break silent

18:50 Oct 31, 2022 

Was just wondering how non-native my train of thought was. Very much so, as it turns out. Your consensus has been very convincing, folks. Thank you.

16:56 Oct 31, 2022 

is that you could spend a week trying to discern what this means, just in the same way as a highly abstract work of art or a very obscure poem. At the end of the day it's simply a name for this piece of instrumental music and probably doesn't describe it any meaningful way. If you are going to try to translate it, it would be better left in English.

09:12 Oct 31, 2022 

Breaking bad makes sense if you think of the phrase 'Them's the breaks', ie twists of fate. Break silent is less easy to construe, because bad luck is a thing but silent luck isn't. But if it had to be done, I would say it was more radical that just shutting up and would be something like Harper Lee just not uttering for a very extended period.

18:22 Oct 30, 2022 

First time I encountered the verb 'break' followed by an adjective alone (or at least made conscious note of encountering it) was when I started watching 'Breaking Bad' some years ago.

I guess I kinda inevitably associated the two phrasings, speculating that 'break silent' might imply a prompt for a sudden shift from talkative to silent (which would essentially make it a sophisticated euphemism for 'shut up'), but I have no idea how arbitrary such a parsing would be seen by natives, which is why I posted the question.