Set phrases and creativity

Clustering at the upper end of the scale of idiomaticity is a group of phrases that are invariable in structure and opaque in meaning. However, some of their near neighbours may also be opaque, and yet allow a few substitutes, as in save one's own neck/skin. Partly because they are so few, the substitutes are seen as wellestablished, memorized parts of the idioms, so that a creative reshaping of one of them can produce the same shock effect as when an invariable phrase is involved.

Quality newspapers are an expected source of such 'nonce' (coined for the occasion) variation. Educated readers, it can be assumed, are linguistically sharp enough to recognize that in the headline Pharaoh's museum hopes to shelter reigning cats and dogs (a reference to plans to dedicate a room in a Cairo museum to mummified royal pets), the well-known idiom is not on the surface but underlies an appropriate recasting of forms and meanings.

Despite the undoubted appeal of such verbal play, however, nonce manipulation of idioms, proverbs, and catchphrases is somewhat rare, though more common in some genres, such as the city pages and sports columns, than others (and altogether more frequent in the tabloid press as a whole). What is much more characteristic of quality newspaper texts is the widespread and unmodified use of collocations.

Of all types of set phrases, it is collocations that make the most significant contribution to educated written proficiency in English. They are, for instance, pervasive in the language of the social sciences, as a number of studies have shown. Some analyses of such texts have put the percentage of collocations as high as 35 per cent of all combinations of a given structural pattern. What explains this preference? One useful property of noncreative collocations is that they represent a neutral ('unmarked') option and help to produce an unobtrusive style that suggests objectivity. They therefore commend themselves to people in public life, including serious commentators and academics, who wish to convey such characteristics in their writing. Collocations play an important role in setting a particular neutral stamp on educated written prose.

The value of the 'marked' option, by contrast (the creatively modified idiom, formula, or catchphrase), is that it draws attention away from the content of a text and on to its form, and in newspaper editorials, for example, provides scope for witty comment and evaluation.

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