This morning’s One Big Happy:
Once again, Ruthie copes with vocabulary she doesn’t know — in this case, the word snit in in a snit, where she has to figure out which of the many senses of the preposition in is at play here.
From NOAD2:
snit noun N. Amer. informal a fit of irritation; a sulk: the ambassador and delegation had withdrawn in a snit. ORIGIN 1930s: of unknown origin.
(I was surprised at how recent the word is.)
In a snit is treated as an idiom in a number of idiom dictionaries, though not in NOAD2. But there’s no denying that snit occurs far more often in in a snit than in any other context; it’s a very hogh-frequency collocation.
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