"Fad" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the public, and became a sort of fashionable fad. It was commended, and after Parliament had voted ten thousand pounds toward it, it was everywhere accepted as the correct thing. The charter was given in June, 1732, and a suitable design was not wanting for the corporation seal—silkworms, with the motto, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... you are married," she said, "I do not think you have any right to risk your life and your position for a fad." ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... arrangements and that—make himself generally useful, as you might say. He had the spending of a lot of money, I should think. The other was confined entirely to the office affairs, and I dare say he had his hands full. As for his being English, it was just a fad of Manderson's to have an English secretary. He'd had ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... the rifle, and the figures that had loomed up seemed to melt away. But as soon as the rifle had flashed there was the fad, fad, fad of hurried steps, something whizzed in at the window, and with a dull thud a spear stuck in ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... your common-sense. That fad about locking the gates is a pure and simple whim on the mother's part. Of course we'll humor it, but not to the extent of waking up old Tester. Come, Kitty, you shall give the old man any amount of blowing up in the morning, only now you really ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... "They use it to darken their eyebrows—women, I mean. From what I understand, it comes and goes in popularity. Right now, it is ultra-popular. A new, uh, fad originating in ...
— Expediter • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... said in his jerky way. "Good employer—model to follow—great man. Watch him, mark him, imitate him—that's the way to get on. Can't go wrong," and he trotted down the street in search of fresh contributions towards his latest fad. ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the old system can be revived and put into operation is a question. Certainly it cannot be adopted as a fad and imposed on an unwilling society as a clever archaeological restoration. It will have to grow naturally out of life itself and along lines at present hardly predicable. There are many evidences that just this spontaneous generation is taking place. The guild system is being preached widely ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... school fad," said the Tennessee Shad, as Doc disappeared. "Every piece is different, collected from all sorts of places—swap 'em around like postage stamps, don't you know. We've got rather tired of the ordinary ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... once. But the engagements are always broken off. Violet was always in love with herself. But very clever, as I said before. At one time she bade fair to become quite a famous artist, and she has had stories in the magazines. Her last fad was the stage and that has lasted quite a long time. In fact she is on the ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... person, if by reputable words already in the language he can express his meaning. And just as he should not be the first to take up an untried word, so the young writer should not be the last to drop a dead one. There is at present a sort of fad for old English. A large number of words that have been resting quietly in their graves for centuries have been called forth. Some may enjoy a second life; most of them will feel only the weakness of a second obsolescence. "Foreword" and ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... Pomponius Laetus, an unrecognised bastard of the noble house of Sanseverini, was professor of eloquence in Rome. Great amongst the humanists, in him the very spirit of ancient Hellas seemed revived. What to many was but the fad or fashionable craze of the hour, was to him the all-important and absorbing purpose of living. He dwelt aloof in poverty; shunning the ante-chambers and tables of the great, he and kindred souls communed with their disciples in the shades of his grove of classic ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... enforce. Not that his hearers would have followed any counsel even if he had been so misguided as to offer it; they did not come to hear him "preach" in the full sense of the word,—they came to hear him "say things,"- -witty observations on the particular fad of the hour—sharp polemics on the political situation—or what was still more charming, neat remarks in the style of Rochefoucauld or Montaigne, which covered and found excuses for vice while ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... he appreciated their praise, for he uttered no word to betray the fact. He was a singularly quiet lad, and Cuthbert, who made it something of a fad to study human nature wherever he found it, felt certain that his past life had been mixed up with considerable ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... his stride. "All this evolutionary fad becomes ridiculous, of course, when a mind that is properly trained in clear thinking by the diligent perusal of the classics strips it of its pseudo-scientific rags and shows it straight out from the shoulder, in the fire of common sense ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... are filled with workers who are charming women, too good to be stenographers or clerks or housekeepers. They come to the settlements, where they receive a good salary and keep their social position, which they feel they could not do if they worked. You see it's rather a fad to be a social settlement worker, and most of the women couldn't make their living to save their soul at work that really took ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper
... of the acquaintance of two specimens of that class," said he, "one was in the Catskill Mountains; she had a geological fad, and went out every morning with a little hammer, to hammer among the rocks all day; the other was a botanist, and returned every evening about covered with plants which she had pulled up, root and branch; I wonder which of them this one ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... space allowed, answer this as best we can. It is not necessary to spend a great lot of money if one uses good judgment and knows where to buy. Take that grand flower, the peony. One can spend as much money as one pleases on these. There is just now a fad regarding these flowers, and some rich people are paying as high as $30.00 a root for certain kinds, but it is not necessary. The most really lovely gardens I have seen in the East and West have not been filled with plants bought at fancy ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... fad involving the expenditure of sums of money for useless "frills" but is a practical means of getting better results with money that must be expended in such changes as disposition of lands, the location of roads, the furnishing of playgrounds, forests, and school ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... been a great "fad," and while not quite so popular, are pretty enough to deserve mention. A table is too often confused in its arrangement of color on account of its changes of courses. This can be entirely done away with by adopting some simple color scheme. A luncheon, or tea, is easier to serve ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... country living, now so far flung as to be a characteristic of American life, is not just a fad. It has been a slow steady growth and has behind it a tradition of a century and more. When our larger commercial centers first began to change from villages to compact urban communities, there were those who found even these miniature cities far too congested. It was incomprehensible ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... would be called in America a rich man, but he had made money enough to travel, to allow himself any reasonable relaxation, to cultivate a taste for art, music, literature or the drama, to indulge in any harmless fad, such as collecting etchings, china or bric-a-brac, or even to permit himself the luxury of horses. In the place of all these he found himself, at nearly sixty years of age, forced again into the sordid round of business as the only escape from the ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... as I do and have my children eat as they do just for a fad. I think nothing is more stupid and silly than for people to do certain things just because somebody else does them. We should all have good sound reasons for our actions in this world. We should all try our very best to use sound common sense. That's ...
— How to Eat - A Cure for "Nerves" • Thomas Clark Hinkle
... to bring music into the lives of all the people is not a fad, but is the result of the working out of a deep-seated and tremendously significant innate tendency—the instinct for self-expression; the same instinct which in another form is making us all feel that democracy is the only sure road to ultimate satisfaction and happiness. It behooves the musician, ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... myself when I commenced to write this volume, and the reader must be the judge to what extent I have been successful in the accomplishment thereof. I have touched but lightly on the material development of the country of recent years. I know from experience that though statistics are the fad of a few they are caviare to the great mass of the public. Nor have I dealt at all with politics or political parties in new Japan. It is, I think, unfortunate that the Japanese people, in adopting or adapting English institutions, ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... began to attract the attention of those surgically ambitious. The ovariotomy or celiotomy expert began to feel the sting of envy and jealousy aroused by those who were making history in the new surgical fad—appendectomy—and they got busy, and, as disease is not exempt from the economic law of "supply always equals demand," the disease accommodatingly sprang up everywhere; it was no time before a surgeon who had not a hundred appendectomies to his credit was not respected by ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... war with Spain, many years' generous mint and watermelon crops, a few long-shot winners at the New Orleans race-track, and the brilliant banquets given by the Indiana and Kansas citizens who compose the North Carolina Society have made the South rather a "fad" in Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp softly that your left forefinger reminds her so much of a gentleman's in Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a lady has to work now—the ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... remained in Louisville for about two years, quite a long stay for one with such nomadic instincts. It was there that he perfected the peculiar vertical style of writing which, beginning with him in telegraphy, later became so much of a fad with teachers of penmanship and in the schools. He says of this form of writing, a current example of which is given above: "I developed this style in Louisville while taking press reports. My wire was connected to the 'blind' side of a repeater at ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... "It's a darn fad, and you'll go back to school looking like a squaw—and serve you right. It's getting along towards the time when snakes go blind. You want to ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... all atheists. For at bottom, atheism is either a fad or a trade or a fatuity. And whether the one or the other, it is a sham more pernicious than the worst. To the young mind, it is a shibboleth of cheap culture; to the shrewd and calculating mind, to such orators as Khalid heard, it is a trade most remunerative; ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... come to stay. It has nothing to do with superstition at all. It's part of Advanced Thought — quite scientific, you know, while Spiritualism was just a fad. ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... bitten with the fad of the moment, 'the simple life'?" he asked. "Let me assure you that it is beautiful only when you can look down upon it from the safe altitude of a comfortable income. I know, because I've been living it for the past ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... To be quite athletic. That's our fad, you know. I can hold the strap, sir! And keep off your lap, sir! ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... art that succeeds. The true artistic genius, who will not cater to accepted notions, who exercises originality, and strives to be true to life, leads an obscure and wretched existence. His work may some day become the fad of the mob, but not until his heart's blood had been exhausted; not until the pathfinder has ceased to be, and a throng of an idealless and visionless mob has done to death the heritage of ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... her father's one of the steel crowd. We've a saying that there are millionaires, and then multi-millionaires, and then Pittsburg millionaires. Anyhow, the two of them spend all their income in entertaining. It's Robbie's fad to play the perfect host—he likes to have lots of people round him. He does put up good times—only he's so very important about it, and he has so many ideas of what is proper! I guess most of his set would rather go to Mrs. Jack ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... it was lucky I got him just as I did. I hadn't much more'n broke him in before I runs up against this new one. Understand, I ain't no fad chaser. I don't pine for the sporting-extra life, with a new red-ink stunt for every leaf on the calendar-pad. I got me studio here, an' me real-money reg'lars that keeps the shop runnin', and a few of the boys to drop around now and then; so I'm willing to let it go at that. Course, ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... Gusterson cut in. "The tickler is the newest fad for increasing worker efficiency. Once, I read somewheres, it was salt tablets. They had salt-tablet dispensers everywhere, even in air-conditioned offices where there wasn't a moist armpit twice a year and the gals sweat only champagne. A decade ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... the right which was conquered by the prima donna generations ago, appears always garbed in the very latest style, whether she be wearing one of her two ball dresses or her simple afternoon gown. For aught that I know, the latest fad in woman's dress may also be hidden in the dainty folds of the robe de chambre in which she dies. The elder Germont has for two years appeared before the New York public as a well-to-do country gentleman of Provence might have appeared sixty years ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... like Ardea's "soldier," is usually called a "warden." No thoughtful or informed person can look upon "bird study" as merely a pleasant pastime for children and a harmless fad for the outdoor man and woman. It is a matter that touches, not only the aesthetic, but the economic welfare of the country: a matter that has concern for legislators and presidents as well as for naturalists. In this connection it is helpful to ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... actually going to let thirty-five thousand a year slip through your fingers, just to pursue a fad?" ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... this booklet could easily be dismissed as a new fad that will gain limited attention for a short time and then be forgotten, but it may instead be the discovery of vast untapped resources that can raise primary human relationships to new and higher levels of richness and creativity. If this should be the case the loss of this great ...
— Marriage Enrichment Retreats - Story of a Quaker Project • David Mace
... pretend to do the swell thing; but I force my own pines and grow my own grapes, and can put as good a dessert on my table as you could buy in Covent Garden for a five-pun' note. That's my missus's fad, that is, and I can afford it; so why shouldn't I do it? You come and eat your Christmas dinner with us, Sheldon. I've got a friend coming that can sing as good a song as Reeves hisself, and might make a fortune, if he wasn't above ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... Ottawa more. But there were many Canadians who were more concerned about how to help Foch and Lloyd George win the war in Europe than about how to knuckle down to common business at home. The trek to England and to Europe became a fad. The nations went world crazy. Premiers neglected to "saw wood." It was a matter for gratitude that they did not parade ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... did not appear to so much advantage. These comprised old Karka, young Dam Zeneb, Sallaamto, Fad-el-Kereem, Marrasilla, and Faddeela. They had learnt to wash, but could never properly fold the linen. Ironing and starching were quite out of the question, and would have been as impossible to them as algebra. Some of these girls were rather pretty, and they knew ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... believed that somebody had been falsely informed that the emperor would visit the plant that day. "These great and frightening changes will probably turn out to be a new fad in abstract sculpture. Any change ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... the one that introduced the hobble skoit. My Bella was one of the foist to wear one. There ain't a fad that he don't go over to Europe and get. He made a fortune ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... having no fads. Few men are without some foible or hobby; Crowl felt almost lonely at times in his superiority. He was a Vegetarian, a Secularist, a Blue Ribbonite, a Republican, and an Anti-tobacconist. Meat was a fad. Drink was a fad. Religion was a fad. Monarchy was a fad. Tobacco was a fad. "A plain man like me," Crowl used to say, "can live without fads." "A plain man" was Crowl's catchword. When of a Sunday morning he stood on Mile-end Waste, which was opposite his ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... fad at present for a man to relate a nonsensical story, and then, if his hearer does not laugh, say gravely: "You have no sense of humor. That is a test story, and only a true humorist laughs at it." Now, the hearer may have an exquisite sense of humor, ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... are kept by all classes of people. Many keep them for the profit in eggs and meat, others keep them as a fad, and others to gratify a craving for animal companionship. There are one hundred and seventy-five recognized breeds, varying in size from that of the Japanese bantam weighing ten ounces to that of the huge Brahma which weighs fourteen pounds. The shapes and colours present as great a variation as ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... his career to linger. This meeting had left his curiosity baffled. He understood how Marta's vitality demanded action, which exerted itself in a feminine way for a feminine cause. The cure for such a fad was most clear to his masculine-perception. What if all the power she had shown in her appeal for peace could be made to serve another ambition? He knew that he was a great man. More than once he had wondered what would happen if he were to meet a great woman. And he should not see Marta ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... under the trees and enjoy nature or a good book, or she should go to some gathering where she will meet those who will refresh her intellectually. Keep the mind open to all the impressions of nature. Love the open air. Fresh air is not a fad, it is a necessity if one would keep young. Occasionally read a book of travel or a biography of some well-known person. Keep mentally alert. An intellectual back number adds years to her seeming age. Nothing makes for youth as a ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... truthless land in the name of the ancient Name; Generous, courteous, gentle, patient under the yoke, Decent (hemmed in a harem land ye were ever a one-wife folk); Royal and brave and ancient—haply an hour has struck When the new fad-fangled peoples shall weary of raking muck, And turning from coward counsels and loathing the parish lies, In shame and sackcloth offer up the only sacrifice. Then thou who hast been neglected, who hast called ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... Tuesday was still kept up in some of the back streets of the town a few years back, and though it may have died out now with us those who enjoy such amusements will find the old custom observed in villages not far away.—At Handsworth, "clipping the church" was the curious "fad" at Easter-time, the children from the National Schools, with ladies and gentlemen too, joining hands till they had surrounded the old church with a leaping, laughing, linked, living ring of humanity, great fun being caused when ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... vicar's wife had ever known, and she wondered no longer at the difficulty they had experienced in finding a house to their taste, when she noted the spirit in which they surveyed the present premises. A convenience was not a convenience at all if it interfered with a fad or fancy, and a serious drawback was hailed with delight if it appeared in quaint or unexpected fashion. As a matter of fact, the purchase of the house had been a foregone conclusion, since the moment when Peggy had beheld the oak walls of the dining-room, and ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... cats was a fad which he shared with Paul de Koch, the novelist, who, at one time, kept as many as thirty cats in his house. Many descriptions of them are to be found scattered through his novels. His chief favorite, Fromentin, lived ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... and agitations the statesman-inventor and the political psychologist find the raw material for their work. It is not the business of the politician to preserve an Olympian indifference to what stupid people call "popular whim." Being lofty about the "passing fad" and the ephemeral outcry is all very well in the biographies of dead men, but rank nonsense in the rulers of real ones. Oscar Wilde once remarked that only superficial people disliked the superficial. Nothing, for example, could on the surface be more trivial than an interest in ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... ask you gents not to leave the room," he said meaningly, over his shoulder, as he stepped toward the rear door. "It's kind of a fad of mine to keep some things even from ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... sextant, quadrant, and chronometer. They were instruments I took from old Captain Barney in payment of some work I did for him. I wasn't usin' them, and Williamson had bought a catboat and was studying navigation; but he has given up that fad now and has promised me over and over to send me back my instruments, but he has never done it. If I'd thought of it I would have stopped and got 'em of him; but I didn't think, and now I expect he has gone to bed. However, I'll row in shore and ...
— The Stories of the Three Burglars • Frank Richard Stockton
... came to light at the call for service, and it was not long before Nettie Weyburn had acquired considerable reputation as a manicurist, while Ethel Hilton gained lasting laurels as a hair dresser and Mary Reynolds proved herself a competent tutor. Hilda Moore became a fad among certain girls who loathed letter writing and willingly paid her for taking their dictation and typing their home letters, while Cecil Ferris stood alone as an expert mender of silk stockings. Louise Sampson made silk blouses. Several members specialized on kimonos. Two girls ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... article from the Chicago Chronicle of 1897, yellowed and framed and recounting in sonorous phrases ("pulchritudinous epidermis" is featured frequently) that the society folk of Chicago have taken up tattooing as a fad, following the lead of New York's Four Hundred, who followed the lead of London's most aristocratic circles; and that Prof. Al Herman, known from Madagascar to Sandy Hook as "Dutch," was the leading artist of the ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... the schedule, so that those who did not finish at Malta had to work hard to get their cards off at Constantinople, and so on through the trip. The chariot of Aurora would hardly hold their output at a single port. At the start it was a mild, pleasurable fad, but later it absorbed the victim's mind to such an extent that he thought of nothing but the licking of stamps and mailing of cards to friends—who get so many of them that they are for the most part considered a nuisance and after a hasty glance are quietly dropped in the waste-basket. ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... Helena's triumphant return, under her especial patronage. Not that a few choice spirits in California had not discovered James for themselves long since; but James as a definite entity, known and approved by Society, awaited the second advent of Helena. He immediately became the fad; rather, Society split into two factions and was threatened with disruption. One young woman of the disapproving camp even went so far as to call an ardent advocate a "Henry James fool." All of which was doubtless due to the fact that the traditions of action still lingered in California. ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... for his food and clothing, his mental and physical improvement, and even his reasonable recreations. Man can lawfully hunt and fish and practise his skill at the expense of the brute creation, notwithstanding the modern fad of sentimentalists. The teacher and the pupil can use vivisection, and thus to some extent prolong the sufferings of the brute subject for the sake of science, of mental improvement, and intelligent observation. But is not this cruelty? and ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... new fad of the old man's and our having a notion that we had better keep quiet for a spell and let things settle down a bit, we had a long steady talk, and the end of it was that we made up our minds to go and put in a month or two ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... tell me," said the minister, moved by a sudden impulse, coming he knew not whence, "what you think of this new fad, if it be nothing worse, of the English clergy—I mean about the duty of confessing to the priest.— I see they have actually prevailed upon that wretched creature we've all been reading about in the papers lately, to confess the murder of her little brother! Do you think they ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... of his rare idle moments and given to the child of a wealthy summer visitor, made a hit. The child liked it and other children wanted mills just like it. Then "grown-ups" among the summer folk took up the craze. "Winslow mills" became the fad. Jed built his little shop, or the first ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... songsters whose lives are sacrificed by the million on the altar of fashion; the men have always been taught that woman's nature was morally superior to theirs, but we'd have to give up this criminal fad which we have persisted in at such a fearful price of bird life before we could be regarded as other than monstrously cruel and bloody. However, he prophesied that the fashion can't continue much longer anyway, because there soon won't be any ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... Raven; 'the master's got a new fad—crazy to mount the hunt on white horses. I've old Sol here, and Jack has a pair of handy white ones for the two whips, but where to get a white mount for Jack stumps us. Jogged over to see if you could ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... right! Clem—my nephew—has a fad in his head. He asked me yesterday for the living—in case you resigned. I tell him it's folly; a youngster oughtn't to play with his chances. But he insists that it will do him good to fling up Oxford and play parish-priest for a year or two. He has taken a fancy ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... me," he commented, "it certainly sounds to me like you've got the right dope on this party. But listen, Mr. Green, how do you figure in this here party's fad for getting himself manicured as a part of the lay-out—I can see it ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... spongy with a capacity for saturation. She took in every new child fad and folly. She believed in a multiplicity of remedies, and was ready to try a new one—on somebody else—whenever the occasion offered. When Frank got the whooping-cough, and used to march around the dining-room table, stamping in her paroxysms of coughing and of speechless anger at the ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... quite off the hinge. What's the meaning of this new fad?" And he tossed me, with visible irreverence, a drawing in which I happened to have depicted both my elegant models. I asked if he didn't think it good, and he replied that it struck him as execrable, ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... that an Englishman's house is his castle, and that awful proprieties ought to regulate admission to it; that marriage is a real bond, making jealousy and marital revenge at the least highly pardonable; that vegetarianism and all pitting of animal against human rights is a silly fad; that on the other hand to save money to give yourself a fine funeral is not a silly fad, but a symbol of ancestral self-respect; that when giving treats to friends or children, one should give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them; that ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... be said on the recent fashion—not to say fad—of suppressing in the printed play the traditional list of "Dramatis Personae." Bjoernson, in some of his later plays, was, so far as I am aware, the first of the moderns to adopt this plan. I do not know whether his example ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... alarmed, it isn't a new fad of mine: it means baptizing on the supposition that there has been no previous baptism; for, you know, our Church does not allow it to be done twice. I wonder if anything could be learnt by going down to the place ...
— Wikkey - A Scrap • YAM
... bear this! I wish some one would give me L150,000 to carry out my pet fad. I'd bear it, and go on bearing it, quite gallantly, I ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... knight our dogs to get any lower. Brave Knights Kennelers then shall be, Noble Knights of the Golden Flea, Knights of the Order of St. Steboy, Knights of St. Gorge and Sir Knights Jawy. God speed the day when this knighting fad Shall go to the dogs and the dogs ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... groceries and round up the new kind. I brought a box to the table at breakfast, and dad fell over himself to fill his saucer, and then he offered some to eight boarders that sat at our table. Dad had been bragging for a week about how he had adopted the breakfast food fad, first for his health, and then to get even with the beef trust. He had convinced the boarders at our table that it was a patriotic duty of every citizen to shut down on eating meat until the criminal ...
— Peck's Bad Boy With the Cowboys • Hon. Geo. W. Peck
... if we were helping the poor old line out. Our Creamery has been collecting milk and shipping butter in an old roadster with a wagon bed thorax for a year. Two of our rural route mail carriers use small machines, except in wet weather, and good-roads societies in our vicinity are the latest fad. We raised one thousand five hundred dollars last spring to bring the Cannon Ball Trail from Chicago to Kansas City through our town, and our hotel-keeper contributed one hundred dollars of it. He says we'll be on the gas-line tourist route to the coast after the trail ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... it," replied "his ludship." "Not so abroad, by no means, my man. In fact, on the home lines in Lunnon, it is quite the thing, you know, for the quality to make a fad of locomotive parties, and the accommodations for their comfort are quite superior ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... them together like bits of jigsaw puzzles. He's absolutely thrilled, and wants to stop the car whenever we come to one of the curiously deformed old trees which still, on country roads, mark the direction of ancient Indian trails. This fad of Jack's leads to awkwardness during our present excursion, as we're part of a weird cavalcade which I'll describe to you later. But just now I can't let ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... bosom. It made his coat bulge out, and at this, some of the fairies wondered, but all they thought of was that this spoiled a handsome fellow's figure. Or was it some new idea? To tell the truth, they were vexed at not keeping up with the new fashions, for they knew nothing of this latest fad ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... of doctrine had intervened. And, with such men, a matter of doctrine is a matter of conscience. And a matter of conscience is the most stubborn of all obstacles to overcome. I looked into their stern, expressive faces, and I saw that they were no triflers. A fad had no charm for either of them. They looked into each other's faces, and each read the truth. The ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... of modern society, of civilisation, the fad of showing off, of exhibiting a life instead of living it, very largely comes, it is not too much to say, from the lack of normal egoism, of self-joy in civilised human beings. It has come over us like a kind of moral anaemia. People cannot get interested ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... husband Amariah. At the opposite end of the row were another pair, whom Ransom, unacquainted with certain chapters of Verena's history, perceived without surprise to be Mrs. Burrage and her insinuating son. Apparently their interest in Miss Tarrant was more than a momentary fad, since—like himself—they had made the journey from New York to hear her. There were other figures, unknown to our young man, here and there, in the semicircle; but several places were still empty (one of which was of course reserved for Olive), and it occurred to Ransom, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... Growers' Association and I have profited very greatly by it. I have become very much interested in nut culture. In a small way I am stumbling along and learning something of the work and the development of this industry. At present it is merely a fad with me but I do not know but what it may become something more as I get into it. I have been particularly impressed this morning with the address of the president. There were one or two suggestions that ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... I'm a man, by golly, and that I look at things like a man. He's got to be proud to have me in the family, before I come into the family. He ain't going to take me in as one more kid to look after. I'll come in as his equal in honesty and business ability,—instead of just a new fad of Mary V's—" ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... poem, a maxim, or a moral admonition that he wished to keep daily before him. Even we ourselves often paste pictures in our watches. We have never, however, gone into the craze as the English of this particular era did. With them it was a fashionable fad that resulted in all manner of curious conceits. They had no kodaks, you see, and small pictures were rarer possessions then than now." Mr. Burton paused a moment to puff little rings of smoke thoughtfully into the air. "So McPhearson ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... plants malignant ulcers, and that many strong men who escape dying there return as wrecks to their own countries. It is also true that the natives of the Solomons are a wild lot, with a hearty appetite for human flesh and a fad for collecting human heads. Their highest instinct of sportsmanship is to catch a man with his back turned and to smite him a cunning blow with a tomahawk that severs the spinal column at the base of the brain. It is equally ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... Crawley and after all there should be no marriage between his son and Grace? "Of course they'll be married," said Mrs Grantly. "It's all very well for you to say that, my dear; but the whole family are so queer that there is no knowing what the girl may do. She may take up some other fad now, and refuse him point blank." "She has never taken up any fad," said Mrs Grantly, who now mounted almost to wrath in defence of her future daughter-in-law, "and you are wrong to say that she has. She has behaved beautifully;—as ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... him off-hand. I could not very well. He knew that his reply had set me thinking of many a curious test and many a curious experience. Harlson had an odd fad over which ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... and there were times when the putting together of words was fascinating, like the putting together of those picture puzzles which were such a fad the other day. And such reading as he did was all in one book—the dictionary. For hours, guided by his nice ear for sound, he applied himself to learning the derivatives and exact meanings of new words—or he looked up old words and ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... inherited a penchant for art, literature, philosophy, and music. Already at eighteen she was dreaming of painting, singing, writing poetry, writing books, acting—anything and everything. Serene in her own judgment of what was worth while, she was like to lay stress on any silly mood or fad, thinking it exquisite—the last word. Finally, she was a rank voluptuary, dreaming dreams of passionate union with first one and then another type of artist, poet, musician—the whole gamut of the artistic and ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... nothing can ever restrict the restriction. The prohibitions are bound to progress point by point; more and more human rights and pleasures must of necessity be taken away; for it is of the nature of this futurism that the latest fad is the faith of the future, and the most fantastic fad inevitably makes the pace. Thus the worst thing in the seventeenth-century aberration was not so much Puritanism as sectarianism. It searched for truth not by synthesis but by subdivision. It not ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... witty and talented, and from the way she treats me, I know she has a tender heart. And her mother is a perfect wonder of a manager, and never makes mistakes except such as happen to be the fad of the hour. And Mr. Edgerton Compton could be splendid, for he seems to know everything, and when we travel with him, or go to the parks and all that, people do just as he says, as if he were a prince; he has a magnificent way of showering money on porters and ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... launched into abuse of what she called the latest masculine fad—prison reform, to wit—and a heated discussion between her and Polyhistor had ensued, in the midst of which she had happened to glance behind her, to find that very notable person who is the subject of this narrative vouchsafing a silent ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... sympathy all sorts and conditions of men. The typical novelist to-day prefers to leave the beaten highway and go into the by-ways for his characters; his interest is with the humble of the earth, the outcast and alien, the under dog in the social struggle. It has become well-nigh a fashion, a fad, to deal with these picturesque and once unexploited ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... opening of the Cake Shop as a minor social event and so in the succeeding days all those who hadn't been invited and couldn't talk French with the waitresses crowded into the store. It was a Novelty,—the New Thing,—and became overnight a popular fad. M. Paul was hard pressed to turn off enough of his delectable tid-bits—they had to employ assistants for him almost at once, and one may suspect that the fairylike melt-in-the-mouth quality of his best work ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... especially on the calculations of Lord Kelvin, caused doubts to be raised regarding evolution which prompted many scientists to renounce it as a working theory. Rudimentary structures received attention, and as a result, St. John Mivart says: "It is an absolute fad that there is no instance of transmutation of species." Dr. Nathaniel S. Shaler, Professor of Geology in Harvard, wrote: "It is not proved that a single species of the two or three millions now on earth has been established by natural selection." Thus the evolutionary philosopher is ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... The style of this essay is slightly wanting in ease and continuity, yet possesses the elements of force. "The Traitor", by Agnes E. Fairfield, is a short story of artistic development but questionable sentiment. The present fad of peace-preaching should not be allowed to influence a writer of sense into glorifying a socialistic, unpatriotic fanatic who refuses to uphold the institutions that his fathers before him created with their toil, blood, and sacrifice. It is not the right of the individual ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... connected with them; belated or superannuated charities formed to deal with circumstances or sufferings that have in a large degree passed away—useless, or almost useless, charities established to carry out some silly fad or to gratify some silly vanity; sectarian charities intended to further ends which, in the eyes of all but the members of one sect, are not only useless but mischievous; charities that encourage thriftless ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... these girls from such dense ignorance; to rescue them from the thralldom of such a fashionable sin, which threatens to become a fad; to open their eyes to the horrible consequences which follow such misalliances, is a work so important as to demand the immediate attention and united effort of a host of ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... the presence of Julio flashed like a ray of sunlight in the tiresome salon of Lacour. She was dancing the fad of the hour and frequenting the tango teas where reigned the adored Desnoyers. And to think that she was being entertained with this celebrated and interesting man that the other women were raving about! . . . In order that he might ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... coyly down over her ear. He was only a man folk, he was in the way, incapable of understanding this problem of fashion, and Mother almost slapped him one evening for suggesting that it "wouldn't make such a gosh-awful lot of difference if she didn't find some new fad to ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... one thing more than another upon which Martha Foote prided herself it was the Senate Hotel bed coverings. Creamy, spotless, downy, they were her especial fad. "Brocade chairs, and pink lamps, and gold snake-work are all well and good," she was wont to say, "and so are American Beauties in the lobby and white gloves on the elevator boys. But it's the blankets on the beds that stamp a hotel first ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... said. "Put the thing away! It's a sheer fad to mend it at all. I don't care what I wear, and I'm sure ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... bow and smile, As we talk of the opera after the weather, As we chat of fashion and fad and style, We know we are playing a part together. You know that the mirth she wears, she borrows; She knows you laugh but to hide your sorrows; We know that under the silks and laces, And back of beautiful, beaming faces, Lie secret trouble ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... her present disheveled condition, she was beautiful—a trifle on the petite side, with black hair and black eyes that quirked up oddly at the outer corners. Her nails were black-lacquered and spotted with little gold stars, evidently a new feminine fad ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... pedant with some unimportant theory about vegetable cells. If I were to say that you did not see in that tree the vile mismanagement of local politics, you would dismiss me as a Socialist crank with some particular fad about public parks. If I were to say that you were guilty of the supreme blasphemy of looking at that tree and not seeing in it a new religion, a special revelation of God, you would simply say I was a mystic, and think no ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... begun to agree with George about their being more a fad than anything else, and I think it must be the height of the fad just now. You know how roller-skating came in—everybody in the world seemed to be crowding to the rinks—and now only a few children use rollers ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... she didn't try. Her whole heart was in the work. She really was very intelligent, and Aunt Betsy said, "If there was such a thing as anybody being born in this world a Christian, she believed Roberta was." I think she must have had the germ of object teaching—that is the fad now—in her nature, she could paint such vivid mental pictures to convey an idea. Once she was telling Polly about God's punishment of sinners, and Polly said, "Lawdy, Lil Missus, I feel dem blazes creepen' all over me dis minit." She had a great deal to contend with, ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... Antoinette and the ladies of her court played at farming in the Park of the Petite Trainon, at Versailles; but they wore silk gowns and powdered wigs. To be rustic was the fad of the day (there was a cult for gardening in England); but shepherdesses were confined to tapestries, and, while the aristocracy held the stage, it played the game of ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... physical impairment and a corresponding impairment in production and quality of voice. It cannot be emphasized too often that the scientific method of voice-production based on the study of the physiology of the vocal tract is not a fad; as is proved by the fact that every violation of physical law affecting the vocal tract results in injury to it and in the same proportion affects the ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... there would have been a party-fight that evening. I think it is a pity Tengga is not chief of the land instead of Belarab. A brave and foresighted man, however treacherous at heart, can always be trusted to a certain extent. One can never get anything clear from Belarab. Peace! Peace! You know his fad. And this fad makes him act silly. The peace racket will get him into a row. It may cost him his life in the end. However, Tengga does not feel himself strong enough yet to act with his own followers only and Belarab has, on my advice, disarmed all villagers. His men went into the houses and took ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... for a girl who will marry for a living. There are lots of them. Pretty, attractive girls, too. Your difficulty is, you want that sort. You really believe all girls are that sort at heart, and you think my independence a fad—something I shall get over. ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... between the hallucinations of a fever, and lucidity. Vagaries occasioned by a high temperature, would suddenly vanish as the struggling mind briefly asserted itself. As he resumed paddling, some swaying willows became three ladies attired in the Grecian bend costume, then a fad in America, smiling and bowing to him. His mind told him they were only willows; but his eyes would ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton |
