dead donkey

名词 n.
中文释义

英文释义

名词 n.
  1. A rarity.
    — A dead bore is as rare a phenomenon as a dead donkey or a dead attorney.
  2. 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.
  3. Something useless on which time or effort is wasted.
    — What, if you like, could be more sensational than the fact that the ancient island of Cythera, " sacred," as Lemrière says, "to the Goddess Venus, who rose, as some suppose, from the sea, near its coasts," has been quite happily governed for three months by an assembly of islanders under the presidency of a local lawyer ? But the papers prefer to go on flogging the same old dead donkeys.

词形变化

dead donkeys plural

词源

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.
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