...what is your comment supposed to be relevant to? You didn't refute any point. (a) These are all common vocabulary items; (b) If you are a native speaker wh

...what is your comment supposed to be relevant to? You didn't refute any point. (a) These are all common vocabulary items; (b) If you are a native speaker who needs to look up a lot of words, what makes these different? ; (c) face value is not an idiom. It is compositional. What would you say if you saw a reference to someone as a "Svengali"? That is a literary allusion. It can't be an idiom because it's only one word long. Do you think it's an idiom anyway? In what sense? It's possible to understand face value as metaphorically referring to the face value of a coin, or as directly referring to the value that any given object or event appears or purports to have on its face, but in either case it won't be an idiom. > but excessive use of idioms makes it hard to understand what someone is actually trying to say This is just false. From a communications or a vocabulary perspective, there is no difference between "idioms" and "words".