thorn in the flesh

Language: en

Meaning: (idiomatic)Apersistentdifficultyor something veryannoyingthat will not go away.1959, Ivar Spector,The Soviet Union and the Muslim World, 1917-1958:Whereas the growth of new middle and upper classes remains athorn in the fleshto the Communist Party, the military element is inclined to favor this development, in the belief that those who have something at stake are more likely to fight to defend the system in the event of another conflict.2001June 13,Kenya National Assembly Official Record (Hansard),page1106:Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, the post of the Executive Director of the Kenya Roads Board has been athorn in the fleshof the Minister.2002, J. F. Verbruggen,The Art of Warfare in Western Europe‎[1], page323:Even individual castles could be athorn in the fleshof a powerful kingdom.

Examples:Note: the examples for non latin scripts have a high likelihood of mistakes, we do not own any of this data and it is sourced from Wiktionary, the NLLB database and Opensubtitles. Please help us improve this by contributing correct examples. We will be working to fix this issue over time however it is a bigger issue due to the the difficulties in dealing with non latin scripts and grammatical structures(non-romantic/european languages have lower resources as well ).

Validation Count: 0

Sourced from Wiktionary