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Phrase: A bull in a china shop
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
When I was young, I often heard my mother complain my father, was like a bull in a china shop.
At that time, I had visions of a rodeo bull in a Chinese medicine shop.
You know what I mean, those stores you sometimes see on TV with an old Chinese guy surrounded by boxes of dried leaves, herbs and animal body parts.
I could never figure out what she meant.
It wasn’t until I went to university that I realized it was china with a small c.
You may have heard of fine china or bone china.
Well, imagine a rodeo bull in a shop full of expensive and easily breakable cups, saucers and plates.
It would be a disaster.
When someone is described as a bull in a china shop, it means they break things, make mistakes or otherwise cause damage when a little more finesse or gentle touch is required.
My dad was a big man, and he was a construction worker.
He was not designed to spend much time indoors.
My mom called him a bull in a china shop because the house always seemed too small for him or he too big for the house.
Whenever he came home, he was ‘in the way.’
Whether he put his feet up in the front room or sat at the kitchen table to read the newspaper, he would knock a picture off the wall by accident or tip something over, just like a bull in a china shop.
There is a place for everything and everything in its place, but my dad did not belong in the house, and bulls don’t belong in china shops.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 77.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.