Understanding idiomatic expressions is vital for gaining fluency in a second language. Both English-speaking students of German and German-speaking students of English will find this dictionary invaluable for improving their conversational skill when speaking in their second language. They'll discover that the book also comes in handy as quick word finder when they read popular newspapers or magazines in the second language. Updated to keep pace with current idioms, this two-part phrasebook translates 2001 expressions from German to English and from English to German. All entries are illustrated with sample sentences. Two fast-reference word-finder indexes are also featured--one following the German section, and the other following the English section.

Dictionary of Authentic American Proverbs offers a comprehensive reference guide for distinctly American proverbs. Compiled by Wolfgang Mieder, a key figure in the field of proverb studies, this compendium features nearly 1,500 proverbs with American origins, spanning the 17th century to present day, including a scholarly introduction exploring the history of proverbs in America, the structure and variants of these proverbs, known authors and sources, and cultural values expressed in these proverbs. Along with a comprehensive bibliography of proverb collections and interpretive scholarship, this dictionary offers a glimpse into the history of American social and cultural attitudes through uniquely American language.

"I’m not hanging noodles on your ears." In Moscow, this curious, engagingly colorful assertion is common parlance, but unless you’re Russian your reaction is probably "Say what?" The same idea in English is equally odd: "I’m not pulling your leg." Both mean: Believe me. As author Jag Bhalla demonstrates, these amusing, often hilarious phrases provide a unique perspective on how different cultures perceive and describe the world. Organized by theme—food, love, romance, and many more—they embody cultural traditions and attitudes, capture linguistic nuance, and shed fascinating light on "the whole ball of wax." For example, when English-speakers are hard at work, we’re "nose to the grindstone," but industrious Chinese toil "with liver and brains spilled on the ground" and busy Indians have "no time to die." If you’re already fluent in 10 languages, you probably won’t need this book, but you’ll "get a kick out of it" anyhow; for the rest of us, it’s a must. Either way, this surprising, often thought-provoking little tome is gift-friendly in appearance, a perfect impulse buy for word lovers, travelers, and anyone else who enjoys looking at life in a riotous, unusual way. And we’re not hanging noodles from your ear.

This pocket-sized reference contains approximately 4,500 common Italian slang words and colloquial expressions not usually found in standard Italian-English dictionaries. Entries contain grammatical information, the definition in English, a sentence or phrase in Italian to illustrate usage, and an English translation of the example using, where applicable, a corresponding English slang expression. Gobetti is program associate at the Center for European Studies, the U. of Michigan. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

This expanded and updated reference book lists approximately 5,100 Russian idiomatic words and expressions with their translations into English. Included are figures of speech, slang, and vulgarisms, many of which cannot be found in standard Russian-English dictionaries. Here are valuable insights on how Russian is really spoken today. Each entry comes with an example sentence in Russian and its English translation.

This book revisits the theoretical and psycholinguistic controversies centred around the intriguing nature of idioms and proposes a more systematic cognitive-linguistic model of their grammatical status and use. Whenever speakers vary idioms in actual discourse, they open a linguistic window into idiomatic creativity – the complex cognitive processing and representation of these heterogeneous linguistic constructions. Idiomatic creativity therefore raises two challenging questions: What are the cognitive mechanisms that underlie and shape idiom-representation? How do these mechanisms define the scope and limits of systematic idiom-variation in actual discourse? The book approaches these problems by means of a comprehensive cognitive-linguistic architecture of meaning and language and analyses them on the basis of corpus-data from the British National Corpus (BNC). Therefore, Idiomatic Creativity should be of great interest to cognitive linguists, phraseologists, corpus linguists, advanced students of linguistics, and all readers who are interested in the fascinating interplay of language and cognitive processing.This book has a companion website: www.idiomatic-creativity.ch.

This new update identifies sources to turn to for quick answers to typical questions that come to the reference desk.