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Reader question: Please explain this sentence, “go for broke” in particular: “Gordon’s ‘go for broke’ strategy comes up short.” My comments: Gordon failed. His strategy didn’t work. It was perhaps too risky. That’s it – “go for broke” suggests Gordon has not been cautious enough. He threw caution to the wind, so to speak, and took unnecessary risks. Well, unnecessary from hindsight. At the time, Gordon thought he could win and win big by risking everything and going all out. In another cliché, Gordon put all his eggs into one basket and this time, it didn’t work. “Comes up short” means it was close, but wasn’t enough. Anyways, “go for broke” is the idiom to remember here. Phrase.org says the term comes from pidgin English from Hawaii. Pidgin English? That’s imperfect English spoken by non-native English speakers. “Long time no see”, for instance, is Chinese pidgin, or Chinglish. It sounded awkward to the native ear in the beginning to be sure but now it seems to be accepted as a legitimate phrase by one and all, at least colloquially. “Go for broke” is of a similar nature. It is originally a gambling term, meaning that a gambler puts all his money in – in the hope of winning big – and therefore run the risk being “broke”. “Broke”, of course, is the colloquialism for being bankrupt. If a person is broke, he’s lost all his money. If a company is broke, it’s bankrupt – it has to close shop because it has run out of money. | 
