A picture dictionary of English idioms (4/1)

In speaking a foreign language, we have all had the experience that we express ourselves in the simplest way possible. We tend to use direct, short, literal ways of speaking. We also tend to avoid what is colorful and imaginative. In short, what we leave out is idiomatic language. Since we have a tendency to leave out idioms, we cannot express our thoughts and feelings in their complexity and richness. Idioms are not just “ornaments” or “strange ways of speaking”. We need them to express ourselves as creative and imaginative human beings, and not like machines. This dictionary aims to help the reader become a more competent and creative human communicator in English. With this book, we launch a new series of idiom dictionaries. The first volume, the present one, contains idioms relating to the most common emotions (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, pride, shame, surprise, and disgust). We have chosen emotion idioms with which to start the series because emotions are present in everything we think and do, and are thus extremely frequently occurring phenomena in our lives; for the same reason, we often feel the need to express and talk about them. Volume two, the next volume of A Picture Dictionary of English Idioms, will contain idioms that have to do with the closely related field of human relationships, including love, sex, marriage, and friendship. Further volumes will focus on such abstract domains as thought and the mind, morality, language and communication, society and politics, people and their qualities, life and death, and others. These are all conceptual areas that greatly abound in idioms in English and many other languages. Most idiom dictionaries are alphabetically arranged, that is, the idioms are simply listed in the order of the alphabet. This only enables learners to make passive use of these dictionaries; they find an idiom that they do not know and they look it up at its place in the alphabet. Idiom dictionaries of this kind give very little help to learners and teachers of English as a foreign language who would like to know what idioms are available to them to talk about a particular area, like the emotions. One of our goals with A Picture Dictionary of English Idioms is to correct this situation. In other words, we want to give learners and teachers an idiom dictionary that they can use to find the most appropriate idiom in any given conceptual area (in this volume that of emotions) to talk about their experiences of the world (here, their own emotions and those of others). To accomplish this goal, idioms in this scries are arranged according to particular subparts of a field (in the present volume, particular emotions).