Reader question: Please explain “in their corner” in the following: Everything else being equal, sending your car to a dealer for service would be an easy decision, because dealers have a lot in their corner. My comments: Here, it means that dealers have a lot in their favor. Dealers of a particular brand of car knows more about the car than, say, the average auto repair shop you find on the sidewalk. For one thing, if there’s something damaged and to be replaced, the audo dealer may have an exact replacement (of the same brand and quality) in store. The average repairs shop on the sidewalk may not have it. That’s what it means when they tell you to send your car to a dealer for service because dealers have “a lot in their corner”. In plain words, they have the carmakers’ backup in terms of providing screws and parts. The “corner” originally is a term in the game of boxing. There are four corners in the ring in which two boxers fight. One boxer takes one corner, the other taking the opposite one, leaving the other two as mutual corners. Pro boxers fight up to 12 rounds. In between rounds, that is, whenever a three-minute round is completed, each boxer returns to his corner. There, he sits down on a stool to take a breather. The stool is prepared by those who are “corner men”, i.e. people in the boxer’s corner. Two of these people, his coach and sometimes a doctor even climb into the ring to help him recover and recuperate. They’re often seen to wipe the sweat off his head with a white towel, mend any cuts (stop the bleeding) on his face, feed him a few sips of water, shout words of encouragement into his ear, flap the towel like it were a fan to generate a wind to cool the boxer off or, in the case of obvious and inevitable defeat, throw the very towel onto the floor in the ring to signal surrender... |