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Examples

  • The delivery is often uninflected, and sometimes perverse: the "hell-kite" Macbeth is described as caressingly as if he were a turtle dove.

    One Night in November; Macbeth; Novecento Susannah Clapp 2010

  • Actors call it the Chicken Scene because Macduff weeps in it about "all my pretty chickens and their dam," meaning his kids and wife, being murdered "at one fell swoop" on orders of that chickenyard-raiding "hell-kite" Macbeth.

    No Great Magic Fritz Leiber 1951

  • Another is this: -- Had he offered 10,000 rupees (£1000 sterling) for the head of Nena Sahib, he would have got it in ten days, besides inflicting misery on the hell-kite.

    The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg Thomas De Quincey 1822

  • It is really wonderful and most interesting to pursue the successive steps of this monster, and to notice the absolute certainty with which the silent hieroglyphics of the case betray to us the whole process and movements of the bloody drama, not less surely and fully than if we had been ourselves hidden in Marr's shop, or had looked down from the heavens of mercy upon this hell-kite, that knew not what mercy meant.

    Note Book of an English Opium-Eater Thomas De Quincey 1822

  • "Oh, A saw 'em plain enough; same ill-lookin 'six that y'r hell-kite laws hatch on a bad frontier!

    The Freebooters of the Wilderness 1903

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