Meaning
A moment of coming very close to dying: a near-encounter with death that grazes you and passes on. By extension, a brush with anything unpleasant is a brief or near encounter with it, as in a brush with the law or a brush with disaster. Almost always in the past tense and with the indefinite article, describing a single survived event. The pattern extends freely to other menaces (a brush with authority, a brush with scandal). Regional use: All English-speaking countries.
Origin
The noun brush has meant 'a skirmish, a light encounter' since about 1400 - Etymonline dates the encounter noun c. 1400, probably from the verb, whose sense of moving over something with slight contact is recorded from the 1640s. A brush with death applies that lightness to the gravest subject: death touches you, brushes past, and moves on. McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Idioms marks the phrase figurative and defines it as an instance of nearly dying; The Free Dictionary's example is 'Ed had a brush with death last summer when he almost drowned at the lake'; Cambridge's phrase guide defines a brush with something as experiencing, or almost experiencing, something unpleasant, with 'Jim had a brush with death (= was nearly killed) on the motorway'. No public dictionary prints a first-use date for the full idiom, but the encounter noun beneath it is six centuries old.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a close brush with death
- brush with disaster
- brush with the law
Usage Examples
- Her brush with death on the motorway left her oddly calm about everything else.
- He had had a brush with death in the army and never spoke about it afterward.
- A close brush with death tends to reorder one's priorities remarkably quickly.