If you ‘make a splash’, you get a lot of public attention.
\n\u2022 We need to make a splash by holding a cocktail party for journalists.
\n\u2022 She made quite a splash when she wore such a small dress to the film premiere.<\/p>\n
If a noise is ‘drowned out\u2019, you cannot hear it because of other noises.
\n\u2022 The sounds of the telephone were drowned out by the noise from upstairs.
\n\u2022 His speech was drowned out by the chanting from the demonstrators.<\/p>\n
If you ‘test the water’, you try to find out what you or people think about an idea or a situation before you take action.
\n\u2022 Before you decide to sell your house in England and move to Spain, why not go there for a trial three months to test the water?
\n\u2022 This is a big project. We should test the water before making such a large investment.<\/p>\n
If a situation is ‘sink or swim’, it either fails or succeeds.
\n\u2022 Either this works or we are all out of a job. It’s sink or swim.
\n\u2022 You’ll get no training here. It’s sink or swim.<\/p>\n
If you ‘dive into’ something, you do it without really thinking about what you are doing. Also \u2018dive into it head-first\u2019. This highlights the lack of preparation and thought.
\n\u2022 He dove into the project with a lot of enthusiasm but not much thought.
\n\u2022 Let’s take our time. There’s no point in diving into this without thinking.<\/p>\n
If you are ‘treading water’, you are staying in the same place without making any progress.
\n\u2022 I’m just treading water, waiting for a job with a better salary.
\n\u2022 People lose motivation if they think they are just treading water in their careers.<\/p>\n
Can you think of other idioms to do with swimming to add to this list?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you ‘make a splash’, you get a lot of public attention. \u2022 We need to make a splash by holding a cocktail party for journalists. \u2022 She made quite a splash when she wore such a small dress to the film premiere. If a noise is ‘drowned out\u2019, you cannot hear it because of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[535,537],"tags":[671,583,584,673,726],"class_list":["post-215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-esl-cultural-communications","category-speak-english-better","tag-expressions","tag-idioms","tag-slang","tag-sports","tag-swimming"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":951,"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions\/951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}