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stiff as a board
Idioms and Phrases
Also, stiff as a poker . Inflexible, rigidly formal, unbending, as in This cloth is stiff as a board; what happened to it? or There he stood, stiff as a poker, unwilling to give an inch . The board in the first simile for rigidity is a slab of wood; the second, alluding to the iron implement used to push around logs in open fires, dates from the late 1700s.Example Sentences
Another stands stiff as a board on the bottom step of a cabin.
Unmoving and stiff as a board, she appeared to be deceased.
At first, Berry couldn’t run: He lay on the floor, rigid, face not moving, “as stiff as a board,†his tour manager recalled.
“Now you’ll want to hold it out in front of you and press—†I press the button and Magnus goes stiff as a board, his thick arms clapping against his sides.
When the Meyers first brought her home, that little girl refused to make eye contact with Mavis and became stiff as a board while she was held.
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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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