ReedeMoore Idiom Update – Don’t Look a Gift Horse In the Mouth

Old Idiom – Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

 

Don't Look!

 

 

Translation – Don’t be an ungrateful jerk.  Be thankful for the things you are given and don’t criticize free things.  Basically.

Applicable Situations – When I used to complain at law firm lunches if there was no hot food; when people complain when you take them to the skybox of a baseball game that they can’t really see the field; when people complain that the portion size of the free supermarket samples aren’t big enough; When I gave some kid my old Playstation 2 and he looked at it, and then looked at me, and then looked at it again, and then looked back at me without once showing any emotion in his face; When sports journalists complain about anything (your job is to write and go on TV to talk about whether grown men ran, jumped and caught a ball to your liking, just be happy).

Origin – Much like you can tell the age of trees from the rings, people can gauge the relative age of a horse by how far its teeth tend to protrude due to the recessing of a horse’s gums as it ages.  If you are looking into the mouth of the horse, you are doing so to assess it’s relative age and health.  And for some reason, you aren’t supposed to do that.  You are supposed to just accept an old horse.  What if it’s wormy or something.  Like, ok, thanks for pawning off your old horse on me and leaving me with a vet bill, that’s exactly what I wanted, an elderly horse.  

First of all, who the hell was giving away all these horses in the first place?  This is an idiom in desperate need of an update…I supply the choices, you supply the votes…Vote I said!

Investor Education

I was doing some research on a class that I will be teaching about securities and understanding various financial instruments when I came across this.  http://www.osc.gov.on.ca/Investor/Resources/res_characteristics-of-securities_en.pdf

I’m was a Securities litigator, General Counsel to an asset management company and launched a mutual fund, and this didn’t really help me out so much.  Wait a minute, let me tilt my head to the side a little…ok,  OH, OK, now I get it.