on my watch
25
6.1
- idiom
:
bajo mi responsabilidad
- You stopped breathing on my watch.
- happens on my watch
- die on my watch
- lose a civilian on my watch
And I stood up and I said, nobody's getting killed in Louisiana on my watch.
- And I stood up and I said, nobody's getting killed in Louisiana on my watch.
- I got to keep it friendly and I care about his business and I need to make sure that fires don't happen on my watch.
Examples
-
What if something happened to him on my watch?
Blog text (16) -
Iran will not acquire nuclear weapons on my watch.
Academic text (2008) -
No child left behind on my watch.
-
Not on my watch, no sir.
Blog text (31) -
I only had four deaths on my watch.
-
And nobody's gonna mess with you on my watch.
-
No riots in my state, on my watch.
Blog text (23) -
As President of the United States, one of the things I've learned, and we just talked about, is that anything that happens on my watch is my responsibility.
Blog text (24) -
But, this kind of behavior cannot continue, not on my watch.
-
The money was stolen on my watch, so everyone's looking at me to fix the situation.
Synonyms
4
4.7
During the time someone is responsible for what happens
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'on' marks timing/location, 'my' indicates possession, and 'watch' (a period or duty of guarding) yields 'during the period I am responsible.' This regular preposition+possessive+noun temporal/possession pattern makes the expression immediately inferable to a learner who knows the given senses of the constituents.
Etymology
On my watch comes from the old idea of a watch as a time when someone stands guard or is on duty. If something happens on my watch, it happened while you were the person 'in charge', so the phrase now means 'during the time I was responsible'.