"Inelegant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... first to come out of it, responding to her voice a good deal as if she dashed cold water in his face, his eyes breaking away from Barbara's, his lips parted in a nervous smile. He ran a hand through his hair—an inelegant gesture for him ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... your mouth the skins of grapes, the stones or pips of fruits. Receive them upon the prongs of your fork, laid horizontally, and place them as conveniently as so inelegant a process will allow upon the edge of ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... old county family. He has changed his address from Bedford Square to South Kensington, and has been educated at a Public School and at a University. Young, tall and fair-haired, there is nothing to suggest that he will ever have that inelegant paunch which prevented the father, even in his loftiest moments of moral indignation, from being dignified. Of course he is a soldier, for the army is still the only profession for a gentleman, and England's hero is that above all things. His morals are unexceptional, ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... prejudice, for personally I have little to complain of. (By the way, this sentence is as open to blame as that of the professor who told his pupils "You must not use a preposition to end a sentence with.") Though I have sat under an army of critics, I have but once been accused of inelegant English, and then it was only by a lady who wrote that my slipshod style ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... hours in the morning, and to stay after hours at night. Of course this benighted person was not aware that by so doing she secured quiet chats with "C," uninterrupted, and without being told in the middle of some pretty speech to "Shut up!" or to " Keep out!" by some soured and inelegant operator on the line, to whom the romance of telegraphy had long ago given place to the monotonous, poorly-paid, ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... Gaveuse Martin, all ready for the broche, used to be sold on the premises. The interior of the building was occupied by six gigantic epinettes, each holding two hundred birds. A windlass mounted upon a railroad enabled the operator (gaveur, from gaver, to cram, an inelegant term) very easily to raise himself to any story of the epinette. The latter was a cylinder turning upon its axis, and thus passing every bird in review. "An india-rubber tube introduced into the throat, accompanied by the pressure of the foot ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... of three colleges, but is now reduced to two; the college of St. Leonard being lately dissolved by the sale of its buildings and the appropriation of its revenues to the professors of the two others. The chapel of the alienated college is yet standing, a fabrick not inelegant of external structure; but I was always, by some civil excuse, hindred from entering it. A decent attempt, as I was since told, has been made to convert it into a kind of green-house, by planting its area with shrubs. This new method of gardening is unsuccessful; the plants ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... up," declared John, dropping calmly into the inelegant expression, "he told 'em to ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... progress and lead change that I didn't always show the joy that was in my heart But the biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this: By the grace of God, America won the Cold War. And there's another to be singled out, though it may seem inelegant. I mean a mass of people called the American taxpayer. No ever thinks to thank the people who pay country's bill or an alliance's bill. But for a half Century now, the American people have shouldered the burden and paid taxes that were higher than they would have ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... specimens that have been given, his compositions in this way are not only unenlivened by any excursions beyond the bounds of mere matter of fact, but, from the habit or necessity of taking a certain portion of time for correction, are singularly confused, disjointed, and inelegant in their style. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... forgetting that the number of seats he had provided was already filled by guests previously asked. The result was what might be expected, and it was often simply bare good fortune if everybody had enough to eat. But, "though the dinner might be careless and inelegant, and the servants awkward and too few," the talk was always pleasant, and no invitations to dine were more eagerly accepted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the letter, which he dictated, finding it better than any I had sent, for, though here and there a little ungrammatical or inelegant, each sentence came to me briefly worded, but most expressive, full of excellent counsel to the boy, tenderly bequeathing "mother and Lizzie" to his care, and bidding him good-by in words the sadder for their simplicity. He added a few lines, ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... neither the ease and airiness of the lighter, nor the vehemence and elevation of the grander ode. When he lays his ill-fated hand upon his harp his former powers seem to desert him; he has no longer his luxuriance of expression or variety of images. His thoughts are cold, and his words inelegant. Yet such was his love of lyrics that, having written with great vigour and poignancy his "Epistle to Curio," he transformed it afterwards into an ode disgraceful only to ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... for by many a seething inward struggle. Cornelia had applied the match, and the tow blazed. Elma laughed again, and seated herself beneath the tree. Cornelia had tossed her hat on the ground and clasped her hands round her knees in comfortable, inelegant position. Elma did the same, and the American girl, watching her, was at a loss to account for the reckless radiance of her smile. The sunshine flickered down between the branches on the sweet pink and white face, the pansy blue eyes, ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... replied Edna, with inelegant emphasis. "If I had my way, the tide shouldn't go out but once a day, and that's at night. These ugly old mud-flats that have to be seen some time during every day are the one thing that spoil Marbury. ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... that he knew not what he was about. To plunder the fish-pond and be impertinent to the lady was not the way to obtain patronage. The impudent painter collected his pencils together, and returned to London to enjoy his inelegant pleasures and ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... men whose minds had been trained in a world which had passed away. They gave place in no long time to a younger generation of wits; and of that generation, from Dryden down to Durfey, the common characteristic was hard-hearted, shameless, swaggering licentiousness, at once inelegant and inhuman. The influence of these writers was doubtless noxious, yet less noxious than it would have been had they been less depraved. The poison which they administered was so strong that it was, in no long time, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... her understanding without stopping to consider what character the husband may have whom she is destined to marry. Let her only determine, without being too anxious about present happiness, to acquire the qualities that ennoble a rational being, and a rough, inelegant husband may shock her taste without destroying her peace of mind. She will not model her soul to suit the frailties of her companion, but to bear with them: his character may be a trial, but not ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... cultivate with their own hands a greater or less extent of ground. They are naturally gay, and fond of all kinds of diversion. They have likewise a strong taste for music, and even compose verses, which, though rude and inelegant, possess much pleasing native simplicity, often more interesting than the laboured compositions of cultivated poets. Extemporary rhymers are common among them, like the improvisatori of Italy, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... and best behaved of the first division, and might be ranked with Grosvenor Square or Lancaster Gate. There were rooms on the second floor where girls of the second and third division herded in inelegant obscurity, the Bloomsbury and Camden Town of the mansion. On this story, too, slept the rabble of girls under twelve—creatures utterly despicable in the minds of girls in their teens, and the rooms they inhabited ranked ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... lines, as if he had suffered from loneliness and misapprehension. He looked, with his careful precision of dress, as if he were the object of cherishing care on the part of elderly unmarried sisters, but I knew Mari' Harris to be a very common-place, inelegant person, who would have no such standards; it was plain that the captain was his own attentive valet. He sat looking at me expectantly. I could not help thinking that, with his queer head and length of thinness, he was made to ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... living, thumped away gaily with her iron in the noisy and stifling laundry. Her wages supported her even beyond the point of comfort; so that her dress profited until sometimes she cast a sidelong glance of impatience at the neat but inelegant apparel of Dan—Dan the constant, the immutable, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... "Your language is inelegant, friend Blenham," he said slowly. "Like yourself it is better withdrawn from public notice. As to your meaning—why, by thunder, I half believe you are right! And I hadn't ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... member of the professor's class had used the figures of speech too frequently employed by Rosamond, he would have received a dignified rebuke for "hyperbolical and inelegant language;" but it never occurred to the deluded man that anything but pearls of thought and diamonds of speech could fall from those ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... conceive these acts to be as effective on the stage as you seemed to expect. However, it is impossible to say what a very clever actor like Macready may make of some of the passages. Notwithstanding the many erasures the diction is still diffuse, and sometimes languishing, though not inelegant. I cannot imagine it a powerful work as far as I have read. But, indeed, running over a part of a thing with people talking around is too unfair. I shall be anxious to hear how it succeeds. Many thanks, dear sir, for ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... writers and statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so many noble matrons. It had induced Parr to suspend his labours in that dark and profound mine from which he had extracted a vast treasure of erudition, a treasure too often buried in the earth, too often paraded with injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still precious, massive, and splendid. There appeared the voluptuous charms of her to whom the heir of the throne had in secret plighted his faith. There too was she, the beautiful mother of a beautiful race, the Saint Cecilia, whose delicate features, lighted ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... stupid enough to say that Balzac knew nothing of the art of painting young girls; they make use of the inelegant, unpolished word rate to qualify his portraits of this genre. To be sure, Balzac's triumph is, we admit, in his portraits of mothers or passionate women who know life. Certain authors, without counting George Sand, have ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... attitudes, Inelegant for men to see, Will, to be candid, foster feuds Between yourself and me. On manners of the best this sport, By right of glory, makes a call, And he who will not as he ought Should never ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... Landor.—He is not inelegant, but he is unimpassioned and affected; [55] and he has not even preserved the coarse features of nations and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... raspingly, with a pathetic note of pleading, 'haven't I always taught you to say preserve?' She was not pleading against the inelegant word, but against Hazel. ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... approach the age of puberty, seem possessed with the idea that the unfrequent action of the bowels is a desirable habit. They do not associate with the duty a proper regard for health, but consider it as an inelegant and repugnant practice. The consequence is, that at this susceptible period, constipation, induced by neglect, arouses a latent hepatic or pulmonary disease which has been lurking in ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... longer any brutal dog-and-bear-baitings at the Barriere du Combat. There is no longer a Belle Limonadiere at the Cafe des Mille Colonnes. Belles Limonadieres (if I may be permitted to use one of the most inelegant, but the most expressive, of American colloquialisms) are "played out." The Catacombs have long since been shut to strangers. The Caveau exists no more. Old reprobates scarcely remember the Cafe d'Enfer. The Fete of St. Louis is as dead as Louis XVIII., ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... senatorial, popular, or judicial. These different styles of eloquence were represented by the grave and dignified debates of the Senate, the impassioned and often noisy and inelegant harangues of the Forum, and the learned pleadings or ingenious appeals of the courts. Among the orators of ancient Rome, Hortensius, (114-50 B.C.), an eloquent advocate, and Cicero ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... to clothe his splendid body in that fashion which her culture demanded. His simple and primitive views of life—as natural as the instinct which governs all creatures in his God-cultivated world—were now unrefined, ignoble, inelegant. His fine nature and unembarrassed intelligence, which found in the wealth of realities amid which he lived abundant food for his intellectual life, and which enabled him to see clearly, observe closely and think with such clean-cut directness, beside the intellectuality ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... substitutes for the corresponding conditionals, categoricals are formally adequate, though sometimes inelegant, it may be urged that Logic has nothing to do with elegance; or that, at any rate, the chief elegance of science is economy, and that therefore, for scientific purposes, whatever we may write further about conditionals must be an ugly excrescence. The scientific purpose of Logic ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... aversion to being so celebrated both in Public, in Private, in Papers, and in Printshops, that are the reasons why I cannot more fully enjoy, the Amusements so various and pleasing of London. How often have I wished that I possessed as little Personal Beauty as you do; that my figure were as inelegant; my face as unlovely; and my appearance as unpleasing as yours! But ah! what little chance is there of so desirable an Event; I have had the small-pox, and must therefore ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... carried far enough to disfigure him; his gayety was so much the more piquant because he always restrained it within the limits of perfect good taste, holding at a suspicious distance all that could wound the most fastidious delicacy. He never made use of an inelegant word, even in the moments of the most entire familiarity; an improper merriment, a coarse jest would have been ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... only did reverence England as once we reverenced her, this is what I would say:—"Upon my country do not visit my sins. Upon my country's fame let me fasten no blot. Wherever I am wrong, inelegant, inaccurate, provincial, visit all your reprobation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... in general, that the chief objections against them are, that they are supposed to have passed through the earl of Morton's hands, the least scrupulous of all Mary's enemies; and that they are, to the last degree, indecent, and even somewhat inelegant, such as it is not likely she would write. But to these presumptions we may oppose the following considerations: 1. Though it be not difficult to counterfeit a subscription, it is very difficult, and almost impossible, to counterfeit several pages, so as ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... established. He sits aloof from the common herd, and looks out of his window upon the poor man, and says—"Put that dirty wretch off my steps immediately!" On Sabbath days he finds the church, but mourns the fact that he must worship with so many of the inelegant, and says, "They are perfectly awful!" "That man that you put in my pew had a coat on his back that did not cost five dollars." He struts through life unsympathetic with trouble, and says, "I cannot be bothered." Is delighted with some doubtful story ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... the metrical life of Celestine V. by the cardinal of St. George (Muratori, tom. iii. P. i. p. 613, &c.,) we find a luminous, and not inelegant, passage, (l. i. c. 3, p. 203 &c.:)— ————genuit quem nobilis Ursae (Ursi?) Progenies, Romana domus, veterataque magnis Fascibus in clero, pompasque experta senatus, Bellorumque manu grandi stipata parentum ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... Livingstone is a well-drawn character; so well, so naturally painted, that he hardly deserves to be the hero of a farce. Although exceedingly soft, he is a well-bred fool—though somewhat fat (for the actor is Mr. David Rees); he is not altogether inelegant. The gentleman who does the theatrical metaphysics in the Morning Herald has described him as a capital specimen of "physical obesity and moral teunity,"[3]—which we quote to save ourselves trouble, for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 4, 1841 • Various
... conceptual knowledge; and let it be our knowledge of the tigers in India, as we sit here. Exactly what do we MEAN by saying that we here know the tigers? What is the precise fact that the cognition so confidently claimed is KNOWN-AS, to use Shadworth Hodgson's inelegant but valuable ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... street, stared curiously at the shabby coach. One of the French dressmakers, hurrying from the palace, stood stock still in surprise at seeing so inelegant an equipage in the street of magnificent 'Louisbourg.' The Duchess, with the morbid sensitiveness of a deeply wounded, slighted woman, winced under the scornful inspection of the pert ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... flimsy, go-as-you-please looking bunches of poor taste knotted, cascaded, and festooned over mantels, pictures, and chair backs, we have outgrown, confining our efforts in this line to the silk draught curtain to conceal the inelegant yawn of an open grate; and even this is being supplanted by the ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... confess, that here on Earth God hath dispensed his bounties as in Heaven. So saying, with dispatchful looks in haste She turns, on hospitable thoughts intent What choice to choose for delicacy best, What order, so contrived as not to mix Tastes, not well joined, inelegant, but bring Taste after taste upheld with kindliest change; Bestirs her then, and from each tender stalk Whatever Earth, all-bearing mother, yields In India East or West, or middle shore In Pontus or the Punick coast, or where Alcinous reigned, fruit of all kinds, in coat Rough, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... of this was rumor rather than fact: an uncharitable interpretation of pleasures which were inelegant, certainly, but possibly not quite vicious. Still, it seemed to be pretty well established that up to the time of Sylvia's marriage her father never worked, and that he always had money—and this condition, on any frontier, is always ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... remote "Allee of the Acacias," and solemnly took their airing away from the bustle of the new world, incidentally setting a fashion that has held good to this day; the lakeside being now deserted, and the "Acacias" crowded of an afternoon, by all that Paris holds of elegant and inelegant. ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... supporters of the General. The Stokes family, of North Carolina, were there, particular friends of his; the Blackburns, and many other old families, whose names have escaped my memory. I well recollect to what disadvantage Mrs. Jackson appeared, with her dowdyfied figure, her inelegant conversation, and her total want of refinement, in the midst of this bevy of highly-cultivated, aristocratic women; and I recall very distinctly how the ladies of the Jackson party hovered near ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... we regret to say, Captain Guy swore a good deal, and became perfectly unheroic and inelegant and unromantic. But his oaths had more effect upon his unruly followers than his protests, and they sat looking at him in a half-sullen, half-shamefaced manner, and would have probably succumbed to his influence had not attention been diverted and aroused by the ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... there was the addition of a square vestibule in front of the tomb, and here, on prescribed days, the memorial ceremonies took place. The statues of the double were rude and clumsy, the coffins heavy and massive, and the figures with which they were decorated inelegant and out of proportion, while the stelae are very rudely cut. From the time of the VIth dynasty the lords of the Said had been reduced to employing workmen from Memphis to adorn their monuments; but the rivalry between the Thebans and the Heracleopolitans, which set the two divisions of Egypt ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... we, like domestic, inelegant Fowls, As unpolish'd as Geese, and as stupid as Owls, Sit tamely at home, hum-drum with our Spouses, While Crickets and Butterflies open their houses? Shall such mean little Insects pretend to the fashion? Cousin Turkey-cock, ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset
... interpretation of a place-name is correct which makes bad grammar of the original. The apparatus of Indian synthesis was cumbersome and perhaps inelegant, but it was nicely adjusted to its work. The grammatical relations of words were never lost sight of. The several components of a name had their established order, not dependent upon the will or skill of the composer. ...
— The Composition of Indian Geographical Names - Illustrated from the Algonkin Languages • J. Hammond Trumbull
... style, to the strongest matter in the world, ill-worded and ill-delivered. Your business is negotiation abroad, and oratory in the House of Commons at home. What figure can you make, in either case, if your style be inelegant, I do not say bad? Imagine yourself writing an office-letter to a secretary of state, which letter is to be read by the whole Cabinet Council, and very possibly afterward laid before parliament; any one barbarism, solecism, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... the day of High-School athletics. Girls who had to walk more than half a mile to school were pitied. There was not a tennis court in the town; physical exercise was thought rather inelegant for the daughters of well-to-do families. Some of the High-School girls were jolly and pretty, but they stayed indoors in winter because of the cold, and in summer because of the heat. When one danced with them their bodies never moved inside ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... we to account for these rock-hermits and their inelegant habits? How explain this poisoning of the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... join with the commentators of Aulus Gellius, who have lamented the loss of a chapter of which the title only has descended to us. That chapter would have demonstrated what happens to all languages, that some neologisms, which at first are considered forced or inelegant, become sanctioned by use, and in time are quoted as authority in the very language which, in their early stage, they ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... though learned, was not edifying. God is an eternal and unchangeable being. The handsome edifice was burned to the ground. The plants and animals in the aquarium were brought from abroad. Though the style is antiquated, it is not inelegant. The arbitrary proceedings of the British Parliament exasperated the Americans. God is the bountiful Giver of all good. The President made a short inaugural address. By combined effort success is sure. One of Scott's novels is called The Antiquary. It ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... poultry do not touch the bones with your fingers. To take a bone in the fingers for the purpose of picking it, is looked upon as being very inelegant. ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... objection most urged is that which relates to style. It is said, the expression will be poor, inelegant, inaccurate, and ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... accident. Then the narrow corridor of a German flat is often uncomfortably choked with articles of household use: lamps, for instance, and a refrigerator, and the safe in which the mistress locks her food; spare cupboards too, and neat piles of papers and magazines. It will be inelegant, but it will be ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... whole string of Chinese pack ponies, eighty at least, coming up from Bhamo, each laden with bales, a Chinaman to every three ponies. At the end stalks a lean Indian. I suppose he owns the show—his wife follows, a very black thing, a Madrassee, to judge by her not very white and inelegant hangings. They drink and spit at the spring, and he sees us and salaams, and looks in to see the durwan, who ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... civil engineer, found them in the great doorway of the flat mansions, Redwood holding out the damp pink paper, and Bensington on tiptoe reading over his arm. Cossar was a large-bodied man with gaunt inelegant limbs casually placed at convenient corners of his body, and a face like a carving abandoned at an early stage as altogether too unpromising for completion. His nose had been left square, and his lower ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... experience, which deals with the whole matter of a life, and yet is rarely wearisome, which condescends to the most fastidious particulars, and yet sweeps all away in the forthright current of the narrative,—such a style may be ungrammatical, it may be inelegant, it may be one tissue of mistakes, but it can never be devoid of merit. The first and the true function of the writer has been thoroughly performed throughout; and though the manner of his utterance may be childishly awkward, the matter has been transformed and assimilated ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dear, seemed to me generally very ugly. The very few exceptions are bad copies of us. Heaven knows what evil genius has inspired their costume; it is amazingly inelegant compared with those of former generations. It has no distinction, no beauty of color or romance; it appeals neither to the senses, nor the mind, nor the eye, and it must be very uncomfortable. It is meagre and stunted. The hat, above ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... a sight, I admit," went on Jennie. "Everything in the shell, girls? Now! up with it. Come on, little Trix," she added to the coxswain. "Don't get your tiller-lines snarled, and bring your 'nose-warmer'"—by which inelegant term she referred to the megaphone which, when they were really trying for speed was strapped to ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... which should adorn her, some sentiments not wholly unworthy might have been offered. But this is a calamity. They come unexpectedly, springing up like mushrooms, and this one is probably due to the lack of virtue of the inelegant and unintellectual ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... Committee is quite right in remarking that the language of this important rubric, as set forth by the Convention of 1883, is "inelegant and inaccurate," but another diocese has called attention to the fact that the substitute which Maryland offers would, if adopted, enable any rector who might be so minded to withhold entirely from ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... night of horror, Antwerp, to use an inelegant but descriptive expression, developed a violent case of the jim-jams. The next night and every night thereafter until the Germans came in and took the city, she thought she saw things; not green rats and pink snakes, but large, sausage-shaped balloons with ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... at the door, opposite to the ante-room, on the other side of the hall, was Decima. She had heard his step, and came to beckon him in. It was the dining-parlour, but a pretty room still; for Lady Verner would have nothing about her inelegant or ugly, if she could help it. Lucy Tempest, in her favourite school attitude, was half-kneeling, half-sitting on the rug before the fire; but she ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... would have been regarded and inveighed against as a popish and superstitious innovation; and a charge of this kind was at a later period preferred against Archbishop Laud. Parochial churches were, therefore, now repaired when fallen into a state of dilapidation, in a plain and inelegant mode, in complete variance with the richness and display observable in the ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... journey was performed by water down the Ganges, on hoard a budgerow. The name of this boat is a native corruption of the word barge. It is somewhat in appearance like an overgrown gondola—very picturesque, and not altogether inelegant. The interior is fitted up with sleeping apartments and a sitting-room, with an enclosed verandah in front, which serves to keep off the sun; the cabin is on all sides surrounded by venetians, which serve to keep off his burning rays by day, and to let ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... folks don't step so lively as they do up here, and old Colonel Tayloes, he used to say there ain't nothin' so inelegant as hurry, lessen 'tis worry. But of course I shouldn't have had no discussion in my mind about that bell. I got a bad ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... abilities, because he mistook the meaning of the words Vagabond and Rambler; he would recollect, that in old English and modern French authors, vagabond means wanderer: des eaux vagabondes is a phrase far from inelegant. But independently of this consideration, no well-bred gentleman would put a foreigner out of countenance by openly laughing at such a mistake: he would imitate the politeness of the Frenchman, who, when Dr. Moore said, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... and his grandson Moses continued the line of faithful but inelegant translators. Judah had turned into Hebrew the works of Bachya, Ibn Gebirol, Jehuda Halevi, Ibn Janach, and Saadiah. Samuel was the translator of Maimonides, and bore a brave part in the defence of his master in the bitter controversies which ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... 'good for sore eyes,' as you sometimes say;" and with this inelegant remark Miss Alfaretta walked away while laughing, happy Jim sped downwards to the vine-wreathed lodge at the great entrance gate. He had been happy all that summer, never more so; yet happier than ever now ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... his cigarette into the fire, stretched himself as he rose, and remained so long in the inelegant attitude that my eyes mounted from his body to his face; a second later they had followed his eyes across the room, and I also was on my legs. On the threshold of the folding doors that divided bedroom and sitting-room, a well-built man stood in ill-fitting broadcloth, and bowed to ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... point that ran out into the lake, to bathe. They were jolly, but uncultivated men, given to rudeness and profanity of speech when out of our immediate presence, and by themselves, and we heard from them, while they were splashing and struggling in the water, expressions somewhat inelegant as ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... her sparkle, then, by all means I won't. Now that's a very inelegant word to use, but it is expressive, and when I use it you may know that I mean it; I am tired of the whole story, and I have been cheated times enough. Look at yesterday! It was a dozen prayer-meetings combined. No, I ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... drapery cast with unbroken grace and complete gradations of shade, while Taddeo's are rigid and meagre; also in the heads, generally Taddeo's type of face is square in feature, with massive and inelegant clusters or volutes of hair and beard; but Memmi's delicate and long in feature, with much divided and flowing hair, often arranged with exquisite precision, as in the finest Greek coins. Examine successively in this respect only the heads of Adam, Abel, ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... grow up elegant, to fit the name. The name grew inelegant to fit her. During her earliest years the witty little children called her Elephant until they tired of the ingenuity and allowed her to lapse indolently from Ellar ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... impressions, conveys the idea of anything but repose, although a mouse on the floor bids us notice, that notwithstanding appearances, the ungainly lady stretches herself in silence. There cannot well be anything more inelegant and untrue than this piece; yet there is clever painting here and there; and some of the accessories, if taken without reference to the design, in which they are blots, are models of their kind. The thought belongs to the middle ages; the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... suggestion for the reform of this article of costume is entitled to the utmost respect. Already Englishmen, when they throw off the trammels of ceremony, and wish to be at their ease, substitute for the stiff, uncomfortable, and inelegant hat, such other article as the taste and enterprise of the hat and cap manufacturers have provided; and in France and Germany the hat has, for the last six or seven years, been gradually altering its form and substance, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... might have become vigorous branches in the tree of knowledge. What have we in return for the outlay? A series of structures concerning which the most ardent friend of the system cannot but admit that they are inelegant, uninspiring and unpractical. Some of the newer dormitories at Harvard and Yale, it is true, are decided improvements. They are well built and supplied with many conveniences that will serve to make student life less heathenish. But they can scarcely be called ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... of ancient Oriental use; the straight, square, uncompromising early Georgian leg; the carved lattice-work Chinese leg; the pseudo-Chinese leg; the fretwork leg, which was supposed to be in the best Gothic taste; the inelegant rococo leg with the curled or hoofed foot; and even occasionally the spade foot, which is supposed to be characteristic of the somewhat later style of Hepplewhite. His chair-backs were very various. His efforts ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... were the table's contemporaries, to judge by their style, and nothing harder or less accommodating to the love of ease ever entered surely a cabinetmaker's brain. The wood of which they were made had, however, come to be of a soft brown colour, through the influence of time, and the form was not inelegant. The floor was bare and painted, and upon it lay here an old rug and there a great thick bearskin; and on the walls there were several heads of animals, which seemed to Esther very remarkable and extremely ornamental. One beautiful deer's ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... expressions; and if magnificence or beauty is ever to be observed in them, it must have been introduced from some other motive than that of adapting the style to the subject. It is in such passages, accordingly, that we are most frequently offended with low and inelegant expressions; and that the language, which was intended to be simple and natural, is found oftenest to degenerate into mere slovenliness and vulgarity. It is in vain, too, to expect that the meanness of those parts may be redeemed by the excellence of others. A poet, who aims at all at sublimity ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... "Gee!" Bob delivered this inelegant exclamation with feeling. "Poll, you're the best little sport I ever knew. You always understand. Any other girl would have said that running was bad for my heart, and expected me to ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... respectability, he could perceive no symptoms of regret that their sentiments so little corresponded, nor could his avowed opinions awaken in her any exertion to render herself more acceptable to him. When he had taken sufficient time to study her character, he decided that the inelegant mirth, and ungoverned vanity of Amaranthe were preferable to the dawdling insipidity of Claribel. After this decision Lionel ceased to be a ...
— The Flower Basket - A Fairy Tale • Unknown
... world,—the clothes that are PUT ON and the clothes that are WRAPPED AROUND. The former style, with its jackets, trousers, and leggings, is not absolutely unknown to the Athenians,—their old enemies, the Persians, wear these[*]; but such clumsy, inelegant garments are despised and ridiculed as fit only for the "Barbarians" who use them. They are not merely absurdly homely; they cannot even be thrown off promptly in an emergency, leaving the glorious human form free to put forth any noble effort. The Athenians wear the wrapped style of garments, ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... the frogs," to which the dean so rancorously alluded, had, indeed, caused some consternation to the fellows of——. There had been a marvellous story going the round of the papers, of a shower of the inelegant reptiles in question having fallen in some part of the kingdom. Old women were muttering prophecies, and wise men acknowledged themselves puzzled. The Ashmolean Society had sat in conclave upon it, and accounted so satisfactorily for the occurrence, that the only wonder ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... especially in the North, resented this policy and dubbed it with the expressive but inelegant phrase, "waving the bloody shirt," the Republicans refused to surrender a slogan which made such a ready popular appeal. As late as 1884, a leader expressed the hope that they might "wring one more President from the bloody shirt." ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... accompaniments of a genteel salon. As you are an elegant person, of course you are ill-dressed: your coat is dusty, your boots speckled with mud, your hair uncombed, you exhale a strong odour of tobacco. At first glance, such things seem rather disagreeable, common, and inelegant. No such thing: this is exactly the most fashionable style we have; it seems to say: "I have just dismounted from the finest horse in Paris. I am a man of fashion, of that distinguished position in society, that I can go in a morning to call on a duchess, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... Flights in Poetry, is not inelegant nor injudicious, and has something of vigour beyond most of his other performances: his precepts are just, and his cautions proper; they are, indeed, not new, but in a didactick poem novelty is to be expected only in the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... won't you?' asked a second farmer. 'You're determined you won't?' inquired a third. 'You're certain you won't?' asked the fourth. To all of which queries the response was in negatives, with certain inelegant expletives added thereto. 'Then,' said the four farmers speaking as one man, and rising in a body, 'out you go.' So saying, they seized the giant form of the wretch, who struggled hard to escape but to no purpose; they forced him to the window, and while the train was still travelling at a slow ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... very ship she had been married; and now it formed her home, temporarily, if not permanently. Bridget had been living so long beneath a tent, and in savage huts, that the accommodations of the Rancocus appeared like those of a palace. They were not inelegant even, though it was not usual, in that period of the republic, to fit up vessels with a magnificence little short of royal yachts, as is done at present. In the way of convenience, however, our ship could boast of a great deal. Her ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... would her petticoats on a very dirty day, in order that he might feel the full warmth of the fire. His wig was put on all awry, with the tail straggling about his neck; his scanty grey trousers and short black gaiters, made in the worst possible style, imported an additional inelegant appearance to his uncouth person; and his limp, badly-starched shirt-collar almost obscured his eyes. We shall never be able to claim any credit as a physiognomist again, for, after a careful scrutiny of this gentleman's countenance, we had come to the conclusion that it bespoke nothing ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... standing conveniently. To stand on the elevated deck or rail of a ship, and look up the wharf, you see the whole space of it thronged with trucks and carts, removing the cargoes of vessels, or taking commodities to and from stores. Long Wharf is devoted to ponderous, evil-smelling, inelegant necessaries of life—such as salt, salt-fish, oil, iron, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... must have been penetrated with the same sentiment, for he rode up close to the cart and grasping the mud guard, turned on his saddle and wistfully shaking his bead, gave vent to his feelings by the following very inelegant but ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... and statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so many noble matrons. It had induced Parr to suspend his labours in that dark and profound mine from which he had extracted a vast treasure of erudition—a treasure too often buried in the earth, too often paraded with injudicious and inelegant ostentation; but still precious, massive, and splendid. There appeared the voluptuous charms of her to whom the heir of the throne had in secret plighted his faith. There too was she, the beautiful mother of a beautiful race, the Saint Cecilia, whose delicate features, ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... ease, and instead of attending, as she ought to have done, to his description of Amtsvorstehers, was thinking of other things. Dellwig had thick lips that could not be hidden entirely by his grizzled moustache and beard, and he had the sort of eyes known to the inelegant but truthful as fishy, and a big obstinate nose, and a narrow obstinate forehead, and a long body and short legs; and though all this, Anna told herself, was not in the least his fault and should not in any way prejudice her against him, she felt that ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... orderly camp-park out of the wilderness of creosote bushes and mesquite. I remember that for some offence against the powers of the day I was then "serving time" for a short while and, among other things, I cut shrub on the site of Tucson's Military Plaza, with an inelegant piece of iron chain dangling uncomfortably from my left leg. Oh, I wasn't a saint in those days any more than I am a particularly bright candidate for wings and a harp now! I gave my superior officers fully as much trouble as the rest ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... interesting book. Captain Widdrington should bear in mind, that however sterling his matter may be, some attention to manner is also expected, and that the appearance, at least, of the most valuable gems is deteriorated by an inelegant setting. Nevertheless, in this book-making age, it may be considered highly creditable to an author when faults of form and not of substance are the greatest with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... forty, and while all her aim is to appear an elegant woman of fashion, all her success is to seem an ordinary woman in very common life, with fine clothes on. Her manners are bustling, her air is mock-important, and her manners very inelegant. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... small words are in the language for a purpose. "And," "a," "the," are important, and their elimination often makes a letter bald, curt, and distinctly inelegant. ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... OLIV.) excels the Banded Epeira in the manufacture of big hunting-nets, but she is less gifted in the art of nest-building. She gives her nest the inelegant form of an obtuse cone. The opening of this pocket is very wide and is scalloped into lobes by which the edifice is slung. It is closed with a large lid, half satin, half swan's-down. The rest is a stout white fabric, frequently covered ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... with her, for she was an impulsive little woman; but at whatever opening in the crowd she and her friend presented themselves, they were sure to find the diver's ridiculously broad and now inelegant back turned towards them. ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... as his own wives in their highly sensational in-door costumes would be to some of us. In order to establish herself in the estimation of the average Persian, as all that a woman ought to be, the European lady would have to conceal her face and cover her shapely, tight-fitting dress with an inelegant, loose mantle, whenever she ventured outside her own doors. With something of a penchant for undertaking things never before accomplished, I proposed one morning to take a walk around the ramparts ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... you, reader. I have chosen a pleasant tale for you in a happy land, in the fairest time of year, in a golden age: I have youth to show you and an ancient sword, birds, flowers and sunlight, in a plain unharmed by any dream of commerce: why should I show you the sleep of that inelegant man whose bulk lay cumbering the earth like ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... rapid drop in an elevator. So Henry had come to her at the first possible moment to protest against "this Tom Reynolds." "He has had a bad recitation," she thought, "and now he is going to take it out on me," and then she called her brother a hard and inelegant name, as people will when angry with their dearest relatives. Had Nancy been of a satirical nature she might have made something of her brother's adoption of Freudian methods; but she was not, and she ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis |
