tickle the dragon's tail

present singular third person tickles the dragon's tail · participle present tickling the dragon's tail · participle past tickled the dragon's tail · past tickled the dragon's tail

1. idiomaticTo do something that has a risk of going catastrophically wrong.

   Climbing so close to an erupting volcano was tickling the dragon's tail.

2. idiomaticTo annoy an irritable person.

   Don't tell him the headline's misprinted; you don't want to tickle the dragon's tail.

3. nuclear physicsTo bring two subcritical masses close together in order to find the edge of criticality.

   The laboratory head tickles the dragon's tail whenever we have guests as a show of machismo.

   4 more examples

   Every real boy likes to tickle the dragon's tail. Maybe I was a little old for it, but that's what I was doing there in the Moran III jungle. I got the shield off my cigarette lighter and jerked out the dinky little damper rods for the pile and started easing the two little bricks toward each other with the point of my lead pencil

   1957, Jim Harman, “Break a Leg”, in Galaxy Magazine, volume 6, numbers 1-6, page 130

   PHYSICIST SLOTIN (manipulating the two hemispheres of the bomb at a table): Come closer. Watch me tickle the Dragon's tail

   1993, James Erwin Schevill, 5 Plays 5, page 52

   And so it happened that Japan and the United States had also tickled the dragon's tail. The two subcritical masses called pride and cultural misunderstanding had been shoved together into one critical mass.

   1995, George Robert Caron, Charlotte E. Meares, Fire of a Thousand Suns: The George R. "Bob" Caron Story, page 219

   Were this assembly functional, a person might manipulate the bricks of the radiant castlelike structure to slow down the neutrons, to "tickle the dragon's tail," as Morland writes

   2003, Jonathan P. Binstock, Jim Sanborn, Atomic Time: Pure Science and Seduction, page 13