Volume XXII

I. Tie one on 👔

Giddy up! This one rides straight out of the Wild West, where cowboys tied bandanas around their necks before a night of hard drinking, hoping it might catch the sweat, the dust, or whatever came back up after one too many.

So if you’re at the lake this weekend and catch a 12% Cutwater eyeing you up from the cooler, do the honorable thing: tie one on for old times’ sake.

II. Eat your own dog food🐶

It may be Summer Fridays, but corporate lingo doesn’t take weekends off.

If someone says they’re eating their own dog food (i.e., dogfooding), don’t panic. In business speak, it means using your own product to test it. Like Google employees using Google as their browser, OpenAI engineers coding with GPT.

The phrase took off at Microsoft in the ’80s, when exec Paul Maritz urged employees to “eat our own dogfood” by running beta versions of Windows. Some trace it further back to Alpo commercials—a household name for dog food—where actor Lorne Greene appeared on camera saying he fed Alpo to his own dog because that’s how much he trusted it.

In short: if you wouldn’t use it yourself, maybe it’s not ready for prime time.

III. Bite off more than you can chew 🐍

This phrase comes from 1800s America, before the days of American Spirits and Juul, when folks would bite off too much chewing tobacco and struggle to handle it.

Over time, it morphed into a warning for anyone taking on more than they can manage.

Whether it’s deadlines, dog-sitting, or committing to make sourdough for the family function, we’ve all found ourselves in over our heads on something we thought would be easy.

Keep on sending on. Forward to a friend.