Photo credit: allvoices.com
This weekend we went camping again and on Saturday evening we decided to go to a pub, no, to walk to a pub using a public footpath. It turned out that this path had far too many bits of shoulder-height nettle and other stingy weeds and also featured some serious-looking bulls, but we did get there in the end. It turned out to be quite a good pub (and I felt compelled to have a dessert too after all the nettle-fighting and gate-climbing). I was surprisingly quick in deciding what to go for, but I heard a man at the next table saying to the waitress ‘I am torn between a steak and sausages’.
All too often I’m torn between things on the menu too, so I decided this phrase simply had to go on the blog.
Here are some more examples. This time some of them are from the brilliant Intelligent Life magazine, an offspring of The Economist.
– But until that happens, many of the UK’s 1.5 million Muslims will remain torn between the practical necessities of economic life, and their traditional Islamic beliefs (The Guardian).
– Germany remains torn between its support for the euro and its aversion to the costly bail-outs that will be needed to restore its health (The Economist).
– If I beat him at cards or a word game, he was torn between being annoyed at himself for losing and proud of me beating him (Intelligent Life).
– “The Museum of Innocence” is Orhan Pamuk’s first novel since he won the Nobel prize in 2006. It takes him back to familiar turf, a Turkey torn between East and West; this time, however, politics are merely a backdrop to the war of the sexes (Intelligent Life).
Confessions of the Linguistic Spy 