Gareth Carrol presents a collection of "modern idioms", which have become a part of our vocabulary in the past 50 years or so. In most cases, idioms such as "raining cats and dogs", that colour our everyday communication, are deeply rooted in culture and history. However, just like words, new idioms emerge in language, and many have entered our vocabulary through, TV, movies and the internet. These modern idioms can be dated very precisely. Jumping Sharks and Dropping Mics finds the origins of these idioms, and charts their development.

Gareth Carrol
I am a senior lecturer and researcher in linguistics at the University of Birmingham. My research focuses on how people use and understand figurative language, such as idioms and metaphor, as a part of everyday communication. As part of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, I cover these topics and consider aspects such as cultural influences, language ability and multiple other factors in how people communicate idiomatically. I have published multiple papers and book chapters on idioms, focusing on how these are processed and understood as a part of real-time communication, and in particular comparing important differences between native speakers and language learners, and looking at idioms from different languages. I have also delivered keynote talks at international conferences on this topic. As well as academic publications, I wrote a featured article on this topic (Modern Idioms) for the language magazine Babel in 2019.