last-ditch A last-ditch effort gets food to orbiting cosmonauts, saving their mission from a disastrous early end. Title summary for news article: “Close...
blue-chip Like their American counterparts, Japanese executives cheerfully overpaid for their late-'80s acquisitions. But the Japanese made another fundamental...
booby-trap Allegations of Gunrunning in Australia and money laundering in Canada and Europe. A suicide note addressed to the French Interior Minister. Two more...
roly-poly a roly-poly guy who resembled the cop in the film ? roly-poly = a rotund individual; pudding made of suet pastry spread with jam or fruit and rolled...
far-fetched you theory is a bit far-fetched. far-fetched = Brought from far, or from a remote place. Not easily or naturally deduced or introduced; forced;...
hunky-dory She suggested it should have had environmental advice or a website link during the end credits, adding it was “troubling” that by the end...
heavy-handed The heavy-handed marketing campaign, as any business-school student can testify, worked for a while and then backfired. After an initial spurt of...
witch-hunt was that Oppenheimer had been railroaded and ruined by the witch- hunters. ? railroad = (informal) To convict (a accused person) without a fair ...
grass-roots The grass-roots campaign to slip prayer back into school is aimed at a chink in the Supreme Court's rulings: the court has never expressly stated...
skinny-dipping skinny-dipping with her. skinny-dipping = swim in the nude. Skinny dipping↗ cloak-and-dagger Lined up on one side are the three-letter...
cul-de-sac cul-de-sac is a passage with only one outlet, as a street closed at one end, or in anatomy, any bag-shaped or tubular cavity, vessel, or organ, open...
gavel-to-gavel So are hundreds of lawyers, journalists and an armchair judiciary of ordinary viewers who have abandoned Luke and Laura on General Hospital↗...
free-for-all During the Middle Ages, tournaments often contained a mêlée consisting of knights fighting one another on foot or while mounted, either divided...
go-for-broke With the go-for-broke enthusiasm of youngsters trying out new toys, scientists are uncovering the mysteries of the brain with technology. ? go for...
avant-garde the Joker character in Batman (1989 film)↗ considers himself to be an avant-garde artist. Xah Lee avant-garde = Characterized by the use of...
pell-mell soldiers retreat in a pell-mell fashion pell-mell = with undue hurry and confusion. ☄ pell-mell soldiers retreat in a pell-mell fashion pell-mell =...
underfoot It is delicious, like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of winesburg. In the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is hard...
verisimilitude Verisimilitude in its literary context is defined as the fact or quality of being verisimilar, the appearance of being true or real; likeness or...
gadfly Here he plays Cyrano↗, gadfly and rabble-rouser, man about town, friend of some, envied by many, despised by a powerful few, and hopelessly, oh, most...
backlash Now there may be a new force for change. Students who are tired of paying $20,000 a year to have someone throw up on their shoes have launched a...
threadbare The theater was moribund, subsisting on threadbare melodramas as vacuous as they were popular,... ? threadbare = Worn out; clothing that show...
warmonger “The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in...
heartland The Usenet newsgroups are, in their way, the perfect antidote to modern mass media. Rather than catering to the lowest common denominator with...
slink At the man's heels trotted a dog, a big native husky, the proper wolfdog, gray-coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from its...
moonshine More recent projects stir the imagination, even if the field is still young. Computer programs have generated over one thousand conjectures in graph...
daredevil Broken Arrow↗, a bomb-ticking chase movie about a daredevil pilot (Travolta) who steals two nuclear weapons, shows how easily the two cinemas can...
beachhead Older (age 15 and up), more hard-core gamers will want that Xbox↗. The machine is Microsoft's beachhead in the console wars, and I predict it will...
hostel While not quite new, the concept is recent - largely confined to Twenty-First Century films such as “Saw” and its sequels, and Roth's earlier films...
Having problems with message search?
Fill out this form to ensure your group is one of the first to be migrated to the new message search system.
