green ceiling
n.— «In Mexico, I painted, I read and then got the idea that I could be a writer.…Back home, I was going to face what I call the “green ceiling.” It was the attitude among the older generation of Irish that you shouldn’t aspire to anything too “artsy.” The question was always, “Who do you think you are?’ when the idea of being an artist came up.» —“Novelist Hamill still a reporter” by Bob Hoover Post-Gazette (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) June 10, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Clabberhead is a mild rebuke that suggests someone has a curdled dairy product for brains, clabber being sour milk, ultimately from an Irish Gaelic term for “mud.” The Dictionary of American Regional English has a good history of clabberhead. In...
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