backarapper
English edit
Alternative forms edit
Etymology edit
Properly, backrapper, from back + rapper. From the dialect of Warwickshire in the Midlands of England. Compare backrackets.
Noun edit
backarapper (plural backarappers)
- (West Midlands) A firework made from multiple firecrackers folded together so that they will explode one after the other.
- 1954, J[ohn] R[onald] R[euel] Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring[1], Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, published 2012, page 27:
- But there was also a generous distribution of squibs, crackers, backarappers, sparklers, torches, dwarf-candles, elf-fountains, goblin-barkers and thunder-claps.
- 1956, John Petty, Five fags a day: the last year of a scrap-picker, Secker & Warburg, page 60:
- He would sink like an express lift and leap like a deer: at times he was almost flat on his back and when the hammer cracked he often appeared to be standing on his nose: like a backarapper he fizzed up and down and […]
- 1966, Oswald Harcourt Davis, The master: a study of Arnold Bennett, page 162:
- It would have been so easy to remove these capricious intrusions of manner clashing with theme; so easy to afford quiet relief, as in the first half of the last chapter, instead of throwing in raillery like backarappers.
- For more quotations using this term, see Citations:backarapper.
References edit
- Glyphweb
- Wright, Joseph (1898) The English Dialect Dictionary[2], volume 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press, page 117