An idiom is an expression, word, or phrase that has figurative meaning — its implication comprehended only through common use; whereas the literal definition of the idiom, itself, does not communicate its meaning as a figurative usage.
I have a need to make these sorts of connections literal sometimes, and a vehicle often helps to do that. I have a relationship to car culture. It isn't really about loving cars. It's sort of about needing them.
Matthew Barney
I have a need to make these sorts of connections literal sometimes, and a vehicle often helps to do that. I have a relationship to car culture. It isn't really about loving cars. It's sort of about needing them. Matthew Barney
I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing. John Searle
It was the point where things became much more abstract and less literal than in the bulk of the film, which was hardcore rockets and space and planets - all a fairly straightforward evolution from what I had been doing before. Douglas Trumbull
Likewise, many Chinese characters are idiomatic constructs, as their meanings often not traceable to a literal (pictographic) meaning of their radicals.
Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It's truly unbelievable. Toni Morrison
Part of the advantage, and part of the result of trying to be a producer and director, are the practical things, you find. It's so advantageous to go to a place that you already have a feel for, a literal and spiritual familiarity. Campbell Scott
That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact. Walter Pater
The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Karl Marx
The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat. Jacques Yves Cousteau
