rickle o' banes
- noun
- Archaic
- After losing her job and her car breaking down, her month turned into a rickle o' banes.
Examples
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Every project this year seems to end up as a rickle o' banes for our team.
-
He laughed off the rickle o' banes that the wedding planning had become.
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What a rickle o' banes this has turned out to be!
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After losing his job, John faced a real rickle o' banes.
-
After losing her job and dealing with a leaky roof, her life turned into a rickle o' banes.
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It seems that every vacation ends up as a rickle o' banes with all the unexpected delays.
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The party became a rickle o' banes when the DJ canceled at the last minute.
Synonyms
19
6.5
A situation that causes many new problems when you start it
15
8.3
In trouble and not sure what to do
1
9.9
A chaotic, badly organized event that makes no sense
A time when many things go wrong because of bad luck
How Serious
Surface Forms
Morphology
rickle + o' + bane
The phrase contains an obscure/dialectal element 'rickle' (and the contraction 'o'') that is not a productive, widely known English lexeme; even if a learner knows 'bane' (source of harm) and 'of', they cannot reliably infer the sense 'a series of misfortunes' from these parts. The expression is idiomatic/dialectal rather than compositionally built from its constituents, so its meaning would be unpredictable to a B1 learner.
Etymology
The phrase rickle o' banes may come from a country image: a small heap, a rickle, of animal banes, or 'bones', left after a hunt, which looks messy and tangled. So rickle o' banes came to mean 'a series of troubles' or a chaotic situation today.