Big Brother
27
7.0
- noun
- /bɪɡ ˈbrʌðər/
:
Gran Hermano
- Will the day come when the government, capital/Big Brother, takes complete control?
- Big Brother watches
- Big Brother government
- Big Brother surveillance
It's just ordinary people #activists kind of assembling in order to kind of recreate this kind of oppressive Big Brother figure.
- It's just ordinary people #activists kind of assembling in order to kind of recreate this kind of oppressive Big Brother figure.
- This kind of language, I mean, that's the language of Huxley's world state that that is not the language of, of Orwell's Big Brother.
Examples
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We, as Americans, are so comfortable with Big Brother watching out for us!
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No way, although I am of the school of thought that Big Brother is always watching.
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Well, we can, but Big Brother's gonna be watching.
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It's Big Brother that keeps it secret.
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Like Big Brother, I'm watching you.
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Once a US company collects information, Big Brother can take all of it under the PATRIOT Act.
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We don't need to worry about Big Brother creeping up on us.
Blog text (27) -
It's just ordinary people #activists kind of assembling in order to kind of recreate this kind of oppressive Big Brother figure.
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Orwell wrote in "1984" of Emmanuel Goldstein, who was the arch enemy of Big Brother (the government).
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In today's society, many feel like they are being watched by Big Brother every time they go online.
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
big + Brother
As a proper-name idiom originating from Orwell's 1984, the sense of intrusive, state surveillance cannot be derived from the literal meanings of 'big' and 'brother' alone. Understanding this MWE requires cultural/political background knowledge rather than simple composition of the constituents, so a B1 learner who only knows the words would not reliably infer the idiomatic meaning.
Etymology
Big Brother comes from George Orwell's book '1984', where a powerful leader watches people on screens and posters warn 'Big Brother is watching you'. So, Big Brother now means a person or group that watches and controls people's lives, especially in a worrying way.