body blow

• body-blow

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

body blow (plural body blows)

1. A severely injurious or damaging physical strike or impact.
   • 2018 October 17, Drachinifel, 14:13 from the start, in Last Ride of the High Seas Fleet - Battle of Texel 1918‎, archived from the original on 4 August 2022:

     The fight is not all one-sided. Lion is taking a savage beating as the two flagships trade body blows almost independent of the furious carronade going on behind them.

   • 2021 May 5, Drachinifel, 30:41 from the start, in Battle of Samar - What if TF34 was there?‎, archived from the original on 8 August 2022:

     There are numerous near misses and various secondary-battery shells flying and setting small fires and causing shrapnel damage to both ships... but these are somewhat irrelevant compared to the body blows that they're dishing out to each other at the moment.

   1. (boxing) A hard punch struck to the torso.
      • 1896, Arthur Conan Doyle, chapter 11, in Rodney Stone:

        He led at Berks's head, as he came rushing in, and missed him, receiving a severe body blow in return.

2. (idiomatic, by extension) A serious setback; a traumatizing event which prevents or hinders continuation of an activity.
   • 1910, Stewart Edward White, chapter 43, in The Rules of the Game:

     "I can hardly exaggerate the body blow to the Service such a decision would give. Nobody will believe in it again."

   • 1955 September 5, “Medicine: Cutter Verdict”, in Time, retrieved 7 April 2014:

     The polio vaccination program took a body blow last spring when the disease developed in children injected with vaccine from the Cutter Laboratories of Berkeley, Calif.

   • 1982 December 11, Frances Russell, “Economic performance buoys Pawley’s position”, in The Vancouver Sun (The Weekend Sun), Vancouver, BC, page A6:

     And the government received a psychological body-blow with the crushing defeat of the Blakeney government in neighboring Saskatchewan.

   • 2009 March 21, Mark Mazzetti, “The Downside of Letting Robots Do the Bombing”, in New York Times, retrieved 7 April 2014:

     [D]rone strikes . . . have delivered body blows to Al Qaeda's leadership in the tribal areas of northern Pakistan without risking a single American soldier on the ground.

• kidney punch

• “body blow”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.