Push the limit

To "push the limit" is to try to do a bit more than what's allowed

Today's story: Painting app
Explore more: Lesson #15
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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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[/mepr-rules]
Story: Painting app