tickle the dragon's tail

短语

发音

AU

词形变化

tickled the dragon's tail tickles the dragon's tail 三单 tickles the dragon's tail tickling the dragon's tail tickling the dragon's tail 现在分词 tickled the dragon's tail 过去式 tickled the dragon's tail 过去分词

释义与例句

v.
  1. 1.

    To do something that has a risk of going catastrophically wrong.

    习语

    Climbing so close to an erupting volcano was tickling the dragon's tail.

  2. 2.

    To annoy an irritable person.

    习语

    Don't tell him the headline's misprinted; you don't want to tickle the dragon's tail.

  3. 3.

    To bring two subcritical masses close together in order to find the edge of criticality.

    The laboratory head tickles the dragon's tail whenever we have guests as a show of machismo.

词源

From the obvious risk of tickling a dragon's tail. In physics, it was coined by American physicist Richard Feynman to describe the experiments of Louis Slotin at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

来源：wiktionary