Englishlower your guard
Meaning: to relax defenses; to become vulnerable.
Example: “The moment the champion lowered her guard, her opponent scored.”
Origin: "Guard" here is a technical term for a defensive posture, and it reaches English through swordplay before boxing. Fencing had its garde — the position of readiness from which an attack could be met, preserved in English in the borrowed command en garde — from the 1500s, and the bare-knuckle and gloved boxing of the 1700s and 1800s adopted the same idea for the raised hands protecting the head and body. What both share is the specific vulnerability the idiom names: the guard is tiring to hold, and the moment it drops the opening is immediate and total. That combination — a defense that costs effort to maintain and fails instantly when relaxed — is precisely what makes it a useful figure for wariness that cannot be sustained indefinitely.
More English idioms
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