see it a mile away — to anticipate something to happen in near future.

A recently proposed communication system is hyped as “totally secure”. However, to me, there is no such thing as a “totally secure” system, just like there is no perpetual motion machine in physics. “It is going to fail. I can see it a mile away“, someone commented.

When your naughty girlfriend/boyfriend kisses your neck, it usually leaves a reddish mark, called hickey a hickey. So if such happens to your foreign friend, you now know how to tease him — “hey dude, where did you get that hickey?”

I don’t know jack shit about sth — a quite native phrase to express the ignorance [dict].

When I had lunch with an American guy from the same lab, he asked me: “do you know jack shit about networking?” Displaying a cunning smile, he knew I couldn’t understand this phrase, and was very satified by my puzzled look. Evil.

English language itself keeps changing with time. I read this “behind a paywall” phrase from Schneier’s blog. However, the word “paywall” cannot be found in any dictionaries. It is actually a made-up word, explained by an American guy in the lab, but now comonly used as an internet-age jargon, much like the word “blog”. The phrase means “You need to pay to get through the wall” — for example, the on-line New York Times is subscription-based, so its news articles are behind a paywall (note the comments by Saar/Tyler). If you want to get through the paywall for free, try bugmenot (a tip from Saar).

psych out — two meanings: one is to anticipate. For instance, “we cannot psych out his intention”. Another one is to lose confidence (usually in the passive tense). Here, we talk about the usage of the second meaning. In Friends, Ross said to Rachel that because of his failed marriage and suckful bad experience in getting along with ex-girlfriends, he “got completely psyched out” until he met Julie in Beijing. This was a big blow to Rachel as she started to like Ross.

One On the tip of one’s tongue — About to say something, but not quite remembered.

Today, a German guy ensusiastically enthusiastically tried to teach me some linux commands. But his fluent fluid explanation came to pause a halt at remembering, as he tried to remember the name of a very familiar command, which slipped his mind. He mumbled, “the command is called … em… em… it is on the tip of my tongue … “

The wardens in our house are an English couple. Recently, a Chinese girl who was is the a former resident came back to visit them with some Chinese dumplings (“Jiaozi”). But However, she didn’t explain to them how to cook those; perhaps, to Chinese, this is common sense. The husband put the dumplings in the microwave for 30 s and ate two, with the yet raw pork meat inside! He frowned “it tastes like metal“.