Needle to thread?

Reader question:

Please explain “tricky needle to thread” in this: How to deal with a lazy co-worker who’s also your friend? That’s a tricky needle to thread.

My comments:

Tricky, indeed.

Tricky, by the way, means this is a situation that requires a lot of care and skill because the task at hand is difficult and, as a matter of fact, awkward.

After all, the lazy co-worker is also your friend. If you handle the situation bluntly, like telling him directly that he’s lazy, he might get offended. He may take your criticism as being selfish, for example, and this disagreement, at the end of the day, may spell the end to your friendship.

Oh, needle to thread.

Needle to thread, literally, means you run a piece of thread through the eye of the needle before doing sewing work. Though it may look easy, putting thread through the needle eye isn’t so easy if you have, say, poor eyesight.

Or if you’re a ham-handed person, literally having, say, thick fingers and are generally clumsy with handy work.

Find yourself a needle and try it yourself. If you are not patient enough, you may indeed find it difficult to thread the needle. You’d be hitting the ring of the hole time and time again before succeeding.

Hence, idiomatically, people liken any delicate task or situation to a needle to thread.

It’s like saying some task is a hard nut to crack but different. It’s different in that with a hard nut, all you need to do is apply more force. With a needle to thread, however, brutal force doesn’t work. A soft touch is absolutely necessary. Force alone isn’t enough.

In our example, dealing with a lazy co-worker, you don’t want to lose his friendship, so you have to mince your words, so to speak, when you tell him your real thoughts. On the other hand, you don’t want to remain silent forever because, sooner or later, you’ll be burned out – literally by doing more than your fair share of work.

Hence, the situation you face is described as a tricky needle to thread.

A figurative needle to thread, in short and to sum up, refers to any “very narrow margin within which one must maneuver in order to accomplish or achieve something successfully” (TheFreeDictionary.com).

And here are media examples:

1. Apple introduced its take on generative AI, Apple Intelligence, at WWDC 2024 with the goal of offering features that are more personal than the competition, and critically, more private, too. But that’s a tricky needle to thread, not only because the processing demands of some requests means that information needs to leave the security of your iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max, but also because Apple’s first third-party AI partner could log information too.

Luckily, Apple has an approach that should keep a majority of the worst-case scenario privacy violations from happening, and it leverages the structure of Apple Intelligence itself, the company’s powerful custom silicon, and the terms of Apple’s deal with third-party partners to work. Here’s what Apple currently has planned for Apple Intelligence's privacy features and how they’ll work when they launch in beta this fall.

Apple has been leveraging local AI processing on the iPhone for years at this point to improve photos, make Siri suggestions, and more, powered by the custom Neural Engines (what other companies call a Neural Processing Unit) in the company’s A-series and M-series chips. The bundle of features Apple has dubbed Apple Intelligence introduces new large language and diffusion models that run alongside what Apple was doing before.

Using the knowledge stored locally on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac about your life, like messages, emails, and calendar events, Apple’s able to feed those new models the necessary information to process a request, and do it all locally on your device. For more complex requests, Apple relies on new servers it calls Private Cloud Compute to access larger models running on Apple Silicon. And for requests that require a large amount of outside knowledge, Apple can also send information to ChatGPT to get answers.

- How secure is Apple Intelligence: Everything Apple has shared so far, Pocket-Int.com, June 11, 2024.

2. Charles Shapiro, the former US ambassador to Venezuela, has explained why the United States’ plan to “run” the country would be a complicated task. President Donald Trump has announced that the US is “going to run the country” until there is a “safe, proper and judicious transition” of power in Venezuela, according to CBS News.

Shapiro told CNN on Saturday, January 3, that it is hard to tell whether Venezuelans who voted for the opposition in 2024 were genuine opposition supporters or voters who were disappointed with the country’s collapsed economy. He further estimated that at least “20%, maybe more of the population” remain supporters of captured President Nicolás Maduro.

“How you win those people over and turn that around is going to be very, very difficult,” Shapiro, now President of World Affairs Council of Atlanta, said.

Venezuela witnessed protests breaking out across the country in 2024 when the electoral body announced Maduro as the winner with 51% of the votes. The president had promised free and fair elections, but allegations of foul play emerged.

With Venezuela’s population of about 30 million and the country being home to some guerrilla groups, security issues are also believed to be at stake. Shapiro noted that the Trump administration is still unlikely to send troops and seems to be relying on Vice President Delcy Rodríguez and the Venezuelan army to maintain security.

“That’s going to be a very, very difficult needle to thread,” he added.

- Venezuela strike: Ex-ambassador explains why Trump’s plan to ‘run the country’ will be a ‘difficult needle to thread’, HindustanTimes.com, January 4, 2026.

3. The Eaton and Palisades fires will be acknowledged during the Oscar ceremony on Sunday.

It’s personal to host Conan O’Brien, whose assistant lost her home in Altadena.

“The Oscars is a show that is very much a hometown show. It’s a Los Angeles show, so what’s happened here needs to be addressed,” O'Brien said while wearing a shirt that read Altadena. “It’s a celebration of hard work that’s been done by many people.”

O’Brien thinks the Oscars should lift people up and get people back to work.

“There’s a needle to thread, there’s a line to walk, and I’m determined to do that correctly,” he said. “But I want to make sure there’s humor, that we have some fun, and that we have some joy.”

O’Brien was asked about a promotional poster that sees him transformed into an Oscar statue.

“Isn’t it cool? I can say that because it wasn’t my idea,” laughed O’Brien. “All I’ve ever wanted to do is not be taken seriously and try to make people laugh.

“That's why I really like what that image represents. Yes, it’s the Oscars, yes it’s this iconic show, yes these are difficult times, but I’m still going to be me.”

- Host Conan O’Brien plans to set right tone on Oscar Sunday, ABC7.com, February 27, 2025.

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。

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）