Hi RickyD
Glad to help if I can. See example of Idioms below. And yes, we keep all the Biblical feasts.
Shalom ( Peace )
30-30 Man
**************************************************
Meet John, John Idiom. John is a middle-aged businessman stuck in the rat race of life. He had planned a corporate outdoor picnic until the rain clouds violently rolled in. John was so mad he blew a fuse because of the wet conditions. His big plans were now ruined and he was boiling over. "It's raining cats and dogs," he complained to himself. A meteorologist had told him, straight from the horses' mouth, that it was supposed to rain hard. John thought his friend was just pulling his leg, yet now he was really up the creek without a paddle. How could John host a cookout with mouthwatering burgers in the pouring rain? "Well, I guess that's just the way the cookie crumbles", John said under his breath as he pushed his grill back to his carport. He worried that because of this failure, his boss would give him the axe. Poor John.
As we might guess, John Idiom is a fictional character, yet his life is just like ours - full of clich�s and idiomatic expressions to explain life.
What is an idiom?
Idioms are words that can't be taken literally and don't always stick out like a sore thumb. This is because we have grown up using idioms to color our speech and express ourselves. Comments like "a bull in a china shop" and "when the cows come home," fill the English language. One web site says that an idiom is "a manner of speaking that is natural to native speakers of a certain language." Idioms add lively ideas to our speech. These phrases have been adapted into our language over the years, to the point where, they have become part of normal speech. They are word pictures that describe situations vividly. Yet, idioms can also be very confusing.
They are confusing because they don't mean what they say. When we say to someone that "the cat's got your tongue," we are not really suggesting that a ferocious feline attacked the person's mouth. Instead, we are actually expressing that the person doesn't have anything to say. Go figure.
Perhaps, we remember the use of the word "bad" in the 1980's that suggested something was actually "good." Was Michael Jackson's dancing good or bad? Who knows?
This can be very confusing! Idioms can also be very frustrating to a foreigner who tries to comprehend words literally. It is easy to be misled by word-for-word speech because people don't really "spill the beans" when they have something special to say. We can't, really "kill time." We even attempt to convey complex ideas, by using a single word or title, such as "America." Do we even know the origin and past, of these words, or their meaning? Probably not.
Every language and dialect has its own collection of sayings that imply and suggest thoughts, naturally. For example, when a teen says you are "off the chain," they are actually giving you their seal of approval. Such an age-specific phrase as this, like many idioms, doesn't cross the culture barrier very easily. People learning a new language; usually translate individual words, to understand what is being communicated. Our minds take in foreign information word-for-word, instead of thought-for-thought. So, just as the phrase "absent without leave" would easily confuse a person new to English, many Hebrew idioms that are hidden within the Scriptures have misled millions.
