Words Have Weight: An Idioms & Clichés Quiz
Welcome to a quiz that puts our everyday language under the microscope. We often use idioms and clichés without a second thought—they’re colorful, common, and get a point across quickly. But many of these old phrases are rooted in a time of fear and misunderstanding about the human mind. Using them can, unintentionally, create stigma and hurt the very people we care about.
This quiz is your opportunity to become a more mindful and compassionate communicator. By identifying why certain common phrases are problematic and thinking about better alternatives, you’re doing more than just a word game. You are learning to recognize the hidden weight our words can carry and choosing a language of respect. This is a crucial skill for breaking down stigma and building a culture of true understanding. Let’s begin.
Learning Quiz
This is a learning quiz from English Plus Podcast, in which, you will be able to learn from your mistakes as much as you will learn from the answers you get right because we have added feedback for every single option in the quiz, and to help you choose the right answer if you’re not sure, there are also hints for every single option for every question. So, there’s learning all around this quiz, you can hardly call it quiz anymore! It’s a learning quiz from English Plus Podcast.
The Unthinking Word: How Our Everyday Language Builds Stigma
Hello. You’ve just taken a deep dive into the words we use every day, and I hope it has made you think. Language is a bit like breathing; we do it so automatically that we rarely stop to consider the substance of it. We inherit phrases from our parents, pick them up from movies, and repeat them without ever really questioning what they mean or where they came from. But as we’ve just seen, many of these common, unthinking words carry a heavy and often harmful history—a history of fear, misunderstanding, and stigma toward brain health.
Let’s break down what we learned. The problematic phrases we explored generally fall into a few distinct categories. The first, and perhaps most common, is trivialization. This happens when we take a serious, often debilitating medical diagnosis and turn it into a casual adjective to describe everyday behavior. We saw this with phrases like “I’m so OCD” to mean “I’m tidy,” or “the weather is so bipolar” to mean “it’s changing a lot.” When we do this, we are watering down the meaning of a real illness. We are taking the reality of a person’s profound struggle and equating it with a minor quirk or an inconvenience. This spreads massive amounts of misinformation. It leads people to believe that OCD is just about being neat and that bipolar disorder is just about being moody, making it incredibly difficult for people with the actual conditions to be taken seriously.
The second category is dehumanization. This is when our language turns a person into a broken object or a monstrous “other.” We saw this with mechanical metaphors like “unhinged,” “lost a screw,” or “crazy.” These words have been used for centuries to justify treating people with brain health conditions as less than human. They suggest a person is an object that is broken beyond repair, rather than a person who is experiencing a health challenge. Using these words, even as a joke, echoes this dark history and reinforces the idea that people with these conditions are fundamentally different from “us.”
The third category is invalidation. This is often the most well-intentioned but can be one of the most hurtful. These are the phrases that dismiss a person’s real pain by offering simplistic, unhelpful advice. “Just snap out of it.” “Just think positive.” “Get out of your own head.” These phrases are built on the false premise that a brain health condition is a matter of a bad attitude or a lack of willpower. They completely ignore the biological reality of these illnesses. For the person on the receiving end, this kind of “advice” doesn’t feel like help; it feels like blame. It feels like being told, “You are not trying hard enough,” which can be a deeply shaming message for someone who is already struggling.
So, what do we do? The goal is not to create a list of “banned words” or to live in fear of saying the wrong thing. The goal is to become more mindful, to make a conscious choice to replace lazy, harmful language with language that is more precise and more compassionate. The first step is to simply be more descriptive. Instead of calling an idea “crazy,” why not say it’s “unconventional,” “bold,” or “surprising”? Instead of saying you’re having a “panic attack” over a high price, why not say you were “shocked” or “stunned”? This not only avoids the stigma but also makes your communication clearer.
The second step is to describe behavior, not to apply a diagnosis. Instead of saying a person is “bipolar” because they are moody, you could say, “I’ve noticed their mood seems to shift a lot lately. I hope they’re okay.” This shifts you from a position of judgment to a position of concern. It opens the door for empathy rather than closing it with a label.
Finally, when someone is in distress, the best response is rarely advice. It is validation and support. Replace “Just snap out of it” with “It sounds like you are in so much pain right now. I’m here for you.” Replace “Don’t be so melodramatic” with “It sounds like that was a really intense experience for you.” This simple shift from advising to validating can make a world of difference. It tells the person that you see them, you hear them, and you are not judging them.
Language is a habit. And like any habit, it can be changed with intention and practice. The words we choose matter. They can either be unthinking echoes of an ignorant past, or they can be the conscious building blocks of a more compassionate future. By completing this quiz, you’ve already taken a massive step toward becoming one of those builders.
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