field day
English
Etymology
Some postulate the idiomatic usage is derived from the "parade day" military use. A parade is much easier than the soldiers’ usual drilling and intense exercise.
Pronunciation
Audio (AU) (file)
Noun
field day (plural field days)
- (military) A day for manoeuvres and tactical exercises in "the field".
- 1937, Siegfried Sassoon, Sherston's Progress, London: Faber, page 621 (in The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston ):
- This morning I got up, with great difficulty, at 6.30, and at 7.45 we started out for a Brigade Field Day. Did an attack from 10.30 to 2.30, but it wasn't a strenuous one for me as I was told to "become a casualty" soon after the 3000 yard assault began ….
- A school day for athletic events; a sports day.
- A day of class taken away from school for a field trip.
- (idiomatic) A great time or a great deal to do; a period of bustling activity.
- They went to the park and had a field day playing on the swings.
- 2014, Vance Munraff, Sounds Like Paradise: a Fugitive's Tale, Lulu.com, →ISBN, page 62:
- A family of frisky squirrels was having a field day amongst the towering obstacle course of foliage.
- (idiomatic) A great time or a great deal to do, at somebody else's expense.
- The reporters will have a field day with a comment like that.
- The scandal was a field day for the press.
- 1966 December, Stephen Stills, “For What It's Worth”performed by Buffalo Springfield:
- What a field day for the heat (Ooo-ooo-ooo) / A thousand people in the street (Ooo-ooo-ooo) / Singing songs and a-carryin' signs (Ooo-ooo-ooo) / Mostly say "Hooray for our side" (Ooo-ooo-ooo)
- 2009, Julie Jurgens-Shimek, Autism Is a Four Letter Word: Love, AuthorHouse, →ISBN, page 32:
- It had become a legal nightmare. All parties had retained attorneys; the community and press were having a field day.
- 2012, Claudia Parker, Becoming a Mother, While Losing My Own, Xlibris Corporation, →ISBN, page 158:
- I thought I'd been so thorough, so efficient, and so cost conscious, but look where I was now. The devil was having a field day with my head.
- 2012, Gary Rosen, Unfair to Genius: The Strange and Litigious Career of Ira B. Arnstein, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 140:
- The reporters were having a field day with our saga and the courtroom filled with spectators.
- 2022 November 15, Patrick Wintour, “Sergei Lavrov, a fixture of Russian diplomacy facing his toughest test in Ukraine”, in The Guardian:
- The Russian foreign ministry had a field day denouncing what it called western propaganda as a high-level lie.
- (US military, specifically US Navy, US Coast Guard and US Marine Corps) A day on which there is top-to-bottom all-hands cleaning.
Translations
school day for athletic events — see also field trip
See also
- open field (idiomatic)
Anagrams
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