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Goes for a six

Posted by Victoria S Dennis on October 23, 2005

In Reply to: Goes for a six posted by Ted Byrne on October 23, 2005

: I recently came across the phrase "goes for a six", which I had never seen/heard before. Googling the phrase turns up results from mostly British locations (or that have been influenced by Great Britain in the past, such as India).

: The gist of the phrase appears to imply disappearance (although I could be wrong about that).

: I'm quite curious about the derivation of the phrase. If anyone could shed light on it, I'd be very interested to hear.
In cricket, when the batsman hits the ball so hard that it lands right outside the field without bouncing once, he scores six runs (points). In many rural cricket grounds, if the ball is hit for six it's liable to land in the village duckpond, or the trees, or the long grass of a hayfield. So if you say that something "went for (a) six", it's lost.

Hitting a six entails bashing the ball very hard indeed, because cricket fields are big; so it's also a metaphor for anything being struck very hard, very far, or unanswerably. "That really knocked me for six" means roughly "That astounded me, left me speechless". (VSD)

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