Idioms

sketchy

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sketchy

Of dubious safety or legal integrity. He's assuring me that the scheme is totally legitimate, but it sounds pretty sketchy to me. He jerry-rigged some sketchy makeshift scaffolding so we could finish the painting on the outside wall, and I spent the whole time worried it would come toppling down around us.
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2024 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.

sketchy

mod. unsafe; illegal; risky. (Alluding to danger due to lack of knowledge.) Why are we going down in the sketchy place on this silly errand?
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions Copyright © 2006 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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References in periodicals archive
First, the Kihnu wedding film revealed the effect of tradition-related rhetoric on interpretation, and second, the overshadowing of interpersonal relations by ideological sketchiness. This sketchiness is increased by the temporal distance between the event and interpretation time.
And yet, it is possible to identify a number of policy initiatives that reflected the beginnings of a return to an era of pronounced sketchiness or fuzziness in this policy domain.
This last point deserves considerable elaboration, not something that I have very much space for, so I must beg indulgence from the reader for my sketchiness. The chief proponents, among anthropologists, for the theory that religion evolved as an "adaptive complex" are Candace S.
Shortly after Colin Powell's February 2003 speech before the United Nations, Dean stated, "I was impressed not by the vastness of the evidence presented by the Secretary, but rather by its sketchiness." He continued, "I am not among those who say that America should never use its armed forces unilaterally....
Despite its indistinct sketchiness, the image is remarkably vivid and acquires particular poignancy by the fact that the sitter was nearly blind.
The bold application of paint, the juxtaposition of dark and light, and the draftsmanship's sketchiness have marked Manet's canvases as modern, but are here reversed by the slick surface of the photograph and the blinding glare produced by the camera.
Because of this sketchiness, An Amazing Grace can be an occasionally frustrating read.
Within the present argument, though, the prior existence of The Water Engine as a radio play, rather than Mamet's authorial prerogatives or the story's melodrama, accounts for Mel Gussow's complaint about the stage version's underproduced and schematic character, even if, according to Dennis Carroll, The Water Engine's alleged sketchiness is chiefly a readerly impression gainsaid by the contextual suggestiveness of actual stagings, like that of Steven Schachter's 1978 New York production (125, 131-139).
But the very sketchiness of its history, combined with the hubris of its mission, riveted Plotz, who set out to track down the 200 or so of the sperm bank's babies with these core questions in mind: Are these kids part of a new elite?
(Regarding the remainder of this paragraph, I "know not whereof I speak," hence the question marks and sketchiness.) Having realized the essence of form, next is?
It is perhaps not surprising that short-lived unions should leave little record of collective action/negotiations with employers and the sketchiness of surviving records, even for longer-lived unions, needs to be acknowledged.
weapons inspectors, few major papers took the issue on full-throttle with demands for answers -- or dissected the sketchiness of the administration's evidence of vast stockpiles of WMDs.
A review in the New York Times Book Review claims, for instance, "Chaon occasionally produces work that feels more like sketches than fully realized short stories." The occasional sketchiness, however, becomes integral to the art of deflection and to involving the reader in the pleasure of literary ambiguity, of holding two or more possible readings in one's mind at once.
In the end, I tried to pick my way down a middle path, emphasizing in my reports the sketchiness of the evidence.
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