cloak-and-dagger love

cloak-and-dagger

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Marked by melodramatic intrigue and often by espionage.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Marked by menacing furtive secrecy, often with a melodramatic tint or espionage involved.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective conducted with or marked by hidden aims or methods

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

First attested 1840, from French de cape et d’épée, “the cloak and the sword”, the French term referred to a genre of drama in which the main characters wore cloaks and had swords. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used the “cloak and sword” term in 1840, whereas Charles Dickens preferred “cloak and dagger” a year later.

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Examples

  • The military intelligence complex an hour outside Washington where the WikiLeaks case goes to court this week is known as a cloak-and-dagger sanctum off-limits to the public - a reputation that's only party true.

    Yahoo! News: Business - Opinion 2011

  • The military intelligence complex an hour outside Washington where the WikiLeaks case goes to court this week is known as a cloak-and-dagger sanctum off-limits to the rest of the world.

    ABC News: Top Stories 2011

  • WikiLeaks suspect's trial near super-secure NSA The military intelligence complex an hour outside Washington where the WikiLeaks case goes to court this week is known as a cloak-and-dagger sanctum off-limits to the public - a reputation that's only party true.

    The Seattle Times 2011

  • The military intelligence complex an hour outside Washington where the WikiLeaks case goes to court this week is known as a cloak-and-dagger sanctum off-limits to the public - a reputation that's only party true.

    Yahoo! News: Business - Opinion 2011

  • The military intelligence complex an hour outside Washington where the WikiLeaks case goes to court this week is known as a cloak-and-dagger sanctum off-limits to the public - a reputation that's only party true.

    The Seattle Times 2011

  • The last part of the story read like something straight out of Hitchcock, with all the cloak-and-dagger characters and international rendezvous of a noir thriller.

    A Covert Affair Jennet Conant 2011

  • Hollywood was always ready to bankroll cloak-and-dagger movies that played on those suspicions.

    O: A Presidential Novel Anonymous 2011

  • Donovan much later would call him “a real cloak-and-dagger boy.”

    Wild Bill Donovan Douglas Waller 2011

  • Some four decades back, he had been the kind of wide-eyed teenager who thought one could volunteer for the KGB, who had believed the cloak-and-dagger stories, only to find in the organs he had romanticized an atavistic bureaucracy staffed by anti-Semites, paper pushers, careerists, and more than a few sadists.

    The Return Daniel Treisman 2011

  • There was a cloak-and-dagger element to the procedure, soured by a clandestine taint, like ducking out of a 1950s nightclub to smoke weed.

    In the Plex Steven Levy 2011

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