"Who's on First", by Abbott and Costello.
panjandrum said:
It was very clear from
a quick Google on xbox and "tap away" that to anyone who knows about xbox, the term "tap away" has a very precise and readily understood meaning.
And maybe, in our state of lack of knowledge, we might be a little more judicious in the terms used to describe "tap away".
I am almost convinced by this argument, which means that I take your point up to a point. I accept that I should not feel absolutely sure of my judgements until I can feel absolutely sure I know the whole context.
But I can't bring myself to concede being totally in error. (Yet.) Since felipe82 had kindly informed us this had to do with the instructions for use of a computer game device, it certainly had occurred to me from the very first that there might be some bizarre, parochial usage at play. But I had assumed that felipe82 would have taken the trouble to clear that debris from our path -- that he would have read the manual himself before deciding he needed a third party's opinion.
In a way, my earlier categorical statement is *still* valid, seeing how it turns out that the point of difficulty was *not* "tap away", but "tap 'Away'". That is, 'away' is not "English preposition meaning such and such", but rather, "name of a key (or button, or whatever) on the console of the Xbox electronic game device". This would be like asking for a definition of "hit enter". If by 'enter' we mean "English verb meaning to move oneself into an enclosed space", then indeed there is no such collocation as "hit enter".
I believe my mistake was in not leaving this thread to Xbox users.