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Birdlime   Listen
noun
Birdlime  n.  An extremely adhesive viscid substance, usually made of the middle bark of the holly, by boiling, fermenting, and cleansing it. When a twig is smeared with this substance it will hold small birds which may light upon it. Hence: Anything which insnares. "Not birdlime or Idean pitch produce A more tenacious mass of clammy juice." Note: Birdlime is also made from mistletoe, elder, etc.



verb
Birdlime  v. t.  To smear with birdlime; to catch with birdlime; to insnare. "When the heart is thus birdlimed, then it cleaves to everything it meets with."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Birdlime" Quotes from Famous Books



... the next generation, battling these identical popular errors in the pages of his Pseudodoxia Epidemica. In the like manner, Gerard's botanical evidence seems to have been of no use in persuading the public that mistletoe was not generated out of birdlime dropped by thrushes into the boughs of trees, or that its berries were not desperately poisonous. To observe and state the truth is not enough. The ears of those to whom it is proclaimed must be ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse

... Polly's nuptials. They drove the eternal forty odd miles to Geelong, each stick and stone of which was fast becoming known to Mahony; a journey that remained equally tiresome whether the red earth rose as a thick red dust, or whether as now it had turned to a mud like birdlime in which the wheels sank almost to the axles. Arrived at Geelong they put up at an hotel, where Purdy awaited them. Purdy had tramped down from Tarrangower, blanket on back, and stood in need of a new rig-out from head to foot. Otherwise his persistent ill-luck ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... linseed oil, rendered drying by boiling it with 2 ozs. of sugar of lead and 3 ozs. of litharge for every pint of oil till they are dissolved, which may be in half an hour. Then put 1 lb. of birdlime and half a pint of the drying oil into an iron or copper vessel, whose capacity should equal about a gallon, and let it boil very gently over a slow charcoal fire, till the birdlime ceases to crackle, which will be in about half or three-quarters of an hour; ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young

... assistance of a handkerchief and a little hot water, he opened the eyes of the barbarian. So we manage matters! A pretty church, that old British church, which could not work miracles—quite as helpless as the modern one. The fools! was birdlime so scarce a thing amongst them?—and were the properties of warm water so unknown to them, that they could not close a pair of eyes ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow

... once with my master, And "Warlock", a sluggard, but honest and true, And "Tancred", as honest as "Warlock", but faster, And "Blacklock", and "Birdlime", and "Molly Carew"?— ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon


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