Wiktionary
a. 1 belonging to the third string of a team; one who plays behind the first string and second strings. 2 a substitute or replacement.
Usage examples of "third-string".
Phoebe had endured dark, late nights stuck at an unsteady round of table at the far end of a murky-aired room in venues called HaHa and Risibility, located in tough, third-string cities.
The Reverend caught him boosting a pack of gum at the local Pig and Whistle and flayed his ass so bad that Big Des popped a bunch of tendons trying to get free of his bonds and was sidelined for the rest of the football season, a first-string linebacker with a third-string brain and a first-class case of kleptomania that he was now terrified to run with: no legs and no balls, courtesy of Liam Considine, first-string Calvinist.
There is no more definitive behind-scene locale in a primary campaign than the F&F Room, which is usually some hotel's little third-string banquet or meeting room off the lobby that McCain2000 rents (at the media's expense, precisely prorated and tallied, just like each day's seat on the buses and plane and the continental breakfasts before Baggage Call and even the F&F Rooms' ``catered lunches,'' which today are weird bright-red ham on Wonder Bread, Fritos, and coffee that tastes like warm water with a brown crayon in it, and the pencils all bitch about the McCain2000 food and wistfully recount rumors that the Bush2000 press lunches are supposedly hot and multi-food-group and served on actual plates by unctuous men with white towels over their arm) so that those media with P.