away-day girl

English

Etymology

From the name of cheap "away-day" tickets introduced by British Rail.

Noun

away-day girl (plural away-day girls)

1. (UK) A prostitute who travels to another city to pick up clients, returning home either the same or next day.
   • 1987, The Police Journal - Volumes 60-61, page 215:

     This provision has particular implications for prostitutes working in the Paddington area where most women are thought by the police to be 'away-day girls', who travel to London from the Midlands and Northern cities.

   • 1993, Nanette J. Davis, Prostitution, page 121:

     These women live in Wolverhampton, Southampton, or other major cities and go to London for the purpose of prostitution and return on the same or the next day. As our interviews with prostitutes show, the away-day girl is more appropriately part of the fictional presentation of street prostitution.

   • 2001, Robert R. Weidner, I Won't Do Manhattan:

     Unlike Matthews' (1990) opportunity-driven "away day girls" who desisted in the face of a crackdown in London, the subjects of this study were, as a group, highly motivated and unlikely to desist.

   • 2002, Jack Curtis, Point of Impact, page 53:

     Even the away-day girls get netted eventually.

   • 2012, Kathy Lette, Mad Cows, page 154:

     Hovering around the soggy sandwiches on this crisp June morning were the Kylie Minogue Sound-Alike Competition runner-up; the usual, baffled assortment of writers on promotional tours accompanied by twenty-something 'away day' girls exclaiming with vivacious insincerity the importance of 'the Vegetarian Personality' or 'Versailles; the View From Sweden'; and the actress Petronella de Winter in a slashed pink vinyl dress ingeniously welded back together with a blow torch and bits of bicycle chain — all the better to show off her recent nipple realignment.

   • 2018, Lorna Ryan, Reading the Prostitute:

     The 'exodus' of women from northern towns to London is a feature of women's magazine stories on prostitution and the reader may here make an association of 'Away Day girls'.