All 3 Uses of
recourse
in
Anna Karenina
- They had to have recourse to the sure, never-failing topic—gossip.†
Part 2 *
- Once in a previous year he had gone to look at the mowing, and being made very angry by the bailiff he had recourse to his favorite means for regaining his temper,—he took a scythe from a peasant and began mowing.†
Part 3
- He knew what makes a soldier, and judging by the appearance and the talk of those persons, by the swagger with which they had recourse to the bottle on the journey, he considered them poor soldiers.†
Part 8
Definitions:
-
(1)
(recourse) a different way to accomplish something when the preferred way doesn't work
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
In finance and law, recourse has more specialized meanings. When someone borrows money to purchase a home, the loan can be a nonrecourse loan or not. If the loan is nonrecourse and the borrower does not make payments, the lender can take the property, but they cannot take other money, valuables, or future wages of the borrower. Some states require that home loans be nonrecourse. In many states borrowers can purchase either kind of loan.
More generally in finance and law, recourse may refer to collecting from a second party who has guaranteed that a first party will pay something. For example, if parents guaranteed a loan made by a bank to their children, then the bank would have recourse to demand payment from the parents if the child didn't make payments.