have sticky fingers

sticky | American Dictionary

sticky
adjective
us/ˈstɪk·i/

stickyadjective (DIFFICULT TO SOLVE)

difficult to deal with or solve:
a sticky situation
a sticky issue

stickyadjective (TENDING TO STICK)

tending to stick, or covered with a substance that sticks:
You had better wash your sticky fingers.
If the weather is sticky, it is hot and the air feels wet.

sticky | Business English

sticky
adjective
uk /ˈstɪki/us
made of or covered with a substance that stays fixed to any surface it touches:
We printed sticky labels to put on the envelopes.
E-COMMERCE, INTERNET
used to describe a website that people like to stay on for a long time:
Big media groups are drawn to social networking sites because of their "sticky" nature.
used to describe the slow speed with which a particular cause can have a particular effect:
Home prices are a bit sticky right now because demand is down.
Change is sticky: enterprises often hang on to existing ways of doing things far too long.

Examples of sticky

sticky
Have you ever bought an item with a large, sticky price ticket which you simply could not remove completely?
On the heavy sticky clays farmers have chosen to keep livestock.
With sticky wages, there is now a clear role for macroeconomic policies.
All water traps tested caught significantly higher numbers of moths than sticky delta traps with open sides under farmers' field conditions.
Samples are expressed as numbers per trap per week; there were ten sticky cards inside and ten outside the greenhouse.
In these latter plots, farmers expected lower yields, even if they considered that less dense vegetation could reduce the risk of producing sticky cotton.
How would the implications of this model be changed if prices were temporarily fixed or" sticky"?
More generally, prices could be sticky and yet the major implication of the flexible-price model developed in chapter 4 could still be true.
We examined 100 terminals of foliage per block at two intervals during the season for aphids, and sampled leafhopper adults on sticky traps.
In both years, the sticky flypaper was replaced every two days.
False-positive results are generally due to antibodies that are too 'sticky'; therefore, they are not specific enough.
The result is a sticky gelatinous mass that provides a defence mechanism for the hagfish when under stress.
Obviously free-living worms would not require sticky secretions, except tube-dwellers.
In fact, arbitrary persistence would obtain, were wages or prices assumed to be exogenously sticky for an arbitrarily long period of time.
The sticky glands on the leaves trap insects.
See all examples of sticky
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.