rain man
1
9.9
- noun
- /reɪn mæn/
- Slur
:
[término ofensivo para una persona con habilidades tipo savant]
- The kid in my class is a real rain man; he can memorize complex math problems in seconds.
Examples
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I've often heard, you know, you hear about Rain Man and various types of autism where these sort of apparent geniuses say that they see.
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He is often called a rain man because he can remember every detail of what he reads.
-
During the quiz, Sarah amazed everyone with her rain man abilities to quickly calculate the answers.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning of 'rain man' comes from a specific cultural reference (the film character) and denotes a savant-like person; this sense cannot be predicted from the literal words 'rain' and 'man'. A B1 learner who knows the constituents would not infer exceptional memory or calculation ability without prior exposure, so the expression is culturally specific and non-compositional.
Etymology
The noun rain man comes from the movie 'Rain Man', where a man shows an amazing memory and can do very fast calculations. So, people use rain man to mean someone with 'extraordinary memory' or number skills.