In the original sense, since a lot of boys (and a few girls, too perhaps) tossed spitballs for idle entertainment and without serious purpose or intent, people began to describe exchanging rough ideas in the same way.
Nowadays, people, especially businesspeople, like to say they’re spitballing when they make a proposal to see other people’s responses and reactions.
If all of them are doing this together, they will be, to use a lofty sounding business-speak, brainstorming.
By the way, I like American idioms and expressions a lot. Consistent with the fact that America is a young country, American English often sounds juvenile, even delinquent, in the sense that it sometimes sounds king of lawless, or law-less, and unruly or, rather, rule-less.
Which, I am sure, if you ask the child in all of us, is just great.
All right, here are media examples of people spitballing everywhere:
1. This seems a good time to gauge the filmic prospects of The Turner Diaries. I bought my copy—out of raw, morbid curiosity—at a Virginia gun show in the mid-90s. Back then, the novel’s Banana Time fanaticism seemed tailor-made for the antigovernment mania of the Clinton era. It even inspired a half-dozen real-life crime sprees, including the Oklahoma City bombing.
Written by Andrew Macdonald (the pen name of neo-Nazi activist William Pierce) in the late 70s, The Turner Diaries is a look back at the great global race war of the 90s, told from the perspective of a diary found in the far future. The book follows Earl Turner, a Joe Sixpack-type who gets radicalized after jackbooted government thugs bust into his house and confiscate his guns. Turner joins a shadowy organization (imaginatively called “the Organization”) and wages war on America.
【Spitball some ideas?】相关文章:
★ 图忆英语简明教程
最新
2020-09-15
2020-08-28
2020-08-21
2020-08-19
2020-08-14
2020-08-12