dadburn fence
- noun
- /ˈdædˌbɜrn fɛns/
- Archaic
:
maldita cerca
- I wish someone would fix that dadburn fence before it falls down completely.
Examples
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He spent all morning arguing with the neighbor about whose job it was to fix the dadburn fence.
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The cows keep slipping through the old dadburn fence in the back pasture.
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That dadburn fence keeps falling down!
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I tripped over the dadburn fence again.
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He spent all morning arguing with the neighbor about whose job it was to fix the dadburn fence.
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I wish someone would fix that dadburn fence before it falls down completely.
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That dadburn fence keeps causing problems with the livestock escaping.
Synonyms
29
2.1
A thing that causes trouble or annoyance
Surface Forms
Morphology
dadburn + fence
The structure is simply an intensifying modifier + noun: if a learner knows 'dadburn' as a mild oath meaning 'damned' or 'annoying', they can compositionally infer 'dadburn fence' = 'a troublesome/annoying fence'. The label is transparent because the overall meaning follows directly from the constituents, though 'dadburn' is dialectal/rare and may be unknown to many learners.
Etymology
Dadburn fence may come from a mild old curse where people softened 'God damn' into dadburn. When someone was upset with a troublesome fence they would call it the dadburn fence, so the phrase means 'a fence that is annoying or causes trouble'.