[hidden email] wrote:
> No, it's established Straker's been living in England for several
> years, married an English woman, may have been stationed on some
> AF base there in Intelligence. He would have naturally picked up
> expressions like that. He indeed uses a lot of British expressions
> and British patterns of speech throughout the series. One is
> 'bloody-minded' where Americans would use 'stubborn'
Good point, that's true. Never really noticed that actually,
probably because I'm English. All the same - while it fits very
well it's probably just a happy accident, a consequence of the
scripts being written by British people.
> Where does the expression 'he's out of it' originate from in
> England, do you know? I believe that the expression 'buying the
> farm' 'or he bought the farm' may have come from wartime.
I don't know .. although it's not only used to denote death, it's
also commonly used to describe unconsciousness, either from (say) a
serious blow to the head (like 'out cold') or from excessive
consumption of alcohol, in which case it can also be used to
describe a state of 'semi-consciousness'.
Slang expressions often mutate into wider meanings. At my last
job, in an American firm, 'buying the farm' used to mean 'getting
fired' - a frequently encountered occupational hazard of working in
IT in a financial organisation where mistakes cost large sums of
money.
Locked
