A picture dictionary of English idioms (4/2)

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. To learn idioms is not simply to learn a collection of phrases whose meaning is not predictable from the parts, like the “legendary” idiom kick thejbjtcket for ‘to die.’ To learn idioms in a foreign language is to acquire a whole new way of speaking—one could say a new “mindset”—about a subject matter. So when we offer in this series of idiom dictionaries a number of idioms to talk about a variety of subject matters, we offer a new way of looking at these subject matters for a non-native speaker of English. The first volume of this series of idiom dictionaries contains idioms relating to the most common emotions (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, pride, shame, surprise, and disgust). Volume two of A Picture Dictionary of English Idioms, the present one, contains 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? The material for the present volume comes largely from the original research of one of the authors on the concepts of friendship, love, marriage, and sex in English. In collecting the idioms, dozens of native speakers of (American) English were interviewed about their ideas concerning these concepts.