to switch gears

[Dan Goncharoff]

I suspect the phrase is more meaningful to non-Americans, since
drivers in the rest of the world still actually switch gears, while
Americans tend to rely on an automatic transmission.

DanG

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 9:25 AM,  <ronbutters at aol.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       ronbutters at AOL.COM
> Subject:      Re: to switch gears
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> This is obviously a metaphor on it's way to becoming an idiom. There are surely a bazillion of these. When does a fairly transparent figurative expression become so commonplace that it crosses the border between cliche and idiom worthy of its own line in all dictionaries? As Burchfield writes in the prefatory material, not every word can be entered in a dictionary--not even an unabridged one. Even the online OED would become impossibly cluttered with material that few if any users would need.
>
> That said, I would guess that students learning English might be puzzled by this expression.
>

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