Sitting on their hands?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Sitting on their hands?

Obviously one can’t do much from this position.

Hence metaphorically speaking, if you sit on your hands when something happens, you do nothing, especially when you’re supposed to do something. For example, “when we needed help from Mary, she just sat on her hands”. The Chinese equivalent, in this case, will be 袖手旁观 – she tucked both hands in her sleeves and watched on, not lending a finger.

This term is also used to call out people in the audience who fail to applaud when they’re supposed to. For instance, “the afternoon audience was apathetic, sitting on their hands for the whole performance”. One or two things must have happened here. The performance was poor. The audiences are impolite or are unable to appreciate the performance.

Or perhaps they have all fallen asleep.

Anyways, according to the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, “both usages of this metaphor for passivity date from the first half of the 1900s.”

Here, an example of each usage, first for inaction, second for failing to clap hands:

1. Wall Street banks got greedy. Credit rating agencies acted as enablers. Congress and federal regulators looked the other way. It’s become the familiar refrain for those investigating what caused the financial crisis, as reported earlier on Credit.com. Now a new, authoritative report confirms it. In a 635-page tome released Wednesday, the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations reached the same conclusions.