You must have heard how your acquaintances mockingly discuss any person, using in their speech an incomprehensible speech turn: "Achilles' heel of this student is mathematics." And so on and so forth. This expression must have interested you, and a question like: "What is the meaning of the Achilles' heel" phraseologism immediately begins to spin in your head?
It is shameful and scary to ask - suddenly they will laugh and twist a finger at the temple! There are no familiar philologists among your friends to ask. And in search engines, for the query "Achilles' heel: meaning" each site gives its own interpretation of this phraseological unit, and each next one differs from the previous one. But if you stumbled across this article, consider yourself lucky! Below we will explain in detail the meaning of the phraseologism "Achilles' heel", or "Achilles' heel".
First, let's parse this phrase. It consists of two words: "Achilles" and "heel". Find out what parts of speech they belong to.
The word "heel" answers the question "what?", has a feminine gender, can change by case (heel, fifth, heel, fifth, on the heel)and has the 1st declension, which means it is a noun. Its synonym is "heel".
The word "Achilles" answers the questions "what? whose?", has a feminine gender and changes in cases (Achilles, Achilles), so, based on the above features, it is an adjective. The noun from which it is derived is "Achilles".
The phrase "Achilles' heel" has the structure "adjective + noun". The way the words are syntactically linked in it is agreement.
Now let's move on to the linguistic part: we find out the literary meaning of the phraseological unit "Achilles' heel". If you read the paragraph about the adjective in this phrase, you already understood that the root of both it and the entire phraseological unit is the word, more precisely, the name: Achilles.
If you have 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 now under discussion is closely connected with 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 to Zeus by Prometheus chained to a rock. He warned the Thunderer not to marry the sea goddess Thetis, otherwise they would have a son who would be stronger than his father. Zeus listened to Prometheus and gave Thetis as a wife to the great heroPeleus, king of the Myrmidons. 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 unyielding to arrows, fire and sword, only the heel, by which his mother held, remained the only weak spot on his whole body.
As a child, Achilles was raised 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 well for Achilles, wanting to save her son, hid him with the king of Skyros Lykomeds among the daughters of the latter, dressing her son in women's clothes.
But Odysseus found out about this and decided to go for a trick. He came to the palace of Lycomedes and laid out women's jewelry and weapons in front of the princesses. All the daughters of the king of Skyros began to admire the decorations, and only one grabbed a weapon. This was Achilles, who, having been trained in the art of weapons from childhood, could not resist the temptation to take them. Odysseus immediately raised a fuss, and the exposed Achilles was forced to join the detachment of the Greeks.
In the 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 launched right into that very vulnerable heel. Subsequently, the body of Achilles was redeemed for an equal weight of gold.
This is the whole legend of Achilles. You probably already understoodphraseological meaning. In this myth, the Achilles' heel is, let's say, the heel of Achilles, which was the only vulnerable part of his body. And in the role of a phraseological unit, it denotes a weak or vulnerable spot, topic, etc. in a person, although he seems to be 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 phraseologism "Achilles' heel" is not the only one among the many questions on the topic "Winged expressions". Another huge number of phraseological units has a not so tricky meaning. But we'll talk about them another time.
