not my circus, not my monkeys
- idiom
- Informal
:
no es mi problema
- When asked to mediate their argument, he replied, 'Not my circus, not my monkeys.'
Examples
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Whenever office politics arise, I remind myself not my circus, not my monkeys.
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That's a problem for them; it's not my circus, not my monkeys.
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She listened to their complaints and thought, 'not my circus, not my monkeys.'
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I won't get involved because it's not my circus, not my monkeys!
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When asked to help with the neighborhood dispute, she simply said, 'not my circus, not my monkeys.'
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He heard their arguments about the project's failures and thought, 'not my circus, not my monkeys.'
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After witnessing the chaos during the meeting, she shrugged and muttered, 'not my circus, not my monkeys.'
Synonyms
35
5.8
Tell someone not to ask about or get involved in other people's lives
3
6.3
Refuse to take the blame for a problem
Refuse to be involved with people or things that seem dangerous and dishonest
A private matter that does not concern you
A rude phrase to tell someone something is not their business
To not ask about or get involved in someone's private matters
Not upset or harmed when something happens to someone else
Antonyms
How Responsible
Surface Forms
Morphology
not + mine + circus, + not + mine + monkey
The phrase literally states that the circus and monkeys do not belong to the speaker, so a learner who knows the words can infer lack of ownership and distance from the situation. However, the mapping from those literal images to the pragmatic meaning 'not my responsibility/problem' depends on a metaphorical use of 'circus/monkeys' for a chaotic issue, which is partly conventionalized and not fully predictable from composition alone.
Etymology
Not my circus, not my monkeys may come from an old Polish saying. Imagine a messy circus where loose monkeys cause trouble; if it is not your circus or your monkeys, you do not have to fix it. So people use this to mean 'not my problem' or 'not my responsibility'.