Idiomatic Expressions Quotes

Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'... they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git.

Slang is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage carts on their way to the dumps.

The hardest portion of English, I must say it: Idioms.

We just say things differently in Australia - like torch. I'd ask, 'Can I have the torch?' It seems to fall flat when I say, 'Can I have the flashlight?'

Things on the whole are faster in America; people don't stand for election, they run for office. If a person says he's sick, it doesn't mean regurgitating, it means ill. Mad means angry, not insane. Don't ask for the left-luggage; it's called a checkroom.

Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily, it's usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is 'fairy lights,' which we boringly refer to as 'Christmas lights.'

Slang moves on so fast that most new words disappear soon after they are coined. But there is always something that sticks behind.

Some words have multiple meanings. Scholastic, aware that I'm allergic to preservatives, kindly got someone to translate the phrase "I can only eat food without preservatives" into Italian. They warned me, however, as they taught me how to say it, that the Italian word for "preservatives" is the same as the word for "condom." So that I should be careful how I look when I say it.

Yankees don't understand that the Southern way of talking is a language of nuance. What we can do in the South is we can take a word and change it just a little bit and make it mean something altogether different.

I’ve always been a word guy, I like weird words and I like American slang and all that and words that are no longer being used… I like to drag them out of the box and wave them around… this is an interesting one, it’s amazing how in addition to punctuation just a little pause in the wrong place can just completely transform the meaning of something.

You cannot learn to curse like an American.

I don't know if English is the only language where some expressions only and solely mean the opposite of what they say but we do have an awful lot of them.

Slang has always moved this way. From Cockney rhyming slang to codes swapped among highwaymen, they're tribal badges of identity, bonding mechanisms designed to distinguish the initiated, and to keep strangers out.

The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.

Slang has different functions: many of the words we use are playful and a lot are tribal - we speak the same way as the groups we are part of. A great deal are also euphemistic, so it's no surprise that a third of us are perplexed by their meanings and origins.

It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.

There were the hawks and doves which we have everywhere else, a phrase which I unfortunately invented. I didn't invent it: I popularized it.

If you travel to the States... they have a lot of different words than like what we use. For instance: they say 'elevator', we say 'lift'; they say 'drapes', we say 'curtains'; they say 'president', we say 'seriously deranged git.'

I don't like catchphrases either. A current one would be, "Bye, Felicia." It's used so much that we don't even know the origin anymore.

Every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another.

The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.

Language is my bugbear. Everyone says things now like 'I was sat' instead of 'I was sitting', which just sounds so ugly.

Dangling punch lines to forgotten stories remain in the language like the smile of the Cheshire cat.

Dialect tempered with slang is an admirable medium of communication between persons who have nothing to say and persons who would not care for anything properly said.

I'm not actually perishing, but I do feel like I die a little every time someone uses 'literally' to mean 'really.'