Idioms are a very important part of the English language: you are told that if you want to go far (succeed) you should pull your socks up (make a serious effort to improve your behaviour, the quality of your work, etc.) and use your grey matter (brain).1 Learning and translating idioms have always been very difficult for foreign language learners. The present paper explores some of the reasons why English idiomatic expressions are difficult to learn and translate. It is not the aim of this paper to attempt a comprehensive survey of the vast amount of material that has appeared on idioms in Adams and Kuder (1984), Alexander (1984), Dixon (1983), Kirkpatrick (2001), Langlotz (2006), McCarthy and O'Dell (2002), and Wray (2002), among others. The paper concentrates on idioms as a learning-translation problem; it makes no claim to be comprehensive or academically rigorous. Leech (1989) defines an idiom as follows: “An idiom is a group of two or more words which we have to treat as a unit in learning a language. We cannot arrive at the meaning of the idiom just by adding together the meanings of the words inside it. E.g.John and Mary usedto be hardup (='They had very little money'.)”(P.186) To be more exact, an idiom is a sequence of words which is semantically and syntactically restricted, so that they function as a single unit. From a semantic point of view, the meanings of the individual words cannot be summed to produce the meanings of the idiomatic expression as a whole. Thus, fly off the handle, which means lose one's temper, cannot be understood in terms of the meanings of fly, off, or handle. The idiom phrase hot air, which means empty or boastful talk, is neither hot nor air; with hot air we are dealing with a set phrase where the meaning cannot be suggested on the basis of the two constituent words. The idiomatic meaning of spill the beans in So who spilt the beans (=told the secret) about her affair with David? has nothing to do with beans or with spilling in its literal sense. The foreign-language learner is left trying to figure out where and how the beans were spilt. From a syntactic viewpoint, the constituent parts of an idiom often do not permit the usual variability they display in other contexts. The point to be emphasized here is this: most idioms do not lend themselves easily to manipulation by speakers and writers; they are invariable and must be learned as wholes, but concord ofnumber, person and gender in the idiom phrase is still necessary, i.e. the verbs must be put into the correct form, and pronouns must agree with their antecedents: I don't give a hoot for her opinion! 2 • She doesn't give a hoot for my opinion! etc.)║He won, but only by the skin of his teeth2• She won, but only by the skin of her teeth• Iwon, but only by the skin ofmy teeth,I had to run for the train, and caught it by the skin of myteeth, etc.║He kept pullingmy arm, throwing me off my balance 2 • She kept pulling his arm, throwing him off his balance • We kept pullingher arm, throwingher offher balance, etc.2 The present paper is divided into five parts, as follows: Part I: An Overview; PART II: Learner’s Difficulties with Idioms; PART III: Some Pedagogical recommendations and Suggestions about Idioms; Part IV: Activities to Practice Idiomatic Expressions; Part V: Summary and Conclusion.
HM Al-Dabbas, RA Azeez, AE Ali, Iraqi Journal of Science, 2023
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Electronic banking plays a prominent role in providing the best banking services and upgrading the banking sector for the better, so this study aimed to shed light on the most prominent obstacles that prevent the application of electronic banking in banks operating in the city of Nasiriyah, and in order to achieve this goal the researcher used the descriptive analytical approach And through a questionnaire form that was distributed to a group of employees, numbering (60) employees in the upper, middle and operational departments in a number of branches of private banks operating in the city of Nasiriyah, namely (the Iraqi Trade Bank, the Gulf Commercial Bank, the Bank of Baghdad, the Union Bank of Iraq), which represented The stu
... Show MoreThis research is based on the descriptive and analytical methodology. The importance of studying labor laws and labor unions in Japan between 1889 and 1946 constitutions is because Japan was out of a feudal phase, and had no idea about the factory system and industrialization in their modern sense before the Meiji era. Generally, its labor system used to be mostly familial, and the economic system was based on agriculture. This called for the enactment of legislations and laws appropriate for the coming phase in Meiji era. Thus, this paper examines the role of Meiji government in enacting labor legislations and laws when he came to power in 1896, and his new constitution in 1889 and the civil code of 1896. It further examines the way Mei
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Since the Internet has been more widely used and more people have access to multimedia content, copyright hacking, and piracy have risen. By the use of watermarking techniques, security, asset protection, and authentication have all been made possible. In this paper, a comparison between fragile and robust watermarking techniques has been presented to benefit them in recent studies to increase the level of security of critical media. A new technique has been suggested when adding an embedded value (129) to each pixel of the cover image and representing it as a key to thwart the attacker, increase security, rise imperceptibility, and make the system faster in detecting the tamper from unauthorized users. Using the two watermarking ty
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The right to property is one of the most fundamental rights enjoyed by individuals, and most national constitutions and laws, as well as international conventions, have to be respected and protected only in accordance with the economic and social development of the country (the so-called public benefit) and in return for just compensation. What is fair compensation?
The marshes form large areas in southern Iraq, which are large water bodies, covered by reeds and papyrus plants. The marshes are characterized by distinctive physical elements, which have given them a unique and unique identity that can be clearly distinguished by the physical pattern. The physical environment derives its identity through a group Of inputs that interact with each other and represent both cultural and social inputs of the most important inputs that affect the formation of identity, and in the physical environment of the Marshlands many of the symbols that are associated with the collective memory of individuals, these symbols have value in the community Thus, the preservation of these symbols and inherited from one gener
... Show MoreThe study included gross morphology and pollen of plants – which collected during field trips , and dry ones for most specimen preserved with the Iraqi herbaria – related to the genus Lycopus L. , and to identify the unidentified species and rectify the error there in , so according to that the species L. europaeus L. only were specified for the genus . Through this work the varity L. europaeus var. glabrescens Schmidely were found at the first time , and suggested to record anew for Iraq . Pollen were of medium size, and had an ellipsoid shape in the equatorial view , and hexagonal in the polar view. The ecological and soil quality where these genus plants grows were specified , and were geographically distribut
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Rainwater harvesting could be a possible solution to decrease the consequences of water scarcity and energy deficiency in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). This study aims to calculate the water and energy (electricity) saved by rainwater harvesting for rooftops and green areas in Sulaimani city, KR, Iraq. Various data were acquired from different formal entities in Sulaimani city. Moreover, Google Earth and ArcMap 10.4 software were used for digitizing and calculating the total rooftop and green areas. The results showed that for the used runoff coefficients (0.8 and 0.95), the harvested rainwater volumes were 2901563 and 12197131 m³ during the study period (2005 – 2006) and (2019-2020). Moreover, by compa
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