salt mine
- noun
- Informal
:
trabajo duro
- After the holiday break, it was back to the salt mine for most employees.
Examples
-
He jokingly refers to his office as the salt mine because of the endless paperwork.
-
After a relaxing weekend, it was back to the salt mine for the team, facing another week of meetings and deadlines.
-
She left the salt mine early today, relieved to finally have a night off.
-
Working at the office feels like a salt mine sometimes.
-
This project is turning into a real salt mine!
-
She often calls her daily routine at the office a salt mine due to the constant stream of monotonous tasks.
-
He described his job in customer service as a salt mine, filled with long hours and demanding customers.
Synonyms
51
7.9
A very dirty, unpleasant, and dangerous place
32
5.6
Work that is tiring and boring and happens every day
12
4.2
A boring repetitive situation that feels never-ending
5
8.8
A very bad situation that makes you feel unhappy
A place that is boring and has few fun things to do
Surface Forms
Morphology
salt + mine
The literal sense 'a mine where salt is extracted' is fully compositional from 'salt' + 'mine', and the figurative use likens an unpleasant workplace to the harsh conditions of a mine. A B1 learner who knows both words can probably infer this humorous/metaphorical meaning, but it requires mapping the property of hard, unpleasant labour rather than direct compositional meaning, so it is only partially predictable.
Etymology
Salt mine is used as a joke for a place where people do hard, boring, or unpleasant work. Because real salt mines were very hard, dirty, and dangerous places to work, people began calling tough offices or jobs a 'salt mine' to show that the work is unpleasant.