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Glite Dictionary
🧹 A punished recruit 🚔 A prison inmate
yard bird

yard bird

9.9
A new soldier who does only boring chores as punishment
  • noun
  • Offensive
translation icon : recluta de castigo (despectivo, informal)
  • Most of the yard birds spent their first weeks doing chores around the base.

Examples

  • The sergeant ordered the yard bird to clean the latrines again.

  • The new recruit feels like a yard bird after being assigned to clean the barracks.

  • He dreaded being called a yard bird because of all the tedious tasks involved.

  • Don't be such a yard bird!

  • The sergeant ordered the yard bird to clean the latrines again.

  • Most of the yard birds spent their first weeks doing chores around the base.

  • The new recruit feels like a yard bird after being assigned to clean the barracks.

Synonyms

yardbird
vsyard bird
  • Archaic
1 9.9

A new recruit who does chores around the barracks

has identical meaning but is written as two separate words

Surface Forms

yard bird singular
yard birds plural

Morphology

yard + bird

The slang sense 'prison inmate' is not predictable from the literal meanings of 'yard' (an outdoor area) and 'bird' (a feathered animal). This is an idiomatic/slang label whose link to incarceration is cultural and regional, so a B1 learner who knows the constituents would not reliably infer the MWE meaning.

Etymology

Yard bird may come from the image of a small bird that stays in the yard, always pecking at the ground and not free to fly away. One popular story says new soldiers who were kept in the base yard doing simple, boring chores were like that bird, so yard bird came to mean 'a recruit given only menial tasks'.