Deep in the weeds?

Reader question:

Please explain “deep in the weeds” in this:

I have no idea when I can leave. Right now, we’re all deep in the weeds.

My comments:

Leave for home?

The speaker is, say, talking on the phone with his wife who wonders whether he’s coming home late again. The speaker says he has no idea when he can finish work because, apparently, there’s much of it. He and colleagues are all deep in the weeds – being submerged in and overwhelmed with work.

Deep in the weeds or in the deep weeds is descriptive of a farmer dealing with weeds running wild and rampant in his farmland. If the field is overgrown with weeds, crops won’t have enough space and nutrients to grow.

The farmer has to weed off the unwanted grass if he wants to have any semblance of a decent harvest.

If he’s unable to deal with the weeds efficiently, of course, he is literally, “in the weeds” or “deep in the weeds”.

In other words, he’s in trouble because he’s too much involved in petty details to spare any time for work on the big goal, which is a good crop come harvest time.

As an idiom, “in the weeds” probably finds its origin in the colonial islands in the Caribbean, as Grammarist.com explains:

Since the exact origin of the phrase cannot be attributed to any one group or publication, it is widely accepted that it came into use during the European colonization of Caribbean islands who also brought with them the slave trade.

The cultivation of rice and sugar required many hands to rid the area of weeds for planting, and it is possible the term came about to describe the escape of slaves through the deep weeds when they were blocked from view.

It became popular again during Prohibition in the 1920s, possibly describing the hiding of bootleg liquor in thick weeds and bushes since storing on the premises was a liability and illegal.

So, to sum up, “in the weeds” suggests that one is in trouble with too much work, especially being bogged down by petty details and trivia while failing to see the big picture.

Here are media examples:

1. Shareholder activists come in different flavors. One is the deep-pocketed investor, such as Carl Icahn or Dan Loeb, who takes big stakes in companies and forces management to change strategy.

Another type is the persistent provocateur who buys a handful of shares and agitates on a shoestring.

That’s John Chevedden.

Now 67 years old, Chevedden launched his career as an activist – he rejects the term “gadfly” – after being laid off from the aerospace industry in the early 1990s.

Since then, he has unleashed a relentless flow of shareholder proxy measures at some of the largest U.S. companies.

Even skeptics grant that Chevedden has become one of the most influential U.S. shareholder activists. James Copland of the Manhattan Institute, a free-market think tank, says Chevedden is “leading the intellectual curve, getting proposals out there before they start to get traction.”

Texas attorney Geoffrey Harrison, who has faced Chevedden on behalf of corporate clients, describes him as possibly the most persistent sponsor of shareholder resolutions ever.

Chevedden’s method is to target deep-in-the-weeds details of corporate governance, such as how often directors are elected and when shareholders can call special meetings of investors.

The measures, he says, are meant to give shareholders more say and make executives more accountable, which in turn improve operations and boost value.

Last year, 50 of his proposals made it onto proxy statements, disclosures to shareholders on issues requiring a vote and related information. He successfully pushed through 58 proposals as of mid-September, the most of anyone this year. The resolutions won 41 percent of shares voted on average over both periods, in line with the overall average, according to corporate-governance researcher FactSet SharkRepellent.

He has helped persuade companies to make procedural changes, including grocer Whole Foods Market Inc’s move to make it easier to remove directors. Two years before “say on pay” votes became widely required under U.S. law, he successfully pushed the utility holding company Edison International to give shareholders more influence over executive pay. This year, under pressure from Chevedden, Bank of America Corp required its chief executive to hold on to stock for at least a year after he retires.

- This Man Has Quietly Transformed Corporate America, Reuters, October 24, 2013.

2. In Hollywood, the push and pull between art and commerce is ever-present. Every creative person in the industry wants to make good, fulfilling, worthwhile films that speak to the human condition or smartly entertain audiences. Conversely, no actor, writer, or director wants to feel like they are making a movie purely to bank big bucks at the box office, even though that is the very thing that the industry lives and dies by. The dichotomy can lead to a situation like the one Sigourney Weaver faced in the early 1990s when she got wind of a planned studio cash-in that offended her by its very existence.

In 1989, a comic book series was released by Dark Horse Comics that excited the bean counters at 20th Century Fox a whole lot. It united two of the studio’s most lucrative properties in one crossover story that sounded like a license to print money. A year later, the second instalment of one of these properties hit the big screen and included a tease for a potential crossover that eagle-eyed fans spotted. Before long, screenwriter Peter Briggs was tapped to adapt the comic into a screenplay for a blockbuster Alien vs Predator movie.

Briggs’ script draft was completed in 1991, but by that point, Fox was already deep in the weeds of Alien 3. Ultimately, the concept was put on a shelf for the next decade, but while making that ill-fated third Alien picture, Weaver got wind of the potential for the spinoff. She had no desire to be involved in something she viewed as a shameless cash-grab and later claimed to The Independent, “It’s the reason I wanted my character to die in the first place.” Indeed, her iconic character Ellen Ripley did perish at the climax of Alien 3 – although she was resurrected as a clone in 1997’s Alien: Resurrection.

Fast-forward to the early ’00s, though, and Fox did its own resurrection job with Alien vs Predator. At this point, Alien director Ridley Scott had already been working with Aliens maestro James Cameron on a potential Alien 5. However, instead of putting all their (alien) eggs in the basket of the visionaries who shaped the franchise into what it was, Fox finally greenlit their lowest common denominator comic book crossover. Cameron raged that the movie would “kill the validity of the franchise” and added, “To me, that was Frankenstein Meets Werewolf. It was Universal just taking their assets and starting to play them off against each other. Milking it.”

In the end, Alien vs Predator was directed by Resident Evil’s Paul WS Anderson and was released in August 2004 to vitriolic reviews – not least from Weaver, who hated the very fact it even existed at all. “There’s an Alien vs Predator movie out now, which is something I’m quite happy not to be in,” she quipped. “I really don’t know much about the Predator except that it looks like a hedgehog. It would be painful for me to watch the Alien get whupped; I’d be cheerleading shamelessly for it, but I probably won’t see it because I don’t really enjoy that kind of movie.”

Weaver admitted in 2016 that she’d still never plucked up the nerve – or the enthusiasm – to watch Alien vs Predator or Aliens vs Predator: Requiem, its truly dismal 2007 sequel. In fact, she told Radio Times that the fact Fox lowered itself to making those movies “really depressed” her because she was “very proud” of the core Alien movies she was a part of. All in all, it’s pretty undeniable that art should have won out over commerce in this instance.

- The movie that offended Sigourney Weaver simply by existing: “Why would you want to do that?” FarOutMagazine.co.uk, March 14, 2025.

2. The author of the Big Short and Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis, has specialised in compelling stories about people that few have ever heard of.

His latest book looks at the workers who’ve become the bete noire of Elon Musk: America’s civil servants.

Many have found themselves cast out of their offices into unemployment as the Trump administration sets out to slash a trillion dollars from public spending in a matter of months. From National Park rangers to nuclear security workers and cyber specialists, Mr Musk’s “chainsaw for bureaucracy” has reached deep into the federal workforce. We asked Michael Lewis why he’d put together a love letter to those who’ve become so unloved.

Michael Lewis: The truth is, it’s like the story that doesn’t get told, is that an awful lot of government works, an awful lot of government’s really important. And the people there can be really impressive. It’s just true – no one says it. It’s so easy to say it’s all screwed up and waste and fraud and abuse. So say it, show some concrete examples, and let people grapple with that.

Matt Frei: These people are dedicated, they’re super educated, they’re doing these incredibly sophisticated jobs for pretty bad money – compared to what they could be earning – and they’re not tooting their own horn. Now why is that?

Michael Lewis: I think it’s kind of in the nature of the expert – that someone who devotes 30 years of their life to figuring out how to stop a coal mine roof from falling on the heads of coal miners, or how objects drift at sea so you can rescue people, or the best way to bury our veterans. They’re so in the weeds that they’re not thinking about what this looks like to other people. And look, the government does not attract self-promotional types. Politics does, but government attracts people who sort of keep their heads down. And why is that? In part, it’s because for the last 50 years, we’ve not celebrated any of them. Like, if anybody’s paying attention to you in government, it’s bad.

Matt Frei: You feature, in one of your chapters, a guy called Christopher Mark, who’s an interesting fellow because he’s a structural engineer and he works out that there’s a particular reason why the ceilings and mines keep collapsing, causing lots of death and destruction, and he comes up with a method of reversing that. Now, this is the kind of guy that you want on your team. You want him to work in the department that deals with mines. But these are the very kinds of people that one suspects are now under threat thanks to Elon Musk’s chainsaw.

Michael Lewis: Well, this is true. I mean, half the characters in the book have either lost their jobs or been threatened with being fired. Why is this? It’s partly because Elon Musk had no idea what was going on inside the government in any particular way. He had a general attitude. He had sort of the bigotry that the population shares, that it’s always fraud and abuse. But that has enabled him to do what he’s done. And what he hasn’t done is actually attack the waste, fraud and abuse. I mean, it’s like a 7 trillion dollar enterprise – there is bound to be problems. What he has done instead is attack the parts of the government that might interfere with Donald Trump or his power. I mean like, for example, each of our agencies in the federal government has this character called an inspector general – and the inspector general is just the neutral watchdog. He reports not to the agency but to Congress. Like if he found fraud, he tells Congress. One of the first things they did was fire all those watchdogs. So there was no one, I mean, it’s not what you do if you’re worried about waste, fraud and abuse.

Matt Frei: What do you think motivates Mr. Musk in his mission to rip things down?

Michael Lewis: I think it’s some combination of ideologically wed to the idea that it’s all the private sector, and the public sector is a waste, which is a weird thing for him to be wed to because Tesla doesn’t exist without government loans. The government is all over his businesses and responsible in part for their success. But I think it’s partly that he just likes the attention. I mean, it’s like, he likes being in the centre of things. He likes having a hold of instruments of power. It feels more that he’s enjoying… it’s the thrill of when you tweet – everybody cares what you tweet.

- Musk working to keep Trump in power – Michael Lewis, by Matt Frei, Channel4.com, March 17, 2025.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）