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More "Shoddy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... It is, perhaps, superfluous to say that the rest procured at this cost was certainly not four or five times better than that easily procurable for four or five shillings; and that the luxury of this hotel appealed, not in its taste perhaps, but certainly in its effect, to the shoddy rather than to the refined demands of the traveller. Shenstone certainly never associated the ease of his inn with any such hyperbolical sumptuousness as this; and it probably could not arise in any community that did not include a large class of individuals with literally more money ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... up with any such absurdities," said Mr. Argenter. "It's confounded ruinous shoddy nonsense. Makes little fools of them all. Sylvie's got airs enough now. It won't do for her to think she can have everything ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... 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 ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... "You can't describe it. He's so cool, and stolid, and silent, that you feel shoddy and cheap, and any simple little remark doesn't seem enough to say. You try to talk up to him, and yet feel small all ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... time when, rather far away for foot travel, the Bois might be considered a driving park for the rich. It fairly blazed with the ostentatious splendor of the Second Empire; the shoddy Duke with his shady retinue, in gilded coach-and-four; the world-famous courtesan, bedizened with costly jewels and quite as well known as the Empress; the favorites of the Tuileries, the Comedie Francaise, the Opera, the Jardin Mabille, forming an unceasing and dazzling line of many-sided ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... at the Blue Villa, by Melville Davisson Post (D. Appleton and Company), and Silent, White and Beautiful, by Tod Robbins (Boni and Liveright). These two volumes furnish an interesting contrast. The subject-matter of both is rather shoddy, but Mr. Post displays a technique in the mystery story which is quite unrivalled since Poe in its inevitable relentlessness of plot based on human weakness, while Mr. Robbins shows a wild fertility of imagination ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... 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 ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... disposition of Popinot. This animal in the street, momentarily revealed by the corner light as he darted across to take position by the door, this animal with sickly face and pointed chin, with dirty muffler round its chicken-neck, shoddy coat clothing its sloping shoulders, baggy corduroy trousers flapping round its bony shanks—this was Popinot's, and but one of a thousand differing in no essential save ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... and shoddy, of display of teacups and rotten foundations—especially, too, now that the 'nexus' of 'cash payment,' which was to bind man to man in the bonds of a common pecuniary interest, is hopelessly broken—it becomes plain that the real ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... raiding the Channel. There was nothing to criticize in the manner in which the Expeditionary Army was thrown into France. Its equipment was ready and in all details fully worthy of German military organization. From arms to boots—the latter not long since a scandal of shoddy workmanship—only the best material and skill had been accepted. Its transport proved the genius of Lord Kitchener in that brand of military service. The railways leading to the ports of embarkation, together with passenger steamships—some ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... of 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
... very 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.
... spiritualism was in fact the product of strangely mingled conditions. Himself the most convinced believer in spirit among the poets of his time, he regarded the bogus demonstrations of the "spiritualist" somewhat as the intellectual sceptic regards the shoddy logic by which the vulgar unbeliever proves there is no God. But even this anger had no secure tenure in a nature so rich in solvents for disdain. It is hard to say where scorn ends and sympathy begins, or where the indignation of the ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... 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," ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... foolish female persons in New York are striving 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Maker to bless them in their day's labour, and help them to do it well. Now, all England—shopkeepers, workmen, all manner of competing labourers—awaken as with an unspoken but heartfelt prayer to Beelzebub,—'Oh, help us, thou great Lord of Shoddy, Adulteration, and Malfeasance, to do our work with the maximum of sluriness, swiftness, profit, and mendacity, ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... 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
... hand, and plundering the commonwealth of farmers by exorbitant freights on the other, dishonestly amassed colossal fortunes. And that still more baleful communion which forms such an important part of America's shoddy aristocracy, the Wall Street gamblers, they who rule "the street," paralyzing healthy business, causing panics at will, and annually sweeping to the wall, to ruin and to death numbers of victims who have been lured into their snares by deceptive ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... weather be 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 ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... your chums like to say they had a supper with a pretty actress, after the curtain went down; but they don't go into details, and own up that the 'actress' maybe never did anything on a stage but walk on in armor and carry a banner. Oh, scowl if you want to! Of course it sounds shoddy when a trapper outlines it; but it doesn't seem shoddy to the people who live like that. Then, about the time that all good girls are asleep, it is just the hour for a supper to be ordered, at just the right place ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... 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 ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... emigrant has a surplus of gold, when his capital is such as can not be dissipated on a suit of shoddy, a fortnight's lodging, and a passage across the Atlantic, the ingenious ones proceed with the Fourth Act of Open Thy Purse. "Instead of starting in New York as a peddler," they say, unfolding before him one of their alluring schemes, "why not do ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... point of revealing itself? Alas! poor Brewster's secret was one that many have striven after before and since, who did not call themselves alchemists,—the secret of getting gold without earning it,—a chase that brings some men to a four-in-hand on Shoddy Avenue, and some to the penitentiary, in both cases advertising its utter vanity. Brewster is a capital specimen of his class, who are better than the average, because they do mix a little imagination ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... but the miserable uniforms with which they had been supplied, now faded and dilapidated, with the finishing touch of destruction given to them by the perilous journey they had made, gave the politicians their first lesson on the worthlessness of "shoddy." ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... more religious than modern trade, for the shoddy maker, or the owner of overladen vessels, could hardly inscribe their vessels or their wares with the motto "Honor Deo;" nor could the director of a bubble company with strict propriety head the columns of his ledger with the solemn words, "Domine dirige nos." But these are cynical ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... 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 not be found ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... spirituals as being the most important of America's contributions to folk song. As compared with the old English and Scottish ballads, the cowboy and all other ballads of the American frontiers generally sound cheap and shoddy. Since John A. Lomax brought out his collection in 1910, cowboy songs have found their way into scores of songbooks, have been recorded on hundreds of records, and have been popularized, often—and naturally—without any semblance to cowboy style, ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... 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 that made my mouth water, ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... grovel for the shoddy goods And plod and plot and plan, And if you win the paltry prize Go prize it—if you can, But I would hurl it in your face ...
— Bars and Shadows • Ralph Chaplin
... trait of the national character is properly understood, all the German shoddy which is so much talked about seems no longer the swindling practice of dishonest tradesmen, but is simply the material expression of their ingrained Kantianism, and their congenital inability ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... with one; and a man who has been sick for five years 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, ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... she will wear it so carefully that it lasts her two years. Under-raiment she will never want to buy, as she will have brought a life-long supply to her home at marriage. You easily figure the children who are dressed on twenty marks a year, the girl in a shoddy tartan made in a fashion of fifty years ago with the "waist" hooked behind, and the boy in some snuff-coloured mixture floridly braided. But the interesting revelation of this small official budget is in ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... 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 to ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... Mrs. Knight, having finished the supper dishes and set her bread to rise, entered the shoddy parlor. Jim turned to her, shrugging his shoulders with an air of washing his hands of a disagreeable subject. "Pa's weakened again," he explained. "He ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... 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 ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... 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 harmonious pattern, smooth, glossy, and respectable. ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... the good high Toby fashion; Surely in your bosom stirs, Constable, a like compassion For our two poor cylinders; All we have is vile and shoddy; See that low-hung touring brute— There's a bonnet! there's a body ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... sacred—sacred to work; that is, to the expression of his best. Why should you 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 ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 skin at the first touch. It is a triumph indeed, to ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... and 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 he 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 ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... made his pile in pasteboard soles for army shoes and sent more boys to the grave from disease than had been killed in battle, touched elbows with the hook-nosed vulture who was sporting a diamond pin bought with the profits of shoddy clothes that had proven a shroud for many a brave soldier sleeping in a ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... himself to a state of intellectual nakedness, until such time as he could satisfy himself which were fit to be worn. He thought a bare skin healthier than the most respectable and well-cut clothing of what might, possibly, be mere shoddy. ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... ingratiate 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, ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... 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
... 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 ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... MYRA,—Here's the 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 ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... the bolt was old, and the woodwork crumbling; the lock was new and shoddy. But I have ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... the world will speak two or three great languages, when all little tongues will be extinct and all little peoples swallowed up, when all costume will be reduced to a dead level of blue jeans and shoddy and all strange customs abolished. The world will be a much less interesting world then; the spice and savour of the ends of the earth will be gone. Nor does it always appear unquestionable that the world will be the ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... town remains. A century after this 'twas lost, In Mary's reign. Oh! what a frost. Weaving In thirteen-three-one England's taught 1331 Weaving by men from Flanders brought. Ryghte goode cloth with lots of 'body' The world was then not up to 'shoddy.' Blanket of Bristol in this year Invented blankets for our cheer; And since that time its been our boast Our beds have been as warm as toast. Edward 'Black Prince' One-three-four-six, A brave and noble warrior, 'licks' Crecy The valiant French in Crecy's fray; ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... been added to the body of the old house, but there was nothing vulgar or 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 buildings, fitted out according to ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... the poor pay highly for it; still it is comforting to know that in this one direction the poor are supplied with good articles. And the poor respect their machines, as the poor always respect things that are not shoddy. ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... a little silver gong, dependent from the corner of the table, whereupon, from the curtained doorway, there entered a short, thickly built Burman whom I recognized for a dacoit. He wore a shoddy blue suit, which had been made for a much larger man; but these things claimed little of my attention, which automatically was directed to the load ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... 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.' Compared with ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... kept open house, in debt or otherwise; she had a salon, as it is called, and received a rather mixed society, for the most part young men. Everything in her house from her own dress, furniture, and table, down to her carriage and her servants, bore the stamp of something shoddy, artificial, temporary,... but the princess herself, as well as her guests, apparently desired nothing better. The princess was reputed a devotee of music and literature, a patroness of artists and men of talent, and she really was interested in all these subjects, even to the point ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... 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 profession be right or wrong, this is certain: they keep one of the ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... 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 ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 sent her. She had a wizened baby of seven months, which ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... 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 ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... 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 for a period ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... 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 impression of ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... lack of romance gives the book its title, achieves her chief social success. As for the conversation with which the Prince is credited, it is of the most amazing kind. We find him on one page gravely discussing the depression of trade with Mr. Ezra P. Bayle, a shoddy American millionaire, who promptly replies, 'Depression of fiddle-sticks, Prince'; in another passage he naively inquires of the same shrewd speculator whether the thunderstorms and prairie fires of the West are still 'on so grand ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... 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
... "pure gold" if He is to meet me there. There must be nothing vulgar about them, nothing shoddy, nothing hastily constructed, nothing thrown up anyhow. They must be chaste and sincere, ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... successful politicians but successful liars? What are your great South African magnates, before whom 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 ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... this: Lady 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 ...
— Love Letters of a Rookie to Julie • Barney Stone
... when she was 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
... 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 to lose men. When we become soldiers, we know ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... 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 ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... detection. Under early conditions foodstuffs or other goods were consumed if not by the producer, at least by his neighbors; and any adulteration or sham was a dangerous matter. Today we seldom know who slaughtered the meat or canned the fruit we eat, who made the clothing or utensils we use; shoddy articles and unwholesome food can be sold in quantity with little fear of the consumer's anger. All sorts of intangible and hardly traceable injuries can be wrought today by malicious or careless men injuries to reputation, to credit, to success. In a ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... the pious who poison the poor man's food In shoddy and shop grow golden and grand: How the rent-roll harbours the stolen rood— The emblazoned escutcheon the bloody hand: How women and men to the altar hie, And swear to the promise they rarely keep; How Vice, a shameless and living lie, Gets honours ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... 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 ...
— 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
... a surprisingly low figure; when it is delivered you have every reason to suppose that it is like what you bought in appearance alone. A roll of cloth marked "all wool," it is half cotton, and the rest shoddy. The business lie, though found so often, is never the friend of merchant or purchaser. It is the foe of all honest transactions. Office, salesroom and storehouse would be better without it; proprietor, clerk and purchaser would thrive better if ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... 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 ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... 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 ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... crowds of children making the road odorous with the smell of pomade; the boys with their hair too long behind; the girls with vile white stockings, all out of drawing, and without a touch that could be construed into a national costume—the cheap shoddy shop in the country lane. All with an expression of Sunday goodness: 'To-day we are good, we are going to chapel, and we mean to stay till the very last word. We have got our wives and families with ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... "what a transformation a few lights make? Who would ever think of State Street as a fairy-land? And yet, if you half close your eyes the hallucination is complete. Even the people who by daylight are shoddy and care-worn take on an appearance of romance and gaiety, and the tawdry colored lights are the scintillant gems of the garden ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a fit of tension far from rare with him, Allerton stood with his nails digging into his clenched palms and his thin lips pressed together. He was sure he was looking at a "drab." All the shoddy, outcast meanings he had read into the word were under the bedraggled feathers of this battered black hat or compressed within the forlorn squirrel-trimmed gray suit. The dragging movement, the hint of dropping on the ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... 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
... solace. But the others who love her consciously, love her as mistress or wife. For them she is more perfect than perfection, adorable in every mood, season, or attire. They love her in velvet, they love her in silk; she is marvellous in broadcloth, shoddy, or corduroy. But, like a woman, her deepest beauty she holds for the soft hours when the brute day is ended and all mankind sighs for rest and warmth. Then she is her very self. Beauty she has by day, but it is the cold, incomplete ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... 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 ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... over. At last they arrived, and we packed our patients 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
... of a Royal series of books, which should be models of good work all round. And though it is necessary that we have cheap editions, and that books should circulate everywhere, we want to save the book trade from shoddy work by keeping good models before us. That we produce the best thought in the best form, and not in any mean, shabby dress, ought indeed to be a serious aim of ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... toil on Sundays, we had to labour long and hard. We started shortly after six in the morning, but it was often about half-past six in the evening before we knocked off for the day. We took a strange and inexplicable pride in the enterprise. The fence was not built upon the typical shoddy German lines, but strictly in accordance with substantial British ideas. I may mention that we had good reason to regret this display of zeal and excellent workmanship ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... 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 labor. ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... the music was outworn and a little shoddy, instantly agreed. "Yes, it is very beautiful," and he meant it, for her pleasure in it brought back a knowledge of the charm ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... 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, ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... sources, their comparative usefulness, and their cost. We may learn whether it is best to buy American-made macaroni or the imported variety; whether French silks and gloves are superior to those made in America; what "shoddy" is, what we may expect from it if we buy it, how much it is worth in comparison with long-wool fabrics, how to know whether shoddy is being offered us when we buy. Countless other matters concerning the markets and products of the world will repay ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... with Una, in the world of business; of offices and jobs and tired, ordinary people who know such reality of romance as your masquerading earl, your shoddy Broadway actress, or your rosily amorous dairy-maid could never imagine. The youths of poetry and of the modern motor-car fiction make a long diversion of love; while the sleezy-coated office-man who surprises a look of humanness in the weary eyes of the office-woman, ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... Shoddy work is not only a wrong to a man's own personal integrity, hurting his character; but also it is a wrong to society. Truthfulness in work is as much demanded as ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... cheap board, a queer scrap to have been used even in so shoddy a job as that wall was.... Eight inches long. And set square in the center of the wall, just below the shelf and pole. If he had not been looking for something odd, however, Dundee acknowledged to himself, he would not have noticed it. Did anyone ever notice ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... loss is deducted from her wages. But who shall pay for the broken threads in life's great web? We cannot throw back and forth an empty shuttle; threads of some kind follow every movement as we weave the web of our fate. It may be a shoddy thread of wasted hours or lost opportunities that will mar the fabric and mortify the workman forever; or it may be a golden thread which will add to its beauty and luster. We cannot stop the shuttle or pull out the unfortunate ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... 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
... 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 ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... and fashionable 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
... English literature would be seriously impoverished without it. Certainly never was there a style which more fully justified the definition given by Buffon, in Sterne's own time, of style as "the very man." Falsetto, "faking," vamping, shoddy—all manner of evil terms may be heaped upon it without the possibility of completely clearing it from them. To some eyes it underlies them most when it is most ambitious, as in the Le Fevre story and the diatribe against critics. It leaves ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... past finds a world of fugitive 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 ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... is difficult for a man to become the good citizen when employed on work for which he is unfitted, it is even more difficult for the man to do so who is set to shoddy work or to ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... 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 ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... 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 ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... wriggled into "society," the stern reality remained that their compensations did not increase, because their owners sillily diminished them in what they called, maintaining their social position. "Vanity Fair" no longer existed, and the shoddy magnates no longer furnished champagne and terrapin suppers for fashionable crowds, regardless as to who composed those crowds; the strugglers for social position retired into modest quietude, and no longer aspired to be ranked ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... 'Oo are you gettin' at, Myn'eer Van Dunck?" swaggered W. Keyse. And he slipped one thin, freckled hand ostentatiously under his coat of shoddy summer tweed. A very cheap revolver lurked in the hip-pocket of which Billy was so proud. In his third-floor back bed-sitting-room in Judd Street, London, W.C., he had promised himself a moment when that hip-pocket should be referred to, just in that way. It was a cheap ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... said. The cuss-word slipped out. 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 ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... the part of wisdom to start forth on the beginning of his new career in his shapeless prison shoddy; so the next day Larry pottered about the studio, acting as maid-of-all-work, while the clothes in his trunk which had been stored with the Duchess were being sponged and pressed by the little tailor down the street, ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... the next to the glory of a sunrise, in time its reactions to beauty in every form will become habitual. If we can induce reactions, day by day, to beautiful or sublime passages in literature, in due time the spirit will refuse to react to what is shoddy and commonplace. By inducing reactions to increasingly better musical compositions, day after day, we finally inculcate the habit of reacting only to high-grade music, and the lower type makes no appeal. By such a process ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... brotherhood—a holy human empire of the World, including all races and colours in a common unity and equality—yes! But these shoddy empires based on militarism and commercialism, and built up in order to secure the unclean ascendancy of two outworn and effete classes over the rest of mankind—a thousand times no! That dispensation, thank Heaven! is past. "These fatuous empires with ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... contrary, he gave me a reference to a large bank "down town," and also to a notorious shoddy celebrity who lived "up" town,—to the former of which I went, making inquiries as to his stability. Certainly, they knew Mr Brown of Philadelphia. Had a large balance at present in their hands. As far as they were aware—must be reticent in commercial ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... 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 same breath with ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... to see that the small shops contained lucifer matches, cotton umbrellas, boots, brushes, clocks, slates, and pencils, engravings in frames, kerosene lamps, {18} and red and green blankets, all but the last, which are unmistakable British "shoddy," being Japanese imitations of foreign manufactured goods, more or less cleverly executed. The road goes up hill for fifteen miles, and, after passing Nanai, a trim Europeanised village in the midst of fine crops, one ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... eight per week. The workers are given a whole week's holiday in August, and in addition they enjoy the benefits of a non-contributory sick and accident fund, and of a 24s. per week pension fund. In these mills cloth is made from wool and wool only, not an ounce of shoddy. Here again the surplus profits, after the fixed reward of capital—viz., interest at the rate of 5 per cent. per annum—has been paid, are divided between labor and custom; and here again the capital sunk in the mills has been written down from L8,655 to L1,680. Unprofitable machinery ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... boots and 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 you ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... in; he could make a gross of apostles in plaster more quickly than a single set of twelve in terra-cotta, and the effect was just as good when painted; so plaster of Paris and unrivalled facility of execution are to have everything their own way. Already what I can only call a shoddy bishop or pope or two, I forget which, have got in among the circle of Tabachetti's saints and angels that still remains. These are many of them portraits full of serious dignity and unspotted by the world of barocco with which Tabachetti was surrounded. ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... was obliged to laugh. Then she and Maggie disappeared as if the earth had swallowed 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 ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... in Wetherford's eyes as he said: "You cannot realize what this clean, warm uniform means to me. For nine years I wore the prison stripes; then I was turned loose with a shoddy suit and a hat a size too big for me—an outfit that gave me away everywhere I went. Till my hair and beard sprouted I had a hard rustle of it, but my clothes grew old faster than my beard. At last I put every cent I had earned into a poor old horse, and a faded saddle, and once mounted ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... prevalent in parts of Yorkshire. The trade depression in the Bradford district tempted disreputable woollen manufacturers to force on their operatives the products of the factory as part payment of wages. Combers were given pieces of cloth, workers in shoddy mills bundles of rags. But this utterly inexcusable fraud, no less than its more specious complement, the employer's store, was rooted out by inspectors and factory reformers. Therefore in 1854 the Government's Commissioner was able to say that in a factory ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... Animal Fibers—Wool, Silk, Mohair. Vegetable—Cotton, Flax, Jute, Hemp. Mineral—Asbestos, Tinsel, Metallic. Remanufactured Material—Noils, Mungo, Shoddy, Extract, and Flocks. Artificial Fibers—Spun Glass, Artificial Silk, Slag Wool. Structure of Wool. Characteristics of Wool. Classification of Wool. Carpet and Knitting Wools. Sheep Shearing. Variation in Weight of Fleeces. Shipping the Fleeces. Value of ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... and the seats substantially upholstered, usually 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 ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... 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
... the Manhattan family, too—the one that made its fortune selling shoddy woolens in the ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... near a window sat Comrade Ossipon, holding his head between his fists. The Professor, dressed in his only suit of shoddy tweeds, but flapping to and fro on the bare boards a pair of incredibly dilapidated slippers, had thrust his hands deep into the overstrained pockets of his jacket. He was relating to his robust guest a visit he had lately been paying to the Apostle Michaelis. ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... matter with Bell, and telling her that Helen had the ring they had admired so much at Tiffany's the last time they were there, and then her spiteful, envious nature found vent in the remark: "I wonder at Mark's taste when only shoddy ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... was 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 basement of ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... is St. Nicholas, and lives in a brown stone house on Fifth Avenue, a great deal handsomer than he can afford, and keeps a carriage, not because he wants it, but because Mrs. Shoddy, next door, keeps one; and loves, not to be jolly himself and to make everybody else so, but to please his wife's mother. He has to give an awful pull, what with his wife's extravagance, and the high prices of Parisian ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... 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
... Everything fitted exactly into its right place, 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, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... it too," the Caterpillar replies coolly. "That Eton captain is cut out of whole cloth; no shoddy there, by Jove!" ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... that morning. My pants, when I put them on, were about six inches too long, and the sleeves of my blouse ditto. After marching all night in the rain, my trowsers only came down as far as my knees; they shrank two feet in twelve hours. Many of the men threw away their shoddy uniforms after wearing them one day, as they were totally unfit for use. They tore as easily as so much paper, and were no protection whatever from the weather. Somebody, I don't pretend to say who, made a good thing when he furnished ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... 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
... that sarongs were not being sported by the more refined class of male diners, who affected as a mass the sombre black of dinner jackets. At all Hong Kong hotels the custom is evening dress for dinner, and Peter felt shabby and shoddy in his silk suit, his ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... with very young men, almost boys. People sneered when they spoke of her. It was said that she was not so well off as she had been. Some shoddy millionaire had put her into a speculation. It had gone wrong, and he had not thought it necessary to pay up her losses. She moved from her house in Park Lane to a flat in Victoria Street, then to a little house in Kensington. Then she gave that up, ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... "It is shoddy, and artificial and false!" she protested in unwonted heat. "My poor, dear Isabelle! Adam, couldn't we make a plea for her?—tell her mother how she improves here, ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... Champneys house 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
... 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 content of wools actually imported. They ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... therefore, requires to be cut by one who is an artist at his trade. Another advantage possessed by this cloth is that it is far easier to clean than any rough-faced material. An experienced saddler has drawn my attention to the fact that the dye from skirts made of cheap shoddy material, is apt to come off and seriously injure the ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... Shoulders like these and carves like those was not quite made for pantry-sprawling; But wot's the use? Trot myself hout for 'Ebrews, or some tuppenny kernel? No, not for JEAMES, if he is quite aweer of it! It's just infernal, The Vulgar Mix that calls itself Society. All shoddy slyness, And moneybags; a "blend" as might kontamernate a Ryal 'Igness, Or infry-dig a Hemperor. It won't nick JEAMES though, not percisely; Better to flop in solitude than to demean one's self unwisely. Won't ketch me selling myself off. I must confess my 'art it 'arrers To see the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 25, 1891 • Various
... for me; Crying, I hear; and I satisfy them out of 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, Everywhere listening to my yawp ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... quantities. As most of these substances are made in this country, it is very difficult to estimate the amount of their annual production with exactness. These substances are as follows: fish-guano, meat-meal guano, dried blood, shoddy, scutch, horns and hoofs, hair, bristles, feathers, leather-scrap, &c. Of fish-guano, the total consumption per annum may be put down at about 8000 tons, of which a fourth is imported into this country, the remaining 6000 tons being manufactured ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... 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
... futility of being non-telepath. Had Mr. Macklin given me the truth or was I being sold another shoddy bill of goods? Or had he spun me a yarn just to get me out of his house without a riot? Of course, there had been a riot, and he'd been expecting it. If nothing else, it proved that I was a valuable bit of material, for ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... you as a common "person," and if you attempt any familiarity they look at you as much as to say: "Sir, I am not allowed to associate with any except the 400." Then they turn their backs and act so much like shoddy aristocracy that you ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... in a silk hat and a checked suit, whirling a cruel knout over the broad and noble (but bent and shuddering) back of Labor—where Boardman Robinson would have found a mother, her white, drawn face half hidden by the shoddy shawl of black, to which cling the hands of her emaciated brood—what has Wallace ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... civilization, and seek the freedom and discomfort of the woods, is explicable enough; but it is not so easy to understand why this passion should be strongest in those who are most refined, and most trained in intellectual and social fastidiousness. Philistinism and shoddy do not like the woods, unless it becomes fashionable to do so; and then, as speedily as possible, they introduce their artificial luxuries, and reduce the life in the wilderness to the vulgarity of a well-fed ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... a living, and they can afford to devote more labour to their produce than they could possibly do if they depended upon it for subsistence. The case was the same with the home-products of earlier times, and compared with them the newer factory-product was shoddy; because, if the manufacturer was to earn a living from his industry he must produce a certain quantity within a limited time. These by-products of the home were enabled to hold their own against the factory products until the development of ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... was taking on a permanent character. In spite of waste, shoddy work, and frequent fires, its vitality was triumphant. The sand hills had all been graded flat, and the material from them had filled in the water lots of the bay; miles of fireproof brick structures had been built on four or five streets; there were now ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... faintly said the stone was shoddy, But he thought that, in a pinch, he might bid fifty cents himself. There ensued a slight commotion where he could repent the notion, And Abdullah was promoted to ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... talk to the workmen themselves, you will soon learn that the rule in such factories is—never to do your best. "Shoddy pay—shoddy work!" this is the advice which the working man receives from his comrades upon ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... cultured, ripens into talent; if original and inborn, we call it genius, and the subtile anatomists of the French schools prove it by telling us that the brains of geniuses are diseased. The healthy oyster ministers only to the palate. It is the diseased oyster that secretes the pearl for Miss Shoddy's necklace. It is the diseased brain that shines through the ages, lights men on to new epochs in knowledge, and advances the race to the millennial perfection. Immortal Jean Paul, picturing himself in Schoppe, knew this. For what is all of Schoppe's ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... And then he would sit close to the lamp on one side the table and read old borrowed magazines for an hour, while I sat on the other side and darned his socks and underclothing. He always wore such cheap, shoddy stuff. And when he went to bed, I went to bed. No wastage of kerosene with only one to benefit by it. And he went to bed always the same way, winding up his watch, entering the day's weather in his diary, and taking off his shoes, right foot first invariably, left foot second, and placing them ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... 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 most curious cities I ever saw. It is like the Midway at the Fair. I want her to have 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 the "Typical Tune of Zanzibar." ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... after a few minutes' patrol of the street—a shoddy tablecloth restaurant between Fifth Avenue and Broadway. Here Key went inside to inquire for his brother George, while Rose waited on ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... "The Shoddy-Court Literary and Scientific, to be sure," said Mick; "we have got fifty members, and take in three London papers; one 'Northern Star' and two ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... increase the other branch of his business. The fabrics which he makes are good, so good that he finds it difficult to sell them in the teeth of competition. The country shops are flooded with what he calls 'shoddy.' An army of eager commercial travellers pushes showy goods on the shopkeepers and the public at half his price. Even the farmers in remote districts are beginning to acquire a taste for smartness. Some things in ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... upholstered, usually 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 smokers, always ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... shoddy new reach-me-downs as pawned old clo,' complained Lazarus Levy, who had taken over S. Cohn's business, together with his daughter Deborah, 'and he charges the Sudminster donkey-heads more than the price we ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... foodstuffs or other goods were consumed if not by the producer, at least by his neighbors; and any adulteration or sham was a dangerous matter. Today we seldom know who slaughtered the meat or canned the fruit we eat, who made the clothing or utensils we use; shoddy articles and unwholesome food can be sold in quantity with little fear of the consumer's anger. All sorts of intangible and hardly traceable injuries can be wrought today by malicious or careless men injuries ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... found 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 ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... As he thought of it he was back in the stifling little shop. Faugh! How it reeked of shoddy! Back in the whitewashed chapel, hot with the fumes of gas and fervent humanity. He heard the hymn ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... every 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, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the world of this divine secret, just on the point of revealing itself? Alas! poor Brewster's secret was one that many have striven after before and since, who did not call themselves alchemists,—the secret of getting gold without earning it,—a chase that brings some men to a four-in-hand on Shoddy Avenue, and some to the penitentiary, in both cases advertising its utter vanity. Brewster is a capital specimen of his class, who are better than the average, because they do mix a little imagination with their sordidness, and who have also their representatives among us, in those ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... different parts 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 laid the ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... furnished a substitute. He was fond of boasting he was doing double duty for his country, not only was he represented in the army, but he was doing a great work at home. This work consisted in contracting for the government, and cheating it at every turn. Many a soldier who received shoddy clothing, paper-soled shoes, and rotten meat had Mr. Harmon to thank for it. But he was piling up money, and was already known as one of the richest men in the county. When he went out with the Home Guards, he had no idea of getting near ...
— Raiding with Morgan • Byron A. Dunn
... hours, traveling only by night, he had traversed one hundred miles with a rope round his neck, and without the prospect of special reward. For he was but a private, and received but a private's pay—thirteen dollars a month, a shoddy uniform, and hard-tack, when he could ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... 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 ...
— Love Letters of a Rookie to Julie • Barney Stone
... sterling. It is, perhaps, superfluous to say that the rest procured at this cost was certainly not four or five times better than that easily procurable for four or five shillings; and that the luxury of this hotel appealed, not in its taste perhaps, but certainly in its effect, to the shoddy rather than to the refined demands of the traveller. Shenstone certainly never associated the ease of his inn with any such hyperbolical sumptuousness as this; and it probably could not arise in any community that did not include a large class of individuals with literally more money than they ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... far 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
... held 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
... 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 ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... 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 hours in darkness. You may laugh at him, you ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... with a cyclopaedia of current knowledge, glib at speechifying, ingenious in the 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, was the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... ranked alongside Negro spirituals as being the most important of America's contributions to folk song. As compared with the old English and Scottish ballads, the cowboy and all other ballads of the American frontiers generally sound cheap and shoddy. Since John A. Lomax brought out his collection in 1910, cowboy songs have found their way into scores of songbooks, have been recorded on hundreds of records, and have been popularized, often—and naturally—without any semblance to cowboy style, by ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... '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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... masterpieces. Reviewing, alas! is for the most part the record of the soul's adventures among books that are the reverse of masterpieces. What, then, are his standards to be? Well, a man must judge linen as linen, cotton as cotton, and shoddy as shoddy. It is ridiculous to denounce any of them for not being silk. To do so is not to apply high standards so much as to apply wrong standards. One has no right as a reviewer to judge a book by any standard save that which the author aims at reaching. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... original and inborn, we call it genius, and the subtile anatomists of the French schools prove it by telling us that the brains of geniuses are diseased. The healthy oyster ministers only to the palate. It is the diseased oyster that secretes the pearl for Miss Shoddy's necklace. It is the diseased brain that shines through the ages, lights men on to new epochs in knowledge, and advances the race to the millennial perfection. Immortal Jean Paul, picturing himself in Schoppe, knew this. For what is all of Schoppe's eloquent and matchless buffoonery, compared ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... his 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
... the past finds a world of fugitive 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 ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... before the war; but—[by this time he has reached the sofa where Savvy and Haslam are seated. He sits down between them; takes her hand; and drops the subject of Labor]. Well, my dear young lady? What is the latest news? Whats going on? Have you seen Shoddy's new play? Tell me all about it, and all about the latest books, and ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... must be of "pure gold" if He is to meet me there. There must be nothing vulgar about them, nothing shoddy, nothing hastily constructed, nothing thrown up anyhow. They must be chaste and sincere, and ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... as very poor manufacture, short-lived productions, the handiwork of which is as valueless as the raw material itself. Not as though platitudes always succeeded better than good works; indeed, the contrary is often the case. Neither is it that careful compositions entail more expense than "shoddy." It is often just the other way. Perhaps it arises simply from the fact that the good works demand the care, study, attention, and, in certain cases, even the mind, talent, and inspiration of every one in the theatre, from the manager ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 in which ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... everywhere, crying aloud for me; Crying, I hear; and I satisfy them out of 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, Everywhere ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... narrow and anti-social views of business life. The high development of his intelligence in relation to his own work will show him the value in his business—as in all else in life—of the standard thing, the genuine thing, the thing that will bear the test as contrasted with the shoddy, or ...
— The business career in its public relations • Albert Shaw
... associated in the minds of my friends with your hat store, understand. I won't have it. That isn't what I sent her away to an expensive school for. To have her come back and sit around a millinery workshop with a lot of little, cheap, shoddy sewing girls! Now understand, I won't have it! You don't know what it is to be a mother. You don't know what it is to have suffered. If you had brought two ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... in Late Syphilis—Gummatous Infiltration.—The essential happening in late syphilis is that body tissue in which the germs are present is replaced by an abnormal tissue, not unlike a tumor growth. The process is usually painless. This material is shoddy, so to speak, and goes to pieces soon after it grows. The shoddy tissue is called "gummatous infiltration," and the tumor, if one is formed, is called a "gumma." The syphilitic process at the edge of the ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... of what I will call the Daily Occidental. This was a paper (I know not if it be so still) that stood out alone among its brethren in the West. The others, down to their smallest item, were defaced with capitals, headlines, alliterations, swaggering misquotations, and the shoddy picturesque and unpathetic pathos of the Harry Millers: the Occidental alone appeared to be written by a dull, sane, Christian gentleman, singly desirous of communicating knowledge. It had not only this merit—which endeared it to me—but was admittedly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... endeavored to assure herself that it came merely from the 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 ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... hammocks, as he'd done since days of youth, and he queered himself with many, for he never told the truth. Oh, he thought it rather cunning if he sold a rooster old as a young and tender pullet through the artful lies he told; and he'd sell a shoddy hammock as a thing of silken thread, and the customer would bust it and fall out upon his head; so his customers forsook him, and he sadly watched them flit, and the sheriff came and got him, and that merchant ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... a girl any young man who should be less godlike 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 like wool of ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... this, sir—to 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 ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... poor pay highly for it; still it is comforting to know that in this one direction the poor are supplied with good articles. And the poor respect their machines, as the poor always respect things that are not shoddy. ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... shows that 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 ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft
... 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 ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... 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.' Compared ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... bless you! mine is sad to tell, sir; The gratitude of great men drove me downward, Reduced me to these shoddy coat and trowsers So sad ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... meantime—just look at 'em—look at 'em paying twice as much for rent as they pay up town: gouged at the company stores down here for their food and clothing; held up by loan sharks when they borrow money; doped with aloes in their beer, and fusil oil in their whiskey, wrapped up in shoddy clothes and paper shoes, having their pockets picked by weighing frauds at the mines, and their bodies mashed in speed-up devices in the mills; stabled in filthy shacks without water or sewers or electricity which we uptown people demand and get for the same money that ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... would have made a great success as the scenario for a comic opera. But as a welcome to an army, supposedly victorious, it was a dismal failure, and Archie wondered what General Aguinaldo would think when he entered the town and saw such shoddy patriotism everywhere. He hadn't long to wait, however, before seeing the famous rebel and the effect upon him of the celebration in his honour. It was about ten o'clock in the morning when he rode into the public square, followed ...
— The Adventures of a Boy Reporter • Harry Steele Morrison
... 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 ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... 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
... he does not leave him a 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
... come and get the misery of it over. At last they arrived, and we packed our patients 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 ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... 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 of Questions than have ever risen ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in the grain, His wool wus sorter shoddy; His courage wus a poorish sort, It hadn't got no body. An' when he see'd old Spense, he shook Es ef he'd see'd ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... been thought that 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 ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... if the earth had swallowed 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 ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... 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 ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... 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
... past been entirely wise and honest, have never intrigued with the Turk the one against the other, have always kept good faith, have never been inspired by false political theories and tawdry and shoddy ideals, have, in short, no responsibility for the abominations that have gone on in the Balkan peninsula for a century? No one outside a lunatic asylum would urge it. But, then, that means that diplomacy has not done all it might to prevent this war. Why does Mr. ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... 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 ...
— Zoe • Evelyn Whitaker
... the Mains. Altogether Donal's thoughts were not of the kind to put him in fit mood—I do not say to gather benefit from the prophesying of Fergus, but to give fair play to the peddler who now rose to display his loaded calico and beggarly shoddy over the book-board of the pulpit. But the congregation listened rapt. I dare not say there was no divine reality concerned in his utterance, for Gibbie saw many a glimmer through the rents in his logic, and the thin-worn ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... make a gross of apostles in plaster more quickly than a single set of twelve in terra-cotta, and the effect was just as good when painted; so plaster of Paris and unrivalled facility of execution are to have everything their own way. Already what I can only call a shoddy bishop or pope or two, I forget which, have got in among the circle of Tabachetti's saints and angels that still remains. These are many of them portraits full of serious dignity and unspotted by the world of barocco with which Tabachetti was surrounded. At the present moment ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... 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 you on ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 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 to lose men. When we become soldiers, we know that we cease to be human beings, and ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... 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 Armstrong's poise and ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... 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 ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... Respectability,' by Geoffrey Mortimer, is well worth reading, and by more of us, perhaps, than imagine it. The shoddy god has votaries in England, where one would least expect to ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... incomes in order to lodge themselves; shops in favoured quarters were let for fabulous prices, and charged fabulous prices for their wares. Cocodettes of the Court, cocottes of the Bois, wives of speculators, shoddy squaws from New York, Calmues recently imported from their native steppes, doubtful Italian Princesses, gushing Polish Countesses, and foolish Englishwomen, merrily raced along the road to ruin. Good taste was lost in tinsel and glitter; what a thing cost was the only standard ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... 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 ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... 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, who has generally ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... Blue Villa, by Melville Davisson Post (D. Appleton and Company), and Silent, White and Beautiful, by Tod Robbins (Boni and Liveright). These two volumes furnish an interesting contrast. The subject-matter of both is rather shoddy, but Mr. Post displays a technique in the mystery story which is quite unrivalled since Poe in its inevitable relentlessness of plot based on human weakness, while Mr. Robbins shows a wild fertility of imagination of extraordinary promise, although it is now wasted on unworthy material. I think that ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... dishes washed," said Mrs. Means to the bound girl, as she shut and latched the back door. The Means family had built a new house in front of the old one, as a sort of advertisement of bettered circumstances, an eruption of shoddy feeling; but when the new building was completed, they found themselves unable to occupy it for anything else than a lumber room, and so, except a parlor which Mirandy had made an effort to furnish a little (in hope of the blissful ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... this trait of the national character is properly understood, all the German shoddy which is so much talked about seems no longer the swindling practice of dishonest tradesmen, but is simply the material expression of their ingrained Kantianism, and their congenital inability to distinguish Appearance ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... turning your soiled linen over to a railroad company—all machine done of course, as everything would be under socialism, and no come-back for the garment that is not hardy enough of constitution to stand the system. In the stores is little or no shoddy material; in general the stock is the best available. If a biscuit or a bolt of khaki is better made in England than in the United States the commissary stocks with English goods, which is unexpected broad-mindedness for government management. But while prices are lower than in Panama or Colon they ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... 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 laces, even—beg a ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... What are your great South African magnates, before whom 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 Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... shook her head positively. "Old American. As old and as good as her name. You wouldn't flatter her by guessing her to be anything else. I dare say she would consider the average British aristocrat a little shoddy ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... 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
... Wetherford's eyes as he said: "You cannot realize what this clean, warm uniform means to me. For nine years I wore the prison stripes; then I was turned loose with a shoddy suit and a hat a size too big for me—an outfit that gave me away everywhere I went. Till my hair and beard sprouted I had a hard rustle of it, but my clothes grew old faster than my beard. At last I put every cent I had earned ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... watering carts and sprinklers 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. Somewhere in a window a caged bird was singing its heart ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... is in all Revolutions and upheavals, so here. A part of the people constitute the winners, in various ways, (through shoddy names, jobs, positions, etc.) while the immense majority bleeds and sacrifices. Here many people left poorly salaried desks, railroads, shops, &c. to become great men but poor statesmen, cursed Generals, and mischief-makers ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... concerning Grace's news. Rain had just begun to fall, and with it descended the smut and grime that darkened above the houses; the pavement was speedily over-smeared with sticky mud, and passing vehicles flung splashes in every direction. Odours of oil and shoddy, and all such things as characterised the town, grew more pungent under the heavy shower. On reaching the stage-door, Clara found two or three of her companions just within; the sudden departure of Miss Walcott had become known to everyone, and at this moment Mr. Peel was ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... 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 to ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... Societies. These were opened with no little curiosity. Strange to say one of the first things an old toothless Yorkshireman drew out was—a toothbrush. This caused general amusement. There was nothing shoddy about the contents of these bags; they contained a suit of pyjamas, shoes, a shirt, socks, towel, sponge bag with sponge, soap, and toothbrush in it, a hairbrush, and handkerchief. So could you but see me now, as I write, you would behold a being ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... has the Indian experienced in dealing with the whites. Indeed, you can judge of fair dealing, or want of it, when it is known that an agent came out our way to pay off annuities with blankets, etc. These were "shoddy blankets," and when one tribe was paid off with them, the agent bought them all back again with bad whisky, and went on farther, to pay off other ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle
... place after a few minutes' patrol of the street—a shoddy tablecloth restaurant between Fifth Avenue and Broadway. Here Key went inside to inquire for his brother George, while ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... 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 may run ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... 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, ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... hat, I could see nothing of her features; but from her graceful little figure and dainty limbs, I gathered that she was probably both beautiful and aristocratic. Her dress, though not perhaps of the richest quality, was certainly far from shoddy, and there was something in its style and make that suggested foreign nationality,—Italy—or Spain—or South America—or even the Orient, the probability of the latter being strengthened by her pose, which was full of the serpent-like ease which is characteristic of the East. I was ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... I gaze, 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 vulgarity coarsens the features, there ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... would have seen heavy-jowled, pig-eyed Capital, in a silk hat and a checked suit, whirling a cruel knout over the broad and noble (but bent and shuddering) back of Labor—where Boardman Robinson would have found a mother, her white, drawn face half hidden by the shoddy shawl of black, to which cling the hands of her emaciated ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... been there, to listen, to help, to solace. But the others who love her consciously, love her as mistress or wife. For them she is more perfect than perfection, adorable in every mood, season, or attire. They love her in velvet, they love her in silk; she is marvellous in broadcloth, shoddy, or corduroy. But, like a woman, her deepest beauty she holds for the soft hours when the brute day is ended and all mankind sighs for rest and warmth. Then she is her very self. Beauty she has by day, but it is the cold, incomplete beauty of a woman before she ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... rather far away for foot travel, the Bois might be considered a driving park for the rich. It fairly blazed with the ostentatious splendor of the Second Empire; the shoddy Duke with his shady retinue, in gilded coach-and-four; the world-famous courtesan, bedizened with costly jewels and quite as well known as the Empress; the favorites of the Tuileries, the Comedie Francaise, the Opera, the Jardin Mabille, ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... are incapable of understanding. And who could be charmed with such women? with such 'Grecian Bends,' Grecian noses? The genuine well-bred woman will shine out from beneath the plainest garb; and shoddy vulgarity, even should it be incased in rubies and diamonds, will only be rendered the more obvious and conspicuous to those who at a glance can discover the difference—to those who cannot be deceived, even by the radiant sparkling of these ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... pillar of discipline which thirteen months of campaigning had built into the constitution of the corps. The climax was reached on the morning of the concentration at Orange River Station. The colonel commanding the over-sea Colonials stood chatting with our brigadier. We were waiting for the shoddy platform buffet to open its hospitable doors, when suddenly we were aware of the whole of the Colonial contingent marching in correct files on to the platform. A full private was in command. He issued his orders clearly. "Halt!"—"Pile arms!"—"Stand clear!"—"Fall ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... it can be; his bread and milk, under the laws of supply and demand, are at the legal minimum of wholesomeness; the coal trade cheerfully raises his coal in mid-winter to ruinous prices. He buys clothes of shoddy and boots of brown paper. To get any other is nearly impossible for a man with three hundred pounds a year. His newspapers, which are supported by advertisers and financiers, in order to hide the obvious injustice of this one-man-fight against the allied forces of property, ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... yard and went with the messenger. The house was a mansion on Spring Garden Street. The house was inelegantly overloaded with luxurious furniture, money wasted by some inartistic purchasers. The paintings were rare and rich. The owners were shoddy. The family of seven or eight gathered by the bedside when I prayed for the dying old man. They were grief-stricken and begged me to stay until his soul departed. It was daylight before I left the bedside, and as the dying still showed that the soul was delaying his ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... object lesson of real youth Sears' fictitious imitation seemed cheap and shoddy. He leaned heavily upon his cane as he hobbled ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... days of champagne and shoddy, of display of teacups and rotten foundations—especially, too, now that the 'nexus' of 'cash payment,' which was to bind man to man in the bonds of a common pecuniary interest, is hopelessly broken—it becomes plain that the ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... 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 to protect ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... she'll like 'em. They're good gingham and real well made. We don't keep shoddy stuff. You could go into one of the big stores and get aprons for fifty, sixty cents, but ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... time for the study of food and clothing products, of their sources, their comparative usefulness, and their cost. We may learn whether it is best to buy American-made macaroni or the imported variety; whether French silks and gloves are superior to those made in America; what "shoddy" is, what we may expect from it if we buy it, how much it is worth in comparison with long-wool fabrics, how to know whether shoddy is being offered us when we buy. Countless other matters concerning the markets and ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... foundation of all righteousness. Whatever we offer for sale, whether it be our labor for wages, or goods for a price, ought to be as good and thorough as we can make it. To sell a day's work for wages, and then to loaf a part of that day, is giving a man idleness when he pays for work. To sell a man a shoddy coat when he thinks he is buying good wool, is giving him cold when he pays for warmth. To give a man defective plumbing in his house when he hires you for a good workman, is to sell him disease and death, and take pay for it. Selling adulterated drugs and groceries is giving a man a stone ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... fit of tension far from rare with him, Allerton stood with his nails digging into his clenched palms and his thin lips pressed together. He was sure he was looking at a "drab." All the shoddy, outcast meanings he had read into the word were under the bedraggled feathers of this battered black hat or compressed within the forlorn squirrel-trimmed gray suit. The dragging movement, the hint of dropping on the seat not from fatigue but from ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... in the manner in which the Expeditionary Army was thrown into France. Its equipment was ready and in all details fully worthy of German military organization. From arms to boots—the latter not long since a scandal of shoddy workmanship—only the best material and skill had been accepted. Its transport proved the genius of Lord Kitchener in that brand of military service. The railways leading to the ports of embarkation, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Una, in the world of business; of offices and jobs and tired, ordinary people who know such reality of romance as your masquerading earl, your shoddy Broadway actress, or your rosily amorous dairy-maid could never imagine. The youths of poetry and of the modern motor-car fiction make a long diversion of love; while the sleezy-coated office-man who surprises a look of humanness in the weary eyes of the office-woman, ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... perversion of truck was prevalent in parts of Yorkshire. The trade depression in the Bradford district tempted disreputable woollen manufacturers to force on their operatives the products of the factory as part payment of wages. Combers were given pieces of cloth, workers in shoddy mills bundles of rags. But this utterly inexcusable fraud, no less than its more specious complement, the employer's store, was rooted out by inspectors and factory reformers. Therefore in 1854 the Government's Commissioner was able to say that in a factory ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... the emigrant has a surplus of gold, when his capital is such as can not be dissipated on a suit of shoddy, a fortnight's lodging, and a passage across the Atlantic, the ingenious ones proceed with the Fourth Act of Open Thy Purse. "Instead of starting in New York as a peddler," they say, unfolding before him one of their alluring schemes, "why not do so as a merchant?" And the emigrant opens his ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... and the surf boomed louder and nearer, and the faint moon-path stretched farther and farther toward the smudgy sky-line, city-going street-cars began to fill with sunburned passengers, and motors began to purr out of the narrow side streets lined with shoddy buildings which housed the summer sojourners. One more Sunday night's revelry was tapering off into shouted farewells, clanging gongs, honking horns and the shuffling of tired ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... 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
... in a shoddy suit and limp straw hat who had tears in his eyes and no courage to make inquiries of station officials because he spoke no word of French. I asked on his behalf and after jostling for half an hour in the crowd and speaking to a dozen porters who shrugged their shoulders and said, "Je n'en ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... 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 property. But I think there must ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... At 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 ...
— Youth • Isaac Asimov
... 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 ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... 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
... 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 concern that ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... Old Shoddy sits in his easy-chair, And cracks his jokes and drinks his ale, Dumb to the shivering soldier's prayer, Deaf to the widows' and orphans' wail. His coat is warm as the fleece unshorn; Of a 'golden fleece' he is dreaming still: And the music that lulls him, night and morn, Is the hum-hum-hum ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... enormous sum of money was spent in purchasing a change in the law of succession, and the new title of khedive; in disastrous Abyssinian campaigns; in multiplying shoddy palaces, and in personal extravagance, which combined Oriental profusion with the worst taste of the Second Empire. Useless works engaged the corvee; the fellaheen were evicted from vast tracts, which became ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... walked into their midst Grishka Chelkash, an old hunted wolf, well known to all the dock population as a hardened drunkard and a bold and dexterous thief. He was barefoot and bareheaded, clad in old, threadbare, shoddy breeches, in a dirty print shirt, with a torn collar that displayed his mobile, dry, angular bones tightly covered with brown skin. From the ruffled state of his black, slightly grizzled hair and the dazed ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... my conviction of the amazing future ahead of the book business. But I tell you that future lies not merely in systematizing it as a trade. It lies in dignifying it as a profession. It is small use to jeer at the public for craving shoddy books, quack books, untrue books. Physician, cure thyself! Let the bookseller learn to know and revere good books, he will teach the customer. The hunger for good books is more general and more insistent than you would dream. But ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... wearily, as suited a drudge to whom respite from drudgery brought no earnest of ease or pleasure. The burning air beat up into her downcast face from sun-baked stones that scorched through the soles of her shoddy shoes, and she gulped down acrid mouthfuls of it ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... remains. A century after this 'twas lost, In Mary's reign. Oh! what a frost. Weaving In thirteen-three-one England's taught 1331 Weaving by men from Flanders brought. Ryghte goode cloth with lots of 'body' The world was then not up to 'shoddy.' Blanket of Bristol in this year Invented blankets for our cheer; And since that time its been our boast Our beds have been as warm as toast. Edward 'Black Prince' One-three-four-six, A brave and noble warrior, 'licks' ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... trench, its butt on the firing-step just out of water, the private proceeded painstakingly to examine the person of the prisoner; in course of which process he unbuttoned and threw open the gray overcoat, exposing a shapeless tunic and trousers of shoddy ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... said another. "I know that, because I was in Shoddy's shop to-day, and he asked me to tell Batchelor the things were sold for ready money and no tick. Do you hear that, Batchelor? that's what he says, and you'd better attend to it, I can ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... meant the Manhattan family, too—the one that made its fortune selling shoddy woolens in the Civil ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... cordiality, according to the clothes we wear, or the entertainments we are able to give. With such people money means everything, brains and breeding being secondary considerations. And it is very amusing on meeting Madam Shoddy to note the look with which she scans one from head to foot, balancing in her mind the cost of each article of apparel, her mind wholly given up to dollars and cents, and woe unto the person, who does not come up to the proper standard, ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... Society's shoddy geometry gives a short-cut for "my lady's maid" to become "my lady." She surely knows "how to dress." The lady who entertains well, in some cases does so with long experience as a successful ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... kept a shoddy mill In starving Lancashire; And shaved the Yankees shamefully For many and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a man to become the good citizen when employed on work for which he is unfitted, it is even more difficult for the man to do so who is set to shoddy work or to ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... 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 ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... She had only the shoddy-looking brown traveling dress to wear, and the out-of-date hat. But she put them on, and ventured downstairs, intent upon going out ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... best, insure but a bare existence. And in the lean years, which are the seventh years—the years of the rabbit plague—starvation stalks in the teepees, and gaunt, sunken-eyed forms, dry-lipped, and with the skin drawn tightly over protruding ribs, stiffen between shoddy blankets. For even the philosophers of the land of God and the H.B.C. must eat to live—if not this week, at least once ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... 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 hen 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 stick, An' ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... doubt is treason to some minds. The time threatens when all the world will speak two or three great languages, when all little tongues will be extinct and all little peoples swallowed up, when all costume will be reduced to a dead level of blue jeans and shoddy and all strange customs abolished. The world will be a much less interesting world then; the spice and savour of the ends of the earth will be gone. Nor does it always appear unquestionable that the world will be the better ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... must inquire into the young man's character and habits; but if Mr. Floyd Grandon is a sample of the manhood of the family, there can be no trouble on that score. Grandon Park is aristocratic, undeniably elegant, and, so far as he can see, less given to "shoddy" than many of ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... (redundancy) 641. vanitas vanitatum[Lat], vanity, inanity, worthlessness, nugacity[obs3]; triviality &c. (unimportance) 643. caput mortuum[Lat][obs3], waste paper, dead letter; blunt tool. litter, rubbish, junk, lumber, odds and ends, cast-off clothes; button top; shoddy; rags, orts[obs3], trash, refuse, sweepings, scourings, offscourings[obs3], waste, rubble, debris, detritus; stubble, leavings; broken meat; dregs &c. (dirt) 653; weeds, tares; rubbish heap, dust ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... again while the train was going slowly, and saw a teamster's camp: three or four wagons covered with tarpaulins which hung down in the mud all round and suggested death. A long, narrow man, in a long, narrow, shoddy overcoat and a damp felt hat, was walking quickly along the road past the camp. A sort of cattle-dog glided silently and swiftly out from under a wagon, "heeled" the man, and slithered back without explaining. ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... 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 ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... Domain 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 of the brace-straps; and they seemed to blame ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... those quite unaware of it. It struck him forcibly, while he went along, how very queer it was that with so many plain people in the country, the population managed to keep up even as well as it did. To his wonderfully keen sense of defect, it seemed little short of marvellous. A shambling, shoddy crew, this crowd of shoppers and labor demonstrators! A conglomeration of hopelessly mediocre visages! What was to be done about it? Ah! what indeed!—since they were evidently not aware of their own dismal mediocrity. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... pump the blood to my face with a rush. It was an insult—a shame, first hand. A shoddy plaster, applied to me—to me, Frank Beeson, a gentleman, whether to be viewed as a plucked greenhorn or not. With cheeks twitching I managed to read the lines accompanying ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... water shareholder; his gas is as cheap in quality and dear in price as it can be; his bread and milk, under the laws of supply and demand, are at the legal minimum of wholesomeness; the coal trade cheerfully raises his coal in mid-winter to ruinous prices. He buys clothes of shoddy and boots of brown paper. To get any other is nearly impossible for a man with three hundred pounds a year. His newspapers, which are supported by advertisers and financiers, in order to hide the obvious injustice of this one-man-fight against the allied ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... 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 conscious importance. I found afterwards that he ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... horse-hair in stuffing cushions. The shell, cut in half, supplies good cups, and is artistically carved by the Polynesians, Japanese, Hindoos, and other benighted heathen, who have not yet learnt the true methods of civilised machine-made shoddy manufacture. The leaves serve as excellent thatch; on the flat blades, prepared like papyrus, the most famous Buddhist manuscripts are written; the long mid-ribs or branches (strictly speaking, the leaf-stalks) answer admirably for rafters, posts, or fencing; the fibrous sheath ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... intellectual nakedness, until such time as he could satisfy himself which were fit to be worn. He thought a bare skin healthier than the most respectable and well-cut clothing of what might, possibly, be mere shoddy. ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... has a surplus of gold, when his capital is such as can not be dissipated on a suit of shoddy, a fortnight's lodging, and a passage across the Atlantic, the ingenious ones proceed with the Fourth Act of Open Thy Purse. "Instead of starting in New York as a peddler," they say, unfolding before him one of their alluring schemes, "why not do so as a merchant?" And the emigrant ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... shop-girl because you have the habit. There is no type; but a perverse generation is always seeking a type; so this is what the type should be. She has the high-ratted pompadour, and the exaggerated straight-front. Her skirt is shoddy, but has the correct flare. No furs protect her against the bitter spring air, but she wears her short broadcloth jacket as jauntily as though it were Persian lamb! On her face and in her eyes, remorseless type-seeker, is the typical shop-girl expression. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... mean? Does it mean that the European Powers have in the past been entirely wise and honest, have never intrigued with the Turk the one against the other, have always kept good faith, have never been inspired by false political theories and tawdry and shoddy ideals, have, in short, no responsibility for the abominations that have gone on in the Balkan peninsula for a century? No one outside a lunatic asylum would urge it. But, then, that means that diplomacy has not done all it might ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... everybody knows, but almost everywhere, it is triumphant: and that English literature would be seriously impoverished without it. Certainly never was there a style which more fully justified the definition given by Buffon, in Sterne's own time, of style as "the very man." Falsetto, "faking," vamping, shoddy—all manner of evil terms may be heaped upon it without the possibility of completely clearing it from them. To some eyes it underlies them most when it is most ambitious, as in the Le Fevre story and the diatribe against critics. It leaves the court ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... was growing, it was taking on a permanent character. In spite of waste, shoddy work, and frequent fires, its vitality was triumphant. The sand hills had all been graded flat, and the material from them had filled in the water lots of the bay; miles of fireproof brick structures had been built on four or ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... a medley of worn school-books—old-fashioned geographies and histories and foreign conversation grammars; of mouldy novels, many in French and Italian; of illustrated lives of actresses, prime donne, and celebrated courtezans. Most of the novels and non-scholastic books were of a shoddy, sensational type. Here, then, he had evidently stumbled across the source of Cleo's early mental nourishment; this was the literature with which her nature had found affinity. In nearly every book he took down ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... 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 ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... twenty-five cent felt hat, Susan's adorned with a blue ribbon, Etta's with a bunch of faded roses; a blue cotton blouse patched under the arms with stuff of a different shade; an old misshapen corset that cost forty-nine cents in a bargain sale; a suit of gray shoddy-and-wool underwear; a pair of fifteen-cent stockings, Susan's brown, Etta's black; a pair of worn and torn ties, scuffed and down at the heel, bought for a dollar and nine cents; a dirt-stained dark blue jacket, Susan's lacking one button, Etta's lacking three ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... resentfully. At 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
... should have dreamt of leaving to them before the war; but—[by this time he has reached the sofa where Savvy and Haslam are seated. He sits down between them; takes her hand; and drops the subject of Labor]. Well, my dear young lady? What is the latest news? Whats going on? Have you seen Shoddy's new play? Tell me all about it, and all about the latest books, ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... for sale, let him say: There! That is the best that I can do! It is not what I tried to make of it—the thing of my dreams—but it is the very best which, under the given conditions, I could produce. Then the shoddy side of trade ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... 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
... 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" ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... 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 that made my mouth water, so ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... silversmiths, jewellers, milliners, furniture and piano dealers, and music and booksellers. Landowners, land speculators, builders and the carrying trade have also suffered." We may also notice that in the early months of the war Florence, the great market of the shoddy "souvenir" and the "tourist's delight," suffered a good deal more than London, although Italy still remained neutral. In London itself a good example of the parasitic industry are the firms which make ingeniously useless silver toys for rich people to give ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... secured by increasing the bonded 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 ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... of tension far from rare with him, Allerton stood with his nails digging into his clenched palms and his thin lips pressed together. He was sure he was looking at a "drab." All the shoddy, outcast meanings he had read into the word were under the bedraggled feathers of this battered black hat or compressed within the forlorn squirrel-trimmed gray suit. The dragging movement, the ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... 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 reasons for them. Sir ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 and told a wonderful story which he ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... 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 labor. From him I gathered a ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... 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 ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... 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 ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... deal table near a window sat Comrade Ossipon, holding his head between his fists. The Professor, dressed in his only suit of shoddy tweeds, but flapping to and fro on the bare boards a pair of incredibly dilapidated slippers, had thrust his hands deep into the overstrained pockets of his jacket. He was relating to his robust guest a visit he had lately been paying ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... silver gong, dependent from the corner of the table, whereupon, from the curtained doorway, there entered a short, thickly built Burman whom I recognized for a dacoit. He wore a shoddy blue suit, which had been made for a much larger man; but these things claimed little of my attention, which automatically was directed to the load beneath ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... Mrs. Potiphar, shoddy of shoddys. Purse-proud, affected, pretentious and ambitious, and even less fit for her position than her husband for his.—George ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... 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 ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... man who should be less godlike 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 like ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... to dwell 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 ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... always be but crudely carven bone, the jades the potter's sham, the musk and aloes the product of a soap factory, the joss but a cigar-store Indian, and the Oriental dainties of Hong Fah the scrappings of a Yankee grocery store. Yet behind the shoddy tinsel of Doyers and Pell Streets, as behind Alice's looking-glass, there is another Chinatown—a strange, inhuman, Oriental world, not necessarily of trapdoors and stifled screams, but one moved by influences undreamed of ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... 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 ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... 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, ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... high-tension intellect of yours and see what you can pick up. Remember, I shall expect results 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, ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... 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
... 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 grasping ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... 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 ...
— Zoe • Evelyn Whitaker
... 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 ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... answered becomingly; but, to use a common phrase, he does not leave him a 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
... be esteemed first-rate. No doubt this last is a 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 convenient ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... her to have 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 the "Typical Tune of Zanzibar." You will see by our route that we spend ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... 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 begins ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... that no 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, that terrible ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... the 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, ...
— Hunting Sketches • Anthony Trollope
... 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
... want of them. On one occasion, we are told, a consignment of shoes for the soldiers turned out to be in women's sizes. Improper inspections resulted in high profits, for the army contractors made uniforms out of shoddy and leather accouterments from paper, filled the cores of hay bales with kale stocks and cheated the Government right and left ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... heart 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 harmonious pattern, smooth, glossy, ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... 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 laces, even—beg ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... heart of Norway. The humor which had been 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 ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... superfluous to say that the rest procured at this cost was certainly not four or five times better than that easily procurable for four or five shillings; and that the luxury of this hotel appealed, not in its taste perhaps, but certainly in its effect, to the shoddy rather than to the refined demands of the traveller. Shenstone certainly never associated the ease of his inn with any such hyperbolical sumptuousness as this; and it probably could not arise in any ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... 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 things that accent the divergencies ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... 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 sent ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... ozokerite, so far 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
... 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
... counter at the same figure. You bargain for a piece of furniture at a surprisingly low figure; when it is delivered you have every reason to suppose that it is like what you bought in appearance alone. A roll of cloth marked "all wool," it is half cotton, and the rest shoddy. The business lie, though found so often, is never the friend of merchant or purchaser. It is the foe of all honest transactions. Office, salesroom and storehouse would be better without it; proprietor, clerk and purchaser would thrive ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... Go down into the dark markets of the town. See the long, narrow, sordid streets lined with the cheap commodities of the poor. Mark how there is a sort of spangled gaiety, a reckless swing, a grinning exultation in the grimy, sordid caravanserai. The cheap colours of the shoddy open-air clothing-house, the blank faded green of the coster's cart; the dark bluish-red of the butcher's stall—they all take on a value not their own in the garish lights flaring down the markets of the dusk. Pause to the shrill music of the street musician, hear the tuneless ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... grinning at him. He went 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 ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... 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
... the amazing future ahead of the book business. But I tell you that future lies not merely in systematizing it as a trade. It lies in dignifying it as a profession. It is small use to jeer at the public for craving shoddy books, quack books, untrue books. Physician, cure thyself! Let the bookseller learn to know and revere good books, he will teach the customer. The hunger for good books is more general and more insistent than you would dream. But ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... too," the Caterpillar replies coolly. "That Eton captain is cut out of whole cloth; no shoddy there, by Jove!" ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... 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 ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... the 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 into ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... of revealing itself? Alas! poor Brewster's secret was one that many have striven after before and since, who did not call themselves alchemists,—the secret of getting gold without earning it,—a chase that brings some men to a four-in-hand on Shoddy Avenue, and some to the penitentiary, in both cases advertising its utter vanity. Brewster is a capital specimen of his class, who are better than the average, because they do mix a little imagination with their sordidness, and who have also their representatives among us, in those who expect ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... through watering stock on the one hand, and plundering the commonwealth of farmers by exorbitant freights on the other, dishonestly amassed colossal fortunes. And that still more baleful communion which forms such an important part of America's shoddy aristocracy, the Wall Street gamblers, they who rule "the street," paralyzing healthy business, causing panics at will, and annually sweeping to the wall, to ruin and to death numbers of victims who have been lured into their snares by deceptive reports industriously circulated and extensively ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... to the workmen themselves, you will soon learn that the rule in such factories is—never to do your best. "Shoddy pay—shoddy work!" this is the advice which the working man receives from his comrades upon entering such ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... dosed with too much religion. Life is to be learned from life, and the professional moralist is at best but a manufacturer of shoddy wares. At the ultimate remove, God or the life force, if anything, is an equation, and at its nearest expression for man—the contract social—it is that also. Its method of expression appears to be that of generating the individual, in all ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... feelings. With ships it is not so. Much as they are to us, they are nothing to each 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 ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... faculty of his, was 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 basement ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... around? Not 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)
... and he queered himself with many, for he never told the truth. Oh, he thought it rather cunning if he sold a rooster old as a young and tender pullet through the artful lies he told; and he'd sell a shoddy hammock as a thing of silken thread, and the customer would bust it and fall out upon his head; so his customers forsook him, and he sadly watched them flit, and the sheriff came and got him, and that merchant ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... though to suggest such a doubt is treason to some minds. The time threatens when all the world will speak two or three great languages, when all little tongues will be extinct and all little peoples swallowed up, when all costume will be reduced to a dead level of blue jeans and shoddy and all strange customs abolished. The world will be a much less interesting world then; the spice and savour of the ends of the earth will be gone. Nor does it always appear unquestionable that ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... on the theory that "an even exchange is no robbery." But so long as brains are not bartered for a title, or beauty sacrificed for a pedigree, we should not complain. Of money, there is plenty in America; and, while marquises are in the market, let Shoddy continue to pipe for its own. A fig for Macbeth's philosophy that "blood will have blood." We modify it in these degenerate days to "blood will ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... 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, who has ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... togs, by the way, make me feel rather shoddy and slattern. I intend to swing in a little stronger for personal adornment, as soon as we get things going again. When a woman gives up, in that respect, she's surely a goner. And I may be a hard-handed ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... yet she kept open house, in debt or otherwise; she had a salon, as it is called, and received a rather mixed society, for the most part young men. Everything in her house from her own dress, furniture, and table, down to her carriage and her servants, bore the stamp of something shoddy, artificial, temporary,... but the princess herself, as well as her guests, apparently desired nothing better. The princess was reputed a devotee of music and literature, a patroness of artists and men of ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... unlovely walls, 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
... 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 appeal to her. ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... disappeared as if the earth had swallowed 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 ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... 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 his hands of the means he had employed, and even encouraged the ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... a microcosm, and 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 he 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 ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... emerged as the fortunate island of Great Britain, or that he had reached a heaven on earth where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal,—or if they do, never think of denying that they have done it. But this was a generation ago, when the noun "shoddy," and the verb "to scamp," had not grown such familiar terms to English ears as they are to-day. Emerson saw the country on its best side. Each traveller makes his own England. A Quaker sees chiefly broad brims, and the island looks to him ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Why should you 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 ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... triumphant: and that English literature would be seriously impoverished without it. Certainly never was there a style which more fully justified the definition given by Buffon, in Sterne's own time, of style as "the very man." Falsetto, "faking," vamping, shoddy—all manner of evil terms may be heaped upon it without the possibility of completely clearing it from them. To some eyes it underlies them most when it is most ambitious, as in the Le Fevre story and the diatribe against critics. ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... last they arrived, and we packed our patients 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
... along, too, ef you're a mind, when you git the dishes washed," said Mrs. Means to the bound girl, as she shut and latched the back door. The Means family had built a new house in front of the old one, as a sort of advertisement of bettered circumstances, an eruption of shoddy feeling; but when the new building was completed, they found themselves unable to occupy it for anything else than a lumber room, and so, except a parlor which Mirandy had made an effort to furnish a little ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... take lines that were stilted and shoddy and speak them in a way to make them sound natural and distinctive and real. She was a clear blonde, but her speaking voice had in it a contralto note that usually ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... abd Almahdi faintly said the stone was shoddy, But he thought that, in a pinch, he might bid fifty cents himself. There ensued a slight commotion where he could repent the notion, And Abdullah was promoted to the ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... which is now closing its gilded gates, dismissing the slaves of pleasure to the bitter waters of the German springs and gaming-tables. I have seen our people put aside for Madame de Lhuile de Petrole and the great M. Caligula Shoddy. The beauties of the season have been 'calculating' and 'going round' in the best salons, and they have themselves given some of the most successful entertainments we have had. Dixie's land has been fairyland. Strange and gorgeous Princesses from the East have ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... 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 like wool of ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... 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 in which he ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... goods were fixed for him by the guild. He might not work elsewhere than in his shop, because of the difficulty of supervising him, nor might he work by artificial light, lest he turn out badly finished goods. Everything made by him was carefully inspected to see if it contained shoddy materials or showed poor workmanship. Failure to meet the test meant a heavy fine or perhaps expulsion from the guild. Thus the industrial monopoly possessed by the craft guild gave some protection ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... used varies from 7 per cent. with the best wools to 15 per cent. with shoddy wools. The scouring agents generally used are the same as those used in loose wool scouring, namely, carbonate of soda for coarse woollen yarns, soap and soda for medium yarns, and soap and ammonia for fine yarns. Prior to treating the yarns it is best to ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... have made a great success as the scenario for a comic opera. But as a welcome to an army, supposedly victorious, it was a dismal failure, and Archie wondered what General Aguinaldo would think when he entered the town and saw such shoddy patriotism everywhere. He hadn't long to wait, however, before seeing the famous rebel and the effect upon him of the celebration in his honour. It was about ten o'clock in the morning when he rode into the public square, followed by about two hundred ragged Filipinos, armed with ...
— The Adventures of a Boy Reporter • Harry Steele Morrison
... addled eggs; the tailor sells me shoddy, I'm only a consumer, and I am not anybody. The cobbler pegs me paper soles, the dairyman short-weights me, I'm only a consumer, and most everybody hates me. There's turnip in my pumpkin pie and ashes in my pepper, The world's my lazaretto, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... by Geoffrey Mortimer, is well worth reading, and by more of us, perhaps, than imagine it. The shoddy god has votaries in England, where one would least ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... with her old contented placidity, a scene in which she 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, in ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... be 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, and the man might as ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... which were hard from a softer sort; which Achilles accepted, under protest always, with an implication that he did it to oblige the donor. He had sacrificed his sleep—that was his suggestion—and he did not deserve to be put off with shoddy goods. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the point of revealing itself? Alas! poor Brewster's secret was one that many have striven after before and since, who did not call themselves alchemists,—the secret of getting gold without earning it,—a chase that brings some men to a four-in-hand on Shoddy Avenue, and some to the penitentiary, in both cases advertising its utter vanity. Brewster is a capital specimen of his class, who are better than the average, because they do mix a little imagination with their sordidness, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... merely from the 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 impression ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... that the rest procured at this cost was certainly not four or five times better than that easily procurable for four or five shillings; and that the luxury of this hotel appealed, not in its taste perhaps, but certainly in its effect, to the shoddy rather than to the refined demands of the traveller. Shenstone certainly never associated the ease of his inn with any such hyperbolical sumptuousness as this; and it probably could not arise in any community ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... 1. An exact duplicate: "Our product is a clone of their product." Implies a legal reimplementation from documentation or by reverse-engineering. Also connotes lower price. 2. A shoddy, spurious copy: "Their product is a clone of our product." 3. A blatant ripoff, most likely violating copyright, patent, or trade secret protections: "Your product is a clone of my product." This ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... This production 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 ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... 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 convenient ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... States, the only uses made of ozokerite, so far 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, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... that 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 ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... Miss Araminta 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 from her questions. Only yesterday ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... on, were about six inches too long, and the sleeves of my blouse ditto. After marching all night in the rain, my trowsers only came down as far as my knees; they shrank two feet in twelve hours. Many of the men threw away their shoddy uniforms after wearing them one day, as they were totally unfit for use. They tore as easily as so much paper, and were no protection whatever from the weather. Somebody, I don't pretend to say who, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... 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 harmonious pattern, smooth, glossy, ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... 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 ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... 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 put ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... game and forests; but not on the free grazing of sheep on the public domain. No, not even while those same sheep are busily growing wool that is so fearfully and wonderfully conserved by a sky-high tariff that the truly poor Americans are forced to wear garments made of shoddy because they cannot afford to buy clothing made of wool! (This is the testimony of a responsible ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... at this 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 hours in darkness. You may ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... think, doctor, that if we do as yo' want us we's be turnin' th' Church into a shoddy hoile?' asked ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... are those comparative lists you sent me. If I didn't know Slosson to be as honest as Old Dog Tray I'd think he had been selling us to the manufacturers. No wonder this department hasn't paid. He's been giving 'em top prices for shoddy. Now what's this new plan ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... it be so still) that stood out alone among its brethren in the West; the others, down to their smallest item, were defaced with capitals, head-lines, alliterations, swaggering misquotations, and the shoddy picturesque and unpathetic pathos of the Harry Millers: the Occidental alone appeared to be written by a dull, sane, Christian gentleman, singly desirous of communicating knowledge. It had not only this merit, which endeared it to me, but was ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... of every sort. The shoddy jostle with the chic: Turk and Roumanian and Greek; student and ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... Another advantage possessed by this cloth is that it is far easier to clean than any rough-faced material. An experienced saddler has drawn my attention to the fact that the dye from skirts made of cheap shoddy material, is apt to come off and seriously injure the leather of ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... samplers of the sixteenth 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 place in ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... school-books—old-fashioned geographies and histories and foreign conversation grammars; of mouldy novels, many in French and Italian; of illustrated lives of actresses, prime donne, and celebrated courtezans. Most of the novels and non-scholastic books were of a shoddy, sensational type. Here, then, he had evidently stumbled across the source of Cleo's early mental nourishment; this was the literature with which her nature had found affinity. In nearly every book he took down he came across ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... of champagne and shoddy, of display of teacups and rotten foundations—especially, too, now that the 'nexus' of 'cash payment,' which was to bind man to man in the bonds of a common pecuniary interest, is hopelessly broken—it ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... 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 ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... exaggerated the disposition of Popinot. This animal in the street, momentarily revealed by the corner light as he darted across to take position by the door, this animal with sickly face and pointed chin, with dirty muffler round its chicken-neck, shoddy coat clothing its sloping shoulders, baggy corduroy trousers flapping round its bony shanks—this was Popinot's, and but one of a thousand differing in no essential save degree ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... 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 you ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 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
... she confides 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
... 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 pattern printed on ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... we did have dinner? But Husband George and I had supper. And then he would sit close to the lamp on one side the table and read old borrowed magazines for an hour, while I sat on the other side and darned his socks and underclothing. He always wore such cheap, shoddy stuff. And when he went to bed, I went to bed. No wastage of kerosene with only one to benefit by it. And he went to bed always the same way, winding up his watch, entering the day's weather in his diary, and taking ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... saw it too," the Caterpillar replies coolly. "That Eton captain is cut out of whole cloth; no shoddy there, by Jove!" ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... is known in the city as "The Shoddy Society." During the time of the oil speculations, many persons were suddenly and unexpectedly made rich by lucky ventures in petroleum lands and stocks, and the shoddy element was in its glory; ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... the 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 ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... 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 vulgarity coarsens the features, there is ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... into talent; if original and inborn, we call it genius, and the subtile anatomists of the French schools prove it by telling us that the brains of geniuses are diseased. The healthy oyster ministers only to the palate. It is the diseased oyster that secretes the pearl for Miss Shoddy's necklace. It is the diseased brain that shines through the ages, lights men on to new epochs in knowledge, and advances the race to the millennial perfection. Immortal Jean Paul, picturing himself in Schoppe, knew this. For what ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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 ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... 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 to lose men. When we become soldiers, we know that we ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... grain, His wool wus sorter shoddy; His courage wus a poorish sort, It hadn't got no body. An' when he see'd old Spense, he shook Es ef he'd see'd ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... Syphilis—Gummatous Infiltration.—The essential happening in late syphilis is that body tissue in which the germs are present is replaced by an abnormal tissue, not unlike a tumor growth. The process is usually painless. This material is shoddy, so to speak, and goes to pieces soon after it grows. The shoddy tissue is called "gummatous infiltration," and the tumor, if one is formed, is called a "gumma." The syphilitic process at the edge of the gumma shuts off the blood supply and the tissue dies, as a ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... 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 is, you ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... 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 ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... Dixon's line, was a city of perpetual unrest. Besides the soldiers stationed in the encircling camps and fortifications, regiments were continually passing through the capital on their way to and from the front. Statesmen, government contractors, and shoddy politicians haunted hotel ...
— The Lost Despatch • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... stood in a row, the shining black rim 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 ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... minute and roll their eyes at you and look upon you as a common "person," and if you attempt any familiarity they look at you as much as to say: "Sir, I am not allowed to associate with any except the 400." Then they turn their backs and act so much like shoddy aristocracy that you would swear ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... king's blood in him, in fact, and the genealogy which he solemnly revealed to Foley reached into an antiquity staggeringly remote, and made Bourbons and Guelphs, Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs appear by comparison as very shoddy parvenus. He claimed descent on the maternal side from Caius Mucius, who, as Livy relates, crossed the Tiber to slay King Porsena and killed the King's secretary by mistake, a piece of business so similar to certain actions of the man who claimed him for an ancestor ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... high Toby fashion; Surely in your bosom stirs, Constable, a like compassion For our two poor cylinders; All we have is vile and shoddy; See that low-hung touring brute— There's a bonnet! there's a body Worthy of a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... picturesque, well-built, low, and uncomfortable. Part of it is as old as the time of Charles II., and part dates from Queen Anne. Something was added at a later date,—perhaps early in the Georges; but it was all done with good materials, and no stint of labour. Shoddy had not been received among building materials when any portion of Folking was erected. But then neither had modern ideas of comfort become in vogue. Just behind the kitchen-garden a great cross ditch, called Foul-water Drain, runs, ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... 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 grasping men, who, though they may gain wealth which they ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... which they breathe is tainted and unwholesome. Something has gone awfully wrong both with the men and women of America in these latter years. The fraud and demoralization of the thing they call "shoddy" has settled down upon our social life everywhere. I shudder to think of it! With a constitution made strong with fresh air from the Green Mountains, and morals consolidated in the oldest congregation of the State, I feel afraid of myself and almost weary of ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... 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 invite us in—"Come right in, boyees, ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... for pantry-sprawling; But wot's the use? Trot myself hout for 'Ebrews, or some tuppenny kernel? No, not for JEAMES, if he is quite aweer of it! It's just infernal, The Vulgar Mix that calls itself Society. All shoddy slyness, And moneybags; a "blend" as might kontamernate a Ryal 'Igness, Or infry-dig a Hemperor. It won't nick JEAMES though, not percisely; Better to flop in solitude than to demean one's self unwisely. Won't ketch me selling myself off. I must confess my 'art ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 25, 1891 • Various
... them. On one occasion, we are told, a consignment of shoes for the soldiers turned out to be in women's sizes. Improper inspections resulted in high profits, for the army contractors made uniforms out of shoddy and leather accouterments from paper, filled the cores of hay bales with kale stocks and cheated the Government right and ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... 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 not ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... 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 born. De son—I knowed him well—he ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... lost, In Mary's reign. Oh! what a frost. Weaving In thirteen-three-one England's taught 1331 Weaving by men from Flanders brought. Ryghte goode cloth with lots of 'body' The world was then not up to 'shoddy.' Blanket of Bristol in this year Invented blankets for our cheer; And since that time its been our boast Our beds have been as warm as toast. Edward 'Black Prince' One-three-four-six, A brave and noble warrior, ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... was old, and the woodwork crumbling; the lock was new and shoddy. But I have always ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... and seek the freedom and discomfort of the woods, is explicable enough; but it is not so easy to understand why this passion should be strongest in those who are most refined, and most trained in intellectual and social fastidiousness. Philistinism and shoddy do not like the woods, unless it becomes fashionable to do so; and then, as speedily as possible, they introduce their artificial luxuries, and reduce the life in the wilderness to the vulgarity of a well-fed picnic. It is ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... up one day would be only to establish a precedent for day after day of inactivity. The prevailing winds would be head winds. We clung to the shoddy hope held out by that magic name—Milk River. We knew too well that Milk River was only a snare and a delusion; but one must fight toward something—it makes little difference what you call that something. A goal, in itself, is an empty thing; all the virtue ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... hers, 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 ...
— Zoe • Evelyn Whitaker
... an unsophisticated boy, but the gift of sudden insight which is sometimes vouchsafed to children showed him all at once what shoddy humanity the quack was made of. There was to be no intellectual light from this source. The leaves dropped from his imaginary crown of laurel; he turned to a gate, leant against it, ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... 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 ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... exclaimed Harriet, "what a transformation a few lights make? Who would ever think of State Street as a fairy-land? And yet, if you half close your eyes the hallucination is complete. Even the people who by daylight are shoddy and care-worn take on an appearance of romance and gaiety, and the tawdry colored lights are the scintillant gems of the garden ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... 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 ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... truck was prevalent in parts of Yorkshire. The trade depression in the Bradford district tempted disreputable woollen manufacturers to force on their operatives the products of the factory as part payment of wages. Combers were given pieces of cloth, workers in shoddy mills bundles of rags. But this utterly inexcusable fraud, no less than its more specious complement, the employer's store, was rooted out by inspectors and factory reformers. Therefore in 1854 the Government's Commissioner was able to say that in a factory district like Lancashire ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... 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 Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... can pick up. Remember, I shall expect results 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 ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... his ride, though not in money. He limped as he walked off, and the gray pallor of his unshaven face was grotesquely shaded and blotched with coal dust. His shoddy clothes were torn and mud-stained, his soft hat begrimed and shapeless, his cheap shoes too far gone for repair. Yet for all his shiftless footwear and his limp, his stride was long ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... 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. Somewhere in a window a caged bird ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... affects 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 is becoming ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... 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 Armstrong's poise and ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... bone, the jades the potter's sham, the musk and aloes the product of a soap factory, the joss but a cigar-store Indian, and the Oriental dainties of Hong Fah the scrappings of a Yankee grocery store. Yet behind the shoddy tinsel of Doyers and Pell Streets, as behind Alice's looking-glass, there is another Chinatown—a strange, inhuman, Oriental world, not necessarily of trapdoors and stifled screams, but one moved by influences undreamed of in our banal philosophies. ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... money, but I draw the line on coonskins. The Hawkinses always have coonskins. I believe they breed coons, but they can't trade their odoriferous pelts to me. If she has them, tell her to take them to Hackett's. He'll trade for fishing worms, if she has any, and then perhaps get more than his shoddy goods are worth. Well, here's the calomel and the goods. Get the cash or charge them. There's a letter in the C box for Seal Coble. Give it to Mrs. Hawkins, and tell her to hand it to Seal as she drives past his house. Tell her to read it to the old man. He ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... no thieving contractor, no 'helping' official, no shoddy scoundrel, no unrighteously 'commission' gathering leech, who is not quietly noted down here and there, to be duly exposed, some soon—some in after years. We know that extensive researches have been undertaken, to prepare and keep in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Rules, Examples, Explanations, etc.; gives full and practical information, in detailed order, from the stock department to the market, of the proper selection and use of the various grades and staples of wool, with the admixture of waste, cotton and shoddy; and the proper application and economical use of the various oils, drugs, dye stuffs, soaps, belting, etc. Also, the most approved method for Calculating and Estimating the Cost of Goods, for all Wool, Wool Waste and Cotton and Cotton Warps. With Examples ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... music was outworn and a little shoddy, instantly agreed. "Yes, it is very beautiful," and he meant it, for her pleasure in it brought back a knowledge of the charm it ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... 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 ...
— Social Justice Without Socialism • John Bates Clark
... are generally ranked alongside Negro spirituals as being the most important of America's contributions to folk song. As compared with the old English and Scottish ballads, the cowboy and all other ballads of the American frontiers generally sound cheap and shoddy. Since John A. Lomax brought out his collection in 1910, cowboy songs have found their way into scores of songbooks, have been recorded on hundreds of records, and have been popularized, often—and naturally—without any semblance to cowboy style, by thousands of radio singers. Two general ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... those 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 ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... intellectual gain, though to suggest such a doubt is treason to some minds. The time threatens when all the world will speak two or three great languages, when all little tongues will be extinct and all little peoples swallowed up, when all costume will be reduced to a dead level of blue jeans and shoddy and all strange customs abolished. The world will be a much less interesting world then; the spice and savour of the ends of the earth will be gone. Nor does it always appear unquestionable that the world will be the better or the happier. ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... 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 been going on for weeks now back and forth upon the River ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... patent medicines 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 ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... 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 smokers, always ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... rarely were proper arrangements made for their reception in camp. The bewildered soldiers stood for hours under broiling southern sun, waiting for rations and shelter, while ignorant officers were slowly learning their unaccustomed duties. At night they were compelled to lie wrapped in shoddy blankets upon rotten straw. Under such conditions these brave volunteers suffered severely and camp diseases became alarmingly prevalent. But the miserable makeshifts used as hospitals were so bad that sick men fought ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... I do comprehend. We old folks are not blind. When it was a matter of those foreign gentlemen, German barons, Italian counts, Austrian princes, and so on, I was extremely particular, perhaps overparticular. Their titles are so often shoddy. But I know all about you. You come from almost as good New England stock as we do. You are talented, almost famous. Besides, your attachment is of no sudden growth. It has stood the test of years. Yes, my dear Decatur, I heartily approve of you. However"—here she rested ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... invocation to the Eternal Maker to bless them in their day's labour, and help them to do it well. Now, all England—shopkeepers, workmen, all manner of competing labourers—awaken as with an unspoken but heartfelt prayer to Beelzebub,—'Oh, help us, thou great Lord of Shoddy, Adulteration, and Malfeasance, to do our work with the maximum of sluriness, swiftness, profit, and mendacity, for the ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... even exchange is no robbery." But so long as brains are not bartered for a title, or beauty sacrificed for a pedigree, we should not complain. Of money, there is plenty in America; and, while marquises are in the market, let Shoddy continue to pipe for its own. A fig for Macbeth's philosophy that "blood will have blood." We modify it in these degenerate days to "blood ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... with other human beings. It is perhaps a recognition of the fact that, though we live in time and suffer its conditions, we are immortal also and chafe under too strict a bondage to time. Our relations with other human beings ought not to be evanescent! There is something cheap and shoddy in the giving and taking of human personality on such easy soon-forgotten terms. It is not only in sexual relations that this is true. It is true of all human intercourse. The longer care and devotion of human parents for their offspring is not a physical only, but a spiritual ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... cigarette had ever been smoked in that house before, and whether the ghost of 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 ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... features; but from her graceful little figure and dainty limbs, I gathered that she was probably both beautiful and aristocratic. Her dress, though not perhaps of the richest quality, was certainly far from shoddy, and there was something in its style and make that suggested foreign nationality,—Italy—or Spain—or South America—or even the Orient, the probability of the latter being strengthened by her ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... house 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 door, ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... wanted her when she was 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 ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... Knight, having finished the supper dishes and set her bread to rise, entered the shoddy parlor. Jim turned to her, shrugging his shoulders with an air of washing his hands of a disagreeable subject. "Pa's weakened again," he ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... otherwise; she had a salon, as it is called, and received a rather mixed society, for the most part young men. Everything in her house from her own dress, furniture, and table, down to her carriage and her servants, bore the stamp of something shoddy, artificial, temporary,... but the princess herself, as well as her guests, apparently desired nothing better. The princess was reputed a devotee of music and literature, a patroness of artists and men of talent, and she really was interested ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... not paid for," said another. "I know that, because I was in Shoddy's shop to-day, and he asked me to tell Batchelor the things were sold for ready money and no tick. Do you hear that, Batchelor? that's what he says, and you'd better attend to it, I ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... traveling only by night, he had traversed one hundred miles with a rope round his neck, and without the prospect of special reward. For he was but a private, and received but a private's pay—thirteen dollars a month, a shoddy uniform, and hard-tack, when ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... showiest 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 begins to appeal ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... 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 conscious importance. I found afterwards that he was the ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... 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 used for ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... discovered by the English and exploited by the Germans now groaning over the wise tyranny of the provisions of the new Patent Act, to which ignorant people have applied the offensive term "Protectionist." Shoddy treated with aniline dyes can produce effects that overwhelm the colours of the honest old materials which owed their hues to the efforts of the vegetable and the insect. A modern manufacturer is proud when his scarlet shoddy shrieks like a steam siren. Unfortunately some of the managers ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... who shall pay for the broken threads in life's great web? We cannot throw back and forth an empty shuttle; threads of some kind follow every movement as we weave the web of our fate. It may be a shoddy thread of wasted hours or lost opportunities that will mar the fabric and mortify the workman forever; or it may be a golden thread which will add to its beauty and luster. We cannot stop the shuttle or pull out the unfortunate thread which stretches across ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... American society do also largely join in this clamor for free liquor. "The upper ten thousand," those that arrogate to themselves that they are par excellence, the elite of the nation—albeit that their assumed gentility is sometimes but a shoddy or shabby gentility—make the road from the top of society to the bottom, and from thence to hell, as short as possible, by assuming that it is ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... Grand Fleet from raiding the Channel. There was nothing to criticize in the manner in which the Expeditionary Army was thrown into France. Its equipment was ready and in all details fully worthy of German military organization. From arms to boots—the latter not long since a scandal of shoddy workmanship—only the best material and skill had been accepted. Its transport proved the genius of Lord Kitchener in that brand of military service. The railways leading to the ports of embarkation, together with passenger steamships—some of them familiar in American ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... price as it can be; his bread and milk, under the laws of supply and demand, are at the legal minimum of wholesomeness; the coal trade cheerfully raises his coal in mid-winter to ruinous prices. He buys clothes of shoddy and boots of brown paper. To get any other is nearly impossible for a man with three hundred pounds a year. His newspapers, which are supported by advertisers and financiers, in order to hide the ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... 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 ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... supernatural 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 his hands of the means he had employed, and even encouraged the faithful ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
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