stem-winder
noun US
1 informal An entertaining and rousing speech: a stem-winder of a speech...
- Giuliani used some of the most overt forms in order to present a classic political stem-winder.
- His was no Gettysburg Address, to be sure, but compared to some of the stem-winders of history, Mr. Clinton's speech, delivered at a rapid pace, flew by.
- To say it wasn't a stem-winder is simply to say that it wasn't like Barack Obama's speech a few nights back, or Clinton's, or even Clark's or Sharpton's for that matter.
2 dated A watch wound by turning a knob on the end of a stem.
Origin
sense 1 from the notion of ‘winding up’ or causing a lively reaction from those listening.