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broken reed



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Idioms and Phrases

A weak or unreliable support, as in I'd counted on her to help, but she turned out to be a broken reed . The idea behind this idiom, first recorded about 1593, was already present in a mid-15th-century translation of a Latin tract, “Trust not nor lean not upon a windy reed.â€
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Example Sentences

Examples have not been reviewed.

The loop at the end had a single broken reed still attached.

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As Chernow writes, the Massachusetts congressman Ben Butler, a Radical Republican, “wondered privately whether Grant can be trusted to disobey positive orders of his chief? When the hour of peril comes, shall we not be leaning on a broken reed?â€

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This would perhaps have been an injustice given the ease with which Wilfred Zaha tumbled like broken reed under Raheem Sterling’s challenge.

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It is conceivable that if Wyeth were still alive and painting, he would be drawn to this new-old landscape to capture the stark beauty of a broken reed or the isolation of the Webb farmhouse and its sugar maple.

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But we soon found that we were trusting to a broken reed, so far as his knowledge as a guide was concerned.

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

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