naturalplastic wrote:
So..I hate to break it to you that...if the "gift horse" referenced were the one in the Iliad it would warn you to do the opposite. To ALWAYS "put a gift horse through a metal detector" because it might contain danger. Not to "never" do it.
And there IS the expression "never accept gifts from Greeks" that does reference the gift horse in the Iliad to mean exactly that.
Exactly! The idiom has always made me wary of gifts and wonder what the motivation is behind them. I always felt like I was being warned not to interrogate the meaning of a gift, to be outwardly thankful but inwardly suspicious, maybe why I've always been uncomfortable receiving gifts
Last edited by Cornflake on 24 Sep 2023, 8:30 am, edited 1 time in total.:
Fixed quoting - please make properly attributed quotes of others