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Reader question: Please explain this sentence, particularly “won’t give him a pass”: I still won’t give him a pass for writing that article against lowering the drinking age a while back. My comments: It seems the speaker supports lowering the drinking age. “He” wrote an article against it some time ago and the speaker still won’t forgive him. To be exact, the speaker won’t let go of the matter without scolding him or at the very least letting him know it. “Pass”, here means permission, as in passport, a piece of document that allows one to go through passport control and travel in another country. When army men go through a checkpoint, they have to show their pass to be allowed through. Hence giving someone a proverbial pass means you’re allowing them to say or do something anyway they want to. If they do something wrong and you still want to give them a pass, it means you’re willing to let it go and let them get away with it without reprimand. That’s the point to make and the thing to remember about this phrase, if someone is given a pass or free pass, it often indicates they’re doing something wrong or improper but are getting away with it, getting away with it scot free, as they say – without suffering any consequences. Let’s read a few media example to drive the point firmly home: 1. In the prepared statement he will deliver on Capitol Hill Thursday, former FBI Director James Comey undercuts a key line of attack from the White House and its allies: that Comey never raised concerns about President Donald Trump before he was fired. In Comey’s telling at least, he did repeatedly tell the bureau’s senior leadership that he feared the president was trying to influence the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Republicans, however, are already floating several talking points to defend the president and poke holes in Comey’s credibility. And there’s some evidence it could work—a majority of Americans expressed little or no trust in Comey in a Washington Post-ABC News poll released Wednesday, skepticism that holds across party lines. | 
