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Better safe than sorry; Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven (John Milton, in Paradise Lost) [8] Be yourself; Better the Devil you know (than the Devil you do not) Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all; Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness; Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to ...
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).
If separating words using spaces is also permitted, the total number of known possible meanings rises to 58. [38] Czech has the syllabic consonants [r] and [l], which can stand in for vowels. A well-known example of a sentence that does not contain a vowel is Strč prst skrz krk, meaning "stick your finger through the neck."
The sentence can be given as a grammatical puzzle [7] [8] [9] or an item on a test, [1] [2] for which one must find the proper punctuation to give it meaning. Hans Reichenbach used a similar sentence ("John where Jack had...") in his 1947 book Elements of Symbolic Logic as an exercise for the reader, to illustrate the different levels of language, namely object language and metalanguage.
Many sentence words have formed from the process of devaluation and semantic erosion. Various phrases in various languages have devolved into the words for "yes" and "no" (which can be found discussed in detail in yes and no), and these include expletive sentence words such as "Well!" and the French word "Ben!" (a parallel to "Bien!"). [14 ...
For example, the nonce word wug coined by Jean Berko Gleason is phonologically well-formed, so informants are able to pluralize it regularly. [1] A word, phrase, clause, or utterance may be grammatically well-formed, meaning it obeys the rules of morphology and syntax. A semantically well-formed utterance or sentence is one that is meaningful ...
A part of speech is provided for most of the words, but part-of-speech categories vary between analyses, and not all possibilities are listed. For example, "I" may be a pronoun or a Roman numeral; "to" may be a preposition or an infinitive marker; "time" may be a noun or a verb. Also, a single spelling can represent more than one root word. For ...
A paraphrase or rephrase (/ ˈ p ær ə ˌ f r eɪ z /) is the rendering of the same text in different words without losing the meaning of the text itself. [1] More often than not, a paraphrased text can convey its meaning better than the original words. In other words, it is a copy of the text in meaning, but which is different from the original.