have horses to put either before or after them.
  • No one remembers what happens if you take a bull by the horns, and I, for one, don’t want to find out.

In elementary school, we delighted in books that showed how silly idioms would be if we took them literally. It shouldn’t be too much of a leap to see how confusing these expressions can be to people who aren’t familiar with them.

If your communication is targeted to a narrowly defined audience – season ticket holders, for example, or donors in Brighton Beach – you have a pretty good idea whether the audience includes immigrants to America or people in other countries. In most other cases, you can assume that your audience includes non-native speakers of English.

For that non-native audience, be aware of your idioms. Turn on your inner eight-year-old to see if you can make nonsense out of your sentence by taking each word literally.

If the context makes it clear – as Soterios’ context would have 20 years ago, when we still fed coins to meters – you can keep it. If not, try saying the same thing in a more straightforward way.

  • Learn the ropes > Learn how the office functions
  • Put the cart before the horse > Have our priorities out of order
  • Take the bull by the horns > Confront the situation directly

If your writing now feels flat and lifeless, it probably needed help to begin with. Rather than using colorful but potentially clichéd idioms, try: