mauvais quart d'heure
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English
Etymology
Unadapted borrowing from French mauvais quart d'heure (“bad quarter of an hour”).
Pronunciation
Noun
mauvais quart d'heure (plural mauvais quarts d'heure)
- (chiefly British) A brief unpleasant period; a bad yet quick experience.
- 1893, Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance, published 1906, act II, page 74:
- Life, Lady Stutfield, is simply a mauvais quart d’heure made up of exquisite moments.
- 1898 April 13, Henry Adams, “”, in Ernest Samuels, editor, Henry Adams: Selected Letters, published 1992, →ISBN, page 343:
- It was a mauvais quart d’heure, the Christmas holidays of ’96, and poor Willy Phillips never lived to see the fight recovered.
- 2003 November 1, Nicholas Lezard, “More than the usual authorial suspects”, in The Guardian:
- Many Guardian readers will have suffered a mauvais quart d'heure when they found out that their views on the Gulf war were closer to Peter's than Christopher's.
- 2020 December 17, Rosemary Hill, “Gosh, what am I like?”, in London Review of Books, volume 42, number 24:
- Kate Fall, Cameron’s deputy chief of staff, has an initial mauvais quart d’heure when all she is offered is the chance to run Comic Relief
References
- “mauvais quart d’heure, n.”, in OED Online
, Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000.
