User:CopperKettle/quotes

potter about

• Chesterton: "But I do not divide these pleasures either by excitement or convenience, but by the nature of the thing itself. It seems human to have a horse or bicycle, because it seems human to potter about; and men cannot work horses, nor can bicycles work men, enormously far afield of their ordinary haunts and affairs."

beholden

• (glimpsed in: Detachment)
  • No, she had money enough of her own to walk through life in maiden meditation, fancy free, without being beholden to anybody for a sixpence. - s:The House by the Churchyard/Chapter XXXI
  • So as it should seem, that hitherto men are rather beholden to a wild goat for surgery, or to a nightingale for music, or to the ibis for some part of physic, or to the pot-lid that flew open for artillery, or generally to chance or anything else than to logic for the invention of arts and sciences. - The Advancement of Learning
  • And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. - A Time For Choosing
  • We created government as our servant, beholden to us and possessing no powers except those voluntarily granted to it by us. - To Restore America
  • ‘I am the more beholden to you for your kindness, when I find what kind of stuff the good citizens here are made of.’ - Martin Chuzzlewit/Chapter 17
  • Although one perform glorious and important deeds, a King is never beholden to his subject. The Cid

to slur over

• • The bad points of the work are slurred over and the good ones brought out into the best light, all this through a feeling akin to that which makes it unpleasant to speak ill of one to one's face. E A Poe
  • The sooner that takes place, the better. It is a question too serious to national pride, if not to national interests, to be slurred over; and every year is adding to the difficulties which environ it. W Irving
  • The work is slurred over that relates to the service of God, because they pile so much work before them that there is nothing done thoroughly. Ellen G White
  • He took up several sheets of paper covered with writing, and began to read rapidly, slurring over the uninteresting legal terms and laying particular stress on some sentences. Tolstoy
  • Now, it is easy to twist out of shape what I have just said, easy to affect to misunderstand it, and if it is slurred over in repetition not difficult really to misunderstand it. Teddy
  • Assessments and taxes were enormous; the public works were notoriously neglected, the accounts were slurred over by bribed auditors, and the decent citizen was terrorized into paying public blackmail, and holding his tongue lest some worse thing befall him. Conan Doyle
  • The manner in which she learnt her lessons and practised her music was calculated to drive any governess to despair. Short and easy as her tasks were, if done at all, they were slurred over, at any time and in any way; but generally at the least convenient times, and in the way least beneficial to herself, and least satisfactory to me: the short half-hour of practising was horribly strummed through; she, meantime, unsparingly abusing me, either for interrupting her with corrections, or for not rectifying her mistakes before they were made, or something equally unreasonable. Anne Bronte
  • I have been so very minute in my accounts of Kate's love-affairs, that I feel it would not be fair to slur over mine. s:The Atlantic Monthly/Volume 1/No. 6/My Journal to my Cousin Mary
  • This is not a matter to be trifled with, or to be slurred over by sneering at those who demand a remedy. s:The Issues of 1874, Especially in Missouri
  • After his college days comes an episode which his biographers seem inclined to slur over, perhaps from a false sense of the dignity of biography, and that is the two years, from 25 April, 1841, to May, 1843, which Thoreau spent under Emerson’s roof. s:The Cambridge History of American Literature/Book II/Chapter X

to arrogate

• Science and art have arrogated to themselves the right of idleness, and of the enjoyment of the labor of others, and have betrayed their calling. s:On_the_Significance_of_Science_and_Art/4, Tolstoy
• Permit the Executive, in addition, to arrogate to itself the war-making authority, and you create a one-man power in the new world stronger and more dangerous in some respects than you find it in some of the constitutional monarchies of the old. s:U. S. Senate Speeches and Remarks of Carl Schurz/Grant's Usurpation of the War Powers in San Domingo
• If a nation seizes on these highways, if it arrogates to itself the exclusive privilege of traversing them without opposition, and repels, by the fear of being plundered, all those who wish to make the same use of them, it is no better than a nation of robbers.... ...Nay, more, a nation which, without a legitimate claim, would arrogate to itself an exclusive right to the sea, and support its pretensions by force, does an injury to all nations; it infringes their common right; and they are justifiable in forming a general combination against it, in order to repress such an attempt. s:United States v. Rodgers/Dissent Brown

rasher

• (good) "He toasted his bacon on a fork and caught the drops of fat on his bread; then he put the rasher on his thick slice of bread, and cut off chunks with a clasp-knife, poured his tea into his saucer, and was happy." \\Sons and Lovers

rip along

• And so they went ripping along, and everybody just petrified and cold to see it; and when they got to the Capitol at last it was the quickest trip that ever was made, and everybody said so. \\Twain

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• "Well," said Mrs. Morel. "I'd starve before I'd sit down and seam twenty-four stockings for twopence ha'penny."
• "Oh, I don't know," said Mrs. Anthony. "You can rip along with 'em." \\Lawrence

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put in, put in for

(in a formal-ese sense)

• In addition, she put in for about $70,000 in reimbursement for things she either did not buy, or bought for personal use.

hash out

(useful in journalese jargon)

• For political cover he convened a “Conference of Alaskans” in mid-February, during which a 55-member panel spent three days hashing out a solution to the budget crunch. (The E)
• The revival of the tradition this year seems a product of China’s particularly fraught political climate, and testament to the utility of a discreet and informal venue for hashing out difficult issues. E
• S: The Iraqi people have shown their impulse toward democracy; they need security in order to hash out the many remaining differences that still divide them. - Winning the War in Iraq

quoit

• He sat at home and, when the children were in bed, and she was sewing—she did all her sewing by hand, made all shirts and children's clothing—he would read to her from the newspaper, slowly pronouncing and delivering the words like a man pitching quoits. (S&L ch 2)

pat of butter, soap, etc.

• Then he bunged up the mouth with a bit of soap—which he got on his thumb-nail from a pat in a saucer—and the straw was finished. s:Armadale/Book the Third/Chapter II
• He was, in point of fact, a waiter, and he comes into the story at this point bearing a tray full of glasses, knives, forks, and pats of butter on little plates. s:Uneasy Money/Chapter 6
• Mrs. Baines was now at the stage of depositing little pats of butter in rows on a large plain of paste. s:The Old Wives' Tale/Book I, Chapter III
• Upon this, the old woman cleared the little table, went out of the room, and quickly returned with a tray on which was a dish of little rusks and a small precise pat of butter, cool, symmetrical, white, and plump. s:Little Dorrit/Book 1/Chapter 3
• Present on the table, one scanty pot of tea, one scanty loaf, two scanty pats of butter, two scanty rashers of bacon, two pitiful eggs, and an abundance of handsome china bought a secondhand bargain. s:Our Mutual Friend/Book 2/Chapter 5
• The gentle way in which she tried to get up a little conversation with the fiery–faced matron in the crunched bonnet, who was waiting to attend her; after making a desperate rally in regard of her dress, and attiring herself in a washed–out yellow gown with sprigs of the same upon it, so that it looked like a tesselated work of pats of butter. s:Martin Chuzzlewit/Chapter 45
• The primrose-coloured pats of butter, each stamped with a shamrock in relief, seemed saturated with the fragrance of Normandy pastures. s:The Street of Our Lady of the Fields
• In the branch he seats himself at a table covered with waxcloth, and a pampered menial, of High-Dutch extraction and, indeed, as yet only partially extracted, lays before him a cup of coffee, a roll and a pat of butter, all, to quote the deity, very good. s:The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson Volume 1/Chapter IV
• The 'quaint' remarks fall all round one during mealtimes, with little soft plups like pats of butter. s:The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke: With a Memoir/Memoir/Part III
• It might be supposed that a grocer was beyond the breath of calumny; but no—the neighbours stigmatised him as a chandler; and the poisonous voice of envy distinctly asserted that he dispensed tea and coffee by the quartern, retailed sugar by the ounce, cheese by the slice, tobacco by the screw, and butter by the pat. s:Sketches by Boz/The Tuggses at Ramsgate
• And such a good breakfast as was presently brought to them,—delicious coffee in bowl-like cups, crisp rolls and rusks, an omelette with a delicate flavor of fine herbs, stewed chicken, little pats of freshly churned butter without salt, shaped like shells and tasting like solidified cream, and a pot of some sort of nice preserve. s:What Katy Did Next/VI.
• Then followed the dairyman with a supply of tiny leaf-shaped pats of freshly churned butter, a big flask of milk, and two small bottles of thick cream, with a twist of vine leaf in each by way of a cork. s:What Katy Did Next/XI.
• s:

hank

• • s:

riff

• Campbell tells me that he began writing the story working in the spirit of a jazz musician, picking up a theme from a great exemplar and then riffing on it, modulating it, using it as a basis for invention and discovery. (The Muse in the Machine: Essays on Poetry and the Anatomy of ..)
• In 1959, he joined Allen Ginsberg and other poets to found Beatitude, a poetry journal that took its name from Jack Kerouac's etymological riffing on the term beat. (The Beat Book: Writings from the Beat Generation)
• Humorously riffing on many of the conventions of science fiction, Adams related the story of Arthur Dent, a perfectly boring, middle-class Englishman who is whisked off into interstellar adventures by his friend Ford Prefect, who turns out to be an alien.

scrim

• 1793 - Before that time the flax was dressed by women there was no cloth made at Forsar but a sew yard wides called Scrims the number of incorporated weavers did not exceed 40 nor were there above 60 looms employed in the town But
• 1793 - Besides these they are now much employed in working a thin kind of coarse linen called Silesias vulgarly Scrims whereof each piece is 27 or 30 inches broad and 92 ...
• 1794 - About 1200 pair of shoes are made annually for exportation and the manufacture of coarse linen is carried on to a very great extent Osnaburgh scrim aud birdy to the amount of about 38,000 1 Sterling were manufactured from September 1791 to September 1792.
• 1798 - For securing the crop in the Spring by defending the bloom till fairly set from the frosty winds which so frequently happen at that season in this country1 canvas screens or old nets are necessary but the canvas is far preferable and in the end little more expensive than the nets There is a kind of thin canvas called Scrim or Osnaburgh which answers very well and is fold at about nine pence per square yard

nip out

• s:The_Gold_Bat/Chapter_9

“Once,” said Renford. “Half-a-dozen chaps came down here once while we were feeding the ferrets. We waited till they’d got well in, then we nipped out quietly. They didn’t see us.”

billhook

• "Yes, there or thereabouts," said Winterborne, a chop of the billhook jerking the last word into two pieces.
• With a small billhook he carefully freed the collar of the tree from twigs and patches of moss which incrusted it to a height of a foot or two above the ground, an operation comparable to the "little toilet" of the executioner's victim.

1. • 1869, Richard D. Blackmore, Lorna Doone, chapter 38

     I worked very hard in the copse of young ash, with my billhook and a shearing-knife; cutting out the saplings where they stooled too close together, making spars to keep for thatching, wall-crooks to drive into the cob, stiles for close sheep hurdles, and handles for rakes, and hoes, and two-bills, of the larger and straighter stuff.

dead letter

• (E.A. Poe) I have thought proper to premise thus much, lest the incredible tale I have to tell should be considered rather the raving of a crude imagination, than the positive experience of a mind to which the reveries of fancy have been a dead letter and a nullity.
• An attempt had been made in 1860 to improve the relations between landlords and tenants by an act which conferred certain powers on limited owners, but the measure had remained a dead letter (23 and 24 Vict. c. 153).
• For ten years convocation had not been suffered to meet for the despatch of business ; by a series of successive prorogations the church's parliament had practically become a dead letter.