subs. (popular).—A colloquialism used both of men and things. Anything out of the common, or that conveys a warning; something wonderful or staggering; something to be avoided. Anything that causes surprise, wonder, fear, or indeed any uncommon emotion, is a CAUTION to this, that, or the other. At Oxford in 1865 it was employed to designate a ‘guy’ or ‘cure.’
1835. C. F. HOFFMAN, A Winter in the West, i. p. 232. The way in which the icy blast would come down the bleak shore of the lake ‘was a CAUTION.’
1853. WHYTE-MELVILLE, Digby Grand, ch. ii. ‘The way he cleaned out a southerner, a fine young Carolinian, who made a series of matches with him, was, as the Squire himself would have said, a CAUTION.’
1861. WHYTE-MELVILLE, Good for Nothing, ch. i. Such a clench of the slender hand and stamp of the slender foot as constitute what our American friends term a CAUTION.
