WORD POWER
Hearing and understanding
Prerana Trehan

"I have heard it through the grapevine that Nikhil dumped you. Is it true?" Meera asked her friend Namrata. "I would like to set the record straight", answered Namrata, "Nikhil didn’t dump me, I was the one who called off the relationship."

"Why? What happened?" asked Meera. "We fought all the time and it seemed as if we had lost sight of why we were together. I felt something was wrong, but at first I dismissed it as a figment of my imagination and didn’t speak to him about it. When I finally asked him where I stood with him, he did not give me a direct answer. I got the message that he was having second thoughts about our relationship"

"I don’t know all the ins and outs of your situation, but I never thought Nikhil would turn out to be like this. I hope your walking out on him has taught him a lesson," said Meera, thoughtfully. "I don’t know about that," replied Namrata, "but his strange behaviour certainly gave me food for thought, though what beats me is where I went wrong."

"Don’t blame yourself for what went wrong, just put it down to experience," advised Meera.

Hear something on the grapevine: hear something from someone who heard it from someone else

To set/put the record straight: to tell the true facts about a situation in order to show people that what they previously believed was not correct

Lose sight of something: to forget about an important idea or a fact because you are thinking too much about other things

Be a figment of your/the imagination: if something is a figment of your imagination, it seems real although it is not

Know where you stand: to know what someone thinks about you, how they expect you to behave and how they are likely to behave themselves

Get the message: to understand what someone is trying to tell you even if they are not expressing themselves directly

Have second thoughts: if you have second thoughts about something, you change your opinion or start having doubts about it

The ins and outs: the details or facts about something

Teach someone a lesson: to punish someone so that they will not behave badly again

Give someone food for thought: to make someone think seriously about something

What beats me: something that you say when you cannot understand something

Put something down to experience: to decide that instead of being upset about something bad that has happened, you will learn from it

The phrase ‘the buck stops here’ means to take responsibility for something. This phrase is thought to have originated from card games that use a marker called a buck. Players take turns to deal the cards and the buck is used to mark the player who is dealing the cards for the game in progress. When the buck is passed to the next player, the responsibility for dealing becomes his.

Stopping the buck is to accept responsibility for dealing. This phrase was popularised by former US President Harry Truman who kept a sign with the phrase inscribed on his desk. The media interpreted the sign to mean that Truman was accepting responsibility for all that went on in the US government, but the reality may have been different. Truman was a poker player and he knew exactly what the ‘buck’ was — it was the marker that identified the person who called the game, or in essence, set the rules. Truman may have been saying that he was in charge and would set the rules, a statement that was a bit different from his saying that he would just accept responsibility.

(Reference: Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms)