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Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
clothes-line

also clothesline, 1830, from clothes + line (n.). As a kind of high tackle in U.S. football (the effect is similar to running into a taut clothesline) attested by 1970; as a verb in this sense by 1959.

Wikipedia
Clothes-Line

Clothes-Line was an early BBC television programme broadcast live in six parts between 30 September and 3 December 1937. It is notable for being the first television programme dedicated to the history of fashion. It was produced by Mary Adams, and co-presented by the fashion historian James Laver and Pearl "Polly" Binder.

Usage examples of "clothes-line".

Every prisoner will bear me out in the assertion that there was probably not a root as large as a bit of clothes-line in all the ground covered by the prisons, that eluded the faithfully eager search of freezing men for fuel.

It was these souls I thought of, Canadian as I am by birth, but half-Gypsy by blood, as I listened to Liszt's three final Hungarian Rhapsodies, all in minor keys, and all speaking the melancholy defiance of a medieval people, living in a modern world, in which their inveterate criminally expresses itself in robbing clothes-lines and face-to-face cheating of gadje who want their fortunes told by a people who seem to have the old wisdom they themselves have lost in their complex world of gadjo ingenuity, where the cheats and rogueries are institutionalized.