A taste of your own medicine.

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Just why would you ever be tasting someone else's medicine? This expression doesn't make sense to me.

http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/a+t ... n+medicine

I only taste my own medicine lol, why someone else's?

It means to treat someone as they have treated others.

For instance, when a schoolyard bully gets beaten up by an even bigger bully, then he is "getting a taste of his own medicine".

Medicine often tastes horrible, and is often sold by pharmacists (chemists, in the U.K.). Thus, when a pharmacist is prescribed a product he sells, then he is finally getting a taste of his own medicine.

I think the way Aspies take certain sayings literally is just cute. This thread made me smile.

i don't understand "split the baby".

could one come up with a less charming idiom?

Split the baby?
That sounds horrible.
Could that mean rough tactics to find who's guilty?
I'm thinking of King Solomon ordering the baby to be cut in two when the two mothers where fighting over it.

^that's where it's from. it means roughly a simple compromise, a solution that "splits the difference".

oh lawyers, you so funny.

I've never understood 'a drop in the ocean'.
It's supposed to mean a small amount of effort compared to what is needed.
But a drop of water in the ocean is part of a huge, powerful force of nature.
It would make more sense to say 'a drop out of the ocean'.

Last week I heard 'hit the ground running'. wtf!

I don't think I take things very literally. I've heard this saying for years and I pretty well knew what it meant, even on an old Smurfs cartoon when Gargamel accidentally swallowed some "medicine" he made that made the Smurfs all really sick and think they were birds.

I asked my mother about any times I took something literally. I told her from when I was a little kid didn't count because small children take everything literally, which is why you should never avoid the word "death" by telling them someone who died is really just sleeping or you'll have a kid terrified to sleep at night. She did tell me when the waitress at the restaurant we were at commented on how I cleaned my plate, I would normally say something like "What, should I leave something on my plate?". But that might have just my being snarky.

As a kid I once heard the phrase "cool as a cucumber", and I thought "Cucumbers really are cool (to the touch) aren't they?" actually it was something someone said on TV when they discovered a woman was faking a high fever, so it really was "cool" as in the literal sense.

I know people hate double posts for some reason, but I just wanted to mention that I am a sucker for learning the original meanings of a lot of old sayings got started. Like "throwing the baby out with the bath water", which originally goes back a long time ago to when a family took a bath, they all used the same water in the tub (ugh), starting with the husband, then the wife, and then the kids from oldest to youngest, so by the time the baby of the family was ready to be bathed, the water was so dirty you could hardly see the kid in there.

I'm sure glad I didn't live back in those days, even though there are only four people in my immediate family.