The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (review)

Reviews1 73 The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms. Ed. Christine Ammer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1997. Pp. ? + 729. $30.00. Christine Ammer's The American Heritage Dictionary ofIdioms (AHDI) is the Houghton Mifflin Company's first contribution to this important category of lexicographical works. As such, it is a very fine effort. The book'sjacket advertises it as "The Most Comprehensive Collection of Idiomatic Expressions and Phrases," and as far as I was able tojudge by comparing it to the armload of similar works I had at hand, the statement is quite correct. Idioms are a critical part of a language, notoriously difficult for nonnative speakers to learn and quite difficult for lexicographers to treat. The Collins Cobuild Dictionary of Idioms, which took its material from the Bank of English corpus of over 211 million words, recently claimed that "one of the first points to be made is that idioms are comparatively infrequent, and it is only by having a very large corpus that we have sufficient evidence to describe idioms accurately and with confidence. Nearly one-third of the idioms in this dictionary occur less often than once per ten million words of the corpus. The idioms in the highest frequency band occur in data at least once per two million words of English" (1995, v). While it is difficult to argue with such precision , one resists the idea that idioms are "comparatively infrequent." The speech of members of the United States Congress, for example, seems larded with nonliteral language, and idioms seem to occur in much of what they offer to the press. One thinks of the nonliteral use of between a rock and hard place, stonewalling someone, pork barrel, landslide victory, war chest, mud-slinging, lining one's pockets, dark horse, lame duck, a winner's coattails, to dance with who brungyou, skeletons in the closet, shooting oneselfin thefoot, testing the waters, media circus, throwing down the gauntlet, spearheading a victory, someone's head having to roll, and innumerable other idioms that seem especially necessary to political discourse.1 They may represent a need to blur the meaning of what is being uttered, often a necessity in a campaign or a press conference. Everyday speech, too, seems full of idioms. One hears such idioms as putting one'sfoot in one's mouth, in hot water, in over one's head, kick ass, a sharp tongue, getting on the wrong side ofsomeone, having too much on one's plate, working like a Trojan (a dog, a horse) , being the devil's advocate, and pulling a fast one again and again, among uncountable other examples , every day. In this connection it is good to recall the statement often attributed to Mark Twain about "lies, damned lies, and statistics": idioms do seem to be rather frequent, so frequent that we don't notice them until we read or listen deliberately. Their very frequency, and frequent obscurity, 'The last five items in this list of political idioms, from testing the waters to someone 's head having to roll, came from The New York Times (7 November 1998, Sect. A: 1, 8, and 9), from a mere four articles, all on Newt Gingrich's resignation as Speaker of the House of Representatives. 1 74Reviews makes clear the need for dictionaries that explain them, as the large number of such dictionaries in print confirms. Though the latest edition of Books in Print lists close to 25 dictionaries of English idioms and phrasal verbs including idioms, I could lay my hands on only five current editions that seemed worth comparing with Ammer's work.2 The available works specifically treating idioms or purporting to contain a comprehensive treatment of them most useful for comparison were the recent A Dictionary ofEnglish Idioms (DEI), the Cambridge InternationalDictionary ofEnglish (CIDE) , Collins Cobuild Dictionary ofIdioms (CCDI) , the Longman Dictionary ofAmerican English (LDAE), and the NTCDictionary ofPhrasal Verbs and OtherIdiomatic Verbal Phrases (NTCDPV) . As a way of taking a first general measure of the completeness of Ammer's coverage, before opening the book I wrote out as quickly as I could a list of 100 common idioms as they came to mind, subsequently looked for each one in all five...