the.com/thorny
nature's polite way of saying touch me and find out.
means Covered in thorns, or — more often these days — describing a problem so prickly and difficult that handling it leaves a mark.
from From Old English 'thorn,' the same word that named the spiky plant and the old runic letter þ (which spelled the 'th' sound). The '-y' simply means 'full of' — so 'thorny' is literally 'full of thorns.' The leap from bramble to bothersome problem is an old one: by the time of Early Modern English, anything bristling with hidden snags could be called thorny, the metaphor practically pricking itself into being.
- plant strategy
- thorns deter grazers without costing energy to regrow
- not all spikes
- true thorns are modified branches, not prickles
- rose myth
- rose thorns are actually prickles, technically
- figurative use
- means a problem bristling with hidden difficulties
israeli-palestinian conflict — ongoing territorial and political dispute since 1948 in the middle east
brexit negotiations — uk-eu withdrawal agreement talks 2016-2020 with irish border complexity
kashmir dispute — india-pakistan territorial conflict over the region since 1947