| 释义 |
Idiom scrape the barrel informal to use something or someone that you do not want to use because nothing or no one else is available.You know you're really scraping the barrel when you have to ask your old mother to come to the cinema with you. (usually in continuous tenses)
scrape the barrelTo use or select from the last or worst of the resources or options from a particular range or set, even if they are not satisfactory, because there are no others to choose from. We used to get hundreds of qualified candidates, but lately I feel like we've been scraping the barrel with the applicants we bring in. A: "These were the best you could get?" B: "Sorry, the selection was already picked through, so I really had to scrape the barrel even to find those." scrape the barrel (or the bottom of the barrel) be reduced to using things or people of the poorest quality because there is nothing else available. informalscrape (the bottom of) the ˈbarrel (disapproving) use things or people of a low quality because all the good ones have already been used: TV is terrible at the moment, it’s nothing but old movies. They’re really scraping the barrel, aren’t they? |