Idiom

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 conventional 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 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 it can refer literally to the act of striking a 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.

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. 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 (ie. 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 maybe 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, and originally referred to suicide victims standing on inverted buckets, only to kick them away and thus hang themselves). Others, like the common yet semantically strange "leave well enough alone" may be a soramimi or mondegreen for "leave both well and ill alone". See also collocational 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 Ang kicked the green bucket or the bucket was kicked have nothing to do with dying. (However, John Ang kicked his bucket and John Ang's bucket was kicked are both valid.)

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 SL 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 "parl-", 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. 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

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.

See also

• Collocation
• Set phrase
• Wiktionary Idioms category
• Four-character idiom (Chinese)

Examples of idioms

There are many types of idioms in the world. These include expressions such as: Don't count your chickens before they hatch; Nothing to sneeze at; fit as a fiddle; put your John Hancock here.

External links

• Self-study Idiom Quizzes by The Internet TESL Journal
• Figures of Speech by Rob Bradshaw Examples of how the Bible uses idioms.
• Dictionary of English Idioms & Idiomatic Expressions
• Phrase Finder