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Comment by moksly | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure 7 or 8 figures really matter to a company the size of Facebook.

I worked in a medium sized municipality in Denmark, and when your budget is 9 billion Danish KR, well let’s just say that you treat expenses differently in enterprise, and we were still a small player compared to our bigger partners on the state level who could sign contracts larger than our entire budget without batting an eye.

(I’m not English, maybe batting an eye is the wrong expression, if so sorry!)

I’m not saying it wasn’t planned, but it may just be a “happy” coincidence.

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Your English usage is spot on. I read your whole comment without batting an eye at any strange constructions :)

I'm British; we would say "batting an eyelid". So correct usage in my book!

In American English we just say "batting an eye".

That would hurt!

Yes, I have been wondering what that even means. So many idioms and phrases don't make sense (ignoring the fact that some are historically outdated which is the cause of some of them not making sense)

https://www.idioms.online/not-bat-an-eye/

Try this old idiomatic phrase: “beating the boundary”.

Once you have made your guess as to the meaning, then and only then link to Wikipedia for a marvelous explanation from a not-so merry old England.

Basically, it means 'without blinking'.

Well, then "opening your eyes" would hurt even more, right? But we still say that, and everybody understands.

When we say "batting an eye", "opening an eye", etc it's clear that we're talking about eye lids since the alternative would be very painful and make no sense.

Colloquially, when we refer to "eyes", we're almost always referring to the facial structure through which the eyeball is visible and almost never the literal eyeball itself.

I mean, when you say somebody has attractive eyes, surely it's understood that you're not referring to the spherical ball of goo itself, but rather their facial structure.

It's the same thing. Just drop the "lid"

Getting batted in the eye will certainly make your lid drop.

For sure, but I think "batting an eye" is more like winking.

I'm English and I've always seen it as 'bat(ting) an eye'. I don't think I've often heard it said though.

No, but they matter on the other side. If I am selling to a nonprofit to save the world, I'll give a different price than to a for-profit.

There ought to be a meta.com shareholder suit.

Maybe you would, but most of the “free market” real world out there wouldn’t. Or if they did you can be sure it was a tax write off as a loss at least.

TIL Demmark doesn't use Euro.

Neither does Sweden: fwiw.

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