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Reader question: Please explain this headline: Mortgage Lenders Get A Slap On The Wrist (Forbes.com, April 13, 2011). My comments: It means mortgage lenders got off the hook one more time. Slap on the wrist is a form of punishment, but it is a light punishment (no-one gets seriously hurt from a slap on the wrist), suggesting that mortgage lenders were not punished as severely as they should. That’s not surprising. They, the regulators who oversee the industry, represent the interests of the mortgage lenders and other banks more than they represent the average citizen, i.e. you and I, the rest of the population. Otherwise, there’d be no economic crisis in America and there’d be no such movement as Occupy Wall Street. That’s a simplification to be sure. But that’s, in fact, what I read from the headline. “Mortgage lenders get a slap on the wrist” simply means mortgage banks are not getting punished. That’s because mortgage banks and the regulators who are supposed to govern them are essentially of the same people. The latter point takes time and space to explain, of course, and so let’s stick with the first. That is, “getting a slap on the wrist” means getting off the hook easily. “Getting a slap on the wrist” is an American idiom, originating from the dining table, I’m sure. I am not quite sure actually but I’m not surprised if it did originate from the dining table. Every child, you see, must have had the same experience of getting slapped on the wrist when they tried to get their fingers on their favorite food. | 
