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Last night, When Water (the African English teacher I mentioned last time) cam e up with an idiomatic expression “A man’s choice is another man’s poison.”, I sheerly didn’t see eye to eye with him and corrected this way, “ A man’s m eat is another man’s poison.” Neither did he assent to my correction, and said MEAT is just choice to different people. Pretty soon, he further explained that it is language which is considerably flexible in expression. So CHOICE in that sentence can be replaced by many different words, such as car, clothes, etc. Whi le he, whose mother tongue is English, stuck to his colors assuredly, I still di dn’t abandon my curiousness about it so easily. So here I would like to give my personal opinions on idiomatic usage partly. As far as I am concerned, an idiom is a combination of two and more words whic h are usually structurally fixed, semantically opaque, and function as a single unit of meaning. In particular, many idioms are characterized by structural inva riability. That is to say, idioms are generally used in their original way, and any element in an idiomatic expression should not to be absurdly altered in one’ s own way he may think reasonable. Besides, as a rule the components of a couple t phrase idiom should correspond with one another in the same way, or entirely opposite. Take the above one for example, meat is very yum and taste sweet, but poison taste bitter very much. Obviously it will against the fundamentally synta ctic rule of the idiomatic usage if the word MEAT in that idiom is replaced by c hoice or other words. Well, above I specially emphasized that idioms are structurally fixed, by no m eans did I mean that the structure of the idioms cannot be absolutely changed. S o there are exceptions, especially for writers, who give a new twist to an old s aying by making slight changes for rhetorical effect. For example, “A horse of the same colour.” Was once quoted by Shakespeare this way, “A horse of another colour.” This slight change is somewhat reasonable and can be understood to th e full. And, what we more easily understand and generally accept the changes in idiomatic usages are: The replacement of one element by another (usually they tw o are synonyms) but without effecting the meaning of the whole; to insert one or more words (Usually are adverb) into an idiomatic usage with the same basic mea ning; deletion of one or more words. For my part, I admit that language is flexible, and we can convey the same mea nings by using different expressions. When it comes to the idiomatic usages, how ever, we, especially non-English natives, should be more cautious. |
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