why do you use idioms in everyday life?
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why do you use idioms in everyday life?
They add character I guess, they aren't needed but they are used in comical ways within the cultures surrounding them. I expect there's been a lot recently deriving from the internet.
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'All Your Base Are Belong To Us'.
What are idioms :?:
OK Olga, we spent an hour and a half chatting about this, but for the edification of others and an on-line answer, here is MY answer.
They add character (color, spice) to speech and writing, they give an idea of the speaker's emotion(s) beyond basic facts.
Q:"How was work today?" A: It was horrible, I was late, the computers crashed, my secretary was out sick, my boss yelled at me, I lost a big account and the coffee machine was broken." :o WAY too much information. "It was a good day to go fishing" says alot and adds a bit of levity to the situation. Conversely, a bad day fishing can be described as "It was a good day to go golfing/ to work".
"A speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements, as in keep tabs on."Quote:
Originally Posted by Leof
So essentially, it's a statement that does not hold an applicable literal meaning, but is understood to mean something.
Here's a site that has a bunch of them with explanations (Catch-22 is one that all students of English should know! :wink:) :
http://www.idiomsite.com/
I don't agree that it has to mean nothing, only that it doesn't mean what it directly says, if it does make sense, that is (like "it was a good day to go fishing").
Fair enough. I stand corrected. My original post has been edited to this effect.Quote:
Originally Posted by Seventh-Monkey
Ah I got it! Thank you!
Meh! Why do Russian use idioms in everyday speech? Didn't you think about it first? The answer will get you!Quote:
Originally Posted by olgaa