monkey parade

• monkeys' parade

monkey parade (plural monkey parades)

1. (Britain, 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, 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.

• Jonathon Green (2023), “monkey parade n.”, in Green's Dictionary of Slang