The Collaborative International Dictionary
Barmecide \Bar"me*cide\, n. [A prince of the Barmecide family,
who, as related in the ``Arabian Nights' Tales'', pretended
to set before the hungry Shacabac food, on which the latter
pretended to feast.]
One who proffers some illusory advantage or benefit. Also
used as an adj.: Barmecidal. ``A Barmecide feast.''
--Dickens.
Usage examples of "barmecide".
He had to struggle along in constant money difficulties, hustled by his solicitors, morally bullied by the Barmecide, and physically bullied by Boxer, while they two were fighting their own way and getting well trained.
With the best will in the world, I say, it can be but a Barmecide feast.
Schacabac lived with the Barmecide many years, and never again knew what it was to be hungry.
Jewels Androclus and the Lion Horatius at the Bridge Julius Caesar The Sword of Damocles Damon and Pythias A Laconic Answer The Ungrateful Guest Alexander and Bucephalus Diogenes the Wise Man The Brave Three Hundred Socrates and his House The King and his Hawk Doctor Goldsmith The Kingdoms The Barmecide Feast The Endless Tale The Blind Men and the Elephant Maximilian and the Goose Boy The Inchcape Rock Whittington and his Cat Casabianca Antonio Canova Picciola Mignon CONCERNING THESE STORIES.
And so Schacabac lived with the Barmecide many years, and never again knew what it was to be hungry.
It was a curious sort of a feast, I reflected, in appearance indeed, an entertainment of the Barmecide stamp, for there was absolutely nothing to eat.
A recent guest was gracious enough to inform me that I had provided a regular Barmecide feast.
That, recoiling from oblivion, we can recreate in a fractional moment whole years gone past, years yet to come -- striving to lengthen our existence, stretching out our apperception beyond the phantom boundaries, overdrawing upon a Barmecide deposit of minutes, staking fresh claims upon a mirage?
The scenes depicted on the emunctory field, showing our ancient duns and raths and cromlechs and grianauns and seats of learning and maledictive stones, are as wonderfully beautiful and the pigments as delicate as when the Sligo illuminators gave free rein to their artistic fantasy long long ago in the time of the Barmecides.
Your lighter boxes of family papers went up-stairs into a Barmecide room, that always had a great dining-table in it and never had a dinner, and where, even in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty, the first letters written to you by your old love, or by your little children, were but newly released from the horror of being ogled through the windows, by the heads exposed on Temple Bar with an insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of Abyssinia or Ashantee.
That, recoiling from oblivion, we can recreate in a fractional moment whole years gone past, years yet to come--striving to lengthen our existence, stretching out our apperception beyond the phantom boundaries, overdrawing upon a Barmecide deposit of minutes, staking fresh claims upon a mirage?