I wrote an answer for the question What does the phrase "listen to yourself" mean?. In my answer I mentioned that the question "Do you even listen to yourself?" is both idiomatic and rhetorical. It is indisputable that "Do you even listen to yourself?" is rhetorical, but then there was a comment that it was not idiomatic since it literally asks someone to listen to what they are saying.
Well an idiom is a group of words that mean something entirely different from their literal meaning, like "raining cats and dogs" — to rain heavily.
So I thought "Do you even listen to yourself?" is idiomatic because it indirectly asks the speaker to review/analyze what they are saying, yes they have to literally listen to themselves about what they are saying, but "Do you even listen to yourself?" tries to urge the speaker to consider what they are saying even before they say it, or urges the speaker to not saying anything else that is not suitable/stupid as their previous responses were already not suitable/stupid.
So I wonder, is "Do you even listen to yourself?" idiomatic or have I got it wrong?
Best Answer
I generally consider "idiomatic" and "idiom" to have approximately the same relationship that Damkerng T's comment suggests: an idiomatic construction is any construction that a native speaker would prefer for a given use, while an idiom is a set and rather quirky phrase or pattern that's unusual enough to identified and talked about by laymen, not just linguists. Conveniently, that's also the dictionary definition.
Basically, yes, the question phrase is idiomatic; it's not really (much of) an idiom, since it's not very odd or exceptional or memorable.