QUOTE(silvia-l @ Oct 28 2007, 08:10 PM) i am longtimenosee
Now the VOA Special English program WORDS AND THEIR STORIES.
From birth to death the word kick has been given an important part in expressing human experience. The proud and happy mother feels the first science of life, kicking inside her room. And that same life many years later comes to its end in a widely use expression to kick the bucket meaning to die.
The expression to kick the bucket is almost two hundred years old. One belief is that it started when an English stable man committed suicide by hanging himself while standing on a pail or bucket. He put a rope around his neck and tied it to a * of ceiling. And then kick the bucket away from under him. After a while, to die in any way was called kicking in the bucket.
Another old expression that comes from the England is to kick over the traces, meaning to resist a command of one's parents or to oppose a reject authority. Traces were the traces that help a horse on you to a * or plow. Sometimes an animal will build and kick over the traces.
The word kick sometimes is used to describe a complaint or some kind of dissatisfaction. Workers, for example, kick about long hours and low pay. There are times when workers are forced to kick that some of their wages to their employers as part of their job. This kick back is illegal.So is another kind of kick back.A secret payment made by a supplier to an official who buy supplies for a government or a company.
Kick around is a phrase that is heard often in American English. A person who is kicked around is someone who is treated badly. Usually he is not really being kicked by somebody's foot. He is just not being treated with the respect that all of us want. A person who has kicked around for most his life is someone who has spend his life moving from place to place. In this case, kicking around means moving often from one place to another.
Kick around has a third meaning when you use it with the word idea. When you kick around an idea, you are giving that idea some thought. There is not physical action when you kick a person upstairs, although the pay can be as strong. You kick a person upstairs by removing him from an important job and giving him a job that sounds more important but really is not. Still another meaning of the word kick is to free oneself Off a bad habit, such as smoking cigarettes. Healthful campaigns urge smokers to kick the habit.
This VOA Special English program WORDS AND THEIR STORIES was written by M.C.M. J was an *.I'm S.G. [right][snapback]1032623[/snapback][/right]
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