This one is always trotted out whenever the writer wishes to describe an area that could do with a lick of paint/ is a bit backward. And, yes, I’ve used it myself.
On a cliché level, it’s not the most obnoxious one out there, but it’s a shoddy simile. How can you compare a place to an action that nobody in human history has actually performed*?
*Unless I got the wrong end of the stick, and Back To The Future was a documentary.
Getting lost in European cities: Venice, Turin, Seville & Bologna
The problems with the Flybe website
Filming Locations | Father Ted, Fawlty Towers, Life of Brian, Cheers
Bad Taste Tours | Jack The Ripper, JFK, Hitler & Hurricane Katrina
Adelaide restaurant | The Grange at the Hilton | Cheong Liew – Migration of Ideas
Review of Mini-Europe, Brussels, Belgium
Kiribati, Rio, Berlin, New York, Madeira & Sydney travel at New Year
Melbourne Cricket Ground information | Test matches, Olympics & Billy Graham
Travel tips: How to get the best spot by the pool
Dancing holidays | Buenos Aires, Andalucia, Ubud, Istanbul, Havana
Or, for anywhere in the Middle East that has a donkey standing beside a tree, “a landscape unchanged since biblical times”.
I think I’ve avoided this specific wording, though I’m sure I’ve written something vaguely similar about areas of former communist Europe.