(a.) Private; indirect; secret; intriguing; -- as if finding access by the back stairs.
Example Sentences:
(1) The backstairs briefings against him were totally unacceptable.
(2) But they are part of Labour's backstairs compromise which saw around 700 hereditary peers expelled from the upper house in 1999.
(3) Mummy was like, so just do the same with Kerslake, it is an excellent backstairs name, I'm like, we did – how do you think we lost Helen Ghosh and David Bell – but there still about 10 million Kerslakes left?
Furtive
Definition:
(a.) Stolen; obtained or characterized by stealth; sly; secret; stealthy; as, a furtive look.
Example Sentences:
(1) The judge said Tamir was given “little if any time” to respond to any commands from the officers, that his arms were not raised, and that he made no “furtive movement”.
(2) Turnbull later shrugged off the concern as there was nothing furtive about the deal, and noted it was reported by Australian media.
(3) Back then the town’s Kurdish character was furtive and suppressed.
(4) For the 30 years I have followed Spurs to away games – in pubs, around tube stations, on the streets around the ground and within Stamford Bridge itself, the venom, ignorance and breathtaking casualness of Chelsea fans’ references to Jews, Auschwitz, the Holocaust and foreskins, often accompanied by a hissing simulation of gas chambers, is simply shocking – not least because it goes unchallenged by police, stewards or the club itself, bar a token reference furtively hidden away in the match-day programme.
(5) The page name could have been better translated to "freedoms on the quiet", since the word "yavashaki" [furtive in Persian] also incorporates the word "yavash" meaning gently.
(6) Part-timers, meanwhile, are envied for having one foot in the playground and one in the office, but worry secretly about failing to keep up with either of them: skidding late into the school pick-up, still furtively sending emails on our phones.
(7) Abroad, he had perhaps been best known for his furtive motorcycle tryst with his actor lover, Julie Gayet, and his messy, public breakup with his First Lady, Valérie Trierweiler.
(8) Nearby, guards waited furtively at the entrance to the Islamic mourning tent for Sheikh Alman al-Shijah, blown apart last Friday by a bomb placed under his car.
(9) A small crowd grows larger, and furtive comments become denunciations as anger pours forth against Nkunda's National Congress for People's Defence.
(10) As I was talking his hand started creeping over my leg in a really furtive way.
(11) I had always loved writing the book: from the first furtive soundings of disaffected employees of Big Pharma in London, to forages among the industry’s white chimneys of Basel, and finally to the tribal villages of Kenya, where young mothers who could barely read were being bamboozled into signing “consent forms” that made guinea pigs of their own children.
(12) He said French troops had come up against "furtive firing" and had briefly fired back, but he said these exchanges had now stopped.
(13) The total number present on the island has been extremely difficult to determine due to the rugged terrain and the furtiveness of the monkeys.
(14) In his documentation of this furtive Islam , Degiorgis has also highlighted the ways in which a community under siege becomes resilient and collectively defiant in the face of creeping oppression.
(15) A politically feeble Japan, that once imperial Asian power, shelters furtively behind its US-made anti-missile batteries.
(16) By 1971, about 100 deserters were living furtively in a district of Saigon nicknamed "Soul Alley", beside Tan Son Nhut airport.
(17) All the druidic mumbo-jumbo about the Elevating Principle and the Straight Line reminds me of stuff I furtively read in my father's books on freemasonry.
(18) And given that the net effectively lowered what one might call the "shame threshold" (instead of having to sneak furtively into a "specialist" shop, punters could view from the comfort and privacy of their own homes), the internet undoubtedly expanded the market for commercial porn.
(19) Though he often shrank snail-like into stay-at-home furtiveness, the town that made him - Salem, Massachusetts - (as any visitor can still see) faces the dark, windy ocean, and it was this Hawthorne would stare at when he worked in its Custom House from 1846-49.
(20) When they do, it is in a slightly furtive way, almost in whispers.