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Recently I heard an interesting sentence on the radio but now I forgot it. It was used like this: that boy is a X image of his father. I thought it was "grazing" but when I looked on Google it was not correct. Can you help me find out what the sentence is? Thank you very much.

By the way, I found that Grazing means grassland suitable for pasturage or eat grass in a field. But that's not what I need. When I search up "the grazing image" I just got some photos of cows eating grass.

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    The phrase that occurs to me is spitting image although that doesn't sound anything like grazing image.
    – stangdon
    Jan 3, 2022 at 16:30
  • Just 'the image' of someone is also possible, or 'the very image', which doesn't sound like 'grazing'.
    – Michael Harvey
    Jan 3, 2022 at 16:46
  • There's graven image, but that's an idol—an object or image, such as a statue, that is worshipped as the representation of a deity or god.
    – FumbleFingers
    Jan 3, 2022 at 17:26

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Almost certainly "That boy is the spitting image of his father".

That doesn't sound much like "grazing", but this is a standard idiom meaning "look very similar"

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  • You and stangdon are right. I'm just remembering the sentence wrong. Thanks, now I know what it is, a spitting image!
    – user149763
    Jan 3, 2022 at 16:44
  • I think Americans use He's the spitting image [of someone he looks just like] at least as often as Brits. But He's the dead spit [of doppleganger] seems to be almost exclusively a Briticism.
    – FumbleFingers
    Jan 3, 2022 at 17:34
  • The expression was originally _spit and image. merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/spitting-image-origin-meaning
    – Kate Bunting
    Jan 3, 2022 at 17:38
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The speaker probably said, "That boy is the graven image of his father." It's a common mistake: a mishmash of "spitting (or very) image of..." and "graven image of..." Graven is the past participle of the archaic verb grave (definition 3), meaning engrave.

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