| 释义 |
whole cloth
whole clothn. Pure fabrication or fiction: "His account of being drugged, kidnapped and tortured was made up of whole cloth" (George Carver).Idiom: out of whole cloth1. By means of the imagination or as a fabrication: "Some of her stories she created out of whole cloth; for others she began with an incident Idella had described and then reimagined it into a full story" (Kate Walbert).2. Out of nothing; from the very start: "The idea of creating out of whole cloth an intelligence network in a country like that is daunting" (Jack Reed).
[From the fabrication of garments out of newly manufactured, full-sized pieces of cloth.]whole cloth
whole clothAn entirely fictional account not based on reality at all; make-believe. Usually appears in the phrase "out of whole cloth." A reference to tailors who would falsely advertise garments being made "out of whole cloth," when, in reality, they were pieced together from different cuts. I broke curfew staying out too late with my boyfriend, but luckily I was able to make an excuse out of whole cloth about being at the library. When my sister refused to go to sleep without a bedtime story, I pulled a tale about princesses together out of whole cloth.See also: cloth, whole |