Interés y vigencia de los fraseologismos recogidos por Juan de Iriarte (1774)

In this paper, in addition to recalling the importance for phraseology studies of Refranes castellanos traducidos en verso latino by the Canarian humanist and Latinist Juan de Iriarte, representative of the Spanish Enlightenment, we deal with the historical background and the validity of the group of somatisms with barba (‘beard’) collected in this work. To this end, and starting from the studies of phraseology and, specifically, from the research in the field of somatisms, we have manually extracted the somatic phraseological units that appear there, classifying them by the somatonym they include. Then, we isolated the phraseologisms with barba and established groups taking into account the semantic and symbolic value that this somatonym represents. Next, we have analyzed, using the relevant bibliography and Spanish reference corpora, some of these units to verify their current use. Finally, we conclude that most of the units with this somatic lexeme are in disuse, among other reasons, because the underlying symbolism is no longer in line with current cultural values.