The Idiocy of Idioms: A Problem in Lexicography

Extract

Many of the hours I passed learning from Wally Avis were spent discussing practical problems of lexicography. Because of this, and because my tribute to him is being published elsewhere (English World-Wide 1:1, 1980), it seems appropriate to honour him here by dealing with one such problem, especially one that no one has satisfactorily solved. I refer to the treatment in monolingual English dictionaries of idioms—those elusive, hard to define, and harder still to classify phrases that appear usually in boldface as numbered or listed subentries.

Perhaps the most common type of idiom so defined is the fuzzy phrasal verb, and Wally was constantly intrigued by the anomalies of such apparently simple examples as start up. We can say, “Let’s start up the car” and “Let’s start the car up”; we can say, “Let’s start up the hill” but not “Let’s start the hill up.”