If you’re like me, you often sneak off to Urban Dictionary and Google to uncover what various shorthand acronyms mean. I usually take a stab at figuring them out myself before looking. Sometimes I’m right, sometimes my guess is far off the mark.
The other day at work I said something like “don’t get snowed by that” and was met with puzzled looks and a “what does that mean?” I thought they meant what did I mean by the whole sentence but in fact they had never heard that bit of idiom. Ha! I said, usually I’m looking up those letters mixed in with tweets and posts to see what they mean – maybe you should look up ‘get snowed’!
We had a little discussion about it – snowed like “snowed in” covered with snow vs the cocaine-intoxicated-related references vs “snowed under“. I thought – wonder when that came about – surely it predates the cocaine-laden 80’s… Mainly though I was amazed that I could say something that made people wonder – what the heck does that mean???
for the record, from The Cambridge Dictionary, snowed:
snow verb us
snow verb (DECEIVE)[ T ] infml to deceive someone with charming, persuasive talk:
This guy is very smooth and can snow anybody.
I love this. There are things I grew up hearing that the young people today would think I lost it. Then that was many moons ago. See I thought I knew about snowed under.
Meant over loaded with work. Now I see another use of that phrase. The letter short cuts sometimes mean nothing to me or two things.