Make Window a Door

I was listening to Be Somebody by Thousand Foot Krutch yesterday and suddenly caught the phrase “you made my window a door”. I used to think that this idiom is rather funny: like, damn, the idea to replace a window with a door somehow sounds unsafe. You can fall from the tenth floor, you know?

At the same time, the song is wonderful and not about that at all! I got curious and started digging around to find out what meaning native speakers put into it.

It turned out that it is actually about two different positions: a passive observer and an active participant. That is, if there is a window in front of you, you only look through it at something or someone. But you can open the door and finally do something. Hence, “when I could only see the floor you made my window a door” means something like “when my hands dropped, you helped me up”.

By the way, there is another similar idiom — “to be a better window than a door”. The abstraction here is the same: if a person is like a window, and not a door — they hardly ever let people close to them, making passive observers even out of people very close to them.

4 August 2024 English