Sailing Terms in Everyday English
- Chock a' block
- Refers literally to the situation where pulling on the working line will not raise the load any further because the cheeks of one lifting block are already against the other. Figuratively this has come to mean that something is as full or as close as it can be.
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Famous quotes containing the words sailing, terms, everyday and/or english:
“I saw three ships come sailing by,
Come sailing by, come sailing by,
I saw three ships come sailing by,
On Christmas Day in the morning.”
—Unknown. As I Sat on a Sunny Bank. . .
Oxford Book of Light Verse, The. W. H. Auden, ed. (1938)
“We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1948)
“I always used to suffer a great deal if I let myself get too close to reality since the definitive world of the everyday with its hard edges and harsh light did not have enough resonance to echo the demands I made upon experience. It was as if I never experienced experience as experience. Living never lived up to the expectations I had of it—the Bovary syndrome.”
—Angela Carter (1942–1992)
“The “Communism” of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)