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Mind your language

Where ‘big ask’ came from, and why it still sounds barbaric

My husband was watching sport, so the cliché came as no surprise

8 August 2015

9:00 AM

8 August 2015

9:00 AM

‘That’s unnecessarily crude,’ said my husband, turning momentarily from the television and improving the shining minute by setting the whisky glass chinking. (He takes ice in it.)

‘What? A “big ask”? That’s not crude,’ I replied.

‘Oh, ask,’ he said in a sort of liquid-hoarse whisky-throaty voice seldom remarked upon by phoneticians.

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