troubled waters
English edit
Noun edit
troubled waters pl (plural only)
- Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see troubled, water.; water that is stirred up with high waves, chaotic currents, etc., and therefore difficult to navigate.
- 1847, S. W. Remington, William Vane: Or, The Young Deserter: A Moral Tale, page 26:
- The rain falling in torrents– the rolling waves, commingling their heavy roar with the pealing claps of thunder– the quiverying lighning, flashing in burnished brighness across the mighty deep, exposing its troubled waters to full view – the laboring ship, rolling from side to side, creaking in every plank as if going to pieces– the winds sweeping, in their fury, from wave to wave– all conspire to fill the mind with wonder, awe, and astonishment.
- 1902, Year-book of the Council of Supervisors of the Manual Arts, page 121:
- In the Perseus and Andromeda series we go again in the Dragon country, through troubled waters, where the waves foam round picturesque rock on which we do not fear to slip, wearing Mercury's sandals.
- 2022, Angela White, Troubled Waters:
- All around the ship, troubled waters bumped against it in warning.
- (figurative) Difficulties, chaos, tribulations, or other confusing and problematic aspects of a situation.
- 1976, Jim Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, page 73:
- Not only were the troubled waters in the Middle East, they had spilled over into Australia.
- 2000, Kathryn M. White, Troubled Waters: I Never Came This Way Before, page 158:
- The tide that was rushing in to pull them both out to troubled waters was stopped at the edge of the shore by the ringing of the telephone.
- 2005, Ange Wieberdink, Troubled Waters: The Ambivalence of South-North Partnerships in Research for Development:
- I will observe the 'troubled waters' of such a programme and try to reveal how the actors involved steer the course of the research process.
- 2018, Julia Kirch Kirkegaard, Wind Power in China:
- Indeed, the research has required experimental tactics and an ability to steer through troubled waters of messy ethnographic research – feeling, living and surviving the resulting productive 'creative chaos' of my own constitution, and of my mode of working and thinking (sometimes a blessing, at other times an excruciating curse) – which, now that I come to think of it, may be a "birth gift" from my mother and father with their blend of a perfectionist sense for structured analytic order, versus the fragility of artistic freedom-seeking creativity and improvisation, and an addition of stubbornness on my part.