phraseologist

English

Etymology

From phraseology +‎ -ist.

Noun

phraseologist (plural phraseologists)

1. A writer or speaker who coins clever phrases; One who is eloquent.
   • 1802, Alexander Chalmers, The British Essayists: The Guardian, page 204:

     The author of Poetæ Rusticantis literatum Otium is but a mere phraseologist, the philological publisher is but a translator; but I expected better usage from Mr. Abel Roper, who is an original.

   • 1865 December, “Mr. Church's Pictures”, in Eclectic Magazine, volume 2, page 692:

     They have descriptive powers, write charmingly, and tickle our sense of profundity with high-wounding dogmas and moral theories, which seem, indeed, plausible enough; but on comparing the description with the work describe, we find, now unfrequently, that the eloquent and dainty phraseologist could not distinguish between ugly and handsome, valueless fact and vital truth, archæology and imagination, good painting and bad; and when we meditate on the moral basis of his aesthetical theories, we find them, in all likelihood, something one-sided, ungenial, contracted, ascetic; their evil influence being indeed traceable in the falsely cramped and rigid lines of the pencils led by them.

   • 1911, Lionel Pigot Johnson, ‎Thomas Whittemore, Post Liminium: Essays and Critical Papers, page 148:

     In these works Mr. Hardy writes an English of strength and purity, with an almost Latin clearness and weight of words, avoiding for the most part the temptation to be too curious a phraseologist, which has sometimes proved too much for him.

   • 1911, Elzéar Blaze, Recollections of an Officer of Napoleon's Army, page 196:

     When the officers of the corps made him a visit, he made us no speech; he was not a phraseologist by nature, he spoke but little, but what he said always made an impression, because it came from the heart.

   • 1912 September 1, “Who is Luny Now?”, in The Engraver and Electrotyper, volume 16, number 9, page 14:

     The phraseologist of that ominous question is a southern gentleman named Chanler, who was at one time "convicted" in New York of being out of his in wits and incarcerated an insane asylum .

   • 2018, Joe Moran, First You Write a Sentence:

     A phraseologist like Sinatra overlays the metre with something like confiding speech.

2. One who studies or collects phrases
   • 1874 August, “Orient Pearls at Random Strung”, in Tinsley's Magazine, volume 15, page 201:

     Another correspondent, who has 'completed [his] education in the language of Tully, the philosophy of Voltaire, and the amplification of Dr. Johnson, the great Lexiconian phraseologist,' aspires to become the dramatic critic of the journal alluded to, and give the following taste of his quality:

   • 2009, Roberta Corrigan, Formulaic Language - Volume 2, page 329:

     At the other end there is the phraseologist's view that at least one member of the collocation has to be restricted (Howarth 1998b).

   • 2014, Wolfgang Mieder, Behold the Proverbs of a People:

     In the meantime Valerii Mokienko (1997) has followed my request and published an article on the phrase, indicating that it also entered the Russian language by way of the Anglo-American route, and the Canadian phraseologist Elizabeth Dawes (2007) took up the challenge in her detailed survey outlining the modern loan translation of the phrase into French and Italian (also mentioning the English and German situation once again) and stressing the polysemanticity of it in contextualized references.

   • 2020, Elisabeth Piirainen, ‎Natalia Filatkina, ‎Sören Stumpf, Formulaic Language and New Data, page 204:

     I cannot guarantee that I did not miss items that another phraseologist would have wanted to include.

3. One who specializes in phraseological details of a field.
   • 2007, Daniel Gouadec, Translation as a Profession, page 116:

     Two further aspects should be underlined: (a) the terminologist is generally also a 'phraseologist' and (b) the task of the terminologist is now recognised as a bona fide job within certain companies.

   • 2014, Sylvia Jaki, Phraseological Substitutions in Newspaper Headlines, page 102:

     It is particularly problematic for the phraseologist to presuppose that a modification is properly understood when the reader has been able to work out all the elements/information that the phraseologist has detected in the modification, for it might even go far beyond what the producer, always under time pressure, intended in the first place.