foot-dragging vs pause

foot-dragging

noun
  • The deliberate delaying of obligatory action. 

pause

noun
  • A temporary stop or rest; an intermission of action; interruption; suspension; cessation. 

  • A break or paragraph in writing. 

  • Hesitation; suspense; doubt. 

  • A short time for relaxing and doing something else. 

  • In writing and printing, a mark indicating the place and nature of an arrest of voice in reading; a punctuation mark. 

  • take pause: hesitate; give pause: cause to hesitate 

  • A sign indicating continuance of a note or rest. 

verb
  • To take a temporary rest, take a break for a short period after an effort. 

  • To hesitate; to hold back; to delay. 

  • To halt the play or playback of, temporarily, so that it can be resumed from the same point. 

  • To interrupt an activity and wait. 

How often have the words foot-dragging and pause occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )