purple patch

Noun

purple patch (plural purple patches)

1. A period of excellent performance where nearly everything seems to go right, contrasting with a lower general level of performance.
   • He came with a disconcerting black-eye that he wouldn’t explain. “Not so much a black-eye,” he said, “as the aftermath of a purple patch.... What’s your difficulty?”1908, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, “The Dawn Comes, and My Uncle Appears in a New Silk Hat”, in Tono-Bungay […], Toronto, Ont.: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Ltd., →OCLC, 2nd book (The Rise of...
   • Paul Weller has been in a relentlessly innovative purple patch since 2008’s 22 Dreams, which is still surprising given the workmanlike nature of his previous decade’s output.2017 May 14, Phil Mongredien, “Paul Weller: A Kind Revolution review – rich in warmth and optimism”, in The Observer, →ISSN
2. (originally) An ornate or elaborate section of a written work; a patch of purple prose.
   • To the picket Private Copper held forth for ten minutes on the life-history of his captive. Allowing for some purple patches, it was an absolute fair rendering.1904, Rudyard Kipling, “The Comprehension of Private Copper”, in Traffics and Discoveries, London: Macmillan and Co., →OCLC
   • The poet had continually to be performing acrobatic feats, now of rhetoric or epigram, now of learning, or again in the description of blood-curdling horrors, monstrous deaths and prodigious sorceries. Each work was overloaded with sententiae and purple patches.1908, Harold Edgeworth Butler, Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to Juvenal