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Its most common use is in response to an affirmative statement, for example "I saw Mrs. Smith exercising, I swear!" to which the response given would be something like, "Yeah right, and cows fly". Other variations slightly fallen into disuse include cuando las ranas crien pelo ("when frogs grow hair") and cuando San Juan agache el dedo ("when ...
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).
For example, oil the wheels and grease the wheels allow variation for nouns that elicit a similar literal meaning. [11] These types of changes can occur only when speakers can easily recognize a connection between what the idiom is meant to express and its literal meaning, thus an idiom like kick the bucket cannot occur as kick the pot.
Cat Herders is a commercial made by Fallon for Electronic Data Systems (EDS). Alluding to the management-speak idiom "It's like herding cats" that refers to the impossibility of controlling the uncontrollable, it posits an analogy between herding cats and the solution of seemingly impossible problems by EDS.
Glossary of English-language idioms derived from baseball; Bed of roses; Belling the Cat; Best friends forever; Between Scylla and Charybdis; Bill matter; Birds of a feather flock together; Black sheep; Blessing in disguise; Blood, toil, tears and sweat; Born in the purple; The Boy Who Cried Wolf; Bread and butter (superstition) Break a leg ...
An idiom dictionary may be a traditional book or expressed in another medium such as a database within software for machine translation.Examples of the genre include Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which explains traditional allusions and proverbs, and Fowler's Modern English Usage, which was conceived as an idiom dictionary following the completion of the Concise Oxford English ...
An example of an idiom is hit the sack, which means to go to bed. It can be used in a sentence like the following: I'm beat; I'm gonna hit the sack. [2] Traditionally, idiom comprehension was thought to require a distinct processing mode other than literal language comprehension. Subsequent research suggested that the comprehension of idioms ...
A list of idioms and your interpretation of them maybe (like a dictionary is copyrightable, but not the list of words within). I say lets make a master list of idioms and then piece together their meanings here. --ShaunMacPherson 23:27, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC) Seeing a list of idioms on one page is rather surprising.