(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.
Watchword
Definition:
(n.) A word given to sentinels, and to such as have occasion to visit the guards, used as a signal by which a friend is known from an enemy, or a person who has a right to pass the watch from one who has not; a countersign; a password.
(n.) A sentiment or motto; esp., one used as a rallying cry or a signal for action.
Example Sentences:
(1) He poses a far greater risk to our security than any other Labour leader in my lifetime September 12, 2015 “Security” appears to be the new watchword of Cameron’s government – it was used six times by the prime minister in an article attacking Corbyn in the Times late last month, and eight times by the chancellor, George Osborne, in an article published in the Sun the following day.
(2) Individualism – the assertion of every person’s claim to maximised private freedom and the unrestrained liberty to express autonomous desires … became the leftwing watchword of the hour.” The result was an astonishing liberation: from millennia of social, gender and sexual control by powerful, mostly elderly men.
(3) That will be the watchword of David Cameron’s Tories next week.
(4) The mantra of "fewer, better" will become a watchword across the BBC's output – as will collaboration with other broadcasters: a reinvented Call The Midwife is relocated to the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
(5) Instead of being held captive to words such as "rational suicide" or "euthanasia", what is needed is an acceptance of more contemporary watchwords such as autonomy and self-determination.
(6) The watchwords are suitably commercial: “strategic commissioning”, “market-making”, and “brand protection”.
(7) In private, the watchword remains "Hamburger Hill", the brutal 80s Vietnam war film named because Vietnamese bullets turned human flesh into hamburger meat.
(8) Indeed, "choice and control" have been watchwords espoused by politicians of all hues since the mid-90s.
(9) It would seem unlikely that Germany would countenance any of these measures in any way, and for that reason caution remains the watchword.
(10) Count the number of times you hear the chancellor and prime minister say “security”, their watchword and their excuse for all they mean to do, from brutal spending cuts to purchasing an armoury of foreign military hardware.
(11) Shopping will change beyond recognition, with “ hyper showrooming ” the watchword – shops will become “emotional destinations”, products hidden away behind digital screens, and heavily tailored to individual taste, guided by algorithms and ultimately our own prior behaviour.
(12) Patience, not aggression, has been the watchword of law enforcement ever since.
(13) Ruthlessness has become the network owners' watchword now, because the mobile phone boom they have ridden for nearly 20 years is over.
(14) Caution was the watchword, and both coaches were unapologetic.
(15) Security” is Cameron’s current watchword – “for families, for the country” – but there is no security for families forever on short private leases.
(16) The traditional core service in most places is essential support with personal care for people with long-term health and care needs, where the watchword is continuity of relationships, reliability and dignity.
(17) "Reform" was their watchword and they had one new article of faith: that the best proof of any leader's bona fides was the habit of loudly defining themselves against their own side.
(18) Except for a few tweaks that generally resonate more at home than with Germany's European and international partners (such as requiring the government to be more transparent concerning arms exports to autocratic regimes), continuity and caution will remain the watchwords of German foreign and security policy.
(19) One understanding holds "Benghazi" as a watchword for government malfeasance.
(20) "[We] propose a 'new union for fairness' whose watchwords are power-sharing, diversity and constitutional partnership, replacing the old union of centralisation, uniformity and Westminster's undivided sovereignty."