get the drift

1. Also, catch the drift. Understand the general meaning or purport. For example, I didn't get the drift—do they want to go or not? or Over all the noise he barely managed to catch the drift of their conversation. The noun drift has been used for “purport” since the early 1500s.

Example Sentences

It’s not exactly secret, but it’s abstruse enough that they hope most people, who aren’t fully conversant with the complexities of the program, won’t get the drift.

Read more on Los Angeles Times

And if you don’t quite follow the lingo, you get the drift:

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Reminiscence Hugh Jackman plays a “private investigator of the mind” who helps clients access lost memories in a dystopian future, and one day a mysterious woman walks into his office— you get the drift.

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The wintry sun, coming in at a slant through the window, gave everything a frozen, precisely detailed look; nothing seemed real, and I felt as though this were some complicated film I’d started watching in the middle and couldn’t quite get the drift of.

Read more on Literature

But you get the drift even without understanding the details: The states are saying that Google and Facebook colluded to help their own businesses at the expense of everyone else’s.

Read more on New York Times

Related Words

• catch 
• determine 
• discover 
• feature 
• feel 
• follow 
• get 
• have 
• hear 
• know 
• learn 
• notice 
• observe 
• perceive 
• realize 
• recognize 
• study 
• suffer 
• think 
• understand