Throw-back

[f. phr. to throw back: see THROW v.¹ 38.] An act of throwing back.

  1.  A backward movement or direction given. Also attrib. Throw-back indicator, see quot. 1902².

1901.  Blackw. Mag., Aug., 192/1. Rob’s head had a confident jerky throwback, like a gamecock’s.

1902.  Daily Chron., 19 March, 9/4. The Light Blues’ throw-back of the bodies for the first catch is imposing.

1902.  O’Conor Sloane, Stand. Electr. Dict., Throw-back Indicator, a drop annunciator, whose shutter or drop is electrically replaced.

  2.  An arrest or reverse in a course or progress; a check, set-back, relapse.

1856.  H. R. Reynolds, in Life, v. (1898), 123. The little throw-back of my progress … was not such as to create any uneasiness.

1902.  Edin. Rev., Oct., 286. The belief in popular principles held by most Englishmen before the great throw back of the French Revolution.

  3.  Reversion to an earlier ancestral type or character; an example of this. Chiefly fig.

1889.  Athenæum, 14 Sept., 351/3. By a not unusual freak of heredity she is personally a ‘throw-back’ to an angel.

1894.  Temple Bar Mag., March, 454. Our feeble throw-back to savagery.

1904.  W. H. Pollock, Anim. that have Owned us, vii. 98. He must have been a freak or a ‘throw back.’