英和和英

名詞

blue light (countable and uncountable, plural blue lights)

1. (historical, chiefly nautical) A mixture of chemicals (including nitre, sulfur and antimony) used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for night-time signaling and general illumination. [from 18th c.]
   • 1828, Samuel Frederick Gray, The Operative Chemist, page 499:

     Blue lights, or blue fire, is a preparation in which zinc and sulphur, or sulphur alone, are used. The particular colour is communicated by the zinc and sulphur.

   • 1874, Marcus Clarke, For the Term of his Natural Life, Penguin, published 2009, page 57:

     The blue-light, which, at its first flashing over the ocean, had made the very stars pale their lustre, and lighted up with ghastly radiance the enormous vault of heaven, was now only a point […] .

   • 2015, Mark K. Ragan, quoting Robert Fleming, Proceedings of a Naval Court of Inquiry into the Sinking of the Housatonic, 1864, quoted in Confederate Saboteurs, Texas A&M University Press, →ISBN, page 98:

     When the 'Canandaigua' got astern, and was lying athwart, of the 'Housatonic,' about four ship lengths off, while I was in the fore rigging, I saw a blue light on the water just ahead of the 'Canandaigua,' and on the starboard quarter of the 'Housatonic.'

2. (US, colloquial, now historical) A New England federalist, who opposed the Anglo-American War of 1812; (loosely), a federalist. [from 19th c.]
   • 1862, John Williamson Palmer, Stonewall Jackson's Way :

     The “Blue-Light Elder” knows ’em well; / Says he, “That’s Banks — he’s fond of shell; / Lord save his soul! We’ll give him” — well, / that’s “Stonewall Jackson’s Way.”

3. (countable) A flashing light, usually fitted to an emergency vehicle. [from 20th c.]
   • 2019 October, Roger Ford, “Power failure highlights specification confusion”, in Modern Railways, page 26:

     Blue-light escorts were provided where possible to get engineers to the stranded GTR trains to reset the software.

4. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see blue,‎ light.