You really are the limit !

It has become a twenty-first-century idiom: “He was nearly twice the drink-drive limit”, reported our local television news a few weeks ago.

Logically, this statement fails on two scores. First, a limit is a fixed boundary, without width. ‘Twice a limit’ is (or should be recognised as) meaningless. Secondly, a person can not be a limit - not even once.

But this sort of conceptual confusion is, I suppose, the way that many of our English idioms originate: ‘Give over !’; ‘He tends to shoot off his mouth’; ‘The small of the back’.

Thus the language evolves. But it’s the pedant’s happy duty to observe and comment, and occasionally to express regret.

You really are the limit !