gandy dancer
- noun
- /ˈɡændi ˈdænsər/
- Archaic
:
trabajador de vías
- The gandy dancer worked tirelessly to lay the tracks.
Examples
-
Before machines took over, teams of gandy dancers did the hard labor of keeping the rails aligned.
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The gandy dancers sang work songs as they synchronized their movements on the tracks.
-
My great-grandfather was a gandy dancer who worked on the railroads across the Midwest.
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Many gandy dancers were employed during the railroad expansion.
-
In the early days of railroads, a gandy dancer would often work tirelessly to lay tracks by hand.
-
He started his career as a gandy dancer, laying down the rails that would support the trains.
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Many skilled gandy dancers labored in heat and rain to ensure the railroad lines were well maintained.
Synonyms
3
4.2
A man who works on trains or train tracks
1
4.8
A person who works for a railroad, for example on trains or helping run it
A worker who builds and fixes rails that trains run on
A person who maintains and inspects railway tracks for safety
Surface Forms
Morphology
gandy + dancer
The intended meaning (‘railroad worker who lays and maintains tracks’) cannot be derived from the parts: 'gandy' is non-transparent/unknown (likely a proper name or dialectal term) and 'dancer' suggests someone who dances, which is misleading. This is historical jargon specific to US railroads with no predictable compositional logic, so a B1 learner who knows the constituents would not infer the meaning.
Etymology
Gandy dancer may come from a tool maker called Gandy and from the way workers looked like dancers as they sang and stepped to lift and move the rails, so the name came to mean 'railroad worker'.