Quotes About Idioms

Thompson: No, you get around that with idioms in the language. Some people write fragile code and some people write very structurally sound code, and this is a condition of people. I think in almost any language you can write fragile code. My definition of fragile code is, suppose you want to add a feature—good code, there's one place where you add that feature and it fits; fragile code, you've got to touch ten places.

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

It may be that Japanese culture is not ego-based like Western culture: argument has often a strong ego base. The most likely explanation is that Japanese culture was not influenced by those Greek thinking idioms which were refined and developed by medieval monks as a means of proving heretics to be wrong. (p36)

He had a penchant for idioms, sayings, proverbs and the like; some of which he invented or used in a way that was incomprehensible to me

Why were all the idioms about being strong male-related?

If we are diligent about building well-formed and robust systems, we should never let little, convenient idioms lead to modularity breakdown. The startup process of object construction and wiring is no exception.

Another translational problem is that many languages make use of idioms, or figures of speech, that mean something in the original language but not necessarily in the translated language.

Why? Oh, Holy Cow!" I groaned. "Please not to use these ridiculous expressions," he exploded in exasperation. "I have never heard any other Americans use them except those—what do you call them—those cartoon animals. Mickey Mouse." "Micky Mice," I said firmly.

Love speaks a language most sublime, Its idioms known in every clime.

The idioms also revealed that Chinese shared a barnyard bawdiness with American English. My favorite was "taking off your pants to fart"—wasted effort.

press-ganged', 'taking the wind out of your sails', 'shot across the bows', 'loose cannon', 'shipshape', 'batten down the hatches' belong more obviously to the sea. Others such as 'close quarters', 'cut and run', 'fathoming' something, 'broad in the beam' and the 'cut of your jib' take a moment

by afternoon was lost in a sea of Russian idioms. Kogda rak na goryeh svistnyet = When the crawfish whistles on a mountain = When pigs fly. Sdelatz slona iz mukha = Make an elephant out of a fly = Make a mountain out of a molehill. S dokhlogo kozla i shersti klok = Even from the dead goat, even a piece of wool is worth something =

Once there were many more in like vein—e.g., tuifu ("the ultimate in fuckups), tarfu ("things are really fucked up"), fubar ("fucked up beyond all recognition"), and fubid ("fuck you, buddy, I'm detached").

Among them: one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all description, cold comfort, to thine own self be true, more in sorrow than in anger, the wish is father to the thought, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, be cruel to be kind, blinking idiot, with bated breath

Language is more fashion than science

I stared through the Russian girl in her double-breasted gray suit, rattling off idiom after idiom in her own unknowable tongue - which Constantin said was the most difficult part, because the Russians didn't have the same idioms as our idioms - and I wished with all my heart I could crawl into her and spend the rest of my life barking out one idiom after another. it mightn't make me any happier, but would be one more little pebble of efficiency among all the other pebbles.

Idioms are a big thing in Ireland. They want to fill the time, to show how good they are at talk - it's a talk-off

I'm really fascinated by lingos and colloquialisms that are outmoded and have gone by the wayside. I love the way people spoke in the '30s, and the amazing slang of the mid-'60s and '70s.

Liu's [2003] idioms commonly used in spoken American English.)

The English language is shot through with idioms and expressions which allude to violence without inciting it, most of which pass without notice unless they're called to your attention. One of the most disingenuous moves in the incivility wars is to treat these expressions with a specious literalism; politics makes Freudians of us all. (205)

In a relentlessly commercial culture, the communication of our private meanings has been vaguely corrupted around the edges by the toxic idioms of merchandising.

CONVENTIONS, LIKE CLICHÉS, HAVE a way of surviving their own usefulness. They are then excused or defended as the idioms of living. For everyone, foreign by birth or by nature, convention is a mark of fluency. That is why, for any woman, marriage is the idiom of life.

Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.

Personally I feel that real rock 'n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.