tickle the dragon's tail
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.85 in modern English
31
Scrabble Score
20
Letters
5
Syllables
14
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To do something that has a risk of going catastrophically wrong.
verb
To bring two subcritical masses close together in order to find the edge of criticality.
Example Sentences
- "Climbing so close to an erupting volcano was tickling the dragon's tail."
- "Don't tell him the headline's misprinted; you don't want to tickle the dragon's tail."
- "The laboratory head tickles the dragon's tail whenever we have guests as a show of machismo."
- "Every real boy likes to tickle the dragon's tail. Maybe I was a little old for it, but that's what I was doing there in the Moran III jungle. I got the shield off my cigarette lighter and jerked out the dinky little damper rods for the pile and started easing the two little bricks toward each other with the point of my lead pencil"
- "PHYSICIST SLOTIN (manipulating the two hemispheres of the bomb at a table): Come closer. Watch me tickle the Dragon's tail"
- "And so it happened that Japan and the United States had also tickled the dragon's tail. The two subcritical masses called pride and cultural misunderstanding had been shoved together into one critical mass."
Etymology
From the obvious risk of tickling a dragon's tail. In physics, it was coined by American physicist Richard Feynman to describe the experiments of Louis Slotin at Los Alamos National Laboratory.