Idioms and Fixed Expressions

A. What is an idiom?

An idiom is a group of words with a meaning that different from the individual words, and often difficult to understand from the individual words. Many of the phrasal verbs in Units 16 and 17 were idiomatic. Here are some more common idioms.

I’m sorry I can’t make it (= come) on Friday.

B. Fixed expressions

There are also expressions in English where the meaning is easy to understand, but the same idea in your language may need a completely different expressions. In other words, if you just translate from your language, you may say something in English which completely wrong. For this reason, you need to learn some expressions as idioms.

C. Using idioms

Idioms are important but they are be difficult so use correctly.

                  1.         With many idioms, if you make just a small mistake, it can sound strange, funny, or badly wrong. For example: get a move, a small talk, put an eye on, off-hands, etc.

                  2.         Idioms often have special features: they may be informal or funny or ironic; they may only be used by certain people (e.g. young children, or teenagers, or elderly people); they may only appear in limited contexts; they have special grammar. For these reasons, you can often ‘learn’ the meaning of an idiom but them use it incorrectly. For example; after her husband died she was down the dumps. (this idiom means ‘sad and depressed’ but is completely wrong here: the situation is too serious and the idiom is too informal).

           Idioms is an expression (i.e term or phrase) whose meaning cannot be deduced from the literal definitions and the arrangement of its parts, but refers instead to a figurative meaning that is known only through conventional use.

            In the English expression to kick the bucket, a listener knowing only the meaning of kick and bucket would be unable to deduce the expression’s actual meaning, which is to die. Although can refer literally to the act of striking a bucket with a foot, native speakers rarely use it that way.

Common features of idioms

1. Non-compositionality : The meaning of a collocation is not a straightforward composition of the         meaning of its part.

2. Other, like the common yet semantically strange “level well enough alone” may be a soramimi or mondegreen for “leave both well and ill alone”

3. Non-subtitutability : One cannot substitute a word in a collocation with a related word. For example, we cannot say kick the pail instead of kick the bucket and pail are synonyms.

4. Non-modifability : One cannot modify a collocation or apply syntactic transformations. For example, john kicked the green bucket or the bucket was kicked have nothing to do with dying. (However, John kicked his bucket was john’s bucket was kicked are both valid).

Example :

Have a set-to = Discuss                  Have a time = Have an opportunity

Have a shot at = Try                       Make a hullabeloo = Make a disturbance