Don't get ahead of yourself?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Don't get ahead of yourself?

It’s like a mom saying to her baby: “Don’t run before you can walk.” If the baby tries to run before he or she can walk steadily, they fall and sometimes get hurt.

That’s the idea. Metaphorically speaking, we get ahead of ourselves by doing or planning for something before its time, its proper time.

I find a good example of thinking ahead of oneself in David Copperfield, the semi-autobiographical novel by Charles Dickens. In it, Miss Betsey Trotwood, David’s great-aunt, came to see David’s mother prior to David’s birth. She insisted on asking the mother in labor to name the future child after her, the aunt, and call the child Betsey Trotwood Copperfield.

Because, of course, that she had “a presentiment that it must be a girl”.

Miss Betsey Trotwood got ahead of herself that time.

She got ahead of herself big time, the consequence being that she stormed out of the house upon learning that “she”, the baby girl, had turned out to be a boy – never to return.

That is a great old story from the great Dickens, who died in 1870.

Now, let’s browse through the Internet for more recent examples:

1. Thursday at Wimbledon was the lull after the storm, and preceding the drizzle. Lightning didn’t strike twice in this same place, and only one spark flew, when Bernard Tomic, in aside, said that Roger Federer might have gotten ahead of himself after Rafael Nadal was dumped from the tournament, leading to his own demise. Tomic is an authority on getting ahead of one's self.