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lose one's grip
Fail to maintain control or one's ability to function, as in Ted wasn't running things the way he used to, and his boss thought he might be losing his grip , or I thought I was losing it when I couldn't remember the words to that old song . The first term dates from the mid-1800s, the slangy variant from the mid-1900s.
Fail to keep one's composure, as in When Billy broke the window, Dad just lost his grip and let him have it , or I just can't deal with this many visitorsāI must be losing it . [ Slang ; first half of 1900s] Also see lose one's temper .
Idioms and Phrases
Also lose it .Example Sentences
To redden and blow is to lose oneās grip on realityāthe act of yelling is either played for laughs or itās indicative of some pathological fissure.
āThe Bell Jarā is about the way this country was in the 1950s and about the way it is to lose oneās grip on sanity and recover it again.
Annoyance is a fact of life; one ought not to lose oneās grip because of it, and in doing so Penelope realized she had made a grave and potentially catastrophic error.
Losing a sense of time is an easy way to lose oneās grip and even oneās sanity.
But to rely on them for truth is to lose one's grip on what is continuous and whole.
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Ā© Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American HeritageĀ® Idioms Dictionary copyright Ā© 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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