The Spaces between the Idiomatic Expressions
I don’t give too much thought to the one that goes, “He has no imagination.” Nobody uses it anymore, but I find myself using it a lot these days. Did I finally crack the code?
When I listen to somebody saying something, and they tell me through their words that they are not really thinking around the problem, it tells me they are not using their imagination. It’s the words that have been repeated by them and everybody else that arrive at saying nothing. Certain phrases and expressions come and go, but using your imagination is never going to go out of style, right? Because, I think, imagination is the interior agency of an individual going outside the prescribed points of contact in a situation and investigating what unseen agency may be affecting the situation.
The problem is really the words. They fail to hit the nail on the head, to hit a grand slam homer — always pulling the cat out of the bag, testing the waters, putting one over on you, having its cake and eating it too. There you have it. Popular expressions are hands down looking to be clear as a bell, but they are a wolf in sheep’s clothing. All of this goes without saying, but don’t shoot the messenger.
Language, as an applied form of communication, has such a limited range of options. If it needs to be clear, that means it cannot be pliable. I remember when it was popular for people to say “thinking outside the box.” It meant something back then. The funny part was that every time you said it, you were doing exactly the opposite of what it was for. I woke up one day, and suddenly people were using it. What was surprising to me was that I had just made this raw drawing that had a square-like center, and in the middle of that inked room, I brushed in bold, ugly letters, “My life is a fucking box!”
I thought it meant the same thing. I was living in a prison in those days because I was stuck in a job and relegated to an apartment on the off hours, and I hated everything about it. It was a limited life, and when people started using that expression, I looked at it as a form of byproduct that comes from a limited life. What sounded like people exercising low levels of imagination was symptomatic for the quality of the lives themselves, and I was turning just as robotic as the masses because of my limited means, the limited connections that were available to me.
At a company meeting, somebody would say, “Now that’s thinking outside the box,” and I would groan, wondering at what point I was going to lose every little particle of creative substance I had left by such close proximity to this sort of exchange.
How much of this does it take for you to lose your imagination? Living in a box could sap you of everything you held dear in life, because what was life without imagination? I never thought I could merely exist and do what everyone else was doing. It was never part of the plan.
That was why when I used to hear the much older expression, “So-and-so has no imagination.” I would be unclear about what was meant. Not exactly sure how that applied to the particular situation that caused such a verdict on that person, I was convinced that the person was stricken with some deformity. It was one of the lowest things you can call anyone, and I always failed to find the situation in question proof positive that they had this ailment. No, it was never clear to me, but I noticed that such a reaction to someone usually came when the targeted person was not in league with your ideas, and nothing more. To me, it was becoming a question of not just the person who purportedly lacked imagination but of the person responsible for the observation.
People still use that outdated expression, and I wonder if they know what they mean by it. I think it is usually meant for someone who doesn’t think outside the box. I don’t think I know anymore.
Did it mean something before and now the meaning is lost because the times have changed and we don’t think under those limitations anymore? The old generation is no longer around to explain it to us.