My old newspaper friend Kurt, now at the Oneida Daily Dispatch, wrote an editorial on Dec. 15 criticizing the local hospital for not releasing information to the paper about patients, even if they gave permission.
"Dollars to doughnuts," wrote Kurt, "this is a modern notion to avoid lawsuits."
What a delightful and underused phrase! I looked it up on Wikipedia and found out that it means "a faux bet in which one person agrees to put up the same amount of dollars to another person's donuts in a bet (where a donut is considered to be worth much less than a dollar). Betting someone dollars to donuts is a rhetorical device that indicates that the person is confident in the outcome of an event, but it does not usually involve an actual bet with actual payoffs (either in dollars or in donuts)."
I asked Kurt what the reaction to his piece was: "It's 4 pm and I haven't heard from the hospital yet, but dollars to doughnuts it's coming."
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