- blast
- blast n blight, nip (see under BLAST vb)Analogous words: destruction (see corresponding verb at DESTROY): extermination, extirpation, wiping out (see corresponding verbs at EXTERMINATE): ruin, wreck (see RUIN vb)blast vb Blast, blight, nip mean as verbs, to ruin or to injure severely, suddenly, or surprisingly and as nouns, the effect of such ruin or injury.Blast which basically implies a violent onrush (as of wind) carries the implication of something pernicious that comes with sweeping force to destroy or demolish or to bring with it complete frustration{
I'll cross it, though it blast me— Shak.
}{O fairest flower, no sooner blown but blasted— Milton
}{the thunder crackled again. It is terrifying in the tropics, that sound. . . . You expect to be annihilated, blasted, burned to a crisp— McFee
}{our shelter from the stormy blast— Watts
}{the East bowed low before the blast— Arnold
}Blight primarily implies a withering and killing of plant tissue by some natural agency (as disease, pests, or adverse weather){dahlias blighted by an unseasonable frost
}{late blight of potatoes
}Similarly in extended use the term implies a destructive altering (as of a plan, a hope, or a life) by some external but relevant agency{a secret marriage . . . was a blight on his life— George Eliot
}{when the true scholar gets thoroughly to work, his logic is remorseless, his art is implacable, and his sense of humor is blighted— Henry Adams
}{a Peloponnesian or a European war lays its blight on whole peoples— Montague
}{The Moonstone[/i] is very near to Bleak House. The theft of a diamond has some of the same blighting effect on the lives about it as the suit in Chancery— T. S. Eliot
}Nip may imply a squeezing, a pinching, or more specifically, a cutting off between two edges, surfaces, or points; in extended use, it implies the acting of something comparable (as a killing frost or a bitter wind) that has power to damage, to check, or to distress{so have I seen some tender slip saved with care from winter's nip— Milton
}{the wind that blows between the worlds, it nipped him to the bone— Kipling
}{most of the flowers had been nipped by a heavy frost
}In the idiomatic phrase "to nip in the bud" nip harks back to the implication of cutting off and suggests a terminating or destroying of something before it has fully developed or matured{the plans for an uprising were nipped in the bud
}{nip a scandal in the bud
}
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
