I'm always on the lookout for, shall we say, 'creative' spellings of words and phrases.
Today I found this one:
This Edition is Chalked Full...
Actually, it's chock-full, meaning full to the limit.
The origin at Merrium-Webster isn't all that helpful: "Middle English chokkefull, probably from choken to choke +full" Then again, it dates back to the 15h century and probably it made more sense then.
Another one I spotted recently:
...in the throws of ecstasy.
No, it wasn't about an excited baseball pitcher, so they meant "throes of ecastasy." They weren't talking about the drug, either, by the way.
Throe is defined as a pang or spasm. Throes is defined as a hard or painful struggle, which suggest being in the throes of ecstacy isn't much fun. That's confirmed by the medical definition of ecstasy: "A trance state in which intense absorption (as in religious ideation) is accompanied by loss of sense perception and voluntary control."
Finally, we have this:
"It's hard to underestimate how fantastic this performance is."
Since this was referring to great box office results for "Despicable Me," no, it's not. I could easily say, "These results? Meh." That would be underestimating how fantastic the results were.
What they meant was it's hard to overestimate how fantastic it is. Even if I said it was super fantastic that might not be an overestimation.
