Louise Bremner wrote:
> Kevin Gowen <kgowenNOSPAM@myfastmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>> Most of the time, I can figure out the meanings of various Seppongo
>>> idioms from the context (although I recently discovered I'd gone
>>> wildly wrong with "take a rain check"), but there's one idiom that's
>>> confusing me. Is there a website somewhere that gives detailed
>>> explanations? Googling on the phrase in question just brings up
>>> pages that use it, not a description of what it means.
>> 
>> What's the confusing idiom?
> 
> I daren't post it here, since it's so public and I don't want to
> trigger another flame fest if that person gets to see it later.

You can email me if you like. I'm tastefully discreet.

>> Others have given you great references but have ignored the real
>> issue: What was your "rain check" howler?
> 
> Not so much of a "howler". I'd guessed at its meaning from films, and
> so 
> took it as a polite brush-off: "Thanks but no thanks". So I got
> somewhat miffed when someone used it at me, until he later came back
> and said he 
> now had time--the movies never show that bit.

You did end up learning of its origins in baseball, yes?

-- 
Kevin Gowen
"I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New
York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White
House."  
 - Columbia University professor Eric Foner in the London Review of
Books, on the attacks of 11 September 2001. A new study has recently
suggested that the inferno that destroyed the World Trade Center and
killed thousands of innocents was indeed more frightening than the
rhetoric of the Bush administration.