perilously

How To Use perilously In A Sentence

• We came perilously close to a situation in which newspapers would have stopped carrying racecards.
• Most English historians were cured of such flatulent emotion by the carnage of the first world war, the desolation of the great slump and the perilously tight margin of victory in the second world war.
• Juliet McMaster explores how in juvenilia in general the presence of "sexual knowingness in a child, especially a girl" is usually met with "resistance": "[w] riting and doing it are seen as perilously close, although the same assumption would not apply in the case of subjects less loaded" ( "Virginal Representations" 304-5, close window 'Pleasure is now, and ought to be, your business': Stealing Sexuality in Jane Austen's _Juvenilia_
• Although fairly common now, the great egret came perilously close to extinction at the hands of the hat trade at the beginning of the twentieth century; egret plumes were deemed a fashion accessory.
• As they scuffled, a foot struck the lantern, pushing it perilously close to the edge. End of Time
• Bohr may be thought to have got perilously close to this when he suggested that complementarity could shed light on the age-old question of determinism and free will in relation to human nature.
• A wolf spider treads perilously on the rim of a South American pitcher plant, perhaps looking to prey on insects drawn to the plant's strong nectar scent.
• A puff of smoke from behind a distant rock, the boom of a jezail, and Desmond fell beside the Boy, stunned by a well-aimed shot on the edge of the cheek-bone, the slug glancing off perilously close to the right eye. Captain Desmond, V.C.
• California, the world's sixth largest economy and home to booming Silicon Valley, had come perilously close to brown-outs on Thursday.
• The jibes that he was nothing more than a gaffe-prone, tub-thumping populist hurt because they were perilously close to the truth.