Idioms in our Life

Living things grow and change, and so does language. One can readily recognize differences between Shakespeare's English and the English of modern authors, but present-day English is also growing and changing, and these tendencies are not so easy to recognize.

This topic is of great interest for me because as a linguist I usually have to face different problems connected with the translation of this or that piece of text and very often these problems lie in interpretation of phraseological units or idioms which can not be translated into Russian directly. So they are the real pain in the neck! You should know your enemy by sight, so I decided to study this linguistic phenomenon. Idioms are always something special about any language, they build up some distinctive features which differ one language from another. What is more, idioms reflect certain cultural traditions and depict the national character.

Since the general tendencies of present-day English are towards more idiomatic usage, it is important that this work on idioms should show the learner how the language is developing. Idioms are not a separate part of the language which one can choose either to use or to omit, but they form an essential part of the general vocabulary of English. A description of how the vocabulary of the language is growing and changing will help to place idioms in perspective.

Idioms appear in every language, and English has thousands of them. They are often confusing because the meaning of the whole group of words taken together has little, often nothing, to do with the meanings of the words taken one by one.

In order to understand a language, you must know what the idioms in that language mean

If you try to figure out the meaning of an idiom literally, word by word, you will get befuddled. You have to know its hidden meaning.

The aim of my work is to distinguish the main features of the idioms, how to recognize them within a text, to learn what are their origin and the spheres of our life where they are used, to clear out the difference between English and Russian idioms and their common features, what are their linguistic and semantical aspects, what are the peculiarities of rendering the English idioms, what idioms are the most and the less difficult to translate.