Today I’ve encountered the phrase “horror run” in two different Australian articles about traffic accidents. What does it mean?
A sequence of bad events in a short time frame.
Commonly used in reference to road traffic accidents as seen in your linked articles.
but also frequently for weather events (i.e multiple storms / hot days in a short period).
And sports - both teams and individuals seem to be having a lot of horror runs, if the headlines can be believed.
I’d never realised it was an Australianism, but from a quick googling and excluding Aust/NZ sites almost no other relevant mentions. You’d have thought Brexit was tailor-made for the term.
So…what Americans might call “a streak,” it sounds like. With the word “horror” in there, I thought it’d be something a lot more dramatic.
As opposed to a dream run. Where everything goes your way.
Not a streak, but a bad streak
Sensationalist journalism is alive and well in Australia. A sport team losing three succesive games in a season of twenty games can be a “horror run”.
A horror run can also be in the future.
A sporting team drawn to play the three teams placed above them in the last three weeks of the regular has a horror run.
Conversely once reaching the finals the same team now needs to beat the same three teams above them to win the premiership is definitely not a horror run, it’s just the luck of the draw.
Also sporting related, a team has “a horror run of injuries”. One of those phrases that nearly always appears in that form.