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Chris -- 2018-04-11
For “cut / head him off at the pass.”
Images of trail-riding cowboys and Indians crossing a footpath, perhaps.
Or maybe someone just learned the idiom from a person with a lisp.
“The trick is to anticipate it, reading your horse’s warning signs, and then cut him off at the path.”
“We need to be one step ahead of them to cut them off at the path.”
“Then, when she opened her mouth as though to protest, he cut her off at the path.”
“It is a familiar well worn path and I know that I need to head him off at the path before something unpleasant occurs.”
Even a CNN transcript of Obama when he was a candidate: “My wife cut me off at the path. She announced on 60 Minutes, she said, yeah, he used to smoke once in a while.”
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/ … bb.01.html
Would be interesting to see the video of that to see if it’s a transcription error or how he says it.
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Good one, larrybob, for a generation deprived of cowboy movies. I went looking for “cut ‘em off at the past” and google sent me to an earlier aside by Pat
“Head * off at the past†gets 1.42 million raw hits (no, I’m not kidding) – and 61 unique hits.
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Results 1 – 10 of about 1,420,000 for head * off at the past
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[Edit: Oops—“head * off at the past†crept in from an unyet finished posting that I was editing on the same page in order to save pixels.]
It’s now “440,000,000” hits :)
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