all of us flew into our heads?

Can't help with this one. I have never heard anything like it.

sounds like a female thing to me.

dunno...

It could be "flew IN our heads" possible misprint. Quite common these days in newspapers, magazines and books.

I never heard that one either.

YAHHHHNNN !

It is probably a euphamism for: We climbed up each others asses in recrimination over our collective poor choice of a vacation destination, and wished we could stay there for a couple of weeks because there were not so many goddamned roaches, and mangy dogs...

I agree. It is another way of saying "to imagine". Also, the possible "in your head" examples - do calculations in your head means to mentally calculate without calculator.

Song: Tegan and Sara - Back In Your Head (Official Music Video)

Possibly nothing. Where did you find this text?

Obviously the context is limited but it could mean that each person fell into their own private thoughts "wondering if the Caribbean might have been a better destination".

It's a very stupid and confusing sentence construction. Personally, I'd just ignore it.

EFLs don't really have that option, Mame. It's grammatical, the sentence construction is fine, the speaker obviously meant something or he/she wouldn't have said it.

What you mean to say is that you don't understand the meaning. That's fine, of course; I'm not 100% sure that I do.

But to mislead by suggesting that there's something wrong with the construction of the sentence is not at all helpful.

Well yeah, gibberish can be grammatical.

And because you can't discern any meaning from an isolated sentence, you leap to the conclusion that it has none, Roger?

What made you change your stance?

"Often all of us flew into our heads" reads to me like something written by a non-native speaker who has perhaps resorted to a word-by-word dictionary translation of a native (to them) idiom, or who has misunderstood an English idiom.

The head is the seat of reason, where thoughts take place, so I would guess that "flew into our heads" might be intended to mean "became pensive" or "reflected" or something like that. Unless the writer is a telepath, I do not see how he or she knows that "all of us" did this, unless we all said so, in which case why isn't it mentioned? If this has been provided as teaching material, then it is very poor.

We wondered.

That 's IMPOSSIBLE

I wasn't misleading anybody. It is a confusing and misleading sentence on its own. I, like Roger, have never heard the idiotic phrase "flew into our heads" and have no bloody idea what was meant by that. Having to guess at the meaning is what's stupid. It is not a common phrase or somebody here would have been able to explain it. Communication shouldn't have to be explained; it should be clear.

That you and Roger have never heard of it is hardly the test, Mame. It's not up to you two to be the arbiters of what's what for language.

Contrex and Laughoutlood both gave possible meanings, as did I. Roger allowed that it could have a meaning then he seemed to get his hackles up and changed his mind. Rocky simply said, "I dunno", allowing that this grammatically constructed sentence may well have a meaning to th person who spoke it and those around that speaker.



Channeling dear old dad? Other people's communication is often opaque. I could give you countless examples where you would be baffled, OR, if you had a real interest in understanding language instead of relying on your old saws, you could remember times in your life when you came into a group having a conversation, you listened a bit and then said something like, "What the hell are you guys talking about?"

This is something to worry about from another standpoint. If this is teaching material for a class, it isn't really helpful to just say it's poor writing and should be ignored. The poor student may not have the option of ignoring it.