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This is a very useful phrase in English and something that you can hopefully avoid doing in your own life.

A “barrel” is like a big jar. Scraping the bottom of the barrel quite literally means that the barrel has almost nothing left inside and you are trying very hard to see if you can get the last little bit out.

The way it is used is like this: If you are scraping the bottom of the barrel it means that the selection (choice) that you made isn’t the most desirable. You only made this choice because you had no better options and you felt you needed to choose something.

If the boss hired someone who didn’t seem very qualified for the job you could say he was scraping the bottom of the barrel. That means that he didn’t have any better people apply for the job so he chose them only because there was no other choice.

Imagine one of your friends is dating someone who is unattractive, rude, and seems to be a bad choice. You could say, “I don’t know why she would date a guy like that. She is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

Your comments are always appreciated.

Andrew

Phrases and idioms

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 10:17 am and is filed under Phrases and idioms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.