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Below is an alphabetical list of widely used and repeated proverbial phrases. If known, their origins are noted. A proverbial phrase or expression is a type of conventional saying similar to a proverb and transmitted by oral tradition.
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).
One magpie at the birth of Jesus, perhaps presaging sorrow for Mary: [3] Piero della Francesca's The Nativity Children's game hopscotch played in Lancashire, England with lyric close to the 1846 version of the rhyme
"When Hell freezes over" [2] and "A cold day in Hell" [3] are based on the understanding that Hell is eternally an extremely hot place. The "Twelfth of Never" will never come to pass. [4] A song of the same name was written by Johnny Mathis in 1956. "On Tibb's Eve" refers to the saint's day of a saint who never existed. [5] "When two Sundays ...
Since the Shijing poems consist of four-character lines, some chengyu are direct quotes from the Classic of Poetry. For example, 萬夀無疆 'ten-thousand year lifespan without bound', a traditional expression to wish someone a long life that often appears on bowls and tableware, quotes the poem "Tian Bao" ( 天保 , poem #166) in the Lesser ...
The poem is first recorded in The Child's Song Book published in 1830. It's Raining, It's Pouring: United States 1912 [53] The first two lines of this rhyme can be found in "The Little Mother Goose", published in the United States in 1912. Jack Sprat: England 1639 [54] First appearance in John Clarke's collection of sayings. Kookaburra
Others are taken from such diverse sources as poetry, [33] [34] stories, [35] songs, commercials, advertisements, movies, literature, etc. [36] A number of the well known sayings of Jesus, Shakespeare, and others have become proverbs, though they were original at the time of their creation, and many of these sayings were not seen as proverbs ...
The words constituting idioms are stored as catenae in the lexicon, and as such, they are concrete units of syntax. The dependency grammar trees of a few sentences containing non-constituent idioms illustrate the point: The fixed words of the idiom (in orange) in each case are linked together by dependencies; they form a catena.