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smell a rat
- To sense foul play: “They claim they will honor the terms of the contract, but I smell a rat.â€
Idioms and Phrases
Suspect something is wrong, especially a betrayal of some kind. For example, When I didn't hear any more from my prospective employer, I began to smell a rat . This expression alludes to a cat sniffing out a rat. [c. 1550]Example Sentences
For any of this representative democracy stuff to work, it has to mean something when GOP politicians look up from nibbling on the scraps of the president's long-forgotten past grievances and say, "I smell a rat."
Did you smell a rat in Season 1?
She speaks like a refugee from a 1940s potboiler — “Something’s fishy here. I smell a rat†and “Listen, Slick, nothing would make me happier than to put that girl in a box marked return to sender†— but with a patina of acquired elegance.
"By the end of the message, she seemed to have worked herself into a complete frenzy and was throwing around wild accusations. 'I smell a rat here. It is more than the usual red tape, incompetence and bureaucracy. That's expected! I believe there is corruption here at the highest levels'," he said.
"I know enough to smell a rat. There's something going on here that they're not telling us. I just don't know what it is."
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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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