Hi,i am a hardworking English learner from China,today i get confused of this sentence "George Bush gets pipped to "Foot in Mouth" award" What is the meaning of get pipped to " and is it a former phrases,is there any same phrase as it?Thank you!!
2007-12-13 14:53:00 · 5 answers · asked by gee 2 in Society & Culture ➔ Languages
not former but formal,sorry~
2007-12-13 14:54:37 · update #1
To get pipped is to go down to a surprise defeat in a close contest. Imagine that I am a runner and it looks like I am going to win, but at the very end the next person suddenly pulls up and goes past me. That person has pipped me or I have been/gotten pipped.
In this case, a lot of people would have expected George Bush to win the "Foot in Mouth" award because he is known for making mistakes when he speaks. However, in the end, someone else was the surprise winner.
To get pipped is definitely not a formal expression. You would find it in familiar speech and in writing that has a somewhat light tone, but it would not normally belong in a university essay.
2007-12-13 15:18:35 · answer #1 · answered by obro 3 · 4⤊ 0⤋
I think you may have misunderstood what they said. It could be they said "picked", but I recently heard an article that someone else had said something even stranger than things GWB has said, so it may have been a word suggesting he was outdone.
Unless it was in someplace outside the US, my guess is that you simply heard it wrong. "Pip" isn't even used as a verb here.
2007-12-13 15:06:16 · answer #2 · answered by open4one 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
I have never even heard the word PIP before.
2007-12-13 15:13:49 · answer #3 · answered by NOT aNOTher blonde! 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
there are various a thank you to check English. i think of the appropriate way is thru speaking with others. i think of you could ask questions in hindi as long as there are some hindi human beings here in yahoo that could talk English.
2016-11-03 05:16:40 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
to be honest, it doesn't even make sense to me and i am a native English speaker...
2007-12-13 15:10:00 · answer #5 · answered by Ryan P 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋