Many people get caught up in being trendy when it comes to speaking English but using the standard form is alright too. And what is the standard form? Well if you’re in the US it is the American variety and if the England it is the Queen’s version. In Canada I used to go on the notion of it being mid-Atlantic somewhere between the two, we use American spelling and skip out on auxiliaries as they do but then we are otherwise grammatically conscious as our English counterparts and take the time to be articulate when we speak. This is not to say that some populations are less articulate than others; I find that with the loss of certain verb forms and with the incorporation of like in every other sentence the language has been watered down over recent years whether one lives here or south of the border. I would imagine that the same phenomenon is happening across the Atlantic in good old England.

The important thing is to be able to work in English and that does not mean having to be a Shakespearean lover or a romantic poet. So language learning is secondary to many who consider it to be just a tool in the work force. This is why new Canadians largely ignore the incorporation of idiomatic speech. There is a tendency to want to see the equivalent of them in their own language and/or having difficulty to see how those idioms would be useful in their day-to-day lives. Idiomatic expressions most often made up of phrasal verbs is not essential at the work place but it does add colour to the language and helps express mood that is otherwise absent in the person’s dialogue.

The person may start to think that he can use words to express not only their standard meaning but also their figurative one. By figurative meaning, one refers to something, which was not originally intended by the word in the expression but became associated with the word because one attaches a certain idea to the word. Such can be said of the word blue, which not only represents a standard primary colour but tends to express a sombre mood. So if you’re ‘feeling blue’, you’re likely to be feeling sad. Similarly being ‘in the red’ in Canada means being in debt. There are origins for those expressions and red likely became associated with owing money because that may have been the colour used to underline an outstanding account to be paid up. It is important for the learner to detach himself from any colour references he has from his own language background to accommodate the new sense.