bottle imp

American  

noun

1. Cartesian diver.

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Etymology

Origin of bottle imp

First recorded in 1815–25

Example Sentences

“Now colors are gentler and fewer; smells are antiseptic. Now when I peek in the basement window where the villagers say they see a girl dancing like a bottle imp, I can no longer see a spirit in a skirt made of light, but a voiceless girl dancing when she thought no one was looking.”

From New York Times

He’s one of the genii or a bottle imp.

From Project Gutenberg

With the exception of an occasional fling at old Mrs. Billing, whom he seemed to regard as a joss or a bottle imp, he was temperate, too, in his remarks about everybody else.

From Project Gutenberg

The Bottle Imp, with Farley Granger, and Geoffrey Holder, a calypso singer and dancer, in a bizarre tale of voodoo.

From Time Magazine Archive

He started accordingly from Honolulu in June 1889 on a trading schooner, the Equator, bound to the Gilberts, one of the least visited and most primitively mannered of all the 292 island groups of the Western Pacific; emerged towards Christmas of the same year into semi-civilisation again at Apia, on the island of Upolu in Samoa, where he wrote his first Polynesian story, The Bottle Imp.

From Project Gutenberg