|
Reader question: Please “looked the other way” in this: He also weighed in on US Soccer chiefs, saying that they “had to know” about graft at FIFA and CONCACAF, “but they looked the other way.” My comments: FIFA refers to soccer’s world governing body. CONCACAF? This is short for, let’s see, Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football. Okay, the speaker alleges here that US Soccer officials knew about graft happening at CONCACAF and FIFA headquarters but chose to look the other way. That means they didn’t do anything about it. Perhaps they felt they were too weak to prevent it – widespread corruption, actually – from happening. Or perhaps they are beneficiaries of malpractices, or perhaps they themselves are stinky rotten eggs, too. But anyhow, to look the other way is to refuse to look at a problem directly and tackle it head on. Say, there’s a young man mugging an old lady at a busy crossroads somewhere in our city. A policeman was standing just round corner of a street nearby. Instead of coming over to help the old lady and stop the youth, he turned to look the other way. Now you know what it means to literally look the other way. By looking the other way, that is, you deliberately try to overlook a problem and willfully refuse to do something about it. In the mugging case, the policeman is not doing his duty by conveniently ignoring the incident altogether. | 
