"Fad" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... power. According to her doctrine of might, everything can be attained by the mightiest. British advances she answered with battleships, simultaneously provoking France and Russia by increasing her army corps. The balance of power in Europe, Germany declares to be an out-of-date British fad, invented solely in the interests of ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... kept up in some of the back streets of the town a few years back, and though it may have died out now with us those who enjoy such amusements will find the old custom observed in villages not far away.—At Handsworth, "clipping the church" was the curious "fad" at Easter-time, the children from the National Schools, with ladies and gentlemen too, joining hands till they had surrounded the old church with a leaping, laughing, linked, living ring of humanity, great fun being caused when some of the ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... made themselves familiar with the matter, there is a common and, I think, a widespread impression among people generally that Unitarianism is a new-fangled notion, a modern fad, a belief held only by a few, who are one side of the main currents of religious ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... with Spain, many years' generous mint and watermelon crops, a few long-shot winners at the New Orleans race-track, and the brilliant banquets given by the Indiana and Kansas citizens who compose the North Carolina Society have made the South rather a "fad" in Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp softly that your left forefinger reminds her so much of a gentleman's in Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a lady has to work now—the war, ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... up to-morrow night, and then we can slip away unnoticed in the dark," said the lieutenant. "I've kept tabs on the weather conditions, as it's always been a fad with me; and I'm happy to say there seems to be no storm in prospect, while the winds are apt to be favorable, coming from the east, a rare thing these fall days. So-long, boys, and here's success to our ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... to them like a report of generosity. Of course, they never stop to think that the poor creatures are much better off dead than alive, and that they really have no hold on the sympathies of others. It's a fad among rich people to weep over the poor! Some of them will probably send flowers to the funeral of that woman, and think themselves angels of light for doing it! I tell you, religion is a trade mark in all lines of business, and I've decided in the last few days that that's about ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... electrified beavers we got behind on the schedule, so that those who did not finish at Malta had to work hard to get their cards off at Constantinople, and so on through the trip. The chariot of Aurora would hardly hold their output at a single port. At the start it was a mild, pleasurable fad, but later it absorbed the victim's mind to such an extent that he thought of nothing but the licking of stamps and mailing of cards to friends—who get so many of them that they are for the most part considered a nuisance and after a hasty glance ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... want to spoil it. I don't like your fad for cutting down the bust. The neck is nothing but a connecting link between the head and the bust. Now here you have a charming and youthful head and face—let the neck at least ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... very much. Perhaps they'll also send me a lump of sugar and a walnut; it's—it's a little fad ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... indeed an unfurnished home. Good books are the fad now. They are everywhere in evidence in the up-to-date colored home. They are exhibited almost as hand-painted china was. In every inventory or collection one finds a Bible, a dictionary, and ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... that an Englishman's house is his castle, and that awful proprieties ought to regulate admission to it; that marriage is a real bond, making jealousy and marital revenge at the least highly pardonable; that vegetarianism and all pitting of animal against human rights is a silly fad; that on the other hand to save money to give yourself a fine funeral is not a silly fad, but a symbol of ancestral self-respect; that when giving treats to friends or children, one should give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them; that there is nothing illogical ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... Centralization, vociferating their fad of Imperial Federation, would have that Constitution, in the moment of its supreme triumph for unity, cast away! Cast away for a new and written one by which Great Britain and all her children alike would chain themselves together! Well may practical ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... that old trouble with her heart, only worse? They'd been obliged to hire a maid—how in the world were the La Rues going to exist on American cooking? Cousin Parnelia said she could cure Madame with some Sanopractic nonsense, a new fad that Cousin Parnelia had taken up lately. Professor Kennedy had been elected vice-president of the American Mathematical Association, and it was funny to see him try to pretend that he wasn't pleased. Mother's garden this ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... beautiful—a trifle on the petite side, with black hair and black eyes that quirked up oddly at the outer corners. Her nails were black-lacquered and spotted with little gold stars, evidently a new feminine fad from Terra. ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... But the equanimity of Francois Blanc was equal to all adventures. Threats, prayers, temptations, left him untouched. This man of ice, self-possessed, cold, indifferent to the ruin of the thousands of victims of his will, had a fad or fancy. It was for raising red and white roses, and while the mad throngs were fluttering in frenzy around the tables in his halls at Homburg, Wiesbaden and Monte Carlo, he, hoe or trowel in hand, ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... rise from the deeps of an emotion, the emotion of compassion for misfortune, as such. This is really a very important point. Collectivism is not an intellectual fad, even if erroneous, but a passionate protest and aspiration: it arises as a secret of the heart, a dream of the injured feeling, long before it shapes itself as a definite propaganda at all. The intellectual philosophies ally themselves with ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... government; nor does mankind accord it, without a prolonged struggle, even in religious doctrine and ordinary life. Every revolt is tested as by fire, and we do not otherwise know the temper of the rebels or the value of their purpose. Is it a trick? Is it a fad? Is it a plot for contemptible ends? Is it a riot—a moment's effervescence—or a revolution glowing from volcanic depths? We only know by the tests of ridicule, suffering, and death. In his "Ode to France," written in ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... whose only asset now is climate that feels good, but contains germs of all diseases, and tobacco that smells good when it is in conflagration under your nose, and does not kill instantly if it is pasted up in a Wisconsin wrapper, that is the pure goods. If tobacco ever ceases to be a fad with the rich consumer of fifty-cent cigars, and beet sugar is found to contain no first aid to Bright's disease, Cuba will amount to about as much as Dry Tortugas, which has purer air, and the Isle of Pines, which has more tropical scenery and less yellow fever. ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... already in the language he can express his meaning. And just as he should not be the first to take up an untried word, so the young writer should not be the last to drop a dead one. There is at present a sort of fad for old English. A large number of words that have been resting quietly in their graves for centuries have been called forth. Some may enjoy a second life; most of them will feel only the weakness of a second obsolescence. ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... Thereafter, nearly every Saturday of the summer found them taking tea with Miss Sally at Golden Gate. Sometimes they came alone; sometimes they brought other girls. It soon became a decided "fad" in their set to go to see Miss Sally. Everybody who met her loved her at sight. It was considered a special treat to be taken by the ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... lives. The tendency to which I refer is no doubt partly the result of our growing humanitarianism and feeling of kinship with all the lower orders of creation, and partly due to the fact that we live in a time of impromptu nature study, when birds and plants and trees are fast becoming a fad with half the population, and when the "yellow" reporter is abroad in the fields and woods. Never before in my time have so many exaggerations and misconceptions of the wild life about us been current in the popular ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... who was the vogue, practically monopolizing public interest. His name might be Scudder or Kittredge or Moody, but while he lasted everybody rushed to hear him. And there was commonly some special fad that prevailed. Spiritualism held the boards for quite ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... slaked your thirsting For an apron, cuffs and cap, Long before the war-cloud, bursting, Made a mess of Europe's map, Though your mind showed some improvement, Lady, I conceived you had Joined a purely social movement For a fad. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 30, 1914 • Various
... penalty, to learn, and if possible to speak, French. So far from practising non-interference, she allows no one to fight but herself. This imperious, warlike, imperial attitude is what Africa wants. It reverses our Quaker-like 'fad' for peace. We allow native wars to rage ad libitum even at Porto Loko, almost within cannon-shot of Sierra Leone. On the Gambia River the natives have sneeringly declared that they will submit to the French, who are men, ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... pleased to be listened to, and it is enormously interesting though somewhat fatiguing, and leaves me no time whatever for anything else! My brain whirls with tiles, mosaics, tesserae, bell-castings, bell-marks, and mottos, electros, squeezes, rubbings, etc., etc. His latest plant fad is Willows and Bamboos, of which he has countless kinds growing and flourishing!!! He is infirm, but it is very grand to see life rich with interests, and with work that will benefit others—so near ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... meant to do his duty to his employers, to obey orders faithfully, to carry ridiculous things and foolish people to and fro between Salissa and England; but that he in no way approved of the waste of a good ship, quantities of coal and the energies of officers like himself over the silly fad of a wealthy ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... Doris said, calmly, though her heart beat quicker. "These fad things are often successes, financially, and ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... you go the more children you see. They are everywhere, and of all sizes and ages, in such reckless profusion that you no longer wonder if the world is to be depopulated through the coming of the fad of Eugenics. The Italian mother has but two thoughts—her God and her children, and it is to care for her children that she has brought from her native land the knowledge of cookery, and of those things that help to put life and ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... nickname Fayrhayr. Aguilar means needle-maker, Fr. aiguille, but Pinner is more often official (Chapter XIX). Culler, Fr. coutelier, Old Fr. coutel, knife, and Spooner go together, but the fork is a modern fad. Poynter is another good example of the specialization of medieval crafts: the points were the metal tags by which the doublet and hose were connected. Hence, the play on words when Falstaff is recounting his adventure with ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... cut in. "The tickler is the newest fad for increasing worker efficiency. Once, I read somewheres, it was salt tablets. They had salt-tablet dispensers everywhere, even in air-conditioned offices where there wasn't a moist armpit twice a year and the gals sweat only champagne. A decade later people wondered what all those dusty ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... can ever restrict the restriction. The prohibitions are bound to progress point by point; more and more human rights and pleasures must of necessity be taken away; for it is of the nature of this futurism that the latest fad is the faith of the future, and the most fantastic fad inevitably makes the pace. Thus the worst thing in the seventeenth-century aberration was not so much Puritanism as sectarianism. It searched for truth not by synthesis but by subdivision. It not only ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... not particularly fond of it; but it's a fad of hers. She likes to wear it on state occasions. I have often wondered if it is really the Nana Sahib's ruby, as her uncle claimed. Driver, the Savoy, and remember it carefully; ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... spendthrifts who paid fourpence for their chairs, when the music could be perfectly well heard without charge outside. It was, in fact, heard there by a large audience of bicyclers of both sexes, who stood by their wheels in numbers unknown in New York since the fad of bicycling began to pass several years ago. The lamps shed a pleasant light upon the crowd, after the long afterglow of the sunset had passed and the first stars began to pierce the clear heavens. But there ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... honest," Mike said, "I think the vibro is just a fad among the JD's now, anyway. You know—if you're one of the real biggies, you carry a vibro. A year from now, it might be shock guns, but right now you're chicken if you carry ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... were quite a fad among farmers of the Central West. Americans have been slow to adopt the German carp ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... best scribe. He said as much while he was examining a paper I had written, and as my writing was not as legible as his he tacitly told me I was his inferior, and that I should therefore treat him with some degree of respect. I laughed at this fad, and, not thinking him incorrigible I took him into my service. If it had not been for that odd notion of his I should probably have merely given him a louis, and no more. He said that spelling was of no consequence, as those who knew how to spell could easily ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... amongst the old "Lakers." It was, of course, a great fur country, and though the fur-bearing animals were sensibly diminishing, yet the prices of peltries had risen by competition, whilst supplies had been correspondingly cheapened. It was a good marten country, and, as this fur was the fad of fashion, and brought an extravagant price, the animal, like the beaver, was threatened with extinction, the more so as the rabbits were then in their ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... revival does visible good. The language is no longer a fad; it is an envied accomplishment, a mark of distinction and education. Wherever it goes, North and South, it obliterates race and creed distinctions, and all the terrible memories associated with them. ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... time to forget the numbers of those who've called and been called up in the last twenty minutes or so. We may be able to catch the ringleader in that way, and get from her the names of every one in the plot—if it's a genuine plot; and I agree with you that it looks rather like it. Peggy, your fad for studying languages and your quick wits may have saved El Paso from ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... use his own intelligence and common sense, avoiding so far as he can the mistake of following a "fad" and accepting a theory without sufficient evidence; and the opposite mistake of accepting as hygienic the customs about him simply because they are customs, and thus mistaking for fads any conclusions of science which are ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... no amateur's job," Hood muttered, squinting at the canvas. "Seems to me I've seen that sort of thing somewhere lately—Pantaloon, Harlequin, Columbine, and Clown—latest fad in magazine covers. We're in the studio of a popular illustrator—there's a bunch of proofs on the table, and those things on the floor are from the same hand. Signature in the corner ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... lucidity. Vagaries occasioned by a high temperature, would suddenly vanish as the struggling mind briefly asserted itself. As he resumed paddling, some swaying willows became three ladies attired in the Grecian bend costume, then a fad in America, smiling and bowing to him. His mind told him they were only willows; but his eyes would ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... authorities felt that women's leagues were informed bodies of women whose suggestions they would make no error in adopting, more legislation could be effected. Too often city councils are approached by those who favor some whim or fad, and so ALL women's demands are classed together. Much harm has been done to the cause by indiscreet, pushing women with only a glimmer of knowledge. The question is not WOMAN, but ability and women. It is better, as a rule, to work out ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... to enforce. Not that his hearers would have followed any counsel even if he had been so misguided as to offer it; they did not come to hear him "preach" in the full sense of the word,—they came to hear him "say things,"- -witty observations on the particular fad of the hour—sharp polemics on the political situation—or what was still more charming, neat remarks in the style of Rochefoucauld or Montaigne, which covered and found excuses for vice while seemingly condemning viciousness. There is nothing perhaps ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... extra beer-money and oatmeal water is made for them gratis, some will, of course, imbibe it, especially if they see that thereby they may obtain little favours from their employer by yielding to his fad. By drinking the crotchet perhaps they may get a present now and then-food for themselves, cast-off clothes for their families, and so on. For it is a remarkable feature of human natural history, the desire to proselytise. The spectacle of John Bull—jovial John Bull—offering his men ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... freaks. And a two column article from the Chicago Chronicle of 1897, yellowed and framed and recounting in sonorous phrases ("pulchritudinous epidermis" is featured frequently) that the society folk of Chicago have taken up tattooing as a fad, following the lead of New York's Four Hundred, who followed the lead of London's most aristocratic circles; and that Prof. Al Herman, known from Madagascar to Sandy Hook as "Dutch," was the leading artist of the tattoo needle ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... to the public, and became a sort of fashionable fad. It was commended, and after Parliament had voted ten thousand pounds toward it, it was everywhere accepted as the correct thing. The charter was given in June, 1732, and a suitable design was not wanting for the corporation seal—silkworms, with the motto, Non Sibi, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... don't think you're quite alive to what it is that is growing up about you. Flippancy is out of place. I abominate flippancy." ("Well, dash it, it's my house!" Sabre thought.) "This Garden Home is not a speculation. It's not a fad. It's not a joke. What is it? You're thinking it's a damned nuisance. You're right. It ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... yacht and sporting arrangements and that—make himself generally useful, as you might say. He had the spending of a lot of money, I should think. The other was confined entirely to the office affairs, and I dare say he had his hands full. As for his being English, it was just a fad of Manderson's to have an English secretary. He'd had ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... women did not appear to so much advantage. These comprised old Karka, young Dam Zeneb, Sallaamto, Fad-el-Kereem, Marrasilla, and Faddeela. They had learnt to wash, but could never properly fold the linen. Ironing and starching were quite out of the question, and would have been as impossible to them as algebra. Some of ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... that the bull, on his holiday, had spent a part of the first night in Carey's lower paddock, and Uncle Abel (who was out mooching about the bush at all hours, "havin' a look at some timber" or some "indercations" [of gold], or on some mysterious business or fad, the mystery of which was of his own making)—Uncle Abel saw the bull in the paddock at daylight and turned it out the sliprails, and talked about it afterwards, referring to the sliprails as "Buckolts' Gate," of course, and spoke mysteriously of the case, and put on an appearance of great ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... be his wife. Her father and her world would think it quite otherwise. They would count him unworthy to mate with her, an heiress, the pet of society; he a man who had given up his life for a whim, a fad, a fanatical fancy! But she knew it was not so. She knew him to be a man of all men. She knew it was true that she was not such a woman as a man like that could fitly wed, and ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... on a bright Sabbath afternoon in mid-autumn when Miss Janet Cragiemuir left her home in K Street and set out leisurely upon her walk to Bethany Church, where she revelled in her latest fad. She had recently taken a class in the Chinese Sunday-school. The good work began at three o'clock, and as it was nearly that hour, groups of Chinamen stood out on the sidewalk chattering as only Celestials can. They greeted Miss Cragiemuir with grave ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... 'A fad to talk Latin of ye courtiers,' Culpepper said with uninterested scorn. 'Ye will forget God's language of English.' He slapped Throckmorton on the sleeve. 'See, what a fine farm I have for my ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... alone, Received hast this message from thy glass, That tells the truth and says that All is gone; Fresh shalt thou see in me the wounds thou mad'st, Though spent thy flame, in me the heat remaining: I that have loved thee thus before thou fad'st— My faith shall wax, when thou art in thy waning. The world shall find this miracle in me, That fire can burn when all the matter 's spent: Then what my faith hath been thyself shalt see, And that thou wast unkind thou may'st repent.— Thou may'st repent that thou hast scorn'd my tears, When ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... a subject about which at the time I was feeling somewhat sore. "Needs must when the Devil drives;" but as matters were, Dan and I could well have afforded domestic assistance. It rankled in my mind that to fit in with the foolish fad of old Deleglise, I the future Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot, Kean, Macready and Phelps rolled into one, should be compelled to the performance of menial duties. On this morning of all others, my brilliant literary career just commenced, the anomaly of the ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... inclined people whose selfish instincts have stultified their souls; a people whose ultimate goal is the acquisition of material things; a people whose only ambition is to satisfy self: a people whose ideas of real happiness are the pursuit of material pleasures, art has little place except as a fad. ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... various Shop-Windows the spindly Utensils and snowy Pellets which, he had reason to believe, were affiliated in some way with the sickening Fad. He would look at them with extreme Contempt and rather resent their contaminating contiguity to the Mask, the Shin-Guard, and the ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... but the business itself. Nothing else could interest him. He was not what would be called in America a rich man, but he had made money enough to travel, to allow himself any reasonable relaxation, to cultivate a taste for art, music, literature or the drama, to indulge in any harmless fad, such as collecting etchings, china or bric-a-brac, or even to permit himself the luxury of horses. In the place of all these he found himself, at nearly sixty years of age, forced again into the sordid round of business as ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... marriage between his son and Grace? "Of course they'll be married," said Mrs Grantly. "It's all very well for you to say that, my dear; but the whole family are so queer that there is no knowing what the girl may do. She may take up some other fad now, and refuse him point blank." "She has never taken up any fad," said Mrs Grantly, who now mounted almost to wrath in defence of her future daughter-in-law, "and you are wrong to say that she has. She has behaved beautifully;—as ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... characteristic enthusiasm of modern society, of civilisation, the fad of showing off, of exhibiting a life instead of living it, very largely comes, it is not too much to say, from the lack of normal egoism, of self-joy in civilised human beings. It has come over us like a kind of ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... one thing more than another upon which Martha Foote prided herself it was the Senate Hotel bed coverings. Creamy, spotless, downy, they were her especial fad. "Brocade chairs, and pink lamps, and gold snake-work are all well and good," she was wont to say, "and so are American Beauties in the lobby and white gloves on the elevator boys. But it's the blankets on the beds that stamp a hotel first ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... will be asked, will not a fifty times millionaire give employment to as many men as will 500 men with $100,000 each. No. Not even if madam and himself are at home from toadying up and down through Europe in search of a princeling. (Stop this fad of the spoiled darlings of fortune and you stop a leak through which over $1,000,000,000 of American money has already disappeared. We will sustain this with facts in its proper place.) One million dollars divided among ten men will do ten times more good than ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... with George about their being more a fad than anything else, and I think it must be the height of the fad just now. You know how roller-skating came in—everybody in the world seemed to be crowding to the rinks—and now only a few children use rollers for getting to school. Besides, people won't ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... made me go out to the groceries and round up the new kind. I brought a box to the table at breakfast, and dad fell over himself to fill his saucer, and then he offered some to eight boarders that sat at our table. Dad had been bragging for a week about how he had adopted the breakfast food fad, first for his health, and then to get even with the beef trust. He had convinced the boarders at our table that it was a patriotic duty of every citizen to shut down on eating meat until the criminal meat ...
— Peck's Bad Boy With the Cowboys • Hon. Geo. W. Peck
... spoke about the difficulties in which Aniela's mother was and is still involved. According to Kromitzki, a great deal of her fortune might still be saved if she would part with the estate. Kromitzki looks upon the reluctance to part with ancestral lands as a mere fad. He said he might be able to understand it if she had the means to prevent it, but as the case stood ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... distinguished foreign guests, would a seat be reserved for me, my object being the study of men when they were off their guard—reading their minds, finding out the man behind the mask, a habit I had never yet thrown off. Most men have some mental fad—this was mine. Sometimes my articles found an echo in a note written to me by the guests themselves; this would fill me with joy. Often I was criticised for the ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... aesthetic To be quite athletic. That's our fad, you know. I can hold the strap, sir! And keep off your lap, ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... She is never to be left alone with gossiping servants. If a word is mentioned in her hearing about this crime which seems to be in everybody's mouth, I shall feel forced, greatly as I should regret the fad, ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... any lower. Brave Knights Kennelers then shall be, Noble Knights of the Golden Flea, Knights of the Order of St. Steboy, Knights of St. Gorge and Sir Knights Jawy. God speed the day when this knighting fad Shall go to the dogs and the dogs ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... scandalously, if not with absolute impunity, yet without any evil consequences that anyone thinks of tracing to it. In a hospital two generations of medical students way tolerate dirt and carelessness, and then go out into general practice to spread the doctrine that fresh air is a fad, and sanitation an imposture set up to make profits for plumbers. Then suddenly Nature takes her revenge. She strikes at the city with a pestilence and at the hospital with an epidemic of hospital gangrene, slaughtering right and left until the innocent ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... then, to consider it as a real and not an abstract question,—"academic," I think it is the fad of these later days to say,—and I propose again (and again unblushingly) to consider it from what has been called a low and sordid point of view—so low, in fact, so unworthy the respect of latter-day ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... different to-day, since Socialism has become a fad. It no longer demands any special energy, or any break with capitalist society to assume the name of Socialist. It is no wonder, then, that more and more these new Socialists remain entangled in their previous ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... stand'st, and armies tremble at thy sight, As at Achilles' self! beneath thy dart Lies slain the great Achilles' dearer part. Thou from the mighty dead those arms hast torn, Which once the greatest of mankind had worn. Yet live! I give thee one illustrious day, A blaze of glory ere thou fad'st away. For ah! no more Andromache shall come With joyful tears to welcome Hector home; No more officious, with endearing charms, From thy tired limbs ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... been described in this booklet could easily be dismissed as a new fad that will gain limited attention for a short time and then be forgotten, but it may instead be the discovery of vast untapped resources that can raise primary human relationships to new and higher levels of richness and creativity. If this should be the case the loss of ...
— Marriage Enrichment Retreats - Story of a Quaker Project • David Mace
... you ought to explain to me. A citizen of the world and a student of its purlieus, like myself, ought to know what there is to know! Now you're a man of sense, in spite of a few bad habits—such as myself, for example. Is this fad of yours madness?—which would be quite to your credit,—for gadzooks, I like a lunatic! Or is it the complaint of a man who has gathered too much data on the subject of Old Rye? Or is it, as I suspect, something more occult, and therefore ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... different," Ralph said. "Honey's right. That business of taking care of their feet symbolizes the whole sex to me. They do the things they do just because the others do them—like sheep jumping over a wall. Their fad at present is pedicure. Peachy's at it just like the rest of them. Every night when I come home, I find her sitting down with both feet done up in one of those beautiful scarfs she's collected, resting on a cushion. It's rather amusing, though." Ralph struggled ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... Jonson and Shakespeare figured, on opposite sides, but if allusions in Jonson's play the "Poetaster" have been properly interpreted, their friendly relations were not deeply disturbed. The trouble began in the first place by the London of 1600 suddenly rushing into a fad for the company of boy players, recruited chiefly from the choristers of the Chapel Royal, and known as the "Children of the Chapel." They had been acting at the new theater in Blackfriars since 1597, and their vogue became so great as actually to threaten Shakespeare's company and other companies ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... Carinthia, for instance, was in 1914 maintaining three Slovene schools and six hundred and twelve German schools, although the Slovenes formed one-third of the population. What the Austrians said was that German was a world-language and that it was a fad to want to learn Slovene. Perhaps the Slovenes told them that Welsh is not a world-language. Anyhow, being not only a patriotic but a very practical race, they built their own schools in the villages, with the result that ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... cats was a fad which he shared with Paul de Koch, the novelist, who, at one time, kept as many as thirty cats in his house. Many descriptions of them are to be found scattered through his novels. His chief favorite, Fromentin, lived ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... danger of being feminized and fad-ridden—grape juice (God knows water's good enough: why grape juice?); pensions; Christian Science; peace cranks; efficiency-correspondence schools; aid-your-memory; women's clubs; co-this and co-t'other and coddling in general; Billy Sunday; petticoats where ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... squad who had a great habit of digging up unusual fads, generally in the matter of diet. At this particular time he had decided to live solely on grape nuts. As he was one of the best men on the team, Jack did not burden himself with trouble over this fad, although at several times Moakley told him that he might improve if he would eat some real food. However, when this man started a grape nut campaign among the younger members of the squad he aroused Jack's ire and upon his arrival at the field house he ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... use your common-sense. That fad about locking the gates is a pure and simple whim on the mother's part. Of course we'll humor it, but not to the extent of waking up old Tester. Come, Kitty, you shall give the old man any amount of blowing up in the morning, only now you ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... fad to get as many of these together as she could and to know the story of each. The less creditable the story, the more highly she valued the medal. People might think it was not a pretty hobby for a young girl, but they could not help smiling ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... would greatly modify the results of observing a few hundreds at home. But, as in the case of opium-eating, populus vult decipi, the philanthrope does not want to know the truth, indeed he shrinks from it and loathes it. All he cares for is his own especial "fad." ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... been asked around by the Juggins boy to inspect a wonderful assortment of treasure trove that an old and peculiar uncle, with a fad for collecting curios of every description, and who was at present out in India, had sent to his young ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... living, now so far flung as to be a characteristic of American life, is not just a fad. It has been a slow steady growth and has behind it a tradition of a century and more. When our larger commercial centers first began to change from villages to compact urban communities, there were those who found even these miniature cities far too congested. It was ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... my District death-rate low?" Said Binks of Hezabad. "Wells, drains, and sewage-outfalls are My own peculiar fad. I learnt a lesson once. It ran Thus," quoth that most ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... furs were becoming a fad. Astor sorted and sifted his buyers, as he had his skins. He himself dressed in a suit of fur and thus proved his ability as an advertiser. He picked his men and charged all the traffic would bear. He took orders, on sample, from the nobility ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... were a fad which affected only the wealthy classes it would be reprehensible enough, but it curses rich and poor alike, and almost every day we saw heavily laden coolie women steadying themselves by means of a staff, hobbling stiff-kneed along the roads or ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... it only concerns us in its connection with the psychology of the people it interprets in satire. There is the psychology of individuals and the psychology of a whole society—the latter was du Maurier's theme. It is generally an obsession, a "fad," a "craze," or "fashion" that his pencil exploits. He does not with Keene laugh with an individual at another individual. His art is well-bred in its style partly through the fact of its limitations. Moreover, in "Society" individuality tends to ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... interest hydrophobia to stamp out; 'Tis a curse to us canines; that no person well can doubt Who has sense. They who think we doggies share old maid's sentimental fad, Just as though it really were a dog's privilege to go ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... her! You know what her plans are already, to live in Vanebury as soon as she is twenty-one, and devote herself to the welfare of the working-people! Don't you call that a fad? Won't she make a laughing stock of herself and of us too? Why, it's worse than Radicalism—it's pure Socialism and Quixotry," said poor Sir John, who ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... women have done a great deal of knitting. Looking at this great army of women struggling with rib and back seam, some have seen nothing in it but a "fad" which has supplanted for the time tatting and bridge. But it is more than that. It is the desire to help, to care for, to minister; it is the same spirit which inspires our nurses to go out and bind up the wounded and care for the dying. The ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... pleasure or of his career to linger. This meeting had left his curiosity baffled. He understood how Marta's vitality demanded action, which exerted itself in a feminine way for a feminine cause. The cure for such a fad was most clear to his masculine-perception. What if all the power she had shown in her appeal for peace could be made to serve another ambition? He knew that he was a great man. More than once he had wondered what would happen if he were to meet a great woman. And he should ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... life to these deserted hostelries. For more than half a century steam has diverted their custom, carrying former patrons from town to town without the need of half-way stops and rests. Coaching is a fad, not a fashion; it is not to be relied upon for steady custom; but automobiling bids fair to carry the people once more into the country, and there must be inns to ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... Mrs. White with a laugh that showed a trace of something not hilarious, "really, you are all too absurd! We are a long way from the authorities here, but I think we will find out pretty soon that simple dinners have become the fad in Washington, or Paris, and that your marvelous Mrs. Burgoyne is simply following the fashion like all the rest ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... "The use of short words is a mere fad," she said, "it is like wearing dimity for every occasion. Now ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... I are going in a little deal with Mr. Schwartz," I explained. "He knows the real estate business backwards. Mr. Schwartz has a fad for collecting apartment houses. He owns the largest assortment of People Coops in the city. All the modern improvements, too. Hot and cold windows, running gas and noiseless janitors. Mr. Schwartz is the inventor of the idea of having two baths in every apartment so that the lessee ...
— You Should Worry Says John Henry • George V. Hobart
... soothed the younger man. "I know all about the free swindles. This isn't one of them. It's just a fad of mine." ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... His position in this matter places him among the dozen men whose name and writings have given them an enduring place in the favor of the profession at all times, when we were not being carried away by some therapeutic fad or imagining that some new theory solved the whole problem of the causation and cure ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... accomplished one of the objects upon which Lady Hunsdon had set her heart. The guests of Bath House, vaguely curious, or properly scandalised, at the first, soon became quite feverish to meet the distinguished friend of Lord Hunsdon. So rapidly does a fashion, a fad, leap from bulb to blossom in idle minds, that before a fortnight was out even the young men were anxious to extend the hand of good fellowship, while as for the young ladies, they dreamed of placing his reformation to their own private account, learned his less subtle poems by heart, and ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... "she is a dear good girl"—I hastened to say that I was sure of it—"and we have lots of fun out of our different ideas on little things like that. The odd thing is, though, that it was Kitty's fad for woman's rights and that sort of thing that is responsible for her being Mrs. Trevgern—I mean, that was what you might call the exciting cause. Pull your chair up to the fire and I'll tell you all about it. It ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... may perhaps be said on the recent fashion—not to say fad—of suppressing in the printed play the traditional list of "Dramatis Personae." Bjoernson, in some of his later plays, was, so far as I am aware, the first of the moderns to adopt this plan. I do not know whether his example has influenced certain English playwrights, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... in a peculiar tone. "Do come in, Tita. It is a fad of mine—a silly one, no doubt—but I cannot bear to look at an open door. Besides, I wish to speak ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... my time at Four Oaks, often going every day, and never let more than two days pass without spending some hours on the farm. To many of my friends this seemed a waste of time. They said, "Williams is carrying this fad too far,—spending too much ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... one, for the Malletts made it a charming festival with inspired ideas for gifts and a delightful party on Christmas Day, when Caroline was allowed to appear. She refused to say that she was better; she had never been ill; it was a mere fad of the doctor and her sisters; she supposed they were tired of her and wanted a little peace. However, she continued to absorb large quantities of strengthening food, beef tea, meat jelly and heady tonic, ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... running over next day with Lord Robert West, to look at a wonderful new motor car for sale there—one that a Rajah had ordered to be made for him, but died before it was finished. Lady Mountstuart always has one new fad every six months at least, and her latest is to drive a motor car herself. Lord Robert is a great expert—can make a motor, I believe, or take it to pieces and put it together again; and he'd been insisting for days that she would be able ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... university's work is to take but the choice ones of these, or, better yet, the scholarly output of the high schools, and equip them for leadership in society, and the point is clear. It is a new problem but coming to be a very real one. Going to college is getting to be the fashion—almost a fad in some places. We all know that a goodly number of students, boys and girls alike, enter the universities, East and West, every year who have no characteristics of leadership, who are not fitted for real university work, either in academic equipment, maturity ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... than one great writer of England had his first popular recognition in America. Even this season the Saturday Review is struggling with Ibsen, while Boston, having had that disease, has probably gone on to some other fad. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... instance of a boy being obsessed by an idea which as a man he carried to its successful fruition. It offers also evidence of the service that may accrue to society from the devotion of a dilettante to what people may call a "fad," but what is in fact the germ of a great idea needing only an enthusiast with enthusiasm, brains, and money for its development. Because the efforts of Santos-Dumont always smacked of the amateur he has been denied ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... strain on all the baby's vital organs and its delicate, fragile blood vessels and heart. There have been thousands of babies who have had irreparable damage done to their constitutions because of this cold-blooded, heartless fad of the doctors, ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... are married," she said, "I do not think you have any right to risk your life and your position for a fad." ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... a bazaar stall, with knobby and unsteady bamboo furniture and much drapery of a would-be artistic nature. It was stuffy and airless. Cecilia wrinkled her pretty nose as she entered. Mrs. Rainham held pronounced views on the subject of what she termed the "fresh-air fad," and declined to let London air—a smoky commodity at best—attack her cherished carpets; with the result that Cecilia breathed freely only in her little attic, which had no carpet ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... that Mrs. Rogers was well known in a certain circle of society in the city. She was wealthy and had the reputation of having given quite liberally to many causes that had interested her. Just now, her particular fad was Oriental religions, and some of her bizarre beliefs had attracted a great deal of attention. A couple of years before she had made a trip around the world, and had lived in India for several months, ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... grandfather clocks. They must have absolutely denuded the Low Countries of these useful timepieces, for at every step at Groote Schuur a fresh solemn-faced Dutch clock ticks gravely away, to remind one how time is passing. Rhodes collected a very fine library, but he had a curious fad for typewritten copies of his favourite books, which fill an entire bookcase in the library. Rhodes paid an immense price for the splendid set of seventeenth-century Brussels tapestries in the dining-room, illustrating the "Discovery of Africa," and the magnificent ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... it is a capital thing, too; it is being taken up by the profession. I use it. It is a curious thing that he should have hit on that when he is not a surgeon. He had studied anatomy as a sort of fad, as he does everything. One of Haile Tabb's boys was bedridden, and he was a great friend of his, and ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... higher than a simple auditor in the Manichean Church. What attracted specially fine minds to the Manichees, was that they began by declaring themselves rationalists. To reconcile faith with natural science and philosophy has been the fad of heresiarchs and free-thinkers in all ages. The Manicheans bragged that they had succeeded. They went everywhere, crying out: "Truth, Truth!" That suited Augustin very well: it was just what he was looking for. He hastened to the preachings of these humbugs, impatient to receive at last ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... England"—the "Grandmothers of England." A few, arrayed in modest calf or embossed linen, address themselves to the sober latitudes of the manse or parsonage-house. Some treat, without permission, of "Woman's Mission"—some, in defiance of custom, of her "Duties." From exuberant 4to, down to the fid-fad concentration of 12mo—from crown demy to diamond editions—no end to these chartered documentations of the sex! The women of this favoured kingdom of Queen Victoria, appear to have been unexpectedly weighed in the balance, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... pair, whom Ransom, unacquainted with certain chapters of Verena's history, perceived without surprise to be Mrs. Burrage and her insinuating son. Apparently their interest in Miss Tarrant was more than a momentary fad, since—like himself—they had made the journey from New York to hear her. There were other figures, unknown to our young man, here and there, in the semicircle; but several places were still empty (one of which was of course reserved for Olive), and it occurred ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... been Sunday, he would have found himself making one of a fashionable throng of promenaders; it being at that time a fad with society people to walk to Forest park and back of a Sunday afternoon. Driving was then considered a respectable diversion only on the six work days ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... the name of the ancient Name; Generous, courteous, gentle, patient under the yoke, Decent (hemmed in a harem land ye were ever a one-wife folk); Royal and brave and ancient—haply an hour has struck When the new fad-fangled peoples shall weary of raking muck, And turning from coward counsels and loathing the parish lies, In shame and sackcloth offer up the only sacrifice. Then thou who hast been neglected, who ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... jolly!" was Rhoda's first remark, with nothing in particular to precede it. "Molly Delawarr's a darling! I don't much care for Gatty, and Betty I just hate. She's a prig and a fid-fad both. But Molly—oh, Phoebe, she's as smart as can be. Such parts she has! You know, she's really—not quite you understand—but really she's almost as clever ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... and the figures that had loomed up seemed to melt away. But as soon as the rifle had flashed there was the fad, fad, fad of hurried steps, something whizzed in at the window, and with a dull thud a spear stuck in the floor ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... alterations and improvements made both outside and in. He was something of an architect himself, it seemed—this rich Mr. Wildred; at all events, it was believed that he had made the designs for the alterations, and having a great fad that way, had even helped the chaps he had had down from London to do the indoor work and decorating. There had only been two or three men, so that progress had been slow, and everyone had wondered ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... not a fad involving the expenditure of sums of money for useless "frills" but is a practical means of getting better results with money that must be expended in such changes as disposition of lands, the location of roads, the furnishing of playgrounds, forests, and school grounds, etc. ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... me as a pedant with some unimportant theory about vegetable cells. If I were to say that you did not see in that tree the vile mismanagement of local politics, you would dismiss me as a Socialist crank with some particular fad about public parks. If I were to say that you were guilty of the supreme blasphemy of looking at that tree and not seeing in it a new religion, a special revelation of God, you would simply say I was a mystic, and ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... I canna mind hearing the like o' yon at the tables; but I wes sorry to see the Doctor sae failed. He wes bent twa fad; a' doot it's a titch o' ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... the care of Professor George Dunbar. Pillans had been a master at Eton, and at a later period Rector of the Edinburgh High School. He was a little man with rosy cheeks, and was a sound scholar and an admirable teacher, whose special "fad" was Classical Geography. Dunbar had begun life as a working gardener at Ayton Castle. He had compiled a Greek Lexicon which had some repute in its day, but he was not an inspiring teacher, and his gruff manners made him ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... American with an income of three-quarters of a million arrived, I needed no introduction. I knew him very well and about his affairs. He had culture, was widely travelled, was both musical and artistic, and his fad was intimacy with prominent people. His dinners were perfection and invitations were eagerly sought. On the plea of delicate health he remained a brief period in the height of the season in London and Paris. But during those few weeks he gave ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... need unless they have committed some folly, or, worse, some crime. There's bread enough for all who deserve to live. I have no sympathy with all this preposterous pauperising which goes by the name of charity. It's a fad, a fashion—nothing more." ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... admonition that he wished to keep daily before him. Even we ourselves often paste pictures in our watches. We have never, however, gone into the craze as the English of this particular era did. With them it was a fashionable fad that resulted in all manner of curious conceits. They had no kodaks, you see, and small pictures were rarer possessions then than now." Mr. Burton paused a moment to puff little rings of smoke thoughtfully ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... to stay. It has nothing to do with superstition at all. It's part of Advanced Thought — quite scientific, you know, while Spiritualism was just a fad. ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... chaff of arid Rad And that of equally dry-and-dusty Tory? CHAPLIN would feed you on preposterous fad, And GARDNER on—postponement! The old story! While the grass grows the horse may starve. Poor ass! Party would bring ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... Buffalo in branches of our city government. They have tried them in nearly every city in this country. We have governed our police by commissions, our parks by commissions, our public works by commissions. Commission government was for many years a fad in this country, and it has become discredited, so that of late we have been doing away with commissions and coming to single heads for departments having executive functions and some minor legislative functions, ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... "fad," and while not quite so popular, are pretty enough to deserve mention. A table is too often confused in its arrangement of color on account of its changes of courses. This can be entirely done away with by adopting some simple color scheme. A luncheon, or tea, is easier to serve in this ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke |
