Anatoly Liberman. 2022. Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms

What to do, lexicographically, with English idioms?The category is huge, diverse, variable, difficult to categorise, and a pain in the neck to organise.I suppose what one does is give the problem to Anatoly Liberman.The title and subtitle of his new book, Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms, was no doubt chosen to appeal to a general audience, but it misleads.This is not simply a dictionary of what English idioms mean (as would be helpful to an English learner).It is a dictionary of idiom history.In her overview of etymological dictionaries, Éva Buchi noted this gap in coverage: 'As for idioms, they often completely lack any etymological analysis, the worst being pragmatemes like English oh, boy!' (2016: 344).The Oxford English Dictionary reveals that lexicographic bias against idioms, defining etymology as 'the branch of linguistics which deals with determining the origins of words' emphasis added.But Buchi goes on to identify Liberman's Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology (2007), a dictionary with only 55 entries, as an exception to this rule.In this book, Liberman continues this work and makes it accessible to a broad audience.Plenty of general-audience books promise the 'why we say that' of 'everyday expressions' or 'popular idioms', collected by (sometimes gullible) enthusiasts without the kind of knowledge and training that encourages historical caution.Take My Word for It has some of these expressions, but also a fair number of flash-in-the-pan nineteenth-centuryisms.The story that emerges of English linguistic creativity would certainly be a fun read for any language enthusiast.But it should stand the test of time as a resource for phraseologists, who will appreciate the archival legwork that underlies this dictionary-and the sense of vocation that has led to it. The corpus and wordlistHow does one choose idioms to include in an idiom dictionary?Of course, one must first define idiom, which Liberman does inclusively: 'a group of words whose meaning has to be learned or explained, even though in separation each of its components is clear' (p.2).Using this definition, one could probably fill a dictionary of this size with the idioms an English speaker hears in a single day-but that might not result in a very interesting dictionary for