the.com/idiom
a sentence that means nothing literally and everything anyway, decoded by no one foreign.
means a fixed expression whose overall meaning can't be worked out from the individual words, peculiar to a particular language or group.
from From Greek idiōma, "a peculiarity, a property of one's own," built on idios, "private, one's own, peculiar" — the same idios that gives us idiot (originally just a private citizen) and idiosyncrasy. It traveled through Latin and French before settling into English around the late 1500s, carrying its core sense intact: an idiom is language that belongs to itself, a phrasing private to one tongue and baffling to all others.
- untranslatable
- Word-for-word translation produces beautiful nonsense
- global cats
- Many languages use animals for impossible tasks
- raining
- English drops cats and dogs, Welsh drops knives
- frozen grammar
- You cannot say 'spill some beans'
- origins lost
- Most speakers ignore where phrases came from