I recently finished reading Notes From a Small Island. Basically it’s a travelogue of sorts, where an American who’s been living in England for the past 20 years goes on a 6-week tour of the UK before moving back to the US.
Anyway, in the glossary, he defines several terms that are likely to be unfamiliar to Americans. He defines Dirty Weekend as such (paraphrased): “A weekend set aside specifically for illicit, or at least memorable, sex.”
Can someone please expand on that definition? If a married man is planning a Dirty Weekend, does that mean he’s planning on bumping nasties with someone other than his wife? Or does it mean that he and his wife are getting away from the kids and drilling for oil in peace? Or are the terms interchangeable?
Pretty interchangeable. It’s basically a weekend break you take with your partner (spouse, mistress or whatever) for the primary purpose of taking in the sights of the bed linen rather than areas of local interest.
Minibreak. I take it that it is a very short vacation, perhaps just for the weekend.
It made me wonder, though, what was the need for this term? Is there such thing as a “break” that must be at least X number of days? Does “vacation” or “holiday” imply a minimum length of time?
Here in the U.S., we don’t feel the need to specify the mini – Maybe it’s because we get so few vacation days already.
We’d just say – “We’re going out of town.” If there was a need to give some specificity as to length, then – “We’re going away for the weekend” or “We’re going away for a few days.”
I’m pretty sure the term arose in the context of people in their late teens, still living under the watchful eyes of their parents and families, in an era when premarital sex was very much more taboo, escaping to some remote (often seaside, for some reason) location, checking into a seedy hotel as ‘Mr & Mrs Smith’, and taking the welcomed opportunity to shag like bunnies.
I would say that it primarily means going away with someone you are not married to, for illicit sexual relations. I think the meaning has broadened to include a spouse, but IMO the illicit aspect is the defining characteristic.
Mini-break isn’t a dirty weekend, necessarily. Do you mean ‘dirty weekend’?
I think ‘mini-break’ is a term that some bright spark in the holiday business coined. Once upon a time, when we all worked in mills and ate coal for breakfast, most people would have just one holiday a year when the factories closed down (typically a week in Blackpool or the like).
Now that we’re all stinking rich and have loads of holiday allowance, there’s a plethora of ‘extra’ holidays we’re enticed to take: mini-breaks, city-breaks (same length as a mini-break, but usually involving some European Capital of Culture), dirty weekends, stag weekends and so forth.
A mini-break would be longer than a weekend, maybe a long weekend, but not a week.
So would we. We wouldn’t say ‘I’m going for a mini-break’, but we might say ‘I’ve booked a mini-break in Scotland’ implying that I’ve booked a specific package holiday with a travel agent that lasts 2-5 days. that is called ‘mini-break’ in the brochure.
You had scraps of newspaper? We got our news on clay tablets. But we weren’t allowed to eat them – only toffs that owned t’mill were allowed to eat them.
I’ve had a proper dirty weekend. With my then “mistress”. We went to York and bumped uglies in a seedy B&B for two days. We even signed in as Mr & Mrs Smith. It was great.
Weekends were always associated with sex for the British (maybe it’s the only time we got any!).
In the days when barbers were the one of the main outlets for the sale of condoms, it was common practice for the barber, on giving a client a haircut on a Thursday or Friday, to whisper discreetly in his ear, “A little something for the weekend, sir?”
The phrase became very well-known, and has an entry in OED.
