The Phrases Dying Right Now — and What Replaces Them

Phrases do not usually die with a bang. They fade, the way a photograph fades: no single day on which the colour is gone, only a slow retreat until one morning you notice that nobody says it any more, and that the people who do sound faintly of another decade. Catching a phrase in the act of dying is harder than it sounds, because the evidence is thin and the temptation to guess is strong. But there are two kinds of evidence worth taking seriously, and together they sketch a rough map of what is going now.

What the surveys claim

The first kind is the opinion survey, and it should be handled with tongs. In 2022 the research agency Perspectus Global polled two thousand Britons under fifty about traditional sayings, and the results were widely reported as a list of idioms ‘in danger of dying out’. Among the phrases a majority said they never used were a fly in the ointment, a flash in the pan, flogging a dead horse, dead as a doornail and to toe the line. The figures made good headlines, and the agency itself later wrote about how eagerly the media picked them up.

That last detail is the reason for the tongs. A survey of whether people say they use a phrase is not the same as a measurement of whether the phrase is dying, and a study designed to be quotable is designed to produce a dramatic list. Self-report is unreliable; ‘never use’ is not ‘do not understand’; and a phrase can sit unused for a generation and then come roaring back. Treat these lists as a hypothesis, not a coroner’s report.

What the objects tell us

The second kind of evidence is sturdier, because it does not depend on what people say about themselves. It is this: an idiom is most at risk when the thing behind it disappears from daily life. The image stops being an image and becomes a puzzle, and a puzzle is easy to drop.

Sound like a broken record is the classic case in progress. The phrase depends on a specific, once-universal experience: a scratched vinyl record whose needle jumps back into the same groove and repeats a fragment endlessly. For anyone who grew up with records the metaphor is instant. For anyone who grew up streaming, it is a description of a thing they have never seen fail in that particular way. The phrase is not dead — it is still widely used and understood — but its foundation is being quietly removed, and phrases in that position tend, over decades, to thin out.

The same fate hangs over a cluster of idioms rooted in obsolete technology and vanished trades. Don’t touch that dial and put a sock in it point back to radio sets that no longer exist in that form; dead as a doornail and flogging a dead horse carry the smell of a pre-industrial world of blacksmiths and knackers’ yards. Commentators writing about idioms ‘lost to tech’ have noted the pattern for years: expressions decay fastest when the physical object that made them vivid slips out of ordinary reach.

There is a subtler mechanism at work alongside the vanishing object, and it is worth separating out. A phrase can lose its footing not only when its referent disappears but when the practice around it changes. Ring someone up assumes a telephone exchange you rang; hold the line assumes a shared line you might lose; tune in next week assumes appointment broadcasting, a world in which a programme happened at a fixed hour or not at all. On-demand streaming does not destroy the object so much as dissolve the habit, and idioms built on a habit are just as vulnerable as those built on a thing.

What the corpora can and cannot show

Between the loud survey and the intuitive argument sits a quieter, more reliable witness: the large text corpus. Tools such as Google Books Ngram Viewer plot how often a phrase appears in printed books across two centuries, and for many idioms the line does curve downward in recent decades. But the corpus comes with its own cautions, and honesty requires stating them. Printed books lag behind speech by years; they over-represent formal, edited prose and under-represent the messy places — texts, group chats, comment threads — where idioms actually live and die today. A phrase can be collapsing in conversation while holding steady in books, or thriving in speech while vanishing from print. The graph is evidence, not a verdict, and it measures the page rather than the mouth.

The quiet replacements

If some phrases are fading, what takes their place? Rarely a neat one-for-one swap. More often the ground shifts: new experiences generate new figures of speech, and these do the work the old ones used to do. Where an older speaker might have said you sound like a broken record, a younger one is at least as likely to reach for a phrase drawn from the internet’s own furniture — the language of buffering, of screenshots, of things going viral, of a take being touched grass. The metaphors migrate from the workshop and the wireless to the feed and the phone.

Some replacements are structural rather than lexical. A great deal of what idioms used to carry — tone, irony, exasperation — is now carried by other means entirely: by an emoji, by deliberate misspelling, by a reaction image, by the flat understatement of typing well. with a full stop. These are not idioms in the traditional sense, but they occupy the same niche, and part of what looks like idioms dying may in fact be idiom’s job being outsourced to punctuation and pictures.

How to tell dying from resting

The honest position is that we cannot always tell the difference between a phrase that is dying and one that is merely resting. English is littered with expressions that looked moribund and revived — often ironically, often among the very young who supposedly killed them. Vinyl itself came back; so, plausibly, could broken record, refreshed as a knowing period piece. A few rough tests help. Is the phrase still understood by people who do not use it? Then it is dormant, not dead. Has the object behind it vanished entirely, leaving only a puzzle? Then it is genuinely at risk. Does anything do its specific job better? Then it may simply be retired.

It is also worth separating two things that get lumped together: idioms and slang. Slang is built to be disposable; it signals membership of a moment, and it turns over fast by design, which is why last decade’s slang sounds so dated. Idioms are sturdier, because they do a semantic job rather than a social one — they compress a whole situation into an image — and they tend to persist until the image itself stops making sense. When people worry that ‘nobody talks properly any more’, they usually have slang in mind; the slower, quieter loss of idioms is the more interesting phenomenon, and the harder one to see, precisely because it happens on the timescale of generations rather than seasons.

What we can say with confidence is narrow but real. Phrases anchored to a physical experience decay when that experience does; surveys can flag candidates but cannot pronounce death; and the vacancies are filled less by tidy substitutes than by whole new registers of meaning-making. The safest prediction is not that any particular saying will die by a particular date, but that the mechanism will keep running — and that some phrase you used this week, without a second thought, is already on someone’s list.