Please tell me what it means.
Thank you.
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A little more context would be very helpful but I guess itās a line a song that has something to do with drinking alcohol.
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ā¦some people need the privacy of a hotel. Some people are picky eaters or on a specific diet. Some people will only fly and not take buses. Some people like to tip the bottle back quite a bit. And some people are just not that open-minded.
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Some people like to drink (alcohol).
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Hi Torsten,
As you say it has to do with drinking alcohol. I found the expression in the Urban Dictionary.
Here is its example: āHe was tipping the bottle after an AA meeting.ā So, the meeting wasnāt quite useful or helpful to him and he started boozing after it. Itās also the title of a song by Gabriel Sullivan: āTip back the bottleā.You can ckeck it out on Amazon.
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Hi Marc, thanks lot for sharing your thoughts on the expression āto tip the bottleā. However, in our case the expression is āto tip the bottle backā and I wonder what exactly the difference between both might be. Any ideas?
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Hi Torsten,
In my opinion there is very little or no difference between them. To tip the bottle= to move it so that one side his higher than the other, like someone who drinks a bottle of beer. Adding ābackā to it simply emphasizes this movement. Like this photo shows
The context of Thanh_Tranās tells me that some people are very careful about choosing what they like to eat, some of them are even on a dietā¦Some people like to tip the bottle back, actually admitting that they need a drink quite often to forget their misery perhaps or simply because of enjoyment. In others words all of them do what they are used to in certain circumstances and then there are those who will do exactly the same, but are ashamed to admit theyāre just like the other ones described in this text. In fact thatās what the writer means with some people are just not that open-minded. In fact they are hypocrites. Tell me if this makes some sense.
By the way Torsten, have you come across this phrase: āThe quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogā, if you havenāt, what makes this phrase so special, as it were? (Iām sure you do know it, but just to make sure)
Marc
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Hi Torsten,
You liked my post, but does it make sense to you? Iād like to know, dear friend.
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This is a classic typing exercise dating to probably the early 1900s, if not earlier. Note that it includes all the letters of the alphabet.
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Wikipedia contains a long history of the sentence. It indicates that youāre not the only person to be baffled by it.
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@Arinker Thank you for finally answering Marcās question. I just realized that I missed the question last year. Also, I was not aware that the phrase The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog used to be a writing exercise and I wonder if it is still used today. Do you happen to know?
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I donāt have direct experience with typing, writing or signaling with it, but the sentence is common knowledge, so I would assume it is still used.
The Wikipedia article describes its uses in the present tense:
āThe phrase is commonly used for touch-typing practice, testing typewriters and computer keyboards, displaying examples of fonts, and other applications involving text where the use of all letters in the alphabet is desired.ā
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Maybe Iām remembering wrong, but I remember it slightly differently.
The quick brown fox jumped over the slow lazy dog.
Iāve known this sentence since approximately the late 1960s. Since then Iāve heard or read it fairly regularly, including recently. I donāt know how widespread it is, but my āguessā is that in the US the large majority of people know the sentence, or have at least heard it before even if they donāt know itās a typing exercise.
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Thatās very interesting because I donāt think we have a sentence with a similar structure and purpose in German, at least Iām not aware of it and the same holds true for the Russians.
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They may have something similar but you havenāt heard of it. Even if itās not a single sentence, one way or another they need to ensure that typing students know every letter. They also need enough repetition of every letter so that muscle memory kicks in.
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I learned touch typing way back when I was a teenager and personal computers were almost none-existent using my taking my fatherās typewriter to the typing school because they didnāt even have enough typewriters for their students. None of my classmates understood why I would want to learn touch typing because back then there was very little demand for this type of skill unless you wanted to become a typist which was regarded as a female profession. Things have changed quite a bit since thenā¦
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When I was in school, typing was almost entirely a girl thing. If a guy took typing it was probably because thatās where the hot chicks were.
Personal computers hadnāt been invented yet. We didnāt even have calculators. The first programming class in my school was offered my senior year. They didnāt have a computer though. All they had was a card punch machine in a large closet. They took the cards to the local university each evening, then picked up the results before class the next morning. Then after waiting a day, theyād discover the program halted at line 3 because of a typo. 
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And now try to imagine what kind of technologies we will have access to 10 years from now. The average smartphone today has several times more compute power than the most powerful mainframe computer a few decades ago and now we are living in the age of machine learning where neural networks learn and evolve at an exponential rate which is hard to grasp for most of usā¦
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For several years now Iāve been predicting that for young people today, the aging process will be ācuredā during their lifetime. They could still die in other ways, but not from things associated with age. Aging is mutation. Without that mutation the body would stay young. This opens up serious ethical questions, but I think itās going to happen.
When I was young I thought that unscrambling DNA was impossible. If it could be done I thought it would take decades. Well they did it. Last year they did the DNA sequencing for Covid-19 in a few weeks.
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Getting back to the original question, Iām reminded of the words to tipple and tippler, meaning to drink habitually and a drinker. Neither is used much anymore, but they may have a common etymology with ātip back a few.ā
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