secondhanded
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Forms: form: second-handed
Etymology: From second + handed.
Senses: examples: text: The clerk studied them. "You could get secondhanded ones for half price," he told Aunt Julina kindly.
ref: 1949, Mattie Virginia Harris, Weddin' Trimmin's, page 58:
text: If the article to which the label or brand is to be attached is secondhanded, the brand or label shall consist of the following: "This mattress (or other article of bedding) is secondhanded and has been sterilized."
ref: 1965, California Legislature Senate Fact Finding Committee on Business and Commerce, Report to the Legislature - Volumes 1-2, page 198:
text: "Secondhanded goods has chips," said the cobbler stoutly. "That is why they are secondhanded goods.
ref: 1987, Walter Dumaux Edmonds, Rome Haul, →ISBN, page 170:
text: We wore hand-me-downs, hand-me-down again and spruced it up to look good. Didn't look secondhanded or nothing when we finished adding the touch to it.
ref: 2012, L.See, All Of Ya'll Aren't From The North, →ISBN:
glosses: Secondhand.
Previously owned or used.
examples: text: You know, they had these secondhanded stores. Dad went to get me a pair of knee pants, but they'd been here too long!
ref: 1976, Eliot Wigginton, I wish I could give my son a wild raccoon, →ISBN, page 358:
text: There were furniture stores, but so many of the secondhanded stores carried furniture.
ref: 1996, Elizabeth Kytle, Home on the Canal, →ISBN, page 257:
text: I had a nice little half-iron bed painted with some kind of golden bronze paint, and a white dresser and a white chair. Babe bought them at a secondhanded store.
ref: 2004, Elizabeth Kytle, Willie Mae, →ISBN, page 75:
glosses: Secondhand.
Dealing in used goods.
examples: text: We "speak of the things that we have seen," and not as one who offers secondhanded reports.
ref: 1855, Horatio Gates Jameson, A Treatise on epidemic cholera, page 198:
text: We believe that Peter, James, and John actually did see holy angels—did behold Meses and Elias, and see Jesus transfigured, upon secondhanded testimonies given on the subject.
ref: 1961, Journal of Discourses - Volume 7, page 36:
text: Religion thus enters upon a new phase, a stage wherein it gradually becomes secondhanded; always does a medicine man, a shaman, or a priest intervene between the religionist and the object of worship.
ref: 2008, Urantia Foundation, The Urantia Book, →ISBN, page 986:
text: I worked strategically to keep myself posted with what I may term a "secondhanded" learning approach. My desperate hunger and thirst for educational nourishment from my pals was intensified.
ref: 2010, Chinazom B. C. Iwuaba, Shaped by Struggles, →ISBN, page 68:
glosses: Secondhand.
Indirect.
examples: text: The common error in most architectural schools is that basic design is taught at an abstract level using contemporary artists as examples to go by. This secondhanded process usually produces little Mondrians, Bauers, Gabos, Moores or, if the faculty member has enough to offer, little duplications of himself.
ref: 1951, Student Publications, The School of Design NC State College - Volumes 1-2, page li:
text: “A grand scale is impersonal, and my thing, as you call it, is real and right here, right now, not some secondhanded satisfaction lording it over the flies."
ref: 2014, Warren R. B. Dixon, The Copenhagen Interpretation, →ISBN:
text: Other Federalist essayists urged the citizens of North carolina to cultivate an attachment to the national government "as necessary to our general happiness and as the best security against oppression,” while portraying John Adams as the leading figure in the American impulse toward liberty in 1776 and Jefferson as “only a secondhanded varnished Deist."
ref: 2015, Lisle A. Rose, Prologue to Democracy: The Federalists in the South 1789--1800, →ISBN:
glosses: Ersatz.