Meaning of dog that caught the car | Babel Free

Definitions

A person who has unexpectedly attained an aspirational goal and is now unsure what to do with it.

colloquial, especially, idiomatic

Examples

“So I went out, and I was telling the President about what a tough time being Governor was. I felt like the dog that caught the car; I really wasn't equipped to be governor... When I got ready to leave, I realized that I had bored a guy who had to make the decision to drop the bomb, telling him what a tough job being the governor of Arkansas was.”

“Mr Reynolds, you might be interested, who seems to be one of the six who run the Labor Party in Western Australia, says this about Mr Kobelke: 'As I have said before Mr Kobelke and the government are like a dog that caught the car—they didn't know what to do about it when they caught it.'"”

“It captures the face of a dog that's caught the car.”

“Since its use on the very day after the referendum, it has become a cliché to say that Brexiters are like ‘the dog that caught the car’, achieving something they had never expected and then did not know what to do with. That was obvious from the very first hours after the 2016 vote, when Johnson and Gove appeared on TV looking both shocked and scared.”

“In this sense, the GOP are the proverbial dog that caught the car. For decades, they have been working their voters into frothing hysteria over the need to protect the unborn from abortionists and their Democratic protectors. But what this means in practice... is far less appealing. From a public health standpoint, the draft decision leaked on Monday is an abomination. From a political standpoint, it imperils midterm victories that were for all intents and purposes inevitable.”

CEFR level