soft underbelly

English

Etymology

Disputed

Pronunciation

• Audio (AU)

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Noun

soft underbelly (plural soft underbellies)

1. (idiomatic) A weak spot; a soft spot.
   • 2009 March 30, Mustafa Qadri, “Nato's soft underbelly”, in The Guardian‎^[1]:

     But supply convoys are the soft underbelly of a powerful, modern military force that the Taliban is incapable of matching in conventional combat.

   • 2014 May 12, Suzanne Goldenberg, “Western Antarctic ice sheet collapse has already begun, scientists warn”, in The Guardian‎^[2]:

     Scientists have known for years that the Thwaites glacier is the soft underbelly of the Antarctic ice sheet, and first found that it was unstable decades ago.

   • 2014, Christian Promitzer, Siegfried Gruber, Harald Heppner, editors, Southeast European Studies in a Globalizing World, LIT Verlag Münster, page 119:

     The current, predominantly right-wing perception is of the Balkans as a contagious disease, an infectious sore in the soft underbelly of Europe, best left to fester in isolation.

Translations

weak spot

• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 軟肋／软肋 (zh) (ruǎnlèi) (figuratively, neologism)

• French: ventre mou (fr) m

Further reading

• “soft underbelly”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.