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Reader question: Please explain “hand to mouth government” in the following passage: This is a hand to mouth government. This government has no programme to confront the economic crisis. My comments: If likened to a person, a hand to mouth government is one who has barely enough to eat. You know what a person who barely has enough to eat is like, don’t you? He or she would grab anything to put into their mouth to quench their hunger, but otherwise would not care much for anything else. They won’t have the energy or the higher purpose for anything nobler. Such as tackling the economic crisis. Anyways, hand to mouth is the idiom in question. This idiom is said to have developed from “when times were hard in the past and during a great famine back in the 16th century in Britain” (SaidWhat.co.uk): Record numbers of people at these times had precious little food to eat due to the famine, and so whenever they got a piece of food they would literally put it straight from hand to mouth to ensure that no-one else could take it and eat it before them, such was the desperation for some food. Yeah, straight from hand to mouth. In other words, they only care for food or matters of immediate concern – food to them, after all, means life or death. As for hand to mouth governments, I think, similarly they’re those that don’t have enough money to cover basic budgets, let alone projects of a higher purpose, such as opening new art museums and so forth. | 
