What "U Is for," in a Sue Grafton book title

Usage examples of undertow.

For all its black slapstick, however, the genre has a plangent undertow.

From the wine riddler who turns the bottles in their cradles, to the wine pourer who allows credulous monkeys to taste little dollops prior to their purchase, to the sommelier who makes diners feel inadequate to the task of selecting their drinks, to the critic who compares the slight hint of chocolate to the subtle undertow of citrus and nutmeg, the field of wine is full of grapes.

Even as these very waves thou beholdest have each his back-wash or undertow, so followeth after every sending an undertow of evil hap, whereby, albeit in essence a less deadly thing, many have been drowned and washed away who stood unremoved against the main stroke of the breaker.

There was a force that pulled on him as violently as that time when as a child he had been caught in the undertow at Rehoboth Beach.

Not only was he ready to lead a crew of rescuers to succor the perishing, fearlessly directing the surfboat in its plunge through a seething tide, but many a time he had dashed bodily into the breakers, despite the hazard of a powerful undertow, and dragged some drowning creature to a place of safety.

It was what had driven her out onto the terrace, to sit and think about the undertow at Windflaw Point.

He and a friend were standing in water just over their waists off Cabo San Lucas when the undertow got them.

Baptist zeal, Methodist self-satisfaction, Presbyterian Scots certainty about everything, Anglican social superiority, and a horde of evangelists and back-street messiahs to suit every taste, as well as an undertow of prohibitionists, anti-tobacco crusaders, and warriors against prostitution, who were linked with the churches though not actually a part of them, seemed to dominate the mores of the city.

Sharpe was close enough to the bluffs edge to sec the French lobstermen pulling on long oars to escape the sucking undertow at the cliffs ragged base.

By catching that undertow, availing himself of its strength, he should be able to counter in a great part the forces seeking to drive him back against the shore.

Invisible to his naked eye, even in this transfigured state, the dense gravitational vortex pulled on him like an undertow, so that Picard found himself leaning forward to counter its attractive force.

To remain at the front of the wave would be to body-surf a vicious breaker onto the beach, undertow and all.

To the right were the three floors occupied by those interred in life, where the gasp of the undertow at the cliffs and the prayers and canticles of the canonical hours almost never penetrated.

Before the undertow could take hold and tug them back, he and Spock jumped out into knee-deep water and caught the mooring cords, beaching the inflatable out of reach of the salty fingers of breakers rolling in and foaming on the shore.

Their frequency excited alarm among the timid, since the undertow at Ellston was not strong, and since there were known to be no sharks at hand.