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Is “your time is done” often used?

English Language & Usage Asked on April 25, 2021

I found the phrase “your time is done” in the following sentence of New York Times (May 12) article titled “When a batting order becomes a reflection of disorder.”

After all the hits and heroics, all the good deeds and game-winning hits and homers, all the championships won — after all of that, forces far greater than you decide that your time is done. For the athlete, the force is nature, and the manager and general manager wind up confirming what nature has wrought.

Though I understand that “one’s time is done” means “one’s time is finished,” I don’t think I’ve heard this phrase many time. Is it used equally with, I mean as often as “your time is over” or “You run out of time”?

At the same time, there were the following lines in the same article:

Posada recoiled when someone asked point blank if he was he [sic] considering retirement now. He repeated his refrain that his back was tight and that he needed time to clear his head.

Isn’t the repetition of he in the first line a typo?

3 Answers

"Your time is up." would be the much more common idiom, meaning "you've run out of time".

Possibly the author chose not to use this phrasing because "up" is used otherwise baseball, namely "up to bat".

Correct answer by Ben Voigt on April 25, 2021

To answer your second question first, Oishi-san, yes, the repetition of he appears to be a typo.

And "your time is done" does means "your time is finished" or "your time is up"; all of them mean something has come to an end: your career, your marriage, your life, whatever is the subject at hand.

Answered by Robusto on April 25, 2021

To answer your second question, if the original quote from the NY Times had the [sic] in it, this would be an indication that "the passage appears exactly as in the original source. The usual purpose is to inform readers that any errors or apparent errors in the copied material are not from transcription—that they are reproduced exactly from the original writer or printer." - From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic
In other words, yes, it was a mistake, but not made by the author of the article, rather it was made by the original questioner and quoted verbatim by the author.

Answered by Mark on April 25, 2021

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