up the duff
1
9.9
- idiom
- /ʌp ðə dʌf/
- Slang
:
estar embarazada
- (Giggling) I bet she gets up the duff on their first night together!
Examples
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I just found out that I'm up the duff and will be a mother soon.
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I bet she gets up the duff on their first night together.
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Not bright enough to stop herself getting up the duff though.
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"Mark, I'm up the duff."
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The very latest in the fight to make sure ladies get up the duff and stay up the duff shifts the argument away from whether women have the right to end their pregnancies should they choose to, and onto the question of whether they have a right to avoid getting pregnant in the first place.
Blog text (23) -
The very latest in the fight to make sure ladies get up the duff and stay up the duff shifts the argument away from whether women have the right to end their pregnancies should they choose to, and onto the question of whether they have a right to avoid getting pregnant in the first place.
Blog text (23) -
They were excited to discover that she is up the duff after months of trying.
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When he heard that she was up the duff, he couldn't stop smiling.
Synonyms
2
8.4
A woman who is pregnant
1
9.4
Having a baby growing inside you
Pregnant and expecting a baby
Surface Forms
Morphology
up + the + duff
The expression 'up the duff' meaning 'pregnant' is an informal British idiom whose overall meaning cannot be predicted from 'up' + 'the' + 'duff'—the word 'duff' is slang/dialectal and offers no transparent link to pregnancy. This lack of compositional or cross-linguistic cues makes it unlikely a B1 learner who knows the individual words would infer the idiomatic sense.
Etymology
Up the duff may come from old slang where duff meant a pudding or dough that swells when cooked and up suggests something rising. One popular idea is that this picture of a rising pudding is like a growing belly, so up the duff came to mean 'pregnant'.