Lovely post Orin, which was as flowing and entertaining to read as it was informative. I love the stock phrase ‘if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen’, meaning, if something is too difficult for you, it might be best to give up and leave it to those who can cope better. Also if there is an issue you don’t want to deal with right now, you can pop it ‘on the back burner’, the less hot part of the cooker, to just bubble away for a bit and allow you some thinking time. If there’s something you really don’t feel you need to deal with any time soon, you can always put it in the ‘deep freeze’ or put it ‘on ice’. So many of these useful, temperature-themed phrases! Thanks for drawing my attention to them.
Too hot to touch, too hot to handle, a lesson on life.
[…] words and took an infinitives trip to splitsville. At Macmillan Dictionary blog, Orin Hargraves ran from hot to cold, while Stan Carey cultivated some linguistic botany, and on his own blog, mused on grammar in song […]
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Lovely post Orin, which was as flowing and entertaining to read as it was informative. I love the stock phrase ‘if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen’, meaning, if something is too difficult for you, it might be best to give up and leave it to those who can cope better. Also if there is an issue you don’t want to deal with right now, you can pop it ‘on the back burner’, the less hot part of the cooker, to just bubble away for a bit and allow you some thinking time. If there’s something you really don’t feel you need to deal with any time soon, you can always put it in the ‘deep freeze’ or put it ‘on ice’. So many of these useful, temperature-themed phrases! Thanks for drawing my attention to them.
Too hot to touch, too hot to handle, a lesson on life.
[…] words and took an infinitives trip to splitsville. At Macmillan Dictionary blog, Orin Hargraves ran from hot to cold, while Stan Carey cultivated some linguistic botany, and on his own blog, mused on grammar in song […]