Push the limit
All right, today’s expression is push the limit. It means trying to do a little more than what’s allowed, without suffering consequences. If you have kids, or if you’ve ever been a kid, you probably know what it means to push the limit. It means you know what’s allowed, but you try to get a little bit more. When I was a teenager, I had a bedtime of about 10:00. I tried to push the limits by listening to the radio in bed. The idea of the bed time, of course, is that I would actually go to sleep at 10:00, but I tried to push the limits. I got in bed, I turned the lights off at 10:00. But I pushed the limits by turning on my radio and listening to baseball games. I was trying to follow the rules, but still get away with a little something extra.
Kids try to push the limits all the time, but adults do it too. Google’s arts and culture app lets you upload a picture of a person to find that person’s match in artwork. If you uploaded a picture of an apple, you wouldn’t get any results. The rule is, it has to be a person, right? So, someone tried to push the limit by uploading a picture of a cartoon character; then someone else pushed the limit farther and uploaded a picture of her dog.
Just yesterday, I saw someone trying to push the limit at the airport. On flights in the United States, you can take one small suitcase and one so-called “personal item,” like a backpack or a purse on the plain. But you always see people trying to push the limit with extra shopping bags and coats and things that they’re carrying in excess of the two-item limit. They want to see just how much stuff they can carry without getting in trouble; they’re trying to push the limit of just two bags on the plane.
That’s the end of the program today. When we transitioned to episodes twice a week instead of weekly, I said I’d make the episodes shorter, but this one is already pretty long. Seems I’m pushing the limit of my new rule about episode length, right?
Remember to check out the new Monday edition of Plain English, when we’ll talk about the world’s most expensive bottle of vodka—and where it was stolen from. See you then.
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