You poured/threw cold water on my hopes.

[Naeem Afzal]

Hi teachers,

You poured/threw cold water on my hopes. Correct?

Many thanks.

 

[emsr2d2]

I don't find either of them natural.

I would use "You dashed my hopes."

 

[Naeem Afzal]

Thank you, emsr. But are they correct?

 

[MikeNewYork]

Yes, those are correct idioms, at least in AmE. Here is a citation from The Free Dictionary.

throw cold water on something also pour cold water on somethingto criticize or stop something that some people are enthusiastic about The proposal seemed reasonable enough, but authorities quickly threw cold water on it.

 

[5jj]

ems has said they are not natural. Is there any point at all in considering whether they are correct? "My pink horse, who is married to a five-legged spider, rides a bicycle and speaks fluent Arabic" is grammatically correct, but not a sentence that most of us would ever need to use.

There are no citations for pour/s/ing/ed cold water on hopes in COCA. I suppose there is no reason why one should not pour cold water on hopes. It just happens that most native speakers don't.

 

[MikeNewYork]

But they seem natural to me, and that idiom has a definition.

 

[5jj]

But they seem natural to me, and that idiom has a definition.

What definition is that?

ps (later): Sorry, I missed it. You did indeed give one.

 

[emsr2d2]

I haven't found "to pour cold water on [someone's] hope" in any idiom dictionary/reference.

 

[charliedeut]

I was curious, because in Spanish we do use that idiom with the same structure, and could not find anything connected to it in English. I found things along the lines of "to come as a [complete] shock" or "to be a bolt from the blue".

charliedeut

 

[MikeNewYork]

<<<I haven't found "to pour cold water on [someone's] hope" in any idiom dictionary/reference.>>>​

I posted one definition. Do you want more? The word "hopes" is just one possibility.

 

[5jj]

I posted one definition. Do you want more? The word "hopes" is just one possibility.

Yes, it's a possibility. It just happens to be one that seems not to be used.

 

[MikeNewYork]

In a corpus, not in a language. The best corpus suffers from too few entries.

 

[5jj]

In a corpus, not in a language. The best corpus suffers from too few entries.

Indeed, but COCA does work on some 450,000,000 words. It doesn't seem to me to be too unnatural to tell a learner that if we can't find a collocation there, then it's probably pretty uncommon and, to some native speakers, unnatural. When I searched the rather larger new Corpus of Global Web-based English, (1,900,000,000 words), I did indeed find a few citations for POUR + cold water on + hope(s). I also found 47 citations for "I ain't been".

 

[MikeNewYork]

I am glad you found some. In some regards, your corpus citations fail because they focus on hope. It's as if "I washed my dog/horse/car is OK, but I washed my alligator/hippopotamus/barbie Doll is not OK because it doesn't come up that often. That seems odd to me.

 

[5jj]

Rooting around the corpora, I have found a couple more examples of throwing/pouring cold water on hopes, so it seems that some speakers at least are happy with it.

. In some regards, your corpus citations fail because they focus on hope. It's as if "I washed my dog/horse/car is OK, but I washed my alligator/hippopotamus/barbie Doll is not OK because it doesn't come up that often. That seems odd to me.

That's a poor analogy. You can wash just about anything, just as you can, in the literal sense of the words, throw/pour cold water on just about anything. The number of things you can throw cold water on , in the sense of reducing enthusiasm for / criticising is severely limited. I have searched over two million words, and found that the most common collocation with this expression is idea(s). There are almost as many citations for idea(s) as there are for the total number of citations for proposal(s), hypothesis, effort(s), speculation, plan(s), dream(s) and hope(s).

 

[Amigos4]

Yes, it's a possibility. It just happens to be one that seems not to be used.

Rooting around the corpora, I have found a couple more examples of throwing/pouring cold water on hopes, so it seems that some speakers at least are happy with it.

It seems that some members of the British press are also 'happy with it': http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/weather-forecasters-have-poured-cold-water-132322

 

[5jj]

It seems that some members of the British press are also 'happy with it':

Now that is a poor argument for the acceptability of anything. ;-)

 

[Amigos4]

Now that is a poor argument for the acceptability of anything. ;-)

Ahhhhhhhhhh, life on the other side of the pond is always a fun experience! ;-)

Have a great weekend, 5jj and ems! :up:

 

[charliedeut]

Ahhhhhhhhhh, life on the other side of the pond is always a fun experience! ;-)

Your statement makes it feel as if you lived in the Lone Star state (nearly half as large as my home country) ;-). The rest of the world would actually call it "ocean" or, at the very least, "large sea". :shock:

 

[emsr2d2]

Whatever the rest of the world calls it, both Brits and Americans use "the other side of the pond" to mean the other side of the Atlantic.