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- Burning the Midnight Oil From Both Ends. “I’m so stressed that I’m burning the midnight oil from both ends.” This is a mixup of the two idioms, “burning the midnight oil” and “burning the candle at both ends.”
- Heavy Is the Goose That Lays the Golden Egg. “George just got promoted to management, I hope he’s ready for it. Heavy is the goose that lays the golden egg.”
- Walking a Thin Line. “That decision seems a little risky! He’s walking a thin line.” This malaphor is a combination of “walking on thin ice” and “walking a fine line.”
- I Can Read Him Like the Back of My Book. “He couldn’t hide anything from me. I can read him like the back of my book!” This malaphor mixes up two very common idioms: “know him like the back of my hand” and “read him like a book.”
Summary. Idioms, conceived as fixed multi-word expressions that conceptually encode non-compositional meaning, are linguistic units that raise a number of questions relevant in the study of language and mind (e.g., whether they are stored in the lexicon or in memory, whether they have internal or external syntax similar to other expressions of the language, whether their conventional use is ...
- Mixed Up
- To Be All Greek to Someone
- Clear as Mud
- To Throw Someone Off/To Be Thrown Off
- To Throw Someone Off Balance/To Be Thrown Off Balance
- To Throw Someone For A Loop/To Be Thrown For A Loop
- To Mess with Someone’S Head
- To Not Be Clear on Something
- To Scratch One’S Head/Head-Scratching
If you are mixed upabout something, it means that you are confused. “Whenever we change the clocks for daylight savings time, I get mixed up and can’t figure out what time it is.” “I’m a little mixed up. Is our meeting on Thursday or Friday?” Mixed up can also mean to think that one person or thing is another person or thing. (MacMillan Dictionary)...
To be all Greek to someoneis an expression we use to explain that someone doesn’t understand anything, usually because the topic is beyond their comprehension. “My roommates are talking about their engineering homework and I can’t understand anything they’re saying. It’s all Greek to me.” “You’ll have to help us understand these accounting document...
If something is clear as mud, it means that it is very confusing and hard to understand. “The assembly instructions that came with this bookshelf are clear as mud. Here, take a look. Can you make any sense out of this?” “Does everyone know how to get to the event tomorrow? How were my directions? Clear as mud?”
If something throws you off, it confuses you or causes you to lose your concentration, get something wrong, or be misled. We can also say that someone is thrown off by something. “Their money laundering scheme is so complicated that it’s been throwing off the authorities for years.” “I get thrown off every time this software updates. Nothing is whe...
To throw someone off balance means to confuse or upset someone for a short time by saying or doing something that they are not expecting. (Cambridge Dictionary) We can also say that someone is thrown off balanceby something. “In high school, there was always that one kid in every class who would ask difficult questions to try to throw the teacher o...
To throw someone for a loop means to cause someone to be very amazed, confused, or shocked. (Merriam Webster) “Mike spent his whole life talking about how he wanted to be a doctor, so we were thrown for a loop when he dropped out of med school.” “It always throws me for a loop when I hear British actors speaking with an American accent on screen.”
To mess with someone’s headmeans to cause someone to feel confused, frustrated, upset, or anxious. “Have you ever see the move Inception? It really messes with your head. I still can’t figure out what happened.” “When I was in elementary school and middle school, I loved math. Then I took algebra in high school, and all the variables and equations ...
If you are not clear on something, it means that you don’t fully understand something. “After Obamacare passed in the United States, not everyone was clear on how the new laws would affect them.” “It’s hard to do an effective job when we’re not clear on what our job functions are. Management needs to do a better job communicating our objectives to ...
To scratch one’s head means to think hard about something or to have difficulty understanding something. (Cambridge Dictionary) We can also use head-scratchingas both an adjective and noun to talk about something that is confusing. “All the plot twists in the TV show left viewers scratching their heads.” “He wasn’t the best coach, and fans will rem...
Aug 31, 2014 · But this means that all of our linguistic competence - from morphemes and words up to the most general phrase structure rules like predication, NPs and VPs, etc. - can be modeled as a hierarchical network of idioms of various abstractness and complexity. (In part because it feels weird to call something as general as predication an idiom, most linguists call the conventional units in these ...
Defining Idioms. An idiom is a group of words whose meaning cannot be understood from the literal meanings of individual words. In other words, the combination of words in an idiom conveys a figurative rather than a literal meaning. Idioms are deeply rooted in language and reflect the culture, history and collective experience of its speakers.
Nov 26, 2019 · The website Lemongrad elaborates: “An idiom is a phrase or expression that has a meaning that in most cases cannot be deduced directly from the individual words in that phrase or expression.”. The words used in an idiom usually appear to have nothing to do with the situation. Idioms are a type of figurative language.
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Nov 4, 2019 · Idioms are used often to replace a literal word or expression, and many times the idiom better describes the full nuance of meaning. Idioms and idiomatic expressions can be more precise than the literal words, often using fewer words but saying more. For example, the expression it runs in the family is shorter and more succinct than saying that ...
