pickle-herring love

Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A pickled herring.
  • noun 2. A merry-andrew; a zany; a buffoon. Compare second quotation under pickled, 3.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun obsolete A herring preserved in brine; a pickled herring.
  • noun obsolete A merry-andrew; a buffoon.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun obsolete A herring preserved in brine; a pickled herring.
  • noun obsolete A Merry Andrew; a buffoon.

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

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Examples

  • How? soul of a pickle-herring, body of a spagirical tosspot, doublet of motley, and mantle of pilgrim, how art thou transmuted!

    Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 Various

  • Others are Mother Goose and nursery tales; -- others bad tragedies or pickle-herring farces; and others, like that of the landlady's daughter at the Star, sweet love-anthologies, and songs of the affections.

    Hyperion Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1844

  • Others are Mother Goose and nursery tales; — others bad tragedies or pickle-herring farces; and others, like that of the landlady's

    Hyperion 1839

  • 'Tis a gentle man here -- a plague o 'these pickle-herring!

    Twelfth Night; or What You Will 1601

  • Tweed: thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms: thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution: thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice: thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory: thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity: thou butcher, imbruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography: thou arch-heretic in pronunciation: thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis: thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences: thou squeaking dissonance of cadence: thou pimp of gender: thou Lion Herald to silly etymology: thou antipode of grammar: thou executioner of construction: thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded: thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax: thou scavenger of mood and tense: thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou _ignis fatuus_, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance: thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense: thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom: thou persecutor of syllabication: thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.

    The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. With a New Life of the Poet, and Notices, Critical and Biographical by Allan Cunningham Robert Burns 1777

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