But don't think that Cray was a shoe-in for the NERSC-7 deal, as this roadmap toward exascale computing for the Berkeley Lab shows:

My comments:

Shoo-in. Shoo. Not shoe, nothing to do with shoes.

Shoo is the sound one makes to a small child or animal to make them go away.

If you had ever raised a group of chickens in a courtyard you would definitely have said “Shoo!” a lot every day. In fact, at dusk when you want to usher the chickens into the cage for the night, you say “shoo” to achieve the purpose.

In other words, you shoo the chickens into the cage, hence the term shoo-in, the noun form of shooing the animals in.

To shoo the chicks into the cage is no big deal, something easy of accomplishment. Therefore, to say someone is a shoo-in for, say, the presidency is to suggest the presidency is easily his to win.

In other words, for him to get the win the presidency is as easy as, using our example again, shooing a few chickens into their cage.

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Go to Zhang Xin's column

本文僅代表作者本人觀點，與本網立場無關。歡迎大家討論學術問題，尊重他人，禁止人身攻擊和發布一切違反國家現行法律法規的內容。

About the author:

Zhang Xin（張欣） 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.