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Pish   Listen
verb
Pish  v. i.  To express contempt.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pish" Quotes from Famous Books



... Ask the beggar whom he gets the most pence from—the fine lady in her carriage—the beau smelling of eau de Cologne? Pish! the people nearest to being beggars themselves keep the beggar alive. You were friendless, and the man who has all earth for a foe befriends you. It is the way of the world, sir,—the way of the world. Come, eat while you can; this time next year you may ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... stayed his mind now on preparations in the pantry. Something solid there! A haunch of venison, mince-meat, winter succotash, a roasted peahen,—and that is the top and crown of Nature's efforts in the way of fowls. For suppers,—pish! However, Tom ate with the rest. Mother was hungry; so they were very leisurely, and joked and laughed to that extent that even Catty was uproarious when they were through. Then Jem fell to work at the great coals, and battered them into a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... Daslles: And thus, they will deliver themselves, like a Court full of wise Counsellors, for the pleasure and instruction of your Beloved. Well, what could you wish for more? D'ye talk of mony? Pish, that's stamp'd with hammers: give it liberally; the good Woman knows how and where to lay it out. If there be but little mony by the hand; be silent of that, it might happen to disturb your Dear, and who knows ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh

... in Hindostanee Billingsgate, before it has acquired enough of its ancestral tongue to frame the simplest sentence. It bullies its bhearer; it bangs distractingly on the tom-tom; it surfeits itself to an apoplectic point with pish-pash; it burns its mouth with hot curry, and bawls; it indulges in horrid Hindostanee songs, whereof the burden will not bear translation; it insults whatever is most sacred to the caste attachments of its attendants; the Moab of ayahs is its wash-pot, over an Edom of bhearers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various

... reluctant for the cool evening, with its dew and stars and fading strain of tragic red. And I ask myself why I ever leave this humour? What I have gained? And the winds blow in the trees with a sustained "Pish"! and the birds answer me ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... "Pish! Now, uncle, don't cry, do what you will, lest I cry too. Help me to be a man while I live, even if I go to the black place when ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... "Pish!" retorted her grace. "Mr. Gay is only exercising commonsense. We all of us have a little of that commodity. If we could only have it handy when it's wanted how much better the world ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce

... William was our king declared, To ease the nation's grievance, With his new wind about I steer'd, And swore to him allegiance: Old principles I did revoke, Set conscience at a distance; Passive obedience was a joke, And pish for non-resistance. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various

... went out, while Bazarov remained standing a minute before the door, and suddenly exclaimed, 'Pish, well, I'm dashed! how fine, and how foolish! A pretty farce we've been through! Like trained dogs dancing on their hind-paws. But to decline was out of the question; why, I do believe he'd have struck me, and then ...' (Bazarov turned ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

... "Pish and tush!" replied Malvolia, who, like a great many people, secretly enjoyed feeling herself aggrieved. "I consider the affair an affront, a deliberate affront. And you shall pay dear for this humiliation," she screamed, quickly losing control of her temper. "Every time ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston

... "Pish! For how long? . . . When she sees daily under her eyes things that she cannot explain, unaccountable things, how long will she remain satisfied, I ask you? And ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler

... Madame de Cocheforet was such a woman. I was glad that she had laughed as she had—with a ring of disdain and defiance; glad that she was not a little, tender, child-like woman, to be crushed by the first pinch of trouble. For if I succeeded in my task, if I contrived to—but, pish! Women, I told myself, were all alike. She would find consolation ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman

... "Pish! Fanny; no satire from you: you, who are not properly speaking even a tragic actress! But there is something about your profession sublimely picturesque in the midst of these noisy brawls. The storms of nations shake not the ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... language would become a dissonant jargon without standard or propriety? The controversy was referred to us; and Banter, notwithstanding his real opinion to the contrary, decided it in favour of Wagtail; upon which the peevish annuitant arose, and uttering the monosyllable pish! with great ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett

... greatest knight in the world? And what now of your sister, hey? Little fool, do you not catch the measure of it now? Two honey years of Jehane Saint-Pol, gossamer pledges of mouth and mouth, of stealing fingers, kiss and clasp; but for the French King's daughter—pish! the thing of naught they have made her—the sacrament of marriage, the treaty, the dowry-fee. Oh, heaven and earth, Eustace, answer me if ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett

... "Pish! Pshaw! You have had a soup, a mutton-chop, a triangle of pie, a lager beer, but you have not dined. You are not starving, and yet you have, from my present point of view, eaten nothing the whole of this day. Mon cher, it is necessary that you ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison

... master, sir? Pish, that's nothing; soldiers have got their swords and pistols to think about, not their pens. Best soldiers I ever knew couldn't write at all. Enough for them to do to fight. You'll hear from him some day, and when you do, you'll know as he has been pretty busy putting the people straight,—more ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn

... glared through his spectacles at the pages of the magazine, from the impatience with which he from time to time dashed his disengaged hand through the masses of his iron-grey hair, and from the frequent ejaculations of "Pish!" "Psha!" "Ach!" and so on which escaped his lips, accompanied by vast volumes of smoke, it seemed evident that he was not altogether at one with the author whose article he was perusing. He was an explorer ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... 'Pish!—Was he thinking of skin and oil when he pulled the trigger? or merely obeying the fleshly lust of destructiveness—the puppet of two bumps on the ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... ha's, thy whine and stammering. 55 Pish—fool! thou blunder'st through the devil's book, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... I give my parole to leave you sons of filth with this beautiful Spanish ship, to go make war upon other Spaniards! Ha!" Don Diego laughed in his throat. "You fool! You can kill me. Pish! It is very well. I die with my work well done. In less than an hour you will be the prisoners of Spain, and the Cinco Llagas will go ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... a surly Tapster tell, And daub his Visage with the Smoke of Hell; They talk of some strict Testing of us—Pish! He's a Good Fellow, and 'twill ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... one of these second-sighted men out of the Highlands, to give his judgment of the then great favourite, George Villers, Duke of Buckingham; as soon as ever he saw him, " Pish," said he, he will come to nothing. I see a dagger in his breast;" and he was stabbed in the breast by ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey

... SO SO spatters, t'other: no! Tis his first play; twere solecisme 'tshould goe; The next 't show'd pritily, but searcht within It appeares bare and bald, as is his chin; The towne-wit sentences: A SCHOLARS PLAY! Pish! I know not why, but th'ave ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace

... in it for the winter, at least, and will make it her home," Arthur replied: at which the Major pish'd and psha'd, and said that there ought to be convents, begad, for English ladies, and wished that Miss Bell had not been there to interfere with the arrangements of the family, and that she would mope herself to death alone in ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... folly! melt earth down for that, Till the pure ore eludes you and leaves you raw scoriae? Pish, the vein's wrong!" But you, friends—come, what were you at When God spat you out suddenly? what was the story He Cut short thus, the growth He ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... Moreover, I do verily think that, in some few instances, he sacrifices his judgment to another's whim; by a reluctance to put out the strength of his own powers. He is also, I had almost said, the admiring slave of Ritsonian fastidiousness; and will cry 'pish' if a u be put for a v, or a single e for a double one: but take him fairly as he is, and place him firmly in the bibliographical scale, and you will acknowledge that his weight is far from being inconsiderable. He is a respectable, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... social life of the later Roman Empire speak of a certain young man of Ariminum, who would jump into rivers and swim in 'em. When his friends said, 'You fish!' he would answer, 'Oh, pish! Fish can't swim like me, they've ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... God would be very stupid to leave in the this world, which he has so curiously constructed, an abominable devil whose special business it is to spoil everything for him. Pish! I recognise no devil if there be a good God; you may depend upon that. I should very much like to see the devil. Ha, ha! I am not ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac

... "Pish-haw!" he sed sneerinly, "I mean you air in this city for the purposes of gloating over a fallen people. Others may basely succumb, but as for me, I ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 2 • Charles Farrar Browne

... in Miss Edgeworth's works of all the kinds from Castle Rackrent to Frank. She also had a great and an acknowledged influence on Scott, a considerable and a certainly not disavowed influence on Miss Austen. She is good reading always, however much we may sometimes pish and pshaw at the untimely poppings-in of the platitudes and crotchets (for he was that most abominable of things, a platitudinous crotcheteer) of Richard her father. She was a girl of fourteen when the beginnings of the domestic novel were laid in Evelina, and she lived to see it ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... went to School one Day Through the Churchyard she took her Way When lo, the Devil came and said Where are you going to, my pretty Maid To School I am going Sir, said she Pish, Child, don't mind the same saith he, But haste to your Companions dear And learn to lie and curse and swear. They bravely spend their Time in Play God they don't value—no, not they. It is a Fable, Child, he cry'd At which his cloven Foot she spy'd. I'm sure there is a God, saith she Who from ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... nonsensical, preposterous, egregious, senseless, inconsistent, ridiculous, extravagant, quibbling; self-annulling, self- contradictory; macaronic[obs3], punning. foolish &c. 499; sophistical &c. 477; unmeaning &c. 517; without rhyme or reason; fantastic. Int. fiddlededee! pish! pho[obs3]! "in the name of the Prophet—figs!" [Horace Smith]. Phr. credat Judaeus Apella [Lat][Horace]; tell it to ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... says the Prince, 'how have I lived fifteen years in thy company without seeing thy perfections? What woman in all Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, nay, in Australia, only it is not yet discovered, can presume to be thy equal? Angelica? Pish! Gruffanuff? Phoo! The Queen? Ha, ha! Thou art my Queen. Thou art the real Angelica, ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray

... of these miscellaneous treasures wore one unvarying smile upon his countenance during the whole time of my remaining with him. He saw me reject this, and select that; cry "pish" upon one article, and "bravo" upon another—with the same settled complacency of countenance. His responses were short and pithy, and I must add, pleasant: for, having entirely given up all hopes of securing any thing in the shape ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin



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