Crowdsourcing Idioms

I am doing research into idioms for a forthcoming book chapter related to my Connecting Online 2012 presentation, that I had been scheduled to do on March 3rd. I am required to write 6,000 words and I am almost half way there. I didn't realise that 6,000 is quite a big amount to write and I haven't had to write so much since my university days, which is a long time ago. It's a huge challenge for me and I am prepared to do my best. I am grateful to Dr Nellie Deutsch, my former tutor and mentor on Moodle For Teachers and WikiEducator courses, for allowing me to work on this collaborative writing project which will be published online next month. One of my goals for this year was to write an e-book, so this is definitely an excellent start.

My chapter is based around my Teaching Idioms with Web 2.0 Tools presentation, which was originally premiered in Brighton 2011. The book chapter will support my presentation and will include some brand new lesson activities and ideas, which I have been working on the past few days.

I love teaching idioms and my students have always enjoyed learning them, too. I hope this chapter will provide further insight into how idioms can be taught effectively.

Looking through my folders, during my research on idioms just now, I found I had created an Xtranormal animation on Idioms a while back, and I include the tweet below. If you click on the image, it will take you to my Xtranormal page and you can view all the animations I have created. Be warned. They are very simple, but I hope they manage to convey whatever vocabulary I am trying to put across to my students!

I have published an Idiomatic Love Story and you can view it online at Slideshare/JanetBianchini or you can simply click on the image of the book below.

In the chapter, I would like to write a few sentences about how some British idioms have completely different meanings in other languages, or make no sense at all. I had read about the power of "crowdsourcing" on Nicky Hockley's fab blog, e-Moderation Station, entitled, "Sourcing the Crowd." So, I decided to do a bit of crowdsourcing myself, for the first time, and this is what I tweeted to my PLN yesterday:



In British English if you were to say "Victoria is full of beans today", it wouldn't mean that she had just eaten lots of beans and so was literally full of beans. No, the meaning would be that Victoria is very lively today, on the ball, very energetic.

http://www.free-stockphotos.com/download-free-coffee-mug-full-of-beans-images/

So my question to my fellow bloggers and readers is this: how would this idiom translate in your language?

Please do add your comments in the Comments' Box as this will help me in my research. Thank you in advance!!

The previous day I had done another bit of crowdsourcing as follows:


Sandy Millin responded within a very short time and gave an excellent reply as follows:

Evelyn Izquierdo my lovely tutor on the EVO Podcasting 2012 course also replied to my tweet and this is her super response:


Thank you both, Sandy and Eve for taking the time to add your thoughts!

I would be thrilled if anybody else could add their comments to my two questions, either here, or via Twitter. I will then be able to summarise the ideas in my book chapter.

My deadline is March 15th, so please do write in before then. Many thanks!!

NB
Below you can view a new idiomatic movie I have just created with Dvolver.

In the movie, Frederick is trying his best to woo Isabella back. I have deliberately chosen this movie to be in silent mode. There is a selection of music that you can choose to embellish your movie and make it more jazzy.