Thin red lines

• Thin Red Line: a nickname given to the 93rd (Sutherland Highlanders) Regiment of British infantry after their dogged defence in the face of overwhelming odds at Balaclava during the Crimean Waro n 25 October 1854; later applied to the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, a regiment formed in 1881 by the amalgamation of the 91st (Princess Louise's Argyllshire) and 93rd Regiments; later applied to all British infantry
  • Wikipedia

• Roter Faden: (German) red thread → Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious II:1: "Herr N.'s attention was drawn one day to the figure of a writer who had become well known from a series of undeniably boring essays which ... dealt with episodes in the relations of the first Napoleon with Austria. The author had red hair. As soon as Herr N. heard his name mentioned, he asked: ‘Is not that the red-haired dullard [der rote Fadian] that runs through the story of the Napoleonids?’.... Herr N.'s joke ... proceeds from two components – a depreciatory judgment upon the writer and a reccollection of the famous simile with which Goethe introduces the extracts ‘From Ottilie's Diary’ in his Elective Affinities. [Footnote: We hear of a peculiar practice in the English Navy. Every rope in the king's fleet ... is woven in such a way that a red thread [roter Faden] runs through its whole length. It cannot be extracted without undoing the whole rope, and thus proves that even the smallest piece is crown property. In just the same way a thread of affection and dependence runs through Ottilie's diary, binding it all together and characterizing the whole of it.]"

• dispatch in thin red lines
  • disperse
  • deploy
  • spatchcock: to interpolate, insert (words, a sentence, etc.) hastily into a narrative → Ulysses 203.17-18: "Why is the underplot of King Lear in which Edmund figureslifted out of Sidney's Arcadia and spatchcocked on to a Celtic legend older than history?"