10 Colorful Idioms: out of blue for your gray matter (2012)
What are idioms? This is a common question for many native speakers and individuals who learn English as a second language. Essentially, idiomatic expressions have acquired an additional proverbial meaning that goes beyond the literal phrase. Here are a few examples of idioms that use the names of colors in an imaginative way.
Food - A Dictionary of Literal and Nonliteral Terms
Each of the more than seven hundred entries in the dictionary contains a description of the historical background of each of the two types of language, literal and nonliteral, and provides an explanation for the relationship between them. Wherever possible, dates of first record in English are provided, along with the bibliographical sources of these dates; and all of the works that record those terms and expressions are given in coded form as listed in the Key to Works Cited.
This book offers a pragmatic account of the interpretation of everyday metaphorical and idiomatic expressions.The central claim is that the mind is rather selective when processing information, and that in the pragmatic interpretation of both literal and figurative utterances, this selectivity often results in the creation of new (‘ad hoc’) concepts or the standardization of pragmatic routines. With this approach, the comprehension of metaphors and idioms requires no special pragmatic principles or procedures not required for the interpretation of ordinary literal utterances...
Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, along with many others, have referred to the influence that this work, written by Leo Tolstoy, has had on their psyche, and subsequent permanent change in their state of mind. The selected excerpt, from this much larger writing, reveal Tolstoy's philosophy regarding the literal interpretation of Christ’s teachings and his fundamental ideas on nonviolent resistance.
In The Art of Poetry, Shira Wolosky provides a dazzling introduction to an art whose emphasis on verbal music, wordplay, and dodging the merely literal makes it at once the most beguiling and most challenging of literary forms.
