jim-dandy meal
- noun
- Archaic
- She prepared a jim-dandy meal for her parents' anniversary celebration.
Examples
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After a long day of hiking, we sat down to a jim-dandy meal by the campfire.
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That restaurant always serves a jim-dandy meal whenever we visit.
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That was a delicious jim-dandy meal!
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We had a jim-dandy meal at the new restaurant.
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After a long day of hiking, we sat down to a jim-dandy meal by the campfire.
-
She prepared a jim-dandy meal for her parents' anniversary celebration.
-
That restaurant always serves a jim-dandy meal whenever we visit.
Synonyms
A meal made with very good ingredients and careful cooking
Tasty, filling food like a home-cooked meal or pub food
A special, nicely made dish of food
A very tasty meal that people enjoy
A person or thing that is very good at what they do
Antonyms
How Good
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is a simple adjective + noun composition: 'jim-dandy' means 'exceptionally good' and combined with 'meal' yields 'an excellent meal', so the meaning is directly derivable from the constituents. This standard adj+noun pattern is cross-linguistically transparent, so a B1 learner who knows both constituent meanings would readily understand it.
Etymology
Jim-dandy meal comes from the older expression jim-dandy, where dandy meant something very fine and 'Jim' was just a friendly name added to make the saying sound good. So a jim-dandy meal is a meal that is especially 'excellent' or very satisfying.