Here’s the second leg of my leg post.
Let’s look at leg preceded by an adjective. From the list below (as usual, all lists and examples are extracted from the COCA: www.americancorpus.org) we are only going to deal with those adjectives that might be problematic – but even so they aren’t too problematic!
The following examples and the illustrations are enough to make the meaning clear, aren’t they?
- That helps to prevent the blood from pooling in your lower leg and cuts down on your risk of suffering from a serious blood clot.
- The boy was clutching his bloodied lower leg and howling.
- The lower leg injury suffered by Cutler is the least of Denver’s problems.
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| Lower leg |
- If you look at his left hind leg, you’ll see the bow in his tendon.
- Then he reached out and stabbed at the rat’s hind leg.
- Her other hind leg still wouldn’t do what she wanted.
- Soon they were at the rear leg of one of the monsters.
- We have a Russian tortoise that did the same thing, even though she has just a stump of a left rear leg (we call her Stumpy).
- [The dog] walked away to sit off to the side licking her left rear leg where she had a small cut.
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| Hind legs |
We talked about this meaning above, remember?
- What do you think was the key to winning that final leg?
- The last thing I wanted to do was spend the final leg of our car ride playing the Probing Questions game.
- Our top story this hour: The final leg of a long journey.
- When I ran my first marathon last year, she ran the final leg with me to get me over the finish line.
Now let’s consider verbal collocations with leg. We will disregard combinations with the verbs to be, to do and to have because they are pretty literal and do not actually form collocations. The first full verb that occurs in the list is broke (position 4), but we also have break (in position 6) and broken (in position 8). So, to break seems to form a quite frequent collocation with leg.
Here are a few examples:
- Arriving in France with the 1st Division, he broke a leg when his horse slipped in the mud and fell on him.
- When he broke his leg in the accident he couldn’t practice for ages and ended up never playing again.
- A single slip and I could easily break a leg… or my skull.
- … the worst that could happen would be to fall and break a leg.
- My left leg was broken in three places.
- If your leg is broken, Kyril will help me to set it.
Nothing worthy of notice so far, right?
But have a look at the next examples:
- “I won’t say break a leg, sweetheart, because that’s the last thing we need. But good luck.”
- We, along with Genesius, have been cast in the role of a lifetime. Break a leg!
- “In you go,” Ramathustra said. “Break a leg.”
- “Break a Leg” embodies the key contradictions of the brave new world of online video entertainment.
- Prince Charming quickly stands up and faces Shrek. SHREK Break a leg. Or, on second thought, let me break it for you.
- Congratulations on the new show. Break a leg.
- All right. Well, break a leg on the production tonight. Good luck with that, Jeffrey.
The meaning is made clear by the following example:
- “Break a leg” is a traditional way of wishing an actor or actress good luck.
Interestingly, out of 114 occurrences of break + leg, 52 are of the good luck expression. In other words, 45.6%.
Our next verb is lost which, up to position 20, only occurs in its past form:
- Dos Sopheap, a young woman from Battambang Province, lost her leg to a mine when she was six years old.
- In 2002, I was in a car accident and lost my leg.
Now, the verb to lift is ambiguous. It can have a literal meaning, as in
- Every time I see our guide lift his leg to scale a rock, I’m filled with dread,
- Lift top leg 6 inches off bottom leg, so top leg is hovering in the air.
but it can also be used metaphorically:
- He would spring out on all fours, lift his leg, and urinate with great force on the young lady’s fine evening frock.
- Seconds later, she let the dog outside, where he disappeared into the darkened.corners of her small yard to, no doubt, lift his leg on every tree, bush and post he could find.
- Honestly Elna said, “Lucky would sashay in from the great outdoors, stand right up against the door she’d just walked through, lift her leg, and spray, right in front of me!” # “I didn’t know female cats lifted their legs”, Shelly said.
- Looking up the trail, she saw each of the wolves stop to lift a leg on a pile of meat. Even the females did so, which was odd.
Obviously most of the occurrences refer to animals.
However, the collocation can also be used for humans:
All these people who just wanted to come lift a leg and pee in his yard.
- “Sir, we know you’ve had a long flight. The restroom is over that way, and once you’ve had a chance to freshen up you can get a bite to eat while your plane is being refueled.” “Absolutely!” the mayor agrees eagerly. “Go lift a leg, then you can come back here and taste some of the best food Topeka has to offer!”
Our next verb is get. But what we have here is not a collocation, it’s an idiomatic expression. Can you guess its meaning from the examples?
- She’s sick of being a fashion assistant, and Sara never lets her get a leg up. All Courtney does is lug around gowns.
- Get a leg up on jewelry display with Lisa Goldberg’s kicky dish.
- TRAINING TIP # Looking to get a leg up? # For so many golfers, the most difficult thing to learn to do is hit down on the ball.
- That’s exactly why he came into the office when he did every morning. It gave him a chance to get a leg up on the day before the cloud of chummy and chirpy voices descended around him.
- Often it would take only a very little bit of money (by U.S. standards) to allow poor people to get a leg up on their financial difficulties.
- One auto-racing team thinks it has found a way to get a leg up on the competition.
- Some are business people trying to get a leg up on the competition by investing in one of capitalism’s last frontiers.
- It’s a tough job market and they want to get a leg up on the competition…
Yes, that’s it, it means ‘to get an advantage’ and notice the use of the preposition on introducing the goal to be achieved: get a leg up on the competition, for example.
The next combination is also idiomatic: pull someone’s leg. Notice that the most frequent form of pull is pullling. Notice also that the idiomatic meaning requires a personal pronoun, The meaning is made clear with the first example:
- B can’t tell whether his father is serious or pulling his leg.
- “I’m pulling your leg, man.” Alonso laughed. “Lighten up.”
- “Are you pulling my leg, Henry?” asked the PM, only half-jokingly.
Not surprisingly, 90% of the occurrences of pulling+pronoun+leg are idiomatic. Here is one of the few exceptions:
- It felt good too, and I concentrated on not pulling my leg away.
Back to our leg exercises:
- One leg was bent at the knee and propped behind her,
- She bent her leg, propping her foot against the wall.
- Till then I hadn’t noticed that her leg was bent right back so it made a circle.
- Extend right leg back with toes pointed while raising right arm.
- Extend leg only, keeping hands on hips.
- Bend left knee and extend right leg in front of you.
- Raise left leg, crunching torso a few inches off floor.
- Lift hips and raise right leg straight up.
- Raise leg straight up behind you, then lower.
These ones are rather sad:
- Doctors amputated his leg below the knee.
- The same day they told me I had to get my leg amputated, was the same day my dad told me that Ashley had died.
- In 2000, Young had to have a leg amputated because of a vascular condition.
But let’s finish on a happier note: another idiomatic expression:
- That dress must have cost an arm and a leg.
- Dinner and a show can cost an arm and a leg these days.
- A memorable vacation to the Caribbean shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg.
Or, better still, on a healthier note:
Foods that don’t cost an arm and a leg
And this is how this expression translates into Portuguese:
Hope your next Saturday night won’t cost you an arm and a leg!!
All the best
Stella
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Stella E. O. Tagnin professora associada do Departamento de Letras Modernas, FFLCH, da USP. Embora aposentada, continua orientando em nível de pós-graduação nas áreas de Tradução, Terminologia, Ensino e Aprendizagem, sempre com base na Lingüística de Corpus. É coordenadora do Projeto CoMET.e-mail: seotagni@usp.br.
