to drive like a hoon
- idiom
- Offensive
:
conducir de forma temeraria
- He was fined after he drove like a hoon through the quiet neighborhood.
Examples
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Teenagers sometimes drive like a hoon when showing off to their friends.
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Don't drive like a hoon in the school zone!
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After the party, she regretted driving like a hoon on the way home.
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He always drives like a hoon when he's excited.
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He was fined after he drove like a hoon through the quiet neighborhood.
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Teenagers sometimes drive like a hoon when showing off to their friends.
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Don't drive like a hoon in the school zone!
Synonyms
1
9.9
To drive dangerously or noisily to show off
To make a car go very fast and in a dangerous way
How Reckless
Surface Forms
Morphology
This is a straightforward simile: combining 'drive' with 'like' and 'hoon' yields 'drive in the manner of a hoon' — i.e., drive recklessly or dangerously. The construction is fully compositional and cross-linguistically common, so a B1 learner who knows the constituent meanings (including the regional slang 'hoon') can readily infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Drive like a hoon comes from Australia and New Zealand, where hoon is a word for a person who shows off with a car, making loud engine noise and driving fast in the street. That's why it means 'to drive in a dangerous, reckless way'.