drugstore cowboy

Etymology

Definitions

1. 1

   Someone who dresses and acts like a cowboy but has none of the skills.

   • When we first came to California and we started putting on Westerns, there were no riders in Hollywood; they were all drugstore cowboys.
   • The Soviet Union, he [Marlin Fitzwater] insisted, was engaged “in a very strange pattern of public-relations gambits”; he compared Mikhail Gorbachev to a “drugstore cowboy,” an old-fashioned term for a pretentious impostor.
   • I was raised on Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, and as a kid I dreamed of doing the things real cowboys do—not drugstore cowboys or rodeo cowboys, but the real sweat-and-dirt variety—like roping and riding, herding cattle, and breaking horses.
2. 2

   A young man who loafs around town, especially a lady's man who hangs out in public places…

   A young man who loafs around town, especially a lady's man who hangs out in public places in an attempt to pick up girls.

   • When any of these jazz-age drugstore cowboys starts trying to fool around with his sister, he won't mince his words. He'll say, "See here, now, what do you mean, trying to ruin my sister?"
   • I saw Duel in the Sun late one Friday afternoon, came out blinking at the drugstore cowboys standing in front of the fly-spattered windows of the cafe across the street […]

The neighborhood