Rhyming slang is a form of slang word construction in the English language. It is especially prevalent among Cockneys in England, and was first used in the early 19th century in the East End of London; hence its alternative name, Cockney rhyming slang. In the US, especially the criminal underworld of the West Coast between 1880 and 1920, rhyming slang has sometimes been known as Australian slang.
In metaphilosophy and ethics, metaethics is the study of the nature, scope, and meaning of moral judgment. It is one of the three branches of ethics generally studied by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics.
An idiom is a phrase or expression that largely or exclusively carries a figurative or non-literal meaning, rather than making any literal sense. Categorized as formulaic language, an idiomatic expression's meaning is different from the literal meanings of each word inside it. Idioms occur frequently in all languages; in English alone there are an estimated twenty-five thousand idiomatic expressions. Some well known idioms in English are spill the beans, it's raining cats and dogs, and break a leg.
"Yankee Doodle" is a traditional song and nursery rhyme, the early versions of which predate the Seven Years' War and American Revolutionary War. It is often sung patriotically in the United States today. It is the state song of the U.S. state of Connecticut. Its Roud Folk Song Index number is 4501.
In grammar, a conjunction is a part of speech that connects words, phrases, or clauses, which are called its conjuncts. That description is vague enough to overlap with those of other parts of speech because what constitutes a "conjunction" must be defined for each language. In English, a given word may have several senses and in some contexts be a preposition but a conjunction in others, depending on the syntax. For example, after is a preposition in "he left after the fight" but a conjunction in "he left after they fought".
Pleonasm is redundancy in linguistic expression, such as in "black darkness," "burning fire," "the man he said," or "vibrating with motion." It is a manifestation of tautology by traditional rhetorical criteria. Pleonasm may also be used for emphasis, or because the phrase has become established in a certain form. Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature.
Hendiadys is a figure of speech used for emphasis—"The substitution of a conjunction for a subordination". The basic idea is to use two words linked by the conjunction "and" instead of the one modifying the other. English names for hendiadys include two for one and figure of twins. Although the underlying phrase is Greek: ἓν διὰ δυοῖν, romanized: hen dia duoin, lit. 'one through two', the only other forms occasionally found in English are '''hendiaduo''' and '''hendiaduous''', the latter of which the 17th-century English Biblical commentator Matthew Poole used in his commentary on Genesis 3:16, Proverbs 1:6, and Isaiah 19:20.
Mutatis mutandis is a Medieval Latin phrase meaning "with things changed that should be changed" or "once the necessary changes have been made". It continues to be seen as a foreign-origin phrase in English and is therefore usually italicized in writing. It is used in many countries to acknowledge that a comparison being made requires certain obvious alterations, which are left unstated. It is not to be confused with the similar ceteris paribus, which excludes any changes other than those explicitly mentioned. Mutatis mutandis is still used in law, economics, mathematics, linguistics and philosophy. In particular, in logic, it is encountered when discussing counterfactuals, as a shorthand for all the initial and derived changes which have been previously discussed.
Isocolon is a rhetorical scheme in which parallel elements possess the same number of words or syllables. As in any form of parallelism, the pairs or series must enumerate like things to achieve symmetry. The scheme is called bicolon, tricolon, or tetracolon depending on whether they are two, three, or four parallel elements.
In linguistics, agreement or concord occurs when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates. It is an instance of inflection, and usually involves making the value of some grammatical category "agree" between varied words or parts of the sentence.
A phraseme, also called a set phrase, fixed expression, idiomatic phrase, multiword expression, or idiom, is a multi-word or multi-morphemic utterance whose components include at least one that is selectionally constrained or restricted by linguistic convention such that it is not freely chosen. In the most extreme cases, there are expressions such as X kicks the bucket ≈ ‘person X dies of natural causes, the speaker being flippant about X’s demise’ where the unit is selected as a whole to express a meaning that bears little or no relation to the meanings of its parts. All of the words in this expression are chosen restrictedly, as part of a chunk. At the other extreme, there are collocations such as stark naked, hearty laugh, or infinite patience where one of the words is chosen freely based on the meaning the speaker wishes to express while the choice of the other (intensifying) word is constrained by the conventions of the English language. Both kinds of expression are phrasemes, and can be contrasted with ’’free phrases’’, expressions where all of the members are chosen freely, based exclusively on their meaning and the message that the speaker wishes to communicate.
"Acquainted with the Night" is a poem by Robert Frost. It first appeared in the Autumn 1928 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review and was republished later that year in his poetry collection West-Running Brook.
A fossil word is a word that is broadly obsolete but remains in current use due to its presence within an idiom or phrase. An example for a word sense is 'ado' in 'much ado'. An example for a phrase is 'in point' (relevant), which is retained in the larger phrases 'case in point' and 'in point of fact', but is rarely used outside of a legal context.
"Sticks and Stones" is an English-language children's rhyme. The rhyme is used as a defense against name-calling and verbal bullying, intended to increase resiliency, avoid physical retaliation, and/or to remain calm and indifferent. The full rhyme is usually a variant of:
A legal doublet is a standardized phrase used frequently in English legal language consisting of two or more words that are irreversible binomials and frequently synonyms, usually connected by "and", such as "null and void". The order of the words cannot be reversed, as it would be particularly unusual to ask someone to desist and cease or to have property owned clear and free; these common legal phrases are universally known as cease and desist and free and clear.
Yes and no, or similar word pairs, are expressions of the affirmative and the negative, respectively, in several languages, including English. Some languages make a distinction between answers to affirmative versus negative questions and may have three-form or four-form systems. English originally used a four-form system up to and including Early Middle English. Modern English uses a two-form system consisting of yes and no. It exists in many facets of communication, such as: eye blink communication, head movements, Morse code, and sign language. Some languages, such as Latin, do not have yes-no word systems.
English adjectives form a large open category of words in English which, semantically, tend to denote properties such as size, colour, mood, quality, age, etc. with such members as other, big, new, good, different, Cuban, sure, important, and right. Adjectives head adjective phrases, and the most typical members function as modifiers in noun phrases. Most adjectives either inflect for grade or combine with more and most to form comparatives and superlatives. They are characteristically modifiable by very. A large number of the most typical members combine with the suffix -ly to form adverbs. Most adjectives function as complements in verb phrases, and some license complements of their own.
The Black Country dialect is spoken by many people in the Black Country, a region covering most of the four Metropolitan Boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton. The traditional dialect preserves many archaic traits of Early Modern English and even Middle English and may be unintelligible for outsiders. This dialect is distinct from and maintains more traditional characteristics than the dialect of Birmingham, which has been more influenced by standard English due to having been urban for a longer time. It has also influenced the accents of the towns and villages in the counties to the north, south and west of the region.
Comprised of is an expression in English that means "composed of". This is thought by language purists to be improper because to "comprise" can already mean to "be composed of". By that definition, "comprised of" would be ungrammatical as it implies "composed of of". However, another widely accepted definition of to "comprise" is to "compose", hence the commonly accepted meaning of "comprised of" as "composed of".
