chain lightning

chain lightning

English

Noun

chain lightning (uncountable)

  1. (chiefly US, Canada) Lightning in angular, zigzag, or forked flashes.
    smart as chain lightning (sharp-witted)
    faster than a cat lapping chain lightning
    • 1872, Mark Twain, chapter 74, in Roughing It‎[3], page 534:
      […] over a mile square of [the desert floor] was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It looked like a colossal railroad map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky.
    • 1971, Robert Graves, “Dreaming Children”, in Poems, 1970-1972‎[4], published 1973, page 14:
      Wild wind sweeps from the North, flattening the bushes / As with a crash of doom chain-lightning falls.
    • 1985, W. P. Kinsella, “Vows”, in The Moccasin Telegraph and Other Stories‎[5], page 129:
      The birch trees are bare and white as chain lightning against the sky.
  2. (US, especially attributively) (A person or thing that is) very fast and dynamic.
    Hettie was chain lightning with a six-shooter.
    • 1921, Mary Roberts Rinehart, chapter 7, in The Out Trail‎[6], page 227:
      It was too late in the day; I would find that compared to a trout a bonefish was chain lightning; I wouldn’t see a bonefish; I would not get one if I did.
    • 1943, Erle Stanley Gardner, chapter 6, in The Case of the Smoking Chimney‎[7], page 12:
      […] he had access to figures which might not have meant much to the ordinary plodder, but to Stanwood’s chain-lightning brain they meant a lot.
    • 1986, Joseph R. Rosenberger, chapter 4, in The Heroin Connection‎[8], page 55:
      With one chain-lightning motion, he kneed Acey viciously in the belly, and, with his right hand, chopped him across the side of the neck.
  3. (chiefly US, slang, obsolete) A high-proof whiskey or other spirit that has not been allowed to mature; a poor-quality or adulterated spirit. [mid-19th to early 20th century][1] [2]
    Synonyms: hooch, moonshine, red-eye, rotgut, squirrel whiskey
    • 1860, Thomas Chandler Haliburton, “The Old and the New Year”, in The Season-Ticket, page 306:
      Give me a meetin where nobody cares a snap of a finger for nobody in particular, and has no interest but in a good feed, a good song, a good smoke, and chain-lightning to top it all off with.
    • 1874, Rebecca Sophia Clarke, chapter 9, in Miss Thistledown‎[9], page 130:
      Grandma said no more, but brought a bottle from the closet, and began to rub the spots with chain lightning. To Prudy’s joy and surprise, the dress was soon as clean as ever.
    • 1901, Elizabeth Charlotte Briggs, chapter 29, in The Staff Work of the Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1901‎[10], page 331:
      The only person who would buy this “chain lightning” was the Kaffir, but the Kaffir was forbidden by law to purchase liquor of any sort.
    • 1985, John Hawkes, Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade‎[11], page 147:
      To jeopardize the whole trip and the lives of the men in his care was an outrage and I told him so. He only laughed and said that chain lightning, as he called it, was the best stuff in the world.

See also

References

  1. ^ Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Historical Slang, New York: Macmillan, 1961, p. 137.[1]
  2. ^ Ernest L. Abel, Dictionary of Alcohol Use and Abuse, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985, p. 35.[2]
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