scare-line

scare-line (plural scare-lines)

1. Alternative form of scare line
   • 1895, The Locomotive - Volumes 16-17, page 188:

     But it presently appears that a black cat was the only creature killed outright, and that the scare-line was merely a playful allusion to the extraordinary vitality that fable says all pussies have.

   • 1896, The National Druggist - Volume 26, page 189:

     Unfortunately this isn't a scare-line, but a frozen truth, and it behooves every druggist to provide himself with ice-economizers.

   • 1928, Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism, →ISBN, page 419:

     I knew for instance, sitting at my desk, just how many extra papers I could sell with a scare-line on a police scandal.

   • 1962, Sunder Lal Hora, T. V. R. Pillay, Handbook on fish culture in the Indo-Pacific region:

     Fry are collected from sandy regions with gear that consist of a piece of cloth 3 m x 1.2 m and 3 m of rope as a scare-line, with palmyra leaves tied to it at short intervals.

   • 1981, Robert Earle Johannes, Words of the Lagoon, →ISBN:

     At Ant Atoll near Ponape in the eastern Caroline Islands the palm frond scare-line is used to catch schools of kawa kawa (Euthynnus affinis) which occasionally enter the lagoon and swim along the edge in shallow water.

   • 1981, O. H. Oren, Aquaculture of Grey Mullets, →ISBN, page 330:

     The net is kept open by two men, while the fry are driven into it using a 30-60 m long scare-line made up of rope and palm leaves.

   • 2008, George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776, →ISBN:

     Did it make any sense, he asked, concluding with administration's favorite scare-line (first used by Rice), “for the world to wait. . . for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud?”

• carelines, larcenies, reliances