That sinking feeling_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

That sinking feeling

That's it. That's how it feels to be out of one's depth. You feel like you've got yourself "thrown in at the deep end" and you get "that sinking feeling" (look both expressions up if you will).

Likewise one may feel out of their depth in other areas of life. Say, you're asked to make a speech to a group of computer scientists and you know little about computers. Or you are asked to talk about China's foreign trade with Russia and you know next to nothing about the subject. You feel you're in unfamiliar territory and you might be unable to cope competently.

You may ask why are people invited to talk about subject matters of which they know next to nothing about? I don't know. It happens all the time. You should address the question to the so-called "experts" that give speeches everywhere, on campus, TV and radio. They might know.

Anyways, here's an example of "out of one's depth" in use from an article on WH Auden (A Voice of His Own, February 3, 2007, The Guardian). Quoted here is a meeting between the author of this article (James Fenton) and the renowned poet.

Actually meeting Auden was an experience that left us quite out of our depth, and there were awkward silences in our small group discussion. I remember desperately trying to think of questions. I asked him what he thought of the latest generation of poets – Ted Hughes, for instance. Brushing the inquiry aside, Auden paused for a moment before saying with a smile that he always suspected questions of that kind of having some malicious purpose. As soon as he said this I recognized with a blush that I had indeed been egging him on to say something perhaps disobliging about Hughes or his contemporaries, although I had no motive for doing so other than hero-worship. I must have crudely felt that, if Auden was the great poet of his day, he himself should say so.