Tag: world idioms

If upper elementary school polyglot students had a collection of bathroom books, then A World of Wisdom would be in every single one of them. The same could be said if those ages also had a coffee table in their living room for those coffee table books that people pick up when they want to make interesting, idle chatter. A World of Wisdom is an illustrated book that humorously shows the absurdity that some idioms mean to those who don’t speak their native tongue. As a former ESL teacher, I can 100% tell you that “it’s raining cats and dogs” is incredibly silly to Chinese students. They’ll gamely play along as they practice and try to master one of the more common idioms in English. However, every country on the planet has some phrase or idiom that uniquely states a condition with such precision that it leaves text 50 times as long for want.

Phrases that we know in ways that we don’t