Ads
related to: 5 proverbs with meaning and examples
Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Below is an alphabetical list of widely used and repeated proverbial phrases. If known, their origins are noted. A proverbial phrase or expression is a type of conventional saying similar to a proverb and transmitted by oral tradition.
However, unlike the examples given above in English, all of which are anti-proverbs, Tatira's examples are standard proverbs. Where the English proverbs above are meant to make a potential customer smile, in one of the Zimbabwean examples "both the content of the proverb and the fact that it is phrased as a proverb secure the idea of a secure ...
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).
[4] [5] This inaction may be due to procrastination, laziness, or another subversive vice. [6] As such, the saying is an admonishment that a good intention is meaningless unless followed through. [7] This is consistent with another saying, often attributed to Edmund Burke: "the only thing necessary for evil to win is for good men to do nothing."
Birds "of a feather" (in this case red-winged blackbirds) exhibiting flocking behavior, source of the idiom. Birds of a feather flock together is an English proverb. The meaning is that beings (typically humans) of similar type, interest, personality, character, or other distinctive attribute tend to mutually associate.
For example, in Portuguese, the expression saber de coração 'to know by heart', with the same meaning as in English, was shortened to 'saber de cor', and, later, to the verb decorar, meaning memorize. In 2015, TED collected 40 examples of bizarre idioms that cannot be translated literally. They include the Swedish saying "to slide in on a ...
The incorrigible nature of fools is further emphasised in Proverbs 27:22, "Though you grind a fool in a mortar, grinding them like grain with a pestle, you will not remove his folly from him." [5] In Proverbs, the "fool" represents a person lacking moral behavior or discipline, and the "wise" represents someone who behaves carefully and ...
An idiom dictionary may be a traditional book or expressed in another medium such as a database within software for machine translation.Examples of the genre include Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which explains traditional allusions and proverbs, and Fowler's Modern English Usage, which was conceived as an idiom dictionary following the completion of the Concise Oxford English ...