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
I'm reading this article.
And there's a sentence.
Houston, already home to the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, is slated to add another notch to its aeronautic belt.
But I can't understand meaning of the sentence.
What does to add another notch to its aeronautic belt mean?
From Russia With Love
To add another notch in your belt is simply a way of keeping some type of count. For a braggart or Lothario, it might be the number of sexual partners, for a gunslinger in the the old American West, it might be number of men you've killed, it might also be the number of mountains you've climbed.
In general, it's no longer a physical notch in a physical belt (or gun stock, or bed post), it's method of tracking something that you care about. In this specific case, it's something that the City of Houston will be proud of, adding another accomplishment, a Space Port, to it's list of commercial attractions.
It has crude origins. In the past, promiscuous people were advised jokingly to put a notch in the bedpost or belt each time they had a new sexual partner so that they would not lose track of how many people they had slept with.
For some, a high notch count was something to be ashamed of. For others, each notch was an accomplishment. To some extent, the phrase has lost its sexual connotation and now implies that a person or group accomplished something amazing, and it is just one conquest in a series.
I think that it means you got fat and needed to add another hole in your belt to accommodate your expanding stomach.
