Dictionary

trashfire en · NOUN

Etymology

From trash + fire.

Meanings

1. Fire resulting from trash burning.
   • The air is tinged with the smell of diesel exhaust, trashfires, and excrement.[…]The haze of trashfires drifted over in a noxious sweet perfume that partially obscured the houses, which emerged like a long row of broken skulls each morning. 2014, Brian Turner, My Life as a Foreign Country, Jonathan Cape, →ISBN:
   • He wheeled the last barrowload of trash from the kitchen yard out to the trashfire and tipped it and stood back and watched the deep orange fire gasping in the dark chuffs of smoke that rose against the twilight sky.[…]Along the limits of the city where the roads died in the desert in sand washes and garbage dumps, out to the white perimeters at midday where smoke from the trashfires burned along the horizon like the signature of vandal hordes come in off the inscrutable wastes beyond. 1998, Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain:
   • Children have been burned by sparks from trashfires, open flames of stoves, unscreened fireplaces, contact with pilot lights of space heaters, or by sticking ' metal objects in wall sockets. 1967, Flammable Fabrics Act Amendments of 1967: Hearings Before the Consumer Subcommittee of the Committee on Commerce, United States Senate, Ninetieth Congress, First Session, on S. 1003, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, page 117:
   • Island Trashfires[…]Adjacent to the garbage dump (an open sore that drains the Island's poisons around the clock), old convairs lift and lower / over trashfires and the bellies of pedigreed sharks—pampered, overfed, domesticated. 1973, Laurence Lieberman, The Osprey Suicides: Poems, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Collier-Macmillan Publishers, page 59:
   • Further and further into what, I suppose, was a state of being I thought befitted some guy whose fucking dad had died around a trashfire in some field ten blocks away. 2016, David Cornwell, Like It Matters, Umuzi, →ISBN:
2. (figuratively) A dumpster fire; a disaster.
   • However the claimed ‘ban’ does not apply if “explicit consent” is obtained from the person whose sensitive data is to be exploited to better target them with propaganda — and online ‘consents’ to ad targeting are already a total trashfire of non-compliance in the region. 2021 November 25, Natasha Lomas, “Europe offers tepid set of political ads transparency rules”, in TechCrunch:
   • Bongo cat has been edited to play all manner of instruments and songs. It brings happiness to all, even in the trashfire year that was 2018. 2018 December 29, Ellen Scott, “The 27 best cats of 2018”, in Metro:
   • ‘Sure, it’s always the wildest kids who have the strictest parents.’ ‘Those children must be so unhappy.’ At this moment I had a terrifying thought – what if they’re not unhappy? Or, more precisely, what if they’re no more unhappy than any other children growing up on this trashfire of a planet? 2018, Darach Ó Séaghdha, “Multilingual Children”, in Craic Baby: Dispatches from a Rising Language, Apollo, →ISBN:
   • Hello, sanity. Hello, trashfire century. 2019 April 22, Sandra Simonds, “April”, in The New Yorker:
   • Before the whole tweet trashfire happened. 2020, Melanie Greene, Roll Play (Roll of the Dice; book 6), →ISBN:
   • ‘Get Krack!n’ Is The Perfect Antidote To Trashfire Breakfast TV Like ‘Sunrise’ 2019 April 4, Cameron Colwell, Junkee:
   • Wasn’t this trashfire of an anniversary why Ed, my unfaithful beast of a husband, had been ruing the day so? 2022, John F.D. Taff, editor, Dark Stars: New Tales of Darkest Horror, Nightfire, →ISBN:
   • Opinion: Rudz to Host Another Transphobic Comedy Trashfire 2022 May 5, Jef Rouner, Houston Press:
   • Elex Is The Biggest Trashfire I've Played All Year, But I Still Love It / Elex is a terribly constructed video game full of glitches, lag, eye-sores, and confusing mechanics. 2017 December 6, Patricia Hernandez, Kotaku:
   • The Internet didn’t become a trashfire all of a sudden: it happened over a long period of time. 2021, Lisa Nakamura, Hanah Stiverson, Kyle Lindsey, Racist Zoombombing, Routledge:
   • Putting out the Twitter trashfire / Tonight I’m drinking and talking about ways Twitter could be less of a shitheap. 2016 February 13, Randi Lee Harper, Medium (published in ART + marketing):

Forms

Translations (6)

de Müllbrand (fire resulting from trash burning) · fi jätepalo (fire resulting from trash burning) · de Müllfeuer (fire resulting from trash burning) · fi jätteenpoltto (fire resulting from trash burning) · pl ogień śmieciowy (fire resulting from trash burning) · de Abfallfeuer (fire resulting from trash burning)