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English
A person holding a handbag.
Etymology
From hand + bag. The music genre is named from women dancing around a pile of their handbags in nightclubs. The verb is a reference to Margaret Thatcher's handbag.[1]
Then came a maid with hand-bag and shawls, and after her a tall young lady. She stood for a moment holding her skirt above the grimy steps, with something of the stately pose which Richter has given his Queen Louise on the stairway, and the light of the reflector fell full upon her.
An enormous amount of off-book money sloshes around Chinese business and officialdom, and some of it runs into handbags.
2020, Jess Ryder, The Night Away:
In London, of all places, where people are always on the lookout for opportunities to commit crimes: an unzipped handbag, a phone sticking out of a back pocket, an unpadlocked bike.
handbag (third-person singular simple presenthandbags, present participlehandbagging, simple past and past participlehandbagged)
(British,transitive,humorous) To attack verbally or subject to criticism (typically used of a woman).
1995, Nicholas Jones, Soundbites and Spin Doctors, London: Cassell, →ISBN, page 202:
‘Apparently Birt happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on Sunday afternoon. Virginia saw him and handbagged him. She really was very cross.’
2010, Rachel Johnson, A Diary of the Lady, London: Fig Tree, →ISBN, page 168:
My favourite part of the whole day was being handbagged by a reader who was quivering with rage and said, ‘You've changed everything!’ and complained about everything, even how easy the crossword was, as Dower filmed every foam-flecked word.
References
^ David Levi-Faur, editor (2012), The Oxford Handbook of Governance, OUP Oxford, →ISBN, page 316:
Governance appeared to give way to hierarchical and even impositional Government, hence the invention of the new verb “to handbag” (coined because Mrs Thatcher always carried a large handbag and it was said that she could not look at any existing British institution without hitting it with her handbag).
