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brick

brick v. (generally) to fail; (of a person) to commit an error or do poorly; (especially in sports) to miss or fail to reach a target, goal, or destination; (of a musical recording) to fail to be successful or sell well; to stiff; (of an electronic device) to be rendered useless. Editorial Note: A thing that has failed can be called a brick. The phrase to drop a brick, meaning to commit a verbal faux pas, dates to at least as early as 1923, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, although Eric Partridge, in the appendix to his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (p. 1379) recounts an anecdote that purports to date the phrase drop a brick ‘make a mistake’ to a single specific event in 1905 at Trinity College, Cambridge. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)

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Further reading

Why Is a Tinker Named That?

Katie in Everett, Washington, is curious about the expression If ifs and ands were pots and pans, there’d be no need for tinkers. What is a tinker? She heard this phrase on the television series The Gilded Age, in response to a character who...

A Chapter of Ifs

Published in the mid-19th century, the poem “A Chapter of Ifs” elaborates at length on the phrase If ifs and ands were pots and pans. The gist is that one shouldn’t dwell upon things that may not come to pass. This is part of a...

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