to hurry up and wait
1
8.4
- idiom
- Informal
:
apresurarse y esperar
- Why is it always "hurry up and wait?"
Examples
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The nurse was talking about the doctor's schedule, how it was always hurry up and wait, but Jody felt that the woman wasn't speaking to her.
Fiction book (1994) -
During the project development, we often find ourselves needing to hurry up and wait for approvals that take longer than expected.
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We're in a phase of hurry up and wait, all right.
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You know what they say, it's all hurry up and wait.
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Hurry up, hurry up and wait
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So many details, so much "hurry up and wait" going on.
Fiction book (2001) -
It's Friday, and all my work today is hurry up and wait....
Blog text (30) -
"Hurry up and wait" as usual.
Fiction book (1993) -
But as all army wives know, the army is all about "hurry up and wait."
Blog text (33) -
Once you've been through a session X times, the more you tend to 'hurry up and wait.'
Blog text (9)
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is compositionally built from 'hurry up' (move quickly) + 'and' (then) + 'wait' (stay/hold), so a learner who knows those constituents can infer the sequence ‘rush, then wait.’ While it carries a pragmatic nuance of frustration in contexts like bureaucracy or travel, the core meaning is directly derivable from the parts and follows a common cross-linguistic sequence pattern.
Etymology
The phrase hurry up and wait comes from army life, where soldiers were told to hurry up to get ready and then to wait for orders or transport. So, the phrase now means 'to rush and then wait'.