Word of the Day

cherry-pick

\ CHER-ee-pik \, verb;

1.Informal . to select with great care: You can cherry-pick your own stereo components .

2.Informal . (in retail use) to buy only the sale items and ignore the other merchandise.

Quotes:

It’s easy to cherry-pick silly or ill-considered or factually flawed things he’s said.

-- Hendrick Hertzberg, "Foul Tip," The New Yorker , Jan. 16, 2009

It is only on a second reading that one can see how delicately Sethe cherry-picks what can be told to Denver as the epic triumph of Denver's birth…

-- A.S. Byatt, Toni Morrison, "Introduction," Beloved , 2006

Origin:

Cherry-pick entered English in the 1960s possibly as an extension of the slang term cherry-picker , defined by Railroad Magazine in 1940 as a "switchman, so called because of red lights on switch stands. Also any railroad man who is always figuring on the best jobs and sidestepping undesirable ones."

Dictionary.com