It was by dint ofpassing strength, / That he moved the massy stone at length.
1847, Robert Holmes,The Case of Ireland Stated:
That parliament was destined, in one short hour of convulsive strength, in one short hour ofpassing glory, to humble the pride and alarm the fears of England.
Ardent pro-lifer Rick Santorum made onepassing reference to "authenticity" as a litmus test for a conservative candidate, but if he was obliquely referring to Romney (and he was), you could be excused for missing the dig.
How wonderful is Death, / Death and his brother Sleep! / One, pale as yonder waning moon / With lips of lurid blue; / The other, rosy as the morn / When throned on ocean's wave / It blushes o'er the world: / Yet both sopassing wonderful!
This use is sometimes misconstrued as meaning "vaguely" or "slightly" (perhaps by confusion with such phrases as "passing fancy", under Adjective, above), leading to formations such as "more than passing clever" etc.
1955 February, T. B. Sands, “The Didcot, Newbury & Southampton Railway—1”, inRailway Magazine, page79:
But capital was proving difficult to raise; rumours were in the air that the G.W.R. and L.S.W.R. were about to patch up their quarrel, and the people of Southampton, who twelve months earlier had staged a torch-light procession to celebrate thepassing of the D.N.S.R. Act, were increasingly loath to part with their cash.
(sports) The act ofpassing aball etc. to another player.[from 19th c.]
1963,Erving Goffman, 'Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity', Ch.2 at p.57, 58(page numbers per the Pelican Books 1976 reprint)
When there is a discrepancy between an individual's actual social identity and his virtual one, it is possible for this fact to be known to us before we normals contact him, or to be quite evident when he presents himself before us. He is a discredited person, and it is mainly he I have been dealing with until now. [...] However, when his differentness is not immediately apparent, and is not known beforehand, [...] he is a discreditable, not a discredited person [...]. The issue is [...] that of managing information about his failing. To display or not to display; to tell or not to tell; to let on or not to let on; to lie or not to lie; and in each case, to whom, how, when, and where. [...] It is this second general issue, the management of undisclosed discrediting information about self, that I am focusing on in these notes - in brief, 'passing'.
