LINGUIST List 17.199
Sat Jan 21 2006
Media: LATimes: Body Part Idioms
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LATimes: Body Part Idioms
Message 1: LATimes: Body Part Idioms
Date: 20-Jan-2006
From: Karen Chung <karchungntu.edu.tw>
Subject: LATimes: Body Part Idioms
She Has It in Her Head to Clarify Sayings
By J. Michael Kennedy, Times Staff Writer
After all those years of slinging hash and refilling coffee mugs, May Pare found herself up to her eyeballs in a collection of sayings that would blow the mind of someone trying to learn English.
She had hundreds of these sayings, many of them overheard and scribbled down while she was waiting tables at Shakers restaurant in Glendale, where she's worked on and off ? but mostly on ? for the last 30 years.
The result of her work is a self-published 363-page book that deals exclusively with body part idioms, in chapters ranging from butt to breath and head to toes.
...
The book, 'Body Idioms and More,' is designed to help foreign-born students who would otherwise throw up their hands in dismay at the odd sayings, some of which give no clue to their real meaning. ...
Pare (pronounced Paray) is a scholar of the English language, her specialty both as a student and as a college teacher in her native Thailand. Later, she earned her master's degree from UCLA, with a specialty in English as a second language.
Linguist Anthony Aristar said it doesn't surprise him that Pare has come up with so many idioms that deal only with body parts.
'English has a huge vocabulary, much more than most languages,' said Aristar, who manages the Linguist List website, which has more than 21,000 subscribers. 'One thing it loves to do is borrow. English grammar is so simple you can insert all sorts of things into it.'
Aristar said he would not be surprised if most of Pare's idioms are found in other such collections, but singling out body parts makes her work unusual.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-idioms1jan01,0,6697349.story?page=1&track=tothtml
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Karen Steffen Chung http://ccms.ntu.edu.tw/~karchung/ http://lists.topica.com/lists/phonetics/
Linguistic Field(s): Language Description Lexicography Pragmatics Semantics
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