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bull in a china shop
Idioms and Phrases
An extremely clumsy person, as in Her living room, with its delicate furniture and knickknacks, made him feel like a bull in a china shop . The precise origin for this term has been lost; it was first recorded in Frederick Marryat's novel, Jacob Faithful (1834).Example Sentences
Gen. Rob Bonta called Musk a “bull in a china shop,” and said Trump’s unilateral appointment of him to a “made up” but extremely powerful post was a “clear and dangerous effort to bypass the nomination and confirmation process required under the Constitution.”
“He’s a bull in a China shop,” McCoy said.
One longtime NFL figure familiar with Bieniemy, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said he came across “like a bull in a china shop; he’s almost honest to a fault, too.”
Germany’s unpopular government came in for lampooning, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz portrayed as a sloth and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock as an elephant in a porcelain shop, the German equivalent of a bull in a china shop.
Ms Shelley described him as "like a bull in a china shop - once he gets moving, nothing's going to stop him".
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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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