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Examples

  • Elsewhere in the Observer the madding crowd strives away like billy-o, just as it did in the days of Richard Nixon and Reginald Maudling, but for those needing a refuge from the weekly din there's still the cool sequester'd vale inhabited by Azed.

    Azed: a giant among crosswords Francis Wheen 2010

  • It struck me that it wasn't safe to be gallivanting about this house in the dark - they might think I was on the East tack, spying - so I flitted on, and two minutes later was stallioning away like billy-o with my modest flower of the steppes - by jingo, she was in a fine state of passion, I remember.

    The Sky Writer Geoff Barbanell 2010

  • But they'd lost no time: already they had a mayor and corporation, and a Grand Central Hotel, and a bath-house and stores and theatres and saloons and gaming-houses and dance-halls, with clerks and barbers and harlots and shopmen and traders and drink enough to float a ship, and everyone beavering away like billy-o and doing a roaring trade.

    Isabelle Estelle Bruno 2010

  • "The wind was cutting up like billy-o, but his drapes-his kilts and his plaid, you know-they didn't move at all, except to the stir of his walking."

    Sick Cycle Carousel 2010

  • Either it's all a lot of hippy nonsense and we can happily go on burning our fossil fuels like billy-o, or we are teetering on the brink of apocalypse and should spare absolutely no effort to reduce carbon emmissions and thus minimise the planetary warming.

    Climate change 2008

  • Switch the hob off sos's you don't burn the house down, then put the chocolate in the hot milk and whisk it like billy-o until there are no lumps left.

    Archive 2008-11-01 MissPrism 2008

  • Would you prefer premier top-notch editing that cannot be compared to, or do you think what a book really needs is a fabuloso marketing campaign that sells your books like billy-o.

    Editing V. Publicity In a Fight to the Finish fusenumber8 2007

  • His talk of Epirote guards that would skin their own grandmothers was all billy-o.

    The Thirty-Nine Steps 2005

  • That was when I saw it was a regimental Colour, and here they came, a regular flood of riflemen, whooping and cheering like billy-o, charging the Ab musketeers who fairly ran before them.

    Flashman on the March Fraser, George MacDonald, 1925- 2005

  • “Your granddaughter, sir, and my daughter-inlaw want to fight like billy-o.”

    The Silver Spoon 2004

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