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idiom
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  • called powers of the olden guard reel in dismay before our leaping strides and charged-up hustling, freewheeling idiom of high-tech personal accomplishment and betterment of all peoples.†   (source)
  • Qendrim, smaller by a head, handed him the ball and responded with an English idiom he'd only recently picked up from a Justin Timberlake tune.†   (source)
  • The words he uses are the idioms of popular songs and poems in the newspaper.†   (source)
  • They'd spent hours once, learning this idiom, working with a poster Caroline made of angry clouds, cats and dogs teeming from the sky.†   (source)
  • And her English was a mishmash of mixed-up idioms and sayings that showed she was "green behind the ears," as she called it.†   (source)
  • She has learned it well, its idioms, its nuances.†   (source)
  • "He looks anemic, not just icteric," she managed to say at last, clinging to the idiom of medicine to describe my pallor and jaundice.†   (source)
  • The idioms for revenge are "report a crime" and "report to five families."†   (source)
  • Away from that intellectual battleground, ordinary Americans can be either gloriously relaxed about their language or, to use the popular idiom, decidedly uptight.†   (source)
  • They spoke in an idiom that I'd never heard before.†   (source)
  • It's another idiom entirely.†   (source)
  • In the second, the apartment was his home, and he was lounging on the sofa, laughing uproariously as Charlie, for my benefit, reminisced about those contentious dinner-table lessons in American idioms.†   (source)
  • Though these people spoke in the stilted self-conscious idiom of the court, with each word intended to be a pearl for the jeweler-emperor, at one or two in the morning, when the music had stopped and the gatherings had broken up, Alessandro heard the real concert of empire-men who spoke like women and women who spoke like men, the click of latches, sighs, grunts, farts, shrieks, sobbing, the sound of small whips, arguments so fierce that they might have been between black jaguars in emerald jungles, and the sound, always, of people talking to themselves, alone, for even among the aristocrats, or perhaps especially among them, the war had shattered many families.†   (source)
  • PILKINGS He's picked up the idiom alright.†   (source)
  • 'Your idiom's as good as your English.'†   (source)
  • She was drawing up idioms in the list, visions of me in the whitest raw light, instant snapshots of the difficult truths native to our time together.†   (source)
  • "Fan club," explained Old Chao, idiom book in hand.†   (source)
  • This was the first time in almost seven years that Zooey had, in the ready-made dramatic idiom, "set foot" in Seymour's and Buddy's old room.†   (source)
  • The child in the bedroom, listening simultaneously to the domestic idiom of his Irish home and the official idioms of the British broadcaster while picking up from behind both the signals of some other distress, that child was already being schooled for the complexities of his adult predicament, a future where he would have to adjudicate among promptings variously ethical, aesthetical, moral, political, metrical, sceptical, cultural, topical, typical, post-colonial and, taken all together, simply impossible.†   (source)
  • The idioms, the figures of speech that make language rich and full of the poetry of place and time must go.†   (source)
  • Yetta, I had come to learn, was deep down a good egg, or, in the other idiom, a balbatisheh lady.†   (source)
  • They liked and they marvelled at everything, most of all at the unceasing chatter of their quaint old driver, in whose speech archaic Russian forms, Tartar idioms, and local oddities of diction were punctuated with obscurities of his own invention.†   (source)
  • Try translating certain French idioms literally into English and you'll see what I mean.†   (source)
  • I thought I spoke in epitaph-in the idiom of man.†   (source)
  • I stared through the Russian girl in her double-breasted gray suit, rattling off idiom after idiom in her own unknowable tongue-which Constantin said was the most difficult part, because the Russians didn't have the same idioms as our idioms-and I wished with all my heart I could crawl into her and spend the rest of my life barking out one idiom after another.   (source)
    idiom = an expression whose meaning cannot be inferred from the meanings of the words that make it up
  • I stared through the Russian girl in her double-breasted gray suit, rattling off idiom after idiom in her own unknowable tongue-which Constantin said was the most difficult part, because the Russians didn't have the same idioms as our idioms-and I wished with all my heart I could crawl into her and spend the rest of my life barking out one idiom after another.   (source)
    idioms = expressions whose meanings cannot be inferred from the meanings of the words that make them up
  • In the idiom of symbology, there was one symbol that reigned supreme above all others.†   (source)
  • "I know what an idiom is," Wilem interrupted.†   (source)
  • There is also the complexity of our idioms.†   (source)
  • !' said the Chinese, drawing out the word, using the particular American idiom.†   (source)
  • I've studied American idiom most carefully but sometimes I am not sure.†   (source)
  • Her sexual idiom, I knew, was lifted entirely from Nathan.†   (source)
  • I have to launder this because Nevian idioms don't parallel ours†   (source)
  • Having dedicated the first several years to a study of the French (covering their idioms and forms of address, the personalities of Napoleon, Richelieu, and Talleyrand, the essence of the Enlightenment, the genius of Impressionism, and their prevailing aptitude for je ne sail quoi), the Count and Osip spent the next few years studying the British (covering the necessity of tea, the implausible rules of cricket, the etiquette of foxhunting, their relentless if well-deserved pride in Shakespeare, and the all-encompassing, overriding importance of the pub).†   (source)
  • That is also an idiom.†   (source)
  • "Forget it," he said, but I knew his quick answer, if anything, was just an American convention, an easy idiom.†   (source)
  • The child in the bedroom, listening simultaneously to the domestic idiom of his Irish home and the official idioms of the British broadcaster while picking up from behind both the signals of some other distress, that child was already being schooled for the complexities of his adult predicament, a future where he would have to adjudicate among promptings variously ethical, aesthetical, moral, political, metrical, sceptical, cultural, topical, typical, post-colonial and, taken all together, simply impossible.†   (source)
  • We will learn every lesson of accent and idiom, we will dismantle every last pretense and practice you hold, noble as well as ruinous.†   (source)
  • It has been called "this appalling English dialect....gutter slang...the dialect of the pimp, the idiom of the gang-banger and the street thug."†   (source)
  • Since he left the music trade, Friedman has lived on a small farm in the Texas Hill Country near Bandera, where he churns out detective stories and other books, utilizing as much Texas idiom as he can stuff in.†   (source)
  • One wave of popularity for black idiom among whites came in the 1920s and 1930s, when it was cool for New Yorkers to go to Harlem to hear jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong but also the hepcat Cab Calloway, who created a 'Jive Talk Dictionary" in song, popularizing expressions such as hip (wise, sophisticated), in the groove (perfect), square (unhip), and chick (girl), or a hip chick (a beautiful girl).†   (source)
  • The Indian employees are mostly college-educated and take pains, if not to sound American, to adopt certain American idioms and catchphrases acquired from watching TV sitcoms.†   (source)
  • Any database would have to be rich in common idioms to avoid the charming mistakes one finds in public signs in non-English-speaking countries, such as this in a Norwegian cocktail lounge: "Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar."†   (source)
  • For if in the 1940s, long before the dawn of our liberation, the ancient chivalry still prevailed and the plastic June Allysons of a boy's dreams were demigoddesses with whom one might at most, to use the sociologists' odious idiom, "pet to climax," I carried self-abnegation to its mad limit and with my beloved Maria did not even try to cop a feel, as they used to say in those days.†   (source)
  • That quaint hasn't been virgin since she's had breasts, to my certain knowledge—and I hear that Muri is 'some dish,' if that is the American idiom.†   (source)
  • The rest stemmed from all of those mingled elements comprising what, in that era so heavily burdened by the idiom of psychoanalysis, I had come to recognize as the gestalt: the blissful temper of the sunny June day, the ecstatic pomp of Mr. Handel's riverborne jam session, and this festive little room whose open windows admitted a fragrance of spring blossoms which pierced me with that sense of ineffable promise and certitude I don't recall having felt more than once or twice after the age of twenty-two—or let us say twenty-five—when the ambitious career I had cut out for myself seemed so often to be the consequence of pitiable lunacy.†   (source)
  • You didn't know the idiom.†   (source)
  • What image or idiom will make it clearer?†   (source)
  • Catching him squarely in the eye' gets the idiom better, I think.†   (source)
  • experience have brought to our notice patients who have shown a direct understanding of dream-symbolism of this kind to a surprising extent.... This symbolism is not peculiar to dreams, but is characteristic of unconscious ideation, in particular among the people, and it is to be found in folklore, and in popular myths, legends, linguistic idioms, proverbial wisdom and current jokes, to a more complete extent than in dreams.†   (source)
  • Wonderful command of the idiom.†   (source)
  • He has an easy quiet way with country people, with the voters and the juries; he can be seen now and then squatting among the overalls on the porches of country stores for a whole summer afternoon, talking to them in their own idiom about nothing at all.†   (source)
  • I should greatly prefer to employ your excellent English idiom and say that we are all of us here 'for good.'†   (source)
  • I could watch him then as he went by, follow with the others a little ways, stare at him unafraid, Love—" With the same suddenness as before, meaning scaled the horizon to another idiom, leaving David stranded on a sounding but empty shore.†   (source)
  • On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness.†   (source)
  • By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.†   (source)
  • When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.†   (source)
  • —PROFESSOR HAROLD LASKI (Essay in FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION) (2) Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic PUT UP WITH for TOLERATE or PUT AT A LOSS for BEWILDER.†   (source)
  • "What would you?" he asked of Balthasar, speaking in the idiom of the city.†   (source)
  • He understood how to say the grandest things in the most vulgar of idioms.†   (source)
  • That does not prevent his nails and hair from growing, or that all in all—but we shall not repeat the slang idiom that Joachim once used in this same context and that at the time offended Hans Castorp's flatland sensitivities.†   (source)
  • They altered the idiom, but they could say whatever they wanted to say quickly; there were none of the babuisms ascribed to them up at the club.†   (source)
  • If I did not know the words and idioms necessary to express my thoughts she supplied them, even suggesting conversation when I was unable to keep up my end of the dialogue.†   (source)
  • Cranly's speech, unlike that of Davin, had neither rare phrases of Elizabethan English nor quaintly turned versions of Irish idioms.†   (source)
  • This process was continued for several years; for the deaf child does not learn in a month, or even in two or three years, the numberless idioms and expressions used in the simplest daily intercourse.†   (source)
  • Hans Castorp—"head over heels in love," as people say, and yet not in the happy sense of the idiom, but as one loves when it is forbidden and unreasonable, when there are no calm little songs from the flatlands to be sung, terribly in love, dependent, subjugated, suffering and serving— was nevertheless a man who remained shrewd enough amid his slavery to know exactly what his devotion was worth, and would continue to be worth, to the slinkin†   (source)
  • As that dialect, however, is but little understood, even by the learned; we shall not only on this, but on all subsequent occasions render such parts as it may be necessary to give closely, into liberal English; preserving, as far as possible, the idiom and peculiarities of the respective speakers, by way of presenting the pictures in the most graphic forms to the minds of the readers.†   (source)
  • Bilibin was now at army headquarters in a diplomatic capacity, and though he wrote in French and used French jests and French idioms, he described the whole campaign with a fearless self-censure and self-derision genuinely Russian.†   (source)
  • The idiom of the Americans seemed to be the product of new combinations, and bespoke an effort of the understanding of which the Indians of our days would be incapable.†   (source)
  • On another occasion he was rather scandalised at finding his sister with a book of French plays; but as the governess remarked that it was for the purpose of acquiring the French idiom in conversation, he was fain to be content.†   (source)
  • He had repaired it with large patches of French, with words anglicized by a process of his own, and with native idioms literally translated.†   (source)
  • "On y va," (coming) exclaimed Peppino, who from frequenting the house of Signor Pastrini understood French perfectly in all its idioms.†   (source)
  • Our family circle by and by represented Babel in miniature, for scraps and fragments of all these tongues kept buzzing about our ears from morning to night, each sporting his newly acquired word or sentence on every possible occasion, propounding idioms and peculiar expressions like riddles, to puzzle the rest.†   (source)
  • The same idiom then comprises a language of the poor and a language of the rich—a language of the citizen and a language of the nobility—a learned language and a vulgar one.†   (source)
  • In the present case—indeed in all cases of secret writing—the first question regards the language of the cipher; for the principles of solution, so far, especially, as the more simple ciphers are concerned, depend upon, and are varied by, the genius of the particular idiom.†   (source)
  • So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture names—a singularly common fashion on the island—and in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman.†   (source)
  • "And I," replied the visitor, changing his idiom, "know enough of English to keep up the conversation.†   (source)
  • He had been walking for some time, when, directly in front of him, borne back by the summer breeze, he heard a few words uttered in that bright Parisian idiom from which his ears had begun to alienate themselves.†   (source)
  • Study and investigation of this strange idiom lead to the mysterious point of intersection of regular society with society which is accursed.†   (source)
  • It is not then to the written, but to the spoken language that attention must be paid, if we would detect the modifications which the idiom of an aristocratic people may undergo when it becomes the language of a democracy.†   (source)
  • No idiom is more metaphorical than slang: devisser le coco (to unscrew the nut), to twist the neck; tortiller (to wriggle), to eat; etre gerbe, to be tried; a rat, a bread thief; il lansquine, it rains, a striking, ancient figure which partly bears its date about it, which assimilates long oblique lines of rain, with the dense and slanting pikes of the lancers, and which compresses into a single word the popular expression: it rains halberds.†   (source)
  • It is not long since the American languages, especially those of the North, first attracted the serious attention of philologists, when the discovery was made that this idiom of a barbarous people was the product of a complicated system of ideas and very learned combinations.†   (source)
  • Almost all the different dialects which divided the idioms of European nations are manifestly declining; there is no patois in the New World, and it is disappearing every day from the old countries.†   (source)
  • His style, described as oral by us in view of its functionality, was an idiom for calling forth figures of old, long celebrated in song.†   (source)
  • We assume that ancient audiences would have been accustomed to Homer's idioms, as modern audiences can follow a complex Shakespearean monologue as it trips off an actor's tongue because they have experience of his rhythms, his range of conceits and figurative language.†   (source)
  • Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men?†   (source)
  • So saying he skipped around, nimbly considering, frankly at the same time apologetic to get on his companion's right, a habit of his, by the bye, his right side being, in classical idiom, his tender Achilles.†   (source)
  • His novels are mines of American idiom, and his style shows an undeniable revolt against the trammels of English grammarians.†   (source)
  • [13] § 4 /Exchanges/—As in vocabulary and in idiom, there are constant exchanges between English and American in the department of orthography†   (source)
  • [56] And of the most copious and persistent enlargement of vocabulary and mutation of idiom ever recorded, perhaps, by descriptive philology†   (source)
  • As I say, the pressure from below broke down the defenses of the purists, and literally forced a new national idiom upon them.†   (source)
  • The true distinction between slang and more seemly idiom, in so far as any distinction exists at all, is that indicated by Whitney.†   (source)
  • They meet the ends of [Pg034] purely descriptive lexicography, but largely leave out of account some of the most salient characters of a living language, for example, pronunciation and idiom.†   (source)
  • These are so familiar that we use them and hear them without thought; they seem as authentically parts of the English idiom as /to be left at the post/.†   (source)
  • The American thinks in American and the Englishman in English, and it requires a definite effort, usually but defectively successful, for either to put his thoughts into the actual idiom of the other.†   (source)
  • Joyce says flatly (English As We Speak It in Ireland, p. 77) that, "like many another Irish idiom this is also found in American society chiefly through the influence of the Irish."†   (source)
  • Krapp attempts to distinguish between slang and sound idiom by setting up the doctrine that the former is "more expressive than the situation demands."†   (source)
  • Most of the examples of its vocabulary and idiom, in fact, have been drawn from written documents or from written reports of more or less careful utterances, for example, the speeches of members of Congress and of other public men.†   (source)
  • In the same way it is breaking down the inflectional distinction between adverb and adjective, so that "I feel /bad/" begins to take on the dignity of a national idiom, and /sure/, /to go big/ and /run slow/[35] become almost respectable.†   (source)
  • The same caveat lies against the work of the later makers of dictionaries; they have gone ahead of common usage in the matter of orthography, but they have hung back in the far more important matter of vocabulary, and have neglected the most important matter of idiom altogether.†   (source)
  • What remained was a small company, indeed—and almost the whole field of American idiom and American grammar, so full of interest for the less austere explorer, was closed without even a peek into it.†   (source)
  • It is competent for any individual to offer his contribution—his new word, his better idiom, his novel figure of speech, his short cut in grammar or syntax—and it is by the general vote of the whole body, not by the verdict of a small school, that the fate of the innovation is decided.†   (source)
  • The Italians, the Slavs, and, above all, the Russian Jews, make steady contributions to the American vocabulary and idiom, and though these contributions are often concealed by quick and complete naturalization their foreignness to English remains none the less obvious.†   (source)
  • Its difference from standard English is not merely a difference in vocabulary, to be disposed of in an alphabetical list; it is, above all, a difference in pronunciation, in intonation, in conjugation and declension, in metaphor and idiom, in the whole fashion of using words.†   (source)
  • /To laugh in your sleeve/ is idiom because it arises out of a natural situation; it is a metaphor derived from the picture of one raising his sleeve to his face to hide a smile, a metaphor which arose naturally enough in early periods when sleeves were long and flowing; but /to talk through your hat/ is slang, not only because it is new, but also because it is a grotesque exaggeration of the truth.†   (source)
  • If, by the chances that condition language-making, it acquires a special and limited meaning, not served by any existing locution, it enters into sound idiom and is presently wholly legitimatized; if, on the contrary, it is adopted by the populace as a counter-word and employed with such banal imitativeness that it soon loses any definite significance whatever, then it remains slang and is avoided by the finical.†   (source)
  • Already in "Roughing It" he was celebrating "the vigorous new vernacular of the [Pg017] occidental plains and mountains,"[29] and in all his writings, even the most serious, he deliberately engrafted its greater liberty and more fluent idiom upon the stem of English, and so lent the dignity of his high achievement to a dialect that was as unmistakably American as the point of view underlying it.†   (source)
  • An American born and bred, I early noted, as everyone else in like case must note, certain salient differences between the English of England and the English of America as practically spoken and written—differences in vocabulary, in syntax, in the shades and habits of idiom, and even, coming to the common speech, in grammar.†   (source)
  • The Yiddish that the Jews from Russia bring in is German debased with Russian, Polish and [Pg155] Hebrew; in America, it quickly absorbs hundreds of words and idioms from the speech of the streets.†   (source)
  • I daresay it is largely a fear of the weapon in it—and there are many others of like effect in the arsenal—which accounts for the far greater prevalence of idioms from below in the formal speech of America than in the formal speech of England.†   (source)
  • The effects of this pressure are obviously two-fold; on the one hand the foreigner, struggling with a strange and difficult tongue, makes efforts to simplify it as much as possible, and so strengthens the native tendency to disregard all niceties and complexities, and on the other hand he corrupts it with words and locutions from the language he has brought with him, and sometimes with whole idioms and grammatical forms.†   (source)
  • [17] § 3 /The Future of the Language/—The great Jakob Grimm, the founder of comparative philology, hazarded the guess more than three-quarters of a century ago that English would one day become [Pg313] the chief language of the world, and perhaps crowd out several of the then principal idioms altogether†   (source)
  • These habits were, in part, the fruit of efforts to translate the idioms of Gaelic into English, and in part borrowings from the English of the age of James I. The latter, preserved by Irish conservatism in speech,[38] came into contact in America with habits surviving, with more or less change, from the same time, and so gave those American habits an unmistakable reinforcement.†   (source)
  • Every existence has its idiom, every thing has an idiom and tongue,
    He resolves all tongues into his own and bestows it upon men, and
    any man translates, and any man translates himself also,
    One part does not counteract another part, he is the joiner, he sees
    how they join.†   (source)
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