English Idioms & their Translation.

Grammatical aspects of idioms

We shall now take a close look at some aspects of idioms. An important fact which must be stressed is that idioms are not only colloquial expressions, as many people believe. They can appear in formal style and in slang. They can appear in poetry or in the language of Shakespeare and the Bible. What, then, is an idiom? We can say that an idiom is a number of words which, taken together, mean something different from the individual words of the idiom when they stand alone. The way in which the words are put together is often odd, illogical or even grammatically incorrect. These are the special features of some idioms. Other idioms are completely regular and logical in their grammar and vocabulary. Because of the special features of some idioms, we have to learn the idiom as a whole and we often cannot change any part of it (except perhaps, only the tense of the verb).

English is very rich in idiomatic expressions. In fact, it is difficult to speak or write English without using idioms. An English native speaker is very often not aware that he is using an idiom; perhaps he does not even realise that an idiom which he uses is grammatically in¬correct. A non-native learner makes the correct use of idiomatic English one of his main aims, and the fact that some idioms are illogical or grammatically incorrect causes him difficulty. Only careful study and exact learning will help.

It cannot be explained why a particular idiom has developed an unusual arrangement or choice of words. The idiom has been fixed by long usage as is sometimes seen from the vocabulary.

The idiom to buy a pig in a poke means 'to buy something which one has not inspected previously and which is worth less than one paid for it'. The word poke is an old word meaning sack. Poke only appears in present-day English with this meaning in this idiom. Therefore, it is clear that the idiom has continued to be used long after the individual word.

The term idiom may also refer to the conventional way of joining words to express a particular idea. Often in English, specific prepositions must follow certain verbs and adverbs. The expressions run out of, run into , run from, run over and run up may mean something different from simple directions. The usage of such idioms may vary between different dialects within one language. For example residents of northern England usually say quarter till the hour and those from London say quarter to the hour.

Idioms involve collocation of a special kind. Consider, for instance, kick the bucket, fly off the handle, spill the beans, red herring. For here we not only have the collocation of kick and the bucket, but also the fact that the meaning of the resultant combination is opaque - it is not related to the meaning of the individual words, but is sometimes (though not always) nearer to the meaning of a single word (thus kick the bucket equals die).

Even where an idiom is semantically like a single word it does not function like one. Thus we will not have a past tense kick-the-bucketed. Instead, it functions to some degree as a normal sequence of grammatical words, so that the past tense form is kicked the bucket. But there are a great number of grammatical restrictions. A large number of idioms contain a verb and a noun, but although the verb may be placed in the past tense, the number of the noun can never be changed. We have spilled the beans, but not spill the bean and equally there is no fly off the handles, kick the buckets, put on good faces, blow one's tops, etc. Similarly, with red herring the noun may be plural, but the adjective cannot be comparative (the -er form). Thus we find red herrings but not redder herring.

There are also plenty of syntactic restrictions. Some idioms have passives, but others do not. The law was laid down and The beans have been spilled are all right (though some may question the latter), but The bucket was kicked is not. But in no case could we say It was the - (beans that were spilled, law that was laid down, bucket that was kicked, etc.). The restrictions vary from idiom to idiom. Some are more restricted or 'frozen' than others.

Idioms take many different forms or structures. They can be very short or rather long. A large number of idioms consist of some combination of noun and adjective, e.g. cold war, a dark horse, French leave, forty winks, a snake in the grass'. Some idioms are much longer: to fish in troubled waters, to take the bull by the horns, to cut one's coat according to one's cloth.

An idiom can have a regular structure, an irregular or even a grammatically incorrect structure. The idiom / am good friends with him is irregular or illogical in its grammatical structure. / is singular; why then is the correct form in this case not / am a good friend with him? This form is impossible although h is more logical ; one would have to say I am a good friend of his. A native speaker is not consciously aware of this inconsistency. This is, therefore, an example of the kind of idiom where the form is irregular but the meaning clear. A second kind has a regular form but a meaning that is not clear. To have a bee in one's bonnet has a regular form, but its meaning is not obvious. It means, in fact, that one is obsessed by an idea, but how can we know this if we have not learnt it as an idiom ? There is a third group, in which both form and meaning are irregular. To be at large: the form Verb + Preposition + Adjective without noun is strange, and we have no idea what it means, either! If we talk about a prisoner who is still at large, it means that he is still free. Here are similar examples : to go through thick and thin, to be at daggers drawn, to be in the swim.

We find, in fact, that most idioms belong to the second group, where the form is regular, but the meaning is unclear. However, even in this group, some idioms are clearer than others, that is, some are easier to guess than others. Take the example to give someone the green light. We can guess the meaning even though we may never have heard it before. If we associate 'the green light’ with traffic lights where green means 'Go!', we can imagine that the idiom means 'to give someone permission to start something'.

Other idioms can be guessed if we hear them in context, that is, when we know how they are used in a particular situation. For example, let us take the idiom to be at the top of the tree. If we hear the sentence 'John is at the top of the tree now', we are not sure what this is saying about John. Perhaps it means that he is in a dangerous position or that he is hiding. But if we hear the phrase in context, the meaning becomes clear to us: Ten years ago John joined the company, and now he's the general manager! Yes, he's really at the top of the tree! The idiom means 'to be at the top of one's profession, to be successful'.

However, some idioms are too difficult to guess correctly because they have no association with the original meaning of the individual words. Here are some examples: to tell someone where to get off, to bring the house down, to take it out on someone. The learner will have great difficulty here unless he bas heard the idioms before. Even when they are used in context, it is not easy to detect the meaning exactly. We shall take a closer look at the first of these examples. To get off usually appears together with bus or bicycle, as in this sentence: Mary didn't know her way round town, so Jane took her to the bus stop and then told her where to get off. But in its idiomatic sense to tell someone where to get off means 'to tell someone rudely and openly what you think of him' as in this context: Jane had had enough of Mary's stupid and critical remarks, so she finally told her where to get off. For a foreign learner, this idiomatic meaning is not even exactly clear in context.

It was said earlier that we have to learn an idiom as a whole be¬cause we often cannot change any part of it. A question which the learner may ask is: 'How do I know which parts of which idioms can be changed?' The idioms which cannot be changed at all are called fixed idioms. Some idioms are fixed in some of their parts but not in others. Some idioms allow only limited changes in the parts which are not fixed. We can make this clear with an example. Take the idiom to give someone the cold shoulder. Which changes are possible? The idiom means 'to treat someone in a cold or unfriendly way'. We may ask if it is possible to say to give someone the 'coo/' or 'warm' shoulder or to give someone 'a' cold shoulder or to give a cold shoulder 'to* someone. None of these are possible, but how can the foreign learner know this? Alternative possibilities are shown in this book by the mark /. If this mark does not appear in the arrangement of the idiom, the idiom is fixed. The learner should note the alternative possibilities and use only these and no others. To give someone the cold shoulder is therefore a fixed idiom. Here are some more: to make a clean breast of it, which means 'to tell the truth about something'. We can only change the tense of the verb. The idiom to take/have/enjoy forty winks allows a limited choice of verb but the pair forty winks is fixed. We cannot say ‘fifty' winks. We cannot explain why this is wrong. We must accept the idiomatic peculiarities of the language and learn to handle them. Here are some more examples of idioms which are not fixed in all parts: to come to a bad/nasty/sticky/no good/untimely end; to keep a sharp/careful/watchful/professional eye on someone.

A very common type of idiom in English is what is usually called the 'phrasal verb', the combination of verb plus adverb of the kind make up, give in, put down. The meaning of these combinations cannot be predicted from the individual verb and adverb and in many cases there is a single verb with the same or a very close meaning - invent, yield, quell. Not all combinations of this kind are idiomatic, of course. Put down has a literal sense too and there are many others that are both idiomatic and not, e. g. take in as in The conjuror took the audience in, The woman took the homeless children in. There are even degrees of idiomaticity since one can make up a story, make up a fire make up one's face or make up one’s mind Moreover, it is not only sequences of verb plus adverb that may be idiomatic. There are also sequences of verb plus preposition, such as look after and go for, and sequences of verb, adverb and preposition, such as put up with ('tolerate') or do away with ('kill'), adjective plus noun combinations, for example a maiden voyage ( the meaning is the first trip of a new ship), noun phrases, such as a baker`s dozen or a pig in a poke. In general practically any part of speech can form an idiom. There are also what we may call partial idioms, where one of the words has its usual meaning, the other has a meaning that is peculiar to the particular sequence. Thus red hair refers to hair, but not hair that is red in strict color terms. Comedians have fun with partial idioms of this kind, e. g. when instructed to make a bed they bring out a set of carpenter's tools. Lewis Carol in his Alice in Wonderland used this specific feature of partial idioms and thus created his famous characters and well known scenes, for instance when a rabbit sends in a little Bill ( actually he uses with effect the meaning of the expression to send in a bill). An interesting set involves the-word white, for white coffee is brown in color, white wine is usually yellow, and white people are pink. Yet, white is, perhaps, idiomatic only to some degree - it could be interpreted 'the lightest in color of that usually to be found'. Not surprisingly black is used as its antonym for coffee and people (though again neither are black in color terms), yet it is not used for wine. Thus it can be seen that even partial idiomaticity can be a matter of degree and may in some cases be little more than a matter of collocational restriction. On a more comic level there is partial idiomaticity in raining cats and dogs (in Welsh it rains old women and sticks!).

What is and what is not an idiom is, then often a matter of degree. It is very difficult, moreover, to decide whether a word or a sequence of words is opaque. We could, perhaps, define idioms in terms of non-equivalence in other languages, so that kick the bucket, red herring, etc., are idioms because they cannot be directly translated into French or German or Russian.