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Reader question: Please explain “under the radar”, as in this sentence: Some great news slipped under the radar last week. My comments: To go “under the radar” means to go undetected, unnoticed, to do things without drawing public attention. “Some great news slipped under the radar last week” simply means that some news-worthy events were not reported by the media. Either organizers of those “great events” did not sound out the media (send out newsletters, etc.) before hand or the media got the messages but deliberately ignored them. If they were deliberately ignored, then one of these two things may have happened. One, news organizations all had even greater news events to worry about at the time. Or two, news organizations were biased – A Republican newspaper in the United States, for instance, may not want to give extensive coverage to what a Democrat candidate has to say before an election. Vice versa, a Democrat newspaper will not quote every word uttered by a Republican candidate. Whatever the case, “under the radar” is the question we’re concerned with here. The radar, as you may very well know, is the device used to monitor the sky. An airplane gets on the radar (appears on the monitoring screen as a blinking dot) once it comes within the airspace covered by the radar. However, as the radar is designed to monitor moving objects high in the air, an aircraft flying at extremely low altitude, or close to the ground, can escape radar detection. | 
