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Sun 12 Nov, 2017 01:32 pm
The following is an excerpt from a Washington Post article:
LONDON — For centuries, this modest little island in the North Sea has punched well above its weight on the international stage: It built a global empire, beat back the Nazi tide and stood shoulder to shoulder with the United States during a decades-long standoff with the Soviets.
My questions are these:
1) Why is it "beat back" and not just "beat"?
2) Why is it "a decades-long standoff" and not "a decade-long standoff"?
Thank you.
1. To beat back is to repel, or make an incoming thing stop and go backwards, whereas to beat is simply to overcome or defeat.
Since, as King Canute demonstrated, tides cannot be beaten back, I call that lazy writing.
2. The Cold War lasted more than one decade.
@centrox,
centrox wrote:2. The Cold War lasted more than one decade.
1947 - 1991 approximately (a bit more than 4 decades).
@centrox,
centrox wrote:1. To beat back is to repel, or make an incoming thing stop and go backwards, whereas to beat is simply to overcome or defeat.
Since, as King Canute demonstrated, tides cannot be beaten back, I call that lazy writing.
Also, tides, having come in, thereupon proceed to go out again, without any intervention by humans.
It's an idiom: You can beat back the tide, go against the tide, go with the tide, swim with the tide, etc.
The "tide" here is representing something unstoppable, consistently moving, inevitable.
"Decades-long" is used to express multiple ten- year time units.
Their marriage was a decades-long misery for him.
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