Idiomatic Use
To "lick your wounds" means to "to withdraw temporarily while recovering from a defeat"
The phrase was spoken by Antony in John Dryden's seventeenth century play All for Love:
They look on us at distance, and, like cursScaped from the lion's paws, they bay far off
And lick their wounds, and faintly threaten war.
Read more about this topic: Wound Licking
Famous quotes containing the word idiomatic:
“One of the necessary qualifications of an efficient business man in these days of industrial literature seems to be the ability to write, in clear and idiomatic English, a 1,000-word story on how efficient he is and how he got that way.... It seems that the entire business world were devoting its working hours to the creation of a school of introspective literature.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)