[Ads-l] ankle-biters

[Dan Goncharoff]

In the financial world, an "ankle-world" is a smaller firm, under $500
million market value, that can be an irritant to larger, more established
firms.

In the context of the article, my WAG is that the MV is irrelevant, and the
focus is on the irritation to a larger entity.

DanG

On Wed, May 9, 2018 at 11:25 AM, George Thompson <george.thompson at nyu.edu>
wrote:

> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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