Research on Language and Social Interaction, 33(2), 121–154 Copyright © 2000, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. How to Resist an Idiom Celia Kitzinger Department of Social Sciences Loughborough University Idiomatic formulations are often successful in achieving affiliative responses: They are hard to challenge both because their generality makes them independent of the specific details of any particular person or situation, and because they invoke and constitute the taken-for-granted knowledge shared by all competent members of the culture (Drew & Holt, 1988). Drawing on data in which women with breast cancer talk in groups about their experiences, in this article we explore how they resist the rhetorical power of the idiom “think positive.” Three resistance strategies are described and illustrated: (a) pauses and token agreements, (b) the production of competing idioms, and (c) particularization. The article ends with a brief discussion of the implications of these findings for conversation analysis and for current debates about the value of fine-grained conversation-analytic approaches within discourse analysis. Think positive: think in a confident way about what you can do: If you don’t think positive, you won’t win [italics added]. (Hornby, Cowie, Crowther, & Crowther, 1995, p. 292) This article would not have been possible without the input of Sue Wilkinson, who collected, select- ed, and transcribed the data on which it is based, and who has spent many hours discussing with me the implications of her data. I would also like to thank members of the Loughborough Discourse and Rhetoric Group for helpful discussion of some of the data on which this article is based, espe- cially Charles Antaki who generously helped me to take my first analytic steps with this data set and gave very useful feedback on this article. Thanks also to Jonathan Potter for helpful comments on an earlier draft, and to Paul Drew for sending me a prepublication copy of Drew and Holt (1998). Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Celia Kitzinger, Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Discourse and Rhetoric Group, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK. E-mail: C.C.Kitzinger@lboro.ac.uk