killjoy
Appearance
See also: kill-joy
English
[edit]Alternative forms
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From kill joy, first attested in 1776.
Pronunciation
[edit]Noun
[edit]killjoy (plural killjoys)
- (occasionally endearing, derogatory) A person who is anti-fun, or prevents others from having fun.
- 1871, George Eliot, Middlemarch:
- “If you mean me, sir, I call you and every one else to the inspection of my professional life. As to Christian or unchristian, I repudiate your canting palavering Christianity; and as to the way in which I spend my income, it is not my principle to maintain thieves and cheat offspring of their due inheritance in order to support religion and set myself up as a saintly Killjoy....”
- 1922, E[ric] R[ücker] Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros[1], London: Jonathan Cape, page 7:
- What kill-joy have we here? […] I feel it in my bones some rascal is come to Galing, one that bringeth ill hap in his pocket and a shadow athwart the sun on this our day of festival.
- December 10 2005, Sam Murphy in The Guardian, A sober thought
- Just in time for the party season, some old killjoys at the journal Medicine & Science In Sports & Exercise have released their findings on the effects on muscle of prolonged heavy alcohol intake (six weeks is prolonged, apparently). The bad news is that it seems too much boozing puts all that effort in the gym to waste - in the study, alcohol prevented the usual resistance-training-induced muscle response that leads to increased size and strength.
Synonyms
[edit]- buzzkill, miserabilist, dampener, party pooper, spoilsport, fun police; see also Thesaurus:spoilsport
Translations
[edit]someone who takes the fun out of a situation or activity — see spoilsport
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