The phrase "chair warmer" is not typically used in formal written English.
It could be used in an informal setting to describe a person who tends to take up space without being actively involved. For example, "The meeting was overcrowded with chair warmers who seemed content to just sit and take up space."
But step into the brick room, the floor still covered in red dirt, and it is not hard to imagine her sitting in a chair, warming herself in front of the fireplace.
Mr. Kondylis, however, lives on a low floor of an Upper East Side prewar building and said his apartment was modeled after his image of the architect Mies van der Rohe in his red-and-white-checked wing chair— "warm, sympathetic, cozy".
If Mr. Levy can streamline the operation of this massive system to help serve its 1.1 million students, he will be doing far more than keeping the chair warm until a permanent chancellor arrives.
There has long seemed to be a tacit agreement between Putin and Medvedev: In exchange for having kept his chair warm for four years, Putin would refrain from embarrassing Medvedev in public the way he has embarrassed many members of his elite over the years.
When Dmitry Medvedev was elected to the Kremlin three-and-a-half years ago, many Russians suspected that he was simply the caretaker: brought in by Vladimir Putin to keep the presidential chair warm until the constitution would allow Mr Putin to take his seat for a third term.
Luke Walton is keeping Steve Kerr's chair warm in Golden State, serving as the team's interim coach while Kerr recuperates from back surgery.
Barbot is now the interim superintendent — a placeholder, someone who will keep the chair warm until a third superintendent gets on this merry-go-round by July 1.
Ted Kennedy, the senator from Massachusetts, has held his seat for 46 years after winning it in a similar replace-the-chair-warmer gambit.
The furniture could give you nightmares: curtains that look like knitted porridge, chairs warm from someone else's bottom.
When she joined the Atlanta orchestra, during the nineteen-forties, many male musicians had been drafted; after the war, the women who had kept their chairs warm were dismissed to keep house.
