What's the meaning for "six words away"? I heard it repeatedly in the movie Coach Carter.
Edit: In the scene in a bus, when the coach blasts the team for sneaking out to a party without informing him, he says "you are six words away from getting kicked off the bus" or something like that.
Best Answer
What actually happens in Coach Carter:
Carter is telling Worm to shut up, because what he just said made things worse. Six is an arbitrary small number, just making the point that Worm is very close to being thrown out of the team. Anything Worm says at this point could be enough to make the coach drop him.
Edit: just to be completely clear, this phrase isn't talking about six literal words, just that it would take dangerously little carelessness on Worm's part to get himself dropped. The general idiom is "N words from undesirable consequence" or "N words away from undesirable consequence", where almost any small number will do for N.
In the right circumstances the threat can be implied rather than specific:
The meaning is very similar to the saying, "When in a hole, stop digging." The speaker is generally angry with the person being spoken to, and nothing that person can say with make things any better right now.