miner's canary

miner's canary

Something or someone who, due to sensitivity to his, her, or its surroundings, acts as an indicator and early warning of possible adverse conditions or danger. Refers to the former practice of taking caged canaries into coal mines—the birds would die if methane gas was present, thereby alerting miners to the danger. Wildlife in disaster movies always acts like the miner's canary, fleeing the scene when catastrophe is imminent. John was used as a miner's canary to see the test drug's effects on the human mind.
See also: canary
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.
See also:
  • canary
  • canary in a coal mine
  • work against
  • tell against
  • tell against (someone or something)
  • brace (oneself) for (something)
  • brace oneself for
  • in the air
  • wither on the vine
  • watch for (someone or something)
References in periodicals archive
Ellensburg, WA, October 13, 2014 --(PR.com)-- "Confessions of the Miner's Canary" is now available in both ebook and POD format.
By drawing from the theory that African Americans serve as the nation's "miner's canary," he underscores Guinier and Torres's argument that "their distress is the first sign of danger that threatens us all."
Caltech graduate student Heather McCaig likens the research to replacing a miner's canary with hi-tech environmental monitoring.
Let's hope Hungary will be our "miner's canary" that helps us to reverse the course we've been on for decades.
Notes from a Miner's Canary: Essays on the State of Native America.
He will deliver an inaugural lecture on Tuesday at 5.30pm about the Welsh contribution to the NHS, called The Miner's Canary, Let it Fly.
The right of the People to keep and bear arms disturbs the ruling class like no other, making support for the Second Amendment the "miner's canary" of the Constitution.
Thematically similar though aesthetically and conceptually distant, The Miner's Canary Project presents another form of degradation and imprisonment: Bright yellow birds and luminous coal become metaphors for human consumption and desecration, a pillaging of nature.
Is autism the coal miner's canary of America's health status?
In educating future leaders, the metaphor of the coal miner's canary exemplifies the most civic minded disposition an aspiring administrator can hold at the K-12 or postsecondary level.
These regions around the Arctic are like the coal miner's canary - if we do not do something now this could, one day, happen to us.
Others, such as Virginia Woolf, claim the opposite, that "the biographer goes ahead of us like the miner's canary, testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, obsolete conventions." In either case, biography is a literary form specifically suited to helping readers make sense of life.
"It would almost be like sending the miner's canary down and then ignoring the canary when it came back up" for individual senators to ignore the findings of the committee staff.
Cole draws from both personal experience as a civil rights attorney and historical analysis to illustrate the concept that immigrants are like the miner's canary. The denial of constitutional protections to foreign nationals is a harbinger of the loss of rights and liberties for American citizens.