‘Did you try to use any new language on Facebook?’
Lam tells the class that she used the idiom ‘get a grip’ on Facebook. The students
compare their ideas on the meaning of ‘get a grip.’ The teacher then suggests that they
consult an online corpus, the British National Corpus (for web address, see page 218).
(The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100-million word collection of samples of
written and spoken language from a wide range of sources). They type in the words
‘get a grip,’ and they are taken to a page with 50 examples of this expression (a
concordance), each used in a sentence.
Screenshot 14.1 A partial concordance: the expression ‘get a grip’ from the BNC.
The teacher asks then what they notice about the phrase ‘get a grip.’ The students
quickly realize that it is always, or almost always, followed by the preposition ‘on.’ In
checking further examples, they see that it can sometimes be followed by the
preposition ‘of.’ They note that it was also used as a command ‘Get a grip!’ They
discuss whether or not this form has a different meaning from the phrase with ‘on’ in
it. With the teacher’s guidance, they see that ‘get a grip’ could be used literally to
mean a physical hold or more metaphorically to mean in control. They then go to an
online dictionary and type ‘get a grip on’ and find out that it means ‘to obtain mastery
or control over something or someone’ and that it can also occur with the verb ‘have.’
The teacher asks them to make up a few sentences with the phrase, which they then