owe someone a marker
- Thread starter csicska
- Start date
Yes, a favor, which might involve money, but needn't. A 'marker', after all, is an I O U.
A new word for me. Do we use that in AE? I truly don't know.
We use "marker" (rarely, but the OED actually qualified it as "U.S. slang"), but I would never say that I "owed someone a marker," no more than I would say that I "owed him an IOU." You give someone a marker (or an IOU), and that represents what you owe him.
No.
Thanks, GF. So is it your feeling that, granting it should be "give," in AE we use "a marker" as a commonly understood equivalent of "an informal I.O.U."?
I know you said it's rare, I'm just trying to find out if this basically understood and if somehow only me has never encountered it before. (Which wouldn't be the first time
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I know you said it's rare, I'm just trying to find out if this basically understood and if somehow only me has never encountered it before. (Which wouldn't be the first time
)Well, that's the definition: "5.b U.S. slang. A promissory note; an I.O.U." Maybe it's more common in some places than others, or was more common at some point in the past; all I know is that I've seen it, but quite infrequently.
I think it's older slang. It featured prominently in the plot of the movie (and musical) 'Guys and Dolls', for example, and there was even an old Shirley Temple movie called "Little Miss Marker" where a father leaves his child as a marker for his gambling debt, promising to come back for her when he has the money.
Remade in 1949 (retitled Sorrowful Jones), starring Bob Hope and Lucille Ball, and in 1980, starring Walter Matthau and Julie Andrews.