On the Cutting of Breaks
Posted by Neal on August 14, 2005
Today I read about a group of high-school kids in Pennsylvania who are facing felony charges for repeatedly circumventing various safeguards and barriers in order to use their school-issued laptop computers inappropriately. They’ve now put up a website where they present their side of the story, a main point of which seems to be that their bad behaviour is the school’s fault, since the administrators did not make it sufficiently difficult to hack the system. The linguistically interesting part is the name of the students’ website: CutUsABreak.org.
Cut them a break? I didn’t know you could do that. I thought you could give someone a break, but that if any cutting was to be done, it would be a cutting of slack. It looks like I was wrong, though; a Google search for “cut * a break” yields plenty of hits. Now you can mix or match, as you please:
|Choose 1:||Choose 1:|
I have now filed cut me a break along with
- it’s not rocket surgery
- the way the cookie bounces
- back to day go
- under the eight ball
- my significant half
- looking for fresh blood
in my list of idiom blends.
(BTW, if you want to read the school’s side of the “Cut Us a Break” story, you can find it here.)