briar-patch

plural briar-patches · alternative briar patch · alternative brier-patch · alternative brier patch

1. literallyA dense thicket of thorny plants; ground made impassable by the impenetrable overgrowth of prickly vegetation.

   Hobbes: I'm sick of going over and through every obstacle on the hill. Calvin: Every obstacle?!? We missed the briar patch, didn't we?! Hobbes: By going down the gully and into the stream, yes.

   1989 January 3, Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes (comic)

2. figurativelysingularusuallyAn intellectual or philosophical issue abounding with seemingly unresolvable problems; a theoretical quandary or impasse.

   Our favorite writers can lead us into ideological brier patches and ethical thickets.

   2016 February 28, A.O. Scott, “In His New Collection, ‘The Rub of Time,’ Martin Amis Takes On Everyone From Travolta to Trump”, in The New York Times

   1 more example

   I do not want to spend long in examining the arguments for this general deprecation of sense-perception or the intellectual motives for denying all credentials to sense-perception in order to enhance those of calculation, demonstration or religious faith. I want to get quickly to the much thornier briar-patch, the place, namely, where scientific accounts of perception seem to issue in the consequential doctrine that observers, including the physiologists and psychologists themselves, never perceive what they naïvely suppose themselves to perceive.

   1954: Gilbert Ryle, Dilemmas: The Tarner Lectures, 1953, dilemma vii: Perception, page 94 (The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press)