2024-10-28
53 分钟You're listening to Away With Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I'm Grant Barrett.
And I'm Martha Barnett.
I came across an intriguing type of word play the other day.
It involves unrelated pairs of words and phrases.
Now, each half of the pair makes sense on its own.
But what makes them a pair is that the words in one pair are synonyms of the words in the other.
Let me give you an example.
Take the term blanket statement.
Now, that makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
Right.
Blanket statement.
This is something that kind of covers all options or situations.
Ah,
interesting that you mentioned the word cover
because you can pair the term blanket statement with cover story.
Oh, so although on the surface the words can be synonyms,
the idiomatic expressions Taken as a whole are not synonyms.
Exactly.
So cover story is a kind of a lie that you tell somebody in order to reveal your true intentions,