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Reader question: Please explain “sounding board”, as in this sentence: He was Einstein’s old friend and admirer, and his sounding board for scientific ideas ever since the early days of special relativity in Berne, Switzerland. My comments: Here, it means that Einstein, Albert Einstein that is, used to talk to this old friend of his about scientific ideas – no surprise, either – to seek advice and mostly to see how well the ideas sound, whether they’re any good and worthy and so forth. Literally, Einstein used his old friend and admirer as a soundboard to bounce ideas off. Soundboard? The soundboard, or sounding board, you see, originally refers to the belly of a violin or cello, onto which the strings are attached. The soundboard, together with the hollow inside magnifies the vibrating sound when the strings are stroked, magnifies it and makes it loud, clear and sonorous, i.e. rich, deep and full. The sounding board is something that’s also placed in the auditorium, behind or over the podium or rostrum. This type of sounding board serves the same purpose, making the speaker’s voice sound distinct, full and sonorous. If a person is somebody else’s soundboard or sounding board, we can then safely infer that this person talks to that somebody quite a lot. It’s as if this person uses the other as a sounding board, to see how his voice echoes back – how his ideas sound to the other person, so to say. | 
