mindmap root((IDIO)) idiom An expression that cannot be understood from the meanings of its separate words but must be learned as a whole.
🌱As a teacher of foreign students, you can't use idioms like "Beats me!" and "Don't jump the gun" in class unless you want to confuse everyone. 🌳If you had never heard someone say "We're on the same page," would you have understood that they weren't talking about a book? And the first time someone said he'd "ride shotgun," did you wonder where the gun was? A modern English-speaker knows thousands of idioms, and uses many every day. Idioms can be completely ordinary （"first off," "the other day," "make a point of," "What's up?"） or more colorful （"asleep at the wheel," "bite the bullet," "knuckle sandwich"）. A particular type of idiom, called a phrasal verb , consists of a verb followed by an adverb or preposition （or sometimes both）; in make over, make out, and make up, for instance, notice how the meanings have nothing to do with the usual meanings of over, out, and up. idiomatic In a manner conforming to the particular forms of a language.
🌱The instructions for assembling the TV probably sounded fine in the original Chinese but weren't exactly written in idiomatic English. 🌳The speech and writing of a native-born English-speaker may seem crude, uneducated, and illiterate, but will almost always be idiomatic—that is, a native speaker always sounds like a native speaker. For a language learner, speaking and writing idiomatically in another language is the greatest challenge. Even highly educated foreign learners—professors, scientists, doctors, etc.—rarely succeed in mastering the kind of idiomatic English spoken by an American 7th-grader. idiosyncrasy An individual peculiarity of a person's behavior or thinking.
🌱Mr. Kempthorne, whose idiosyncrasies are well known to most of us, has recently begun walking around town talking to two ferrets he carries on his shoulders. 🌳Idiosyncrasies are almost always regarded as harmless. So, for example, filling your house with guns and Nazi posters might be called something stronger than idiosyncratic. But if you always arrange your Gummi candies in table form by color and type, then eat them in a special order starting with the pterodactyls （purple ones must die first!）, you might qualify. Harmless though your strange habits might be, they may not be the kind of thing you'd tell people about; most Americans are careful to hide their idiosyncrasies, since our culture doesn't seem to value odd behavior. The British, however, are generally fond of their eccentrics, and English villages seem to be filled with them. By the way, few words are harder to spell than idiosyncrasy—be careful. idiopathic Arising spontaneously or from an obscure or unknown cause.
🌱After her doctor hemmed and hawed and finally described her condition as "idiopathic," she realized she needed a second opinion. 🌳Words with the -pathy suffix generally name a disease or condition （See PATH,） so you might think idiopathic should describe a disease or condition that's unique to an individual. But the word is actually generally used to describe any medical condition that no one has yet figured out. Most facial tics are called idiopathic by doctors, since no cause can be found. Other well-known conditions, including chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, and fibromyalgia, still perplex the medical community. And even though doctors expect that the causes of all of them will eventually be found, and that those causes will turn out to be the same for hundreds of thousands of people, the conditions are still called idiopathic.