Dictionary

one-way ticket to Palookaville en · NOUN

Etymology

From a line in the 1954 film On the Waterfront.

Meanings

1. (idiomatic) Something that results in failure or obscurity, with no chance at redemption; a dead end.
   • 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. 2007, Douglas Booth, The Field: Truth and Fiction in Sport History, page 128:
   • 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. 2017, Rhodri Morgan, Rhodri: A Political Life in Wales and Westminster, page 114:
   • [… 1954, Budd Schulberg, On the Waterfront, spoken by Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando):
   • […] History is […] 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. 2012, James Howard Kunstler, Too Much Magic:

Forms

wikipedia: On the Waterfront