Queen Anne's dead
- idiom
- Archaic
:
ya no importa
- As soon as the kids left for school, he sighed and muttered, "Queen Anne's dead."
Examples
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When everyone finally stopped talking about the issue, Sarah joked, "Queen Anne's dead."
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The enthusiasm faded quickly, and before long everyone was saying, "Queen Anne's dead."
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It's like Queen Anne's dead!
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What a relief! Queen Anne's dead now!
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When they finally finished discussing the old topic, Mark shrugged and said, "Queen Anne's dead."
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After the project was scrapped, Jane felt relieved and remarked, "Queen Anne's dead."
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Once the debate was over, Tom leaned back with a smile and declared, "Queen Anne's dead."
Synonyms
Words said to show an event has ended so people can leave
How Indifferent
Surface Forms
Morphology
Queen + Anne's + dead
Although the individual words 'Queen', 'Anne's' and 'dead' are lexically transparent, the idiomatic use meaning 'relief or indifference after someone has left / something is no longer relevant' is a pragmatic/cultural extension that is not predictable from the parts. This fixed, culture-bound expression would not be reliably inferred by a B1 learner who only knows the constituent words, so it is best classified as opaque.
Etymology
Queen Anne's dead comes from one popular story: in old times, hearing that a queen had died made people stop because the matter was over. That's why today people say it to show relief or that something is 'no longer important'.