blue-bottle
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: blue-bottles
Senses: examples: text: To-morrow there is a party of purple at the “blue” Miss Berry’s. Shall I go? um!—I don’t much affect your blue-bottles;—but one ought to be civil.
ref: 1813, Lord G. G. Byron, edited by Rowland E. Prothero, The Works Of Lord Byron Letters And Journals Vol II, page 358:
text: What is the tane but a waefu’ bunch o’ cauldrife professors and ministers, that sate bien and warm when the persecuted remnant were warstling wi’ hunger, and cauld, and fear of death, and danger of fire and sword, upon wet brae-sides, peat-haggs, and flow-mosses, and that now creep out of their holes, like blue-bottles in a blink of sunshine, to take the pu’pits and places of better folk—of them that witnessed, and testified, and fought, and endured pit, prison-house, and transportation beyond seas—A bonny bike there’s o’ them!
ref: 1818 July 25, Jedediah Cleishbotham [pseudonym; Walter Scott], chapter XI, in Tales of My Landlord, Second Series, […] (The Heart of Mid-Lothian), volume I, Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne and Co.] for Archibald Constable and Company, →OCLC, pages 311–312:
text: There appears to be a growing disposition on the part of the literary and dramatic blue-bottles of this city to get up a national drama and to manufacture a new race of actors.
ref: 1846 February 22, “Letter from Spranger Barry, Esq.”, in Sunday Dispatch (New York), page 2, Column 6:
text: It's a precious dark set of offices, and in the room where I sit, there's a high fender, and an iron safe, and some cards about ships that are going to sail, and an almanack, and some desks and stools, and an inkbottle, and some books, and some boxes, and a lot of cobwebs, and in one of 'em, just over my head, a shrivelled-up blue-bottle that looks as if it had hung there ever so long.
ref: 1846 October 1 – 1848 April 1, Charles Dickens, “In Which Some More First Appearances Are Made on the Stage of These Adventures”, in Dombey and Son, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1848, →OCLC, page 27:
text: I went to a gentleman's piper recently, to get the piob-reachd of Cill-a-Chriosd for this work, and received a specimen, which is a much better imitation of the inexpressive notes, eternally repeated, that would be made by three unfortunate bumbees or blue-bottles imprisoned in a tin snuffbox […]
ref: 1862, Donald Campbell, A Treatise on the Language, Poetry, and Music of the Highland Clans:
text: Drowsy with dawn, barely asail, Buzzes the blue-bottle over the shale, Scared from the pool by the leaping trout; And the brood of turtlings clamber out On the log by their oozy house.
ref: 1912, William Vaughn Moody, The poems and plays of William Vaughn Moody:
text: Lily shook her head violently and sneezed a large blue-bottle fly from where that insect had perched itself on the tip of her nose.
ref: 1924, Hugh Wiley, The Prowler, page 88:
text: I listened to little oral essays on jelly blubbers, men-o'-war, sea slugs, blue-bottles, giant crabs, and even prawns.
ref: 1943 March 1, ABC Weekly, page 22:
text: There was nothing else in the room at all except a dead blue-bottle on the window-sill.
ref: 1950, C[live] S[taples] Lewis, “Lucy Looks into a Wardrobe”, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe […], London: Geoffrey Bles, →OCLC:
glosses: Alternative form of bluebottle.