be born yesterday

English

Etymology

be + born + yesterday

Verb

be born yesterday (past tense only)

  1. (informal) To be new, naive, innocent, inexperienced, or easily deceived.
    I was not born yesterday, you know. I have done this before!
    • 1840, Henry Cockton, chapter 60, in The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox, the Ventriloquist, page 508:
      "Do you think," he added, with an ironical grin, "that you'll go for to gammon me into that air! I'm hinnocent, I know, but I wasn't born yesterday exactly."
    • 1915, William MacLeod Raine, chapter 6, in Steve Yeager:
      "Say, do I look like I was born yesterday? See any green in my eye, Cactus Center?"
    • 1998, Gwyn Hyman Rubio, Icy Sparks‎, page 155:
      "Compared to me, you were born yesterday."
    • 2005, Howard Zinn and Donaldo Pereira Macedo, Howard Zinn on Democratic Education‎, page 69:
      If you don't know important things about history, then it's as if you were born yesterday.

Usage notes

  • Mostly used in the negative to indicate that one is not as naive as had been implied, but sometimes in an affirmative form, as in most of the quotations above.

Synonyms

Translations

The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables, removing any numbers. Numbers do not necessarily match those in definitions. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout#Translations.
This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.