You probably have heard how your acquaintances mockingly discuss a person, using an incomprehensible speech phrase in your speech: "The student’s Achilles heel is mathematics." And so on and so forth. This expression probably interested you, and a question like “What is the meaning of the phraseology of the“ Achilles heel “?” Immediately begins to revolve in my head.
It is shameful and scary to ask - they will suddenly laugh and twist a finger at the temple! There are no friends philologists among your friends to ask. And in the search engines for the query "Achilles' heel: meaning", each site gives out its own interpretation of this phraseological unit, and each following differs from the previous one. But if you stumbled upon this article, consider yourself lucky! Below we will explain in detail the meaning of the phraseology “Achilles' heel”, or “heels of Achilles”.
To begin, let's do a parsing of this phrase. It consists of two words: “Achilles” and “heel”. We find out which parts of speech they relate to.
The word “heel” answers the question “what?”, Has a feminine gender, can change in cases (heels, heels, heels, fifths, heels) and has a 1st declension, which means it is a noun. Her synonym is the heel.
The word "Achilles" answers the questions "what? Whose?", Has a feminine gender and varies in cases (Achilles, Achilles), which means, based on the above signs, is an adjective. The noun from which it is formed is Achilles.
The phrase "Achilles' heel" has the structure "adjective name + noun." A way to syntactically link words in it is matching.
Now we turn to the linguistic part: we find out the literary meaning of the phraseology “Achilles' heel”. If you read the paragraph about the name adjective in this phrase, you already realized that the root of both him and the entire phraseology is the word, or rather, the name: Achilles.
If you read ancient Greek mythology, then you probably know the word "Achilles" or, as they say in some sources,
"Achilles". This is the name of one of the participants in the
Trojan War. The origin of the expression being discussed now is closely related to the death of this hero. His ... No, stop. Until you understand the whole life of Achilles, you will not understand anything when I talk about his death.
The birth of Achilles was predicted by Zeus Prometheus, chained to a rock. He warned the Thunderer not to marry the sea goddess Thetis, or else they would have a son who would be stronger than his father. Zeus listened to Prometheus and gave Thetis a wife to the great hero Peleus, king of the Myrmidon. Soon they had a son named Achilles. To make her son invulnerable, Thetis, holding Achilles by the heel, dipped him into the waters of the sacred river Styx. And he became stubborn for arrows, fire and sword, only the heel, which his mother held for, remained the only weak spot on his whole body.
In childhood, Achilles was brought up by his friend Phoenix and the centaur Chiron. Soon, according to the requirements of Odysseus and Nestor, as well as fulfilling the will of his father, Achilles joined the campaign against Troy. His mother, the prophetic goddess Thetis, knowing that this campaign would not end with anything good for Achilles, wishing to save her son, hid him with King Skyros Likomed among the daughters of the latter, dressing her son in women's clothes.
But Odysseus found out about this and decided to go on a trick. He came to the palace of Lycomedes and laid out before the princesses female jewelry and weapons. All the daughters of King Skyros began to admire the jewelry, and only one seized a weapon. This was Achilles, who, learning the art of owning weapons from childhood, could not resist the temptation to take it. Odysseus immediately made a fuss, and the exposed Achilles was forced to join the Greek detachment.
In battles, Achilles proved to be an excellent warrior, 72 Trojans fell from his hand. But in the last battle, he was killed by the arrow of Paris, which he shot him right on that very vulnerable heel. Subsequently, the body of Achilles was bought for an equal weight of gold.
This is the whole legend of Achilles. You probably already understood the meaning of phraseology. In this myth, the Achilles' heel is, let’s say, the calcaneal part of Achilles, which was the only vulnerable part of his body. And in the role of phraseologism, it denotes a weak or vulnerable place, topic, etc. in humans, although in appearance he seems invulnerable.
There are a lot of idioms in the Russian language. And the conversation in which the subject of discussion is the meaning of the phraseology “Achilles' heel” is not the only one among many questions on the topic “Winged Expressions”. Another huge number of phraseological units has not such intricate meaning. But let's talk about them another time.