|
Reader question: Please explain “banana skin” in this sentence: “You should watch what you write because Twitter has been a banana skin for many.” My comments: This is a good piece of advice for anyone who are always sending a message via Twitter or, for that matter, WeChat or other forms of social media. Because, if you say something wrong, the message is instantly spread around – among your circle of friends and foes alike, and, if you’re famous enough, the public at large. That’s why Twitter is described by the speaker as a “banana skin”. Imagine you’re walking on the street and there’s a piece of banana skin in front of you. If you are watching your mobile phone, as many do read their mobile phone while walking, you may not notice. And hence you may step on it and if that particular piece of banana skin is rotten and slippery, you may stumble and fall – flat on your face if worse comes to worst. Anyways, “banana skin” as an idiom is American in origin – presumably a lot of people have indeed walked onto a banana skin and got tripped up. Metaphorically, a banana skin represents anything that may not appear to be problematic but potentially can create a problem for you, making you look bad, silly or embarrassed or all of those things together. It can be any sudden and unexpected situation. Donald Trump, using Twitter for example, once misspelled “unprecedented” as “unpresidented”. That’s exactly the type of situations that makes the speaker in our example call Twitter a “banana skin”. | 
