tin ear
2
9.4
- noun
- /tɪn ɪr/
- Offensive
:
sordera musical
- City Councilman Michael Julian Bond said she had a tin ear for public input or accountability.
Examples
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Unfortunately, one of our senior partners has a tin ear for languages, which leaves him somewhat handicapped.
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You know, you have a tin ear, too.
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I got a tin ear, you know.
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For some reason, this otherwise intelligent writer had a tin ear for all we said.
Blog text (27) -
Unfortunately, one of our senior partners has a tin ear for languages, which leaves him somewhat handicapped.
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My sister has a tin ear for the language, and over the years she has provoked a lot of laughter with malaprops.
Blog text (29) -
Nothing in Hillary's past suggests anything other than a tin ear for democratic politics.
Synonyms
Not able to sing, play, or understand music well
Unable to hear differences between musical notes
Antonyms
- Specialized
The ability to hear and understand musical sounds like pitch and rhythm
How Musical
Surface Forms
Morphology
tin + ear
The phrase pairs the literal parts 'tin' (a metal suggesting dull, metallic quality) and 'ear' (hearing), so a learner who knows both words can plausibly infer a negative, metallic quality of hearing — i.e. poor musical sensitivity. However the usage is metaphorical and idiomatic (not a straightforward compositional meaning), so the exact sense 'insensitivity to musical subtleties' may not be fully predictable without exposure.
Etymology
Tin ear may come from imagining an ear made of tin, which would hear only loud, metallic sounds and miss the soft, musical notes. That's why it describes someone who is 'not good at noticing musical pitch or small changes in tone or speech'.