blue ruin

Definitions

1. 1

   Low-end gin, usually home-made.

   • ‘Till you're full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin’
   • ‘tell us who the devil ye all are, and what business ye have here, rigged off like the foul fiends, and swilling the snug blue ruin stowed away for the winter by my honest shipmate, Will Wimble the undertaker!’
   • ‘As soon as this "sentiment" had been duly drunk, and Mr. Bagshot had dried his tears and applied himself to his favourite drink,--which, by the way, was "blue ruin,"--the work of division took place.’
2. 2

   Complete and utter ruin, desolation.

   • "It's blue ruin." He laughed for the third time. I notice that people always laugh when they prophesy blue ruin.
   • For a nation to wait in a market of heavily reduced prices for the still lower prices of blue ruin, even if it could wait, would be economic suicide...
   • But, Sir, hon. members of the government, led by that old knight of blue ruin, have done something infinitely worse than cry blue ruin.

The neighborhood