"Shoddy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... warehouses and in the holds of vessels while men died for the 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
... expenses or refusing to keep our institutions up to the standard in repairs, extensions, equipment, and accommodations. I refuse, and the Republican Party refuses, to endorse that method of sham and shoddy economy. New projects can wait, but the commitments of the Commonwealth must be maintained. We cannot curtail the usual appropriations or the care of mothers with dependent children or the support of the poor, the insane, and the infirm. The Democratic programme of cutting the ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... 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 is a Mephistophelian wrinkle in the corner ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... 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, ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... 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 ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 |
