Idioms taken literally Lesson 25 of the language course of Mova's primary school: 16 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
0 An idiom is a group of words whose meaning is not the meaning of its separate words; you have to learn it as one whole piece, like a key that opens one door. 1 Grandad looks out and says "It's raining cats and dogs!", and little Kai runs to the window to look for falling pets; Grandad only meant it is raining very hard. 2 Every language has idioms, and they sound mad when translated word for word: a Ukrainian gran says "вішати локшину на вуха", "to hang noodles on someone's ears", which means to tell them nonsense. 3 People love telling stories about where idioms came from, but many of those stories are guesses; when nobody is sure, a good speaker says "maybe". 5 "Raining cats and dogs" means raining very hard; nobody knows for sure where it came from, and the stories about animals falling from roofs are not proven. 6 In theatre "Break a leg!" means "Good luck!"; actors thought saying "good luck" was unlucky, and the exact origin is not known. 7 "Beat about the bush" means avoid saying something directly; it comes from hunters beating bushes to scare birds out. 8 "Cost an arm and a leg" means cost a lot of money; it is a deliberate exaggeration, called hyperbole. 9 "Bite the bullet" means face something unpleasant bravely; the story about soldiers biting bullets is often told but not proven. 10 "Hit the nail on the head" means be exactly right; it comes from carpentry, where a nail hit exactly goes straight in. 11 In British football talk, "sick as a parrot" means very disappointed and "over the moon" means very happy. 12 The Ukrainian idiom "вішати локшину на вуха" (hang noodles on ears) means to tell someone lies or nonsense; to translate an idiom, find the matching idiom, not the matching words. 13 "Pull someone's leg" means tease or trick them for fun. 14 "Let the cat out of the bag" means reveal a secret; the story about a cat swapped for a pig at a market has no clear proof. 15 In Scots, "Away and bile yer heid!" (go and boil your head) means "go away" or "don't talk nonsense"; it is cheeky, not a real threat. 16 "I'm all ears" means "I'm listening carefully"; other body-part idioms are "keep an eye on", "give someone a hand" and "a heart of gold". ← previous Borrowed words from far away: Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Ukrainian and morenext → Phrasal verbs: get up, give up, make up↑ back to Language This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/25-idioms-taken-literally/