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Amuck   Listen
adjective
Amuck  adj., adv.  In a frenzied and reckless manner.
To run amuck, to rush out in a state of frenzy, as the Malays sometimes do under the influence of "bhang," and attack every one that comes in the way; to assail recklessly and indiscriminately. "Satire's my weapon, but I'm too discreet To run amuck, and tilt at all I meet."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Amuck" Quotes from Famous Books



... looks around it is invariably a portent of trouble; the man forgets his important engagement, and runs amuck, knocking over people, principles and principalities. If Aspasia had not observed Pericles that memorable day; if there had not been an oblique slant to Calypso's eyes as Ulysses passed her way; if the eager Delilah had not offered favorable comment on Samson's ringlets; ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath

... for some days in the neighbourhood what is called "a rogue elephant"—an elephant which, for some reason known only in elephant councils has been driven out of the herd, and is so enraged by his expulsion that he is ready to run amuck at every person and animal he sees. This was not pleasant intelligence. We found native carts at the place, ready to proceed in the morning to a market to be held at the foot of the hills; and after a very uncomfortable night, much disturbed by the ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy

... with spies, plotting constantly against her peace and her honour. She had run amuck upon the seas, and by her submarine warfare endangered the lives and welfare of all mankind. She had become a menace to the world's freedom. The President loves peace even as the soul of America loves peace. But both President and ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall

... came to something—as a body I mean; for individual members were constantly working themselves up the summit of resolution to rush headlong and regardless down the other side and out of our sight. When a man had reached a certain pitch of excitement he ran amuck. He sold anything, deserted anything, broke through anything in the way of family, responsibility, or financial lacks in order to go. But, as I say, occasionally one of these clubs pooled its individual ...
— Gold • Stewart White

... pioneer region. Nomads they were, though they might settle down to work for a while on one ranch, and then pass on to another; the sort of creatures who loafed in the saloons of the little villages and amused them selves by running amuck and shooting up the town. These men, and indeed nearly all of the pioneers, held the man from the civilized East, the "tenderfoot," in scorn. They took it for granted that he was a weakling, that he had soft ideas ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... acts as a powerful stimulant; but the better class among the tribe look upon it with disfavour, as its use often leads to madness and death. The effect of the poison is cumulative, and the Indians under its influence, like the Malays, run amuck and try to kill ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz

... Severinus (1580-1656) and Peter Marchettis (1589-1675) were the leading surgeons of their nation. Like many of his predecessors in Europe, Severinus ran amuck with the Holy Inquisition and fled from Naples. But the waning of the powerful arm of the Church is shown by the fact that he was brought back by the unanimous voice of the grateful citizens, and lived in safety despite the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... his nature there was no alloy, nor moderation, nor forbearance. The appreciative Esquemeling, who might be called the Boswell of the buccaneers, could never have met his hero Roc, when that bushy-bearded pirate was running "amuck" in the streets, but if he had, it is not probable that his book would have been written. He assures us that when Roc was not drunk he was esteemed, but at the same time feared; but there are various ways of gaining esteem, and ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton

... coyotes such as Cripp, with the hair slipped from their hides,—the ones that had survived a dose of poison but were unable to shake off its devastating after effects. Hydrophobia broke out among these and they ran amuck, striking alike at friends and foes. Sound coyotes were turned into frothing fiends that helped to spread the wave of madness that swept across three States. Horses and cows died by hundreds and it was ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts

... up his wounds and carried him on my back to the nearest dressing station. 'Fred,' he said, 'would you mind kissing me just once? So long!' and with that he was gone. Then I got mad and began to see red. In the first trench I ran amuck and with rifle, bayonet, and bombs I suppose I accounted for twenty men in ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy

... and I'd as lief her throat were cut! She almost ripped my bowels up, I vow, Running amuck with horns well set to butt: Nathless I've locked her in the stall below: She's blown with grass, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... Stamp their flat feet and gnash their toothless gums, And flaunt their petticoat-flag of "Liberty." Hear the old bandogs of the Daily Press, Chained to their party posts, or fetter-free And running amuck against old party creeds, On-howl their packs and glory in the fight. See mangy curs, whose editorial ears Prick to all winds to catch the popular breeze, Slang-whanging yelp, and froth and snap and snarl, And ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon

... first theory rests its case on the facts of history. Certain social institutions like the family, the state, and the church have thrown restraint about the individual, and when this restraint is removed he tends to run amuck. From the beginning the family was the unit of the social order, and the authority of its head was the source of wisdom. Self-control was not a substitute for paternal discipline, but was a fact only in presence of ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... when it needed all his intelligence to keep him from springing on the keeper, and running amuck in the ward-room, simply for the sake of uttering a violent, brutal protest. Then there were hours when he was too exhausted to leave his cot. At such a time he wrote a letter, his first letter to his mother, and he made the keeper promise to have it mailed so that no one could possibly suspect ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various

... quiet, inoffensive bottle-nosed whale, leisurely prowling about the Sound in search of a living, and, in fact, none other than the one that my friend had supposed to be a reef. These creatures rarely run amuck until the harpoon is thrust into them. They usually roll about the sea in the most harmless way. No doubt the sight of a huge creature in localities unaccustomed to it creates an impression of dull alarm, and, strange though it be, some minds are so constituted that ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman

... lazy. Mabrook quarrelled with a boy belonging to the quarter close to us about a bird, and both boys ran away. The Arab boy is missing still I suppose, but Mabrook was brought back by force, swelling with passion, and with his clothes most scripturally 'rent.' He had regularly 'run amuck.' Sheykh Yussuf lectured him on his insolence to the people of the quarter, and I wound up by saying, 'Oh my son! whither dost thou wish to go? I cannot let thee wander about like a beggar, with torn clothes and no money, that the police may take ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon

... murder every living creature in their way. In this, however, they differ from the gamesters of our country, who never find their senses, until they have lost their fortunes, and beggared their families; whereas the Malays never run amuck, but in consequence of misery ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... was no easy task. The lead they had gained put their opponents on their mettle, and they fairly ran amuck in the second quarter. By successive rushes, they worked the ball down the field. At the ten-yard line, the Rally Hall boys braced, and the enemy lost the ball on downs. A fake forward pass, splendidly engineered by Billy and ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport

... of our officers was shot. A row occurred in a restaurant, which ended in two young toughs drawing their revolvers and literally running amuck, shooting two or three men. A policeman, attracted by the noise, ran up and seized one of them, whereupon the other shot him in the mouth, wounding him badly. Nevertheless, the officer kept his prisoner and carried him to the station-house. The tough who had done the shooting ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... the description is to show that they are the amusements of a peculiar and limited class. The greater part of them are at a miserable discount (horse-racing excepted, which has been already sufficiently done in H. W.), and there is no reason for running amuck at them at all. I have endeavoured to remove much of my objection (and I think have done so), but, both in purpose and in any general address, it is as wide of a first article as anything can well be. It would do best in the ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens

... all, always at the head of the class. The laziest and dullest formed a league against him: every day, when school broke up, he was assaulted with a brutality equal to that of an English public school, but which certainly would not have been roused against him there by the same cause. He had to run amuck through the courtyard to the gate, where a servant was waiting for him, often reaching it with torn clothes and a bloody face. This persecution was stopped by his old playfellow, Orlando Furioso, who was two years his senior: he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various

... a guy-rope snap with a sound like a pistol-shot, and a great stone swung to a boom and weighing tons should begin running amuck through piles of cement, machinery, and men, and some one of the working gang, seeing the danger, should, with the quickness and sureness of a mountain-goat, spring straight for the stone, clutching the end of the guy and bounding off again, twisting the ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith

... soldier, "that man will some day drive me amuck. What do you think? One night, on a tiger hunt, he got me into an argument like this. A brute of a beast jumped into the middle of it. Courtlandt shot him on the second bound, and turned to me with—'Well, as I was saying!' I don't know to this day whether it was nerve or what you Americans ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath

... said he. "No, you're not, boy. If I catch you down there I'll play the game as you've mapped it out for me. I'll grab Jerry's axe or pitchfork and run amuck, blest if I don't. You'll wake up and find yourself ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... strict accordance with a set of rules. For several centuries nobody in these islands had broken the rules. It had come to be regarded as impossible that any one could break them. No one expects his opponent at the bridge table to draw a knife from his pocket and run amuck when the cards go against him. Nobody expected that the north of Ireland Protestants would actually fight. To threaten fighting is, of course, well within the rules of the game, a piece of bluff which any one is entitled to try if ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham

... may guess the latter, and the animus of a more intelligent precedent may some day hopefully be directed to such definite evils, of which our ancestors were well aware, rather than blindly running amuck at all. The coal-dealers in Boston, by the way, made the same argument that is always made, and was made at Athens in the grain combination of the third century B.C.—to wit, that they put up the prices ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson

... antagonistic leaders it always follows the one who is longest on vague and brilliant words and shortest on sense. Thus the man in office, if he would be free to carry on his duties in anything approaching freedom and comfort, must adopt measures against that tendency to run amuck. ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan

... never meant a word I said!" he began, with exaggerated trepidation. "Why the dickens didn't you murder the whole yapping bunch of us, Grant?" He clapped his hand affectionately upon the other's shoulder. "We kinda run amuck yesterday afternoon," he confessed cheerfully, "but it sure ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower

... woman, I fancy. He's knocked about th' wurrld quite a piece since thin. Eyah! he talks av some quare parts he's been in. Fwhat doin'? Lord knows. Been up an' down the ladder some in this outfit—sarjint one week—full buck private next. Yen know th' way these ginthlemin-rankers run amuck?" ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall

... crowd of wheelmen came, and from a cloud of dust the winner of the mile bicycle-race shot past the tape. The difficulty in the carabao event was to stick on to the broad, clumsy animal, during the gallop around the course. One of the beasts, excited by the shouts, began to run amuck, and cut a swathe in the distracted crowd as clean as an ungovernable automobile ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert

... in drawing-rooms, and as vain and egotistical on a Norfolk Broad as in Grosvenor Square. In this Appendix Borrow defends 'Lavengro,' both the book and the man, at some length, and with enormous spirit. At gentility in all its manifestations he runs amuck. The Stuarts have a chapter to themselves. Jacobites, old and new; Papists, old and new; and, alas! Sir Walter Scott as the father of 'Charley o'er the Waterism,' all fall by turn under the lash of Lavengro. The attack on the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... term for the embracing, the prancing, the Carmagnole-like ecstasy of the half-clad madmen running amuck in the almost unendurable joy of liberation. Barney knew that this condition of things would never do. All who bore commissions in the army were selected from the men. The highest in rank, who proved to be a colonel, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... he would do worse to Le Borgne's master than he had done to the supercargo; but he never by any chance let slip who Le Borgne's master might be, though M. Radisson, Chouart Groseillers, young Jean, and I kept watch by turns lest the drunken knave should run amuck of our Frenchmen. I mind once, when M. Radisson and I were sitting quiet by the bunk where Ben was berthed, the young rake sat up with a fog-horn of a yell and swore he would slice that pirate of a Radisson and all his cursed Frenchies into meat ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut

... distributed all over Penrod, both upon his body and upon his spirit. Driven by subtle forces, he had dipped his hands in catastrophe and disaster: it was not for a Georgie Bassett to beard him. Penrod was about to run amuck. ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... it next Sunday.... Well, a swishing isn't a likely thing anyhow. But I would.... There isn't a master here I'd stand a thrashing from—not one.... And because I choose to say what I think!... I'd run amuck." ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... Mrs. Dermot? For God's sake get into the house. There's a man running amuck. Wargrave's killed. I'm wanted"; and the doctor, taking no thought of danger to himself when there was need of his skill, ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly

... Paine by the country he had so much benefited. Superstition and hallucination are really one thing, and fanaticism, which is mental obsession, easily becomes acute, and the whirling dervish runs amuck at sight of a man whose religious opinions ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... run amuck!" some one cried, and in an instant there was an uproar of terror as the people left their seats and surged back to higher tiers where they hoped the elephant ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell

... as well as any man in the bunch. I only caught sight of her now and then . . . you see what we had to do, don't you? . . . We had to secure all these infernal things that were running amuck and ease up the rest of the cargo that had got jammed on the port side. There were accidents. Three or four were knocked out. Petersen, the Swede, had his leg crushed. I don't know what was wrong at the time. He was working next me, and a ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke

... could feel myself deteriorating, morally and intellectually. I had a desire to beat the Precious Ones (who were certainly well behaved for children shut up in two stuffy rooms) or better still to set the house afire, and run amuck killing and slaying down four flights of stairs—to do something very terrible in fact—something deadly and horrible and final that would put an end forever to this melancholy haunt of Tuesday stews and ghoulish ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine

... particularly if the piece be read and not seen, Schiller's first play is very apt to produce the impression of a boyish extravaganza. The sentimental bandit who nourishes his mighty soul on the blood of his fellow-men, and undertakes to right a private wrong by running amuck against society in another part of the world, is a figure upon which we decline to waste our sympathy. We have no place for him in our scheme of art unless it be in comic opera or in the penny dreadful. Emotionally we ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... his massive hands wrapped in the chain and his wrists encased in steel, and this time it was as if Don Pablo's head had been caught between a hammer and an anvil. The negro's strength, exceptional at all times, was multiplied tenfold; he had run amuck. When he arose the machete was in his grasp and Don Pablo's ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach

... that meeting was stunning in its entire unexpectedness. The landscape went off in protest, exploded in pyrotechnic marvels; the earth spun and cavorted; the solar system was disrupted and planets ran amuck with din unbelievable. But he was used to these cataclysms now, and out of the roar of breakage he heard a voice much like his ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... prize bull belonging to Alton Shepard, a Keegan cattle breeder, has created considerable sensation by running amuck in a most peculiar manner. While seemingly more intelligent than heretofore, it has developed characteristics known to be utterly alien to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various

... myself often enough," he resumed presently in a low voice. "I've been pulled up by something inside of me when I was plunging ahead with the bit in my teeth, and it's been just exactly as if this something said: 'Go steady or you'll run amuck and bu'st up the whole blooming show.' You can't talk about it. It sounds like plain foolishness when you put it into words, but when it comes to you, no matter where you are, you have ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... into his bunk, his legs swaying perpendicularly in the air like two derricks gone amuck. From the depths of his involuntary position he heard the silvery pealing of Dolly's laughter. When he rose again though, Dolly had ceased laughing, and Bison Billiam's face had a gravity which somehow vaguely impressed Charles-Norton as ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper

... future," continued the Doctor, as he handed Dave two strange-looking spheres, the size of a man's head, "the work of sheriffs, policemen and other officers of the law is not going to be quite so hazardous. When a criminal runs amuck, he will not kill a half-score of brave men before he is captured. The officers of the law will do what we will soon be doing, and a child can do the rest. Only," he continued, "watch your step going up that hill. It doesn't take ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell

... however, certain that the typical amok is the result of circumstances, such as domestic jealousy or gambling losses, which render a Malay desperate and weary of his life. It is, in fact, the Malay equivalent of suicide. "The act of running amuck is probably due to causes over which the culprit has some amount of control, as the custom has now died out in the British possessions in the peninsula, the offenders probably objecting to being caught and tried in cold blood'' (W. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... a bewildered unicorn. For a few days he steers wild; in this ill-balanced course his lone horn strikes every tree on this side as he dodges from that side. The unhappy creature is staggered, body and mind. In what Jericho of the forest can he hide his diminished head? He flies frantic. He runs amuck through the woods. Days pass by in gloom, and then comes despair; another horn falls, and he becomes defenceless; and not till autumn does his brow bear ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various

... man had some sort of weapon in his hand, either a tomahawk, a billet of wood, or a rock. With marvellous celerity they formed a huge circle, though what they were after was a puzzle to me. I fancied for awhile that one of their number must have run "amuck," and the rest meant to send him to slumber. Quickly they narrowed the circle, the whole body of them moving as if linked together and propelled by unseen mechanism. When the circle got about the third the size of an ordinary ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales

... streets— And it was starving time in houses Where fat generosity once ran amuck, No fires in inns, no cheerful bark of hounds, Or stroke of social hoofs upon the stones. And the long docks bit the black water Like old loosened fangs that held the sea In one ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen

... gliding, snake-like step, whom I know to be a Malay, brings my afternoon tea to the Stadthaus! Of them I may write more hereafter. They are symbolized to people's minds in general by the dagger called a kris, and by the peculiar form of frenzy which has given rise to the phrase "running amuck." ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... Howard Street to Folsom Street had been saved, the fire at this point not being permitted to creep farther east than Main Street. Another series of fatalities occurred, caused by the stampeding of a herd of cattle at Sixth and Folsom Streets. Three hundred of the panic-stricken animals ran amuck when they saw and felt the flames and charged wildly down the street, trampling under foot all who were in the way. One man was gored through and through by a maddened bull. At least a dozen persons', it is said, were killed, though probably this is an overestimate. One observer tells us that ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... the pity was that he did not trust to your honour, but he seems to have worked himself into the state of mind when young men run amuck. I saw his colonel, Lydiard, and the captain and sergeant of his company, who had from the first seen that he was a man of a higher class under a cloud, and had expected further inquiry, though, even from the little that had been seen of him, there was a readiness to take his ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge

... be loved, and nothing worth living for; but every thing to be hated, in the wide world. He was a horrid desperado; and like a wild Indian, whom he resembled in his tawny skin and high cheek bones, he seemed to run amuck at heaven and earth. He was a Cain afloat; branded on his yellow brow with some inscrutable curse; and going about corrupting and searing every ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... a fit in the dining room of the contract hotel this morning (I don't blame him, do you?) and they hauled him out by the feet. We run amuck with another advance car, the other day, but nobody got into a fight. I thought rival cars always—excuse the typewriter, it doesn't know any better— got into a fight ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington

... doing. Every thought and every act has in it something of all three elements. An emotion is not an isolated phenomenon; it is bound up on the one hand with ideas and on the other with bodily states and conduct. Whoever runs amuck in his emotions runs amuck in his whole being. The nervous invalid with his exhausted and sensitive body, his upset mind and irrational conduct is a living illustration of the central place of the emotions in ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

... is Loot. The dictionary says that it means "to plunder," but it holds more than that or any equivalent English word. Perhaps it has scarcely risen above the level of slang yet, but the phrase "to run amuck" is classical, having been used by both Pope and Dryden. The pedantic attempt made by some writers to change the common way of writing it because the original Malay term is a single word, "amok," comes too late ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)

... bridge aboard the leading ship of a flotilla—with compass, chart-house, engine-room-telegraph, steering wheel, and every soul on duty there—the men on "monkey's island," just above the bridge, never knew their ship was even hit till she began to run amuck and rammed another ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood

... truth, Freedom is not congenial to Germans. Had Germany won she hoped to impose her type of civilization everywhere, and she saw little harm in the fact of imposition. Inferior nations ought to be raised to Germany's cultural level by force, and they ought to be prevented from running amuck internationally, also by force. The German mind viewed complacently the bondage of the small nations in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It did not think that Czechs or Poles lost anything by being governed from Vienna. ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... it," the younger man groaned, his gaze turned sullenly downward. "Even granting that I have, that's no sign I'd ever—run amuck the way he did." ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... did not take a deep student of human nature to set down the entire crowd of them as visionaries, most fantastically inclined—in which direction, having no restraint whatever, they ran absolutely amuck. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... do!" snorted the civil administrator. "Keeping his men in hand is what he has to do! They're running amuck all over Panama, getting into fights with the Spiggoty police, bringing the uniform into contempt. As for the climate, it's the same climate for all of us. Look at Butler's marines and Barber's Zone police. The climate hasn't hurt them. They're as smart ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis

... on pandemonium reigned. Blue funk seized the petty officers while some of the crew ran amuck. One member of the engine watch attacked four of his companions with a wrench; another went into the ship's kitchen and slashed himself with a paring knife. The assistant engineer leapt through a 'chute opening, after avowing that he ...
— The Sky Trap • Frank Belknap Long

... with bhang and running amuck, a company of howling dervishes, may possibly, in our own day, go through similar frantic vagaries; but I doubt if any civilized European people but the French would permit and enjoy such scenes. Yet our neighbors see little shame in them; ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... opulence and extravagance, Ransome had never seen anything to beat the Poly. There was no end to it, no end to the privileges you enjoyed. He positively ran amuck among his privileges—those, that is to say, offered him by the Poly. Swimming Bath and the Poly. Gym. As he said, he "fair abused 'em." But he considered that the Poly. "got home again" on his exceptionally moderate use of the Circulating Library, ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair

... limits, and will acknowledge the importance of leisure to man, with space for joy and worship, and a home of wholesale privacy, with associations of chaste love and mutual service. If this concession to humanity be denied or curtailed, and if profit and production are allowed to run amuck, they will play havoc with our love of beauty, of truth, of justice, and also with our love for our fellow-beings. So it comes about that the peasant cultivators of jute, who live on the brink of everlasting famine, are combined against, and driven to lower the price of their labours ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... well ordered, no emotion so thoroughly controlled, but that under sudden pressure—click!—the mechanism slips a cog and runs amuck. Just that thing happened inside the Unspeakable Perk's smooth-running, scientific brain upon incitement of his flag's desecration and his lady's grief. To her it seemed that he shot past her horizontally like a human dart. The next second he was over ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... miles from the nearest American port, but he reckoned that he could capture provisions enough to feed his crew and supplies to refit the ship. As a raid there was nothing to match this cruise until the Alabama ran amuck among the Yankee clippers and whaling barks half a century later. It was the wrong time of year to brave the foul weather of Cape Horn, however, and the Essex was battered and swept by one furious gale after another. But at last she won through, stout ship that she was, and her weary ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine

... Malay running amuck, Mrs. Doolan; that is not courage, it is madness. You cannot tell—no one can tell—what I have suffered since the siege began. The humiliation of knowing that I alone of the men here am unable to take my part in the defense, and ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty

... or with the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage upon them, but only in armed opposition to an irresponsible government which has thrown aside all considerations of humanity and of right and is running amuck. We are, let me say again, the sincere friends of the German people, and shall desire nothing so much as the early reestablishment of intimate relations of mutual advantage between us,—however hard it may be for them, for the time being, to believe that this is spoken from ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson

... went on shore, and brought back anything but an edifying account of the state of things. Every single man and woman appeared to be drunk, reeling about the place. One young Samoyede in particular had made an ineffaceable impression on them. He mounted a sledge, lashed at the reindeer, and drove "amuck" in among the tents, over the tied-up dogs, foxes, and whatever came in his way; he himself fell off the sledge, was caught in the reins, and dragged behind, shrieking, through sand and clay. Good St. Elias must be much flattered by such homage. Towards morning the howling gradually ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... slowly. "It peps them up. It makes the monotony and the weariness bearable. And then, suddenly, they break. They hate the machines and the city and everything they ever knew or did. It's a sort of delayed-action psychosis which goes off with a bang. Some of them go amuck in the city, using their belt-weapons until they're killed. More of them bolt for the jungle. The city loses better than one per cent of its population a year to the jungle. And then they're Ragged ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... whom Charon will not ferry over; but I can single out none of them who is, without positively evil qualities, so absolutely intolerable as Marius.[103] Others have more such qualities; but he has no good ones. His very bravery is a sort of moral and intellectual running amuck because he thinks he shall not get Cosette. Having, apparently, for many years thought and cared nothing about his father, he becomes frantically filial on discovering that he has inherited from him, as above, a very doubtful ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... Fortescue said, lazily, "of course they do; but we have got our revolvers handy, and our guns are within reach of our hands. We should make precious short work of any Ghazis who were to run amuck ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty

... exclaimed, "I've no mind to run amuck of Pegasus! I'll get out of your way. Faith, 'tis the first time I've seen poetry in buckskin of this particular binding," and he wheeled his broncho out, leaving ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... squall &c (wind) 349; earthquake, volcano, thunderstorm. berserk, berserker; fury, dragon, demon, tiger, beldame, Tisiphone^, Megaera, Alecto^, madcap, wild beast; fire eater &c (blusterer) 887. V. be violent &c adj.; run high; ferment, effervesce; romp, rampage, go on a rampage; run wild, run amuck, run riot; break the peace; rush, tear; rush headlong, rush foremost; raise a storm, make a riot; rough house [Slang]; riot, storm; wreak, bear down, ride roughshod, out Herod, Herod; spread like ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... fell upon fertile soil in the worst of Lucien's nature, and spread corruption in his heart; for him, when his desires were hot, all means were admissible. But—failure is high treason against society; and when the fallen conqueror has run amuck through bourgeois virtues, and pulled down the pillars of society, small wonder that society, finding Marius seated among the ruins, should drive him forth in abhorrence. All unconsciously Lucien stood with the palm of genius on the ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac

... must make many sad discoveries. Like other artists, he does not care nearly so much for the praise as he is dashed and discomfited by the slightest hint of blame. It is a wonder that irascible painters do not run amuck among their own canvases and their visitors on Show Sunday. That, at least, in Mr. Browning's phrase, is "how it strikes a contemporary." Were the artists to yield to the promptings of their lower nature, were they to hearken to the Old Man within them, fearful massacres ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang

... aloud. "There comes a point where you can't eat yer bile any more, where it don't do no good to cuss. Then you runs amuck." Hanging his head he ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos

... sciences upon the thought and energy of the century, it has not monopolized them. No trifling resources have been left for mere abstract investigation. If meta-physics stands, despite the labors of Stewart, Hamilton, Hegel, Comte, very much where it did when Socrates ran amuck among the casuistical Quixotes of his day, and left the philosophic tilters of Greece, the knights-errant in search of the supreme good, in the same plight with the chivalry of Spain after Cervantes, the science of mind, and particularly mental pathology, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various

... our going any farther," Sheldon said. "Seelee will turn out his village and hunt them out of that. They'll never get past him. All we can do is to guard the coast and keep them from breaking back on the plantation and running amuck. Ah, I thought so." ...
— Adventure • Jack London

... rang out on the night the sudden tumult of a bell; a bell that told as plainly as though it clamored with a human tongue, that the hand that rang it was driven with fear; fear of fire, fear of thieves, fear of a mad-man with a knife in his hand running amuck; perhaps at that moment creeping up ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis

... week it was true that matters—always according to Mr. Greyne's letters home—slightly improved. While walking near the quay, in active search for nautical outrage, he saw an Arab dock labourer, who had been over-smoking kief, run amuck, and knock down a couple of respectable snake-charmers who were on the point of embarkation for Tunis with their reptiles. This incident had filed up a half-score of pages in exercise-book number one, and had flooded Mr. Greyne with hope and aspiration. But it was followed ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens

... with a happy smile in them, firmly-cut lips half hidden by the thick brown beard, a face that would have looked well under a lifted helmet—such a face as the scared Saxons must have seen among the bold followers of William the Norman, when those hardy Norse warriors ran amuck ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon

... myself," the voice went on. "I'm not above lifting a few calves for the brand I'm riding for or any little thing like that, but this deal sort of gorges up in me. They'll never cinch it on to any man—they never do. Old Rile is brooding over it. He'll likely run amuck. One way or another he'll try ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts

... found the brain behind the syringe of the thing; for it reared in an agony that could only have been that of approaching death, and ran amuck. ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst

... Madame Mauer, who squinted, squinted more painfully at Follet than at any one else. But his idleness was beginning to tell on him; occasionally he had moody fits, and there were times when he broke out and ran amuck among beach-combers and tipsy natives along the water-front. More than once, Ching Po sought him out and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... thin, bitter lips, his bare brawny arms, tattooed with strange devices. How clean he kept his teeth and nails! There was the stamp of the thoroughbred all over him. In what strange parts of the world had he run amuck? What fair, gracious women mourned for him ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... and his wife Balinsogo. This couple love blood and for this reason cause men and women to fight or to run amuck. ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole

... had been able to save them, made the threatening aspects of sea and air seem small indeed. Let the wind shriek through the wire stays and the waves roar and burst about and over the submarine chaser as they listed, none of these dangers equaled that of the depth charge which had run amuck. ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson

... momentary suggestion presented itself to his mind that what Jill had really wanted was Mr Willoughby on the eighth floor, but it was too late to say so now: and soon, becoming absorbed in the narrative of a spirited householder in Kansas who had run amuck with a hatchet and slain six, he dismissed the matter from ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse

... so flimsy. With a poke of my fist I could kill any one of these master brains. The ten-foot workers seemed mere shells, light and fragile; even the buildings were light and flimsy. The little globe-houses on their sticks seemed to waver, almost like nodding flowers. If we ran amuck we could smash everything ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings

... in which heavy benches were used, it being thought that in the hands of violent patients, chairs might become a menace to others. In the dining room, however, there were chairs of a substantial type, for patients seldom run amuck at meal time. Nevertheless, one of these dining-room chairs soon acquired ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... haven't that diathesis, to use your expression. Doesn't it strike you that you and I are very respectable persons? We really have no vices. Put us on a social pedestal, and we should be shining lights of morality. I sometimes wonder at our inoffensiveness. Why don't we run amuck against law and order? Why, at the least, don't we become savage revolutionists, and harangue in Regent's ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing

... the squire's new thrashing-machine ran amuck in Grammoch-town, and for some minutes the market square was a turbulent sea of blaspheming men, yelping dogs, and stampeding sheep, only one flock stood calm as a mill-pond by the bull-ring, watching the riot with ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant

... these two—the bandmaster, the fellow who's taking these women about and our Schomberg. Signor Zangiacomo ran amuck in the morning, and went for our worthy friend. I tell you, they were rolling on the floor together on this very veranda, after chasing each other all over the house, doors slamming, women screaming, seventeen of them, in the dining-room; Chinamen ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad

... spring forward at once. He had not forgotten for a moment his young charge. He knew that, driven to desperation, the Malays were very likely to run amuck, and, if they found him, to kill him. He felt sure that he would only be safe if he had him with him. Stooping down, therefore, he seized the little fellow in his arms, and, holding him as much as possible behind his back, he sprang on, and overtaking ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston

... when herds of buffalo grazed along the foothills of the western mountains, two hardy prospectors fell in with a bull bison that seemed to have been separated from his kind and run amuck. One of the prospectors took to the branches of a tree and the other dived into a cave. The buffalo bellowed at the entrance to the cavern and then turned toward the tree. Out came the man from the cave, and the buffalo took after him again. The man made another dive ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... Mrs. Conrad. "I don't put much faith in this regiment business. I think Pachuca has simply gone back to first principles and run amuck." ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall

... at once brutish, terrible, Homeric; the fellow's reserves of strength seemed immense; sheer animal rage drove him; he ran amuck with lust to kill. He beat, rushed, strove to close. His opponent's lithe body evaded a clutch that might have ended the contest. John Steele fought without sign of anger, like a machine, wonderfully trained; missing no point, regardless of punishment. He knew that if he ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham

... into the stout timbers of the ship's side and they were splintered like match-wood. It rebounded as the deck sloped sharply in the next wallowing roll, and now this frenzied monster of wood and iron seemed fairly to run amuck. It was inspired with a sinister intelligence, resolved to wreak all the damage possible. The pinnace, the water barrels, the coamings of the cargo hatches, were smashed to fragments as the gun turned this way and that and went plunging in search ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine

... tonality. When this is destroyed and the singer is forced to measure intervals abstractedly he is called upon to do something immeasurably more difficult than anything that is asked of the instrumentalist. Many modern composers have lost their heads and run amuck on the modern idiom, and their writing for voices is so complex that it would require a greater musician to sing their music than it ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger

... to him about Howard again, did you?" Mrs. Carnarvon was indignant. "You are old enough to know better, Marian. You carry frankness entirely too far. There is such a thing as truth running amuck." ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)

... unfortunately, even this classic resemblance to the legitimate farce of our civilization was deceptive. Another brocaded actor, who represented the hero of the play, turned three somersaults, and not only upset my theory and his fellow actors at the same time, but apparently ran amuck behind the scenes for some time afterward. I looked around at the glinting white teeth to observe the effect of these two palpable hits. They were received with equal acclamation, and apparently equal facial ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various

... his Hair outgrew the Legislature. He was on whispering terms with a clean majority of all the Partisans in three connecting Counties, so he bought one Gross of the White String Kind and a pair of Gum Sneakers and began to run amuck ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade

... Goblets were drained in competition to the sound of cannon, and the judges who awarded the prize to the Prince, were presented by him with estates comprising hundreds of peasants. Maimon began to shout in imitation of the cannon, in imagination he ran amuck in a synagogue, as he had seen the prince do, smashing and wrecking everything, tearing the Holy Scrolls from the Ark and trampling upon them. Yes, they deserved it, the cowardly bigots. Down with the law, to hell with the Rabbis. A-a-a-h! He would grind the phylacteries under his heel—thus. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... her, also with a pail, is the helpless Araminta. Among the impedimenta are the Reverend Austin Thorpe and the step-ladder, the Reverend Thorpe being, dismissed at the door and allowed to run amuck for the day. ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed

... are here, I suppose, for some purpose or other. Whether we fulfil it or not may well be a matter of opinion. But that purpose is certainly not to look after any young idiot—you must excuse my speaking plainly—who runs amuck in this most fascinating city. In your case the Chief has gone out of his way to help you. He has interviewed the chief of police himself, brought his influence to bear in various quarters, and I can tell you conscientiously that everything which possibly can be done is being done at the ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... to men like you, Starratt," Mr. Ford was saying, his voice suave to the point of insincerity, "to tide us over a crisis. Just now, when the laboring element is running amuck, it's good to feel that the country has a large percentage of people who can be reasonable and understand another viewpoint except their own... After everything is said and done, in business a man's first loyalty is to the ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... which it had leaked, and a packet of dishevelled cigarettes. Lighting one, and restoring the other objects to his pocket, he continued calmly: "Tell me how did you manage to smooth things over with the Gillows? Ursula was running amuck when I was in Newport last Summer; it was just when people were beginning to say that you were going to marry Nick. I was afraid she'd put a spoke in your wheel; and I hear she put a big cheque ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton

... surprise awaited me. The noise, which had hitherto been loud, now became deafening, and I realised that, contrary to Eunice Westonhaugh's expectation, the supper had been spread in the kitchen, and that I was likely to run amuck of the whole despicable crowd in any effort I might make to get a bite for ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green

... that point to say that "We came to a difficult passage with them, and Bedford mistaking certain gestures of theirs"—pretty gestures they were!—"gave way to a panic violence. He ran amuck, killed three, and perforce I had to flee with him after the outrage. Subsequently we fought with a number who endeavoured to bar our way, and slew seven or eight more. It says much for the tolerance of these beings that on my recapture I was not instantly slain. We made ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... Lloyd George was no man's man. He became a free lance and while sometimes he ran amuck his cause was always the cause ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson

... beat, E'en though you get there Zaza with both feet, In forty flickers, it's the same hard luck, And you are up against it nip and tuck, Shanghaied without a steady place to eat, Guyed by the very copper on your beat Who lays to jug you when you run amuck. ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin

... old-established practice: fine house, carriage and pair, white-haired butler—everything correct, except myself. It was of no use. I can hold myself in for a month or two; then I break out, the old original savage that I am under my frock coat. I feel I must run amuck, stabbing, hacking at the prim, smiling Lies mincing round about me. I can fool a silly woman for half-a-dozen visits; bow and rub my hands, purr round her sympathetically. All the while I am longing to ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... shebang'll be floppin' roun' the marsh like enough on full moon tide. My advice to you is to git along. Not that you done no damage or what I'd call damage—but it won't do no good fer yer to run amuck o' Ole Man Stanton. 'Cause he's a reg'lar ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh

... Briskett lost her temper, and when a woman of mature years and grey hairs loses control of herself, and lets her tongue run amuck, it is a sorry spectacle. The flush on Cornelia's cheeks was not for her own humiliation, but for her aunt's. She lowered her lids, ashamed to look into the angry, ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... peril on the killing beds was when a steer broke loose. Sometimes, in the haste of speeding-up, they would dump one of the animals out on the floor before it was fully stunned, and it would get upon its feet and run amuck. Then there would be a yell of warning—the men would drop everything and dash for the nearest pillar, slipping here and there on the floor, and tumbling over each other. This was bad enough in the summer, when a man could see; in wintertime ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... to consider the impossible idea that the convention would bolt—would run amuck, no matter who addressed it—no matter what contingency arose. But to have the convention even tolerate this brazen interloper troubled his sense of mastery; the convention had been too ready to permit the stranger to speak. It wasn't politics as the colonel had been accustomed to ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day

... sciences: geology, astronomy, zoology, biology, geography, chemistry, physics, anatomy, philology, archaeology, history, ethics, religion, etc. There is not one chance in a million that a writer of a fictitious account would not have run amuck among many of these sciences, if, like Moses, he had ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams

... the exotic atmosphere of those fashionable finishing schools which no sane country should permit. But even these wild and unbroken colts and fillies, she believed, had excuses. They were the natural results of a complete lack of parental discipline and school training. They ran amuck, advertised by the press and applauded by the hawks who pounced upon their wallets. They were more to be pitied than condemned, far more foolish and ridiculous than decadent. They were not unique, either, or peculiar to their own country. Every nation possessed its "smart set," ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton

... over in the foundry town. The local authorities have jailed some I. W. W.[69-2] plotters. They state that a jail delivery is threatened, that the Sheriff can't control it, and that they believe the mob will run amuck generally and shoot up the town. Take a few men; go over and ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various

... Persei have been almost as numerous as the astronomers who have speculated about it. One of the most startling of them assumed that the outburst was caused by the running amuck of a dark star which had encountered another star surrounded with planets, the renewed outbreaks of light after the principal one had faded being due to the successive running down of the unfortunate planets! Yet another hypothesis is based on what we have already said of the tidal ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss

... started to tell me, and then your dog ran amuck and began butting perfect strangers all ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... mean to quarrel, but you've goaded me too much. I'm grateful for what you have tried to do for me, and I'll pay you back as soon as I can. But I can't go on with this game. I'll quit, and you can disown me to your friends—tell them that I've run amuck, and to forget they ever knew me. They'll hardly blame you for it—they know you too well for that. And as for Alice, I'll talk it out with her to-morrow, and let her decide for herself—if she wants to be a ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair



Words linked to "Amuck" :   amok, possessed, demoniacal, murderously, berserk



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