For example – Why are you bringing up my failed marriage? That is a low blow.
Par for the course – What was expected. This idiom comes from golf. When you shoot the required number of shots on a particular hole, you are said to have made par. If you make the required number of shots for the entire round, you have made par for the course. But we use it in everyday English to mean that what happened seems like the right thing or at the very least what we expected to happen.
For example – I had another bad date last night, but at this point in time that is pretty much par for the course.
Drop the gloves – To engage in a fight, whether verbal or physical. This comes from Ice Hockey, when players choose to fight and the remove their gloves to fight bare knuckled. In common use you would say that someone has dropped the gloves when they get serious in an argument or indeed in an actual fight.
For example – During the presidential debate, Donald Trump eventually decided to drop the gloves and attack Hillary Clinton personally.
Drop the ball – To make a mistake or disappoint people. This comes from many different ball games such as Rugby and American Football. Obviously when your objective is to hold onto the ball, dropping the ball is a bad thing. When we use it during our day it might refer to the fact that someone was given a task to perform and they either failed or they made a big mistake.
For example – We trusted you to finalise the deal with them but you seem to have really dropped the ball on that one.
So as you can see there are many idioms that have their roots in sports. There are many more that we use every day that we will look at in a forthcoming blog.
K. Charles
Come to our school and make a free english test
- “Delexical Verbs”
- “Primary Auxiliaries And Modal Auxiliaries”
- “Word Order”
- “Phrasal Verbs with ‘Put’”
- “The Difference Between Reflexive Pronouns and Emphasising Pronouns”