airy-fairyadj.

1830 Ld. Tennyson Poems 3 Airy, fairy Lilian, Flitting, fairy Lilian, When I ask her if she love me, Claps her tiny hands above me.]

1837 C. V. Incledon Taunus viii. 262 Entranced I sought the lightly trodden path, or musroom [sic] circle, the airy fairy ring.

1853 C. Brontë Villette II. xxv. 223 Between the candles, and before the glass, appeared something dressing itself—an airy, fairy thing—small, slight, white.

1871 T. Hardy Desperate Remedies III. Epil. 272 A young lithe woman in an airy fairy dress.

1907 F. Niecks Programme Mus. iii. iv. 174 There are pieces and snatches of airy fairy music; a charming Intermezzo..and the lovely Notturno.

1927 R. Halliburton Glorious Adventure xvi. 272 The agitated water cast phosphorescent reflections all about us, and the whole Grotto danced and glittered... We splashed and shouted and reveled in this airy fairy world.

1957 J. Morris Market of Seleukia iii. xxviii. 253 A vast technical school, built in the Festival of Britain manner, all airy-fairy colonnades.

1998 C. Raymo Skeptics & True Believers x. 182 I imagined it [sc. the soul] to be a kind of airy, fairy ghost-self, much like the visible self, but immaterial.

1857 M. A. Power Foresters I. xv. 215 She had for some time been, on the faith of a few of these indications, building an airy fairy cloud-castle.

1888 Reno (Nevada) Evening Gaz. 13 Feb. The following airy-fairy tale [of an impractical road-building scheme] appears in the Carson Appeal of the 12th inst.

1920 D. H. Lawrence Lost Girl iv. 55 He had already an airy-fairy kind of knowledge of the whole affair.

1956 P. Herbst in Ess. Conceptual Anal. vii. 153 We must take care not to speak of facts as if they were material things; similarly we must not speak of them as if they were airy-fairy nothings.

1963 R. F. Harrod Brit. Econ. iii. 39 The Trades Union Congress..would tend to be opposed to airy-fairy schemes that might endanger solid work-a-day interests.

1993 S. Gray Gray's Anat. (1994) 19 Give up on this magical thinking and this airy-fairy Disneyland kind of let's pretend.

2002 Dominion Post (Wellington, N.Z.) (Nexis) 23 Nov. (Features) 1 Zero waste councils..are not being altruistic, misguidedly wasting ratepayers' money in an airy-fairy attempt to save the planet.