“Bone bag” is an idiomatic expression for a very thin person. Idioms can be transparent or opaque, and their meaning is figurative. English has many idioms, making it difficult to learn as a second language. Idioms are cultural and often have no literal translation.
A “bone bag” is an idiomatic expression used to describe a person who is very thin, almost to the point of losing weight, and whose bones are often visible through the skin. The idioms are metaphorical: an exceptionally thin person isn’t actually a bag of bones, for example, but they look like it. Their meaning is figurative, not literal, and English sayings like this rarely translate well into other languages. This is why, when hiring editors, writers or translators, canny employers insist that candidates have experience in the idiomatic use of language.
Idioms are generally classified as transparent or opaque. “Bag of bone” would generally be classified as a transparent idiom. These are idioms that, if translated literally into another language, could be decoded by someone who only understands the individual words used, even if the idiom is unknown. A person’s cultural and historical knowledge may play a role in the transparency of a particular idiom.
Many idioms constructed as similes, including “like” or “like,” are transparent because the comparison is explicit. Examples of such similarities are “thin as a shoe” or “crazy as a hatter.” This is not a universal rule, though. Someone who is “crazy as a fox” is very smart and subtle.
Opaque idioms are less clear, and those who know only the meanings of their component words are usually unable to decode their idiomatic meanings. “Kick the bucket” and “break the ice” are examples of opaque idioms. “Bonebag,” on the other hand, could easily be interpreted in a literal translation, especially in the context: “You are nothing but a bag of bones! When was your last meal?”
Idioms are considered to be more cultural than linguistic in nature, especially in the case of opaque idioms for which there is often no intelligible literal translation. There are idioms in many languages that euphemize death, for example, that are analogous to “pull the bucket,” such as “put the spoon down” (Latvian) or “eat the dandelions by the root” (French). In each of these cases, however, the inclusion of the appropriate linguistic idiom in the translation depends more on knowledge of the culture than on the various words of a language and the grammatical rules for putting them together.
English is sometimes said to be the language with the most idioms and idioms. This is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to learn as a second language. Regarding “bag of bone,” for example, most English speakers would provide another idiom — “skinny” — as part of the definition. The use of “skinny” as a word meaning “skin-like” was first noted in the late 16th century, while its idiomatic meaning was first recorded in the early 17th century. In modern usage, however, the original meaning has been all but forgotten, and the only recognized meanings of the word are idiomatic.
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