Long leash?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Long leash?

This phrase reminds me of another one, a popular expression involving rope instead of leash. If you give an idiot enough rope, that is, he’ll eventually hang himself.

Have you ever heard of this? Anyways, here the rope means the same thing, freedom. Give people enough freedom and they’ll use it to hang themselves with. Meaning? Too much freedom can be too much of a good thing to many people. It’ll lead them to getting completely out of control. It’ll lead them to ruin.

Eventually, that is. At any rate, allow people to do what they want and they’ll reveal their true colors, however terrible those colors are to see.

Now, read a few examples of people giving or given leash, or rope:

1. The last members of the original Winamp team have said goodbye to AOL and the door has all but shut on the Nullsoft era, BetaNews has learned. Only a few employees remain to prop up the once-ubiquitous digital audio player with minor updates, but no further improvements to Winamp are expected.

Winamps abandonment comes as no surprise to those close to the company who say the software has been on life support since the resignation of Nullsoft founder and Winamp creator Justin Frankel last January.

The marriage of Nullsoft and AOL was always one of discontent. After AOL acquired the small company in 1999 for around $100 million, the young team of Winamp developers was assimilated into a strict corporate culture that begged for rebellion. Although Nullsoft was initially given a long leash by AOL, it wasn’t long until the two ideologies collided. Frankel and his team were accustomed to simply brainstorming ideas over coffee and bringing them to the masses without approval. So when Frankel and fellow Nullsoft developer Tom Pepper devised a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing system, dubbed Gnutella, parent AOL was left in the dark.