From the headline for this article: “world’s most popular streaming service is tied at the neck with its biggest rival”
At first I thought it would be “tied neck and neck”, as in at an equal level, but it seems to mean entangled with. But I’ve never heard this usage, and googling for “tied at the neck” is returning only literal descriptions of clothing.
I’ve never heard the phrase; “is neck and neck” would be proper use of the term. Based on what you describe about the article’s content, the term “joined at the hip” would seem closer.
I’m going to guess bad writing, bad editing, or use of an AI to write the headline.
I read the article and it doesn’t seem to be saying that they’re “tied neck and neck” with Amazon but that they’re dependent on them for compute, storage and networking. They might have said “joined at the hip” instead?
Could it mean they’re eating from the same mouth? Like eating from the same trough?
Yes, I’ve heard it. It means something similar to “joined at the hip” but with a more negative connotation. That you are attached to someone, having to work with them due to forces outside your control, but you probably would rather not.
I believe the imagery is tied to animals tied at the neck to a plow.
It’s different from “neck and neck” which means competing against each other but very close to even.
ETA: Of course Google shows nothing, so now I’m wondering if I’m losing my mind…
I thought that it may have been written by an Indian author. Someone who had in mind the two companies being “yoked together.” However that wasn’t the case.
That’s my vote, and letting AI do the headline writing strikes me as the most likely.
FWIW, AI (GPT-4o) says this isn’t a widely used phrase anywhere, and it should be pretty good at identifying words that go with each other. (Also, “tied at the neck” doesn’t ring to me as something an AI would spit out, and I’ve spend hundreds to maybe even over a thousand hours on these things since they first came out. It would have picked a cliche phrase, IMO.)
On the other hand, “Netflix - more like Netfix” does sound utterly stupid, too. What the hell does that even me in context? So, I don’t know. Maybe the headline is AI generated by one of the stupider AIs.
What a weird, stupid headline. It sounds like a response to some other article about Netflix, but there’s no link. Could have been much cleaner by leaving off the “Netflix? More like”.
Never heard “tired at the neck” before. Perhaps it’s a regionalism?
I’m not sure if that is the headline’s intent but that makes it a useful and clever phrase, especially now that fewer people know what a yoke is.
I’ve never heard “tied at the neck” as an idiom, but I like it as a way to describe a relationship that’s too tightly coupled in a dangerous way. Like 2 people literally tied together with a rope around their necks might strangle each other if they strain too hard to put any distance between them. That’s a good metaphor for this situation.
Although the literal medical term “joined at the hip” could be taken the same way, I normally hear it used to describe a close voluntary relationship that endures due to a strong mutual benefit.
If “tied at the neck” weren’t so adjacent to “tied neck and neck”, and “joined at the hip”, I would say it’s a delightful turn of phrase, otherwise it’s more likely to be confusing than evocative.
It sounds like they’re hanging a person, you know with a noose. Or how you might hang a dead animal to bleed it. Never heard of any sense that people or animals are joined together by ‘tying at the neck’.
Trying to search for the phrase “tied at the neck” returns mostly results about neckties so I don’t think it’s easy to research.
One important point is that, as used in this article, it is not implying a peer or symmetric relationship. Netflix needs Amazon a lot more than Amazon needs Netflix.
When visiting Ireland we saw a couple of goats “tied at the neck” with a rope maybe 5’(?) long. They were in a field with stone walls that either one of them could have easily climbed but, without the cooperation of the other, they weren’t leaving that field. So, I take the phrase to mean “both dependent on and limited by the other”. I assume that goats aren’t very cooperative or this method wouldn’t work. I have no idea if that interpretation makes sense in this case.