Historical Commentary on Idioms Containing the Word ‘War’

Abstract

The article examines phraseological units of the modern Russian language containing the component war from historical-etymological and semantic perspectives. The military sphere, which for centuries has exerted a significant influence on public consciousness, has become one of the key sources of metaphorization and the formation of stable expressions that function actively beyond strictly military discourse.

The aim of the study is to identify the historical sources of phraseological units containing the component war, to analyze their origin, borrowing paths, and semantic transformations, as well as to describe the specific features of their usage in contemporary language.

The research material includes data from phraseological dictionaries, the Russian National Corpus, as well as examples from literary and journalistic texts of various historical periods. The study employs methods of continuous sampling, contextual analysis and historical-etymological analysis.

As a result of the research, it has been established that phraseological units of military origin were formed in different historical epochs; some of them were borrowed from Latin, French, and English, while the majority gradually lost their narrowly specialized military semantics and acquired figurative, universal meanings. The article demonstrates that these phraseological units preserve cultural and historical memory and are actively used in modern Russian to describe social, political, psychological and everyday situations.