Reader question:

What does “country mile” mean, as in this sentence, “He missed the target by a country mile”?

My comments:

It means he is off the mark by a big, huge margin.

A country mile is a long distance. When I was a kid, I lived in the countryside with my grandma and I remember vividly my first trips out of the village. They were regular visits to Grandma’s only close relative in the area, her sister who lived in a nearby village.

“A wee bit distance”, grandma would say comfortingly. “Just three li.”

One Chinese li, of course, is 500 meters. Three li would be like 1,500 meters (or roughly a mile, which, strictly speaking, is 1,609 meters).

In other words, three li would be, like, a 20-minute walk.

However, back in the day, those three-li travels took us more than an hour on each trip, what with crossing bridges and walking along river banks, cutting through cornfields and so forth.

The point?

The point is, in the eyes of country folk, distance is but his or her estimation and nothing scientifically accurate. Hence, a mile in the eye of the country folk can be much, much, much longer in distance than what is feels like in the city.

Hence, if a lover says they’d walk a country mile to be with his beloved, it means they’d walk a long distance, i.e. make a great effort, or in other words do everything he/she asks them.

Well, I’m being liberal in interpretation, but you get the point.

Likewise, if someone is described as being better than all others by a country mile, then he’s considered the best by far.

Now, media examples:

1. The image that France’s best-known rugby newspaper, Midi Olympique, chose for their latest front page to illustrate the country’s thoroughly uninspiring start to this year’s Six Nations came as no surprise to me. It was Sebastien Chabal, hand on hairy head, showing off his preferred look – confused. Now this was indeed a perfectly reasonable visual interpretation of the national rugby team’s disjointed performance against Scotland, where nobody looked more out of sort than ‘Le Caveman’ himself. But I suspect the choice of shot had less to do with what had happened on the field of play and more to do with Chabal’s hyper-mediatised status in France.

It really is quite remarkable. For a man who doesn’t even play in his native country, Chabal is by a country mile the most recognisable rugby face in France. Whether it’s health insurance you’re after or if you’re thinking of buying a new Seat Altea (XL, of course), it’s always Chabal who’s staring out of the page at you, trying to intimidate you into putting your hand in your pocket. No doubt the guys at Midi Olympique reasoned that if they put Chabal on their front page, then they’d be far more likely to sell copies than if they’d gone with the man he came off the bench to replace against Scotland, Romain Millo-Chluski. The trouble is, though, for a guy who’s made his name entirely by looking fierce, Chabal’s performances out on the pitch are in danger of reducing his ‘tough guy’ image to nothing but rubble.

- Chabal A Mere Pussycat? Rugbyrugby.com, February 17, 2009.

2. Mitchell Johnson has found the unlikeliest of allies as he attempts to retain his place in the Australian line-up for the Edgbaston Test. James Anderson, the spearhead of the England attack, expressed supreme confidence that his opposite number would not only play in the third Test, but emerge from his extended form slump to again trouble England's batsmen.

“If I’d have had 18 months like he had, then two bad games, I would not expect to get dropped for the next game,” Anderson said. “As a bowler, you do go through varying bits of forms. The last 18 months he’s been the best bowler by a country mile for Australia and all their success has pretty much centred around him. For him to have a couple of bad Tests and for people to be getting on his back is a bit harsh. He’s just going through a bit of a dodgy patch, and I think he’s a good enough bowler to come through the other side.”

- Anderson backs Johnson to shine again, CricInfo.com, July 27, 2009.

3. The NYSE puts out a weekly list of the top program traders by volume, and Goldman typically tops this list by a country mile. Then last week’s list came out, and Goldman’s name was shockingly absent. And today, now that the code theft story is out, the NYSE has put out a statement claiming that Goldman’s absence on the list was the result of a “system error”; it has also released a revised list showing Goldman once again dominating program trading activity.

Needless to say, many econ bloggers are incredulous that the top entrant in the weekly program trading list suddenly went missing last week and nobody at the NYSE caught the error before now, especially given the Aleynikov news and the timing of the “error.” Conspiracy theories are legion, and even if none of them are true, it’s hard to shake the feeling that this story is about to blow up into a major scandal.

- Goldman’s secret sauce could be loose online; markets beware, ArsTechnica.com, July 7, 2009.

本文仅代表作者本人观点，与本网立场无关。欢迎大家讨论学术问题，尊重他人，禁止人身攻击和发布一切违反国家现行法律法规的内容。

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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.

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