break off
v. phr.— «“I told them I just reached down and picked up some of the money sitting there on the floor of the van and said, ‘Break me off.’…What’s wrong with that? Wouldn’t you want to break off some of the money for yourself, too?”…”You think the judge is going to believe anything you say now? Break me off. He’s gonna break you off, all right. Break you right off into prison.”» —by Edward Humes No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court Mar. 5, 1996. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
The so-called “lifestyle influencer accent” you hear in videos on TikTok and YouTube, where someone speaks with rising tones at the end of sentences and phrases, suggesting that they’re about to say something important, is a form of what linguists...