looking glass
/ˈlʊkɪŋ ˌɡlɑːs
/noun
1A mirror: she stared at her reflection in the looking glass...
- One would expect brilliant reflections in a looking glass owned by the marquise and depicted by Boucher, not murky half-lights.
- Janet looks into her looking glass, practising a number of reflections for a public audience.
- Cate opened her eyes and avoided looking into the looking glass placed before her.
1.1 [as modifier] Opposite to what is normal or expected: looking-glass logic...
- Germany is a looking-glass land for rockers, a place to slip personae and assume new guises.
- It is a kind of moral idiocy: the greatest defender of freedom on the planet, enjoying the freest institutions, seeking its moral yardstick in the looking-glass values of a corrupt, perverse institutional relic.
- America's restorationist revolution led to a looking-glass system of politics in which progress and retrogression, left and right, were jumbled, just as they were in the initial stages of the French Revolution.