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1876. Broadside Ballad [quoted in C. G. Leland's Captain Jonas]. We carried away the royal yards, and the stuns'le boom was gone. Says the skipper, 'they may go or stand, I'm darned if I don't crack on.
To crack up, verbal phr. (colloquial).—To praise; eulogize. A superlative is to crack up to the nines. Fr., faire l'article, (commercial travellers') and faire son boniment or son petit boniment (cheap jacks' and showmen's).
1843. Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit. Ch. . . . We must be cracked up, said Mr. Chollop, darkly.
1856. Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays, p. 139. Then don't object to my cracking up the old school house, Rugby.
1878. Jas. Payn, By Proxy, ch. i. 'We find them cracking up the country they belong to, no matter how absurd may be the boast.'
The crack, or all the crack, phr. (general).—The go (q v.); 'the thing'; the 'kick'; the general craze of the moment.
In a crack, phr. (colloquial).—Instantaneously; in the twinkling of an eye. For synonyms, see Bedpost.
1725. Ramsay, Gentle Shepherd, Act i. I trow, when that she saw, within a crack, She came with a right thieveless errand back.
1763. Foote, Mayor of Garrett, Act i. Nic Goose, the taylor, from Putney, they say, will be here in a crack.
1819. Byron, Don Juan, ch. i., st. 135. 'They're on the stair just now, and in a crack will all be here.'
1842. Punch, vol. III., p. 136. In a crack the youth and maiden To a flowery bank did come.
Cracked or Cracked-Up, ppl. adj.
phr. (colloquial).—1. Ruined;
'bust up'; 'gone to smash' or to
'pot.' For synonyms, see Dead
broke.
1851. H. Mayhew, Lon. Lab. and Lon. Poor, vol. I., p. 2 [also pp, 24, 47]. If a Catholic coster,—there's only a very few of them—is cracked up (penniless) he's often started again, and the others have a notion that it's through some chapel fund. Ibid, p. 22. 'If we're cracked up, that is, if we're forced to go into the Union.'
1870. Britannia, June. 'Speculation in 1870.' Of these there only remain now 122 companies, with a capital of a hundred and eighty millions, the rest having one and all cracked up, as the Americans would say.
2. (common).—Crazy. For synonyms, see Apartments and Tile Loose.
1872. Daily Telegraph, 3 Sept. 'Police Court Report.' Mr. Bushby: Is her head affected? The Prisoner: Am I cracked? Of course—in the nut. You'll be to-morrow.
3. (common).—Deflowered. Also Cracked in the Ring.
Cracker, subs. (common).—Anything approaching perfection. Used in both a good and bad sense; e.g., a rattling pace, a large sum of money, a bad fall, an enormous lie, a dandy (male or female) of the first magnitude, and so forth. [Cf., Crack, subs.; senses 3 and 7, adj., and verb, sense 1.]
1861. Whyte Melville, Good for Nothing; ch. vi. 'I remember . . . Belphegor's year. What a cracker I stood to win on him and the Rejected!'
1863. C. Reade, Hard Cash, I., 28. You know the University was in a manner beaten, and he took the blame. He never cried; that was a cracker of those fellows.
1869. Daily News, Nov. 8. 'Leader.' Now he's gone a cracker over head and ears.
1871. Daily News, Nov. 1. 'Prince of Wales' Visit to Scarborough.' The shooting party, mounting their forest ponies, came up the straight a cracker, Lord Carrington finishing a good first.
