all duck or no dinner
- idiom
- Informal
:
todo o nada
- In this competition, it's all duck or no dinner; there's no reward for second place.
Examples
-
When the clock was running out, the coach shouted, "All duck or no dinner! Take the risk!"
-
He approached the final negotiations with an all duck or no dinner mentality.
-
It's all duck or no dinner!
-
In this project, it's all duck or no dinner!
-
In this competition, it's all duck or no dinner; there's no reward for second place.
-
When the clock was running out, the coach shouted, "All duck or no dinner! Take the risk!"
-
He approached the final negotiations with an all duck or no dinner mentality.
Synonyms
12
4.2
Being fully committed to one plan with no compromise
4
6.7
A situation when you must succeed because failure is not allowed
Antonyms
How Committed
- Informal
79
4.0
11
4.8
9
4.9
73
3.2
Surface Forms
Morphology
The syntactic pattern 'all X or no Y' transparently signals an all-or-nothing choice, so a learner who knows 'all', 'or', 'no' and 'dinner' could infer a high-stakes either-or meaning. However, the specific pairing with 'duck' as the valued item is idiomatic and the exact pragmatic nuance (why duck, how threat/consequence works) is not fully predictable from the words alone, so prior exposure helps.
Etymology
All duck or no dinner may come from duck hunting: if a hunter goes out and brings back no duck, there will be 'no dinner'. So it means 'all or nothing'. You must give everything or get nothing.