brink

It’s totally adorable—and it’s driving customers to the brink.

He apologized “unreservedly,” but was still forced to retire as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Long Island, N.Y., institution he had rescued from the brink of insolvency decades earlier.

Am I in shock or on the brink of some cardiovascular event?

With a sudden end to foreign exchange earnings, Venezuelan GDP went into the kind of free fall you rarely see outside war, setting off a humanitarian crisis that brought millions to the brink of starvation.

And in the Soviet Union, while walking along the Black Sea waterfront with his minister of defense, Nikita Khrushchev proposed an idea that would push the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.