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分享一个知识点： Reader question: In this sentence – the film was predictable to a fault – how do we understand “to a fault”? Is it good English? My comments: Films are predictable most of the time, i.e. you could infer from the first scenes that this man and that woman are going to fall in love with each other or that the good guy is going to win in the end. However, if a film were described as predictable to a fault, it is accused of being too predictable, and that is a fault. If you could guess out the film's ending as well as everything else then there's no suspense – nothing to bring you to the edge of the seat holding your breaths. That's no fun. Now, definitions. If you do something to a fault, you do it excessively. Confucius once said, perhaps in explaining to someone the concept of “enough is enough”: “More (than enough) is no better than less (than enough).” A real-life example. Thieves, for instance, sometimes knock on doors introducing themselves as beggars. Some generous folks welcome them into the house and offer them food and drink, only to find their purse or jewelry missing afterwards. In cases like these, those charitable folks are generous to a fault. That is, they're so excessively generous that they could reasonably be FAULTED for it. Now, that's a good way to understand the phrase. Is it good English? Yes, it is. In fact, according to the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, this phrase, “always qualifying an adjective, has been so used since the mid-1700s.” | 
