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Daylight, change in the wind, clear water

Posted by Smokey Stover on March 22, 2004

In Reply to: Just around the corner... posted by Miri Barak on March 18, 2004

: : : : : : : It is said about our dinosaur Pod when he encounters other kind of dinosaurs::

: : : : : : : Luckily for them, Pod's instinct to avoid their kind is too deeply ingrained.

: : : : : : : Feeling no *comfort factor*, he withdraws. As an added precaution, Pod puts some daylight between himself and the odd-sized animals.

: : : : : Thank you Henry,you

: : : : : : : My question: What does he mean by comfort factor", somehow it doen't make sense here.

: : : : : : : Thank you very much

: : : : : : : By the way I have a problem also with "put some daylight between himself..." but I stills have'nt try to dig into it.

: : : : : : Comfort factor is a safety margin.

: : : : : : "Put daylight between" means to create a clear gap between two things. A phrase popular recently in politics was to create/put/keep clear blue water between the policies of one party and another to show that they were different.

: : : : : Thank you Henry you helped me immensely.

: : : : Another one:
: : : : "Just around the corner a change is in the wind".

: : : : Does it mean that a change is expected soon?

: : : : Thanks. I found a confirmation to my guess.

: : That's what you call a mixed metaphor, isn't it?

: yes it is and it's kind of strange.

When "Pod puts some daylight between himself and the odd-sized animals," his chronicler is using an expression which customarily means, "He got the hell out of there!" "Winds of change," if it wasn't copyrighted by Churchill, is in any case a kind of high-falutin' literary conceit. A coming or inchoate change in the wind, however, even if subtle, can sometimes be detected by the time-honored finger-in-the-wind method. That is, you stick your finger in your mouth, then raise it in the air (vertically). If this gives different results from the last time you did it, there's a change coming. Rowers don't often row in clear blue water, do they? SS

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