Grasping at straws?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Grasping at straws?

Desperate is the word to best describe the situation where someone is grasping at straws.

Originally, you see, grasping at straws is the proverb that depicts a drowning man in the lake. What the drowning man wants to clutch in that situation is, of course, a large tree trunk to keep him afloat. But there are no tree trunks around. All he sees are straws, i.e. stems and stalks of thin wheat and rice and other crops.

These thin scattered straws are not going to help but the drowning man will snatch at them and hold onto them for, literally, dear life.

That’s the precise situation of the drowning man doing anything he can in order to save himself, even though none of it makes any logical sense.

Hence, figuratively speaking, grasping at straws is used to describe anyone who’s so desperate that he will do something, anything, to salvage a hopeless situation.

Got it?

Alright, let’s move promptly to media examples of people grasping or grasping at straws, trying to, hope against hope, extricate themselves from a hopeless situation:

1. Bill English is struggling under the pressure of his creaking economy that has the highest number of people out of work in 20 years, and wrongly claims the highest number of Kiwis ever are in work, says Labour’s Finance spokesperson David Parker.

“Bill English is struggling with the pressure of his stagnating economy. The facts are terrible. The highest unemployment rate since Jenny Shipley. The highest number of unemployed in 20 years. The Number of Kiwis in work down by 12,000 since March.