purple monkey dishwasher
- noun
- Informal
:
frase absurda
- Calling their theory a purple monkey dishwasher, he dismissed it as absurd nonsense.
Examples
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That explanation sounded like a purple monkey dishwasher!
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Her last email became a purple monkey dishwasher of miscommunication after so many people replied.
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After hearing the wild rumors, he said it all sounded like a purple monkey dishwasher situation.
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Can you believe he said purple monkey dishwashers in his speech?
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After hearing the wild rumors, he said it all sounded like a purple monkey dishwasher situation.
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Calling their theory a purple monkey dishwasher, he dismissed it as absurd nonsense.
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Her last email became a purple monkey dishwasher of miscommunication after so many people replied.
Synonyms
16
7.4
Untrue or silly talk that people should not believe
A very messy, confused mix of things in one place
Surface Forms
Morphology
purple + monkey + dishwasher
The phrase is a deliberately nonsensical, nonce combination whose conventional use to signal confusion, absurdity, or garbled information is not derivable from the literal meanings of 'purple' + 'monkey' + 'dishwasher'. A B1 learner would notice the absurd literal image but would not be able to infer the conventional pragmatic meaning without prior exposure, and there is no cross-linguistic compositional logic to make it predictable.
Etymology
The phrase purple monkey dishwasher makes a funny picture in your head: a purple monkey using a dishwasher to wash plates. Because that image is so absurd, people use the phrase to call something 'nonsense' or a confused, silly idea.