Listen to the author reading this blog post.

by Kate Woodford

Today’s post is the latest in my Newspaper idioms thread, in which I present you with a selection of English idioms and phrases used in several newspapers published on the same day. The aim is to provide you with a range of contemporary, frequently used English idioms.

I’ll start with a tabloid paper that criticizes a new government policy, calling it a ‘smoke-and-mirrors trick’. The intriguing phrase smoke and mirrors refers to words or actions that are intended to conceal the true situation, usually because it is bad. (The phrase is hyphenated here because it is used before a noun.)

The same paper predicts that the weather will improve by the weekend and promises that sunny spells will ‘put a spring in our step after the cold snap’. If you have a spring in your step, you walk energetically, in a way that suggests you are happy.

In the media section of this paper, a journalist reflects on his terrible musical tastes as a younger man, exclaiming ‘What on earth was I thinking?’ The emphatic idiom how/what/why on earth…? is used for conveying disbelief when asking a question.

Meanwhile, in the sports pages, a famous golfer is said to have ‘raised the bar’ with his recent brilliant performance in a championship. If you raise the bar, you do or produce something to a standard that is better than anyone or anything that went before you.

In a different tabloid, the editor writes about the government’s attempts to raise money in order to ‘balance the books’. To balance the books is to ensure that the amount of money spent by a government or company is not more than the amount of money received. The editor also comments on the recent threats by UK pharmacists to limit the hours that pharmacies are open. Deliberately closing early, he claims, ‘would be cutting off their nose to spite their face’ because people would instead buy their medicines from supermarkets. If you cut off your nose to spite your face, you unintentionally harm yourself by trying to punish someone else or prove a point.

A sports journalist in the same paper reports that a football team’s captain has urged his players to ‘keep their eyes on the prize of Champions League football’. If you have or keep your eyes on the prize, you stay determined to achieve something, even when this is difficult.

A broadsheet newspaper reports on the problems in the UK television industry which, it says, is being ‘hit by a perfect storm’. A perfect storm is a major problem caused by several bad things happening at the same time.

Finally for this post, a football commentator claims that if a particular player isn’t currently the best striker in the land, he is ‘definitely knocking on the door’. If you are knocking on the door, you are very close to being or achieving something impressive.

I hope you’ve picked up one or two interesting new idioms today. I’ll be back with another of these ‘Newspaper idioms’ posts in a couple of months.