to eat you for breakfast
4
8.4
- idiom
- Informal
- Even better, discuss them with Plimer; my bet is that he'd eat you for breakfast.
Examples
-
He will eat you for breakfast.
-
If I hired you, the guys in this office would eat you for breakfast.
-
Well, we're eating you for breakfast.
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- They eat you for breakfast.
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Sorry I didn't sit by and let them eat you for breakfast.
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Those mosquitoes eat you for breakfast?
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She's gonna eat you for breakfast!
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If you try to make Humson look like a Nazi, they will eat you for breakfast.
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One day one of them may catch up with us and eat us for breakfast, and it wouldn't even burp in the process.
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If you show any weakness, they'll eat you for breakfast and take advantage of you.
Synonyms
34
8.3
Defeat someone easily without much effort
4
8.6
To beat someone in business by taking their customers and sales
1
9.0
To beat someone and gain an advantage over them in competition
Antonyms
How Dominant
- Informal
78
1.7
- Informal
4
8.4
193
4.4
704
2.1
∞
1.4
Surface Forms
Morphology
eat + you + for + breakfast
The literal words 'eat' + 'you' + 'for breakfast' evoke consumption and dominance, so a learner who knows the constituents can infer a threatening or aggressive sense. However, mapping that image to the conventional meaning 'to defeat or overwhelm someone easily' is a metaphorical extension that is not fully predictable without exposure and varies cross-linguistically, so it is only partially transparent to a B1 learner.
Etymology
Eat you for breakfast comes from a simple picture: imagine someone so strong or skilled they could eat you like a small, easy breakfast. So the phrase now means 'to beat someone easily'.