If you say, ''The cat's out of the bag'' instead of ''The secret is given away,'' you're using an idiom. The meaning of idiom is different from the actual meaning of the words used. ''An apple a day ...

Actions speak louder than words. A picture is worth a thousand words. Birds of a feather flock together. Proverbs are an integral part of the English language. Larry speaks with two language experts ...

Do you know what 'an elephant in the room' means? What about 'when pigs fly'? Or 'what's good for the goose is good for the gander'? Learn more as we explain these idioms and sayings in this lesson.

TO many, idioms and proverbs are just another lesson in English grammar to get over with, however, they can be powerful tokens of symbolism and expression. When used effectively, a handful of these ...

In a hard-hitting TED talk in Arabic, Suzanne Talhouk makes a case for loving the mother tongue. Her talk invokes the untranslatability of numerous phrases, the many times we have choked due to the ...

From William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney, figurative language such as idiom, metaphor, symbolism and allegory all function to make a poem sound more colourful and appealing to the reader. But are we ...

Language, as I’ve always said, is quite a peculiar phenomenon to every people. And this peculiarity reflects in the modality of thoughts and perceptions into which the language moulds and weaves the ...

To take up from last week, I would like to share stories about Lal Ded, an outstanding figure in Kashmiri tradition from the mid-14th century. We are told ‘Lalla’, meaning ‘seeker’, was married off ...