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BY HERBERT VEGO
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Sunday, March 5, 2017
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IF you have a favorite English novelist, I bet you could feel your heart pounding while being carried away by the author’s skill with idioms that seem to transform his words into action, enabling you to visualize his intended scenes.
An idiom is a group of words having a different meaning from each individual word. It’s a tool that even we journalists use to dramatize an otherwise boring news. You must have heard your favorite weather newscaster say, “It is raining cats and dogs” rather than “It is raining heavily.”
Therefore, we cannot deduce the meaning of an idiom from its individual words; otherwise, we lose the meaning of the idiom. The idiom “pull your socks up,” for example, means “improve the way you are behaving” (or it can have a literal meaning).
In common practice, however, uncommon idioms are used sparingly and only when the context of the sentence would allude to the real meanings.
Many idioms originated as quotations from well-known writers, notably Shakespeare. For examples, “at one fell swoop” comes from Macbeth and “cold comfort” from King John. Sometimes such idioms today have a meaning that has been altered from the original quotation.
Some idioms are typically used in one version of English rather than another. For example, the idiom “yellow journalism” originated from American English. Other idioms may be used in a slightly different form in different varieties of English. Thus the idiom “a drop in the ocean” in British English becomes “a drop in the bucket” in American English. However, in general, globalization and the effects of film, television and the Internet mean that there is less and less distinction between idioms of different varieties of English.
The English language is one of the vastest and most vivid languages in the world. It is made up of over 1.5 million words. Over and above that, the same word can have a variety of different meanings depending on the context it is put in; two (or more) words can have the exact same spelling but are pronounced differently, depending on their meanings.
The idioms made from the combinations of those words further alter their meanings in metaphorical way.
Another important feature to point out is that idioms are fixed, which means that people cannot just decide to make up their own.
Here are some familiar idioms and their meanings:
Add insult to injury. When people add insult to injury, they make a bad situation even worse.
A blessing in disguise. Something good that isn’t recognized at first.
A doubting Thomas. A skeptic who needs physical or personal evidence in order to believe something.
Break a leg. A superstitious way to say “good luck” without saying “good luck”, but rather the opposite.
Cry over spilt milk. When you complain about a loss from the past.
Devil’s advocate. Someone who takes a position for the sake of argument without believing in that particular side of the argument. It can also mean one who presents a counter argument for a position they do believe in, to another debater.
Go for broke. To gamble everything you have.
Graveyard shift. Working hours from about 12 a.m. to 8 a.m. The time of the day when most other people are sleeping.
Over the moon means “extremely happy.”
Your guess is as good as mine. I often use this in my columns to avoid libel. The writer conveys no idea. But by inference it could also lead the reader to think of his idea as similar to the writer’s./PN
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