"Shoddy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... even 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 any nation ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... 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 it ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... 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 thought of offering ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... and you live in precisely the same shoddy surroundings as you did when your manuscripts were responsible for an extra size in waste-paper baskets. I was surprised to hear that you were still in Walpole Street. I supposed that, at any rate, you ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... up one day would be only to establish a precedent for day after day of inactivity. The prevailing winds would be head winds. We clung to the shoddy hope held out by that magic name—Milk River. We knew too well that Milk River was only a snare and a delusion; but one must fight toward something—it makes little difference what you call that something. A goal, in itself, ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... 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
... you and look upon 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 would swear they ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... 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 shoot ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... use a common phrase, he does not leave him a leg to stand upon. Although during the previous book Cato has talked so well that the reader will think that there must be something in it, he soon is made to perceive that the Stoic budge is altogether shoddy. ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... incomes in order to lodge themselves; shops in favoured quarters were let for fabulous prices, and charged fabulous prices for their wares. Cocodettes of the Court, cocottes of the Bois, wives of speculators, shoddy squaws from New York, Calmues recently imported from their native steppes, doubtful Italian Princesses, gushing Polish Countesses, and foolish Englishwomen, merrily raced along the road to ruin. Good taste was lost in tinsel and glitter; what a thing cost ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... Everything must be of the very best that art or long and painful labour can produce. But for most of those whose labour produces all these good things—anything is considered good enough. For themselves, the philanthropic workers manufacture shoddy cloth—that is, cheap cloth made of old rags and dirt; and shoddy, uncomfortable ironclad boots. If you see a workman wearing a really good suit of clothes you may safely conclude that he is either leading an unnatural life—that is, he is not married—or that ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... like 'em. They're good gingham and real well made. We don't keep shoddy stuff. You could go into one of the big stores and get aprons for fifty, sixty cents, but ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... line, was a city of perpetual unrest. Besides the soldiers stationed in the encircling camps and fortifications, regiments were continually passing through the capital on their way to and from the front. Statesmen, government contractors, and shoddy politicians haunted hotel lobbies ...
— The Lost Despatch • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... 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 ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... women go hand in hand all over the earth. When women degenerate, it is because the moral atmosphere which they breathe is tainted and unwholesome. Something has gone awfully wrong both with the men and women of America in these latter years. The fraud and demoralization of the thing they call "shoddy" has settled down upon our social life everywhere. I shudder to think of it! With a constitution made strong with fresh air from the Green Mountains, and morals consolidated in the oldest congregation of the State, I feel afraid ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... 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
... on the theory that "an even exchange is no robbery." But so long as brains are not bartered for a title, or beauty sacrificed for a pedigree, we should not complain. Of money, there is plenty in America; and, while marquises are in the market, let Shoddy continue to pipe for its own. A fig for Macbeth's philosophy that "blood will have blood." We modify it in these degenerate days to ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... into his own street and his heart sank. Something had indeed touched his eyes and he saw new and terrible things. The row of houses looked as though they had come out of a child's playbox. They were all untrue, shoddy, uninviting. The waste space on the other side of the unmade street, a repository for all the rubbish of the neighborhood, brought a groan to his lips. He stopped before the gate of his own little dwelling. ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... placidity, a scene in which she had little part. No, mercifully, though in it she was not of it. This was Gregory's relieving thought as his eye ran over them, the women with powdered faces and extravagant clothes and the men with the oddest collars and boots and hair. "Shoddy Bohemians," was his terse definition of them; an inaccurate definition; for though, in the main, Bohemians, they were ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... wildly up and down the field, well out of range of the players. Indeed, most of the ponies seemed inclined to keep their shins out of the melee. Sommers laughed rather ill-naturedly, and Miss Hitchcock frowned. She disliked slovenly playing, and shoddy methods even in polo. When the umpire called time, Parker Hitchcock rode up to where they were standing and shook hands with the young doctor. As he trotted ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... immediately to this odd harangue. She knew a good deal about horses, but nothing whatever about the knavery of betting, the shoddy tricks of it and the despicable spirit in which this great game is often played. Something of her father's cunning, inherited and ineradicable, led her to condone the Captain's sporting creed and not to seek understanding. The man's high spirits made a sure appeal to her. She ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... heart told her that if she put him in a school he would 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, ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... tolerable—fancy turning your soiled linen over to a railroad company—all machine done of course, as everything would be under socialism, and no come-back for the garment that is not hardy enough of constitution to stand the system. In the stores is little or no shoddy material; in general the stock is the best available. If a biscuit or a bolt of khaki is better made in England than in the United States the commissary stocks with English goods, which is unexpected broad-mindedness for government management. But while ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... 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 seat not from fatigue but from desperation, completed the picture ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... Follingsbees, 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
... enough to pump the blood to my face with a rush. It was an insult—a shame, first hand. A shoddy plaster, applied to me—to me, Frank Beeson, a gentleman, whether to be viewed as a plucked greenhorn or not. With cheeks twitching I managed to read the lines accompanying ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... 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 To hold ...
— Bars and Shadows • Ralph Chaplin
... and all the time it's gettin' whiter and whiter, and sweeter and sweeter, the more you bang it round; till at last you have bank-note paper, and write to the Queen of England on it, if you're a mind to, and she won't have none better. And take jute or shoddy, and the minute you touch to wash it, it cockles up, or drops to pieces, and it ain't no good to mortal man. Jest like folks, I tell ye! and May and her mother's pure linen clippin's, if ever ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... 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 of extraordinary promise, although it is now wasted on ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... carelessness and recklessness which allowed the agents of the Liberal Party 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, ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... 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; 1346 Cannon first used ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... comfort. And rarely were proper arrangements made for their reception in camp. The bewildered soldiers stood for hours under broiling southern sun, waiting for rations and shelter, while ignorant officers were slowly learning their unaccustomed duties. At night they were compelled to lie wrapped in shoddy blankets upon rotten straw. Under such conditions these brave volunteers suffered severely and camp diseases became alarmingly prevalent. But the miserable makeshifts used as hospitals were so bad that sick men fought for the privilege of dying in camp with their comrades rather than ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... 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
... 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 of the ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... 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 sheds alone, where again she finds five ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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
... 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
... and sprinklers spread freshness over the Boulevard, the sparrows had become 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 river craft. Somewhere in a window ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... An exact duplicate: "Our product is a clone of their product." Implies a legal reimplementation from documentation or by reverse-engineering. Also connotes lower price. 2. A shoddy, spurious copy: "Their product is a clone of our product." 3. A blatant ripoff, most likely violating copyright, patent, or trade secret protections: "Your product is a clone of my product." This use implies legal action is pending. 4. 'PC clone:' ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... can hardly forbear comparing the magnificently thorough manner in which this frontier was fixed, with the shoddy, confused method in which the Perso-Beluch frontier was "demarcated"—if the word can be used in this case—by Sir Thomas Holdich at the ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... attention, as his dress was not exactly that of a Quaker, 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
... "The Shoddy-Court Literary and Scientific, to be sure," said Mick; "we have got fifty members, and take in three London papers; one 'Northern ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... poetaster's padding. He does not stop to consider whether his rhyme interferes with the necessary rhythm of his verse; or, if he does, he is in too much of a hurry to care, for the interference occurs again and again. And these disturbances and deviations, rhetoric and the sacrifice of rhythm to shoddy rhyme, appear more often than the thematic ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... things. It is 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.' ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... friends of ours who are doing things and making the world sit up and take notice. The mere fact that we live near to them, know them and associate with them is proof-positive that we, too, shall go through life with clean minds and bodies. They would not tolerate us if we were to slip into shoddy ways. Nothing is revealed quicker to our intimates than the losing of ambition ... the slipping into careless habits. We cannot conceal it from them. We fool only those who brush by. The loss of this self-respect has a terrible effect upon the ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... contractor who had 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
... 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, ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... 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 ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of oil used varies from 7 per cent. with the best wools to 15 per cent. with shoddy wools. The scouring agents generally used are the same as those used in loose wool scouring, namely, carbonate of soda for coarse woollen yarns, soap and soda for medium yarns, and soap and ammonia for fine yarns. Prior to treating the yarns it is best to allow them to steep in ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... all alight and alive with bustle. Here a fakir with loud voice and market-place eloquence was vending his shoddy wares; there a drunkard reeled or was kicked from the door of a saloon, whose noiselessly swinging portals closed for an instant only to be reopened to admit another victim, who ere long would be treated likewise. A quartet of young negroes were singing on the ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... generally ranked alongside Negro 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 ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... lacked, that De Morbihan had not exaggerated the 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
... a shop-girl—because you have the habit. There is no type; but a perverse generation is always seeking a type; so this is what the type should be. She has the high-ratted pompadour, and the exaggerated straight-front. Her skirt is shoddy, but has the correct flare. No furs protect her against the bitter spring air, but she wears her short broadcloth jacket as jauntily as though it were Persian lamb! On her face and in her eyes, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... on the 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 with their sordidness, and who ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... son of John Duff, late his own tenant of the Mains. Altogether Donal's thoughts were not of the kind to put him in fit mood—I do not say to gather benefit from the prophesying of Fergus, but to give fair play to the peddler who now rose to display his loaded calico and beggarly shoddy over the book-board of the pulpit. But the congregation listened rapt. I dare not say there was no divine reality concerned in his utterance, for Gibbie saw many a glimmer through the rents in his logic, and the thin-worn patches of his philosophy; but it was not such glimmers that ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... should be less godlike 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
... towards 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 ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... 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 ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... SHODDY; filling her ears and soul with shriekery and metallic clangor, mad noises, mad hurries mostly no-whither;—and are awakening, I suppose, in such of her sons as still go into reflection at all, a deeper ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... belongs to Hon. Geo. Okill Stuart, Judge of the Court of Vice Admiralty. Its beginnings brings us back to the era of the Bourbon sovereigns of Canada, to the unregretted time (1758), when Intendant Bigot's shoddy entourage held ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... sells me addled eggs; the tailor sells me shoddy, I'm only a consumer, and I am not anybody. The cobbler pegs me paper soles, the dairyman short-weights me, I'm only a consumer, and most everybody hates me. There's turnip in my pumpkin pie and ashes in my pepper, The ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... they are to us, they are nothing to each other. Those sensitive creatures have no ears for our blandishments. It takes something more than words to cajole them to do our will, to cover us with glory. Luckily, too, or else there would have been more shoddy reputations for first-rate seamanship. Ships have no ears, I repeat, though, indeed, I think I have known ships who really seemed to have had eyes, or else I cannot understand on what ground a certain 1,000-ton barque of my ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... may be known from the fact that once he got enough votes to make him a State Senator by asking his auditors at each rally to feel of the lumps in the corners of their ready-made vests. A man who is fingering the sheddings of shoddy feels like voting for the candidate who declares that he will make a sheep a respectable member of society ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... 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 ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... shoddy new reach-me-downs as pawned old clo,' complained Lazarus Levy, who had taken over S. Cohn's business, together with his daughter Deborah, 'and he charges the Sudminster donkey-heads more than the price we ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... there, to listen, to help, to 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
... state, in passing, that it was during the Civil War that the word "shoddy" was coined. It was originally used to designate a class of inferior goods intended for use in the army from the sale of which many fortunes were made. Later the word was employed to designate those who used such ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... place 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
... genuine and frequent reason for the non-acknowledgment of indebtedness to what one may call impersonal as well as personal sources: even an American editor of school classics whose own English could not pass for more than a syntactical shoddy of the cheapest sort, felt it unfavourable to his reputation for sound learning that he should be obliged to the Penny Cyclopaedia, and disguised his references to it under contractions in which Us. Knowl.. took the place of the low word Penny. Works of this convenient ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... recognition of the fact that, though we live in time and suffer its conditions, we are immortal also and chafe under too strict a bondage to time. Our relations with other human beings ought not to be evanescent! There is something cheap and shoddy in the giving and taking of human personality on such easy soon-forgotten terms. It is not only in sexual relations that this is true. It is true of all human intercourse. The longer care and devotion of human parents for their offspring is not a physical only, but a spiritual necessity: and ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... to no account for his work, and whether it was right or wrong made little difference. He found that his teacher would profess to know things of which he knew he was ignorant, and, in a word, that there was an air of shoddy, not to say dishonesty, about ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... 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 ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... 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 introduced Frank as Lord Mount Rorke's son, then as his ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... of the 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 rural ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... as a mere acquirement of art, is a quality that has not been enough noticed in him; doubtless because it is not enough looked for anywhere by the majority of critics and readers, in these days of adulteration and of rapid manufacture out of shoddy and short-fibred stuffs. We demand a given measure of reading, good or bad, and producers of it are in great part paid for length: so that with much using of thin and shapeless literature, we have forgotten ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... 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
... various styles of architecture adopted in different parts of the buildings—some old, some comparatively new. I found the older more grand and massive, and the newer, of the sixteenth century, wanting in dignity of design, and the workmanship very inferior. The reign of Shoddy had already begun before Cromwell laid the castle ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... themselves to dinner in shady corners on the pavement, there walked into their midst Grishka Chelkash, an old hunted wolf, well known to all the dock population as a hardened drunkard and a bold and dexterous thief. He was barefoot and bareheaded, clad in old, threadbare, shoddy breeches, in a dirty print shirt, with a torn collar that displayed his mobile, dry, angular bones tightly covered with brown skin. From the ruffled state of his black, slightly grizzled hair and the dazed look ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... 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 ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... Everything made for the soldier is commonplace, ugly, and of bad quality; from his cardboard boots, attached to the uppers by a criss-cross of worthless thread, to his badly cut, badly shaped, and badly sewn clothes, made of shoddy and transparent cloth—blotting-paper—that one day of sunshine fades and an hour of rain wets through, to his emaciated leathers, brittle as shavings and torn by the buckle spikes, to his flannel underwear that is thinner than cotton, to ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... sea-level, is picturesque and unusually clean for 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. ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... 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 a scale' ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... 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 ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... bless you! mine is sad to tell, sir; The gratitude of great men drove me downward, Reduced me to these shoddy coat and trowsers So sad ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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 Worthy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... The ivied walls, and purplish roof lichened yellow in places, the quiet meadows harbouring ponies and kine, reaching from it to the sea—all was mellow. In truth it made all the other houses of the town seem shoddy—standing alone beyond them, like its, master, if anything a little too esthetically remote from ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... proportions, in comparison with its larger rivals, far more respectable and aristocratic—if such terms may be permitted to anything appertaining to the land of so-called "equality" and "freedom," where, according to the poetical belief, there is no aristocracy save hat of merit and shoddy! ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... 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 ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... 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 it becomes unwearable, and ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... that is the first and biggest step towards a man improving it. Sometimes it gave a man a figure who before possessed merely elongation with practically no width. But the days of khaki are over—thank God for the cause, but aesthetically it's a pity. We have returned to the drab and shoddy days of dress before the war, and men look more shoddy and more ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... uncomfortable. Part of it is as old as the time of Charles II., and part dates from Queen Anne. Something was added at a later date,—perhaps early in the Georges; but it was all done with good materials, and no stint of labour. Shoddy had not been received among building materials when any portion of Folking was erected. But then neither had modern ideas of comfort become in vogue. Just behind the kitchen-garden a great cross ditch, called Foul-water ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... 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 and commercial enterprise ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... the perusal of what I will call the Daily Occidental. This was a paper (I know not if it be so still) that stood out alone among its brethren in the West; the others, down to their smallest item, were defaced with capitals, head-lines, alliterations, swaggering misquotations, and the shoddy picturesque and unpathetic pathos of the Harry Millers: the Occidental alone appeared to be written by a dull, sane, Christian gentleman, singly desirous of communicating knowledge. It had not only this merit, which endeared it to me, but was admittedly the best informed ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... 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 ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... can not go to the 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
... old, and the woodwork crumbling; the lock was new and shoddy. But I have always been ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... 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! ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... saw 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
... jades the potter's sham, the musk and aloes the product of a soap factory, the joss but a cigar-store Indian, and the Oriental dainties of Hong Fah the scrappings of a Yankee grocery store. Yet behind the shoddy tinsel of Doyers and Pell Streets, as behind Alice's looking-glass, there is another Chinatown—a strange, inhuman, Oriental world, not necessarily of trapdoors and stifled screams, but one moved by influences undreamed ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... hours! If aye he wanted her 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
... said Mrs. Bell, "that cashmere is dark and heavy, and coarse, too. I don't expect it's all-wool. It's shoddy, that's what ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... is as cheap in quality and dear in price as it can be; his bread and milk, under the laws of supply and demand, are at the legal minimum of wholesomeness; the coal trade cheerfully raises his coal in mid-winter to ruinous prices. He buys clothes of shoddy and boots of brown paper. To get any other is nearly impossible for a man with three hundred pounds a year. His newspapers, which are supported by advertisers and financiers, in order to hide the obvious injustice of this one-man-fight against ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... was eleven o'clock; and at twelve that night he entered Colonel Cranor's quarters at Paris,—having ridden a hundred miles with a rope round his neck, for thirteen dollars a month, hard-tack, and a shoddy uniform. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... 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 truthfulness ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... can be of no service, and that must 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 will ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... no adequate prevision of the extent and duration of the war, and of the necessary arrangements for its demands, a considerable period elapsed before a sufficient quantity of the required materials could be accumulated. Those were the days of 'shoddy' cloth and spavined horses. The department, however, exhibited great administrative energy, under the direction of its able head, General M. C. Meigs, and has amply provided for ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... 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 compelled to accept land ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird |
