beat with the ugly stick
- idiom
- Offensive
:
parecer muy feo
- She laughed off the comment that she'd been beat with the ugly stick in her school photo.
Examples
-
He claimed his brother was beat with the ugly stick, but everyone knew it was a joke.
-
Wow! You look like you were beat with the ugly stick!
-
The old building looks like it was beat with the ugly stick over the years.
-
He looks like he was beat with the ugly stick!
-
Everyone joked that he was beat with the ugly stick, but he was just having a bad hair day.
-
She playfully suspected her friends thought she had been beat with the ugly stick after her awkward fall.
-
After seeing those photos, I couldn't help but feel like I was beat with the ugly stick in comparison.
Synonyms
3
9.9
Very ugly in an informal, rude way
2
7.2
Very unpleasant to look at or to be with
1
9.9
To call someone ugly as a joke
1
9.9
A joking way to say that someone looks very ugly
1
2.0
A person or thing that is not pleasant to look at
Something that looks very ugly and unpleasant
A face that people think is very ugly
A face that looks very ugly
Looks very ugly and a little funny, especially in the face
To look much less attractive after a sudden change
Antonyms
How Ugly
171
5.1
- Offensive
866
1.0
37
1.8
50
2.5
Surface Forms
Morphology
beat + with + the + ugly + stick
The phrase evokes the clear image of someone being struck by an "ugly stick," so a learner who knows 'beat', 'with', 'ugly' and 'stick' can plausibly infer that the speaker means the person looks very unattractive. However, this is a conventional humorous metaphor rather than a literal composition, so the causal figurative meaning is idiomatic and may require cultural exposure to be fully recognized.
Etymology
Beat with the ugly stick imagines someone being beat many times with a silly ugly stick. Because the joke is that the hits made them look bad, the phrase is used to say someone is 'very unattractive'.