Idioms through Time and Technology

Book excerpt: This game-changing, reader-friendly book provides a more precise definition of idioms, along with new classifications of them. It eliminates fixed phrases such as phrasal verbs, collocations, slang, and proverbs from the class of idioms, while including two major new categories: similidioms and irony-based idiom sentences (IBISes). As a matter of fact, similidioms (basically, idioms in the form of a simile) have been there probably since the beginning of our history as being capable of speaking, but they have not been revealed, until now. Starting from the observation that the production of idioms in any language is influenced by the technological advance of society, the book takes two of the most productive lexico-semantic categories of idioms in both English and Romanian—crazy and stupid idioms—and provides, for the first time, their classification according to their topic and pattern, in an intriguing contrastive approach. Well-documented and not lacking a subtle sense of humour, the book not only opens new perspectives for researchers in the field, but will also captivate the general reader interested in finding out more about the expressions they use every day.