Microsoft Word - English_Grammar_through_Stories.doc

by Alan Townend

40. Sea expressions..............................................................

Let's start with three 'Sea Expressions':

ƒ All at sea

ƒ Sea change

ƒ Sea of faces

If you live in Britain, as I do, it doesn’t take long to realise that
whatever direction you take, it isn’t long before you reach the sea.
And of course if you don’t like flying, as I don’t, and you want to
travel to another country, you have to cross that strip of water
between England and France called the Channel. It will come as no
surprise therefore that this mass of water we call ‘sea’ and all the
things people do on it have had a great influence on daily language.

In terms of expressions where the word ‘sea‘ itself appears, the
emphasis is on its great size. After all more of the earth is covered
with water than land and it wasn’t that long ago when people
thought that once you went over the horizon in your boat, you fell off
the end of the world!

Imagine that you’ve just started in a new job and only a few days
later you find yourself alone in your place of work. Then the
telephone rings and you very nervously answer it. You get asked lots
of questions. You don’t know the answers and you don’t know where
anything is kept. You are totally confused and can’t help the caller –
‘You are all at sea.’

At lunchtime you feel you must have something to eat after all the
problems you’ve had and you go into the firm’s canteen. The trouble
is that as you’re new, you don’t know anyone and the place is full of
hundreds of people and you think they’re all looking at you. You go
down the stairs and can see this enormous number of unknown faces

• ‘a sea of faces’.

Let me finish with an expression some hundreds of years old created
by our greatest national poet, Shakespeare, which is still very much
in use today. When we want to talk about a dramatic alteration
taking place that affects many people like for example the ending of
apartheid in South Africa, we call this in Shakespeare’s words – ‘a
sea change.’ And now as it’s high summer, I’d like to go for a long
walk in the countryside but I can’t really because as well as being
surrounded by sea in this small island, we have a few problems with
another mass of water inland too – in other words it’s raining!