It’s important to take stock of your idiom before you use it. You might look at a large person. They might be shady — not to be trusted. You might then say “I trust that person about as far as I could throw him.”

You’d be right. Were you to try to throw him, you would likely find it harder than it would be to throw a hard boiled egg.

Of a particularly dastardly hard boiled egg, you would not say “I trust that hard boiled egg about as far as I could throw it.”, because you might be able to launch it a considerable distance.

Another consideration is the actual distance that confers trust between thrower and throwee. If you only ever trust items that you can comfortably throw into the sun from where you stand, you may end up a distrustful person.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2008 at 10:08 pm and is filed under #, Humor, Language, Minutiae. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.