made of stone
2
8.1
- idiom
- Informal
:
de piedra
- You must be made of stone if you can walk past a stray puppy without feeling compassion.
Examples
-
After hearing the heartbreaking news, anyone who is made of stone wouldn't have felt a thing.
-
And your mother, my love, your mother has hardened; her soul is made of stone. She almost never cries...
Fiction book (1992) -
It's hard to believe she is so made of stone that she didn't cry at the movie's sad ending.
Synonyms
7
6.5
Showing no feeling or sympathy
4
7.2
Not showing any feeling or kindness to others
3
6.5
A person who is tough and does not show feelings or pity
2
8.1
Not showing feelings or care and seeming cold and unkind
1
7.2
Not feeling or showing pity for other people
Not feeling sorry for other people
Very firm and unwilling to change in attitude or mind
Antonyms
How Unemotional
Surface Forms
Morphology
The literal compositional pattern 'made of' (composed of) is transparent, so a learner who knows 'made' and 'stone' will get the concrete sense of being physically composed of stone, but the MWE’s intended meaning — emotionally unresponsive — is a metaphorical extension (stone = hardness/lack of feeling). This connection is partially inferable for some learners (especially if they know figurative uses of 'stone' or similar metaphors in their L1) but is not fully predictable without prior exposure.
Etymology
The expression made of stone comes from the image of a statue or a rock that cannot move or feel. If someone were literally made of stone, they would show no feeling, so the phrase came to mean 'showing no emotion or sympathy'.