collar-work

(Yes, it's a misconception that blue collar-work requires all brawn and no brain.)

Jessica DuLong: Do We Hold the Solution to the Recession in Our Hands? 2010

As a horse settles down to strong collar-work better when the gloss of the stable takes the ruffle of the air, so this man worked at his business all the harder, with the brightness of the home joys fading.

Mary Anerley Richard Doddridge 2004

Other subjects can be taught and can be learnt; but the teaching will be stiff collar-work, and the learning evanescent, if the pupil is not interested in the subject.

Cambridge Essays on Education Various

Some were sent back to Moffat in charge of the lads who rode the extra tracers used in snowy weather for the few miles of heavy collar-work out of Moffat; of the rest, loaded with the mail-bags, MacGeorge led one, Goodfellow, the coachman, another; and the two set off for Tweedshaws, accompanied by a man named

Stories of the Border Marches Jeanie Lang

In this last word of Fielding's active political career (for his later anti-Jacobite papers are concerned rather with Constitutional and Protestant, than with party strife), a retirement from political collar-work is certainly signified.

Henry Fielding A Memoir Godden, G M 1909

The walk was collar-work at first, up, up, up, climbing a steep track between loose-built, fern-covered walls, taking a short cut over the slope that formed the spur of Cwm Dinas, and scaling the rocky little precipice of Maenceirion.

For the Sake of the School Angela Brazil 1907

Now and then, as the two tall brown mares slackened for a bout of collar-work at a hill, or squeezed slowly past a cart stacked high with sods of turf, we, sitting in silence, Irish wolves in the clothing of English tourists, could hear across the intervening pile of luggage and bicycles such a storm of conversation as bursts forth at a dinner-party after the champagne has twice gone round.

All on the Irish Shore Irish Sketches Martin Ross 1903

The boy was one of those untameable young lords of misrule that frolic and chafe themselves through nursery and preparatory and public-school days with the utmost allowance of storm and dust and dislocation and the least possible amount of collar-work, and come somehow with a laugh through a series of catastrophes that has reduced everyone else concerned to tears or Cassandra-like forebodings.

The Unbearable Bassington 1870-1916 Saki 1893

[189] I have said that you _can_ do this with the _Astrée_, and that this makes for superiority in it: but there also I think absolutely continuous reading of the whole would become "collar-work."

A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 From the Beginning to 1800 George Saintsbury 1889

But several weeks 'collar-work [190] is a great deal to spend on a single book of what is supposed to be pastime; and the pastime becomes occasionally one of doubtful pleasure now and then.

A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 From the Beginning to 1800 George Saintsbury 1889