buttonhole
verbEtymology Originally buttonhold (“a loop of string to hold a button down”), but changed by folk etymology by influence of hole, By surface analysis, button + hole.
1
Colloquial To detain (a person) in conversation against their will.
- He backed Mr. Lykins against an iron fence, buttonholed him, fastened him with his eye, like the ancient mariner, and proceeded to unfold his narrative as placidly and peacefully as if we were all stretched comfortably in a blossomy summer meadow instead of being persecuted by a wintry midnight tempest: […]1880, Mark Twain [pseudonym] (Samuel L[anghorne] Clemens), chapter XXVI, in A Tramp Abroad; […], Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company; London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC, page 265:
- He buttonholed people on the street and related details of his child’s miraculous progress without even prefacing his remarks with the hypocritical but polite: “I know everyone thinks their own child is smart but—”1936 June 30, Margaret Mitchell, chapter L, in Gone with the Wind, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, published June 1944, →OCLC, part V, page 890:
2 more examples
- Hiro and Chuck grab the closest thing they can find to a corner table. Hiro buttonholes a waiter and surreptitiously orders a pitcher of Pub Special, mixed half and half with nonalcoholic beer.1992, Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, New York: Bantam Books, →ISBN, page 295:
- Here they are, the brainless few we had been raised to pity and fear, the Stone Age oafs and the seething runts and the ominous, swaggering weightlifters, buttonholing kids like me out on Chancellor Avenue and telling us to keep our baseball bats at the ready in case we were called in the night to take to the streets [...]2004, Philip Roth, The Plot Against America:
2
Ambitransitive To cut one or more buttonholes (in).
3
To sew by buttonhole stitch.
5
Rare To apply a flowery formation in.
- What tree of more pulchritude and symmetricalness could you nominate for roadside, street and public park planting than the graceful linden? We should possess more of the spirit which predominates in this direction in the crowning gem of America’s constitutionality—the City of Washington, D. C. ‘‘Unter den Lindens’’ would not only be found in Germany, but in all the large cities of our grand and glorious United States. Washington has her Unter den Linden in the Massachussetts^([sic]) avenue. Her North and South Capital streets are buttonholed with the stately tulips, which are fit emblems to thus adorn the meridian of the United States.1871 December 17, Henry K. Staley, “Forestry and Apiculture”, in The American Bee Journal, volume 28, number 25, pages 781b of 779a–782b:
- Furze cut it himself after his dinner, with great care and concentrated solemnity, finding the loaf rather too new and the knife too blunt for the carving of slices of ideal thinness. The beastly things would buttonhole!1927, Warwick Deeping, Doomsday, page 77:
- Derived terms
- buttonholer