monkey parade

English

Alternative forms

• monkeys' parade

Noun

monkey parade (plural monkey parades)

1. (British, dated slang) Synonym of monkey run
   • 1911, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, chapter 3, in The New Machiavelli, London: John Lane; The Bodley Head […], →OCLC, book the first (The Making of a Man), page 66:

     These twilight parades of young people […] —unkindly critics, blind to the inner meanings of things, call them, I believe, Monkeys' Parades—the shop apprentices, the young work girls, the boy clerks and so forth, stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their first-earned money upon collars and ties […] and come valiantly into the vague transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk up and down, to eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends.

   • 1918 [1915], Thomas Burke, Nights in London‎^[1], New York: Henry Holt and Company, page 76:

     […] On Clapham Common, the monkeys' parade is South Side; and the game is started by strolling from “The Plough” to Nightingale Lane. As the boys pass the likely girls they glance, and, if not rebuffed, offer wide smiles.

Further reading

• Jonathon Green (2024) “monkey parade n.”, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang