Importance Of Idioms

An idiom is an idiomatic expression whose meaning does not seem to follow logically from the combination of its parts and the “rules of language.” The word “idiom” is borrowed from Greek and it means “own or peculiar”. So an idiom cannot be interpreted grammatically. Idioms are not merely colloquial expressions, as many people believe. They can be used both in formal style and in slang. They can also appear in poetry, drama and the Bible. Some people refer to idioms as poems in miniature, because they create vivid word-pictures and give the language a more lively hue (Simpson& Mendis, 2003: 420).
In the middle of the year from 1930s to 1950s, with the influence of Saussure ' structural linguistics and the flourishing development of the American structural linguistics represented by Bloomfield, vocabulary, semantics and syntax based on the structural linguistics were used to explain the idiomatic structure of vocabulary, characteristics of semantics and function of syntax.
In the later 1950s, linguists started to study the idiomatic deep structure with the theory of transformational generative grammar, especially the transformational features of idiom. In recent

Different from the English idioms, Chinese idioms are usually classified into set phrase，a two-part allegorical saying , proverb , folk saying and pun. As Logan Pearsall Smith (1925) once wrote in Words and Idioms “Some writers, like Gibbon and Dr. Johnson, seldom use idiomatic phrases in their prose, so their prose can be translated to another language verbatim. But there is another type of writers, like Dryden, Addison, Swift, Sterne and Lamb. Their works are full of idiomatic phrases, especially in Sterne’s and Lamb’s works. Their articles are lively with these idiomatic phrases…” from his words we know that idioms play import role in polishing literature and making characters come to