An emblem of rapidity.
1833. He spoke as quick as “greased lightning.”—Boston, Lincoln, &c., Herald, Jan. 15. (N.E.D.)
1837. If I did n’t fetch old dug-out through slicker than snakes, and faster than a well-greased thunderbolt, niggurs ar’n’t niggurs, nor Injuns Injuns.—R. M. Bird, ‘Nick of the Woods,’ ii. 90 (Lond.).
1842. I will come, as the Americans say, like greased lightning.—T. Hood, Comic Annual, p. 215.
1842. The horse went up the street like a blue streak of greased lightning.—Phila. Spirit of the Times, Sept. 7.
1843. [The snake] darted head foremost at us, and believe me reader, in the true western style, like “greased lightning.”—B. R. Hall (‘Robert Carlton’), ‘The New Purchase,’ i. 85.
1843. I dad! if I didn’t streak off that way like greased lightnin!—Id., i. 178.
1848.
| Down went the pins,—up flew the ball, | |
| And kit me on the head; | |
| And quicker than greased lightning, | |
| My covies, I was dead. | |
Durivage and Burnham, ‘Stray Subjects,’ p. 72. |
1851. As smoothly and easily “as lightning on a greased railroad.” Pardon the inelegant simile, reader, but it is Davy Crockett’s own.—Yale Lit. Mag, xvii. 61 (Nov.).
1852. I was goin’ jest like a flash of greased lightnin’, or quicker.—H. C. Watson, ‘Nights in a Block-House,’ p. 29 (Phila.).
1853. “I got a big gad,” continued he, “expecting to work my passage hum, but, by lightnin’, he [the mule] went off like a greased streak, and I couldn’t do nothin’ but holler, say my prayers, and stick like death to the mane, what there was of it.”—S. A. Hammett (‘Philip Paxton’), ‘A Stray Yankee in Texas,’ p. 270.
1888. His retreat was accompanied with every sort of missile—sticks, boots and rocks—but this dog, that made himself into a “greased streak of lightning,” as a colored woman described him, bounded on, untouched by the flying hail of the soldiers’ wrath.—Mrs. Custer, ‘Tenting on the Plains,’ p. 209.
