clear-cut

comparative more clear-cut · comparative clearer-cut · superlative most clear-cut · superlative clearest-cut

1. alternativeAlternative form of clear cut.

   One of the questions which seem to recur more often that most is the reason for selection of the red light as a danger signal on railways. As in so many cases there is no clear-cut answer.

   1943 July and August, “Red Light for Danger”, in Railway Magazine, page 189

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   The most striking passage of the poem is the descant on nobility, which occupies nine out of the twenty-nine stanzas. Some of the lines in this have all the incisiveness of the clearest-cut aphorism.

   1892, “John Bellenden”, in George Eyre-Todd, editor, Scottish Poetry of the Sixteenth Century (Abbotsford Series of the Scottish Poets), Glasgow: William Hodge & Co., pages 113–114

   When you deal for “Heart’s Haven” you are playing with a big-time picture. It is the clearest-cut answer to the query, “What does the public want?” that has been given by any picture released in months.

   1922 December 3, “A Thousand Days in 300 Theatres before Release Date”, in The Film Daily, volume XXII, number 62

   Legislation was to Mencius a phase of external discipline futile in the making of morality. To live naturally is to achieve virtue. He recognized the ancients, and acknowledged that a few of them were perfect (cf. Bk. IV, Pt. I, 4), but he insisted that men—himself, at least—could do without them, for of what value, said he, were they, if virtue lies within you? His theory is clearer-cut than anything Confucius had proposed; wherein he makes a weighty contribution.

   1934, John Clark Archer, Faiths Men Live By (Nelson’s Religious Series), New York, N.Y.: Thomas Nelson and Sons, page 96

   I want to congratulate you on the two outstanding articles in the April and May issues, which I believe would lend themselves excellently for combination in one booklet as they seem to complement each other and are to my mind the clearest-cut answers to modernism and unbelief.

   1949 October, Harold A. Lowen, “[Our Moody Readers] Answers to Unbelief”, in William Culbertson, editor, Moody Monthly, volume 50, number 2, Mount Morris, Ill.: The Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, page 67, column 1

   There were frequent assertions in the past that the “advice and consent” clause meant something more than the ratification of treaties and a late telephone call, but the fact of the matter is that Senator Fulbright’s reading of the Constitution is now widely accepted. Even with domestic matters, where the constitutional position is clearer-cut than with foreign affairs, it is the President who drafts the legislative program.

   1968, Louis Heren, The New American Commonwealth, New York, N.Y.; Evanston, Ill.: Harper & Row, →LCCN, page 38