Interesting Quotes About Idioms

• “People use idioms to make their language richer and more colorful and to convey subtle shades of meaning or intention. Idioms are used often to replace a literal word or expression, and many times the idiom better describes the full nuance of meaning. Idioms and idiomatic expressions can be more precise than the literal words, often using fewer words but saying more. For example, the expression it runs in the family is shorter and more succinct than saying that a physical or personality trait ‘is fairly common throughout one’s extended family and over a number of generations. ” (Gail Brenner, Webster’s New World American Idioms Handbook. Webster’s New World, 2003)
• “If natural language had been designed by a logician, idioms would not exist. ” (Philip Johnson-Laird, 1993)

Agar (1991) proposes that biculturalism and bilingualism are two sides of the same coin. Engaged in the intertwined process of culture change, learners have to understand the full meaning of idioms. ” (Sam Glucksberg, Understanding Figurative Language. Oxford Univ. Press, 2001)

Shakespeare’s Idioms

Shakespeare is credited with coining more than 2,000 words, infusing thousands more existing ones with electrifying new meanings and forging idioms that would last for centuries. ‘A fool’s paradise,’ ‘at one fell swoop,’ ‘heart’s content,’ ‘in a pickle,’ ‘send him packing,’ ‘too much of a good thing,’ ‘the game is up,’ ‘good riddance,’ ‘love is blind,’ and ‘a sorry sight,’ to name a few. ” (David Wolman, Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling. Harper, 2010)

Levels of “Transparency”

Idioms vary in ‘transparency’: that is, whether their meaning can be derived from the literal meanings of the individual words. For example, make up [one’s] mind is rather transparent in suggesting the meaning ‘reach a decision,’ while kick the bucket is far from transparent in representing the meaning ‘die. ‘” (Douglas Biber et al. , Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Pearson, 2002) “The thought hit me that this was a pretty pathetic way to kick the bucket–being accidentally poisoned during a photo shoot, of all things–and I started weeping at the idiocy of it all. ” (Lara St. John)

The Idiom Principle

The observation that meanings are made in chunks of language that are more or less predictable, though not fixed, sequences of morphemes leads [John] Sinclair [in Corpus Concordance Collocation, 1991] to an articulation of the ‘idiom principle. ‘ He states the principle thus: The principle of idiom is that a language user has available to him or her a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analysable into segments (Sinclair 1991): 110) The study of fixed phrases has a fairly long tradition . . , but phrases are normally seen as outside the normal organising principle of language. Here, Sinclair extends the notion of phraseology to encompass a great deal more of language than it is commonly considered to encompass. At its strongest, we might say that all senses of all words exist in and are identified by the sequences of morphemes in which they typically occur. ” (Susan Hunston and Gill Francis, Pattern Grammar: A Corpus-Driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English. John Benjamins, 2000)

Modal Idioms

“Modal idioms are idiosyncratic verbal formations which consist of more than one word and which have modal meanings that are not predictable from the constituent parts (compare the non-modal idiom kick the bucket). Under this heading we include have got [to], had better/best, would rather/sooner/as soon, and be [to]. ” (Bas Aarts, Oxford Modern English Grammar. Oxford University Press, 2011)