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Rough-and-tumble   /rəf-ənd-tˈəmbəl/   Listen
Rough-and-tumble

noun
1.
Disorderly fighting.  Synonyms: dogfight, hassle, scuffle, tussle.
adjective
1.
Characterized by disorderly action and disregard for rules.  Synonyms: bare-knuckle, bare-knuckled.  "Rough-and-tumble politics" , "Undisguised bare-knuckle capitalism"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Rough-and-tumble" Quotes from Famous Books



... divested himself of the scowl. He smiled as a man who has solved some knotty problem to his entire satisfaction. Moreover, he bore no mark of conflict, none of the conventional scars of a rough-and-tumble fight. His clothing was in perfect order, his tie and collar properly arranged, as a gentleman's tie and collar should be. For a moment Hazel found herself believing the Herald story a pure canard. But as he walked across the room her searching gaze discovered ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... sticklers for technicalities, hot after declensions, and happy when they close in on a new exception to a Greek verb, giving it no quarter. When they come to die, they leave earth with but a single regret: they have never been able fully to compass the ablative. But the rough-and-tumble student was the rule, with nose deep into stein, exaggerating little things into great, making woful ballad to his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... those days had not attained its later refinements. The combatants were placed opposite to each other, each flinging a cloak about his left arm, to serve as a shield, and they prepared to encounter in what would seem a fashion of "rough-and-tumble" to our ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene

... intellectualities and subtleties and scrupulosities, and when every possible sort of combination and transition obtains within its bounds, what a brutal caricature and reduction of highest things to the lowest possible expression is it to represent its field of conflict as a sort of rough-and-tumble fight between two hostile temperaments! What a childishly external view! And again, how stupid it is to treat the abstractness of rationalist systems as a crime, and to damn them because they offer themselves as sanctuaries and places of escape, ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James

... word, eh? Well, why not? Flipping a man in the face with a glove was fashionable in the days of Charles II. Tweaking the nose was Georgian. The horsewhip went out with Victoria. Posting your man was always rather coffee-house and a rough-and-tumble very hooligan. If I were you, which I am not, but if I were, I would adopt contemporaneous methods. To-day we just sit about and backbite. That is progress. Let ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus


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