APAD: I wouldn't give him the time of day.
Meaning:
The person is unimportant to me/I treat him with contempt
Background:
It appears that this expression originated some time in the mid-twentieth
century. It can be found in Harper Lee's To Kill A Mocking Bird (1960): "Mr
Ewell seemed determined not to give the defense the time of day."
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Classics try my patience, I found over the years, and never finished the famous
novel. I'll give it another go, someday. Meanwhile, it's good to learn the quote.
Now I can play with a longer and less pointed version of "snub" or "ignore" when
they are called for which sounds like a line from a Clint Eastwood movie.
Taleb must have many that he wouldn't give the time of day to, maybe even
including the author of To Kill A Mocking Bird, as he said
Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one
thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine
and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty. A man without a heroic
bent starts dying at the age of thirty.