If natural language had been designed by a logician, idioms would not exist. They are a feature of discourse that frustrates any simple logical account of how the meanings of utterances depend on the meanings of their parts and on the syntactic relation among those parts. Idioms are transparent to native speakers, but a course of perplexity to those who are acquiring a second language. If someone tells me that Mrs. Thatcher has become the Queen of Scotland, I am likely to say: "That's a tall story. Pull the other one!" As anyone struggling to learn English will aver, stories cannot be tall-they have no height, and.
