alarums and excursions

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alarums and excursions

Frantic activity that causes a clamor. Often seen in Elizabethan drama as a stage direction denoting military activity. What on earth is going on? The alarums and excursions in the living room woke me from a sound sleep—keep it down! It's been nothing but alarums and excursions since the kids got here. That drop in the stock market is sure to set off alarums and excursions in international trading.
See also: and, excursion
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2024 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.
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References in periodicals archive ?
Her other books are Nice Day for Murder: Poems for James Cagney (2001), Alarum Within: theatre poems (2003), and fake Paul (2005).
In 1871, Whitman printed an altogether different four-line epigraph to the section of Leaves of Grass titled "Drum-Taps": "Aroused and angry, / I thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war; / But soon my fingers fail'd me, my face droop'd, and I resign'd myself, / To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead" (LG 1871, 261).
After the offstage sound effect of 'Alarum' and the entrance of the bloody captain to give his report in Macbeth, we know we are some distance from the fighting.
(24) Nashe, 'To the Gentlemen Students', in Greenes Arcadia, or Menaphon: Camillaes alarum to slumber, Euphues in his melancholy cell at Silexedra (London: Valentine Simmes for Nicholas Ling, 1599), fol.
And while down below everything disintegrated and changed into nothingness in that silent panic of quick dissolution, above there grew and endured the alarum of sunset.
Vae terrae cymbalo alarum, quae est trans flumina AEthiopiae, qui mittit in mare legatos, et in vasis papyri super aquas!
But other than in the snatches of verse, the rhythmic alarum and tension so characteristic of Poe's writing is missing, both in dialogue and the written reports to Landor." ART WINSLOW
A simple, but in its own way beautiful antique alarum lantern clock, it had been pooh-poohed by the huddle of dealers at our local Saturday village hall auction.
For those who prefer to exeunt without alarum, Robins provides interesting commentary, concise directions and maps, handy places of refreshment, and gallery-quality photographs.
He shouted the unpleasant alarum that the American right is at a moment of extreme and self-inflicted peril.
It is not entirely clear even now what motivated many of these voters beyond a generalized alarum that our coarse popular culture is sanding down all moral sensibilities.
Even the somewhat mystically idealistic manifesto that launched the RAT movement, Ehn's "A Proposal and an Alarum Towards Big Cheap Theater," published in Theater magazine in 1993, brims with concern about logistics.