lunch-pail mentality
n.— «He has what I call a lunch-pail mentality.…Tommy comes to work every day, and outworked people in practice. He called all our signals in the secondary, and was our quarterback on defense. Tommy is not only a good football player, but a wonderful young man. He is the consummate student-athlete, with a grade-point average above 4.0.» —“Irvin is Vikings’ defensive quarterback” by Cliff Mehrtens Charlotte Observer (North Carolina) Dec. 25, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Some college students are using the word loyalty as a synonym for monogamy. Are the meanings of these words now shifting? Plus, a biologist discovers a new species of bat, then names it after a poet he admires. Also, warm memories of how a childhood...
A North Carolina listener is curious about his meemaw’s use of a term meaning “food” that he heard as either jasmine or jassum. A dialectal term with various spellings that include jassum, jasum, and jazm can mean “gravy,” “sauce,” or even “juice...