There are some phrases we hear often in English that just don’t mean what they say.  For example, my daughter comes into the kitchen. ‘There’s nothing on the telly. I’m bored to death.’ She obviously isn’t dead.

She is walking talking, making tea, eating a biscuit – she never gets bored of chocolate biscuits. Her  words though serve to emphasise just how very bored she is.  She could have said ‘Bored stiff’ – dead bodies stiffen after all.