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cut and run
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Idioms and Phrases
Clear out, escape, desert, as in He wished he could just cut and run . This term originally (about 1700) meant to cut a vessel's anchor cable and make sail at once. By the mid-1800s it was being used figuratively. Charles Dickens had it in Great Expectations (1861): “I'd give a shilling if they had cut and run.” Also see cut out , def. 7.Discover More
Example Sentences
Today the Gipper would be considered lily-livered, a “ surrender monkey,” another member of the “cut-and-run crowd.”
But it is reassuring that this withdrawal does not have, about it, the feel of a totally cynical cut-and-run.
Ill betide the Hun who dared to make a cut-and-run raid upon Dover.
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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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