[Ads-l] ankle-biters

George Thompson george.thompson at NYU.EDU
Wed May 9 15:25:49 UTC 2018


>From an article in the Business section of today's (Wednesday's) NYTimes,
about plans to include hotels in housing,
​ ​
office, restaurant and shopping projects:

“If you have a successful mixed-use center with lots of apparel stores,
you’ll attract tenants and it’s less likely that a shopping center will be
built near you,” said Ms. Olshan, whose firm expects to open a hotel and
retail development in Boston’s Haymarket district this year. “But with
hotels, we’re seeing more and more ankle biters.”

​I get the idea here, I suppose, more or less, but the image is certainly
strange.  Are the ankle-biters unforeseen problems, or ​foreseen problems,
or what?  I know the expression that something or other "will come back to
bite him someday".  I don't think I've heard is as "come back to bite him
in the ankle".  But then, I'm often out-of-touch.

GAT

-- 
George A. Thompson
The Guy Who Still Looks Stuff Up in Books.
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998.

But when aroused at the Trump of Doom / Ye shall start, bold kings, from
your lowly tomb. . .
L. H. Sigourney, "Burial of Mazeen", Poems.  Boston, 1827, p. 112

The Trump of Doom -- also known as The Dunghill Toadstool.  (Here's a
picture of his great-grandfather.)
http://www.parliament.uk/worksofart/artwork/james-gillray/an-excrescence---a-fungus-alias-a-toadstool-upon-a-dunghill/3851

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