Spilling the Beans on the Cat's Pyjamas

2011-02-17
Language Arts & Disciplines

Author: Judy Parkinson

Publisher: Michael O'Mara Books

ISBN: 184317667X

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 190

View: 726


How on earth did 'with bells on' come to express enthusiasm? What do chips on shoulders have to do with inferiority complexes? And who is the face that launched a thousand ships? Did you know that 'the rule of thumb' refers to the use of the thumb to make measurements, as the first joint of the average adult thumb measures one inch? Spilling the Beans on the Cat's Pyjamas provides us with the meanings of these well-worn and much-loved phrases by putting these linguistic quirks in context, and explaining how and why they were first used. Absorbing, diverting and fascinating - Spilling the Beans really is the bee's knees!

Spill the Beans (Whatever After #13)

2019-04-30
Juvenile Fiction

Author: Sarah Mlynowski

Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

ISBN: 1338162985

Category: Juvenile Fiction

Page: 176

View: 7731


The enchanting New York Times and USA Today bestselling series continues with installment number 13!

Spilling the Beans

1995
Humor

Author: José Antonio Burciaga

Publisher: N.A

ISBN: N.A

Category: Humor

Page: 230

View: 2443


The author of Drink Cultura: Chicanismo presents nearly two dozen short pieces including essays on the Mambo dance of el Diablo, the 1943 Los Angeles Zoot Suit riots, NAFTA, and the defense of the jalapen+a1o. Original. IP.

Creativity and Convention

2007-01-01
Language Arts & Disciplines

Author: Rosa E. Vega Moreno

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

ISBN: 9789027253996

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 272

View: 1587


This book offers a pragmatic account of the interpretation of everyday metaphorical and idiomatic expressions. Using the framework of Relevance Theory, it reanalyses the results of recent experimental research on figurative utterances and provides a novel account of the interplay of creativity and convention in figurative interpretation, showing how features 'emerge' during metaphor comprehension and how literal meaning contributes to idiom comprehension. The central claim is that the mind is rather selective when processing information, and that in the pragmatic interpretation of both literal and figurative utterances, this selectivity often results in the creation of new ('ad hoc') concepts or the standardization of pragmatic routines. With this approach, the comprehension of metaphors and idioms requires no special pragmatic principles or procedures not required for the interpretation of ordinary literal utterances, but follows from an automatic tendency towards selective processing which is itself a by-product of Sperber and Wilson's Cognitive Principle of Relevance.

Spilling the Beans

2009-10-15
Biography & Autobiography

Author: Clarissa Dickson Wright

Publisher: Hachette UK

ISBN: 1848941218

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 300

View: 1006


Clarissa was born into wealth and privilege, as a child, shooting and hunting were the norm and pigeons were flown in from Cairo for supper. Her mother was an Australian heiress, her father was a brilliant surgeon to the Royal family. But he was also a tyrannical and violent drunk who used to beat her and force her to eat carrots with slugs still clinging to them. Clarissa was determined and clever, though, and her ambition led her to a career in the law. At the age of 21, she was the youngest ever woman to be called to the Bar. Disaster struck when her adored mother died suddenly. It was to lead to a mind-numbing decade of wild over-indulgence. Rich from her inheritance, in the end Clarissa partied away her entire fortune. It was a long, hard road to recovery along which Clarissa finally faced her demons and turned to the one thing that had always brought her joy - cooking. Now at last she has found success, sobriety and peace. With the stark honesty and the brilliant wit we love her for, Clarissa recounts the tale of a life lived to extremes. A vivid and funny story, it is as moving as it is a cracking good read.

Multiword expressions

Author: Manfred Sailer ,Stella Markantonatou

Publisher: Language Science Press

ISBN: 3961100632

Category:

Page: 376

View: 9752


Multiword expressions (MWEs) are a challenge for both the natural language applications and the linguistic theory because they often defy the application of the machinery developed for free combinations where the default is that the meaning of an utterance can be predicted from its structure. There is a rich body of primarily descriptive work on MWEs for many European languages but comparative work is little. The volume brings together MWE experts to explore the benefits of a multilingual perspective on MWEs. The ten contributions in this volume look at MWEs in Bulgarian, English, French, German, Maori, Modern Greek, Romanian, Serbian, and Spanish. They discuss prominent issues in MWE research such as classification of MWEs, their formal grammatical modeling, and the description of individual MWE types from the point of view of different theoretical frameworks, such as Dependency Grammar, Generative Grammar, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Lexicon Grammar.

101 THINGS YOU SAY ALL THE TIME

2011-08-09
Humor

Author: Charles Adams

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

ISBN: 1462847552

Category: Humor

Page: 213

View: 7960


We all use these expressions to a greater or lesser extent because they are helpful. They constitute a kind of verbal shorthand by which we can express our intentions and our emotions. We are “on cloud nine” or “in the pink.” We are “under the weather” or “at sixes and sevens.” Sometimes “things pan out,” or they just aren’t “up to snuff.”We know what we mean when we say these things, but we don’t always know what we’re talking about. How did these expressions come into the language? What are we really saying when we’re “happy as a clam” or “three sheets to the wind”?This book intends to give you some of the answers—while at the same time letting you have some fun. Three possible explanations as to origin are given for each commonly used expression. Only one is correct, and a number on the page that follows will tell you which one it is. The other two are simply fabrications, which I made up to confuse you.See if you can figure out which is which. See if you can “separate the wheat from the chaff.”CFA

America's top 30 Idioms and their Origins

2022-07-15
Antiques & Collectibles

Author: Fred Engh,Todd Van Linda

Publisher: Amazon Pro Hub

ISBN: N.A

Category: Antiques & Collectibles

Page: 130

View: 4492


If you’re looking for a book to “knock your socks off” Let me bounce something off you. I heard it through the grapevine that there are over 25,000 idioms in the English language. That’s straight from the horse’s mouth. Now don’t get up in arms or beside yourself as I spill the beans on the top 30 ones that will make you think something is fishy about this book. Take it with a grain of salt and don’t think I’m off my rocker when I suggest that you use this book for your tank top (no, not table top).
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