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Reader question: Please explain the following sentence, with “dug a hole” in particular: He dug a hole for himself by not telling the truth at the beginning and he has to live with that. My comments: He did not tell the truth at the beginning and finds it difficult to explain himself now. Not being upfront when he had the chance has its consequences and he has to live with that. Or die with it, to put it more gravely. Gravely is exaggerating things a bit, I admit, but, you see, digging a hole for oneself was originally the same as digging a grave for oneself. Serious? Serious. I first read this many, many years ago, I believe, from, if memory serves, A People’s History of United States of by Howard Zinn, who gave an account of the history of America entirely through the views of the downtrodden instead, as is the usual case, from the political elite. For example, his account of America’s colonial history is not from the point of view of Christopher Columbus, but the local Indians, American Indians that is, and slaves. At any rate, back in the day, times were, in a nutshell, hard. Times were so hard that prisoners didn’t have shelter – they did not live in modern cells complete with television that we see today. No. They lived in holes in the ground. Unsheltered. In fact, the prisoner was ordered to dig a hole for himself, a hole of about one meter in diameter and three meters deep. Maybe less, but the upshot is, when the hole was deemed deep enough, the prisoner is ordered to jump right into it. | 
