"Shoddy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... first beyond the gangway. Here were the boarding-houses and garish saloons, the money-changers' and shoddy shops. The boarding-houses were cleaner than the dinginess of an old-world seaport would allow, and the proprietors who manned their doorways looked genial monuments of benevolence. On occasions they would ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... before in connection with an army in the field. Trainsful of articles to be repaired come down from the front every day, and almost every imaginable article that the men at the front can use, from guns to boots, comes here to be repaired, or if found beyond repair, to be sent to Yorkshire for shoddy. The marvellous thing is that, as soon as they are received, they are repaired and made nearly as good as new and returned to their owners at the front, a vast work in itself. The boot and uniform sheds alone, where again she finds five hundred French women and girls, and the ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to outdo the demi-monde of Paris in extravagance, it must not follow that every sensible and patriotic matron, and every nice, modest young girl, must forthwith and without inquiry rush as far after them as they possibly can. Because Mrs. Shoddy opens a ball in a two-thousand-dollar lace dress, every girl in the land need not look with shame on her modest white muslin. Somewhere between the fast women of Paris and the daughters of Christian American families there should be established a cordon sanitaire, to keep out the contagion ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... spread freshness over the Boulevard, the sparrows had become vulgarly obtrusive, and the credulous Seine angler anxiously followed his gaudy quill floating among the soapsuds of the lavoirs. The white-spiked chestnuts clad in tender green vibrated with the hum of bees. Shoddy butterflies flaunted their winter rags among the heliotrope. There was a smell of fresh earth in the air, an echo of the woodland brook in the ripple of the Seine, and swallows soared and skimmed among the anchored river craft. ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... peace the commercial interests had practiced the grossest frauds in corruptly imposing upon the Government every form of shoddy supplies. These were the same interests so vociferously proclaiming their intense patriotism. The Civil War put their pretensions of patriotism to the test. If ever a war took place in which Government and people had ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... world sit up and take notice. The mere fact that we live near to them, know them and associate with them is proof-positive that we, too, shall go through life with clean minds and bodies. They would not tolerate us if we were to slip into shoddy ways. Nothing is revealed quicker to our intimates than the losing of ambition ... the slipping into careless habits. We cannot conceal it from them. We fool only those who brush by. The loss of this self-respect has a terrible effect upon the system and every tendency toward ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... Blue Jeans Shoddy or some name like that was givin an afternoon funkshun (I'm quotin from the invite so I can' tell you what it means derie) fer charity and a lot of our company was invited to come, admission free—tickets fifty cents. Anyhow it was a lecture by Lord Somebody for ...
— Love Letters of a Rookie to Julie • Barney Stone
... Trojans are all dead, now. They were born too late to see Noah's ark, and died too soon to see our menagerie. We saw where Agamemnon's fleets rendezvoused, and away inland a mountain which the map said was Mount Ida. Within the Hellespont we saw where the original first shoddy contract mentioned in history was carried out, and the "parties of the second part" gently rebuked by Xerxes. I speak of the famous bridge of boats which Xerxes ordered to be built over the narrowest part of the Hellespont (where it is only two or three miles wide.) A moderate gale ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... giving me twenty-four shillings' worth of champagne. It is a true story, and illustrates, I think, the training and method of the German mind, of the industry of the merchants who are trading over all the seas. As a rule the "trade" goods "made in Germany" are "shoddy." They do not compare in quality with those of England or the States; in every foreign port you will find that the English linen is the best, that the American agricultural implements, American hardware, saws, axes, machetes, are superior ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... into it as comfortably as we could on the straw. Each had a parcel with a little money and a few delicacies our ever-generous Madame D—— had provided. It was terrible to think of some of these poor men in their shoddy uniforms, without an overcoat, going off to face a long ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... grew and Dennis with it—both in self-importance and in popularity. He went about the State making speeches, threatening the "shoddy aristocrats who want an emperor and a standing army ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... of dismay when incompetent or vile ones get elected, as they sometimes do,) there are other, quieter contingencies, infinitely more important. Shams, &c., will always be the show, like ocean's scum; enough, if waters deep and clear make up the rest. Enough, that while the piled embroider'd shoddy gaud and fraud spreads to the superficial eye, the hidden warp and weft are genuine, and will wear forever. Enough, in short, that the race, the land which could raise such as the late rebellion, could also ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... was tightly closed, with the upper door and windows boarded up, the blonde person in shoddy fineries rang the area bell on the chance that there must be a caretaker somewhere about the premises. She felt that when one has come upon such an errand as hers, one mustn't leave any stone unturned; and she couldn't trust to a haphazard letter. An impassive and immaculate Japanese opened the ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... position which his brother, his uncle, his cousin holds? He is a shopkeeper, who never has a holiday, and does not know what to do with it when it comes to him; to whom the fresh air of heaven is a stranger; who lives among sugars and oils, and the dust of shoddy, and the size of new clothing. Should such an one take to hunting once a week, even after years of toil, men would point their fingers at him and whisper among themselves that he was as good as ruined. His friends would tell him of his wife and children; and, indeed, would tell him truly, for ...
— Hunting Sketches • Anthony Trollope
... as I know, are chewing gum and the adulteration of beeswax. In this the Yankee gives another illustration of the ruling passion strong in money making, which gives us wooden nutmegs, wooden hams, shoddy cloth, glucose candy, chiccory coffee, oleomargarine butter, mineral sperm oil made from petroleum, and beeswax made ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... By the use of shoddy in the manufacture of woollens, and of jute in both cotton and woollen fabrics, the English artisan saves many millions of pounds both of wool and cotton. In those districts of India where British skill and commercial enterprise have checked the manufacture of muslin and calicoes, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... she lived with her father, Doctor Lester Cochran, at seven o'clock on a Sunday evening. It was June of the year nineteen hundred and eight and Mary was eighteen years old. She walked along Tremont to Main Street and across the railroad tracks to Upper Main, lined with small shops and shoddy houses, a rather quiet cheerless place on Sundays when there were few people about. She had told her father she was going to church but did not intend doing anything of the kind. She did not know what she wanted to do. "I'll get off by myself and think," she told herself as she walked slowly ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... tremendous card for them to get the star pitcher of the World's Series," said McRae with a sigh of relief. "And in these days, when so many rumors are flying round it's a comfort to know there's one man, at least, that money can't buy. There isn't a bit of shoddy in you, Joe. You're all wool and a ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... was old, and the woodwork crumbling; the lock was new and shoddy. But I have always ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... habit of saving in small ways which many self-made men had in common. She dwelt resolutely upon his integrity, upon the acumen which had made him a business success; yet in her heart she could not help likening him to a garment of shoddy material aping the style of elegance. While endeavoring to palliate these small offenses Helen knew perfectly that they were due to the fact that he was innately what was known in the office vernacular as a "cheap skate," striving to give the ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... some fun out of this. She has been so unselfish and fine all through and I hope I can make the rest of the adventure to her liking— It is sure to be for after Delagoa Bay it is all real Africa not the shoddy "colonial" shopkeepers' paradise that we have here. And we are going to stop off at Zanzibar for some time where we have letters to everybody and where Cecil is to draw the Sultan and I am to play him ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... dignity she might perhaps avoid her tendency to assign to decorum a larger power than it actually exercises, even in the societies about which she writes.... The illusion of reality in her work, however, almost never fails her, so alertly is her mind on the lookout to avoid vulgar or shoddy romantic elements. ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... the moment, the circus appeared to him a rather tawdry and shoddy substitute for the glories of astronomy, and he wondered how he had come to fall in with Red's ...
— Youth • Isaac Asimov
... leg to stand upon. Although during the previous book Cato has talked so well that the reader will think that there must be something in it, he soon is made to perceive that the Stoic budge is altogether shoddy. ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... herself in the position of apologizing for what had hitherto been her proudest boast. Lady Staines looked tolerantly around her. "London's a poor place," she observed, "and very shoddy. When my friends the Malverns lived here, they had old oak and rather nice chintzes. I see you go in for color schemes and nicknacks. I hope Estelle won't find Staines uncomfortable; however, she probably won't ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... the thunderbolt to strike, he rushed from the car as precipitately as he had rushed in. I WAS angry,—not because I was to have been cheated, for I been repeatedly and atrociously cheated and only smiled, but because the rascal dared attempt on me such a threadbare, ragged, shoddy trick as that. Do I LOOK like a rough-hewn, unseasoned backwoodsman? Have I the air of never having read a newspaper? Is there a patent innocence of eye-teeth in my demeanor? O Jeru! Jeru! Somewhere in your virtuous bosom you are nourishing ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... tribe just above us was paid off their annuities in shoddy blankets; they were bought back again with whisky, and another tribe was paid with the same blankets; and one agent took out several thousand "elastics" (girls know what I mean) to pay the Indians (among other things), and yet no wild Indian ever ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle
... I've got an idea that there's too much pity in the world. People seem to be losing their nerve; reality shocks them, and they live slothfully in the shoddy palaces of Sham Ideals. The sentimentalists, the cowards, and the cranks have broken the spirit of mankind. The general in battle now is afraid to strike because men may be killed. Sometimes it is worth while ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... walk of the Advocate office, and not much more than half that distance from the Thames Embankment—a spot which interested me as much as its lively neighbour, the Strand, irritated and worried me. An uneasy, shoddy street I thought the Strand, full of insistent tawdriness and of broken-spirited folk whose wretchedness had something in it more despicable than pitiable. Save for its occasional gaping rustics (whom I thought sadly misguided to be there at all) I cordially hated the Strand. But ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... than Cousin George. But he had gifts of simulation, which are valuable; and poor Emily Hotspur had not yet learned the housewife's trick of passing the web through her fingers, and of finding by the touch whether the fabric were of fine wool, or of shoddy made up with craft to look ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... of the buildings—some old, some comparatively new. I found the older more grand and massive, and the newer, of the sixteenth century, wanting in dignity of design, and the workmanship very inferior. The reign of Shoddy had already begun before Cromwell ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... shoddy of shoddys. Purse-proud, affected, pretentious and ambitious, and even less fit for her position than her husband for his.—George William ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... melody. Venders of Indian bead-work; itinerant philosophers; camera-obscura men; imitation squaws; free and enlightened negroes; guides to go under the cataract, who should have been sent over it; spiritualists, phrenologists, and nigger minstrels had made the place their own. Shoddy and petroleum were having "a high old time of it," spending the dollar as though that "almighty article had become the thin end of nothing whittled fine:" altogether, Niagara was a place to ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... and seventeenth centuries, and even so recently as thirty years ago specimens of this primitive and early lace-making were to be seen in the quaint "smock-frock" of the English farm labourer, a garment which, though discarded by the wearer in favour of the shoddy products of the Wakefield looms, is now deemed worthy of a ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... speculations, and during the war, the shoddy class was largely increased by those who were made suddenly and unexpectedly rich by lucky ventures in petroleum lands and stocks, and by army contracts. Now other speculations provide recruits for this class, to which Wall street is constantly sending fresh "stars" ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... in blue woolen cloth; in the second, the seat alone is cushioned; and in the third, you sit on a bare bench. But all classes go by the same train, and often in the same car, or carriage, as they say here. In the first class travel the real and the shoddy nobility and Americans; in the second, commercial and professional men; and in the third, the same, with such of the peasantry and humbler classes as travel by rail. The only annoyance I experienced in the third class arose from the freedom with which the ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... three books to which we invite attention, Mr. Froude's is least like the average book of travel, and undoubtedly is the most suggestive of thought. Whether we agree with Mr. Froude or whether we do not, it is always a pleasure to read him. The 'shoddy' work which extends to everything in the present day, and which is eating into the very heart of our new literature, has not corrupted the older handicraftsmen among us. Not one record of travel in a hundred deserves to be mentioned in ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... in full blast; in fact, the skum had begun to come to the surface, and shoddy was the gentleman. By this, I mean that civil law had been suspended; the ermine of the judges had been overridden by the sword and bayonet. In other words, the military had absorbed the civil. Hence the gambler was in ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... "See the holes and the stains; there is not one straight seam; there is not a star that is in perfect form; ravel it, and you will find no thread in warp or woof that is flawless; nay, you may even discover shreds of shoddy mixed with the fine fibre. Your flag is nothing more than any other old piece of bunting, and if you think it ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... very similar process goes on now-a-days in a great many hearts. Bad times come. What is to be done? There is nothing for it but to be just a little bit dishonest. Honesty won't pay. So the manufacturer weaves bad silk, and makes shoddy cloth, and the wine-merchant doctors his wine, and the brewer his ale, and the milkman puts water into his milk, and the butterman sells butter made of Thames mud, and the calico is dressed with chalk, and the ready-made clothes come to ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... conscience. General corruption is impossible in a commercial age like this, when the whole system of business is built on credit, and large transactions are carried on, as on the Stock Exchange, with full confidence in the word or even the nod of an operator. Of course, shoddy and impure goods are sold over the counter and the customer often pays more than an article is really worth, but every mercantile house has its popular reputation to sustain as well as its rated financial standing, and the business ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... answer to your question. I'm doing the inclosed, and doing it in West Tenth Street. Do you know the neighborhood? Old Greenwich Village, red, shabby, shoddy, common, and vulgar. Mother and I are as happy as children. How are you? Your letter is splendid. I am sure you will come to understand. When are you returning to ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... had little part. No, mercifully, though in it she was not of it. This was Gregory's relieving thought as his eye ran over them, the women with powdered faces and extravagant clothes and the men with the oddest collars and boots and hair. "Shoddy Bohemians," was his terse definition of them; an inaccurate definition; for though, in the main, Bohemians, they were not, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... thousand feet above sea-level, is picturesque and unusually clean for an Eastern town. The bazaar is a long one, and its numerous caravanserais finer even than those of the capital. The manufacture of silk [F] and copperware is extensive; but, as usual, one saw little in the shops, en evidence , but shoddy cloth and Manchester goods, and looked in vain for real Oriental stuffs and carpets. I often wondered where on earth they were to be got, for the most persistent efforts failed to produce the real thing. I often passed, on the road, camel and mule-cloths ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... cease to express your holiest and highest on Sunday? Ah, I know why you don't work on Sunday! It is because you think that work is degrading, and because your sale and barter is founded on fraud, and your goods are shoddy. Your week-day dealings lie like a pall upon your conscience, and you need a day in which to throw off the weariness of that slavery under which you live. You are not free yourself, and you insist that others shall ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... them several good remarks. Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity (coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something), and his avowed preference for coarseness. Vulgarity, to him, had been the primal curse, the shoddy reticence that prevents man opening his heart to man, the power that makes against equality. From it sprang all the things that he hated—class shibboleths, ladies, lidies, the game laws, the Conservative party—all the ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... gran'ther, 'and let every man-child die! 280 Oh for three weeks o' Crommle an' the Lord! Up, Isr'el, to your tents an' grind the sword!'— 'Thet kind o' thing worked wal in ole Judee, But you forgit how long it's ben A.D.; You think thet's ellerkence,—I call it shoddy, A thing,' sez I, 'wun't cover soul nor body; I like the plain all-wool o' common-sense, Thet warms ye now, an' will a twelvemonth hence, You took to follerin' where the Prophets beckoned, An', fust you knowed on, back come Charles the Second; Now wut I want's to hev all we gain ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... other. Those sensitive creatures have no ears for our blandishments. It takes something more than words to cajole them to do our will, to cover us with glory. Luckily, too, or else there would have been more shoddy reputations for first-rate seamanship. Ships have no ears, I repeat, though, indeed, I think I have known ships who really seemed to have had eyes, or else I cannot understand on what ground a certain 1,000-ton barque of my acquaintance on one particular ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... SHODDY; filling her ears and soul with shriekery and metallic clangor, mad noises, mad hurries mostly no-whither;—and are awakening, I suppose, in such of her sons as still go into reflection at all, a deeper and more ominous set ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... firm with which I deal, I am going to study not only with my mind but with my money. I will proceed to take my trade away from the big employers who think that I want shoddy goods or who think that I want or am willing to trade with saleswomen who would let an employer impose on them, saleswomen that he thinks he can afford to impose upon. I will proceed to vote with my money, with every penny I have in the world, and I will earn more that I may vote more, for the ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... unhappily, as there have been in all times, but too many instances of flagrant dishonesty and fraud, exhibited by the unscrupulous, the over-speculative, and the intensely selfish in their haste to be rich. There are tradesmen who adulterate, contractors who "scamp," manufacturers who give us shoddy instead of wool, "dressing" instead of cotton, cast-iron tools instead of steel, needles without eyes, razors made only "to sell," and swindled fabrics in many shapes. But these we must hold to be the exceptional cases, of low-minded and ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... don't waste your tears over that vile combination of unseasoned timber and devil's-dust. Rather pluck up a spirit and pitch into me, who was fool enough to be tricked by a plausible advertisement, a scheming vendor of shoddy furniture, a hired villa, a verbose villain, and the thrice-told tale of a mythical "Indian gentleman," an imaginary "emergency," and a purely supposititious "sacrifice." ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 29, 1890 • Various
... of theirs, therefore, being allowed to take us by storm without let or hindrance, now advanced aft, when their ringleader, a plausible scoundrel who described himself as the 'Marquis de Pomme-Rose,' or some other similar shoddy title belonging to the black peerage of Hayti, to which I did not give heed at the time, beyond in my own mind thinking it ridiculous and that it was probably a name made up for the occasion, this man came up to Captain Alphonse with a smile on his black face ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... literature on forgotten bogies. Chairs move untouched by human hands, and tables walk about in lonely castles of Savoy, and no one marks them, till a day comes when the furniture of some American cottage is similarly afflicted, and then a shoddy new religion is based on the phenomenon. The latest revival among old beliefs is faith in the divining rod. 'Our liberal shepherds give it a shorter name,' and so do our conservative peasants, calling the 'rod of Jacob' the 'twig.' To 'work the twig' is rural English for the craft of Dousterswivel ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... am bound by an oath, David. Some day it may be that you will know. Perhaps not. You may guess what you will—you have much to go on. But from me, nothing. Now, let us settle the details. I've very little time." He glanced again at the shoddy tin clock, with a ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... involuntary bath. These garments, as will be remembered, had been obtained in haste, and were of the kind known in the trade as "ready-mades," and in this case composed of a well-glazed and pressed material, containing just enough wool to hold together a great deal of shoddy. ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... they chill an author to reduce his royalty? It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer. I am told that even the best plays are hawked with disregard from theatre to theatre, until the hungry author is out at elbow. They get less civility than greets a mean commodity. Worthless mining shares and shoddy gilt editions do not kick their heels with such disregard in the outer office. Popcorn and apples—Armenian ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... cropping out tentatively in Lie's earlier tales comes here to its full right, and his shy, beautiful pathos gleams like hidden tears behind his genial smile. It is close wrought cloth of gold. No loosely woven spots—no shoddy woof of cheaper material. Captain Jaeger and his wife, Inger-Johanna, Joergen, Grip, nay, the whole company of sober, everyday mortals that come trooping through its chapters are so delightfully human that you feel the blood pulse under their ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... designs are in the cheaper goods, and the showier a cheap article is the quicker its shoddy qualities will be made manifest. Therefore, if we must count the pennies on our living-room rug, let us select a simple design with a good body—something that will be unobtrusive even when it ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... can hardly forbear comparing the magnificently thorough manner in which this frontier was fixed, with the shoddy, confused method in which the Perso-Beluch frontier was "demarcated"—if the word can be used in this case—by Sir Thomas Holdich at ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... difference between the savage and the civilized Indian is that the latter carries firearms and gets drunk on whisky. The Indian Agency has been a sink of fraud and corruption; it is said that barely thirty per cent of the allowance ever reaches those for whom it is voted; and the complaints of shoddy blankets, damaged flour, and worthless firearms are universal. "To get rid of the Injuns" is the phrase used everywhere. Even their "reservations" do not escape seizure practically; for if gold "breaks out" on them they are "rushed," and their possessors are either compelled to accept land ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... Follingsbees, Lillie. He is a man I have no respect for; he is one of those shoddy upstarts, not at all our sort of folks. I'm sorry you ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... northern Newfoundland I found a young mother near St. Anthony. She was twenty-six years old, suffering from acute rheumatic fever, lying in a fireless loft, on a rickety bedstead with no bedclothes. She had only one shoddy black dress to her name, and no underwear to keep her warm in bed in a house like that. The floor was littered with debris, including a number of hard buns which she could not now eat, but which some charitable neighbour had ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... alight and alive with bustle. Here a fakir with loud voice and market-place eloquence was vending his shoddy wares; there a drunkard reeled or was kicked from the door of a saloon, whose noiselessly swinging portals closed for an instant only to be reopened to admit another victim, who ere long would be treated likewise. A quartet ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... unemployed, and hadn't noticed, or had entirely forgotten, the circumstance in his business cares—if such a word as care could be connected with such a calm, self-contained nature. He wore a suit of cheap slops of some kind of shoddy "tweed". The coat was too small and the trousers too short, and they were drawn up to meet the waistcoat—which they did with painful difficulty, now and then showing, by way of protest, two pairs of brass buttons and the ends ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... to Horace Milbrey on her left, "that you haven't got to followin' this fad of havin' one wine at dinner; I know it's English, but it's downright shoddy." ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... annual sermons in aid of the missionaries who did some yachting in the South Seas, and had brought into existence the sin of nakedness among the natives, in order that they might be the more easily swindled by those Christians who sold them shoddy for calico, to purge them of their sin. George Holland could not see his way to follow the example of his brethren in this respect. He did not think that the Day of Judgment would witness the inauguration of any great scheme of eternal punishment for the heathen in his blindness who ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... carpenters. They are for the most part a fatherly whiskered tribe and they eat their lunches neatly from a pail, their backs against the wall, their broad toes upturned. I look suspiciously on painters, however, who present themselves for work like slopped and shoddy harlequins, and although I have myself passed a delightful afternoon painting a wooden fence at the foot of the garden—and been scraped afterwards—I would not wish ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... only one quarter of our army of child labor—work in local industries, stores, and farms, homework in dark and unsanitary tenements is still permitted. Children work in "homes" on artificial flowers, finishing shoddy garments, sewing their very life's blood and that of the race into tawdry clothes and gewgaws that are the most unanswerable comments upon our vaunted "civilization." And to-day, we must not forget, the child-laborer of yesterday ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... and even the draw-well of the mansion was fashioned of the oakwood usually thought suitable only for mills or ships. In short, wherever Chichikov's eye turned he saw nothing that was not free from shoddy make and well and skilfully arranged. As he approached the entrance steps he caught sight of two faces peering from a window. One of them was that of a woman in a mobcap with features as long and as narrow as a cucumber, and the other that of a man with features ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... one can suit himself with any sort of society within a radius of a mile. To a large portion of the people who frequent Washington or dwell where, the ultra fashion, the shoddy, the jobbery are as utterly distasteful as they would be in a refined New England City. Schoonmaker was not exactly a leader in the House, but he was greatly respected for his fine talents and his honesty. No one would have thought of offering to carry National Improvement ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... consider whether his rhyme interferes with the necessary rhythm of his verse; or, if he does, he is in too much of a hurry to care, for the interference occurs again and again. And these disturbances and deviations, rhetoric and the sacrifice of rhythm to shoddy rhyme, appear more often than the thematic outline ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... out, feeling that Glory was farther than ever from him now, and if he met her they might not speak. But he could not drag himself away. In the darkness under a lamp at the other side of the street he stood and waited. Shoddy broughams drove up, with drivers in shabby livery, bringing "turns" in wonderful hats and overcoats, over impossible wigs, whiskers, and noses—niggers, acrobats, clowns, and comic singers, who stepped out, shook the straw of their ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... carelessness and recklessness which allowed the agents of the Liberal Party to make a secret deal with a man like Mr. Rhodes, and a deal in which the consideration was a large sum of money. And all the time a number of the conventional Liberals were denouncing Mr. Rhodes for his shoddy Imperialism! The attitude of the public at large in regard to my action was curious. The politicians on my own side evidently thought that I had pushed things too far, and had been indiscreet. Some of them naively asked, in effect, where ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... insight to prefer WAVERLEY, for it IS different; and though not quite coherent, better worked in parts than almost any other: surely more carefully. It is undeniable that the love of the slap-dash and the shoddy grew upon Scott with success. Perhaps it does on many of us, which may be the granite on which D.'s opinion stands. However, I hold it, in Patrick Walker's phrase, for an 'old, condemned, damnable error.' Dr. Simson was ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was a great, raw-boned, black-haired, and bearded giant of a man, and he was more than half drunk before he stood up with the girl. He wore his work clothes—all he had, it's probable—flannel shirt, shoddy trousers, and high boots. He did take off his hat. And 'Mandy was in a clean gingham; but she was barefooted, it ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... on this strange museum at length that seems disproportionate, not merely because of its unique character, but because it seems to me full of lessons and reproach for an age that has subordinated honest workmanship to cheap and shoddy productiveness, and has sacrificed the workman to machinery. Certainly no one who visits Antwerp can afford to overlook it; but probably most people will first bend their steps towards the more popular shrine of the great cathedral. Here I confess myself utter heretic: to call ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... and careered wildly up and down the field, well out of range of the players. Indeed, most of the ponies seemed inclined to keep their shins out of the melee. Sommers laughed rather ill-naturedly, and Miss Hitchcock frowned. She disliked slovenly playing, and shoddy methods even in polo. When the umpire called time, Parker Hitchcock rode up to where they were standing and shook hands with the young doctor. As he trotted off, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... has had a similar experience with me will agree that the seasons and climate enjoyed here are singularly pleasant and salubrious. (Cheers.) You have, gentlemen, real seasons—there is a real winter and a real summer. (Loud laughter.) You are not troubled with shams in that respect—(laughter)—no shoddy manufactures of that nature are imported over here from Europe, where winter is often like a raw summer and summer like a wet winter. How different has been the reality of your winter, for as an old woman once wrote home to her friends in Scotland, "All the children here ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... from you, young man. When can you start for Cleveland? To-night, eh? Good! And just note this: It isn't merely the Corrugated Trust you are representing: it's Uncle Sam and the Allies generally. And if anything shoddy is being passed, you hunt ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... in the Saturday Squallers—men of a higher grade— That lay down a law they know not, of a game that they have not played? Holding the folly of flannel, still will ye teach the Schools That Wisdom is dressed in shoddy, and how should the Wise be fools? Not doubting but ye are The People—ye are the Sons of The Blood? Loafers and talkers and writers,—Read ye ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... for the absurd idea that a paper-eating worm could be kept a prisoner in a paper box. Oh, these critics! Your bookworm is a shy, lazy beast, and takes a day or two to recover his appetite after being "evicted." Moreover, he knew his own dignity better than to eat the "loaded" glazed shoddy note paper ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... of that hand glistened the shoddy ring which Marat had said was not worth stealing. Yet, apparently, it roused the cupidity of the poor wretch who had served him faithfully for these last few days, and who now would once more be thrown, starving and friendless, upon the streets ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... was barren with thinking on the unthinkable, and his spirits were dashed with a bitter sense of futility. He had honestly done his best. So far his conscience was clear; but as he reviewed the past in detail, his best seemed a very shoddy compromise. It was comfort to see the rugged face of Wratislaw again, though his greeting was tempered by mistrust. The great man had refused to speak for him and left him to fight his own battles; moreover, he feared the judgment of the old warrior on his conduct of the fight. He was acutely conscious ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... economy, it is certain that from that time on the middle-class folk at all events began to wear better clothes and buy better commodities generally—articles which lasted longer, and were better worth using. The reason of this was all a part of the same teaching, the same general tendency. Shoddy goods, representing the surplus output of German and American firms, could no longer be sold in England, however low the prices at which they were offered; and shopkeepers soon found that they lost standing when they offered such goods to the public. Thus true economy and true ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... of shoddy cloth, cotton laces, cheap furniture, what is it but waste! Waste of labor and material! Time and money and strength which might have been turned to producing things of permanent values, have been spent in things which have no goodness in them, things which because of their lack of integrity ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... and now as you've told me about shoddy, I'd like to know about flocks, for that's what I have got to ...
— Under Fire - A Tale of New England Village Life • Frank A. Munsey
... individual," said he, "can in any noble sense succeed, with such rotten inconsistency woven into its life. It was this shoddy in the garment of our Goddess of Liberty, which has occasioned the rent which those needles there"—pointing to some bayonets—"must mend. And it is this shoddy of contradiction and infidelity which makes many a man's prosperity, seemingly substantial at first, promising warmth and wear, ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... subconsciously repeating snatches from her letter word for word, even as he noted the dimly lighted, untidy, and disorderly interior of what, from strings of leather slippers that decorated the cellarlike entrance, was evidently a cheap and shoddy shoe store in ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... here at hame and safe and sensible, the Morrison o' the Morrisons had only to reach his hand to her and say, 'Coom, lass!' But noo that she is back wi' head high and notions alaft, he'd no accept her! She's nowt but a draft signed by Sham o' Shoddy and sent through the Bank o' Brag and Blaw! No! He'd no' accept her! And now back wi' ye to yer tickety-tack! I hae my orders, and the Queen o' Sheba might yammer and ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... a sense of something shoddy oppresses me, of tinsel and glitter and flamboyance: a feeling that here is no true greatness, no sphinx-like sublimity. A shadow of the world and the flesh falls across the brooding figure, a Napoleonic ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of all he passed with a fixed, far gaze. He had a hatchet-face, sallow, with lantern jaws, a petulant mouth, hot eyes that showed too much white above their pupils. A lank black mane greased his collar. His garments, shoddy but whole, were stained and bleached in spots, apparently the work of acids, and so wrinkled and shapeless as to suggest that their owner slept without undressing as a matter of habit. The pockets of his coat ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... wages—and buy a coat that can be of no service, and that must be thrown away the first march. I do not believe that the Government designs that our Volunteer Regiments should be compelled to take both blouses and dress coats. The General had better enter into partnership with some shoddy contractor, if he intends giving orders of this kind. I tell you, the men will ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... door. His appearance attracted much attention, as his dress was not exactly that of a Quaker, and otherwise he was not quite of the Quaker type; and it was a Quaker church in which he was. But he wasted no thoughts upon his apparel, and did not stop to think or care whether he was arrayed in shoddy or fine linen. ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... bless you! mine is sad to tell, sir; The gratitude of great men drove me downward, Reduced me to these shoddy coat and trowsers ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... writings. He has a range of about three notes: a flunkeyish koo-tooing to soap-bubble eminence; a tawdry sympathy with aristocratic woe; and a drivelling contempt for angular Poor Relations, in bombazine gowns. Bombazine, by-the-way, is a cheap, carpetty-looking fabric, built of shoddy, and generally ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... to the prison is a walk of but a few minutes. On my way there I met a one-legged ex-convict who was just leaving the institution. His pale face, shoddy suit of clothes and light-colored felt hat all spoke but too plainly of the fact that he was very recently "let loose," Entering into conversation with him, I found that he had a few moments before completed a term of five years at hard ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... to no account for his work, and whether it was right or wrong made little difference. He found that his teacher would profess to know things of which he knew he was ignorant, and, in a word, that there was an air of shoddy, not to say dishonesty, about ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... clothes-press and found it now to hug o'ersnugly for comfort, I cajoled my saner self into accepting a most transparent lie—my figure had not materially altered through the intervening spring and summer; it was only that the garments, being fashioned of a shoddy material, had shrunk. I owned a dress suit which had been form fitting, 'tis true, but none too close a fit upon me. I had owned it for years; I looked forward to owning and using it for years to come. I laid it aside ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... ostentatious. Everything about the place, from the old red palace to the placid herd of Alderney cows that grazed in a mighty avenue, spoke of wealth—wealth solid and well-rooted. There was no sign of shoddy anywhere; the old gentleman had bought the place at an enormous price, and he had left all the ancient work untouched; but he would have stables, laundry, tennis-court, and so on through the offices and outside ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... mix with no prophets so long as we both should live. Prophets, she truly said, are low-class, even dirty, persons. Their parties, their 'at homes' are shoddy. They live in fourth-rate neighbourhoods. They burn gas and sit on horsehair. Only in rare cases do they have any bathroom in their houses. Their influence would be bad for the children when they begin to grow up. How could Corona make her debut"—Malkiel pronounced ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... took me down, Mr. Baddeley, a portly gentleman, with an expanse of snowy shirt from which flashed three diamond studs. A huge gold chain reposed upon his front, and on his finger shone a brilliant of great size. Every thing about him seemed to say, "Look how real I am! No shoddy about me!" His hands were plump and white, and looked as if they did not know what dust was. His talk sounded very rich, and yet there was no pretence in it. His wife looked less of a lady than he of a gentleman, for she betrayed ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... clothing material similar to cassimere, made with a cotton warp and a filling of short, inferior, shoddy wool which is mixed with enough long wool to enable it to be spun and woven in a way to bring that filling to the surface of the cloth; afterwards fulled, sheared, and the ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... not rainy he reaches his train unscathed. But if that new suit, with "jail-bird" written all over it in characters which all detectives and police, at least, can read as they run, chance to get wet, the raw shoddy forthwith shrivels miserably up, and the wearer's ankles and wrists stick out so betrayingly that a mere child might recognize the sinister source of the garments. But, anyhow, a few days' wear will so wrinkle and crease and deform the suit that it becomes unwearable, ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... take wounded German prisoners to No. 14 hospital, about 30 kilometres away. On these occasions we always had three armed guards to prevent them from escaping. The prisoners looked like convicts with their shorn heads and shoddy grey uniforms, and I always found it very difficult to imagine these men capable of fighting at all. They seemed pretty content with their lot and often tried to smile ingratiatingly at the drivers. One day going along the sea road ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... Aleck Douglas was somewhere near, struggling vainly against the inevitable. It certainly was unbelievable that a Lorrigan should be there, master—in effect, at least—of the Douglas household, wearing the shoddy garments of Aleck Douglas, and finding them at least three sizes ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... with small, surprised, dazzled-looking, pale blue eyes, and a tangle of grizzled light hair under his chin. He was noticeable for the green smock-frock he wore, a garment which is so rapidly disappearing before the march of civilisation, and giving place to the ill-cut, ill-made coat of shoddy cloth, which is fondly thought to resemble ...
— Zoe • Evelyn Whitaker
... may call the candid speaker a boar, and shun him. He may be an outcast from their society: but, after all, his honesty and candour will wear better and longer than their sham and shoddy. His "Nay, nay," and "Yea, yea," will outlast and outshine their double-tongued prevarication and flattery. Better a boar—if you know him to be such—than a wolf in sheep's clothing. A rough friend is more valuable ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... reminds them of Hayden and Mozart. The paintings in the building are those of great masters. It took an entire year to paint the scenery for the play in 1910, but they could not afford to spend so much upon it in 1922. The curtains and costumes are of fine material, nothing shoddy or ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... warm breakfast which the good woman had, half-cooked, in the kitchen. It was eleven o'clock; and at twelve that night he entered Colonel Cranor's quarters at Paris,—having ridden a hundred miles with a rope round his neck, for thirteen dollars a month, hard-tack, and a shoddy uniform. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... stage, and Leonard was too silly—or it is tempting to write, too sound a chap to attempt them. His reticence was not entirely the shoddy article that a business life promotes, the reticence that pretends that nothing is something, and hides behind the DAILY TELEGRAPH. The adventurer, also, is reticent, and it is an adventure for a clerk to walk for a few ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... in these days of factories and of tramways, of shoddy, and of adulteration, that all life must tread with even rhythm of measured footsteps, and that the glory of the ideal could no longer glow over the greyness of a modern horizon. But signs are not awanting that the breath of the older heroism is beginning to stir men's breasts, and ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... was thrown open and Nicol Brinn entered. One who knew him well would have said that he had aged ten years. Even to the eye of Wessex he looked an older man. He wore a shoddy suit and a rough tweed cap and his left ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... impenetrable complacency, his peasant-like delight in petty vices, his capacity for hiding the harsh face of reality behind the cloak of romanticism, his general innocence and childishness. But she never envies him his puerile ego; she never envies him his shoddy ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... act, nor excite their respectful awe as much as the less harmful frenzy of one of their own medicine-men; they were NOT influenced by implacable white gods, who relaxed only to drive hard bargains and exchange mildewed flour and shoddy blankets for their fish and furs. I am afraid they regarded these raids of Christian civilization as they looked upon grasshopper plagues, famines, inundations, and epidemics; while an utterly impassive God washed ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... of the new soles contrasting with the worn, dingy uppers—the patched and mended shoes of the poor, who must wear them while upper and sole hang together. They betrayed the age and sex of the wearer as clearly as a photograph. The shoddy slipper, with the high, French heels, of the smart shop-girl; the heavy bluchers, studded with nails, of the labourer; the light tan boots, with elegant, pointed toes, of the clerk or counter-jumper; the shoes of a small child, with a thin rim of copper ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... reverence; and towards the last you have about six Sisters of Mercy, belonging St. Wilfrid's convent, who pass through the formality in a calm, easy, finished manner, and then hurry along, some with veils down and others with veils up, to a side sitting they have. There is no religious shoddy amongst these persons. They may look solemn, yet some of them have finely moulded features; they may dress strangely and gloomily, yet, if you converse with them, they will always give indications of serener spirits. Whether their ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... debt for current expenses or refusing to keep our institutions up to the standard in repairs, extensions, equipment, and accommodations. I refuse, and the Republican Party refuses, to endorse that method of sham and shoddy economy. New projects can wait, but the commitments of the Commonwealth must be maintained. We cannot curtail the usual appropriations or the care of mothers with dependent children or the support of the poor, the insane, and the infirm. The Democratic programme of cutting the State tax, by ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... these spaces more often than not cluttered and further disfigured by piles of rusty tins, old clothing and shoes and other discarded refuse. As she rode farther she saw now and then the more pretentious buildings, some with the false fronts which deceived nobody, the houses appearing shoddy and aged and sinister, one here and there deserted and given over to ruin, disintegration and spiders spinning unmolested ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... so with any other matter whatsoever that was advertised. However bad, shoddy, harmful, or even treasonable the matter might be, the proprietor was always at the choice of publishing matter which did not affect him, and saving his fortune, or refusing it and jeopardizing his fortune. He chose ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... "Broken Stowage"?) a collector of first editions, a man who stood on the bridge of the flagship at Harwich and watched the self-defiled U-boats slink in and come to a halt at the international code signal MN (Stop instantly!)—"Ha," said Mr. Green, "Were I such a man, I would pass by like shoddy such pitifuls as colyumists." But he was a glad man no less, for he knew the captain was bigger of heart. Besides, he counted on the exquisite tact of the doctor to see him through. Indeed, even the stern ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... showed him crossly where to make his mark. At a signal from his bent forefinger a negro trusty came forward and took the pardoned man away and helped him put his shrunken limbs into a suit of the prison-made slops, of cheap, black shoddy, with the taint of a jail thick and heavy on it. A deputy warden thrust into Dugmore's hands a railroad ticket and the five dollars that the law requires shall be given to a freed felon. He took them without a word and, ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... that if men can't get a little warmth and color and sympathy in the home-circle they're going to edge about until they find a substitute for it, no matter how shoddy ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... himself with the natives. He would arrive in some settlement up a river, make a present of a cheap carbine or a pair of shoddy binoculars, or something of that sort, to the Rajah, or the head-man, or the principal trader; and on the strength of that gift, ask for a house, posing mysteriously as a very special trader. He would spin them no end of yarns, live on the fat of the land, for a while, and then ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... amusing simply as a difference of idiom or costume is always amusing; just as English idiom and English costume are amusing to Americans. But about this kind of difference there can be no kind of doubt. So sturdy not to say stuffy a materialist as Ingersoll could say of so shoddy not to say shady a financial politician as Blaine, 'Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine strode down the hall of Congress, and flung his spear full and true at the shield of every enemy of his country and every traducer of his fair name.' ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... your clothes!" I cried. "Nobody will notice them here." (Which was true enough, for in those days the land was strewed with shreds and patches of the war. The drivers and conductors of street cars wore overcoats made out of shoddy army blankets, and the dustmen went about in cast-off infantry caps.) "What troubles me is that I can't wait to start ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... protectionist.[1] Ohio, which is the home of the strong protection feeling, regards the duty on wool as the corner-stone to the whole fabric. It is argued that "a cheap coat makes a cheap man." In the East the feeling is that the duty on wool makes clothing poor and shoddy, and the prices excessively high for the poor. It is odd to find that the very first thing that did make trouble was the duty on wool, and it is still making the same ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... If you live far from town and can not go to the shops look through the magazines which make a feature of dress and study what is best suited to your particular style and requirements. Study materials and buy economically, which means paying a little more if necessary rather than have shoddy goods. ...
— Armour's Monthly Cook Book, Volume 2, No. 12, October 1913 - A Monthly Magazine of Household Interest • Various
... Shoddy clouds are of little account, and soon fall to pieces. Have your clouds show a good strong fibre, and have them lined,—not with silver, but with other clouds of a finer texture,—and have them wadded. ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... grey-and-yellow uniform. I can't stand it, I tell you. I can't stand the sight of any more of these uniforms. Like a blight on the human landscape. Like a blight. Like green-flies on rose-trees, smother-flies. Europe's got the smother-fly in these infernal shoddy militarists." ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... interior has been clothed with undignified exterior of commercial character, marking a certain spirit of transition in its inhabitants. This is partly due to the ruthless American industrial invasion, which, whilst it has valuable elements for the country, should not be allowed to stamp a shoddy modernism upon the more dignified antiquity of environment. This tendency, however, has not yet had time to show itself, except in a few instances in the capital. Nevertheless, some portions of the City of Mexico have already been spoilt by the speculative Anglo-American builder, ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... and you live in precisely the same shoddy surroundings as you did when your manuscripts were responsible for an extra size in waste-paper baskets. I was surprised to hear that you were still in Walpole Street. I supposed that, at any rate, you had taken ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... vain, moreover, a very ignorant woman, a "nouvelle riche" in fact, or what might be termed in modern parlance "shoddy," without tact, sense, or savoir faire. One day at a grand reception, some of her guests desired to see her young son, of whom she was very proud, and of whose talents and virtues she was always boasting. He was sent for and came into the presence accompanied by his tutor, an Italian savant ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... wealth of the South, and it only needs intelligence to turn it into our own coffers and make it the possession of our own people. Among the whites money seems to be the sesame that opens the doors to social recognition, and converts the shoddy into a man of influence and rank. Barney Barnato, a London Jew, who began life with a trained donkey, became at length the "South African diamond king," and then all London paid homage to this despised son of a hated race. Would money thus convert our despised people ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... industry escapes unburthened, no possession unentered, no affection even, untaxed. Tax! tax! tax! is the cry from the rear! Blood! blood! blood! is the cry from the front! Gold! gold! gold! is the chuckling undertone which comes up from the mushroom millionaires, well named a shoddy aristocracy. Nor do I think the army interest, the contracting interest, and the tax-gathering interest, the worst results that have grown out of this war. There is another and equally serious interest— the revolution in the spirit, mind, and principles of the people, ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... them for several hours. The Grenadier Guards played on the lawn, and Frank was introduced to ladies of all ages and sizes; and as these bored him, he began to see that the place was vulgar and the people shoddy, and he wondered what Mount Rorke would say if he were to come suddenly across him. Grace was the subject of much concern, and obviously enceinte, she passed through the different groups. She had introduced Frank as Lord Mount Rorke's son, then as his nephew, then as his heir, and, fearing ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... not reply immediately to this odd harangue. She knew a good deal about horses, but nothing whatever about the knavery of betting, the shoddy tricks of it and the despicable spirit in which this great game is often played. Something of her father's cunning, inherited and ineradicable, led her to condone the Captain's sporting creed and not to seek understanding. The man's high spirits made a sure ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... a common practice of large proprietors, engaged on railroad or city work, to buy up horses with unsound feet, unfitted for speed or gentle service, and use them up, as old clothes are put through a shoddy-mill for what wool there is left in them. This cruel policy, under an intelligent system of shoeing, would be impossible, because the vast aggregate of foot diseases would be so abated that horses, sound in general health but creeping upon disabled hoofs, could ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... artistic & intellectual & other artificialities must be added or it isn't complete. We & the English have these latter; but as we lack the great bulk of those others I think the Boer civilization is the best of the two. My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing & full of cruelties, vanities, arrogancies, meannesses, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... from their maritime or commercial occupations with a competence, or of prosperous professional persons.[2] But a competence in those frugal days was an insignificant sum in comparison with the fortunes of our own time, scarcely approaching the annual income of the shoddy-masters, who now regulate the avenues of social and so-called aristocratic life. Indeed, I was once informed by an old inhabitant, that the richest person in the town, near the close of the last century, was assessed upon only ten thousand dollars' worth of personal ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... this man stood there on the steps, a moment, then advanced to meet a woman who was coming toward him in the August glare. As he removed his cheap, convict-made cap, one saw his finely shaped head, close cropped with the infamous prison badge of servitude. Despite the shoddy miserable prison-suit that the prostituted government had given him—a suit that would have made Apollo grotesque and would have marked any man as an ex-convict, thus heavily handicapping him from the start—Gabriel ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... seen Mr. Trimmer," mused Agnes. "I seldom go into his store, for there always seems to me something shoddy about the whole place; but to-morrow I think I shall make it a point to secure a glimpse ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... nor then frequently. A temperature at the freezing-point is to him a mere oven, which one should be a salamander to live in; with the thermometer thirty or forty degrees lower, he is still sweltered; while his custom of growing his own coat, though it saves him from shoddy, expense, and Paris fashions, has the disadvantage that he cannot strip it off at pleasure, not even when away from the ladies and the dinner-table. He is fain, therefore, to keep well away toward the Polar North, where the climate is more temperate and pleasing, leaving Newfoundlanders and Labradorians ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... that womanly women and manly men are most successfully made by way of silly, shoddy, sorry-for-themselves girlhoods, or lying, swaggering, loafing boyhoods; and it is the empty, the vulgar, the cheap, smart, trust-to-luck story, rather than the gory one, that ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... my nature; And he that comes at the end of the feast shall find something over. Whatever they want I give; though it be something else, they shall have it. Drunkard, leper, Tammanyite, small-pox and cholera patient, shoddy and codfish millionnaire, And the beautiful young men, and the beautiful young women, all the same, Crowding, hundreds of thousands, cosmical multitudes, Buss me and hang on my hips and lean up to my shoulders, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... Shoddy from Michigan Avenue, Chicago, who is finishing her education in Paris. She comes here twice a week for drawing-lessons from the antique, and also in pursuit of general information, I should think, judging ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... genuine and frequent reason for the non-acknowledgment of indebtedness to what one may call impersonal as well as personal sources: even an American editor of school classics whose own English could not pass for more than a syntactical shoddy of the cheapest sort, felt it unfavourable to his reputation for sound learning that he should be obliged to the Penny Cyclopaedia, and disguised his references to it under contractions in which Us. Knowl.. took the place of the low word Penny. Works of this ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... is a delight from every point of view, and it is a pity that such lines of architecture are not oftener followed in America. Our churches as a rule are shoddy and inharmonious affairs compared with those in England. It is not always the matter of cost that makes them so, since more artistic structures along the pleasing and substantial lines of architecture followed in Britain would in many ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... stands immeasurably higher than a mere cadet who has not been sick six months. Having only a two years' standing, I was forced to bear the contempt which I received from chronic cases, but I repaid it with interest on some evidently shoddy invalids, who were trying to work their way into society on an attack of only a few weeks duration. I remember one case, however, in which our whole aristocratic circle was swept into insignificance by a little lady, whom I saw after I left Hampton, and who didn't weigh ninety pounds. She ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... of the war, too, within the coach, and a reminder of the mode in which the recruiting service was being conducted. On one of the front seats sat a fine-looking young man, bright-eyed and keen-faced, in the shoddy uniform of a private. His conversation was at once that of a patriot and a gentleman; and it did not require many moments of unavoidable listening for the young girl to discover that he was well educated. ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... to speak more intimately to us than all the music of the continental composers, his work will be marvelled at as a new-created thing, and his pieces will appear on English programmes and displace the masses of noisome shoddy which we revel in just now. It will then be recognised, as even the chilly Burney recognised a century ago, failing to recognise much else, that "in the accent of passion, and expression of English words, the vocal ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... even when they adopt industrial methods, do not lose their sense of beauty. One hears complaints that their goods are shoddy, but they have a remarkable power of adapting artistic taste to industrialism. If Japan were rich it might produce cities as beautiful as Venice, by methods as modern as those of New York. Industrialism has hitherto brought with it elsewhere a rising tide of ugliness, and any nation which ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... even Royalty bows, but successful adventurers? And what are your millionaire manufacturers but canting hypocrites who have got their money by paying a starvation wage and giving the public advertised shoddy, a quack medicine, or a soap which smells pleasantly but is injurious to the skin? No, my dear Ewart," he laughed, as we turned into the long tunnel, with its row of electric lights, "the public are not philosophers. They worship the golden calf, and that is for them all-sufficient. ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... frontmost German defenses. I knew that stretching away to the southeast of us and to the northwest was a line some two hundred miles long, measuring it from tip to tip, where sundry millions of men in English khaki and French fustian and German shoddy- wools were fighting the biggest fight and the most prolonged fight and the most stubborn fight that historians probably will write down as having been fought in this war or any lesser war. I knew this fight had ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... money and dey'se quality, too. No shoddy upstarts dem, but born to purple, lady, born to purple. Old Gen'ral Cresswell had niggers and acres no end back dere in Carolina. He brung a part of dem here and here his son, de father of dis Colonel Cresswell, was ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... the duties on wools, wool wastes, and shoddy, which are adjusted to the rate Of 33 cents on scoured wool are prohibitory in the same measure that the duty on scoured wool is prohibitory. In general, they are assessed at rates as high as, or higher than, the duties paid on the clean ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... I was always sorry about that. I always aimed to be awful respectful. 'They're damned fine wages! A car to ride around in,—sure, merely material just like yours, but better than a strap in the subway with all the men sitting down. And clothes—not shoddy rags. Clothes! Silk things, with lace on 'em, and rosebuds. And a place to live in with trees in the lobby and a tub level with the bath-room floor, and a chaise-something-or-other.' Oh, I'd been reading! I hadn't been studying for ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... on the poor man. His wardrobe contains little or nothing that is made of wool, and he may well sigh for the mixed cotton and shoddy of earlier days. Our import duties, which do, indeed, try to spare his dinner-pail, should be made to spare his wardrobe and the modest comforts of ...
— Social Justice Without Socialism • John Bates Clark
... told her that if she put him in a school he would be changed so that she would no longer know him for her boy. For it is true that our schools are factories, with a machinery to unmake and remake, or fabricate, the souls of children much in the way in which shoddy is manufactured. You may see a thousand rags or garments of a thousand shapes and colours cast in to be boiled, bleached, pulled to pieces, combed and woven, and finally come out as a piece of cloth a thousand yards long of a uniform ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... construction of an epigram or compliment? If some of the more sensible sort grumbled that Jesuit learning was shallow, and Jesuit morality of base alloy, the reply, like that of an Italian draper selling palpable shoddy for broadcloth, came easily and cynically to the surface: Imita bene! The stuff is a good match enough! What more do you want? To produce plausible imitations, to save appearances, to amuse the mind with tricks, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... every sort. The shoddy jostle with the chic: Turk and Roumanian and Greek; student and officer ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... me of that little store. I just thought I'd laugh out loud the first time I went in there. There were packs of furs, all kinds of Indian work, hats and caps, tallow dips and more elegant candles, a beautiful piece of delaine for white women and shoddy bright stuff for the squaws, a barrel of rounds of pork most used up, but no flour, that was all gone. There was a man's shawl, too, kind of draped up. You know men wore shawls in them days; some hulled corn the Indians done, too, I saw. But to return to that first Fourth—it seemed a good ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... dying, slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter. I have read the first volume of Rob Roy, and as far as chapter XIX of Guy Mannering, and I can no longer hold my head up nor take my nourishment. Lord, it's all so juvenile! so artificial, so shoddy; and such wax figures and skeletons and spectres. Interest? Why, it is impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these milk-and-water humbugs. And oh, the poverty of the invention! Not poverty in inventing situations, but poverty in furnishing ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... happiness. This is childlike ignorance. Truth in its pure, perfect condition would simply kill them—like unadulterated drugs. They could not stand its blinding light. They could not stand the shock. Like the rest—to change the metaphor—it has to be made up so largely of shoddy to wear well ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry |
