lose the dressing room
v.— «The Irishman’s placidness was also perceived as a handicap in a job which requires infectious animation and this was confirmed by a player who said Brady had “lost the dressing room and when that goes, everything goes.”» —“Can Macari be Kellys’ hero?” by Glenn Gibbons Observer (U.K.) Oct. 10, 1993. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
After hearing our conversation about how dictionaries decide on a preferred pronunciation, and specifically about how to pronounce aioli, Vern from San Diego, California, wrote to say that a friend once made fun of him for pronouncing grimace with a...