trashfire

From trash +‎ fire.

trashfire (plural trashfires)

1. Fire resulting from trash burning.
   • 1967, Flammable Fabrics Act Amendments of 1967: Hearings Before the Consumer Subcommittee of the Committee on Commerce, United States Senate, Ninetieth Congress, First Session, on S. 1003, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, page 117:

     Children have been burned by sparks from trashfires, open flames of stoves, unscreened fireplaces, contact with pilot lights of space heaters, or by sticking ' metal objects in wall sockets.

   • 1973, Laurence Lieberman, The Osprey Suicides: Poems, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Collier-Macmillan Publishers, page 59:

     Island Trashfires […] Adjacent to the garbage dump (an open sore that drains the Island's poisons around the clock), old convairs lift and lower / over trashfires and the bellies of pedigreed sharks—pampered, overfed, domesticated.

   • 1998, Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain:

     He wheeled the last barrowload of trash from the kitchen yard out to the trashfire and tipped it and stood back and watched the deep orange fire gasping in the dark chuffs of smoke that rose against the twilight sky. […] Along the limits of the city where the roads died in the desert in sand washes and garbage dumps, out to the white perimeters at midday where smoke from the trashfires burned along the horizon like the signature of vandal hordes come in off the inscrutable wastes beyond.

   • 2014, Brian Turner, My Life as a Foreign Country, Jonathan Cape, →ISBN:

     The air is tinged with the smell of diesel exhaust, trashfires, and excrement. […] The haze of trashfires drifted over in a noxious sweet perfume that partially obscured the houses, which emerged like a long row of broken skulls each morning.

   • 2016, David Cornwell, Like It Matters, Umuzi, →ISBN:

     Further and further into what, I suppose, was a state of being I thought befitted some guy whose fucking dad had died around a trashfire in some field ten blocks away.

2. (figurative) A dumpster fire; a disaster.
   • 2016 February 13, Randi Lee Harper, Medium (published in ART + marketing)‎:

     Putting out the Twitter trashfire / Tonight I’m drinking and talking about ways Twitter could be less of a shitheap.

   • 2017 December 6, Patricia Hernandez, Kotaku‎:

     Elex Is The Biggest Trashfire I've Played All Year, But I Still Love It / Elex is a terribly constructed video game full of glitches, lag, eye-sores, and confusing mechanics.

   • 2018, Darach Ó Séaghdha, “Multilingual Children”, in Craic Baby: Dispatches from a Rising Language, Apollo, →ISBN:

     ‘Sure, it’s always the wildest kids who have the strictest parents.’ ‘Those children must be so unhappy.’ At this moment I had a terrifying thought – what if they’re not unhappy? Or, more precisely, what if they’re no more unhappy than any other children growing up on this trashfire of a planet?

   • 2018 December 29, Ellen Scott, “The 27 best cats of 2018”, in Metro‎:

     Bongo cat has been edited to play all manner of instruments and songs. It brings happiness to all, even in the trashfire year that was 2018.

   • 2019 April 4, Cameron Colwell, Junkee‎:

     ‘Get Krack!n’ Is The Perfect Antidote To Trashfire Breakfast TV Like ‘Sunrise’

   • 2019 April 22, Sandra Simonds, “April”, in The New Yorker‎:

     Hello, sanity. Hello, trashfire century.

   • 2020, Melanie Greene, Roll Play (Roll of the Dice; book 6), →ISBN:

     Before the whole tweet trashfire happened.

   • 2021, Lisa Nakamura, Hanah Stiverson, Kyle Lindsey, Racist Zoombombing, Routledge:

     The Internet didn’t become a trashfire all of a sudden: it happened over a long period of time.

   • 2021 November 25, Natasha Lomas, “Europe offers tepid set of political ads transparency rules”, in TechCrunch‎:

     However the claimed ‘ban’ does not apply if “explicit consent” is obtained from the person whose sensitive data is to be exploited to better target them with propaganda — and online ‘consents’ to ad targeting are already a total trashfire of non-compliance in the region.

   • 2022, John F.D. Taff, editor, Dark Stars: New Tales of Darkest Horror, Nightfire, →ISBN:

     Wasn’t this trashfire of an anniversary why Ed, my unfaithful beast of a husband, had been ruing the day so?

   • 2022 May 5, Jef Rouner, Houston Press‎:

     Opinion: Rudz to Host Another Transphobic Comedy Trashfire