blasting

Pluralblastings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of blast.

   Engineers spent the week blasting tunnels through the mountain.

   She kept blasting cold air through the vents to clear the smoke.

   Note

   With sound, this form can face two ways. Used intransitively, the noise-maker is the subject: the TV is blasting. Used transitively, which is informal, the music is the object: he was blasting old records all night. The transitive form also has a destructive meaning, as in blasting a hole in a wall, and an old curse meaning, close to damning.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A deliberately set explosion, such as one used to break apart rock in mining, quarrying, or construction.

   A series of blastings cleared the way for the new highway tunnel.

   Residents complained that the blasting near the dam shook their homes.

   Similarexplosion, detonation

   Note

   Often the word names a whole operation rather than a single bang. Voyageur's 1960 account of the mountain railways of the Bernese Oberland describes how things changed "when the blasting of the tunnel was commenced." When individual explosions are being counted, the plural is blastings: a series of blastings, each one set and fired in turn.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The act of striking something with ruin or decay, as when frost or disease blights a crop or withers living growth.

   Old letters describe the blasting of the vineyards during that bitter year.

   A single night of frost was enough for the blasting of the young buds.

   Similarblighting, withering

   Note

   Ruin of this kind sits beside famine, pestilence and mildew in the King James Bible of 1611. Its natural partner is blight. Mark Twain's Following the Equator (1897) speaks of "the blightings and blastings of time," stretching crop damage into a figure for aging. The damage here comes from frost or disease, not from the explosives behind the planned explosion.

4. 4
   nounslanguncountable

   Taking performance-enhancing drugs at full dosage, rather than reducing them during a lower-dose 'cruising' phase.

   After eight weeks of blasting, he dropped down to a maintenance dose.

   Veteran lifters debated whether year-round blasting was worth the health risks.

   Oppositecruising

   Note

   Gym slang that comes with a partner built in. A blast is the full-dose stretch and a cruise is the reduced one, and users speak of a blast-and-cruise cycle. The term belongs to bodybuilders who use steroids. In medical or journalistic writing, "full-dose cycle" or naming the drugs directly is clearer and avoids sounding like insider talk.

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