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As a response to an unlikely proposition, "when pigs fly", "when pigs have wings", or simply "pigs might fly".[1]"When Hell freezes over" [2] and "on a cold day in Hell" [3] are based on the understanding that Hell is eternally an extremely hot place.
A Dictionary of Similes is a dictionary of similes written by the American writer and newspaperman Frank J. Wilstach. In 1916, Little, Brown and Company in Boston published Wilstach's A Dictionary of Similes, a compilation he had been working on for more than 20 years. It included more than 15,000 examples from more than 800 authors, indexing ...
A simile (/ ˈ s ɪ m əl i /) is a type of figure of speech that directly compares two things. [1] [2] Similes are often contrasted with metaphors, where similes necessarily compare two things using words such as "like", "as", while metaphors often create an implicit comparison (i.e. saying something "is" something else).
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).
The Starliner suits would have been useless ballast aboard the ISS and so they came home aboard what became, effectively, a useless spacecraft. ... If there was a more potent metaphor for Boeing ...
The term was popularized from Shakespeare's Hamlet (1599-1601). [11]The earliest ancestor of "willy-nilly" is the Old English, "sam we willan sam we nyllan" ('whether we wish to or wish not to'), found in King Ælfred's translation of De Consolatione Philosophiæ in 888 AD. [12]
Crab mentality, also known as crab theory, [1] [2] crabs in a bucket [a] mentality, or the crab-bucket effect, is a mentality of which people will try to prevent others from gaining a favourable position in something, even if it has no effect on those trying to stop them.
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