What it means
A very British bit of phrasecraft with two neat lanes. If something's going spare, there's an extra one up for grabs, like a ticket, chair, or wristband nobody's using. If someone's going spare, they're getting agitated, fed up, or starting to lose their rag. Same wording, different mood, and the situation usually does the heavy lifting.
Usage examples
"Got a spare festival ticket going spare if you fancy it. I’m going spare though, been looking for my keys for an hour and they were in my pocket."
"I am going spare in the queue at the post office on Tuesday afternoon, four counters open in theory and only one serving in practice, with the pensioner ahead of me opening a Royal Mail special delivery envelope to check the contents in real time."
"There is a spare ticket going spare for the Saturday matinée of the West End musical, my cousin pulled out at the last minute because of a clash with the wedding of her boss, so the front row stalls is going to a friend with very short notice."
"We've got one wristband going spare if your mate's still coming."
"I was going spare trying to get through to the bank, just forty minutes of hold music and spiritual decay."
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Where it comes from
Going spare in the modern British sense of becoming frantic emerged in the nineteen-fifties working-class English of industrial Manchester and Liverpool, where workers spoke of a part going spare when it became surplus to the factory line and was thrown to the scrap heap. The metaphorical transfer to a person who is rendered surplus to the moment, frustrated and useless, was a small leap, and the verbal sense spread through the Coronation Street television series of the nineteen-sixties to the national consciousness. The parallel literal sense of an unused ticket or seat going spare has remained current alongside the emotional reading throughout the same period.
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