Reader question:

Please explain “big time” in this sentence: All good investors know cost matters, big time.

My comments:

Being aware of what an investment costs is important, extremely important.

If a car costs 200,000, for example, and your annual income is less than that, you won’t be able to afford that car. Hence, it’s probably not a good idea to attempt to buy one for the time being.

You can borrow some money to get that car, of course. But here, you need to be even more aware of cost – this time, how much borrowed money costs.

Before borrowing, that is, you should know that you have to pay that money back, plus interest.

Just the other day, I heard a few old guys talking about some young people who are courageous enough to borrow money to play the stock market.

The stock market, as you may have heard, was in what’s called a bull market before the National Day holiday period. That means stock prices were rising, like, steeply. And some young men are said to have bought money from banks to invest in stocks for the first time – all with the good intention of making a quick buck.

Their idea is, hopefully very soon, they’ll pay back their loans, plus interest, after they sell their stocks at a much higher price.

However, the markets had since stopped rising. And now, they’re at a loss what to do.

They’re not at a loss what to do, actually. Not all of them, at any rate. Not totally. A few have vowed on social media not to pay their loans back, ever.

All because, they say, they were cheated because they felt like they were misled by all the hype in the media about how the bull market would last.

Well, we don’t know how not paying one’s loans back works out for them but what I want to say is youngsters today are easy with money. They are big-time spenders, unlike their elders and, unlike their elders, they tend to make rash financial decisions. Or, put in another way, they’re adventurous and fearless.

Or, they are just not good investors as our question sentence at the top of this article points out. All good investors know that cost matters, big time. You’ve got to know what your investment costs and what the returns are going to be.

Oh, big time.

Here, “big time” is an adverb, although it is also a noun and an adjective.

Big-time as in contrast to small-time.

Small time?

Yes, that’s a phrase, too.

Have you heard of small-time crooks? They’re small thieves who, for example, mug an old lady in the street for only a few dollars. They’ll never attempt anything big, such as robbing a bank for or something spectacular like that.

Both “small time” and “big time” come from lower-salaried circuits dating back to the early 20th century, according to IdiomOrigins.org. Back in the day, small, village-based circuits relied on daily performances from one small place to another. In other words, a lot of hard work, little payback. Later on, when they became well-known, they got to perform in big cities in front of large audiences and make a lot of money.

That’s when they are said to have hit the big time. That means they have made it big, having achieved the highest level of success.

Or in the words of Donald Trump, former President of the United States, they have succeeded, bigly.

All right, without quibbling over Trump’s language, here are recent media examples of “big time” as noun, adverb or adjective (in that order):

1. Megan Moroney may have hit the big time, but that doesn’t mean the country upstart has forgotten where she comes from. And when it came time to pick a date to the CMA Awards – where Moroney is nominated for Best New Artist and Best Song (“Tennessee Orange”) – she knew exactly who she wanted to bring.

“I’m taking my dad as my date,” says the 26-year-old star, who has been the topic of much online dating speculation lately. “He taught me how to play guitar and he was the one who made me love music as much as I do, so to be able to bring him the first time I’m nominated, I’m just really excited about that.”

But don’t expect them to pull a Britney and Justin and dress alike. Moroney says their look will be “classic.”

“He’s going to wear a black tux, because we didn’t want to look like we’re going to prom together,” she says, adding with a laugh, “He wanted to wear a hat, but he was like, ‘What if we’re sitting in front of people and they get annoyed?’”

Moroney has earned a prime seat at the show after spending the past year riding high on the massive success of her debut album, Lucky, which she released in May and features the No. 1 platinum hit “Tennessee Orange.” And while the Georgia native has always loved music, growing up in a small town in the South she didn’t realize it was a career option.

“I just thought I was going to be an accountant and live in my hometown,” she says. “My mom was an accountant, and, for the most part, where I’m from you just do what your parents do, maybe get a family business. Being a country artist was not even on my radar, because I did not think that was something that would be possible.”

- Country Star Megan Moroney on Her Whirlwind Year and Her Sweet CMA Awards Date: ‘It’s Surreal’, USMagazine.com, November 8, 2023.

2. A former head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives at Facebook and Nike was sentenced to five years in prison this week for a brazen fraud scheme she ran while working at the companies.

Barbara Furlow-Smiles pleaded guilty in December to stealing more than $5 million from the two massive companies, though the vast majority was taken during her time working for Facebook from 2017 to 2021. She used the stolen cash to fund a “l(fā)uxury lifestyle,” prosecutors said.

“I blew it big time,” Furlow-Smiles admitted in a letter to the judge in her case.

Furlow-Smiles said she had a lifetime commitment to being a voice for disenfranchised people, but acknowledged that her actions “added fuel to the fire of disengagement and attack of DEI efforts.”

Exploiting her access to company credit cards at Facebook, which is now called Meta, Furlow-Smiles would pay people for services they did not do for the company, then have those people kick back the money to her.

She brought dozens of people into her scheme, prosecutors said, including “relatives, former interns from a prior job, nannies, a hair stylist, and her university tutor.”

Sometimes, Furlow-Smiles had Facebook directly pay third parties for personal goods or services, including $10,000 for specialty portraits and $18,000 for her child’s preschool tuition. She would then submit false reports about the work the people had done for the company.

She stole about $4.9 million from Facebook as part of the scheme, prosecutors said.

- ‘I blew it big time.’ Former Facebook, Nike DEI head gets 5 years in prison for stealing millions, OregonLive.com, May 17, 2024.

3. Documentaries aside, few American filmmakers will attempt making any sort of overt political statement these days. If your money is coming from a streamer or a larger studio, forget it. Gone, long gone, are the days a Francis Ford Coppola or an Alan Pakula might venture to make a picture like The Conversation or All the President’s Men. Even Jonathan Demme’s remake of John Frankenheimer’s great 1962 political chiller The Manchurian Candidate is now 20 years old, though both films have turned out to more prescient than anyone would have believed two decades ago, or six – you could consider them quasi-documentaries.

Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, which premiered here in Cannes on May 20, arrives at just the right time. And if it isn’t a great movie, it’s at least a fascinating and thoughtful one, an even-handed film that doesn’t need to resort to extremes to paint an accurate picture of what America and the world are up against right now, in terms of one particular past and possibly future president. Sebastian Stan plays 1970s-and-'80s-era Donald Trump, at the time a socially clumsy, insecure underling in his bullying father’s real estate business. Jeremy Strong plays Roy Cohn, the cutthroat lawyer who’d served as Senator Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel during the Army-McCarthy hearings, and who’d earlier used questionable means to get Julius and Ethel Rosenberg convicted as Soviet spies, resulting in their 1953 execution. By the 1970s, he was gathering steam as a fixer extraordinaire, and this is where Abbasi’s movie begins. In 1973 the government accused Trump of violating the Fair Housing Act by barring African Americans from his rental properties; he secured Cohn’s services to file an audacious countersuit for $100 million in damages. Though the countersuit was dismissed by a federal judge, Trump later settled the case out of court, an encouraging first step for an aspiring megalomaniac.

In telling this story, which begins in a suitably gritty mid-1970s New York, Abbasi’s movie does a lot of things right. In the early scenes, Stan plays Trump as an awkward climber, driven by an inferiority complex that compels him to hang around with what he sees as the right people. This is why he approaches Strong’s Cohn in a restaurant one evening, as the lawyer sits at a table surrounded by numerous powerful and/or crooked cronies, among them mobster racketeer “Fat Tony” Salerno (Joe Pingue), who will later play a not-so-straight-arrow role in the construction of Trump Tower. But at this point, young Trump is in trouble with the feds; he thinks Cohn can help. Cohn tries to brush him off at first, but he can’t resist a challenge – he also sort of likes the kid. He takes Trump’s case and turns his new young friend into a protégé, instilling in him three rules for success: Attack, attack, attack; admit nothing, deny everything; and always claim victory – never acknowledge defeat.

Abbasi presents this student-teacher union with an almost dispassionate detachment. We already know how well one particular individual has already been served by these rules; no need for Abbasi to spell them out in bold type, and so he doesn't. His restraint is admirable, even if it makes his movie feel a little inert, at least through the first two-thirds or so. Still, his actors carry the film: Stan maps a believable transition from the striver Trump of the 1970s to the arrogant Trump of the 1980s, a guy who’s reached what he views as the top and who thinks nothing of betraying those who helped get him there, including his first wife, Ivana (played, with wit and vigor, by Maria Bakalova). In the movie’s most unsettling scene, Ivana suggests that maybe the couple needs to reinvigorate their sex life. Trump responds by informing her angrily that he’s no longer attracted to her and hates the way her fake breasts feel – never mind that he’s the one who talked her into getting them enlarged in the first place. As his anger mounts, he shoves her to the floor, forcing himself on her. You can read this episode as “consensual” if you’re looking to split hairs, but in Abbasi’s framing, it sure looks like rape. It’s a horrifying scene, though hardly a surprising one.

It’s also most likely the chief reason a billionaire investor in the film, Dan Snyder, who is a friend and financial supporter of Trump’s, is said to have been “furious” over the cut of The Apprentice he saw in February, according to reports from Variety. Trump himself has called the movie “pure fiction,” vowing legal action. But in the grand scheme, Abbasi – who is Danish-Iranian – doesn’t seem to have embroidered much, if he’s done so at all, to make Trump look like a reprehensible human being. His portrayal – as drawn from Gabriel Sherman’s script – has a calmly chilling verisimilitude, meshing with all the behavior we’ve already seen. It tells us nothing new, but it does give us a sense of how we reached the point we’re at today, facing the possible re-election of a man who has no scruples, and no feeling at all for his constituents or his country. He’s driven only by what he stands to gain personally, in terms of money and power – not a public servant, just a servant to the self.

Which leads us to the most chilling effect of The Apprentice: the way it makes even a duplicitous manipulator and big-time hypocrite like Roy Cohn seem, at least in the end, believably sympathetic. Strong is terrific at capturing Cohn’s deadpan sharpness. At one point, as he’s getting the young Trump fitted for his first good suit, he observes drily, “You’ve got kind of a big ass, you gotta work on that.” But later, as Cohn is dying of AIDS – he never acknowledged his homosexuality, and never admitted to having the disease – we see how in the end, frail and capable of hurt feelings, he wasn’t even king of his own world. Plus, no matter what you think of Cohn – and there’s every reason to despise him – he claimed to the end that everything he did was for the love of his country. He may not be your kind of patriot, or mine, but he was motivated by a belief system that had meaning for him.

You can’t say the same for the young wanna-be who eagerly took to his tutelage. As of this writing, The Apprentice hasn’t yet secured U.S. distribution, which tells us how nervous American distributors are about the political climate in the United States leading up to the election. That’s ironic, because the movie, while highly principled, isn’t bold enough to change any minds, though it’s specific and potent enough to make some people very angry. In that sense, it’s a quiet act of resistance, and still, even in its restraint, it’s viewed as dangerous. That’s where we’re at today, a place where subtleties aren’t easily grasped. But everyone knows the meaning of attack, attack, attack.

- Donald Trump Has Called The Apprentice ‘Garbage.’ But the Actual Movie Is Almost Too Real, Time.com, May 23, 2024.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：張欣）