darkest timeline
- noun
- Slang
:
la peor línea temporal
- Many people joked that 2020 felt like the darkest timeline after so many things went wrong.
And that opens up sort of these scenarios for authoritarian centralized control, which to me is the the darkest timeline.
- And that opens up sort of these scenarios for authoritarian centralized control, which to me is the the darkest timeline.
Examples
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Sometimes, when the news is especially grim, it feels like we've slipped into the darkest timeline.
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Have we reached the darkest timeline yet?
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After losing his job and apartment, he said he must be living in the darkest timeline.
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This is the darkest timeline for our team!
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After losing his job and apartment, he said he must be living in the darkest timeline.
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Many people joked that 2020 felt like the darkest timeline after so many things went wrong.
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Sometimes, when the news is especially grim, it feels like we've slipped into the darkest timeline.
Synonyms
An imagined version of events where many bad things happen
A very serious situation likely to have bad results
How Bad
Surface Forms
Morphology
dark + timeline
The phrase combines 'dark' (metaphorically 'bad' or gloomy) with 'timeline' (a sequence of events), so a learner who knows both words can plausibly infer it means the worst or most negative sequence of events. However, the expression relies on metaphorical extension and has a pop-cultural nuance (alternate/parallel timeline) that is not strictly compositional, so its precise connotations may not be fully predictable to a B1 learner.
Etymology
Darkest timeline may come from the TV show 'Community', where a dice roll created many possible timelines and the one with the most trouble was the darkest one. So, people now say darkest timeline to mean a time when everything has gone wrong, the 'worst possible reality'.