Gordon Jarvie - Bloomsbury Dictionary of Idioms

SECOND EDITION

Gordon Jarvie

First published as Idioms in 1996
This revised paperback edition first published in Great Britain 2009

A & C Black Publishers Ltd
36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY
www.acblack.com

Copyright Gordon Jarvie, 1996, 2009

All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organisation acting or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by A & C Black Publishers Ltd or the author.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9781408114063

This book is produced using paper that is made from wood grown in managed, sustainable forests. It is natural, renewable and recyclable. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

Design by Fiona Pike, Pike Design, Winchester
Typeset by Saxon Graphics, Derby

Printed in the United Kingdom by Cox & Wyman, Reading RG1 8EX

For Frances, Sally, Andrew and the late Daisy Jarvie, for whom idioms were never quite the same again. They cheerfully got into the spirit of the project, fed it lots of useful suggestions and steadfastly refused to let it drive them up the wall (qv within).

The author and publishers are grateful to R R Jordan and to Modern English Publications for permission to quote the poem The Idiomatic English Teacher, by R R Jordan, in the Introduction to this book. It first appeared in the journal MET, vol 4, no 3, 1995.

Books by the same author

ON LANGUAGE

Scottish Names, 1992

Good Punctuation Guide, 1992

Bloomsbury Grammar Guide, 1993

POETRY

Ayrshire Recessional, 1998

Times Traverse: Poems 19912001, 2002

Room for a Rhyme from Time to Time, 2004

Another Working Monday, 2005

The Tale of the Crail Whale, 2006

Climbers Calendar, 2007

Poems Mainly from the East Neuk, Fife, 2007

Watching the Sun, 2008

La Baudunais and Other Poems of Brittany, 2009

FOR YOUNG READERS

Edinburgh: A Capital Story (with Frances Jarvie), 1991

Scottish Castles, 1995

The Clans, 1995

Scotlands Vikings (with Frances Jarvie), 1997

Flight in Scotland (with Frances Jarvie), 2009

Robert Burns in Time and Place (with Frances Jarvie), 2009

AS EDITOR

The Wild Ride and Other Scottish Stories, 1986

The Genius and Other Irish Stories, 1988

Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales, 1992

Irish Folk and Fairy Tales, 1992

Scottish Short Stories, 1992

A Friend of Humanity: Selected Stories of George Friel, 1992

The Scottish Reciter, 1993

Great Golf Stories, 1993

A Nest of Singing Birds: Nine Fettes Poets, 1995

Writing from Scotland, 1997

Crme de la Crme (with Cameron Wyllie), 2001

100 Favourite Scottish Poems to Read Out Loud, 2007

You are urged as far as possible, when using this book, to think idioms. All idioms are listed alphabetically according to their first word, so youll find the entry for above board under the headword ABOVE, while across the board is under ACROSS. And so on. If you forget to think idioms, and decide for example to think nouns, you may want to look up these entries under the word board. You wont find them under board in the main dictionary.

If you fail to locate the idiom youre looking for in the main dictionary, you should consult the Index of Additional Keywords at the back of the book (from page 297). If you look there at board, youll find all the various idioms in the dictionary which contain the keyword board listed alphabetically under that keyword. Thus, by cross-referring, the Index gives you another way in which youll be able to locate above board and across the board, even if you start from a word within the idiom. All the key words in each idiom are listed in the Index.

The 4,500 entries in the dictionary are alphabetically arranged, but certain lexical items are discounted from the alphabetical order. All bracketed items are discounted, as are the words someone, something and one (when used as a possessive pronoun, not as a numeral). Thus, in pull someones leg, the word someone doesnt count for purposes of alphabetisation, so this idiom precedes pull out all the stops because leg precedes out. Similarly, in take something in good part and take it into ones head, words like something and ones do not affect the alphabetical order.

Alphabetisation is also by whole word, not part word. Thus, under the headword TAKE, entries are listed in the following way (the bold type draws your attention to how the alphabetisation operates):

take a raincheck

take a rise out of

take a running jump

take a shine to

take account of

take an oath

take someone as one finds her/him

take someone at his/her word

take someones breath away

take by storm

take by surprise

There is one other component of the book to which the readers attention should be drawn here. This is the series of boxed articles on topics like simile, clich, dyad, phrasal verb, etc. These are terms that feature from time to time throughout the dictionary, sometimes quite frequently. So it seemed like a good idea to explain exactly what the terms mean. The titles of these articles are listed on page xi of the Introduction, and the boxes themselves are located as near as possible to their alphabetical location in the main dictionary.

There are five components in the organisation of the main dictionary, each drawing on a specific typographical style:

1. The headword, or first word of the idiom, is in BOLD CAPITAL LETTERS;

2. The idiom itself comes next, in lower case, but also in bold type;

3. A definition or gloss of the meaning of the idiom follows in ordinary type;

4. One or sometimes two example sentences, in light type, show the context in which the expression is used; and

5. Lastly, in ordinary type, there is an etymology or anecdote about the history of the expression, if there is anything interesting to report about it.

Idioms are everywhere in English today. You cannot utter two or three sentences without recourse to them. You cannot open a newspaper without being beaten about the head by them. One of the main problems with idioms in the modern world, apart from their ubiquity, is that they are commonly, and deliberately, mixed up if not made up. Without hunting them out, I read the following references in my daily newspaper: someone is seriously out to lunch (meaning I take it, from the articles context mad, or extremely eccentric); a project is bedevilled by too many cooks and not enough Indians; and someone stoops to the heights of absurdity. The authors, or perpetrators, of these creations are professional journalists, presumably with a feeling for language. They are not splicing or garbling their idioms in the heat of animated conversation (which one hears happening often enough). One has to conclude that there is today a widespread tendency for people to take the view that an expression says what I want it to say, not what the dictionary says it says; that idioms are perhaps