| 释义 |
drongo
noun- a fool; a hopeless individual AUSTRALIA, 1941
Originally Royal Australian Air Force slang for “a recruit”. Said in an early RAAF source to be named after the “(spangled) drongo” (a large clumsy flying bird), but drongos are not particularly large (smaller than a pigeon), and while they are somewhat aerobatic and erractic flyers they are certainly not clumsy. Otherwise it has been suggested that it is an allusion to a racehorse named Drongo which gained notoriety for never winning a race and was used as a character in satirical political cartoons in the Melbourne Herald in the 1920s, which may be true despite the gap of 20 years. - Now don’t call me a galah, yer stupid drongo! — Robert S. Close, With Hooves of Brass, p. 91, 1961
- I’ll make soldiers out of you drongoes if it takes years off my life! — Ray Slattery, Mobbs’ Mob, p. 20, 1966
- Don’t come the raw prawn with me either or I’ll drop ya you pommy drongo. — The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, 1972
- Blind Frieda could see you are a pie-eating drongo and a blithering suds-artist. — Ignatius Jones, The 1992 True Hip Manual, p. 158, 1992
- [They] were enjoying the sort of bacchanalian freakout usually the preserve of mushied-up [high] drongos invading Stonehenge for the Solstice. — Kevin Sampson, Powder, p. 27, 1999
- a new recruit to the Royal Australian Air Force AUSTRALIA, 1941
Probably after Drongo, a Melbourne racehorse in the mid-1920s who, it is claimed, having failed to win a single race, was retired; hence “a slow and clumsy individual”. An alternative etymology form the Australian Army journal, Salt, 1941 cited in A Dicitionary of Australian Colloquialisms, G.A. Wilkes, 1978 offers a large and clumy flying bird found in Australia’s Cape York Peninsula as the source; in fact, the “drongo” is a small, averagely graceful bird, but is surely the creature after which the horse was named.
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