cat and dog life
- noun
- UK
:
vida de gato y perro
- After years of living a cat and dog life, the couple finally decided to separate.
Examples
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The movie depicts the cat and dog life of two business partners who rarely agree on anything.
-
Growing up in a cat and dog life household taught him to value peace and compromise.
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They live a cat and dog life together!
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After years of fighting, their cat and dog life finally calmed down.
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After years of living a cat and dog life, the couple finally decided to separate.
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Growing up in a cat and dog life household taught him to value peace and compromise.
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The movie depicts the cat and dog life of two business partners who rarely agree on anything.
Synonyms
3
4.2
A relationship that has frequent problems and disagreements
1
8.2
Two people who have strong feelings, frequent fights, and sudden changes
Antonyms
16
4.2
Living together in the same place at the same time, often peacefully despite differences
How Peaceful
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning ‘a life marked by continual arguing’ is only indirectly signalled by the constituents: 'cat' and 'dog' evoke the common metaphor of animals that fight (as in 'fight like cats and dogs'), but the literal words 'cat and dog life' do not transparently compose to that sense without cultural/idiomatic knowledge. A learner who knows the words but not the idiom may not reliably infer the quarrelling sense, so the expression is partly inferable but still idiomatic.
Etymology
Cat and dog life may come from the image of a cat and a dog always fighting or chasing each other in the same house. That picture became a way to say 'a life of constant arguing', so the phrase describes people who live in ongoing conflict.