"blowing out"

[Lynne Murphy]

OK, this isn't related to those uses of 'blow out' but... one thing that
often "gets" me in BrE is that 'blow out' is the equivalent of AmE 'blow
off' --i.e. to not show up when you said you would...

Lynne of the One-Track (AmE/BrE) Mind

Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language
Arts B135
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

--On Friday, March 28, 2008 9:46 am -0400 George Thompson
<george.thompson at NYU.EDU> wrote:

> This passage seems to have thee difference senses of "blowing out", but
> what these senses are isn't at all clear.
>
>         The Boston Artillery will attend the "blowing out"** ball at
> Manchester, N. H., March 19 (Monday.)  On the next evening, 20th, there
> will be a grand ball at Lowell, on the occasion of the "blowing out."
> Pushee's band will be on hand as usual.  [footnote]  ** "Blowing out"
> means when the girls do not work by candle-light.  [quoting a Boston
> newspaper]          We have known "blowing out" balls in the interior of
> New Jersey before now, where the boys and girls, after blowing out the
> candles, continued "blowing out" until day-light.  We thought the custom
> obsolete in New England, however.         New York Daily Globe, March 12,
> 1849, p. 2, col. 4
>
># 3, what the boys and girls do in Jersey, seems to indicate a practice
># like bundling?  In any event, there's a sexual association.  The
># connection with "blowing out" is perhaps based on the sense of regaling
># one's self, treating one's self to a good time?
>
> The Editor of the Globe I take it was put in mind of this sense by an
> apparent implication of the paragraph from the Boston paper.  But I'm
> sure that the young men of the Boston Artillery were all most virtuous
> chaps, and don't believe that the balls in Manchester and Lowell were of
> the ballum rankum sort.  (If you don't know what a ballum rankum is, ask
> Jonathan, Jonathon, or Captain Grose.)   The expression perhaps has
> reference to a militia exercise, perhaps practice firing of artillery?
> And treating that as a major event by having a dance afterwards?
>
> The definition of "blowing out" offered by the Boston paper doesn't help
> at all.  The definition seems to me to connect to a labor demand.  The
> girls working at the Lowell factories were pretty obstropulous at this
> time, and were perhaps refusing to work by artificial light?
>
> I don't see these senses in the OED, DARE, or the A-Man's dictionary, nor
> the O-Man's.
>
> GAT, who's baffled.
>
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

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