Considérations sur les expressions françaises construites avec le mot « saint, -e »
Considerations on French expressions built with the word "holy"

Summary/Abstract: Designed to give accuracy and to beautify an expression through the force of their words, idioms exist and play a very important role in every language, thus illustrating verbal resource fullness and the spirituality of those who use them. In French, the words forming the usual sentences, based on common subjects, are not the only ones used at building an expression. There are also some expressions (and we shall name a few) that are built using common nouns and anthroponyms which paint a Universe different from ours. Could this be seen as an attempt to find a resemblance between the Saints and us, humans? Could it be our way of bringing God’s Heaven closer to our world? In our opinion, both of these situations can be taken into account. A short enumeration (not exhaustive, but very up-to-date) of some expressions built around names that evoke religious figures is followed by some considerations regarding their formation, function and meaning. Nevertheless, our study also aims at clarifying the various components and the origins of such expressions. We shall end our present research by making a few remarks on the spelling of anthroponyms which form the images illustrated by the above-mentioned expressions. Our analysis relies on a corpus of French expressions that is not only computerized, but also published in some French papers concerning the expressions used by French people on a daily basis.

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