an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff

Something that is helpful only after one is already injured or in trouble. The idea is that, while an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff can help people who fall off the cliff, a fence at the top would be more beneficial. Services like this, which only help kids once they've gotten into significant trouble, are like an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff. Don't you think we should have preventative measures in place, rather than putting an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff? Sure, you can have an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff, but how much good will that do? Don't you want to stop people from going over the cliff?

See also: ambulance, an, bottom, cliff, of

cliffhanger

1. An ending of a piece of fiction (e.g., a television episode, chapter of a book, a film, etc.) characterized by a dramatically suspenseful and uncertain end. A good summer book always has a cliffhanger at the end of each chapter so that you never want to put it down! Judging by that movie's cliffhanger, I'd say we'll be seeing a sequel coming out fairly soon. The TV show kept audiences in suspense with a big cliffhanger at the end of the season finale.

2. A serial television or film production characterized by such endings. That show is a cliffhanger—the episodes never really have endings. That medical drama isn't particularly good, but it is a cliffhanger, so people just keep on watching it. If that show's a cliffhanger, then, nah, I'll pass—I like 30-minute episodes with neat resolutions.

3. Any contest, competition, or other such situation in which the outcome is suspenseful and uncertain until the very end. The two teams have been neck and neck for the entire second half, and with two minutes left this match has become a real cliffhanger. This election is looking like a cliffhanger, and we won't be able to truly say who's won until all the votes are counted. If all of the sport's best make it to the final heat, it will definitely be a cliffhanger.

go over a/the cliff

To enter into a catastrophic decline from which someone or something will be unable to recover. Analysts are warning that the economy could go over a cliff if drastic financial measures aren't put in place immediately. The two countries are scrambling to put a trade agreement in place before they pass the December deadline and end up going over the cliff. If you don't reprioritize your spending, your business is going to go right over the cliff.

cliff-hanger

A situation whose outcome is in extremely suspenseful doubt until the last moment. The term comes from serialized adventure films popular in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, in which, at the end of each installment, the hero or heroine is left in a very dangerous situation, sometimes literally dangling from a cliff. The rationale, of course, was to entice the audience to return for the next installment in order to see what happened. By the 1940s the term was being transferred to other suspenseful states of affairs—for example, “the election was a cliff-hanger.”

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