monkey parade

plural monkey parades · alternative monkeys' parade

1. UKdatedslangSynonym of monkey run.

   […

   1918 [1915], Thomas Burke, Nights in London, New York: Henry Holt and Company, page 76

   1 more example

   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.

   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

   Synonyms: monkey run