dead donkey
nounEtymology
From the saying that no one ever sees a dead donkey, hence a rarity. This then became a stock example of a slow-news-day story, which was popularized by the title of the British sitcom Drop the Dead Donkey.
Definitions
A rarity.
- A dead bore is as rare a phenomenon as a dead donkey or a dead attorney.
- I say, if they only get proper treatment, it will be no more likely to see a dead heath than it would be to see a dead donkey.
A news item of no real significance, usually of whimsical or sentimental nature, placed…
A news item of no real significance, usually of whimsical or sentimental nature, placed at the end of a news bulletin or in a newspaper as filler. A dead donkey can often be removed from the programme or publication if a more significant story needs extra time or space.
- Swap these ages around to produce a 59-year-old father and a 45-year-old mother and what was previously a hot news story becomes a dead donkey.
- When disaster strikes, the dead donkey does not get dropped, but merely occurs later on the television news.
Something useless on which time or effort is wasted.
- Happily he cannot effect this object for Haldane has a backbone and will go straight on regardless of all the old boys and professors who beat your "dead donkeys of pedantic professionalism".
- Overall then, with Vista, Megabollox were 'flogging a dead donkey' by introducing this cosmetic, resource-flogging successor to Windows XP falsely as an advance.
The neighborhood
Vish — recursive loop
No curated loop yet for dead donkey. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.
sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA