Monday, August 15, 2011

What does "You're in suspension!" mean?

I'm from the U.S., and I'm hoping that someone from the U.K. can help me to understand something that I heard in a song by the Pistols (Liar). The quote in a fuller context is "You're in suspension. You're a liar." I have no idea what "You're in suspension." means. Here we often use the adjective "suspended": students can be suspended from schools, employees or athletes can be (temporarily) suspended for doing something wrong or breaking rules, etc. Events can also be temporarily suspended. We also use the noun "suspension", but rarely the prepositional phrase "in suspension". In any case, I have no idea what that means in the context of this song. As a teenager, I wrongly umed that the singer was saying "You're in suspicion" because you would logically consider suspicious anything said by a person that lies as a common practice (even though we would typically say "under suspicion" and not "in suspicion"). I find it interesting now how many things were said in other songs that went completely "over my head" so to speak because these are words or expressions that are not used or even understood in the U.S. Here are some others that I encountered. "I'm no dog's body!" (I'm no gofer!), "chalk and cheese" ("as different as night and day" or "apples and oranges"). I also found odd their reference to a "shopping scheme" (shopping trip? or shopping outing?) because the word "scheme" in the U.S. often has a bad connotation (meaning a devious plot or something similiar, although it sometimes has other meanings). By the way, we spell "gofer" with an "f" to distinguish it from "gopher" (the rodent) because it comes from the words "go for" (i.e. your errand boy who goes somewhere for you)

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