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While reading a book I stumbled upon the following sentence:
He was too young to call it quits.
I can perfectly understand the gist, he was too young to be done with something, but what leaves me a bit baffled is the structure of call it quits. I am familiar with the phrase call it a day, for example, but never encountered a verb instead of a noun before. Why is it constructed this way? Are there other examples of call it <verb>?
Quits is not a verb, but an adjective. Call it quits (see call) is then an idiomatic expression meaning "to agree to end a contest, disagreement, etc. because both sides seem equal" or "to decide to stop doing something."
As far as I can see on the Corpus of Contemporary American English, call it is never followed by a verb.
I used OneLook's wildcard feature, and found these phrases that begin with call it:
(There are more on the OneLook page, but all the others are book, film, or record album titles.)
That leaves two traditional nouns (day and night), two traditional adjectives (even and off), and quits, which you call a verb, but Collins puts that usage into the adjective category.
