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Cussedness   Listen
noun
Cussedness  n.  Disposition to willful wrongdoing; malignity; perversity; cantankerousness; obstinacy. (Slang or Colloq., U. S.) "In her opinion it was all pure "cussedness."" "Disputatiousness and perversity (what the Americans call "cussedness")."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Cussedness" Quotes from Famous Books



... from it," he heard Crane declare: "there's some sort of funny business going on, or liable to go on, aboard this ship. She wasn't held up for a solid week out of pure cussedness. Neither did they come aboard to-night to give us another once-over through sheer voluptuousness. ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph

... the hardest master with his men that you could find either side of the water. In the beginning he made his money by screwing down the wages and unscrewing the labor—and no sentiment. That was his slogan. Whether he kept it up from habit or pure cussedness I can't tell, but that's the real reason Billy would never go into his father's business—he couldn't stand his meanness. The old man's secretary forged a check for ten thousand; Billy caught him and cashed it himself—to save the man. He shouldered ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer

... had been destroyed, and another where a number of houses had been burned. A nice-looking young chap told us that there had been a fight there the day before and that the Germans had set fire to the place as they retreated—just from cussedness, so far as he could see. There, and at another place along the road, peasants told us that they had been made to march in front of the German troops when they marched against the Belgians. I don't like ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson

... likewise, and when I start again they deliberately follow, altogether too near to be comfortable. They are, all four, rough-looking peasants, and their object is quite unaccountable, unless they are doing it for "pure cussedness," or perhaps with some vague idea of provoking me into doing something that would offer them the excuse of attacking and robbing me. The road is sufficiently lonely to invite some such attention. If they are only following ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... occurred. At first it made him catch his breath to see the apparent chances they took; but after a little he perceived that seeming luck was in reality a coolness of judgment and a long experience in the peculiar ways of that most erratic of inanimate cussedness—the pine log. The banks grew daily. Everybody was ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White

... liberality very frequently at one glance, and in any case form an accurate opinion of him by the way he orders his menu. We know whether we have to do with a gentleman or a cad, and whether his subsequent parsimoniousness is caused by cussedness or simply ignorance of the customs of such establishments, and we treat him in consequence. It is pitiful sometimes to see all the ruses employed by well-meaning people, unwilling to be thought unaccustomed to the life of a large ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... Kennedy explained. Then an expression of gratification crept into his face. "Miss Lamar was 'up- stage'?" he mused. "That's a theatrical word for cussedness, ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve

... was to get to Oravicza in the Banat, I had done with the steamboat, and intended taking the rail to my destination; but, in the "general cussedness" of things, there turned out to be no train till the evening. I did not at all enjoy the prospect of knocking about the whole day amongst coal-sheds and unfinished houses, with the alternative refuge of the ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse

... too. Each of us expressin' our opinion of t'other and not holdin' back anything to speak of. I don't know how he felt when we quit, but I know I respected him—for his out and open cussedness and grit, if nothin' else. And I think he felt the same way about me. But he's smart—consarn him, he is! And HE never backs water. That's why I think you're takin' chances in bein' too friendly with him. He's layin' low and, if you get off your ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln

... Bodine, "if this earthquake does not cure him of his cussedness, I hope the Lord will ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe

... boy made a scientific suggestion that they got plenty of food from the cloudy water, which served them as a kind of soup. My guess was that their sight was impaired so that they could not see the fly. But Sam said it was "jest pure cussedness." Many things in the world happen from that cause, and as a rule it is best not ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke

... through all these years of privation and struggle? And her money is all in dollars. Pah! I smell the oil. Struck ile! Of all things in the world, her brother should just go and strike ile!" A great shudder traversed his form. "Everything seems to have been arranged out of pure cussedness, just to spite me. She would have been happier without the money, poor child—without the money, but with me. What will she do with all her riches? She will ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill

... simp—what's the matter with you? A fellow's got to let off steam once in a while, and if you'd been pestered like I have with Unc' Zenas's ornery trifling spells and old Pomp's general cussedness, you'd wonder that I don't get mad and stay mad every minute. Don't let's talk any more about it. Say, look there—there's a scarlet tanager! Ain't it pretty? Shyest bird there is, but up here in the woods there's a couple pairs 'most ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... next proceeding. I knew there was to be some more of it, and there was. Hunt's brother offered back half the money; offered it! why, he tried to force it on the fellow, and couldn't. His master wouldn't let him buy himself and his wife,—I suspect, out of sheer cussedness,—and he hadn't any other use for money, he said. Besides, he didn't want to take, and wouldn't take, anything that looked like pay for doing aught for a 'Linkum ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson

... who has affection for Thoreau may find worst is a combative streak, in which he too often takes refuge. "An obstinate elusiveness," almost a "contrary cussedness," as if he would say, which he didn't: "If a truth about something is not as I think it ought to be, I'll make it what I think, and it WILL be the truth—but if you agree with me, then I begin to think it may not be the truth." The causes of these unpleasant colors (rather than characteristics) ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... whirlwind and the flood, and differentiates itself through the smallest minutia of the affairs of human life. It is the primeval element, the "pure cussedness" which has to be conquered, or adjusted in every human being. It essays to bar all progress; Ignorance and Superstition are its blinded handmaids. It exacts the fearful penalties of scornfully misunderstood efforts, if not ostracism ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield

... she said. 'Seems to me it's just cussedness that makes people go away from Broadway when they've got plunks enough to stay there and ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... such, while the charitable acts which he was constantly performing are too numerous to be remembered. He had a supreme contempt for money, but he spoiled the best sides of his strange, eccentric character by enjoying a display of its worst facets with a "cussedness" as amusing as it was sometimes unpleasant. Is it remarkable, then, that many people who only saw him in the disagreeable moods should judge him from an entirely false and misleading point ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill

... make in discipline (where there was no show or trace of it) whether I looked after the invalids or not was not perceptible. But our commander, though brave, was unfortunately one of those men who are also gifted with a great deal of "pure cussedness," and think that the exhibiting it is a sign of bravery. Although we had no tents, only a miserably rotten old gun-cover, and not always that, to sleep under (I generally slept in the open air, frequently in the rain), ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... and say it is due to carelessness and a slip-shod mind, because they do not know that the muscles sometimes grow faster than the bones, making accurate co-ordination a physical impossibility; in a word, to general, all round cussedness they charge behavior that should be referred to high blood pressure, aching bones, the knitting together by fiber growth of the various brain centers, and finally, to youthful enthusiasm, all of which are perfectly ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd

... to think of the external world around us as a nasty tiresome old thing of which all we can say for certain is that it works by a "law of cussedness"—so that, whichever way we want to go, that way seems always barred, and we only bump against blind walls without making any progress. But that uncomfortable state of affairs arises from ourselves. Once we have passed a certain barrier, ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... very wild, but I believe it is now pretty generally believed that a mining city must go through with a certain amount of unadulterated cussedness before it can settle down and behave itself in a conservative and seemly manner. Virginia has grown up in the heart of the richest silver regions in the world, the El Dorado of the hour; and of the immense ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne

... means to go to Palmer an' to have a talk with young Dorn. I sure gave that boy a good word. Poor lad! He's true blue. An' to think of him with that old German devil. Old Dorn has always had a hard name. An' this war has brought out the German cussedness." ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey

... that things couldn't well be going better at Chicago than they are. There's no other machine that can set type eight hours with only seventeen minutes' stoppage through cussedness. The others do rather more stopping than working. By and by our machines will be perfect; then ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... was, he was bound to admit, an exceedingly plucky deed which he could not too highly praise, so that frankly he was utterly at a loss to fathom what earthly reason could be at the back of it except he put it down to sheer cussedness or ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... no saint, and which I repeat merely to show how extremes meet. It was that this gypsy, who was inspired with anything but the inner glowing glory of God, but who was, on the contrary, cram full of pure cussedness, being warmed by the same,—and the devil,—when chased by the constable, took refuge in a river full of freezing slush and broken ice, where he stood up to his neck and defied capture; for he verily cared no more for it than did Saint Peter of Alcantara, who was both ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland

... intolerable fussing with those potatoes was not calculated to make me forget the part which I had played. He looked upon it as a purely commercial transaction of a particularly foolish kind, and his devotion—if it was devotion and not mere cussedness as I came to regard it before long—inspired him with a zeal to minimise my loss as much as possible. Oh, yes! He took care of those infamous potatoes with a vengeance, as the ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad

... presence in his true light by butting a sleepy steer out of its bed, which bed he straightway proceeded to appropriate for himself. This was folly, for the ground was not cold and he had no excuse for stealing a body-warmed place to lie down; it was pure cussedness, and retribution followed hard upon the act. In about half a minute he had discovered the great difference between bullying poor, miserable, defenceless dogies and trying to bully a healthy, fully developed, and pugnacious steer. After assimilating the preliminary punishment ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford

... you now what happened to Mick Molloy. He was certainly a good horse and a splendid jumper, but he had one bad fault and that was that, every now and again, apparently for no reason whatever, except the same cussedness that held him when he wouldn't go up the hill, he would hit a bank or a wall full hard and turn head over heels into the next field. As the weather, as a rule, was moist, and there was plenty of mud about when Mick Molloy performed his athletic feat and I ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon

... Weary would have ruined the horse with harshness, but Weary was really proud of his deviltry and would laugh till the tears came while he told of some new and undreamed bit of cussedness in ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower

... explored, and even the fragments found excite wonder and admiration. Ignorant Barbarians may be destructive on general principles, but fanatical Ecclesiasticism has ever been destructive of all light, knowledge and civilization, through insane hatred or pure "cussedness"! We need only to regard intelligently what it has done, and is doing ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck

... the hot, black breath of the burnin' boat Jim Bludso's voice was heard, And they all had trust in his cussedness, And knowed he would keep his word. And sure's you're born, they all got off Afore the smokestacks fell,— And Bludso's ghost went up alone In the smoke of the ...
— Successful Recitations • Various

... telling us sleek, comfortable sinners the truth without mincin'! No smooth, deludin' lies in that chapter. That's the way to talk to people who don't want their right hand to know what cussedness their left hand is up to. Now, Jeremiah Growther, the next time you want to do a mean thing that you wouldn't have all the town know, just remember what a wrigglin' snake ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... had, my dear," Eustace spoke with a grim hint of humour. "It would have saved us both a good deal of unnecessary trouble and humiliation. However, Scott was too big a fool to tell you. There is a martyrlike sort of cussedness about him that is several degrees worse than any pride. So he let things be, still cheating himself into the belief that the arrangement was for your happiness, till, as you are aware, it turned ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell

... under your hat, Pops, get to work! The 'Purple Slipper' has got to go on Broadway and go big. I followed that purple hunch for pure cussedness against Violet, and now watch it lead me by the nose. You get Gerald Height on the wire as soon as you can, while I talk ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess

... factor was the effect of the excessive heat. This effect, rather subtle in itself, might be called the psychological factor of the situation, for there is not the slightest doubt that it produced a kind of cussedness in everyone, from the highest to the lowest, and sapped energy and made changes unwelcome. For excessive and prolonged heat—and the hot season lasted seven or eight months—rouses a defensive mechanism ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne

... chair and stood up. "First, I want to know what made ye act like that in the church fer. Don't ye know me well 'nough to think I'd get ye sooner or later. Ye knowed yer Daddy couldn't always live in the shack. Ye might better took me while ye could. I would jest have beat ye a bit fer yer cussedness, then mebbe after a while ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White

... strong an' fed up, an' the chill o' Mrs. Daggett is out o' your body an' soul. You can take it from me, that woman is worse than any line-storm I ever struck for dampenin'-down purposes, an' freeze-out, an' generl cussedness. Your business to-day—now—is to get well an' strong. Then the future'll take care ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann

... religion and some call it cussedness, begging your pardon, Mrs. Dr. dear, for using such a word. It seems they cannot make out which it is in Harrison's case. There are days when he growls at everybody because he thinks he is fore-ordained ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... these luncheons and dinners, which were sharply timed to the minute, were these crisp table speeches, often made in re some particular offender or his offense, at other times mere sarcastic comments on life in general and the innate cussedness of human nature, which amused at the same time that they were certain to irritate some. For who is it that is not interested in hearing the peccadilloes of ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser

... of ostrich chicks to full size through the difficulties of disease, wild beasts, and sheer cussedness. Of the resultant thirty birds or so of the season's catch, but two or three will even promise good production. These must be bred in captivity with other likely specimens. Thus after several years the industrious ostrich farmer may become possessed of a few really ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White

... up and down, Tony talked between tears and anger—tears for himself and George, anger at the cussedness of things. He looked straight before him, to where the row of lamps divided the lesser from the greater darkness, the town noises from the chafing surf; it is the only time I have ever seen a fisherman walk along shore without a constant eye ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... impertinent spying of Cosh, threatened to punch his head, and "learn Cosh to be watching him." As everybody knows, boys have no sentiment and no feeling, so the collapse of that morning must be set down to pure cussedness; but the school was so low that Byles ruled over them without resistance, and might have thrashed them if he had so pleased and had not ventured ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren

... boy replied. "That's what you get by being brother to a long-eared mule that for cussedness has Becker's gunmen backed up a ...
— The Boy Scout Camera Club - The Confession of a Photograph • G. Harvey Ralphson

... back, the only men as I can remember that amounted to enough to make you willing to overlook their cussedness, was men as had a handicap ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock

... with them to my satisfaction, I get some one to systematically drop stones and drive them up stream, where, perhaps out of pure unadulterated cussedness, they seem to readily take a fly. A great advantage of this spot up stream is that the baby bass and sun fish give but little trouble. The principal nuisances are the large eels. If the line touches the bottom for an instant an eel seems certain ...
— Black Bass - Where to catch them in quantity within an hour's ride from New York • Charles Barker Bradford

... not Osage on't other side, neither. I'll bet his mother was a Kiowa, an' that means his maternal grandad was a rattlesnake, even if his paternal grandpop was a French markis turned religious an' gone a-missionaryin' among the red heathen. You dig fur enough into that buck's hide an' you'll find cussedness big as a sheep, I'm ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter

... ready t' die of old age and general cussedness," stormed Happy Jack, "I'd just about kill yuh for that." This, however, is a revised version and not intended to be exact. "I want my supper, and I want it blame quick, too, or there'll be a dead Dutchman in camp. ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower

... von Minden, unexpectedly. "There's just two things in your life, just as there's always been, your work and your German cussedness. Otto, I want that strong box of yours. Give it to me and I'll go ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie

... set it down to female infidelity; he had served her turn, she had made a fool of him, and that was all she wanted. Now he might enjoy his humiliation. It did not occur to him that it might be simple "cussedness," to borrow an energetic American term, or that she had not really changed, but was angry with him for some reason which she did not choose to show. It is difficult to weigh the motives of women in the scales of male experience, and many other men besides Geoffrey ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard

... of his unsympathetic nature; it never occurred to any one (but himself probably) that they might have been the cause. In those Sierran altitudes, as elsewhere, the belief in original sin—popularly known as "pure cussedness"—dominated and overbore any consideration of passive, impelling circumstances or temptation, unless they had been actively demonstrated with a revolver. The passive expression of harshness, suspicion, distrust, and moroseness was ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... result up to date is the Virago of the Brain, or the Female Frankenstein. The patentees of this fearsome tertium quid hope to present it to their patrons, within a very few years, in a form entirely devoid of certain physiological defects, with which the cussedness of human structure still uselessly burdens the Virago. As it is, of course, it is by no means uncommon for the virago to be born without that sentimental organ, the heart; and it can, therefore, only be a matter of time before she is rid of what the present writer has been criticised for calling ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne

... real vicious horse, but a dangerous one. Full of vinegar and all-round cussedness, but without malice. Just as soon kill you as not, but in a playful sort of way, you understand, without meaning to at all. Personally, I wouldn't think of riding him. But he's a stayer. Look at them lungs. And look at them legs. Not a blemish. ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... full of cussedness!" grumbled Stransky. "Not having any home, I'm fighting to save the other fellows' homes, principally because I was married this morning by a shrapnel-shell to a lady that understands me perfectly. Say, shall we give them a few?" he asked with a squint down the bridge of ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer

... ye there's a lot o' common-sense an' kindness in the country, only it's so dum slow to git around; while the cussedness and meanness always acts like they felt the hell fire sizzlin' their hind-end whiskers, an' knowed they had jest so many minutes to live an' make a record. There's where a man's smart that fixes things so he kin hold out ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton

... sciatica, more often a punk digestion, and seldom pure cussedness. If you don't humor 'em by comin' back messy yourself, but just jolly 'em along, they're apt to work out of it. And I'd seen sort of a human flicker in them ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford

... raws and galls, that are urged forward at a gallop by the remorseless stick, or even by the goad, for the Neapolitan donkey-boy is absolutely callous to the feelings of his animal. Not that he is cruel out of sheer cussedness, for cruelty's sake, for he can be really kind to his dog or his cat; but the beast of burden, the helpless uncomplaining servant of man, suffers terribly at his hands. It is useless to remonstrate or argue with the young ruffian, who at ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... them a talk for what he called their long-eared cussedness, and laid down a little law and wound up with a number of reasonable explanations for the same. Every man who went out hunting trouble was a camp liability, and would be fired. He did not propose to give the town authorities a chance to jail ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd

... next. I wuz surprised to see no one make a motion at him, but he sunk all the same. "We never waste effort," sed Satan to me; "he carries enough natural cussedness about him, all the time, to sink him, without pilin any devilment on his shoulders ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby

... along, if he did. But they didn't. They got it squared, and ready to be lifted into its place; the kindly darkness of tar was ready to cover a fraud that took four strong men with crowbars and levers to shift; and now (such is the regular cussedness of things) as the fraudulent piece of timber lay its last hour on the ground, looking and smelling, to their guilty imaginations like anything but iron-bark, they were aware of the Government inspector drifting down upon them obliquely, with something of the atmosphere of a casual ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson

... Whitwell, with pleasure in the distinction rather than assent. "But I guess it ain't original sin in the boy. Got it from his gran'father pootty straight, I should say, and maybe the old man had it secondhand. Ha'd to say just where so much cussedness gits statted." ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... to prove embarrassing to their companions. The Saxons, to use their own expressive parlance, were always "a trifle wary" in dealing with Maud, for what that young lady thought she promptly said, and said without reserve, choosing, as it seemed, out of pure "cussedness" the very moment of all others when they would have ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... Adam-and-Evesdropping as we went, and giving the nearest small boy fifty cents to take our copy down to the managing editor. Some of our enterprising clients, who are not habitual commuters and who live in a state of single cussedness, might try it ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... things. I try to study at night and educate myself. But I haven't got any chance against you fellows who are born intellectual and have college training on top of it. So if I have talked sharp to you, my cussedness is really due to envy. I really want to be in your shoes, and I haven't got the brains ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis

... usual divorce court result of some 'society' marriages,"—said Maryllia, calmly—"Anyhow, I'd rather risk single blessedness than united 'cussedness'! Let us go down to dinner, Eva! On all questions pertaining to 'Souls' and modern social ethics, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... that was with him for years and years, his very best friends on earth as you might say, wasn't with him when he died. If it hadn't been for her he'd have stayed in South Harniss where he belonged. Consarn women! They're responsible for more cussedness than the smallpox. 'When a man marries his trouble begins'; that's ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln

... the dictionary, but most of 'em came from observin' people as they look to me from my own level. I have a way of bringin' everybody down to my own level, kid, and I find, except for that commandment about stealin', we all have about the same amount of cussedness in us some'eres. It's human nature to be bad, or to want to be bad. We'd all be a little bit bad, from time to time, if we wasn't afraid of being found out. Course, it comes in different size doses. Some girls think it's terrible bad just to wink at a feller, but they do ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon

... entirely too belligerent in tone for so grave a matter. There is a heap of 'cussedness' mixed up with your usual amiability, and you are at times too fond of a fight. If I were you, I would simply state the facts as they were. I would give the statement as you have here, without the pepper and salt. Let me try my ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure

... I do, I'm certain he tried and tried again. After mother died he left whisky alone, though he still had it in the house. He took to reading philosophy instead. You see, he was not like you. There was a hardness, a bravery in him that you haven't got. You have cussedness instead and cussedness is a thing you can never be sure of. You see," she went on, flushing a little, and suddenly tossing her head proudly, "you don't understand this, and it may sound most appalling snobbishness to you. But my father's people have always ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... outcome of the Colonel's proclamation. His action was pronounced grossly unconstitutional. What our Rulers meant by it, what such arbitrary interference with the liberty of the stomach portended, we could not tell. Some ascribed it to pure "khaki cussedness"; others maintained that the Military aimed at stretching the duration of the Siege to six months—that they might be lifted by a short cut to promotion. Such were our views of collectivism; and if the Military left ear did not tingle ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan

... resumed its normal functions, for no cause that a hot and oily human being could perceive other than the occasional "cussedness" which inanimate objects can be capable of; while surveying it wrathfully, he awoke to the ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy

... conscience takes (and one that I abhor!) In asking one this question: "What did you buy it for?" Why doesn't conscience ply its blessed trade before the act, Before one's cussedness becomes a bald, accomplished fact— Before one's fallen victim to the Tempter's stratagem And blown in twenty dollars ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field

... simple—almost any pony is fast enough for the calf cut—but now Homer gave orders for the steer cut to begin, and steers are rapid and resourceful and full of natural cussedness. Little G and I were relieved by Windy Bill, and betook ourselves to the ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White

... so sure. It might have been that quixotism had inspired his infatuate gesture, but it might quite as conceivably have been everyday vanity or plain cussedness: a noble impulse to serve a pretty lady in distress, a spontaneous device to engage her interest, or a low desire to plague a personality as antipathetic to his own as ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... — N. obstinateness &c adj.; obstinacy, tenacity; cussedness [U.S.]; perseverance &c 604.1; immovability; old school; inflexibility &c (hardness) 323; obduracy, obduration^; dogged resolution; resolution &c 604; ruling passion; blind side. self-will, contumacy, perversity; pervicacy^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... surroundings. Twenty old soldiers in the corps would have taught them how to make themselves moderately snug at night, but they had no old soldiers, and, as the troops on the line of march said, 'they lived like pigs.' They learned the heart-breaking cussedness of camp-kitchens and camels and the depravity of an E.P. tent and a wither-wrung mule. They studied animalculae in water, and developed a few cases of dysentery in ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling

... bitter all my life because I've had to go without so much, and this summer I've been equally bitter because things were changing. It must be just natural cussedness—but I'm honestly going ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes

... Testament, about as an immoral, dissolute, and bestial a set as one could well imagine. Their religions were nothing but a gross mixture of stupid superstition and blind idolatry, pederasty, fornication, and general cussedness. In the then state of the Jewish nation, to have allowed them to mingle freely with these people would have ended in having the Jews adopt all their customs and habits. The aim of the Jewish leaders was to prevent any too free intercourse ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... the move, is a jolly little chestnut, very strong and hardy, with a magnificent long tail. I ride him and the mare on alternate days. Horses are ridiculous creatures. They will eat all sorts of things, even wood, mud, and pieces of coal, as if from sheer cussedness. It can't be because they are hungry, as they get plenty to eat in the way of oats, hay, dry clover, etc. Sometimes, as if from devilment, they will roll in the mud a few minutes after they have been nicely ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... street alone. There's a shot, out comes everybody, and sees Fargo the sheriff laid along the ground, his mouth in the dust, and a full-up gun in his fingers. Not forty feet away stands Malachi with a gun smokin' in his fist. It seems to be the opinion that it was cussedness—just cussedness—that made Malachi turn the sheriff's boots to the sun. For Malachi was quarrelsome. I'll give you a quarter on that. And the sheriff was mettlesome, used to have high spirits, like as if he's lift himself over the fence with his bootstraps. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker



Words linked to "Cussedness" :   orneriness, contrariness, perversity, cussed, perverseness



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