Cluing ATE/EAT
Consumed by options.
EAT and its past tense, ATE, are both three-letter words consisting of the same three letters. As with EAR, there’s one really obvious meaning that’s tangible in our day-to-day lived experience…but you can get a bit more creative if you choose to.
Still, any definition of “eating” has to start with consumption. You could still go obscure here: to EAT could be to “Practice aristology,” to “Find esculent,” or to “Show oneself sitophilic.” But most of us are gonna put in things like “Break bread,” “Nosh,” or the called-out imperative “Mangia!” (Ugh. Why would I write this entry when I was hungry? Now I’m hungrier.)
Time, rust, or acid can corrode or erode most any object. This is sometimes clarified as EAT AWAY, but the smaller form can work fine with context: “Slowly destroy, as a piece of metal.”
Likewise, to eat in the sense of to irritate is sometimes shown as EAT AT, but the smaller form sees use in the “What’s eating” construction, as in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, which is not, as I once believed, a movie about a talking grape being slowly done in by a monstrous giant.
When you eat a cost, you’re absorbing the loss. This is the most passive definition of eat, because that money’s gone one way or another…you’re just deciding to accept its absence and move on. Of course not everyone has that option, which might suggest the clue, “___ the rich.”
If you eat humble pie or eat crow, you’re again accepting a loss. But we recognize that this is a harder kind of acceptance, because it’s a loss of dignity or a loss of self-image. You agree to stop thinking, at least for a bit, that you are right most or all of the time and that everyone else knows it. (We don’t, but you can pretend.)
If being forced to eat humble pie is hard on you, you may end up eating your feelings. Unfortunately, feelings don’t stay eaten. And if you eat them too much, then you get health and body image issues, which give you more feelings to eat. But hey, everything in moderation: a little self-care in the form of banana splits helped me through a rough patch or two.
You eat my dust when I outrace you in a way that leaves you firmly behind in the race, and…huh, a lot of these definitions involve some kind of humiliation for the eater, huh? I haven’t even gotten to eat shit. That’s a little odd, since when a cat eats a mouse it’s about as aggressive a move from the eater as could be made, but I guess we’re all humiliated by our biological needs in the end.
If someplace eats your money, then you’ve moved beyond a cost you can eat to a worrisome situation, as is usually the case when the eater becomes the eaten.
Finally, there’s the definition that you’re not gonna see in newspaper markets, but it’s nice to have a single, simple word that means to fellate and to…um…cunnilingualize. You can even clue it as “f_ll__e” if you’re feeling saucy.
