Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Informal An extremely conservative or old-fashioned person.
- noun An old sluggish fish.
- noun An old turtle with a growth of algae on its back.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A large and old fish, as a bass: so called by anglers, in allusion to the growth of seaweed, etc., which may be found on its back.
- noun In United States politics, one attached to antiquated notions; an extreme conservative.
- noun In the southern United States, during the civil war, one who hid himself to avoid conscription.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun Political Slang, U.S. A veteran partisan; one who is so conservative in opinion that he may be likened to a stone or old tree covered with moss.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
turtle that, because of its age, has a growth ofalgae on its back. - noun by extension A very
conservative orreactionary person, especially one withold-fashioned views.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun an extremely old-fashioned conservative
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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A: because mossback is a traitorous cancervatard who would rather see the country fail than a democrat succed.
Think Progress » San Francisco Commonwealth Club postpones O’Keefe event. 2010
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The mossback is the man who has either misread the signs of the times, or who has not possessed the speed demanded in the two-minute class.
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The mossback is the man who tries to use the old methods under the new conditions; he is not "up" with the present times, but "back" with the old times.
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Indeed the boys so loved this work and were so proud of their skill, that when an unusually vicious old "mossback" was encountered, each strove to be the first catch and master him.
The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier Edgar Beecher Bronson
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District, Province of British Columbia, there lived a "mossback" who was as happy as the 22nd day of June is long in each year.
Skookum Chuck Fables Bits of History, Through the Microscope
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He was followed to the very verge of the wood, and then the exhausted "mossback" left him to return to the house.
A Tramp's Notebook Morley Roberts 1899
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"mossback," or a "garrulous dotard," and with singular irreverence they took delight in twitting him upon his senility and in pestering him with divers new-fangled notions altogether distasteful, not to say shocking, to a gentleman of his years.
The Holy Cross and Other Tales Eugene Field 1872
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Meanwhile, the Bush family's Supreme Court appointees -- along with that mossback relic of the Reagan era, Antonin Scalia -- habitually thumb their noses at the very notion of an independent and impartial judiciary.
Michael Winship: The Bush Legacy Strikes Out American Justice Michael Winship 2011
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Q: why does mossback insist on giving “aid and comfort” to “the enemy” by not wanting them to be tried for their crimes?
Think Progress » San Francisco Commonwealth Club postpones O’Keefe event. 2010
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Call me a mossback but I still believe in supply and demand.
The Fear Factor, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009
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