What's the difference between idiom and proverb?

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.

Proverb


Definition:

  • (n.) An old and common saying; a phrase which is often repeated; especially, a sentence which briefly and forcibly expresses some practical truth, or the result of experience and observation; a maxim; a saw; an adage.
  • (n.) A striking or paradoxical assertion; an obscure saying; an enigma; a parable.
  • (n.) A familiar illustration; a subject of contemptuous reference.
  • (n.) A drama exemplifying a proverb.
  • (v. t.) To name in, or as, a proverb.
  • (v. t.) To provide with a proverb.
  • (v. i.) To write or utter proverbs.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The tasks which appeared to present the most difficulties for the patients were written spelling, pragmatic processing tasks like sentence disambiguation and proverb interpretation.
  • (2) He quoted a Chinese proverb that to be a painter "you need the eye, the hand and the heart.
  • (3) "We have an African proverb: when two elephants fight, the grass gets trampled."
  • (4) A Group by Type of Proverb (familiar versus unfamiliar) interaction was found for bizarre-idiosyncratic scores; (Per-Mags) scored higher than controls on unfamiliar, but not familiar proverbs.
  • (5) Judgment and abstraction are examined by assessing the client's ability to interpret proverbs and plot a sensible course of action.
  • (6) Passages in the Bible attribute one and the same 'life' ('soul') to both (Book of Proverbs 12: 10) and presuppose 'salvation' or 'preservation' of the two (Psalm 36:7c).
  • (7) The proverbs appeared either in their original form or with their final word changed to be incongruous with the sentence context.
  • (8) More men in the rural area expected help in old age from their sons (10.1%) rather than their daughters (6.1%), despite the fact that a popular proverb exists, especially among the Creoles, that sons are for the mother while the daughters are for the father.
  • (9) Holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy he has time to think, and quoted both Aristotle and the Books of Proverbs on the natural human thirst for knowledge and understanding on the world in which we live.
  • (10) A proverb of the Buddhist religion often quoted by physicist Richard Feynman encapsulates the whole discussion, "To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell."
  • (11) Familiarity with a proverb increased the probability of its correct interpretation.
  • (12) Russians have a proverb: beat your own so the others fear you.
  • (13) Bookcases line the property: there are tomes on Hitler, Disney, Titanic, J Edgar Hoover, proverbs, quotations, fables, grammar, the Beach Boys, top 40 pop hits, baseball, Charlie Chaplin – any and every topic.
  • (14) It was also found that performance on the proverb task steadily improved at least through the eighth grade and was significantly correlated to performance on a perceptual analogical reasoning task.
  • (15) Libyans have a saying: “In Libya it is region against region; in the regions, tribe against tribe; in the tribes, family against family.” The five years following the revolution gave grim confirmation to that proverb.
  • (16) 36 male patients (12 schizophrenic, 12 organic, and 12 neurotic), age 19-57, each took two forms of the Gorham Proverbs test under two different instructional sets.
  • (17) But we have a Russian proverb which goes: “Even an old lady can have a roof falling on her.
  • (18) Why you should listen : “Answer not a fool according to his folly,” it says in Proverbs, “lest thou also be like unto him.” Jones’s appearance on Rogan’s show is a cautionary tale.
  • (19) But our favourite has to be this – somewhat dubious – suggestion from Bill Wright, relating to Proverbs 13:23: " A poor man's field may produce abundant food, but injustice sweeps it away."
  • (20) The data were collected using the Benjamin Proverb Test and rating scales for psychopathology and adverse effects.