highflier

plural highfliers · alternative high flier · alternative high-flier · alternative high flyer · alternative high-flyer · alternative highflyer

1. A person who or a type of aircraft that flies at high elevations.
2. figurativelyAn ambitious person, especially one who takes risks or has an extravagant lifestyle.

   under the appellations of Tory, Jacobite, highflier, and other cant words

   c. 1711, Jonathan Swift, Some Remarks Upon A Pamphlet, Entitl'd, A Letter To The Seven Lords Of The Committee, Appointed To Examine Gregg

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   A beautiful woman juggled expensive shopping bags while taking a call; friends gathered clinking glasses in celebration; a young man coyly slurped noodles; a gaggle of suited highfliers shook hands over a boardroom with views across the city. Everything screamed: “We are no longer in recession! We are a beating heart of London’s future!”

   2014 September 25, Hugo Macdonald, “Could those utopian hoardings for new developments get any more nauseating?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

3. fishingA vertical pole used in commercial fishing to locate the beginning and end of a long fishing line.
4. businessA glamorous stock that potentially offers high returns to investors.

   Virtually all highfliers that I have seen over all these years of trading have crumbled at some point.

   2003, Larry Williams, The Right Stock at the Right Time, page 93

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   I like Canadian stocks and have done quite well investing in them, but you are typically better off buying a stock on the Toronto Stock Exchange, Canada's leading exchange, than some of the highfliers in Vancouver.

   2008, George Angell, Small Stocks for Big Profits

5. A swingboat.

   […] and high-flyer boat-swings, full of half-drunken men and half-mad, screaming girls, swing up to perilous heights, and all but whirl over, as if to shoot out the whole of their frantic cargoes!

   1871, The Contemporary Review, volume 18, page 392

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   A small copper-plate representation of Frost Fair […] Among the activities shown are Letterpress Printing, Copperplate Printing, a Sheep to be roasted, Ballad Singers, Swinging (in boat-shaped swings called the 'high Flyer'), playing at Skittles, […]

   1980, Journal of Meteorology, volume 5, page 9

6. UKobsoleteslangA writer of begging letters.
7. A type of phaeton carriage.

   The emotions of those who journeyed for the first time on a railway at a speed four times as great as that of the swiftest High-flier that ever devoured the road are forgotten by this generation.

   1919, Stanley J. Weyman, “VI. Field and Forge”, in The Great House