shoo-flyphr.n.

1867 Chicago Republican 24 July 8/1 [Baseball] players invariably say ‘Shoo-fly’, when they make a miss.

1889 J. S. Farmer Americanisms 484/2 Shoo! fly! don't bother me! An exclamation of impatience is shoo and fly are both common ejaculations in country districts when driving wandering fowls or cattle from gardens etc., to legitimate pastures... The full phrase is now familiarly colloquial.

1919 H. L. Mencken Amer. Lang. 311 Shoo-fly afflicted the American people for at least two years, and ‘I don't think’ and aber nit quite as long.

1879 Glendale (Montana) Atlantis 28 Dec. 4/4 A Dutchman drove rapidly along Main Street, with a new shoo-fly attached to his wagon, making forty flips a second and striking back and forth with the vigor of a hewgag.

1896 J. Ralph Dixie iv. 126 In many cases they order great pavilions like giant nests built around their trees, and..they call them ‘shoo-flies’, a name utterly without significance in that connection.

1877 Daily Graphic May 1 A ‘shoofly’ is the term applied by a policeman to another officer who is detailed to watch him.

1903 H. Hapgood Autobiogr. Thief (1904) xii. 265 I was gathered in to make a reputation for those two shoo-flies.

1931 Detective Fiction Weekly 27 June 790/2 A force of ‘shoo flies’—roundsmen in civilian clothes—were sent out regularly from headquarters to sweep into a precinct and look over the men.

1952 Sun (Baltimore) 10 May (B ed.) 2/2 Evans said he spent eighteen months on ‘shoo-fly duty’—on the chief inspector's squad that worked out of headquarters keeping other policemen in line and honest.

1980 ‘E. McBain’ Ghosts vii. 127 ‘You want a beer?.. Officially I'm still on duty, but fuck it.’ ‘Shooflies are heavy around the holidays.’

1887 Chicago Tribune 27 Nov. 16/7 (advt.) Shoo fly hobby horse, 75 c.

1895 Montgomery Ward Catal. Spring & Summer 563/2 Shoo-fly rockers... Shoo-fly 12 × 40 inches; painted and dappled.

1947 Chicago Tribune 30 Dec. 15/1 The Teaneck, N.J., library has installed something called a shoo-fly, an enclosed rocker in which little Elmer..can rock his head off.

1905 Los Angeles Express 18 Mar. 8 A freight train had left the track. The work of building a shoofly around the train was at once begun.

1905 N.Y. Evening Post 29 July 1 The Southern Pacific Company's ‘shoo-fly’ around the tracks now submerged will be completed in a few days.

1907 Dial. Notes 3 249 Shoo-fly, n., suburban railway train.

1929 Macon (Georgia) Tel. 2 July There comes into Macon every morning on the Eatonton Shoo Fly a very old white woman named Mary Loring.

1937 Highway Mag. Jan. 9/1 Beginning in the spring of 1936 the railroad built two temporary ‘shoo fly’ tracks about 75 feet west of the existing tracks.

1961 Washington Post 17 Feb. b4 (caption) Workers on top of a construction train adjust the overhead wires for a bypass—or ‘Shoo-fly’ in railroad parlance—of the main railroad tracks serving the area to the south of Washington.

1908 Inland Printer XL. 551/2 Where the delivery construction uses shoo-fly fingers to give the forward edge of the sheet a lift as it passes out onto the delivery, the proper setting of these fingers or shoo-flies, as they are usually called, is of prime importance.

1927 E. St. John Pract. Hints Presswork ii. 10 When farthest open the shoofly fingers should be five-sixteenth of an inch away from the drawsheet.

1962 Theory & Pract. of Presswork (U.S. Govt. Printing Office) (rev. ed.) xxviii. 170 The shooflies, stripper fingers, and tape delivery have all been eliminated on the newer chain-delivery Miehle presses.

1931 R. S. McKim One Hundred & One Patchwork Patterns 84/1 As shoo fly is one of the simplest of old-fashioned patchworks, both to cut and to piece, it would be a good choice for one on which a little girl could learn sewing.

1977 E. Y. Wood Amer. Patchwork Quilts 15 Four-patch designs are here, such as the classic ‘Shoo Fly’.

1935 Esquire Dec. 200/1 ‘Shoo-fly pie’—a brown-and-white crumb-cake, faintly spiced.

1971 Daily Colonist (Victoria, Brit. Columbia) 9 July 3/4 The pair is helping their father sell shoo-fly Pie and other Pennsylvania items.

1979 United States 1980–1 (Penguin Travel Guides) 48 Vermont cheese and maple syrup,..and shoofly pie and pretzels in the Pennsylvania Dutch country are all specialties of their respective regions.

1902 Cycl. Amer. Hort.: R–Z 1664/1 Shoo-fly plant. A name proposed by one seedsman for Physalis.]

1949 L. H. Bailey Man. Cultivated Plants (rev. ed.) 871 N[icandra] Physalodes..Apple-of-Peru, Shoo-fly Plant.

1973 Times 20 Oct. 16/7 Left-over seeds thrown out for the birds from special mixtures..are responsible for appearances of casual weeds like..the Apple of Peru, or ‘shoo-fly plant’, and its pale blue flowers that are succeeded by swollen, green berry-enclosing lanterns.