mercy buckets
- noun
- Slang
:
¡gracias mil!
- Whenever her friends helped her move, she always responded with a cheerful 'mercy buckets!'
Examples
-
After handing her the gift, he said, 'mercy buckets,' making everyone laugh.
-
At the end of the show, the comedian thanked the crowd with a big 'mercy buckets.'
-
Thank you for the gift; I say mercy buckets!
-
When she helped me, I exclaimed, 'mercy buckets!'
-
After handing her the gift, he said, 'mercy buckets,' making everyone laugh.
-
Whenever her friends helped her move, she always responded with a cheerful 'mercy buckets!'
-
At the end of the show, the comedian thanked the crowd with a big 'mercy buckets.'
Synonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
mercy + buckets
The phrase is a playful phonetic imitation of French 'merci beaucoup' rather than a compositional combination of 'mercy' (compassion) + 'buckets' (containers), so knowing the constituent words does not yield the meaning 'thank you'. Only speakers aware of the French phrase or the pun will infer the gratitude sense; for an average B1 learner the meaning is not derivable from the parts.
Etymology
The phrase mercy buckets comes from a joke on the French 'merci beaucoup', because the French words sound like 'mercy buckets' in English. The silly image of saying mercy and a pile of buckets makes it playful, so people use it as a cheerful or joking way to say 'thank you very much'.