English Idioms and Idiomatic Expressions and Their Meanings

Fast development of information technologies and means of the communications allow to speak today about processes of globalization in the world community. It, on the one hand, results in unification and standardization of world cultures, and on the other hand, raises consciousness of some representatives of national cultures, deduces on the first place desire to keep specificity and features of the culture at respect for representatives of other cultures and clever acceptance of most these cultures.
On shoulders of the translator lies the responsibility for adequate transfer of the text. Art "to inform the author" to the reader consists now not only in skill to transfer the text without infringement of usual norms of language on which translation is carried out, but also at the maximal reflection of cultural (mental) features of language of the original.
The national beginning of one or another country reflected in its literature culture and in written culture that is especially interesting for us from the translation point of view is the aggregate of characteristic peculiarities and features that are specific for this nation and the constant historical development of this nation.
In the repertoire of any language, idiomatic expressions constitute a special category of lexical items presenting a fixed structure and a specific behaviour in language use. Proverbs, frozen similes, aphorisms, binomials, sayings, etc.. are spontaneous manifestations of colloquial language whose use needs to be mastered in much the same way as individual lexical items. Idioms though, display greater rigidity and structural complexity than individual words, which makes them uncomfortable elements in any theory of language. The fact that they are ready-made structures with small range, if any for variability, accounts no doubt for their subsidiary role in language lea
ing.
Idioms do show influence of the cultural values of society on language: the corpus of idiomatic expressions that...

Like imagery, idiomatic expressions are an important stylistic weapon in the literature. They are a stylistic weapon as they are used as language techniques that determine the figurative use of language. It is therefore befitting that their use is examined with literary stylistics as the underpinning theory.
Idiomatic expressions are language specific and are not easily translated into another language. Their meaning is not easily determined from the meaning of their cognitive parts.
We may end up by stressing the point that idioms play an important role in all languages and are a prime vehicle of communication in many cultures. The fact that they behave like lexemes but with a pragmatic entailment absent from ordinary words makes them a special category not easily amenable to linguistic description. Idioms, however, are not a separate part of the language which one can choose either to use or to omit, but they form an essential part of the general vocabulary of any language. They are undoubtedly a reflection of a particular way of thinking, behaving, and also of conceptualizing reality and experience.
Idiomatic expressions may be viewed as figurative elements or expressions used in literature. They arouse interest and create imagination in the reader's mind. Their wisdom is based on the observation of and experience of people's daily life. Because of their non-literal nature, they appeal to the reader to engage his mental skills to arrive at their meaning. These expressions are also the pride of a specific language because they are not translatable into another language.
Idioms can also be viewed as a form of expressions in which the overall meaning cannot simply be predicted from the meaning of their individual words, as the latter may contain meanings quite different from what the expression is referring to. Idiomatic phrases or grammatical construction that cannot be translated into another language because it's meaning is not equivalent to that of its...