one-way ticket to Palookaville

English

Etymology

From a line in the 1954 film On the Waterfront.

Noun

one-way ticket to Palookaville (plural one-way tickets to Palookaville)

1. (idiomatic, originally US) Something that results in failure or obscurity, with no chance at redemption; a dead end.
   • 1954, Budd Schulberg, On the Waterfront, spoken by Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando):

     […] You remember that? "This ain't your night"! My night! I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors on the ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville! […]

   • 2007, Douglas Booth, The Field: Truth and Fiction in Sport History, page 128:

     Proper German gentlemen harbored a particular distaste for boxing and its two-fisted muscularity, considering it lower class and bestial, a one way ticket to Palookaville.

   • 2012, James Howard Kunstler, Too Much Magic:

     […] History is also not symmetrical; you don't necessarily go down in the same sequence backward. What we might get instead could be just a one-way ticket to Palookaville instead of getting to relive the sixteenth century.

   • 2017, Rhodri Morgan, Rhodri: A Political Life in Wales and Westminster, page 114:

     Well, my one-way ticket to palookaville turned out to be the chairmanship of the select Committee on public Administration. it had never been a particularly prestigious select Committee, but I was going to chair it and I could make of it what I wanted.