C'mon! Spice it up somebody !

[ozwinner]

Al

The free pot of MFKL is winging its way eastwards as we speak. Enjoy!

Col

Ohh be still my beating heart.
I have now gone all tingley in the nether regions with the thought.
I wait with baited breath, what ever that means??

Al

[bitingmidge]

I wait with baited breath, what ever that means??

The last time I saw a bloke with baited breath, he had just put on his Box prior to going out to bat, before realizing it had a liberal coating of Dencorub applied by persons unknown.


:eek: :eek: :eek:

P

[Driver]

Ohh be still my beating heart.
I have now gone all tingley in the nether regions with the thought.
I wait with baited breath, what ever that means??

Al

If that means your breath smells like bait then please don't breathe in this direction! :eek:

(Incidentally, I see your mate Chuck has been making derisory remarks about coalminers in another thread. Up the Republic!)

Col (the rabble-rouser)

[Driver]

The last time I saw a bloke with baited breath, he had just put on his Box prior to going out to bat, before realizing it had a liberal coating of Dencorub applied by persons unknown.


:eek: :eek: :eek:

P

Now y'see - if that batsman had been in the habit of applying MFKL, the Dencorub would have been unable to penetrate the lustre and would therefore have been rendered harmless.

[silentC]

I wait with baited breath, what ever that means??

Unless you mean 'bated breath', which means having the breath of a 'bate, short for reprobate.

[Grunt]

Ah, the internet has all the answers.

bate1 ( P ) Pronunciation Key (bt) tr.v. bat·ed, bat·ing, bates To lessen the force or intensity of; moderate: “To his dying day he bated his breath a little when he told the story” (George Eliot). See Usage Note at bait1. To take away; subtract.

Baited or Bated?

The correct spelling is actually bated breath but it’s so common these days to see it written as baited breath that there’s every chance it will soon become the usual form, to the disgust of conservative speakers and the confusion of dictionary writers. Examples in newspapers and magazines are legion; this one appeared in the Daily Mirror on 12 April 2003: “She hasn’t responded yet but Michael is waiting with baited breath”.
It’s easy to mock, but there’s a real problem here. Bated and baited sound the same and we no longer use bated (let alone the verb to bate), outside this one set phrase, which has become an idiom. Confusion is almost inevitable. Bated here is a contraction of abated through loss of the unstressed first vowel (a process called aphesis); it has the meaning “reduced, lessened, lowered in force”. So bated breath refers to a state in which you almost stop breathing through terror, awe, extreme anticipation, or anxiety.

Shakespeare is the first writer known to use it, in The Merchant of Venice: “Shall I bend low and, in a bondman’s key, / With bated breath and whisp’ring humbleness, / Say this ...”. Nearly three centuries later, Mark Twain employed it in Tom Sawyer: “Every eye fixed itself upon him; with parted lips and bated breath the audience hung upon his words, taking no note of time, rapt in the ghastly fascinations of the tale”.

For those who know the older spelling or who stop to consider the matter, baited breath evokes an incongruous image, which Geoffrey Taylor humorously (and consciously) captured in verse in his poem Cruel Clever Cat:

Sally, having swallowed cheese,
Directs down holes the scented breeze,
Enticing thus with baited breath
Nice mice to an untimely death.

[I’m indebted to Rainer Thonnes for telling me about this little ditty, which appears in an anthology called Catscript, edited by Marie Angel. However, it was first published in 1933 in a limited edition of Geoffrey Taylor’s poems entitled A Dash of Garlic.]

[silentC]

Jeez, Grunt, you spoiled all our fun. Here we were, the thread happily ticking along with the usual line of crap and you had to come along and spoil it by posting actual fact. I thought I knew you better than that.

[Grunt]

Sorry, just got back from spending 2 days in Brisbane. Still feeling a little strange.

[vsquizz]

Yeah Grunt, I'm just trying to work out the relevance?. Read below again carefully, with ****ed breath:

Shakespeare is the first writer known to use it, in The Merchant of Venice: “Shall I bend low and, in a bondman’s key, / With pancaked breath and whisp’ring humbleness, / Say this ...”. Nearly three centuries later, Mark Twain employed it in Tom Sawyer: “Every eye fixed itself upon him; with parted lips and pancaked breath the audience hung upon his words, taking no note of time, rapt in the ghastly fascinations of the tale”.

Cheers

[silentC]

Sorry, just got back from spending 2 days in Brisbane. Still feeling a little strange.

Oh yes, I can see how you would feel. Apology accepted!

Now, where were we? Ah yes...

Bated breath.....

[Daddles]

bate,[*]To moderate:

Does that make the official 'Bater' :confused:

Richard
whereas the rest of us are just 'baiters'

[silentC]

This is me leaving that last remark well alone....

[RETIRED]

Leave the crew of the ship in the other Forum please.

[Caliban]

Leave the crew of the ship in the other Forum please.

, where's the emoticon?
I assume you're being witty? :confused:

[RETIRED]

:confused: :eek: :mad: