The proposals are more a trial balloon than anything else.

We send up trial balloons all the time, feeling each other out on a justice's position.

Seems to me you've been floating trial balloons for quite a while.

A trial balloon is information sent out to the media in order to observe the reaction of an audience.

"Your father has floated a trial balloon," he said at last.

Then he called the current British compromise efforts a "trial balloon."

There is no way to distinguish a regular test question from a trial balloon.

But this was one trial balloon that, by all appearances, never quite left the ground.

To many, this game is a trial balloon to that end.

It was a trial balloon the two of them had worked out, to see how they'd get along.