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gilded cage
- To be like “a bird in a gilded cage” is to live in luxury but without freedom: “Because the movie star could not go out without being recognized and pursued, she stayed in her penthouse, living like a bird in a gilded cage.”
Idioms and Phrases
The encumbrances or limitations that often accompany material wealth, as in She had furs, jewelry, whatever money could buy, but was trapped in a gilded cage . This metaphoric expression indicating that riches cannot buy happiness was popularized (and possibly coined) in a song, “A Bird in a Gilded Cage” (1990; lyrics by Arthur J. Lamb, music by Harry von Tilzer), about a young girl marrying for wealth instead of love and paying for luxury with a life of regret.Example Sentences
In transplanting this device to a hypervisible celebrity, it affords Finn the chance to play on a bigger stage, producing stylized musical numbers, backstage antics, public meltdowns, fan frenzy and private anguish in Skye’s luxury gilded cage.
With “Maria,” he’s got the gilded cage, but little of the bird’s desperation.
Fabio Capello lead a campaign that mirrored his countenance - grim, austere and discontented, the Italian choosing to base England in a gilded cage at the Royal Bafokeng Sports Palace outside Rustenburg.
Trump would be put in a gilded cage.
It shows Taylor and Burton essentially confined to the gilded cage of their New York hotel suite.
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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