English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Could you please tell me what this sentence means?
"Do you think I should grow some hair just to pull it out with an order this low?"
This is an example of Rhetorical Questions in a book I am reading these days and there is no context for the question.
That...is a very weird sentence. Still, let's have a go at it...
I think it's a reference to the idiom "Pulling one's hair out", indicating frustration, confusion, or other loss of temper. Examples:
You kids are too loud! I'm pulling my hair out over here!
We fixed the machines, you can stop pulling your hair out.
When I was a kid, I always made my Mum pull her hair out.
So the first part of the sentence appears to be expressing frustration. By the sounds of it, a person who is either bald or has a very short haircut is frustrated, and is jokingly suggesting that they should grow some hair so that when frustrated they could pull it out.
"Order this low" is a bit more puzzling - it could mean a number of things. For our purposes, though, we can suppose it's some condition that causes distress to the speaker - perhaps it's a very small order for some product that requires a complicated set-up procedure to produce, thus the order is more trouble than it's worth.
Honestly, this sentence seems like it needs a lot of context to be clear; I would rephrase it like this:
"This order is annoyingly low", said the bald manager. "Do you think I should grow some hair so that I could express my anger by pulling it out?"
