deathlock
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: deathlocks
Etymology: From death + lock.
Senses: topics: hobbies
lifestyle
sports
glosses: A certain wrestling move that traps the opponent's leg.
examples: text: When close to the whale, in the very deathlock of the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and offhandedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer.
ref: 1851, Herman Melville, Moby Dick: Or the Whale:
text: In a word, luck — that's the word — shortly threw in Paul's way the great action of his life : the most extraordinary of all naval engagements ; the unparalleled deathlock with the Serapis.
ref: 1855, Israel Potter: his fifty years of exile, page 125:
text: The wasp, who had apparently been playing possum, suddenly became very much alive, and in a flash spider and wasp were clasped in a deathlock.
ref: 1894, St. Nicholas - Volume 21, Part 2, page 658:
text: The fighting was the most violent of the war, and along the whole line, plunging forward after intense artillery preparation, the Americans and French met the Germans in the deathlock of hand-to-hand fighting.
ref: 1919, History's Greatest War: A Pictorial Narrative:
glosses: Synonym of death grip.
A close struggle between two opponents in which each tries to kill the other.
examples: text: The struggle of Europe, coming, as well as past, is a final struggle of opposite principles; it is the deathlock between self-government and slavery.
ref: 1852, The United States Democratic Review - Volume 30, page 411:
text: He wrote about us as if we were all Prometheuses in noble deathlock with the forces of repression in a battle for the soul of man.
ref: 1983, Kent Forrester, Jerry A. Herndon, The Freshman Reader: Essays and Casebook, →ISBN, page 193:
text: In our time a great struggle, which may very well be a deathlock struggle, is going on in the world between freedom on the one hand and the totalitarianism of communism on the other.
ref: 1993, Gordon Barlow Dodds, Varieties of hope: an anthology of Oregon prose, page 253:
text: The traditional medical establishment, led by the conservative American Medical Association (AMA), has long engaged the chiropractic community in what has been reported (by many disgruntled Chiropractors) as a "heavily funded," "deathlock-type of struggle" focused on "government lobbies, legal actions and media manipulations" to attempt to discredit and disavow chiropractic legitimacy.
ref: 1996, Hal Alpiar, Doctor Shopping: How to Choose the Right Doctor for You and Your Family, →ISBN:
glosses: Synonym of death grip.
A struggle to destroy a force or principle to which one is opposed, or between two mutually incompatible principles.
examples: text: "Don't believe the fellow who tells you to hold your shotgun in a deathlock-tight grip — so that it won't kick you.
ref: 1936, Field and Stream - Volume 41, page 43:
text: Slocum eased the hammer back down as Harding twitched one last time and his eyes remained fixed in a deathlock.
ref: 1988, Jake Logan, Sixgun law, →ISBN, page 144:
text: The animal fell backward, its talons in a deathlock on the sill of the empty window frame.
ref: 2010, S.M. Stirling, The Sky People, →ISBN:
text: Elmer Blaney Harris eloquently captures the feel of the Bowery in 1906: Bands, orchestras, pianos, at war with gramophones, hand-organs, calliopes; overhead, a roar of wheels in a deathlock with shrieks and screams; whistles, gongs, rifles all busy, the smell of candy, popcorn, meats, beer, tobacco, blended with the odor of the crowd redolent now and ten of patchouli; a streaming river of people arched over by electric signs -- this is the Bowery at Coney Island.
ref: 2014, Louis J. Parascandola, John Parascandola, A Coney Island Reader: Through Dizzy Gates of Illusion, →ISBN, page 19:
glosses: Synonym of death grip.
Rigor mortis, or a physical grip that is similarly inflexible and unyielding.
examples: text: But so, it seems, is the problem. The furor instigated by the war in Vietnam was projected into fraternity bull sessions and Ballantine coffee breaks. The trouble was that nobody, not even Rusk or Zinn, had a deathlock on accurate information.
ref: 1968, Arbutus, page 56:
text: The colonial links, broken by the spate of independence movements of the recent past, have been once again reestablished-albeit on a firmer footing-with the First World enjoying a deathlock on the fragile economies of the Third World.
ref: 1989, Manabendra Nath Roy, The Radical Humanist - Volume 53, page 21:
text: Efforts are also being directed against the international financial institutions that are holding underdeveloped countries in the deathlock debt grip.
ref: 1996, WID Working Papers, page xxiv:
text: But just now, Howard was seriously considering relaxing his deathlock on the leadership.
ref: 2009, Peter Hartcher, To the Bitter End, →ISBN:
text: But even as we troubled souls feel the deathlock of disagreements profound and if we can avoid sheer cynicism, it seems almost impossible to retain clarity about fundamental principles and diagnostic politics.
ref: 2014, Joe R. Jones, A Lover's Quarrel: A Theologian and His Beloved Church, →ISBN:
glosses: Synonym of death grip.
A similarly tight hold on something nonphysical.
Derived terms: sense: wrestling move
word: Indian deathlock
sense: wrestling move
word: scorpion deathlock