Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Shoddy material, as for the construction of standardized housing.
- adj. Made of shoddy material; cheaply built.
- adj. Marked by a mediocre uniformity of appearance or style: ticky-tacky rows of look-alike houses.
- adj. Tawdry; tacky.
Wiktionary
- n. US Cheap, low-quality building material, especially as that used to make conventional suburban housing of a uniform design
- adj. US Made of this material
Etymologies
- Reduplication of tacky2. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“The overall effect is to put a bureaucratic stranglehold on attempts of protest organizers to give expression to the 1st amendment, so tying them up in ticky-tacky provisions, fines and possible jail time that only a masochist would organize a protest with a message that the city fathers don't want to hear.”
“The monstrous and incredibly ugly development of ticky-tacky on Jocotepec´s east side reminds me of another place from my youth.”
“As you may know I have a fondness for the ticky-tacky known as Reality Television, I so love the term because it's so not anyone's reality I've ever known.”
The Huffington Post: Holly Cara Price: Rubbernecking's Year in Television 2011
“Horns, pedal steel, folk guitars and ticky-tacky drum-machine beats flesh out the arrangements under the vocal harmonies.”
The Wall Street Journal: Cultural, Musical Roots Sprout Great Performances
“Pabian has done exactly that with his own unfashionable, scary book, which is in no way a Big One ticky-tacky book.”
The Huffington Post: Daniel Krotz: Leatherstone by David Pabian: A Review
“At the endpoint all our stuff, including political institutions, is "made out of ticky-tacky and it all looks just the same.”
The Huffington Post: Daniel Krotz: Leatherstone by David Pabian: A Review
“And now Mars Bar, the last Mohican, will fall for another ticky-tacky glass box.”
“Pete Seeger had a huge success of his own with the song, which ridiculed the harmless citizens of Daly City, California, and gave us the word ticky-tacky.”
“It was a new housing development, and nearly every house looked “ticky-tacky” like every other house.”
“Back in the ancient days when I was a youth, we all wore gray flannel suits to school, spent most of the day learning to duck and cover, and then went home afterwards to our little houses made of ticky-tacky.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘ticky-tacky’.
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Choi inspired
Fun words my friend loves and others I introduced to him.
Namby-pamby, Niminy piminy, Nitpick, Nit-wit, Piggly-wiggly, Ping-pong, Pitter-patter, Raggle-taggle, Riff-raff, zoot suit, zig-zag, wishy-washy and 73 more...
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GRE
partisan, erudite, insular, cosmopolitan, imperturbable, facetious, recapitulate, repudiate, inscrutable, baseness, bailiwick, freeloader and 318 more...
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Words Words and more Words
ruckus, bustle, ominous, odious, abominable, atrocious, appal, abysmal, dismal, calamity, debacle, fiasco and 231 more...
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Tack
Sharp as in tack
tackle, attack, tack, gear, zigzag, taque, tick-tack, tick-tack-toe, ticktacktoe, hardtack, tacky, ticky-tacky and 7 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for ticky-tacky.
nancyschimmel In the first forty or so examples, Pete Seeger, who made the song "Little Boxes" popular, is mentioned twice, but Malvina Reynolds, who wrote the song and originated the term, is not mentioned at all. Daly City is mentioned, and she was passing through Daly City when she got the idea for the song. Jul 2, 2012