Chapter Black Standard to Blaze of B by Brewer's Phrase & Fable

angle of the castle, about twenty feet from the top, and containing this inscription: “Cormac Mac Carthy fortis me fieri fecit, A.D. 1446.” Blarney is near Cork.

Blase (pronounce blah-zay ). Surfeited with pleasure. A man blasé is one who has had full swing to all the pleasures of life, and has no longer any appetite for any of them. A worn out debauchée (French, blaser, to exhaust with enjoyment).

Blasphemous Balfour Sir James Balfour, the Scottish judge, was so called because of his apostasy. He died 1583.

Blast In full blast. In the extreme. In America will be heard such a sentence as this: “When she came to the meeting in her yellow hat and feathers, wasn't she in full blast?” A metaphor from the blast furnace in full operation.

Blast To strike by lightning; to make to wither. The “blasted oak.” This is the sense in which the word is used as an exclamation.

“If it [the [ghost] assume my noble father's person,
I'll cross it, though it blast me.”
Shakespeare: Hamlet, i. 1.

Blatant Beast (The ). “A dreadful fiend of gods and men, ydrad,” type of “Common Rumour” or “Slander.” He has 100 tongues and a sting; with his tongues he speaks things “most shameful, most unrighteous, most untrue;” and with his sting “steeps them in poison.” Sir Calidore muzzled the monster, and drew him with a chain to Faërie Land. After a time the beast broke his chain and regained his liberty. (Saxon, blæton, to bellow.) (Spenser: Faërie Queene, books v. vi.)

Blayney's Bloodhounds The old 89th Foot; so called because of their unerring certainty, and untiring perseverance in hunting down the Irish rebels in 1798, when the corps was commanded by Lord Blaney.
   This regiment is now called “the Second Battalion of the Princess Victoria's Irish Fusiliers.” The first battalion is the old 87th Foot.

Blaze A white mark in the forehead of a horse. (Icelandic, blesi, a white star on the forehead of a horse; German, blasz, pale.)
    A star is a sort of white diamond in the forehead. A blaze is an elongated star or dash of white.
   To blaze a path. To notch trees as a clue. Trees so notched are called in America “blazed trees,” and the white wood shown by the notch is called “a blaze.” (See above.)

“Guided by the blazed trees ... they came to the spot.”- Goulding: The Young Marooners, 118.

“They buried him where he lay, a blazed tree marking his last resting-place.”- Adventures in Mashonaland, p. 158.