Many of my little students are doing work related to insects using larger-than-life plastic figures. Bee, butterfly, spider, beetle, termite, scorpion, ladybug, praying mantis, dragonfly, ant, grasshopper, and house fly are represented. The house fly has creepy red eyes, and the model is even larger than the horse flies that scared me on my first horse ride in Estes Park, Colorado when I was about ten.
There's a stomach bug going around--nausea, chills, low-grade fever. Students were "dropping like flies" yesterday. Many of our students and their parents do not speak English as their first language. They probably wouldn't understand the idiomatic expression.
Idiom Meaning - Falling down ill and in large numbers, often associated with a highly contageous illness. One possible origin is the Grimm Brothers' story of "Brave Little Tailor". The little hero strikes seven flies dead with one whip of his belt.
Speaking of flies and belts reminds me of raising my preschool sons. Seems like I spent most of 1984-1990 toilet-training the three of them. After a day asking, "Did you flush and wash?," it was difficult relating to my spouse's adventures in the outside working world of finance and law, business travel and Embassy Suites.
Small boys seemed to lack Early Warning Systems for restroom emergencies. I told my kids, "__________, you're doing a heckuva job!," any time they made it to the toilet, so basically, Dubya was quoting me after Katrina. Cute as they looked in overalls or little Levis, they just couldn't manage the buckles, belts, snaps, and zippers in what we might call a "timely fashion" when the need arose.
Living in Oklahoma in the late Eighties, I was able to buy sweatpants and other elastic-waist pants for the guys at the Anthony's store. In the early Nineties in Texas, the Mervyns Cheetah brand sweatpants made fly-less operations simple and swift, and probably saved my sanity.
I love this example of the idiom:
The words were so difficult that the spelling bee contestants were dropping like flies.
For my tenth birthday I received a dragonfly-blue fishing rod all my own. There is something transcendant in casting a line in a perfect arc and dropping the fly on the surface of a pond.
An even better gift was when my sons all managed their own flies and cast perfect arcs in a timely fashion for my thirty-fifth birthday. They even washed their hands with soap!
Perhaps our next preschool language exploration will be "dropping our drawers".
© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder
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