dog's breakfast

English

Pronunciation

• Audio (General Australian):

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• Audio (General Australian):

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Noun

dog's breakfast (plural dog's breakfasts)

1. (UK, Ireland, Commonwealth, idiomatic) An unappealing mixture; a disorderly situation; a mess.

   Synonyms: cat's breakfast, pig's breakfast, hodgepodge, pig's ear, dog's dinner; see also Thesaurus:disorder, Thesaurus:hodgepodge

   • 1961 July 7, “Black Temper”, in Time‎^[1], archived from the original on 2012-02-03:

     So complex was the scheme that neither blacks nor whites could say for certain who had won. "A dog's breakfast," cried Laborite M.P. James Callaghan. "I say frankly that I do not begin to understand it."

   • 2008 May 18, David Usborne, “The Gene Genie gets an LA makeover”, in The Independent‎^[2], retrieved 9 June 2008:

     Critics here are reserving judgement on whether ABC will do "Life in Mars" justice or make a dog's breakfast of it.

   • 2010, Kate Jennings, “Bouleversé”, in Trouble: Evolution of a Radical/Selected Writings 1970–2010, page 277:

     I'd trade one of their sublime sentences for the entire crop of sprawling, show-offy novels – dog′s breakfasts of facetiousness – that are currently the literary vogue.

2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see dog,‎ breakfast.
   • (Can we date this quote?), Alfred Anderson, “59. The Lazy Sisters and the Smart Sister”, in Swapping Stories: Folktales from Louisiana‎^[3], University Press of Mississippi, page 133:

     And the next morning she got up to fix breakfast: the old lady had told her, she had to fix her breakfast, the old lady's breakfast, the cat's breakfast, the dog's breakfast, and the bull's breakfast.

References

• “dog's breakfast”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.