kaiser blade

plural kaiser blades

1. alternativeAlternative form of Kaiser blade (“sling blade”).

   A tool known in Mississippi and vicinity as a kaiser blade gained national attention in Billy Bob Thornton's 1996 movie Sling Blade. That movie was titled after the tool's better-known name.

   2000, Allan A. Metcalf, How We Talk: American Regional English Today, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, →ISBN, page 33

   5 more examples

   I picked up a kaiser blade that was a layin' there by the screen door, some folks calls it a sling blade, I call it a kaiser blade. It's just a long handle like a^([sic]) axe handle with a long blade on it that's shaped kind of like a banana. Sharp on one edge and dull on the other.

   1996, Billy Bob Thornton, Sling Blade, Miramax Books

   No one is expected to speak, so the grass falls audibly with the sound of a heavy drunken whisper. The man who does not have the jimmy blade is stuck with the kaiser blade. The kaiser is heavier, the handle more like an axe's than the ...

   2003, StoryQuarterly

   six days a week, starting on the highest ground and working their way downward foot by foot, cutting with saws and axes and kaiser blades—long-handled machetes—and then dynamiting and burning out the stumps.

   2003, Johnny Cash, Cash: The Autobiography, Harper Collins, →ISBN, page 16

   At the county work farm, the prisoners were put in striped uniforms and made to cut roadside grass with kaiser blades. If you wanted to go to the bathroom, you told the sarge, “Taking a leak here, Shot.” One day out in the fields, the Shot ...

   2004, Paul Hendrickson, Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy, Vintage

   "Something thin and strong." Hollis glared at him. "Hurry up," Connolly said. Hollis disappeared around the corner. In a few minutes, he returned with a kaiser blade, a curved blade about a foot long with a solid wooden handle […]

   2004, Joseph H. Hilley, Sober Justice, Riveroak Pub, →ISBN

plural Kaiser blades · alternative kaiser blade

1. USespecially MississippiSynonym of sling blade.

   What had been a trusty sluff job was now as onerous as swinging a Kaiser blade or shoveling out ditches. As soon as he'd hauled the buckets back to the cage truck it was time to go again.

   2013, Ron Rash, Nothing Gold Can Stay: Stories, Harper Collins, →ISBN

   3 more examples

   He let the Kaiser blade slip down into his palm. It felt good there, the well worn handle intimately comfortable in his calloused hand. His blood tricked down the haft and flowed across the slightly curved, upturned blade.

   1864, Brannon Hollingsworth, Prelude to Okolona, Four Fools Press, page 18

   On the flat the planting was done in narrow lanes cut through the dense brush, weeds, and vines with "Kaiser" blades (large ditch-bank blades or brush hooks). On the other two sites the entire planting area was cleared with Kaiser blades after the trees were removed.

   1937 (reprinted 1941), Southern Forest Experiment Station (New Orleans, La.), Occasional Paper - Southern Forest Experiment Station, page 3

   ... a shirt tail in a wind; and the guards ape-like body toppled backward and lay anesthetized and unconscious on the floor. The Choctaw raised his unchained right heel and hacked it down across the guards chest, striking like a Kaiser blade, ...

   2001, Jerry Lee Bustin, To Kill a Viper, Xlibris Corporation, →ISBN, page 258

   Synonyms: sling blade