Waldo said:What the hell is "baited" breath jobe...what are you trying too catch man !! A cold !!!
I too am anticipating the "process" these ladies use in making their great labels
[Q]</span> From Steve Gearhart: “Where does the term baited breath come from, as in: ‘I am waiting with baited breath for your answer’?”
[A]</span> The correct spelling is actually bated breath but it’s so common these days to see it written as baited breath
that there’s every chance it will soon become the usual form, to the
disgust of conservative speakers and the confusion of dictionary
writers. Examples in newspapers and magazines are legion; this one
appeared in the Daily Mirror on 12 April 2003: “She hasn’t responded yet but Michael is waiting with baited breath”.
It’s easy to mock, but there’s a real problem here. Bated and baited sound the same and we no longer use bated (let alone the verb to bate), outside this one set phrase, which has become an idiom. Confusion is almost inevitable. Bated here is a contraction of abated through loss of the unstressed first vowel (a process called aphesis); it has the meaning “reduced, lessened, lowered in force”. So bated breath refers to a state in which you almost stop breathing through terror, awe, extreme anticipation, or anxiety.
Shakespeare is the first writer known to use it, in The Merchant of Venice:
“Shall I bend low and, in a bondman’s key, / With bated breath and
whisp’ring humbleness, / Say this ...”. Nearly three centuries later,
Mark Twain employed it in Tom Sawyer: “Every eye fixed itself upon him;
with parted lips and bated breath the audience hung upon his words,
taking no note of time, rapt in the ghastly fascinations of the tale”.
For those who know the older spelling or who stop to consider the matter, baited breath evokes an incongruous image, which Geoffrey Taylor humorously (and consciously) captured in verse in his poem Cruel Clever Cat:
<blockquote>
Sally, having swallowed cheese,
Directs down holes the scented breeze,
Enticing thus with baited breath
Nice mice to an untimely death.
</blockquote>
