[...] the phrase 'in the dog house' is frequently used to mean 'out of favor with someone'. We speak of such expression as constituting an 'idiom'. From the standpoint of the description of the semantic patterning of the language, we must describe the phrase 'in the dog house' as a new kind of unit.
- Nida (1951), a pag.12

Most constructions [...] are semantically endocentric. This is true of most productive derivative formations, practically all inflectional formations, and most syntactic expressions. When expressions are semantically exocentric, we simply classify them as idioms [...]
- Nida (1951), a pag.13