Phrasal Verb and Idioms
It’s like cooking: combine flour and water, stick it in the oven for a bit, and you have bread. If you combine a verb and certain prepositions, and stick it somewhere in a sentence, you have a phrasal verb. However, baking the dough in a gas oven will obviously result in a different flavor than baking the dough over an open fire; phrasal verbs don’t require such varied treatment to have a different meaning, even if you’re working with the same two words. Sometimes all that’s required is they phrasal verb being used in a different room of the house.
This is where the idiomatic meaning comes in. You won’t be able to figure out the meaning of the phrasal verbs just by looking at the two or three words involved. Each phrasal verb is capable of having several meanings, and the meanings can also vary from place to place: if English isn’t your first language, be sure you understand the local idiomatic interpretation of a phrasal verb so you don’t end up getting your face slapped. For instance, you can look at a baby who is just learning to walk and say, “She really gets around”; you don’t want to say that about a twenty-three year old woman.