ABSTRACT
Scholars often treat idioms as dead metaphors because they confuse dead meta phors with conventional ones. For example, suppose we encounter a word like gone in an expression like He’s almost gone to speak of a dying person. The traditional dead metaphor theory would claim that gone is not really metaphoric now, although it once may have been. Gone simply has come to have “dead” as one of its literal meanings. In a similar manner, the phrases spill the beans and kick the bucket are not viewed as metaphorical, though they at one time might have been quite figurative. Spill the beans simply has come to mean “reveal the secret,” whereas kick the bucket now simply means “to die.” Each of these idiomatic meanings presumably is listed as one of these phrase’s literal meanings alongside their other literal meanings that are based on their compositional analy ses, such as “tip over the beans” and “to strike your foot against the pail” (Green, 1989).
