Thorn in the side——查字典英语网

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Reader question: What does this sentence - Al Jazeera has been a thorn in the side of the Bush administration in the Middle East - mean, and in particular “thorn in the side”?

My comments: In other words, Al Jazeera, the Qatari pan-Arab television station has been a pain in the arse, pardon the expression, to the US government.

Because it’s not pro-American, not as most mainstream media are pro-American at any rate.

“Thorn in the side” literally means for someone to have gotten a thin piece of thorn into the flesh of their torso, presumably either in the left or right or the back side. In the SIDE (not in the neck or belly), because presumably if the thorn is in the front of the body, you can remove it more or less easily – and therefore it would not be THORNY enough as a problem(^-^).

Imagine yourself with such a predicament, with a thorn, say, in the back where you can’t quite reach with your hands. It’s irritating. It’s annoying. It may not be an issue of life and death such as, you know, a broken neck or a brain tumor, but it bothers you nevertheless. You’re itching. You know it’s there and there’s nothing you can do about it. Of course there is always something you CAN do. You can, for instance have that whole piece flesh cut off along with the thorn in it, but then why would anyone overkill like that?

So there, a thorn in your side – a nagging pain or a thorny issue that lingers (won’t go away).

This idiom is easy to understand, isn’t it, if it’s explained word for word? Unlike other idioms, you know, which you can never get a hang of in terms of where they came from (nip and tuck, make no bones about it and so forth). Whatever the case, the thing with idioms for you to remember is that they’re all born out of common usage. Therefore they can best be learned in the same way, via actual examples.

So here are actual examples of some of the more notable “thorns” in the side of the afore-mentioned US government: 1. A photograph has been published of former Cuban president Fidel Castro, showing him looking relaxed and in apparently good health. The picture shows 82-year-old Mr Castro wearing a sports jacket and smiling alongside Michelle Bachelet, the Chilean President, who was in Cuba on a diplomatic visit. … Since the Cuban Revolution brought him to power in 1959, Mr Castro has been a thorn in the side of the US, which failed to overthrow him by supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Throughout the Cold War, he was president of a Communist nation on America’s doorstep, and survived a number of alleged CIA conspiracies to remove him from power. - Times Online, February 13, 2009.

2. The on-screen revolutionary met the off-screen revolutionary when Hollywood actor Benicio Del Toro flew into Venezuela earlier this week. Promoting his role in Steven Sodergergh’s Che, Del Toro attended a private meeting with president Hugo Chávez, a close friend of the Cuban leader Fidel Castro and a thorn in the side of the US government. “He’s nice,” said Del Toro of the 54-year-old leader of the Bolivarian Revolution, adding that he had enjoyed “a good meeting with the president”. Puerto Rican-born Del Toro, 42, arrived in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas on Tuesday to attend a screening of the complete, four-and-a-half hour version of Che at a former bull-ring. The film charts Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s pivotal role in the Cuban revolution of 1959 and his disastrous later attempt to spark a similar uprising in 1960s Bolivia. Del Toro told reporters that he was drawn to the project because it represented “a totally Latin-American movie”. - Revolution in the air as Benicio Del Toro meets Hugo Chavez, Guardian.co.uk, March 5, 2009.

3. “The bad news” investigative reporter Seymour Hersh told a Montreal audience last Wednesday, “is that there are 816 days left in the reign of King George II of America.” The good news? “When we wake up tomorrow morning, there will be one less day.” Hersh, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine, has been a thorn in the side of the US government for nearly 40 years. Since his 1969 exposé of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, which is widely believed to have helped turn American public opinion against the Vietnam War, he has broken news about the secret US bombing of Cambodia, covert C.I.A. attempts to overthrow Chilean president Salvador Allende, and, more recently, the first details about American soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. - ‘There has never been an American army as violent and murderous as the one in Iraq’, The McGill Daily, October 30th, 2006.