meter maid
12
6.8
- noun
- /ˈmiːtər meɪd/
- Archaic
:
inspectora de parquímetros
- During the nine years Shirley Williams has walked Portsmouth's streets as a meter maid, she's been bribed, threatened, followed, exposed to, and yelled at.
- meter maid tickets
- meter maid writes
Examples
-
Rita Marek, 28, they call her Lovely Rita, but she's no meter maid.
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We gotta roll before the meter maid shows up.
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Leave the meter maid alone.
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You are a successful meter maid.
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Judy, are you a meter maid?
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You're a cute meter maid, though.
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She's a meter maid.
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Meter maids armed with Wi-Fi contraptions are writing almost as many parking tickets as they wrote before the storm.
Academic text (2007) -
The meter maid handed out parking tickets to cars that were illegally parked.
-
On busy streets, the meter maids patrol regularly to ensure all vehicles are parked legally.
Surface Forms
Morphology
meter + maid
The components give a useful clue: 'meter' points to parking meters and 'maid' signals a woman or female worker, so a B1 learner could plausibly infer 'a woman who works with meters' (i.e. a parking enforcer). However, 'maid' commonly means a domestic servant and the occupational sense and US-specific usage are somewhat specialized and dated, so the exact job of issuing tickets is not fully predictable without exposure.
Etymology
Meter maid comes from the city's meter, the parking meter, and the word maid, meaning a woman worker. So, women who walked the streets checking meters and giving out 'tickets' were called meter maids, which is why the phrase now means a woman who gives parking 'tickets'.