What are idioms?

Every language has “figures of speech”, or idioms. They are kind of a short hand way of explaining something unfamiliar or complicated.

The English language has thousands of them. You cannot understand them because the group of words together has little, often nothing, to do with the meanings of the words taken one by one.

Hundreds of years ago, the words might have meant what they said, but today they do not.

In order to understand a language, you must know what the idioms in that language mean. If you try to figure out the meaning of the idiom word by word you’re likely to get nowhere – you will get befuddled or confused. You have to know the “hidden” meaning. You need to read between the lines and behind the words.