Lingo-Lessons: Pear-shaped

I’m learning that many of our “Aussie lingo-lessons” are actually “Brit lingo-lessons”. But we’re learning them here, so I’ll continue to attribute them to Oz.

So for me, “pear-shaped” means that something is shaped like a pear.

Here, it is used when things have gone wrong, or not quite the way you planned. As in “The date was going really well, but then his ex-girlfriend showed up and things went a bit pear-shaped.” Or “The Tigers just keep narrowly loosing – this season has just gone all pear-shaped for them.”

I forget which natural disaster it was recently – the floods, the earthquakes, the cyclones, the bush fires – but for one of them, I heard a news reporter state “Things have gone all pear-shaped in (wherever), with the body count continuing to rise.” I’m obviously not that comfortable with Aus-speak, yet, because that totally didn’t work for me - it just seemed to trivialize the whole disaster.