malignant animosity toward what they called a biled shirt.
1872. Dublin Univ. Mag., Feb., p. 219. Every man arrays himself in 'store-clothes' and boiled shirts.
1888. New York World, 13 May. Is it possible that the Chicagoans never heard of white shirts before this spring? May be the street-railway presidents never saw a starched shirt (I must deplore the use of the word biled as applied to shirts) until this year.
Boiler, subs. (Winchester College).—1. A plain coffee-pot used for heating water. Called fourpenny and sixpenny boilers, not from their price, but from the quantity of milk they will hold: [Greek: to\ pan] boilers were large tin saucepan-like vessels in which water for hot bidets (q.v.) was heated.
2. See Pot boiler.
Boiler-Plated, adj. (American).—Imperturbable; stolid; stoical. [The simile is akin to that contained in expressions like iron-clad,copper-bottomed, etc., drawn mainly from marine phraseology.]
Boilers or Brompton Boilers, subs. (popular).—1. A name originally given to the new Kensington Museum and School of Art, in allusion to the peculiar form of the buildings, and the fact of their being mainly composed of, and covered with, sheet iron. This has been changed since the extensive alterations in the building, or rather pile of buildings, and the term boilers is now applied to the Bethnal Green Museum.—See Pepper-boxes.
1885. Daily News, July 9, p. 5, col. 1. The building is merely a fragment of the old 'Brompton boilers,' set up originally for the South Kensington Museum.
2. (Royal Military Academy.)—Boiled potatoes. Fried potatoes are called greasers.
Boiling or Biling. Whole boiling or biling, subs. phr. (common).—The whole lot; entire quantity. [A figurative usage, from a quantity boiled at one time.] Variants are the whole gridiron (q.v.) and all the shoot.
1835. Haliburton ('Sam Slick'), Clockmaker, 3 S., ch. xviii. The last mile, he said, tho' the shortest one of the whole bilin', took the longest [time] to do it by a jug full.
1837. Marryat, Dog Fiend, xiii. [He] may . . . whip the whole boiling of us off to the Ingees.
1852. Dickens, Bleak House, ch. lix., p. 496. 'And the whole bileing of people was mixed up in the same business, and no other.'
1874. E. L. Linton, Patricia Kemball, ch. xxii. 'He have Dora? No, not if he licked my foot for her, and I broke the whole boiling of them—as I will!'
Boil One's Lobster, verbal phr. (old).—To enter the army after having been in the church. [From lobster, a slang term for a soldier, the allusion being to the change in colour which lobsters undergo in the process of boiling, turning from a bluish black to red.] Cf., Black coat and Red coat.
Boke, subs. (American thieves').—The nose. [This may either be derived directly from beak, sense 3, or indirectly from boko (q.v.).] For synonyms, see Conk.
Bold as Brass, adv. phr. (popular).—Audaciously forward; presumptuous; without shame. The simile, or at least the general idea, seems to be an old
