| English > English |
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| beat around the bush |
| 1. v. To treat a topic, but omit its main points, often intentionally. |
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| 2. v. To delay or avoid talking about something difficult or unpleasant. |
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| Just stop beating around the bush and tell me what the problem is! |
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| Analysis |
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| beat |
| 1. n. A stroke; a blow. |
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| 2. n. A pulsation or throb. |
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| a beat of the heart; the beat of the pulse |
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| 3. n. A pulse on the beat level, the metric level at which pulses are heard as the basic unit. Thus a beat is the basic time unit of a piece. |
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| 4. n. A rhythm. |
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| around |
| 1. prep. Defining a circle or closed curve containing a thing. |
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| I planted a row of lillies around the statue. The jackals began to gather around someone or something. |
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| 2. prep. Following the perimeter of a specified area and returning to the starting point. |
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| We walked around the football field. She went around the track fifty times. |
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| 3. prep. Following a path which curves near an object, with the object on the inside of the curve. |
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| the |
| 1. art. Definite grammatical article that implies necessarily that an entity it articulates is presupposed; something already mentioned, or completely specified later in that same sentence, or assumed already |
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| I’m reading the book. (Compare I’m reading a book.) |
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| The street in front of your house. (Compare A street in Paris.) |
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| The men and women watched the man give the birdseed to the bird. |
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| 2. art. Used before a noun modified by a restrictive relative clause, indicating that the noun refers to a single referent defined by the relative clause. |
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| bush |
| 1. n. (horticulture) A woody plant distinguished from a tree by its multiple stems and lower height, being usually less than six metres tall; a horticultural rather than strictly botanical category. |
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| 2. n. (slang) A person's pubic hair, especially a woman's; loosely, a woman's vulva. |
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| 3. n. A shrub cut off, or a shrublike branch of a tree. |
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| bushes to support pea vines |
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| 4. n. (historical) A shrub or branch, properly, a branch of ivy (sacred to Bacchus), hung out at vintners' doors, or as a tavern sign; hence, a tavern sign, and symbolically, the tavern itself. |
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