(a.) Pertaining to, or used in, conversation, esp. common and familiar conversation; conversational; hence, unstudied; informal; as, colloquial intercourse; colloquial phrases; a colloquial style.
Example Sentences:
(1) When the Washington Post reports a boom in bullet-proof backpacks for children, it is not a good time to be a resident of a place colloquially known as The Arms.
(2) The prose rhythm and colloquial diction here work against exaggeration, but allow for humour.
(3) In colloquial terms, senior ministers in the new government should have been having more cups of tea with the crossbench members in the Senate in the weeks and months after the election.
(4) This paper attempts a new departure both in German dialectology and in phonemic analysis: (i) It is based on an open corpus of spontaneous, colloquial speech.
(5) The Stanford Health Assessment Questionnaire was modified for use amongst British patients by the substitution of colloquial expressions.
(6) For both thyroxine and triiodothyronine the component contribution of within-individual variation to the population-based variation (the latter also termed the 'reference interval', or colloquially the 'normal range') was small.
(7) We can end our nation’s domestic violence epidemic by properly funding crisis lines, legal centres, emergency accommodation, affordable long-term accommodation and prevention.” Thousands of Australians still turned away from homeless services Read more Labor introduced a private members’ bill earlier in the year to criminalise the sharing of private sexual imagery without the consent of the subject, a practice colloquially known as revenge porn.
(8) Emad Hajjaj, a popular Jordanian cartoonist, drew an elderly Palestinian woman by her sagging UN tent saying – in an untranslatable pun on the words “Charlie” and the colloquial Arabic “I have been” – that she had lived as a refugee for the 67 years since the creation of Israel in 1948.
(9) The media as a whole should be united in defending freedom of expression.” NewstrAid, known colloquially as “Old Ben”, was set up in 1839 to support newspaper vendors in London.
(10) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a poem that succeeds through a series of vivid contrasts: standard English contrasting with colloquial speech; the devotion and virtue of the young knight contrasting with the growling threats of his green foe; exchanges of courtly love contrasting with none-too-subtle sexual innuendo; exquisite robes and priceless crowns contrasting with spurting blood and the steaming organs of butchered animals; polite, indoor society contrasting with the untamed, unpredictable outdoors.
(11) Whereas in 37 of 51 patients a normal or almost normal colloquial speech could be demonstrated, 30 of 39 patients with cleft lip and palate showed a normal or almost normal realization of the test sentences.
(12) Comey made self-deprecating jokes and slipped into colloquialisms.
(13) He was studiedly colloquial – "You won't believe this, Jacqueline" – and cast himself as the rebel.
(14) Being friends with Irish people is almost a nostalgic thing – we can speak some Irish language, reminisce about Irish colloquialisms and talk about sports.
(15) Similar changes were also observed on acupuncture points CV17 (Shan Zhong), CV 22 (Tian Tu), Yin Tang (at an area just between the eyebrows: the pituitary gland representation area, colloquially known as the "third eye") and GV20(Bai Hui), the entire pericardium meridian & triple burner meridian, their acupuncture points, the adrenal glands, testes, ovaries and perineum, as well as along the entire spinal vertebrae, particularly on and above the 12th thoracic vertebra, medulla oblongata, pons, and the intestinal representation areas of the brain located just above and behind the upper ear.
(16) In his commentary, Robinson writes that Chaplin "can move without warning from the baldly colloquial to dazzling yet apparently effortless imagery, as when the crushed Calvero gazes 'wearily into the secretive river, gliding phantom-like in a life of its own … smiling satanically at him as it flecked myriad lights from the moon and from the lamps along the embankment'".
(17) When a physician performs unprofessional activity breaking the rules of his profession, which is colloquially interpreted as charlatanism, the term "malpractice" is used.
(18) He volunteered initially but within months had secured a permanent position in the West Wing, latterly as the President's aide – a role dubbed the "body man", or more colloquially "butt boy" in the US.
(19) The voice that Plath eventually created is indeed fresh, brazen and colloquial, but also sardonic and bitter, the story of a young woman's psychological disintegration and eventual – provisional – recovery.
(20) He might have said "we agree to disagree" or used some other flaccid political colloquialism for the truth – that to Gordon, this lady's views were bizarre – but he just said it like it was.
Idiom
Definition:
(n.) The syntactical or structural form peculiar to any language; the genius or cast of a language.
(n.) An expression conforming or appropriate to the peculiar structural form of a language; in extend use, an expression sanctioned by usage, having a sense peculiar to itself and not agreeing with the logical sense of its structural form; also, the phrase forms peculiar to a particular author.
(n.) Dialect; a variant form of a language.
Example Sentences:
(1) Case studies of two anorectic women from Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota, show that for some anorectics self-starvation is encoded in religious idioms and symbols about the body, food, and self.
(2) Ali Motahari, an influential MP, said after Trump’s win that his presidency was to Iran’s advantage because Democrats “would chop your head with cotton”, a Persian idiom which means killing someone with kindness, and reflecting a view that the Islamic Republic has historically coped better with the Republicans.
(3) This study compared the comprehension of 20 idioms of normal children with children exhibiting mild mental retardation.
(4) Our hypothesis is that they can reach an idiomatic competence if idioms are presented within a rich informational environment allowing children to grasp their figurative sense.
(5) A contemporary idiom blurs not only Flaubert's precision but the shocking and revolutionary nature of the work, which makes more sense when set back in its own time and context.
(6) Six experiments examined why some idioms can be syntactically changed and still retain their figurative meanings (e.g., John laid down the law can be passivized as The law was laid down by John), while other idioms cannot be syntactically altered without losing their figurative meanings (e.g., John kicked the bucket cannot be passivized into The bucket was kicked by John).
(7) An attempt is made to show how personal concerns of the dreamers are mediated through the culturally shared idiom of the saint.
(8) "A dialogue of the deaf", as it has been translated into an English idiom, is a conversation between two people who cannot listen to each other.
(9) But they were not tired-and-emotional, and for such mannerly foreigners to have been given a practical definition of that local idiom would have been gilding the lily.
(10) In Experiment 1, idioms referring to the same temporal stage of a conceptual prototype were judged to be more similar in meaning than idioms referring to different temporal stages.
(11) These results suggest that adults with unilateral brain damage can activate and retrieve familiar idiomatic forms, and that their idiom-interpretation deficits most likely reflect impairment at some later stage of information processing.
(12) Experiment 3 was designed to investigate children's production of idioms as compared to the comprehension abilities explored in experiments 1 and 2.
(13) Our thesis was that the syntactic behavior of idioms is determined, to a large extent, but speakers' assumptions about the way in which parts of idioms contribute to their figurative interpretations as a whole.
(14) By establishing a broad understanding of the problem of knowledge, this new view of epistemology is developed within the idiom of each psychiatric approach.
(15) When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.'
(16) Although this idiom is necessarily expressed through language, it is more than language.
(17) Hickman parries this by pointing to such non-rock Record Store Day releases as a 7-inch single by One Direction and three albums of classical music conducted by Herbert von Karajan, but it seems to me that the point is almost incontrovertible: to use the vocabulary of the 1980s, much of the energy that goes into the event is unmistakably rockist, and the festivities often feel like a day-long benefit for an entire musical idiom: Live Aid meets the Antiques Roadshow, with the aim of keeping the guitars ringing out for another year.
(18) Dolezal does not discuss her own ethnicity in detail in her numerous writings on civil rights issues, but in several pieces she uses idioms such as “our cultural memory” when speaking about African American history.
(19) "You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics.
(20) Experiment 6 showed that the metaphoric information reflected in the lexical makeup of idioms also determined the metaphoric appropriateness of idioms in certain contexts.