flesh one's maiden sword

Meaning: (idiomatic,dated)Toexperienceorsucceedincombatorstrugglefor the first time, as in themilitaryor inpolitics.c.1597(date written), [William Shakespeare],The History of Henrie the Fourth;[…], quarto edition, London:[…]P[eter]S[hort]forAndrew Wise,[…], published1598,→OCLC,[Act V, scene iv]:Come brother Iohn, full brauely hast thouflesht / Thy mayden sword.1831, “Speakers and Speeches in Parliament, No. IV”, inThe New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, volume31,page222:Well, Lord Althorpe has last nightfleshed his maiden swordas a finance minister—and the result, I am sorry to say, is a failure.1869July 22,William Fox,New Zealand. Parliamentary Debates: Fourth Session of the Fourth Parliament. Legislative Council and House of Representatives, volume 6, published1869,page79:Day after day, and year after year, we have heard the Native question discussed in an intelligible and statesmanlike manner, when the subject was brought forward in a practicable form, but not when presented in the style of a young member of a debating society endeavouring to “flesh his maiden sword.”1956, Carlile Aylmer Macartney,October Fifteenth: A History of Modern Hungary, 1929–1945, volume 1,page286:The Ragged Guardists, when they didflesh their maiden swordson the 12th, could do nothing more spectacular than kidnap three Czech soldiers from Csap railway station.

Examples:

No examples available.

Note: the examples for non latin scripts have a high likelihood of mistakes, we do not own any of this data and it is sourced from Wiktionary, the NLLB database and Opensubtitles. Please help us improve this by contributing correct examples. We will be working to fix this issue over time however it is a bigger issue due to the the difficulties in dealing with non latin scripts and grammatical structures(non-romantic/european languages have lower resources as well ).