Chapter Sleave to Slubber-Degullion of S by Brewer's Phrase & Fable

pin my faith to your sleeve,” meaning, “I shall not slavishly believe or follow you.” The allusion is to the practice of knights, in days of chivalry, pinning to their sleeve some token given them by their ladylove. This token was a pledge that he would do or die.

Sleeve of Care (See Sleave .)

Sleeve of Hildobrand (The), from which he shook thunder and lightning.

Sleeveless Errand A fruitless errand. It should be written sleaveless, as it comes from sleave, ravelled thread, or the raw-edge of silk. In Troilus and Cressida, Thersi'tës the railer calls Patroclus an “idle immaterial skein of sleive silk” (v. 1).

Sleight of Hand is artifice by the hand. (Icelandic, slædgh, German, schlich, cunning or trick.)

“And still the less they understand,
The more they admire his sleight of hand.”
Butler: Hudibras, pt. ii. c. 3

Sleipnir (2 syl.). Odin's grey horse, which had eight legs, and could carry his master over sea as well as land. (Scandinavian mythology.)

Slender A country lout, a booby in love with Anne Page, but of too faint a heart to win so fair a lady. (Shakespeare: Merry Wives of Windsor.)

Sleuth-Hound A blood-hound which follows the sleuth or track of an animal. (Slot, the track of a deer, is the Anglo-Saxon sloeting, Icelandic, sloth, trail; Dutch, sloot.)

“There is a law also among the Borderers in time of peace, that whoso denieth entrance or sute of a sleuth-hound in pursuit made after fellons and stolen goods, shall be holden as accessarie unto the theft.”- Holinshed: Description of Scotland, p. 14.

Slewed Intoxicated When a vessel changes her tack, she staggers and gradually heels over. A drunken man moves like a ship changing her angle of sailing. (Probably from the Icelandic, snua, turn.).

“Mr. Hornby was just a bit slewed by the liquor he'd taken.”- W. C. Russell: A Strange Voyage, chap. xii. p. 25.

Slick (Sam). A Yankee clock-maker and pedlar, wonderfully 'cute, a keen observer, and with plenty of “soft sawder.” Judge Haliburton wrote the two series called Sam Slick, or the Clock-maker.

Slick Off To finish a thing there and then without stopping; to make a clean sweep of a job in hand. Judge Haliburton's Sam Slick popularised the word. (German, schlicht, sleek, polished, hence clean; Icelandic, slike, sleek.) We say, “To do a thing clean off” as well as “slick off.”

Sliding Scale A schedule of payment which slides up and down as the article to which it refers becomes dearer or cheaper. In government duty it varies as the amount taxed varies.

Slip Many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. Everything is uncertain till you possess it. (See Ancaeos .)

“Multa cadunt inter calicem supremaque labra.” Horace.

   To give one the slip. To steal off unperceived; to elude pursuit. A sea-phrase. In fastening a cable to a buoy, the home end is slipped through the hawse- pipe. To give the slip is to cut away the cable, so as to avoid the noise of weighing anchor.

Slippers The Turks wear yellow slippers; the Armenians, red; and the Jews, blue.

Slipshod, applied to literature, means a loose, careless style of composition; no more fit for the public eye than a man with his shoes down at heels.

Slipslop A ricochet word meaning wishy-washy. (Anglo-Saxon, slip-an, to melt, which makes slopen in the past participle.)