horse opera
1
7.7
- noun
- /hɔrs ˈɑpərə/
- Archaic
:
película del oeste
- She loves watching horse operas because they transport her to the wild west with their exciting stories.
Examples
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Many classic horse operas feature thrilling gunfights between cowboys and outlaw gangs.
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Nyquist is quite simple, and you are very familiar with it unless you just never watched a horse opera movie or TV show.
Blog text (25) -
The new series is a modern take on the traditional horse opera, showcasing life on the frontier.
Synonyms
63
4.3
A film or book about cowboys and life in the American West
Surface Forms
Morphology
horse + opera
A learner who knows 'horse' and 'opera' can guess this refers to a dramatic or theatrical thing involving horses, so some general sense is derivable, but the conventional meaning 'a melodramatic Western or exaggerated situation' depends on English cultural usage (analogy with 'soap opera') and is not fully predictable. Because the sense is a metaphorical extension and requires prior exposure to the idiom/genre, it is only partially transparent to a B1 learner.
Etymology
Horse opera began as a joking name for old Western movies. People compared an opera, a large dramatic show, to films full of cowboys and horses, so the picture of a loud, dramatic horse show stuck and came to mean 'a film or show about the American West'.