Proverb and Idioms

PROVERB

Proverb is a brief, simple and popular saying, or a phrase that gives advice and effectively embodies a commonplace truth based on practical experience or common sense. A proverb may have an allegorical message behind its odd appearance. The reason of popularity is due to its usage in spoken language as well as in the folk literature. Some authors twist and bend proverbs and create anti-proverbs to add literary effects to their works. However, in poetry, poets use proverbs strategically by employing some parts of them in poems’ titles such as Lord Kennet has written a poem, A Bird in the Bush, which is a popular proverb. Some poems contain multiple proverbs like Paul Muldoon’s poem Symposium.

There are some examples of proverb:

·         Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

·         Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone.

·         Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

·         All that glitters is not gold.

·         An army of sheep led by a lion would defeat an army of lions led by a sheep.

·         The old horse in the stable still yearns to run

Examples proverb in literature:

1.      From Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart:

“If a child washes his hands he could eat with kings.”

If you remove the dirt of your ancestors, you can have a better future. Everyone can build his/her own fame.

“A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing.”

Everything happens for a reason and for something not for nothingness.

“A child’s fingers are not scalded by a piece of hot yam which its mother puts into its palm.”

Children who obey their mothers are not punished.

2.      From William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

“The weakest goes to the wall.”

The weak people are never favored.

“He that is strucken blind cannot forget

The precious treasure of his eyesight lost.”

A man who loses his eyesight can never forget the importance of lost eyesight.

“One fire burns out another’s burning,

One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish.”

(http://literarydevices.net/proverb/)

IDIOM

Idioms exist in every language. An idiom is a word or phrase that is not taken literally, like “bought the farm” has nothing to do with purchasing real estate, but refers to dying. Idiom also refers to a dialect or jargon of a group of people, either in a certain region or a group with common interests, like in science, music, art, or business.

Common idioms that refer to people include:

• A chip on your shoulder - means you are holding a grudge
• High as a kite - means you are drunk or on drugs
• Sick as a dog - means you are very ill

Idioms that refer to your actions would be:

• Rub someone the wrong way - meaning to annoy or bother
• Jump the gun - would mean to be doing something early
• Pay the piper - means you need to face the consequences of your actions

Some idioms use color words to convey other meanings. For example, there are several that use the word “blue:”

• “The blues” can refer to both a style of music and feeling sad.
• If something occurs rarely, it is said to happen “once in a blue moon”, because a blue moon is two full moons in one month, which doesn’t happen often.
• “Out of the blue” means something happens that was unexpected.  

Learning a Language with Idioms

Because of idioms, learning a language can be complicated. After you can conjugate verbs, and know a lot of words, you may still have difficulty speaking the language with native users.

This is partly due to the use of idioms and would also depend of which region of a country you were in. Idiom usage is not just regional, but also varies according to people’s interests and social groups.

The best way to pick up on the meaning of certain idioms would be to converse with people and ask them for a clarification of the idiom if you are not clear about the idiom they used. There are also sites on the Internet which will help explain the meaning of idioms.  

Idioms In the Arts

There are many idioms in the field of music.

• If you “fine tune” something, you make small improvements to it.
• “Changing your tune” means changing your mind.
• If you are “whistling Dixie” or “whistling in the dark” you are overly positive about something.
• If you try and make a decision too early without knowing all the facts, people may tell you that “it’s not over ‘till the fat lady sings.”

Drama and dance have idioms, too, like:

• “Break a leg” means good luck.
• If you are a “ham” you overact.
• If you say, “it takes two to tango” you mean that more than one person is at fault or involved.
• If you “tap dance” your way out of a sticky situation, then that implies that you get out of it in a clever way.
• Being “in the spotlight” means you are the center of attention.

Remember, a group of people with shared interests such as the arts or business will have their own idioms. As with all idioms it will be easier to understand the idioms if you concentrate on what is being said and ask questions about the meanings of the idioms.

(http://examples.yourdictionary.com/idiom.html)

Homonymy, Homophones and Homograph

A HOMOGRAPH

A homograph is a word that has the same spelling as another word but has a different sound and a different meaning:

lead (to go in front of)/lead (a metal)

wind (to follow a course that is not straight)/wind (a gust of air)

bass (low, deep sound)/bass (a type of fish)

A HOMOPHONE

A homophone is a word that has the same sound as another word but is spelled differently and has a different meaning:

to/two/too

there/their/they're

pray/prey

The ending –graph means drawn or written, so a homograph has the same spelling. The –phone ending means sound or voice, so a homophone has the same pronunciation. But here's where it gets tricky. 

(https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/homonym-homophone-homograph/)

HOMONYM 

The –onym root means “name.” You also hear it in anonymous, which literally means “without a name,” and of course, in the words synonym and antonym. Homonyms are words that have the same name; in other words, they sound the same and they’re spelled the same. For example, pen meaning the writing instrument, and pen meaning an enclosure for an animal, are homonyms. They have the same pronunciation, “pen,” and they’re both spelled P-E-N. To put it another way, homonyms are both homophones and homographs! You can even illustrate this with a cute little Venn diagram of two overlapping circles. One circle contains homophones; the other circle contains homographs; and the football in the middle contains homonyms.

So homophones sound the same; homographs are spelled the same; and homonyms do both. That’s all you need to know. 

At this point, if you already knew the difference between the three words, you might be saying, “Now hold on just one minute! Homographs are words that are spelled the same, and don’t sound the same! Homophones are words that sound the same, but aren’t spelled the same!”

This is where my fingers and thumbs analogy comes in. Sure, when somebody says, “Ow! I cut my finger!” you probably figure they cut their pointer, tall man, ring finger, or pinky. That’s because if they’d cut their thumb, they’d probably have been more specific and said, “Ow! I cut my thumb!” Even so, you agree that a thumb is a finger—a special finger, but still a finger. In the same way, it makes more sense to say that pen and pen are special homophones than to say they’re not homophones. And by the same reasoning, it’s simpler to think of pen and pen as special homographs than say they’re not homographs. 

Of course, if you really want to, you can write the definitions of homophone, homonym, and homograph so that there’s no overlap, but I suspect that definitions like that are part of the reason for people’s confusion.

(http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/homophones-homographs-and-homonyms)

Polysemy

POLYSEMY

Polysemy is the association of one word with two or more distinct meanings. A polyseme is a word or phrase with multiple meanings. Adjective: polysemous or polysemic.

In contrast, a one-to-one match between a word and a meaning is called monosemy. According to William Croft, "Monosemy is probably most clearly found in specialized vocabulary dealing with technical topics" (The Handbook of Linguistics, 2003).

According to some estimates, more than 40% of English words have more than one meaning. The fact that so many words (or lexemes) are polysemous "shows that semantic changes often add meanings to the language without subtracting any" (M. Lynne Murphy, Lexical Meaning, 2010).

Polysemy is became from two words, there are poly “many” and sema “sign”. Polysemy is a word or phrase with multiple meanings. It has association of one word with two or more distinct meanings. So, polysemy is the phenomenon of having or being open to several or many meanings.

(http://grammar.about.com/od/il/fl/lexical-meaning-words.htm)

Examples of Polysemy:

Man

1.      The human species (i.e., man vs. animal)

2.      Males of the human species (i.e., man vs. woman)

3.      Adult males of the human species (i.e., man vs. boy)

This example shows the specific polysemy where the same word is used at different levels of a taxonomy. Example 1 contains 2, and 2 contains 3.

Mole

1.      a small burrowing mammal

2.  consequently, there are several different entities called moles (see the Mole disambiguation page). Although these refer to different things, their names derive from 1. :e.g. A Mole burrows for information hoping to go undetected.

Bank

1.      a financial institution

2.      the building where a financial institution offers services

3.      a synonym for 'rely upon' (e.g. "I'm your friend, you can bank on me"). It is different, but related, as it derives from the theme of security initiated by 1.

However: a river bank is a homonym to 1 and 2, as they do not share etymologies. It is a completely different meaning. River bed, though, is polysemous with the beds on which people sleep.

Book

1.      a bound collection of pages

2.      a text reproduced and distributed (thus, someone who has read the same text on a computer has read the same book as someone who had the actual paper volume)

3.      to make an action or event a matter of record (e.g. "Unable to book a hotel room, a man sneaked into a nearby private residence where police arrested him and later booked him for unlawful entry.")

Newspaper

1.      a company that publishes written news.

2.      a single physical item published by the company.

3.      the newspaper as an edited work in a specific format (e.g. "They changed the layout of the newspaper's front page").

The different meanings can be combined in a single sentence, e.g. "John used to work for the newspaper that you are reading."

Milk

The verb milk (e.g. "he's milking it for all he can get") derives from the process of obtaining milk.

Wood

1.      a piece of a tree

2.      a geographical area with many trees

Crane

1.      a bird

2.      a type of construction equipment

3.      to strain out one's neck

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysemy)