|
Reader question: Please explain this sentence: “The person laying poisoned meat to kill dogs should be killed with a dose of his own medicine.” My comments: The speaker means to say that the person who kills those dogs should be fed the same thing – poisoned meat. That’s taking it literally, of course. How can anyone even contemplate feeding someone poisoned food? Then again, how can anyone contemplate feeding dogs with poisoned meat in the first place? I’m sure the speaker just wants to teach him a lesson. Anyways, giving someone a dose of his or her own medicine means teaching him/her a lesson by doing to him/her exactly the same thing he/she has done to others. Let me give you a more innocuous example. Back in school, one boy in my class was particularly fond of playing pranks and tricks on us. And one of the things he did a lot was hiding people’s bicycle keys during the class and later enjoying the spectacle of their owners sweating it out trying to find them. Anyways, one of these days this person’s own bicycle key was seen lying idly on his desk. You guessed it. We hid it immediately to see how he liked the taste of his own medicine. Giving someone a dose or taste of their own medicine is probably an idiom inspired by a story in Aesop’s Fables. In the fable, a cobbler who’s not very good at making or repairing shoes finds himself losing business. So he roams to another town where he is unknown and starts a new practice as a medical doctor specializing in an antidote to curing all poisons. | 
