1. What is the meaning and origin of ‘riding roughshod over someone’?
(K. S. Sundaram, Bangalore)
When you ‘ride roughshod over someone’, you dominate the person quite ruthlessly. You just walk all over him. You do what you want to, and you don’t really care what the other person thinks. If the circumstances demand it, you use brutal force to get the desired results.
The new boss is a bully and rides roughshod over everyone.
The term ‘roughshod’ refers to the type of shoe that was often mounted on a horse’s hoof. The word ‘shod’, as you probably know, is related to the word ‘shoe’; in order to ensure that the horse didn’t slip, the shoes were often kept rough. To make sure that the animal had good traction, what the blacksmith did was to leave the nailheads projecting from the shoes. During times of war, horses were armed with these projecting nails on their hooves; the nails provided better grip on slippery ground, and they enabled the horse to injure or kill fallen enemy soldiers. It was during the 18th century that the idiom began to mean ‘to bully someone’.
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2. What is the meaning of ‘fashionably late’?
(Dilip Saxena, Kanpur)
When you arrive at a party ‘fashionably late’, what you are doing is making an appearance a few minutes after the scheduled time. You don’t turn up an hour or two after the event has begun, you are late only by a few minutes. This is your way of telling others that you are a busy or popular person. Most actors and politicians are fashionably late for events in order to create the impression that they were busy elsewhere.
As expected, the children arrived fashionably late for the party.
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3. Is it OK to say, ‘She pleaded with her daughter to never go there’?
(K. Madhusudhan, Vizag)
No, it isn’t. In such constructions, careful users of the language would place the words ‘never’ and ‘not’ before the infinitive ‘to’ — not after it.
It is very dangerous. I promise never/not to do it again.
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4. What is the meaning of ‘qualm’?
(Murali Pillai, Thiruvananthapuram)
The word rhymes with ‘calm’ and ‘arm’; the ‘qu’ is like the ‘qu’ in ‘quit’ and ‘quick’ and the ‘l’ is silent.
It is pronounced ‘kwaam’. This is one way of pronouncing the word. When you have qualms about something, you have misgivings about it; you have this feeling of doubt as to whether you are doing the right thing or not.
The man had no qualms about stealing from his own parents.
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5. What is the difference between ‘squash’ and ‘quash’?
(B. Hamsa, Coimbatore)
‘Quash’ is a term which is used quite frequently in legal contexts to mean ‘to set aside’ or ‘annul’. When a judge, for example, ‘quashes’ a conviction, what he is doing is stating officially that the earlier decision taken is no longer acceptable or valid.
As expected, the minister’s conviction was quashed.
When you ‘quash’ something, you forcibly suppress it.
The dictator sent his army to quash the rebellion.
When you ‘squash’ something, you apply so much pressure on it that you make it lose its shape.
The children had fun squashing all the clay models.
Like the word ‘quash’, ‘squash’ can also mean to forcibly suppress something.
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“If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.” —
J. P. Getty
S. UPENDRAN