cast loose

cast loose

Let go, freed, or lost. Likened to a ship that drifts without an anchor or moorings to a dock. When I arrived in the country, I found myself cast loose in a city I didn't know, among people whose language I couldn't speak. With my inheritance money, I was cast loose to pursue whatever life I fancied.
See also: cast, loose
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

cast loose

Also, cast adrift. Let go, freed, as in After Rob was suspended from boarding school, he was cast loose with nowhere to go, or Selling her home meant she was cast adrift with no financial ties or responsibilities. Originally a nautical term for releasing a vessel, this idiom was being used figuratively by the late 1500s.
See also: cast, loose
The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.
See also:
  • like a lost soul
  • adrift
  • be cut adrift
  • cut adrift
  • a Monday morning quarterback
  • babbling idiot
  • idiot
  • get (one's) rocks off on (something)
  • drift with the tide
  • as though
References in classic literature
The sight of a powerful party of traders, trappers, hunters, and voyageurs, well armed and equipped, furnished at all points, in high health and spirits, and banqueting lustily on the green margin of the river, was a spectacle equally stimulating to these veteran backwoodsmen with the glorious array of a campaigning army to an old soldier; but when they learned the grand scope and extent of the enterprise in hand, it was irresistible; homes and families and all the charms of green Kentucky vanished from their thoughts; they cast loose their canoes to drift down the stream, and joyfully enlisted in the band of adventurers.
Astoria or Anecdotes of an enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountain
Winkle were unfortunate foundlings, deprived of their natural rights, cast loose upon the world, and billeted nowhere.
The Posthumous Papers Of The Pickwick Club
He faced his fleet in line abreast south, had the drachenflieger manned and held ready to cast loose, and ordered a general ascent into the freezing clearness above the wet and darkness.
The War in the Air
Sam, sliding silently down the surface of the rock, let himself quietly into his skiff, cast loose the fastening, and abandoned himself to the rapid current, which in that place runs like a mill stream, and soon swept him off from the neighborhood.
Adventure of the Black Fisherman
He had such a neckcloth on (puffing his very eyes out of their natural shape), and his chin and even his ears so sunk into it, that it seemed as though be must inevitably double up if it were cast loose. He had under his arm a hat of great size and weight, shelving downward from the crown to the brim, and in his hand a pair of white gloves with which he flapped it as he stood poised on one leg in a high-shouldered, round-elbowed state of elegance not to be surpassed.
Bleak House
The stars add up to more than 100 billion Suns' worth of mass adrift in the cluster's intergalactic spaces, cast loose by galaxy collisions and tidal interactions.
Galaxies: the ghost glow of galaxies past
The bravado of the ladies - led by perfectly cast Loose Woman Lynda Bellingham - to go "nude and not naked" adds even more hilarity when seeing them strip, some bashfully and others unashamedly, before your eyes.
Theatre; REVIEWS
The bravado of the ladies, led by perfectly cast Loose Woman Lynda Bellingham, to go "nude and not naked" adds even more hilarity when seeing it happen before your eyes.
Date worth keeping for calendar gig; REVIEWS
The chief exec then did a U-turn, saying Ryanair would compensate those customers it had tried to cast loose.
Ryanair boss O'Leary is left with ash on his face