Grind to a halt

Grind to a halt

Today we’re going to talk about the English expression “grind to a halt.” What does it mean when a machine or a system “grinds to a halt”? It means that it slowly stops working. There are different definitions of “ grind .” I grind coffee beans every morning. Your local meat market might grind beef or pork right there in a shop. When a machine is grinding, that’s not usually good. The parts are rubbing up against each other and making a loud, alarming noise .

That’s what I want you to think about. I want you to think about a machine—it could even be your car—think about a machine where something has gone badly wrong . The parts haven’t been lubricated or a belt snapped or something broke, who knows. Something went wrong. It’s making a terrible noise and eventually all movement stops . There’s smoke hanging in the air . The machine is broken. If your car grinds to a halt, then you’ll probably need to call a tow truck . If a machine in a factory grinds to a halt, you’ll probably need an engineer or a specialist to come take a look.

Now that you have this imagery in your mind, we can talk about what it means for a process to grind to a halt. When we say that a process grinds to a halt, something important—something critical—to that process has stopped working. As a result, the whole process begins to break down and then stops entirely.

International tourism has ground to a halt during the pandemic. People are not able to cross borders or take long flights due to the travel restrictions . Being able to move from place to place is essential to international tourism, and as a result that whole industry has shut down.

I will say that we often use “grind to a halt” with a little bit of an exaggeration . Earlier in this lesson, I said that without the important work of global cargo ships, trade between countries would grind to a halt. Since the ships carry 80 percent of all goods between countries, they are pretty important. But the US and Canada trade goods without using cargo ships. So I don’t mean that all global trade would stop completely; but I do mean that most of it would, a large, large share of it would stop. In that way, it’s a bit of an exaggeration. But that type of exaggeration is typical with this phrase.

Here’s another example. Passenger trains in the US are required to have a new safety system called Positive Train Control. The federal government requires all local railroads to implement this system by December 31 this year. Two big systems—suburban train systems in Illinois and New Jersey—have not yet finished implementing this system. If they don’t finish by December 31, suburban rail service in Illinois and New Jersey could grind to a halt. The suburban trains would have to stop running if they don’t have this system finalized. They wouldn’t literally grind to a halt—it would still be physically possible to run them. But they would not be allowed to run the trains without this new safety system, so we say the service would grind to a halt. It would inelegantly stop.

When a winter storm hits and dumps a foot of snow on northern cities , life grinds to a halt. When transportation workers go on strike in France, life in big cities grinds to a halt.

Without JR editing the audio and posting the new lessons to Spotify and the web site, Plain English would grind to a halt. Luckily we have him dutifully working hard to deliver you your dose of Plain English each week!

Quote of the Week

I went looking for a shipping-related quote for today and I found a good one, by the long-deceased American politician George William Curtis. Here it is: “It is not the ship so much as the skillful sailing that assures the prosperous voyage .” I like that one; I think it has broad applicability . It’s not necessarily the best equipment you need, but a good operator of that equipment in order to meet with success. “It is not the ship so much as the skillful sailing that assures the prosperous voyage,” says George William Curtis.

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