Sunday driver
1
7.3
- noun
- Offensive
:
conductor dominguero (despectivo)
- She tends to drive like a Sunday driver, making everyone behind her impatient.
Examples
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Goddamn Sunday driver.
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- Sunday driver.
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A good attraction for Sunday drivers.
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Hey, Sunday driver!
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Jack braked for a slow-moving car ahead of them, adjusted the defroster, and went around the car on a straight piece of road, mumbling about Sunday drivers and goddamn cold rain.
Fiction book (1993) -
That elderly man is such a Sunday driver; he always drives 10 miles under the speed limit.
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I can't believe how slow that Sunday driver is; I'm going to be late for my meeting!
How Fast
Surface Forms
Morphology
The words 'Sunday' and 'driver' are individually transparent and a learner can plausibly infer a driver associated with Sundays — i.e., someone driving leisurely or occasionally. However, the fuller idiomatic sense (slow, inexperienced or annoyingly cautious) depends on cultural/figurative inference beyond the literal constituents, so the meaning is only partially predictable.
Etymology
Sunday driver comes from the image of people taking a slow, relaxed drive on Sunday, when a casual driver would go out for fun or to church. One popular idea is that these easy rides annoyed faster drivers, so the phrase now means 'a slow or inexperienced driver' who holds others up.