1789. Geo. Parker, Life’s Painter, p. 94. This is a fault, which many of good understanding may fall into, who, from giving way too much to the desire of telling anecdotes, adventures, and the like, habituate themselves by degrees to a mode of the hatchet-flinging extreme.
1821. P. Egan, Life in London, p. 217. There is nothing creeping or throwing the hatchet about this description.
1893. Emerson, Signor Lippo, ch. xx. We had to call her mother, and, if anyone stopped, she’d sling the hatchet to them, and tell them she was a poor lone widow left with five children.
2. (nautical).—To sulk.
Hatchet-faced, adj. (old colloquial: now recognised).—See quots. For synonyms, see Ugly-mug.
1690. B. E., Dict. Cant. Crew, s.v. Hatchet-fac’d, Hard favor’d, Homely.
1725. New Cant. Dict., s.v.
1785. Grose, Vulg. Tongue, s.v. Hatchet Face, a long thin face.
1865. Sala, Trip to Barbary, p. 130. The man in black baize with the felt képi, and who had a hatchet face desperately scarred with the small-pox, looked from head to heel a bad egg.
1888. J. Runciman, The Chequers, p. 7. His hatchet face with its piggish eyes, his thin cruel lips, his square jaw, are all murderous.