| 释义 |
at cross purposes at cross purposesIn conflict with or in opposition to. You will never find success if you continue to work at cross purposes with your teammates.See also: cross, purposeat cross-purposeswith opposing viewpoints; with goals that interfere with each other. We are arguing at cross-purposes. We aren't even discussing the same thing. Bill and Tom are working at cross-purposes. They'll never get the job done right.at cross purposesWith aims or goals that conflict or interfere with one another, as in I'm afraid the two departments are working at cross purposes. This idiom, first recorded in 1688, may have begun as a 17th-century parlor game called "cross-purposes," in which a series of subjects (or questions) were divided from their explanations (or answers) and distributed around the room. Players then created absurdities by combining a subject taken from one person with an explanation taken from another. See also: cross, purposeat cross purposes If two people are at cross purposes, they think they are talking about or trying to do the same thing as each other, but they are actually talking about or trying to do different things. They had been talking at cross purposes earlier, he realized. The Hungarian hadn't been offering him a share of the deal at all. Now that Council members are working together instead of at cross purposes, the chances of success look considerably brighter.See also: cross, purposeat cross purposes misunderstanding or having different aims from one another.See also: cross, purpose at cross-purposes Pursuing conflicting or contrary goals, usually unintentionally: We're working at cross-purposes. |