I don’t remember ever learning about idioms in English class. After
all, when we speak English, the idioms appear naturally and unnoticed.
But when you are studying a foreign language, idioms become important. I
think I first heard the term in my high school French class when I
encountered a phrase that didn’t seem to make sense even though I knew
all the words. “Ah,” the teacher explained, “that’s an idiom.”

Recently I’ve been leading a weekly class in English conversation for
foreign graduate students at MSU, and their questions have brought home
to me how many English idioms we use daily without noticing. In some
cases, the combination of words is peculiar. For example, in the first
sentence of this piece, I used the phrase “figured out.” What is
somebody learning English to make of this? To be sure, among the many
meanings of the verb “to figure” is “to determine.” But why “out?”
Because it’s an idiom.

As another example, the preceding paragraph includes the words “brought
home to me.” In a phrase like, “She brought the package home to me,”
“brought” is a transitive verb and the individual words clearly convey
the meaning. But what is to be understood by “the questions brought
home to me?”

Other idioms consist of phrases that appear to make sense in terms of
the individual words, but which, in use, convey an idea entirely
different from this surface meaning. For example, the apparent sense of
the phrase “don’t cry over spilt milk” probably poses little difficulty
to somebody learning English, but until it is explained, he would hardly
recognize what it really means when applied in practice. And what would
he make of the statement that something is “six of one and half a dozen
of the other?”

Different languages put together even the most elementary expressions in
quite different ways. In English we say, “I am hungry.” The French,
however, say, “j’ai fain,” meaning, word for word, “I have hunger.”
While the Germans come up with “es hungert mich,” which might be
rendered “it hungers me.”

The more I think of it, the more I realize that phrases, not individual
words, are the real units of speech. And that is why it is so difficult
to compile a software program to translate from one language to
another. It is a simple matter to build a dictionary that matches
languages word-for-word. It is much more complicated to construct one
that matches phrases. One of the on-line search engines uses a
word-for-word dictionary to “translate this page” when it encounters
foreign language material, but the “translation” leaves a great deal to
be desired. When the text is fairly simple and straightforward, as in a
recipe, the result is awkward but understandable enough to be useful,
but often the result of word-for-word “translation” is unintelligible.

Maybe you know the old joke about the software that translated English
into Russian, and Russian into English. To test the program, they typed
in the sentence “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” The
computer translated the sentence into Russian, and then translated the
Russian back into English. What came out at the end was “The vodka is
available, but the meat is bad.”