broken reed

1. A weak or unreliable support, as in I'd counted on her to help, but she turned out to be a broken reed. The idea behind this idiom, first recorded about 1593, was already present in a mid-15th-century translation of a Latin tract, “Trust not nor lean not upon a windy reed.”

Example Sentences

The loop at the end had a single broken reed still attached.

Read more on Literature

As Chernow writes, the Massachusetts congressman Ben Butler, a Radical Republican, “wondered privately whether Grant can be trusted to disobey positive orders of his chief? When the hour of peril comes, shall we not be leaning on a broken reed?”

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This would perhaps have been an injustice given the ease with which Wilfred Zaha tumbled like broken reed under Raheem Sterling’s challenge.

Read more on The Guardian

It is conceivable that if Wyeth were still alive and painting, he would be drawn to this new-old landscape to capture the stark beauty of a broken reed or the isolation of the Webb farmhouse and its sugar maple.

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But we soon found that we were trusting to a broken reed, so far as his knowledge as a guide was concerned.

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