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Foist   Listen
verb
Foist  v. t.  (past & past part. foisted; pres. part. foisting)  To insert surreptitiously, wrongfully, or without warrant; to interpolate; to pass off (something spurious or counterfeit) as genuine, true, or worthy; usually followed by in. " Lest negligence or partiality might admit or foist in abuses and corruption." " When a scripture has been corrupted... by a supposititious foisting of some words in."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Foist" Quotes from Famous Books



... to be sure, times and manners have altered. While you lived, taste kept the French drama pure; and it was the congenial business of English playwrights to foist their rustic grossness and their large Fescennine jests into the urban page of Moliere. Now they are diversely occupied; and it is their affair to lend modesty where they borrow wit, and to spare a blush to the cheek of ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang

... money into a certain failure. I will not listen to you, Dick. Much as I love you, I still have a conscience and it will not allow me to sacrifice that simple soul. Why, don't you know what would happen? The critics would go into convulsions over the attempt to foist a silly little—" ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon

... Ha, excellent! I was awaiting this. Thou wilt inoculate our knightly veins With thy corrupted Jewish blood. Thou 'lt foist This adder on my bosom. Henry Schnetzen Is no weak dupe, whom every lie may start. Make ready, Jew, for death—and warn ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus

... irritation or hurts between peoples may be molified and healed by indemnities, which also serve his purpose because they necessitate the incurring of a bonded debt, interest bearing. But the history of the world for centuries proves that a condition of war is Mammon's opportunity to foist a debt upon a free people and to increase the burden of those whose ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott

... William leaned on his hoe and fixed her with stern eye. "Easier a brick without straw, a law without a legislature, than to foist an idea, a plan, a measure on this village save in one way. My dear Annie, haven't you found out in five days that Miss Pamela is chief of the clan? Sister, aunt, cousin, in varying degrees, to every Roscoe and Collamer in the township—and there are no ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various

... engagement on the part of the Scottish nation subscribed to by all ranks of the community, the first signature being appended to it in the Greyfriars' Churchyard, Edinburgh, on February 28, 1638, to maintain the Presbyterian Church and to resist all attempts on the part of Charles I. to foist Episcopacy upon it; it was ratified by the Scottish Parliament in 1640, and subscribed by Charles II. in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... He can't. Stillwater has kept him solely because that unspeakable wife of his hopes to foist their dull, ugly eldest girl ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips

... think if gentlemen would look at this proposition seriously, there would be no difference of opinion among us. Such a proposition would foist into the Constitution a most injurious, pernicious, and troublesome doctrine. By the most ultra abolitionists of the free States the power of emancipating our slaves has been disclaimed. From the organization of the Government, no such right has been claimed by any respectable party ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden

... was, to do her justice, one of those "lion" finders who seek the animal for pleasure, not for the glory it brings them; she had the courage of her instincts—lion-entities were indispensable to her, but she trusted to divination to secure them; nobody could foist a "lion" ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... human, and at this she rose, her delicate face quiet and impassive, and shook out the shimmering folds of her beautiful dress. She said casually, picking up her fan and evidently preparing for some sort of adjournment: "Oh, Arnold, don't be so absurd. Of course you can't foist yourself off on a family that's no relation to you, that way. And in any case, it wouldn't do for you to graduate from a co-educational State University. Not a person you know would have heard ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... alone. It was mighty cool in Jean Arlac to foist her on thee. And now that we have left the crowd behind and ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas

... American, which can be found in vol. vi, p. 113, of his "History." On page 153 he asserts that he is an "impartial historian"; and about three lines before mentions that "it may suit the Americans to invent any falsehood, no matter how barefaced, to foist a valiant character on themselves." On page 419 he says that Captain Porter is to be believed, "so far as is borne out by proof (the only safe way where an American is concerned),"—which somewhat sweeping denunciation of the veracity ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt

... She was his steady champion from first to last. Whether it was some crackbrain scribbler who tried to prove Poe "mad," some accomplished scholar who endeavored to disparage him in order to magnify some other writer, or some silly woman who attempted to foist herself into notice by relating "imaginary facts" concerning the poet's hidden life, Mrs. Whitman was always ready ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various

... Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii was of great interest to her, and she at once asked for the enfranchisement of the women of these newly won island possessions. She regarded it as an outrage for the most democratic nation in the world to foist upon them an exclusively masculine government, a "male oligarchy," as she called it. "I really believe I shall explode," she wrote Clara Colby, "if some of you young women don't wake up and raise your ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz

... morning passed like minutes to the girls, and they were surprised when the porter came through with his "Foist call ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope

... have not accustomed yourself to analysis," he said. "However, I will summarise my views, and if you can find any flaws in my reasoning I will be glad. The first thing to observe is that the diminutive Frenchman drew on himself the special vengeance of the Turks when I exposed the attempt to foist on them a collection of dummy diamonds. Yet he actually had the nerve to return to the Rue Barbette later in the day. He has not been seen since, so the little scoundrel is either dead or a prisoner in Hussein-ul-Mulk's flat. As I cannot permit myself to participate in ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy

... more criminal than the crimes they condemn": the excuses that are self-accusations: instances, from his own experience, of a hasty confidence in other men's virtue which "God had favoured": and how, "even to the worst people, it is sweet, their end once gained by a vicious act, to foist into it some show of justice." In the presence of this indefatigable analyst of act and motive all fixed outlines seemed to vanish away. The healthful pleasure of motion, of thoughts in motion!—Yes! Gaston felt them, the oldest of [95] them, moving, as he listened, ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... and speculations; other names given to parts which have been ill observed, or which are even non-existent, have been sources of new errors. What functions and uses has it not been attempted to foist upon the pineal gland, and on the alleged empty space in the brain which is called the arch, the first of which is but a gland, while the very existence of the other is doubtful,—the empty space being perhaps produced by the hand of the anatomist ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler



Words linked to "Foist" :   impose, insert, stick in, bring down, foist off, inflict, visit, introduce, enclose, inclose



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