"It has been known for a long time that much of communication proceeds with routinized, prefabricated expressions. Robert Louis Stevenson (1882, p. 13) observed that the business of life is not carried on by words, but in set phrases, each with a special and almost a slang signification. This prescient comment refers to the highly specialized knowledge that speakers have, knowledge that includes a constellation of detail around every fixed, familiar phrase. John Ciardi made a similarly astute observation in the forward to his 1987 book: Idiom [i.e., language] is a seemingly sequential illogic (psycho-logic?) to which native speakers of any particular language become conditioned. It is a language convention and encodement, and we become imprinted with it in something like the way a gosling is inner directed to follow the first creature it sees. The gosling asks no questions. It does what seems to be its nature. Like it, we follow our language lead even to the point of absurdity (p. 1) The germaneness of this remark-following language conventions to the point of absurdity-pertains to the nature of many fixed, familiar phrases: the meanings are often nonliteral and not predictable from the words themselves; grammatic structure is sometimes distorted; the pronunciation might be idiosyncratic, with specified melody, voice quality, and phonetics; nuances and connotations are strong; and, in many cases, only certain social and linguistic contexts allow for appropriate use. These interesting notions are explored from many perspectives in this book"-- Provided by publisher.