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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).
An essay of 1724 emphasizes not the fact of being the last cause, but rather of being a least cause, that is, a minor one: . Every thing must be at rest which has no Force to impell it; but as the least Straw breaks the Horse's Back, or a single Sand will turn the Beam of Scales which holds Weights as heavy as the World; so, without doubt, as minute Causes may determine the Actions of Men ...
suite of rooms set aside for a particular person (rare), usu. rented housing unit in a larger building implying luxury (In other words, a narrower definition than the US.) (Overlapping with the rare usage in reference to stately homes or historic properties which have been converted into residential units.)
The expression is said to have been popularized by the English politician and orator John Bright.Speaking in the House of Commons in March 1859 on Bright's efforts to promote parliamentary reform, Lord Elcho remarked that Bright had not been "satisfied with the results of his winter campaign" and that "a saying was attributed to him [Bright] that he [had] found he was 'flogging a dead horse'."
Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men"). During the Renaissance, scholars meticulously enumerated and classified figures of speech.
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.
The repeated sentences or clauses provide emphasis to a central theme or idea the author is trying to convey. [1] Parallelism is the mark of a mature language speaker. [2] In language, syntax is the structure of a sentence, thus parallel syntax can also be called parallel sentence structure. This rhetorical tool improves the flow of a sentence ...
Decision fatigue is a phrase popularised by John Tierney, and is the tendency for peoples’ decision making to become impaired as a result of having recently taken multiple decisions.