sliding door
- noun
- Informal
:
oportunidad perdida
- She considered her failed audition a sliding door moment that could have changed her career.
Examples
-
Missing that job interview was a sliding door experience that made me rethink my future plans.
-
He realized that his decision to move to a new city was a sliding door that opened up many unexpected opportunities.
-
Lines of good people pushed to the edge wait by sliding doors which open every now and then but do not announce imminent boarding or disembarking, but rather seem designed only to permit diesel fumes to engulf all nearby.
Blog text (8)
Synonyms
6
3.4
A chance to succeed that you missed
How Life-Changing
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a missed opportunity' is not compositionally derived from 'sliding' (moving smoothly) + 'door' (an entry barrier); the literal image of a moving door does not predict the abstract idea of a life-changing missed chance. This usage is largely idiomatic and tied to a cultural/film reference (e.g. the movie Sliding Doors), so a B1 learner who knows the individual words but has not seen the expression before would not reliably infer the intended meaning.
Etymology
The idiom sliding door comes from the image of a sliding door opening to different paths in life. One popular story says a movie showed a small choice, catching or missing a train, making two different lives, so 'sliding door' now means 'a chance that could change your life'.