The use of common names in idiomatic expressions (стр. 2 из 4)

· Specificityof label. J. Locke (1869) noted that this property originates from the way in which proper nouns are used to separate one particular item from all other similar ones. Likewise persons, countries, cities, rivers, mountains, and other distinctions of place have usually found peculiar names, and that for the same reason ; they being such as men have often an occasion to mark particularly, and, as it were, set before others in their discourses with them.

· Does not impart connotation or attributes. According to J. S. Mill (1843), proper nouns do not carry meaning other than as a label for a specific object and they are not translated. Thus, man is capable of being truly affirmed of John, Peter, George, and other persons without assignable limits: and it is affirmed of all of them in the same sense; for the word man expresses certain qualities, and when we predicate it of those persons, we categorically state that they all own those qualities. But John is only capable of being truly affirmed of one single person, at least in the same sense. For although there are many persons who bear that name, it is not conferred upon them to indicate any qualities, or anything which belongs to them in common; and cannot be said to be affirmed of them in any sense at all, consequently not in the same sense.

Proper names could be divided into several groups:

1. Place names;

2. Personal names;

3. Diacritics.

In our work we will research place and personal names in the idioms.

2.2 Place names

Geographical or place names are the nouns we use to refer to specific places and geographic features. They are also called toponyms.

Toponyms can be both place names, real or imaginary, as well as names derived from places or regions. They can be found in many different arenas of industry, enterprise, culture, and current events. It is not unusual to find toponyms used for places that withdraw other places, as well as wars, treaties and agreements, bands, food, and fabric, among other items (http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-toponym.htm). For example, there are many places beginning with the word new that are toponyms named to recall or honor other places. In North America – New Hampshire named after Hampshire, England; New Jersey named for the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel; New Mexico, recalling the country to south; New York, after York, England; and the Canadian province Nova Scotia, which means “New Scotland.” Toponyms can be found in almost every sphere of our life.

Some modern-day bands have toponyms for their name. Chicago (the American rock band formed) takes its name from the city of Chicago.The Manhattan Transfer (an American vocal group) has a name that is a toponym once-removed: it is named after novel Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos, after Manhattan Transfer train station in Harrison, New Jersey. The rock group Styx, originally called The Tradewinds, drew their toponymic second name from the river in Greek mythology. The Shangri-Las, named after the Himalayan utopia in James Hilton’s novel, Lost Horizon, was an all-girl American pop trio.

A number of fabrics have toponyms that notice their place of origin. The shirt fabric called Oxford takes its name from Oxford, England. The two thick cotton materials used for pants, denim and jean, are both place names: the first derives from the fact that it came from Nоmes, France – “de Nоmes”, Jeans comes from the French pronunciation – Gкnes – of its city of origin, Genoa.

There are toponyms of food as well. Hamburgers, named for Hamburg, Germany, and frankfurters or hotdogs, named for Frankfurt, Germany. Also, two nicknames for coffee, Java and Mocha, referencing cities in Indonesia and Yemen. Tangerines are a popular fruit named for Tangiers, Morocco, but the Barbados cherry, Natal plum, and Java plum might be less familiar. Using the name "Champagne," a name for sparkling wine, is illegal in a number of parts of the world unless the product originates in the Champagne region of France.

In addition to that, the well-known names are derived from toponyms:

· Event and agreements. For example, Jackon State (Mississippi) – the Jackon Statelkilling in 1970; Maastricht (The Netherlands) – the Maastrict treaty of 1992; Potsdam (Germany) – the Potsdam Conference in 1945. (http://en.wikipedia.org/).

· Cheese: Edam after town of Edam in the Netherlands; Parmesan, from Parma Italy; Roquefort after a village in southern France. (http://en.wikipedia.org/).

· Wine: Bordeaux, Chablis, Madeira wine, a fortified wine and Plum in madeira, a dessert – Madeira islands of Portugal. (http://en.wikipedia.org/).

· Corporations: Nokia, Vaasa, Raisio – some corporations whose name is simply the same as their original location. (http://en.wikipedia.org/).

· Derivations from literary or mythical places: Eden, any paradisiacal area, named after the religious Garden of Eden; El Dorado, any area of great wealth, after the mythical city of gold; utopia, term for organized society – Utopia, fictional republic from the book of the same name. (http://en.wikipedia.org/).

2.3 Personal names

Personal names are the names given to people, but can be used as well for some animals (like race horses) and natural or man-made inanimate objects (like ships and geological formations). As proper nouns, are almost always first-letter capitalized. Exceptions are made when the given individual does not want their name to be capitalized, and the lowercase variant has received regular and established use in reliable third party sources. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_article). Personal names are transcribed into English spelling but generally not Anglicized or translated between languages; it was also mentioned in the case with place names.

Let us look at the examples:

Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin (Алексбндр Серге́евич Пу́шкин) was a …

Canute (sometimes Cnut; Danish Knud) is the …

Personal names are also called eponyms. An eponym is a word derived from the names of real, fictional, mythical or spurious character or person (). One who is referred to as eponymous is someone that gives their name to something, e.g. Julian, the eponymous owner of the famous restaurant Julian's Castle.

In different cultures, time periods have often been named after the person who ruled during that period:

· One of the first recorded cases of eponymy occurred in the second millennium BC, when the Assyrians named each year after a high official (limmu).

· In Ancient Rome, one of the two formal ways of indicating a year was to mention the two annual consuls who served in that year. For example, the year we know as 59 BCE would have been described as “the consulship of Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus and Gaius Julius Caesar”. Under the empire, the consuls would change as often as every two months, but only the two consuls at the beginning of the year would lend their names to that year.

· In the Christian era, many royal households used eponymous dating by regal years. Although The Roman Catholic Church finally used the Anno Domini dating scheme based on the birth of Christ on both the general public and royalty.

· Government administrations or political trends often become eponymous with a government leader. North American examples include the Nixon Era, Trudeaumania, Jeffersonian economics, Jacksonian democracy, McCarthyism, Thatcherism, Kennedy’s Camelot or Reaganomics.

· British monarchs have turned eponymous throughout the English speaking world for time periods, fashions, etc. For example, Elizabethan, Edwardian, Georgian and Victorian (www.wikipedia.org).

Places and towns can also be given an eponymous name through a relationship (real or imagined) to an important figure. Peloponnesus, for example, was said to derive its name from the Greek god Pelops. In historical times, new towns have often been named after their founders, discoverers, or after notable individuals. In science and technology, discoveries and innovations are often named after the discoverer (or supposed discoverer) or to honor some other influential workers. Examples are Avogadro’s number, the Diesel engine, meitnerium, Alzheimer’s disease and the Apgar score. Some books, films, video, and TV shows have one or more eponymous principal characters: Robinson Crusoe, the Harry Potter series, Seinfield and I love Lucy, for example.

There are thousands of eponyms in everyday use of English language today and study of them yields a fascinating insight into the rich heritage of the world’s most popular language and its development (http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/eponyms.htm). The list of themes where eponyms can be found is very long and various:

· Albums: David Bowie: David Bowie; Cher: Cher. (www.wikipedia.org)

· Adages: Murphy’s law – ascribed to Edward A. Murphy who stated “If there's more than one way to do a job, and one of those ways will end in disaster, then someone will do it that way.” (www.wikipedia.org)

· Adjectives: parkinsonian – James Parkinson (as in parkinsonian syndrome), Stalinist -Joseph Stalin. (www.wikipedia.org)

· Cartoon characters: Baby Face Finlayson, from The Beano comic – Baby Face Nelson, Nero, Belgian comic character by Marc Sleen is named after the Roman emperor Nero. (www.wikipedia.org)

· Chemical elements: curium (Cm, 96) – Pierre and Marrie Curie, promethium (Pm, 61) – Prometheus, a Titan from Greek mythology. (www.wikipedia.org)

· Human anatomical parts: Achilles tendom – Achilles, Greek mythological character, Adam’s apple – Adam, Biblical character. (www.wikipedia.org)

· Ideologies: Leninism – after Vladimir Lenin, Maoism – after Mao Zedong. (www.wikipedia.org)

· Inventions: Braille – Louis Braille, diesel engine – Rudolph Diesel. (www.wikipedia.org)

· Mathematical theorems: Ptolemaios theorem (geometry), Atkinson’s theorem (operator theory). (www.wikipedia.org)

· Prizes, awards and medals: Nobel Prize – Albert Nobel, O. Henry Awards – O. Henry. (www.wikipedia.org)

3. Practical Chapter. The use of proper names in idioms

3.1 The methodology of the Research

The aim of the research work is to analyze the use of proper names in English idioms and to identify origins of these names. Idioms were classified into two groups: with personal names and with place names. The definitions of the collocated idioms were presented as well and they were illustrated with examples. The scope of the work is 97 idioms which were selected from the following sources:

· Longman Idioms Dictionary (1999).

· www.dictionary.com.

· www.usingenglish.com.

The distribution of all taken examples is shown in figure No. 1.

Figure No.1 Kinds of idioms

Research methods employed in the work are as follow:

· Descriptive-theoretical literary analysis provided a possibility to review numerous issues concerning features of proper nouns.

· Statistical method – was salutary for the processing of the results of the empirical part of the research.

The English language has quite a long list of idioms. Idioms with personal and place names among all the idioms are not the prevailing ones. To compare both idioms with personal and place names researched in our work we can draw a conclusion than idioms with personal names are used more frequently in the English language. In our sources we have found only 24 ones with place names and even 73 idioms with personal names, in percent style, accordingly 25 % and 75 %. For example:

· Be robbing Peter to pay Paul – to take money from one part of a system or organization that needs it and use it for another part of the system or organization, so that you deal with one difficulty but still have problems. (Longman Idiom Dictionary:1999:261). Idiom with personal names.

· New York minute – (USA) if something happens in a New York minute, it happens very fast. (www.usingenglish.com). Idiom with place name.

3.2 Idioms with personal names

We have analyzed 73 idioms with personal names and while analyzing the idiom we have noticed that they could be divided into groups according to their origins. We distinguished the following groups:

1. Names derived from mythology.

2. Names derived from religion.

3. Names based on characters of the books, films, cartoons etc.

4. Names derived from folk mythology.

5. Names of the real persons.

6. Others.

Results of this analysis are shown in figure № 2.

Figure № 2.Origin of personal names in idioms

According to the results we made conclusions that religion and mass media influence people’s language the most. Idioms with these names are quite popular and very often used in spoken language. For example, idioms based on religion characters:

1. Raise Cain – to complain a lot about something in an angry or noisy way because you are determined to get what you want (www.usingenglish.com).

2. Put the fear of God into somebody – to make someone feel frightened of doing something wrong by making them realize the bad things that could happen if they do it (Longman Idioms Dictionary: 1999:139).

3. Adam's apple – the Adam's apple is a bulge in the throat, mostly seen in men (www.usingenglish.com).

Let us see the origin of the name Cain –this personwas the first murderer according to scriptural accounts in the Bible – Genesis 4 and in the Qur'an – 5:27-32. The biblical account, from the King James' Version, tells us how Cain and Abel, the two sons of Adam and Eve, bring offerings to God, but only Abel's is accepted. Cain kills Abel in anger and is cursed by God ().

The next big group is idioms with personal names which are taken from famous books, songs, cartoons. For example:

1. Rip van Winkle – Rip van Winkle is a character in a story that slept for twenty years, so if someone is a Rip van Winkle, they are behind the times and out of touch with what is happening now (www.usingenglish.com).

2. Mickey Mouse – something that is intellectually trivial or not of a very high standard (www.usingenglish.com).

3. Live a life of Riley – used in order to say that someone has a very comfortable, easy life without having to work hard or worry about money (Longman Idioms Dictionary: 1999:210).

Let us look at the origin of the name Riley – this phrase originated in a popular song of the 1880s, “Is That Mr. Reilly?” by Pat Rooney, which described, what its hero would do if he suddenly came into a fortune (http://www.answers.com/topic/life-of-riley).

Idioms with personal names that are related to real persons are also often used in the English language. We have found 13 idioms of this kind. For example:

1. Bob’s your uncle – said after you tell someone how to do something, in order to emphasize that it will be simple and will definitely achieve the result they want (Longman Idioms Dictionary: 1999:33).

2. Look a right Charlie – to look very strange or stupid, so that people laugh at you, or feel that people are going to laugh at you (Longman Idioms Dictionary: 1999:58).

3. 50 million Elvis fans can’t be wrong – used to say that something must be true because so many people think so (Longman Idioms Dictionary: 1999:103).

Two well-known persons in our examples are Elvis Presley and Charlie Chaplin. Let us look at the example Bob’s your uncle. It is a catchphrase dating back to 1887, when British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury decided to appoint a certain Arthur Balfour to the prestigious and sensitive post of Chief Secretary for Ireland. Not lost on the British public was the fact that Lord Salisbury just happened to be better known to Arthur Balfour as “Uncle Bob”. In the resulting furor over what was seen as an act of blatant nepotism, “Bob's your uncle” became a popular sarcastic comment applied to any situation where the outcome was preordained by favoritism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob's_your_uncle).