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Horses for courses

Posted by ESC on December 24, 2007

In Reply to: Horses for courses posted by Mukund Lele on December 24, 2007

: Please could you explain the meaning of the phrase:
: "Horses for courses"?

People (and horses) do best when they are in familiar territory.

"horses for courses: A mostly British expression urging someone to stick to the thing he knows best, horses for courses comes from the horse racing world, where it is widely assumed that some horses race better on certain courses than on others. In 1898 a British writer noted in the first recorded use of the expression: 'A familiar phrase on the turf is 'horses for courses.'" From "Encylopedia of Word and Phrase Origins" by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, 1997).

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