Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A staff or stick formerly used in some way about a bed, and frequently serving as a weapon, in which sense the word most commonly occurs. Specifically—
- noun [Used in the colloquial phrase in the twinkling of a bed-staff, in which, when bedstaff became obsolete, bedpost was substituted, depriving the phrase of its literal force in modern use.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun “A wooden pin stuck anciently on the sides of the bedstead, to hold the clothes from slipping on either side.”
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun obsolete A wooden
pin stuck on the sides of abedstead , to prevent thebedclothes from slipping on either side.
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Alas, his whole estate and life depended on his hatchet; by his hatchet he earned many a fair penny of the best woodmongers or log-merchants among whom he went a-jobbing; for want of his hatchet he was like to starve; and had death but met with him six days after without a hatchet, the grim fiend would have mowed him down in the twinkling of a bedstaff.
Five books of the lives, heroic deeds and sayings of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel 2002
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Alas, his whole estate and life depended on his hatchet; by his hatchet he earned many a fair penny of the best woodmongers or log-merchants among whom he went a-jobbing; for want of his hatchet he was like to starve; and had death but met with him six days after without a hatchet, the grim fiend would have mowed him down in the twinkling of a bedstaff.
Five books of the lives, heroic deeds and sayings of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel 2002
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And at that I told him, not seeing how I could keep it back, the matter of my former affidavit and of the bedstaff in the dispensing-room, and said that a house where such things happened was no place for me.
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There is one very obscure part in this statement, namely, the reference to the former affidavit and the matter of the bedstaff.
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When I was in another service I remember to have spoken to my fellow-servants about the matter of the bedstaff, but I am sure
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I did what you did not do -- what you are not doing even now; I put two and two together in the twinkling of a bedstaff.
The Grafters Francis Lynde 1893
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See how we trifle! but one can't pass one's youth too amusingly for one must grow old, and that in England; two most serious circumstances, either of which makes people gray in the twinkling of a bedstaff; for know you there is not a country upon earth where there are so many old fools and so few young ones.
The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford — Volume 1 Horace Walpole 1757
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Alas, his whole estate and life depended on his hatchet; by his hatchet he earned many a fair penny of the best woodmongers or log-merchants among whom he went a-jobbing; for want of his hatchet he was like to starve; and had death but met with him six days after without a hatchet, the grim fiend would have mowed him down in the twinkling of a bedstaff.
Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 4 Fran��ois Rabelais 1518
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"Marry, she can pluck a chick, and roll pastry, and use a bedstaff, and scour a floor, and sew, and the like.
The White Rose of Langley A Story of the Olden Time Emily Sarah Holt 1864
reesetee commented on the word bedstaff
One of the four standards that support a bedstead or the canopy over a bedstead, or (obsolete usage) "a wooden pin stuck anciently on the sides of the bedstead, to hold the clothes from slipping on either side."
April 4, 2008