On Idioms, Collocations - and Being Insanely Jealous

Tuomo yazıyor: Here’s something I’ve been meaning to write about for quite some time. And it forces me to digress temporarily in the field of linguistics… But don’t worry, it’ll all lead to a Bagel Moment, I promise! :-)

In linguistics, a collocation is a group of words that inherently belong together. For example we make decisions but do dishes - the words make and do cannot be used interchageably, i.e. make collocates with decision and dishes collocates with do. Collocations should not be confused with idioms, or groups of words where the meaning is not a sum of the parts, for example to have a green thumb (why only a thumb?) or to kick the bucket (why not a pail?). You can't understand these expression only by understanding the words green and thumb or kick and bucket.

The way Dave and I speak English on a regular basis contains a lot of collocations that are basically hyperboles, or exaggerations. For example, we don’t just refer to bees as crazy; no, we have to refer to them as deranged bees. In the same way, we can't just be jealous: we have to say that we're insanely jealous (this collocation was inspired by the time when I bought an iPod before Dave did, and Dave was insanely jealous for months).

Now to the Bagel Moment. Right before the holidays, I got an e-mail from Pekka and Timo where they told me about their trip to Istanbul, Turkey right after new year, and that obviously made me insanely jealous. The two of them lead a life full of fabulous activities such as singing in a choir, taking music and language classes (not just French in France but also evenign classes in Turkish and Lëtzebuergesch, the third local language with French and German!). On top of that, this adorable couple has time to take care of their house and keep it immaculate and plant potatoes and stuff – and all that in the most organized way. More reasons than one to be insanely jealous :-)

I wrote about Pekka some time ago, on how a song had led me to one of those Bagel Moments. The two of them have been very close friends in my life even though our paths don't cross often enough these days. I’m on this side of the Atlantic, and they live in Luxembourg, meaning that whenever I go to Finland, it’s not guaranteed that I get to see them there.

Now let me say a couple of words on Timo. We were introduced on our first semester in college at a potluck. Somehow we hadn’t met before, but we had been assigned to be in charge of the dessert. Not that we ever got into a fight, but we had some severe differences on how moist a cake should be. To make use of some hyperboles again, Timo prefers his cake to “crunch in the teeth” whereas I clarly prefer mine to “swim off the plate.” As a result, our cake got over-moistened and literally slid off the plate - not that I complained! So, it was a weird yet wonderful start to a beautiful friendship…

Later on in the years, we traveled by train to Turkey, which on its own is worth a posting of its own. Such train trips (Interrail anybody?) are notorious for driving lifelong friends apart to the extent that they never speak to each other. I guess in our case though, this did not happen because right after that I went to Toulouse to study, and Timo went to Thessaloniki.

Inspired by this trip (can it really be that it's been more than 15 years?!) and driven by my insane jealousy, I would like to dedicate the next clip to Timo: Şinanay by Sezen Aksu (sorry about the quality of the clip – or is it intentional?). This song always reminds me of our trip from Helsinki all the way to Istanbul...



Arkadaşlarım, I do hope you had an iyi yolculuk! Insanely jealously though :-)