kaiser blade

English

Noun

kaiser blade (plural kaiser blades)

1. Alternative form of Kaiser blade (“sling blade”)
   • 1996, Billy Bob Thornton, Sling Blade, Miramax Books:

     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.

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

     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.

   • 2003, StoryQuarterly:

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

     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.

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

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

     "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 […]

   • 2010, William Ferris, Give My Poor Heart Ease, Enhanced Ebook: Voices of the Mississippi Blues, Univ of North Carolina Press, →ISBN, page 232:

     ... with a kaiser blade. Fifty cents a day.

   • 2020, Calvin Cherry, STOKER: Evolution of a Vampire, Page Publishing Inc, →ISBN:

     Looking closer, he realized it was a kaiser blade that he assumed was left by a groundskeeper, possibly even the Slovak himself, used to thin out some of the overgrowth. The half-moon-like cutting edge was razor sharp on one side, dull on [the other].