One-Way Idioms

I don't think I'll have the same tone every day, but the first few days the tone has been pretty dry. How's that working?

I don't really have any readers yet (nor do I expect any, these early posts are called filler so that when I eventually write something interesting it looks like the blog has been around long enough that some people bookmark it), so I don't expect an answer to this question.

What's the opposite of a dry tone? A wet one?

I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way. English is funny like that, a lot of idioms are one-directional.

In college, I helped Taiwanese students practice their English. They wanted to sound more like a native, and I guess I qualified as one (I'm from Austin, do they speak English there?), so they asked me for help.

They'd grab magazines and highlight any sentences, sayings, words, whatever they thought was unclear. They'd bring these to me, and I'd then try to explain how any two English speakers can ever understand what the other is saying¹.

One day, one of my Taiwanese friends brought me a magazine with the phrase get up highlighted. The sentence was something like, "I get up at 8."

"Well," I said. "Get up means to awaken, you know, to sit up and get out of bed. Does that make sense?"

He nodded vigorously. "Yes, I see. So I should say, this morning I get up at seven thirty, and tonight I get down at ten."

"Yes," I said. "That's exactly what you should say. All of you write it down, right now."

(Actually I explained and we all had a laugh, but that would have been funny, don't you think?)