I'm looking for a word which describes a brief auditory examination. Analogous to “glance” in the sense of the following example:
At first glance, the object appeared round.
At first ____, the theme seemed to be in a minor key.
nounssingle-word-requests
I'm looking for a word which describes a brief auditory examination. Analogous to “glance” in the sense of the following example:
At first glance, the object appeared round.
At first ____, the theme seemed to be in a minor key.
Best Answer
First, the action in
at first ____
doesn't have to imply brevity--the phrase itself does that.Secondly, you're trying to make a generalization about a idiomatic phrase but that doesn't always work. For example,
take a listen
sounds strange as opposed totake a look
even though they are perfectly analogous.That said, go on CNN for a few minutes and you'll hear a reporter say it. Some people may have a beef with it, but that's all part of language change; someone exercises poetic licence to generalize an idiom and if the linguistic community finds it useful/fashionable they'll adopt it.
In fact, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) has 3 hits for
at first listen
, so maybe in a decade or two you'll be able to use the phrase freely.Point is, the issue you're having isn't with a word but rather trying to generalize an existing idiom. If you're not bent on using
at first ____
then it becomes trivial: