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Letter Zyu
Letter Zyu () is a Russian phraseme, meaning the contortion of the human body into a strange, improbable, hunched shape. This is a relatively new idiomatic expression, dating from the 1970s or 1980s, which has come to acquire a variety of other meanings in the process of becoming more widespread. History Origin A hypothesis for the origin of the phrase was offered in an article in the journal "Russian speech" by A. V. Zelenin, who believed that it originated from films about Zorro, the hallmark of which were the letter Z, and had spread in the 1970s and 80s among college students. According to Zelenin, the letter zyu was created by replacing the last two letters of the British English name for the Latin letter Z with the letter "Yu (Cyrillic)". Zelenin believed that this change occurred under the influence of the Greek letters Mu (letter), Mu and Nu (letter), Nu, the phonetic form of which, in his view, bemused students. However others disagree with the association with Zorro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phraseme
A phraseme, also called a set phrase, fixed expression, multiword expression (in computational linguistics), or idiom, is a multi-word or multi-morphemic utterance whose components include at least one that is selectionally constrained or restricted by linguistic convention such that it is not freely chosen. In the most extreme cases, there are expressions such as ''X kicks the bucket'' ≈ ‘person X dies of natural causes, the speaker being flippant about X’s demise’ where the unit is selected as a whole to express a meaning that bears little or no relation to the meanings of its parts. All of the words in this expression are chosen restrictedly, as part of a chunk. At the other extreme, there are collocations such as ''stark naked'', ''hearty laugh'', or ''infinite patience'' where one of the words is chosen freely (''naked'', ''laugh'', and ''patience'', respectively) based on the meaning the speaker wishes to express while the choice of the other (intensifying) word ('' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
