Being the Word Nerd that I am, I enjoy speculating and/or learning about the origin of words or expressions. One of blogs I read regularly, Mother Tongue Annoyances, often enlightens me. Today the writer of that blog had an interesting post about the use of the word "break" in slang expressions.
He includes uses such as "tough break" and "them's the breaks" in his discussion. I thought of several others; for example, the title of this post, "Give me a break!", and "couldn't catch a break". MTA quotes from Wikipedia's definition:
In baseball, the curved path of a curveball is called its break. A batter who is trying to hit a curveball has to be aware of its break, and the ball may appear to suddenly veer in another direction. In common usage, break means luck or fortune, or just the way things happen. If someone "gets a good break," it means they got lucky.
So, Friend, if you were hoping for an original post from me today, too bad; but them's the breaks!
No comments:
Post a Comment