The writer of Ecclesiastes observed that the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong – but he’d probably never tried to buy tickets online for a well advertised new play or show. If you don’t click the ‘Book Now’ button the instance they go on sale you’ll discover that a legion of trigger happy internet buyers have cleared the shelves of all but the most expensive tickets. And patiently waiting for the reviews of anything before you book is like standing at a bus stop on Christmas Day.
In other words you’d just be flogging a dead horse. Well, I hope you wouldn’t say that because – like a refusal – it often offends, at least according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, much better and more succinctly known as PETA.
Apparently, many animal lovers in general but especially vegans and vegetarians are upset by the disrespect to animals suggested by phrases like ‘bring home the bacon’, ‘take the bull by the horns’, and the admittedly rather unpleasant ‘more than one way to skin a cat’.
Suggested alternatives to those phrases included ‘bring home the bagels’, ‘take the flower by the thorns’, and ‘more than one way to peel a potato’. Whether they make any more sense than the traditional ones is open to question. And I suspect that PETA is being provocative rather than deadly serious about this. So let’s just resolve to let sleeping dogs lie as far as this subject is concerned.
