In an article by Alan Cowell in the NYTimes, he says that the Swedish minister who was fartally stabbed was “tipped” to be a candidate for president. Cowell used the word twice. Where did this usage come from?
And, in another unrelated article in another publication, Fouad Ajami says something like, “you don’t have to go that far to count the cats in Zanzibar.” What does “counting the cats in Zanzibar” mean?
“Tipped” is, I believe, a Britishism of long standing.
The cats in Zanibar are beyond my ken. So to speak.
The real question is, how did he get the knife in there?
“Tipped” is pretty clear; it comes from tipping (predicting) the winner of a race, such as a horserace.
As for the other one, 30 seconds on Google found:
It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. – Henry David Thoreau, Walden