Imagine yourself speeding down the street and at an intersection you find yourself having to swerve to avoid colliding with the building on the corner. If you do end up running into this problem, it’s safe to say you’ve made a pretty serious mistake.
From this scene emerged the idiomatic expression occupy a corner. While it literally means “hitting the corner of a building at the intersection of two streets,” metaphorically it means making a mistake, making a mistake, or allowing oneself to be deceived.
occupy a corner
screw up/make a mistake
you might occupy a corner If you’ve been tricked into spending a lot of money on something of very little value, or you’ve scolded someone only to find out you were dead wrong.
But how could you make such a mistake?
How could you make such a mess?
the term corner from Guangzhou (corner), which in turn originates from chant. Cantor It can refer to the point where two interior walls meet in a room or space, or it can refer to the junction of two exterior walls at the intersection of a building.
Another expression for this word is in every cornermeaning is Everywhere (or literally “on every corner”).
Synonyms for this idiomatic expression are caught a crabliterally catch crabs. This expression comes from the field of sport fishing. When you cast a fishing line into the ocean, there is always a good chance that a crab will take the bait rather than a fish. In this situation, the crabs often put up a violent struggle, often leading anglers to mistakenly believe they have caught a lot of fish.
Heather Broster is a graduate with honors in linguistics from the University of Western Ontario. She is an aspiring polyglot, fluent in English and Italian, as well as varying degrees of fluency in Japanese, Welsh and French. Originally from Toronto, Heather has lived in several countries, notably Italy for six years. Her main research areas are language acquisition, education and bilingual teaching.
