“put a sock in it”

when you tell someone to “put a sock in it”, what you are telling him/her to do is to stop talking. In other words, you are telling the person to shut up. The expression is mostly used in British English in informal contexts. The Americans tend to say “put a cork in it”. Here are a few examples. *Hey Varsha, put a sock in it, will you? *Vishnu has gone on long enough. It’s about time he put a cork in it. *Put a sock in it you two. The baby is sleeping.

According to some scholars this expression began to be used after the first gramophone was invented. Do you remember those old gramophones? Those funny looking things fitted with huge horns that served as speakers? Maybe you have seen one in the movies — especially movies set in the 1940s and 1950s. In order to play the old gramophone, you had to do two things — you had to wind it up, and you had to attach the huge horn so that the sound could be heard. But the problem with the early gramophone was that you couldn’t control the volume; there was no volume control. So how did people reduce the volume? Simple, they put a sock in the horn to muffle the sound! Pretty smart, wouldn’t you say?

The Hindu- ‘Know Your English’ Series, August 05, 2003

“compare” and “liken”

When you compare two products what you are doing is looking for similarities and differences between the two. You look at the two things and see in what ways they are alike and in what ways they are different. And after you have made the comparison, you invariably come to a conclusion as to which is better. Before we buy anything, we usually compare different products. *They compared the two products and decided not to buy either. *Why do you want to compare the two samples?

When you “liken” something to something else, what you are saying is that one is similar to the other. You are not looking for the differences in this case. You are merely stating that the two objects or the two persons are very much alike. The word is normally used in formal contexts.

*Ganesh has been likened to Tendulkar. *The article has likened the minister to a saint. *The students have likened the new university to a supermarket.

The Hindu- ‘Know Your English’ Series, July 29, 2003