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Synonyms
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Idioms
--> What are Idioms
An idiom 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 common use. In linguistics, idioms are widely assumed to be figures of
speech that contradict the principle of compositionality; however, some debate
has recently arisen on this subject.
In the English language expression to kick the bucket, for example, 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 it can refer literally to
the act of striking a specific bucket with a foot, native speakers rarely use it
that way. It cannot be directly translated to other languages – for example, the
same expression in Polish is to kick the calendar, with the calendar being as
detached from its usual meaning as the bucket in the English phrase is. The same
expression in Dutch is het loodje leggen (to lay the piece of lead), which is
entirely different from the English expression, too. Other expressions include
break a leg, crossing the Rubicon and fit as a fiddle. It is estimated that
William Shakespeare coined over 2,000 idioms still in use today.
Idioms hence tend to confuse those not already familiar with them; students of a
new language must learn its idiomatic expressions the way they learn its other
vocabulary. In fact many natural language words have idiomatic origins, but have
been sufficiently assimilated so that their figurative senses have been lost.
Idioms and culture
Idioms are, in essence, often colloquial metaphors
— terms which require some foundational knowledge, information, or experience,
to use only within a culture where parties must have common reference and as
such are not considered an official part of the language, but rather a part of
the culture. As cultures are typically localized, idioms are more often not
useful for communication outside of that local context. However some idioms can
be more universally used than others, and they can be easily translated, or
their metaphorical meaning can be more easily deduced.
The most common idioms can have deep roots, traceable across many languages. To
have blood on one's hands is a familiar example, whose meaning is relatively
obvious, although the context within English literature (see Macbeth and Pontius
Pilate) may not be. Many have translations in other languages, and tend to
become international.
While many idioms are clearly based in conceptual metaphors such as "time as a
substance", "time as a path", "love as war" or "up is more", the idioms
themselves are often not particularly essential, even when the metaphors
themselves are. For example, "spend time", "battle of the sexes", and "back in
the day" are idiomatic and based in essential metaphors, but one can communicate
perfectly well with or without them. These "deep metaphors" and their
relationship to human cognition are discussed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
in their 1980 book Metaphors We Live By.
In forms like "profits are up", the metaphor is carried by "up" itself. The
phrase "profits are up" is not itself an idiom. Practically anything measurable
can be used in place of "profits": "crime is up", "satisfaction is up",
"complaints are up" etc. Truly essential idioms generally involve prepositions,
for example "out of" or "turn into".
Interestingly, many Chinese characters are likewise idiomatic constructs, as
their meanings are more often not traceable to a literal (i.e. pictographic)
meaning of their assembled parts, or radicals. Because all characters are
composed from a relatively small base of about 214 radicals, their assembled
meanings follow several different modes of interpretation - from the
pictographic to the metaphorical to those whose original meaning has been lost
in history. It may be a feature that helps everyday life.
Common features
Non-compositionality: The meaning of a collocation
is not a straightforward composition of the meaning of its parts. For example,
the meaning of kick the bucket no longer has anything to do with kicking buckets
(Kick the bucket means to die) even if it once did (the phrase "kicking the
bucket" originally referenced suicide by hanging, wherein the despondent person
would stand on a bucket with the noose around his or her neck, and then "kick
the bucket" to allow the noose to tighten). Others, like the common yet
semantically strange "leave well enough alone" may be a mondegreen for "leave
both well and ill alone"[1]. See also collocation restriction.
Non-substitutability: 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 although bucket and pail are synonyms.
Non-modifiability: One cannot modify a collocation or apply syntactic
transformations. For example, John Nag kicked the green bucket or the bucket was
kicked have nothing to do with dying.
It is likely that every human language has idioms, and very many of them; a
typical English commercial idiom dictionary lists about 4,000. When a local
dialect of a language contains many highly developed idioms it can be
unintelligible to speakers of the parent language; a classic example is that of
Cockney rhyming slang. But note that most examples of slang, jargon and catch
phrases, while related to idioms, are not idioms in the sense discussed here.
Also to be distinguished from idioms are proverbs, which take the form of
statements such as, "He who hesitates is lost." Many idioms could be considered
colloquialisms.
In Spanish, the word idioma (= lengua) means language, and this is often
reflected in their Second language's English—using idiom to refer to language.
Parlance
"Idiom" can also refer to the characteristic manner of speaking in a language,
also called its parlance. Parlance is a word which originates from the Latin
root "purl-", to speak. An utterance consistent with a language's parlance is
described as idiomatic. For example, "I have hunger" is idiomatic in several
European languages if translated literally (e.g. Dutch ik heb honger, German ich
habe Hunger; French j'ai faim; Spanish tengo hambre; Italian ho fame), but the
usual English idiom is "I am hungry".
This sense is also carried over to programming languages, where the former sense
does not apply as an expression or statement in a programming language can
generally have only one meaning. For example, in Haskell, it is possible to
apply a function to all members of a list using recursion, but it is more
idiomatic to use the higher-order function map.
Computer science
Main article: Programming idiom
In computer science, an idiom is a low-level
pattern that addresses a problem common in a particular programming language. An
idiom describes how to implement particular aspects of components or the
relationships between them using the features of the given language.
For instance, in C source code one might see while(*a++ = *b++);, which copies
characters from b to a until the null character ('\0') is encountered. This is
an idiom in that a C programmer on seeing it does not need to mentally parse
what it might mean, although in this case the effect of the code can be deduced
from the literal syntax and C's order of operations. |
