backbone

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success depends on your backbone, not your wishbone

Success is achieved through dedication and effort, not hopes and dreams or wishful thinking. You need to work on your writing every single day if you really want to be a famous author because success depends on your backbone, not your wishbone.

put (one's) backbone into (something)

To exert a strong effort toward (doing) something. Come on, we need to get this car off the road. Put your backbone into it and push! It's clear that the legislators have put their backbones into crafting a bill that will find support across party lines, as well in the general population.

to the backbone

Through and through; thoroughly; in every manner or respect. The fellow is stubborn to the backbone; he won't even listen to my plan the whole way through! Though he grew up in America, Henry is still British to the backbone.

put backbone into (one)

To embolden one; to give one courage or determination. All of their encouragement put backbone into me to tell the boss we wanted better working conditions. She was afraid of changing careers, but the thought of staying in this dead end job forever put backbone into Janet.

put backbone into someone

encourage someone to behave resolutely.

As a metaphor for ‘firmness of character’, backbone dates from the mid 19th century.

1998 Spectator There is a widespread belief that if only Mrs Thatcher had still been in No. 10, she would have put backbone into Bush and got rid of Saddam .

to the backbone

in every respect; through and through.

backbone

n. courage; integrity. (Colloquial.) If you had any backbone, you would be able to deal with this.

References in periodicals archive ?

T-1 remains the most common speed used in backbone connections.

ISP BACKBONE MARKET TO REMAIN FLAT THROUGH 2002 ACCORDING TO IN-STAT/MDR

Indeed, research firm Cahners InStat finds that while the number of backbone connections will have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of close to 23 percent from 1999-2004, revenues for the overall backbone connection market will have a CAGR of just 16.

Multi-Gigabit IP Backbones Ramp Up, But Will Revenues Rise To Match?

In extremely large topologies where scalability to thousands or tens of thousands of terabytes are required, the Backbone Switch can be added at the top tier to provide the needed connectivity to thousands of host and storage devices.

Loop Switches Speed SAN Deployment

While monitoring high-level, backbone-to-backbone traffic has been historically difficult, in May Keynote introduced a real-time reporting system on peering point and backbone latency.