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.
I studied linguistics at university. The emphasis was on how language changed over the years from Beowulf to hip-hop.
We are decorating at the moment so old books have been moved and I have in front of me ‘Historical Slang’ - some 50,000 terms, many of them quite crude, that are no longer used by English speakers. Elsewhere I have ‘Hobson, Jobson’ a book of words used in British India – some of which are still in use both by Indians and Brits, but most of which are obscure to say the least.