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Tinsel   /tˈɪnsəl/   Listen
Tinsel

noun
1.
A showy decoration that is basically valueless.
2.
A thread with glittering metal foil attached.



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"Tinsel" Quotes from Famous Books



... in a hollow log in the center, and departed flapping. After that the ceremonial developed itself into the education that was to flow down upon her defenseless head at the waving of the wand of Minerva, who was Charlotte with a tinsel star of wisdom resting rampantly upon her brow. And it came down upon the Suckling with a vengeance. A whole troop of young letters of the alphabet, led by small Susan with the large red A upon her fat back, ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... out of the old church through a side door leading into a small green enclosure, now gloomy in the shade of the old stone walls. At one end was a tangle of briar, and here were some old graves, each with a tinsel wreath or two on the iron cross. And presiding over these was the limp figure of a one-legged man on two crutches, who saluted us. We passed along to the end of the inclosure, where lay a chance beam of sunshine like a bar of dusty gold ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards

... fraud and artifice to obtain the mere reputation of it. Men do not affect a conduct that tends to their discredit. Let us, then, get the better of Monsieur Necker in his own way; let us do in reality what he does only in pretence; let us turn his French tinsel into English gold. Is, then, the mere opinion and appearance of frugality and good management of such use to France, and is the substance to be so mischievous to England? Is the very constitution of Nature so altered by a sea of twenty miles, that ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... Eternity and of God in the minds of those to whom they had nothing to offer in return. A threat of death yesterday, misery, starvation and squalor! all the hideousness of a destroying anarchy, that had nothing to give save a national fete, a tinsel goddess, some shallow laughter and momentary intoxication, a travesty of clothes and of religion and a dance on ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... The pomp and tinsel of unrighteous power; Bloated oppression in its awful hour,— I, dying, ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy

... to be attracted by glitter and tinsel, and to live for earthly things which perish in the using. The candidate who cares much for honour and nothing for learning, the professional man who will sacrifice reputation to win a fortune, and all ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.

... could have secured an immense amount of popularity if I had gone in for a crescendo of anti-clericalism after the Vie de Jesus. The general reader likes a strong style. I could easily have left in the flourishes and tinsel phrases which excite the enthusiasm of those whose taste is not of a very elevated kind, that is to say, of the majority. I spent a year in toning down the style of the Vie de Jesus, as I thought that such a subject ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan

... captain, Tinsel is a mayor, Tony is a baker-boy With 'lasses in his hair, Tipsy is a sailor, With anchors on his chest, And Tiny is the baby boy Who bosses ...
— The Peter Patter Book of Nursery Rhymes • Leroy F. Jackson

... jacket pockets were pleasant-smelling new white gloves, and inside their heads solemn timidity commingled with glittering anticipations. Before them, like a Christmas tree glimpsed through lace curtains, they beheld joy shimmering—music, ice-cream, macaroons, tinsel caps, and the starched ladies of their hearts Penrod and Sam walked demurely yet almost boundingly; their faces were shining but grave—they were on their ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington

... carpet. Seated on it, against no more romantic object than a blackened chimney-stack, over which some humble creeper had been trained, they both pored over one book, while a basket of common fruit, and another basket of strings of beads and tinsel ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... is a real thing," said Mrs. Mayflower. "It does not project itself in advance of us; but exists in the actual and the now, if it exists at all. We cannot catch it by pursuit; that is only a cheating counterfeit, in guilt and tinsel, which dazzles our eyes in the ever receding future. No; happiness is a state of life; and it comes only to those who do each day's work peaceful self-forgetfulness, and a calm trust in the Giver of all good for the blessing that lies stored for each one prepared to receive it in every ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur

... you like it? I wonder! Or think you it's stupid To send such a commonplace gift as a Purse? Do you sigh for the tinsel, and gauze, and the Cupid, And the wonderful sentiments written in verse? Well, suppose I had sent them. You'd murmur, "How pretty!" Then not see them again as you put them away. Shall I candidly tell you I thought 'twere a pity Just to send you a gift that would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various

... and dropped her too. It was a happy night for Belinda when Blanche went away; and her husband, with rather a blush and a sigh, said "he had been deceived in her; he had thought her endowed with many precious gifts, he feared they were mere tinsel; he thought she had been a right-thinking person, he feared she had merely made religion an amusement—she certainly had quite lost her temper to the schoolmistress, and beat Polly Rucker's knuckles cruelly." Belinda flew to his arms, there was no question about ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... his own hands, and he proceeded to issue a number of sumptuary laws which were far from mild. Food was regulated, minstrels were not allowed to sit at the same table with ladies and gentlemen, most rigid rules were formulated against the abuse of gold, silver, and tinsel trimmings on the dresses of the women, and of the men as well, and the use of ermine and of all fine and Costly furs was carefully restricted. In Castile the same movement was taking place, and Alfonso X., who followed Fernando, issued similar laws, wherein women were forbidden to wear any bright ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... a scarf across it, and back of the table three steps leading up to a little platform on which were ranged two or three mediocre statues of saints, once brilliant with blue and scarlet and tinsel, but tarnished and dim ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan

... ship from which the view had been taken had approached, the details grew plainer. At the same time, it became evident that the plain inside the curve of the sickle was powdered with tiny sparkles, like tinsel ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper

... the truth, Agnes could scarcely understand how a boy could so dislike circus life as to really want to run away from even Twomley & Sorber's Herculean Circus and Menagerie. There was a glitter and tinsel to the circus that ever appealed to ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill

... tatters, he brandishing a sweep's broom and she a ladle. Jim Crow and a fancifully bedizened ballet-dancer in white muslin, often swelled the ranks, and the rest of the party rigged out in a profusion of gilt paper, flowers, tinsel and gewgaws, their faces and legs colored with brick-dust, made up a comical crowd. But even these mild remains of the great festival are almost entirely banished to the rural districts, and are ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... came and called me I deserted all to follow, Never knowing, in my dazedness, I had slipped my hand from His— Never noting, in my blindness, that the bauble fame was hollow, That the gold of wealth was tinsel, as I since have learned it is— I have spent a life-time seeking things I've spurned when I have found them; I have fought and been rewarded in full many a petty cause, But I'd take them all—fame, fortune and the pleasures that surround ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell

... Persia. This play was brought upon the stage in a style of princely magnificence. The dresses were of rich material, profusely ornamented with gold and silver, the kind indulgence of the audience, for once, not being asked to attribute an extraordinary value to professional tinsel. The author is said to have laid out four hundred pounds for this occasion. Brennoralt, also a tragedy, was first published under the title of The Discontented Colonel, in 1639, as a satire on the Scottish insurgents. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... she thought she caught a glimpse of the reason underlying it all. In Sequoia, Bryce Cardigan was regarded as the heir to the throne of Humboldt's first timber- king, but Shirley knew now that as a timber-king, Bryce Cardigan bade fair to wear a tinsel crown. Was it this knowledge that had led ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne

... Newgate, and of Smithfield, engendered not the least admiration; and as for the Poet's Corner in the Abbey, he loudly declared that he could see no poetry whatever about it. But what hurt the feelings of Herr Burkhardt most of all, was the utter contempt Clare showed for the delights of Vauxhall. The tinsel and the oil-lamps, the wooden bowers and paper flowers, struck Clare as perfectly absurd, and he expressed his astonishment that people should go and stare at such childish things, with a world of wonder and of beauty lying all around ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin

... on hamely fare we dine, Wear hodden-gray, and a' that; [coarse gray] Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, [Give] A man's a man for a' that. For a' that, an' a' that, Their tinsel show, an' a' that; The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor, Is king o' ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson

... at the beginning, and enlighten the mothers. Follies and fripperies, in cooking or dressing, will give way before enlightenment, just as do the skin paintings, tattooings, gaudy colors, glass beads and tinsel, and other absurdities of savage tribes; just as have done the barbaric customs and splendors of the barbaric ages. Woman is not quite out of her barbaric stage yet. At any rate, she is not fully enlightened. The desire for that redundancy of adornment which is in bad taste still remains. In the ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz

... restrained to rational action. But the world will recover from the panic of this first catastrophe. Science is progressive, and talents and enterprise on the alert. Resort may be had to the people of the country, a more governable power from their principles and subordination; and rank and birth and tinsel-aristocracy will finally shrink into insignificance, even there. This, however, we have no right to meddle with. It suffices for us, if the moral and physical condition of our own citizens qualifies them to select the able and good for the direction of their ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... and, as if noticing her borrowed clothing for the first time, looked about the room for the tinsel and gauze. ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... is a story illustrative of this altered manner and matter of preaching. He had been preaching when very young, at Galashiels, and one wife said to her "neebor," "Jean, what think ye o' the lad?" "It's maist o't tinsel wark," said Jean, neither relishing nor appreciating his fine sentiments and figures. After my mother's death, he preached in the same place, and Jean, running to her friend, took the first ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... pondered in his private study at home. His musings arraigned before him for judgment and contrast the two women who had so stormily wrought upon his new life. Esme Elliot had played with his love, had exploited it, made of it a tinsel ornament for vanity, sought, through it, to corrupt him from the hard-won honor of his calling. She had given him her lips for a lure; she had played, soul and body, the petty cheat with a high and ennobling passion. Yet, because she played within the rules ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... the coast towns; the girl who went thither came not home again, and a young man was lost to all that Africa held dear. In course of time she saw every native craft despised, and instead of the fabric that her own fingers wove her children yearned for the tinsel and the gewgaws of the trader. She cursed this man, and she called upon all her spirits to banish the evil. But when at last all was of no avail—when the strongest youth or the dearest maiden had ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... from her the philosophies and beliefs and religions of her kind. He encouraged her to talk of art—to give her understanding of the world of artists as she knew it, and to express her real opinions and tastes in pictures and books. He persuaded her to throw boldly aside the glittering, tinsel garb in which she walked before the world, and so to stand before him in all the hideous vulgarity, the intellectual poverty and the moral ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright

... freed from every bond, With all the tinsel-state of puppet-play! Lay off the crown, for it befits thee not, Even in jest; the mantle ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... loaded with lackeys, as tall as Swiss, with most gaudy liveries, all covered with lace, appeared in the court, and disembarked the whole wedding company. Never was country magnificence more naturally displayed: Rusty tinsel, tarnished lace, striped silks, little eyes, and full swelling breasts, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... Indian carpets from the "Tosho Khana" or Treasury. The sides and roof were stretched at one end with sulphur-coloured Indian silk, at the other with pale blue silk, the yellow silk with a two-foot border of silver tinsel, the blue edged with gold tinsel. Cunning craftsmen from Agra fashioned "camouflage" doorways and columns of plaster, coloured and gilt in the style of the arabesques in the Alhambra, and the thing ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton

... the nacre of any mussel or oyster-shell you might cut, at your pleasure, any quantity of small flat circular discs of the prettiest colour and lustre. To some extent, such tinsel or foil of shell is used pleasantly for decoration. But the mussel or oyster becoming itself an unwilling modeller, agglutinates its juice into three dimensions, and the fact of the surface being now geometrically gradated, together with the savage instinct of attributing ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... with it. Everything pleased them; they applauded wildly, and uttered shouts of encouragement and delight to bulls and toreadors alike. The grand people were richly attired; beautiful ladies watched with excited eyes the bulls, wearing their colors in rosettes of satin and glittering tinsel; the thousands of waving, brilliantly hued fans fluttered like a swarm of butterflies; the music filled the air. Pe-" pita sat in a dream of joy, the color coming and going on her cheeks, her rapture glowing in her eyes. She was a Spanish girl, and not so ...
— The Pretty Sister Of Jose - 1889 • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... so odd, but he's an excellent sterling character; and that, you know, Mr. Linden, tells more in the bosom of a family than all the shining qualities which captivate the imagination. I am sure, Mr. Linden, that the moralist is right in admonishing us to prefer the gold to the tinsel. I have now been married some years, and every year seems happier than the last; but then, Mr. Linden, it is such a pleasure to contemplate the growing graces of the sweet pledge of our mutual love.—Adolphus, ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... awakening after the last mad night of its celebration. The tents of the tawdry shows that had tempted the crowds with vulgar indecencies, and the booths that had sheltered the petty games of chance where loud-voiced criers had persuaded the multitude with the hope of winning a worthless bauble or a tinsel toy, were being cleared away from the borders of the plaza, the beauty of which their presence had marred. In the plaza itself—which is the heart of the town, and is usually kept with much pride and care—the bronze statue ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright

... Jacob Alspaugh crossing the parade ground in more than Solomonic splendor of uniform. His inflated form bore upon it all the blue and tinsel prescribed by the Army Regulations for the raiment and insignia of a First Lietenant of Infantry, with such additions as had been suggested by his exuberant fancy. His blue broadcloth was the finest and shiniest. Buttons and bugles seemed masses of barbric gold. From broad-brimmed ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy

... high character for sobriety and gravity of deportment, and purity of morals; but the glimpses we get of the real, every-day routine of his domestic life, are such as to show that the pomp and parade of royalty is mere glittering tinsel, ...
— Charles I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... sort of masculine chivalry—the heritage only of fools and very clever men—which takes no note of such things. It was Miss Brown who, from her place in a corner of the room, ran over the cheap attractions of this unwelcome visitor with an expression of scornful wonder—who understood the tinsel of her jewellery, the cheap shoddiness of her ready-made gown; who appreciated, with merciless judgment, her mincing speech, ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... post, warmed themselves by the Frenchman's fire, ate his food, and patted their stomachs with delight; and they swarmed by thousands to Quebec, bringing their peltries for trade, received gewgaws and tinsel decorations from the Governor, and swore eternal allegiance to his master, the Sun of the ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson

... colors of the chromatic scale. Their necks and arms, which were stained a saffron yellow, were hung with jewels or near-jewels. On their heads were towering, indescribable affairs of feathers, flowers and tinsel, faintly reminiscent of those fantastic headdresses affected by the lamented Gaby. The music was furnished by a gamelan, or orchestra, of half-a-hundred musicians playing on drums, gongs and reeds, with a few xylophones thrown ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell

... contempt of him; and declared, that, were there not another man in England, she would not have him. She was ready, on the contrary, she could assure them, to resign her pretensions under hand and seal, if Miss Clary were taken with his tinsel, and if every one else approved of his address ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... this, the fellow was a great dandy, spending many hours each day in greasing and arranging his long coarse hair, which he ornamented with plates of silver, bits of gaudy-colored cloth, bright feathers, and tinsel. Every hair was scrupulously plucked from his brows and eyelashes, and the lids of his eyes were painted a bright vermilion, giving to his face the expression of a demon ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens

... of the romance that surrounded him—of which, plainly, he was not conscious. To him, romance meant the lights, the crowds, the amusements, the glitter and tinsel of the cities of the East, word of which had come to him through various channels. To her these things were no longer novel,—if they had ever been so—and so for her romance must come from the new, the unusual, ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer

... falling. In the west the sun was slipping down behind the hills, leaving the strong day with a rosy and radiant glamour, that faded away in eloquent tones to the grey, tinsel softness of the zenith. Out in the yard a sumach bush was aflame. Rich tiger-lilies thrust in at the sill, and lazy flies and king bees boomed in and out of the window. Something out of the sunset, out of the glorious freshness and primal majesty of the new land, diffused ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... as I have mentioned—expeditions to various beautiful spots in the neighborhood, and music parties on the water. The last of these used sometimes to have a peculiarly romantic effect; for on fete days the young peasant girls, all glittering in their golden tinsel bonnets, would push off with their sweethearts, like mad things, in whatever boats they could find upon the beach. I have seen them paddling their little fleet round the duchess's boat with all the curiosity ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott

... horseback, with lances and banners. We were a little too near for the full enjoyment of the spectacle; for, though some of the armor was real, I could not help observing that other suits were made of silver paper or gold tinsel. A policeman (a queer anomaly in reference to such a mediaeval spectacle) told us that they were going to joust and run at the ring, in a field a little ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... an opportunity of acquiring a very dangerous influence. But this is not the worst.... A man who is fond of office, and has his eye upon reelection, will be courting favor and popularity at the expense of his duty.... There is a barbarism crept in among us that extremely shocks me: I mean those tinsel epithets with which (I come in for my share) we are so beplastered,—'his excellency,' and 'his honor,' 'the honorable president of the honorable congress,' or 'the honorable convention.' This fulsome, nauseating cant may be well enough adapted to barbarous ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler

... at this when I observed that a strange procession was passing by the cobbler's door. First there was a man who was burdened with a great tinsel box hung with velvet, in which were six plush chairs. After him came another who was smothered with rugs and pictures. A third carried upon his back his wife, a great fat creature, who glittered with jewels. Behind him he dragged a dozen trunks, from which dangled ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks

... though one shrieked with dismay, the other with diversion. At last the Colonel, slower of foot than the rest, arrived on the scene, just as the pride of his heart, the old King Chanticleer of the yard, made his exit, draped in a royal red paper robe and a species of tinsel crown, out of which his red face looked most ludicrous as he came halting and stupefied, haying evidently been driven up in a corner and pinched rather hard; but close behind him, chuckling forth his terror and flapping his wings, came the pert little white ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... you do, you unfledged Guy Fawkes. I know nothing would give you greater joy than to put on a mask, grasp a dagger in your hand, and go to Wesley, crying, 'Villain, your secret or your life!' Dick, you're a stage hero; you're a thing of sawdust and tinsel. Come to the parlor and hear Kate play the divine songs of Mendelssohn; perhaps, night-eyed conspirator, to whirl Polly or Miss Rosa in the delirium of the 'Blaue ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... too many modern Anglo-Indians, she prided herself on keeping airily apart from the country of her exile. Natives gave her 'the creeps.' Useless to argue. Her retort was unvarying and unanswerable. "East is East—and I'm not. It's a country of horrors, under a thin layer of tinsel. Don't talk to me——!" Lance Desmond had achieved fame among the subalterns by christening her the Banter-Wrangle; but he liked her well enough, on the whole, to hope she would ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... yawned and sprawled. Half a dozen rifles lay on a rock and a cutlass was leaned against a pillar: the armoury of these drowsy musketeers. At the far end, a little closed house of wood displayed some tinsel curtains, and proved upon examination to be a privy on the European model. In front of this, upon some mats, lolled Teburcimoa, the king; behind him, on the panels of the house, two crossed rifles represented fasces. He wore ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Heaven sent to earth—this night when in all Christian families they eat, drink, dance, sing, laugh, play, caress, and kiss one another—this night, which in cold countries holds such magic for childhood with its traditional pine-tree covered with lights, dolls, candies, and tinsel, whereon gaze the round, staring eyes in which innocence alone is reflected—this night brought to Basilio only orphanhood. Who knows but that perhaps in the home whence came the taciturn Padre Salvi children ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... for titles. She considered them a tinsel, and the devotee on his knee-caps to them a lump for a kick. Adding: 'Of course I stand for my class; and if we can't have a manlier people—and it 's not likely in a country treating my brother ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... copper gong. My masseur disappeared. A stunted old Negress entered, dressed in the most tawdry tinsel. She was talkative as a magpie, but at first I did not understand a word in the interminable string she unwound, while she took first my hands, then my feet, and polished the nails with ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit

... I have seen the executrix and son-in-law, whom that great genius deceased, my well-beloved cousin in folly, King Corny, chose for himself. As to that thing, half mud, half tinsel, half Irish, half French, Miss, or Mademoiselle, O'Faley, that jointed doll, is—all but the eyes, which move of themselves in a very extraordinary way—a mere puppet, pulled by wires in the hands of another. The master showman, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth

... the host, they proved that the green bush had not lied, for the wine really did come from a freshly opened cask just brought up from the cellar. But as the niche was illumined only by the tiny oil lamp burning beneath the image of the Virgin, bedizened with flowers and gold and silver tinsel, fastened against the wall, Biberli asked the weary bar-maid ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... down again and admired the fish. Frenchy and I lighted our pipes, and I took the little Silver Doctor from the leader. It was just the least bit frayed but still very pretty and bright, with its golden floss and silver tinsel, its gold pheasant tips, blue ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick

... passed through flames and issued thence purified with love in their hearts. Emmy, Septimus, Sypher, all in their respective ways, had grappled with essentials. She alone had done nothing—she the strong, the sane, the capable, the magnificent. She had been a tinsel failure. So far out of touch had she been with the real warm things of life which mattered that she had not even gained her sister's confidence. Had she done so from her girlhood up, the miserable tragedy might not have happened. She had failed in a ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... constant request during the next weeks. It was filled with the dainty oddments which a woman of means and taste collects in the course of years; trimmings and laces, and scraps of fine brocades; belts and buckles, and buttons of silver and paste; glittering ends of tinsel, ends of silk and ribbons that were really too pretty to throw away, and cunning little motifs which had the magic quality of disguising deficiencies and making both ends meet. Claire gave with a lavish ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... many times over—to either party, to both parties, to the highest bidder, in short. They will sell their vote much more readily than the lowest classes of men now do. They will hold it with greater levity. They will trifle with it. They will sell their vote any day for a yard of ribbon or a tinsel brooch—unless they are offered two yards of ribbon or two brooches. They will vote over again every hour of every election day, by cunning disguises and trickery. And thus, so far as women are concerned, the most degraded element in society ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper

... satin and silver, lifted on high his two barb-tipped sticks, gaily ornamented with tinsel paper, and called Vivillo from a distance. His mocking voice infuriated the bull, who rushed upon him; then, as he swayed lightly aside, it was all he could do to save himself from the great animal's sudden, swift turn, without placing either of his banderillas. Again and again the play was ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... easy to regard the Lane of the Mad Eccentrics from the point of view of metropolitan sophistication; to dismiss the Vermilion Hound and the Hell Hole and the Pirate's Den and the Purple Pup and Polly's as clap-trap and tinsel designed for the mystification of yokels and social investigators from Long Island City. But it is impossible to deny that the crazy decorations have added a touch of real colour to what had been a drab corner of ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice

... day Katchiba came to see us, bringing a present of flour. I gave him a tin plate, a wooden spoon, the last of the tea-cups, and a tinsel paper of mother-of-pearl shirt buttons, which took his fancy so immensely, that my wife was begged to suspend it from his neck like a medal. He was really a very good old fellow—by far the best I have seen in Africa. He was very suspicious ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker

... was certainly much greater than any I had expected to see. Some of the shops were filled with French, English, and Dutch toys; others with China and glass ornaments; then came one filled with coloured glass bangles, and every kind of native ornament in talc and tinsel, all set off with a profusion of lights. Instead of gingerbread, there were immense quantities of metai, or sweetmeats, of different shapes and forms, and various hues; sugar rock-work, pink, white, and yellow, with all sorts and descriptions of cakes. The carriage moved slowly through ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts

... 'stranger' to him. And then, twice as suddenly, to great, grown-up, cool-blooded, money-staled, book-tamed me—it swept over me like a cyclone that I should never be able to decide anything more in all my life—not the width of a tinsel ribbon, not the goal of a journey, not the worth of a lover—until I'd seen the Face that belonged to the Voice in the ...
— The Indiscreet Letter • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... fashionable parts of the city; there are the bar houses; there are the dance houses; and there are the miserable basements where this traffic is seen in its hideous deformity, divested of the gaslight glare and tinsel of the high-toned seraglios. The internal arrangements of the palatial bagnios are in many instances sumptuous, magnificent and suggestive. The walls of these seductive arsenals, too, are frequently of a color calculated to throw the most becoming ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... The royal happy pair. Great in themselves, 360 They smile superior; of external show Regardless, while their inbred virtues give A lustre to their power, and grace their court With real splendours, far above the pomp Of eastern kings, in all their tinsel pride. Like troops of Amazons, the female band Prance round their cars, not in refulgent arms As those of old; unskilled to wield the sword, Or bend the bow, these kill with surer aim. The royal offspring, fairest of the ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville

... powerful debater of France since Mirabeau—figured among the chief ornaments of the salons of De Stael. Roland, and the showy and witty Theresa Cabarrus, and even the flutter of La Fayette, the most tinsel of heroes, and the sullen sententiousness of Robespierre, then known only as a provincial deputy, furnished a background which increased the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... after. He said he thought a speech of Webster's delivered during the war or soon after it, probably the speech on the currency, superior to his speech in reply to Hayne, and altogether free from the tinsel of his later speeches. The speech of Pinkney on the Missouri question, which he heard, he thought the ablest ever delivered in the senate. For the intellect of Calhoun he had the highest respect and ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby

... are growing old and find themselves broken in body and in spirit, who are thrust aside in the fierce competition of their trade in favour of younger rivals; those who find the wine in their tinsel cup turning, or turned, to gall, the case is different. They are sometimes, not always, glad to creep to such shelter from the storms of life as the Army can offer, and there work out their moral and physical salvation. For what bitterness is there like ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard

... up to call him blessed. His mind is not at ease, because the atmosphere of envy is all around him; he knows he is the cause of evil thoughts, and that he holds his position by keeping comfort away from many around him, and his fine surroundings become to him as tinsel and dross. Dyspepsia, ennui and weariness of spirit claim him. He is a poverty-haunted coward, ashamed that he is so; and, saddest of all, he is not a Christian. He does not believe that if he seeks the kingdom of God, which means only to do aright, all things of material beauty ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman

... that he had never carried out. From the melancholy mass of papers, faded photographs, seals, diaries, withered flowers, and such like, Jocelyn drew a little portrait, one taken on glass in the primitive days of photography, and framed with tinsel in ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy

... half-closed eyes. He looked over the pale rose wave of the almonds, he saw Peter's dome and St. Angelo. He was conscious of a fatigue of his powers, a melancholy that they gave him no more than they did. "How it is all tinsel and falsetto!... I want a clean, cold, searching wave—desert and night—not life all choked with wax tapers and harlequins! I want something.... I don't know what I want. I only know I ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston

... tho' on hamely fare we dine, Wear hodden-gray, and a' that; Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, A man's a man for a' that. For a' that, and a' that, Their tinsel show, and a' that; The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor, Is King ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris

... some the ivories will always be but crudely carven bone, the jades the potter's sham, the musk and aloes the product of a soap factory, the joss but a cigar-store Indian, and the Oriental dainties of Hong Fah the scrappings of a Yankee grocery store. Yet behind the shoddy tinsel of Doyers and Pell Streets, as behind Alice's looking-glass, there is another Chinatown—a strange, inhuman, Oriental world, not necessarily of trapdoors and stifled screams, but one moved by influences undreamed of in our banal philosophies. Hearken ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train

... of a concertina. And what in it is not purely mechanistic nevertheless completes the picture of the world as it appears to one who has seen the man-machine in all its comedy. The stage pictures, the trumpery little fair, the tinsel and pathetic finery of the crowds, the dancing of the human ephemeridae a moment before the snow begins to fall, are stained marvelously deeply by the music. The score has the colors of crudely dyed, faded bunting. It has indeed a servant ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... not been for Pocahontas. She was resolved that her beloved white chief should want for nothing, and now every four or five days she came to the fort laden with provisions. Smith also took Captain Newport to visit the Powhatan, and great barter was made of blue beads and tinsel ornaments for ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall

... who walked the earth ever passed to his tomb through such a storm of human tears. The pageants of Alexander, Caesar, and Wellington were tinsel to this. Nor did the spirit of Napoleon, the Corsican Lieutenant of Artillery who once presided over a congress of kings whom he had conquered, look down on its like even ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon

... of silver-lustrous Chinese silks and waves of tinsel, which an oblique sunbeam shot through with luminous beads, while portraits of every era, in frames more or less tarnished, smiled through ...
— The Mummy's Foot • Theophile Gautier

... Desirous to make you their friend Despairs of ever being able to pay Difference in everything between system and practice Dignity to be kept up in pleasures, as well as in business Distinction between simulation and dissimulation Do not mistake the tinsel of Tasso for the gold of Virgil Doing what may deserve to be written Done under concern and embarrassment, must be ill done Dressed as the generality of people of fashion are Economist of your time Establishing a character of integrity and good manners ...
— Widger's Quotations from Chesterfield's Letters to his Son • David Widger

... sideshow and its banners, the Punch and Judy show, the horse tent, the cook tent, the blacksmith shop. Where once stood a dripping white city, now stretches a barren, ugly waste of unhallowed, unfamiliar ground, flanked by the solitary temple of tinsel and sawdust which they have just left behind, and which even now is being desolated by scowling men in overalls. The crowd oozes forth, to find itself completely lost in the night, all points of the compass at odds, no man knowing east from west or north from south ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon

... dainty work. When the clean granite stands where it should to shelter the four-and-thirty States as they walk the vast colonnades together, intent upon the great interchanges of the country's thought and work, this tinsel will not be missed; as men look upon the grave lines that assure them of security, they will rejoice that the time for the truly beautiful has arrived, and hasten to relieve the solid space with shapes as durable as the imagination ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various

... then recent converts to Catholicism, was, as is well known, the original of Lothair in Lord Beaconsfield's famous novel. Lord Beaconsfield's portrait of him was disfigured, and indeed made ridiculous, by the gilding, or rather the tinsel, with which his essentially alien taste bedizened it; but, apart from such exaggerations, there were elements in it of unmistakable likeness, and the entertainment to which I am now referring was, apart from its peculiar sequel, like a page ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock

... had animated his countenance with an uncommon degree of vivacity; and being dressed in a neat deshabille, his figure could not have appeared to more advantage in the eye of a person who despised the tinsel of unnecessary ornament. She was extremely well pleased to see her expectations so agreeably disappointed; for, instead of the squalid circumstances and wretched looks attending indigence and distraction, everything was decent and ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... mutual understanding, and a joint determination that carried all before it—when, I say, Aunt Rennie, defeated, prepared to take her leave, she said a word to me which I often thought of afterwards. "She is choosing blindfold, tinsel for gold." I thought of it, not on account of the expression, but of Aunt Rennie herself. There was something in the pallor of her face, and in her tone, that made me ask myself whether there could be anything ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall

... he, good Lord, Compete with such a money-making Horde Of tinsel rhymesters that infest the Shops? They say he makes enough ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess

... again upon the sandy shore two or three feet in front of where they had stood—or behind, just as it happened; and their swords banged against their breast-plates and shields, proving that they were real metal and not merely tinsel; and they twirled round and round like beef on a roasting-jack, until at last Michele dealt the inevitable blow and the giant fell dead on the sand with a thud that jolted the coast, shook the islands, rippled across the sunset sky and restored ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones

... not ask, when back on Blighty's shore My frozen frame in liberty shall rest, For pleasure to beguile the hours in store With long-drawn revel or with antique jest. I do not ask to probe the tedious pomp And tinsel splendour of the last Revue; The Fox-trot's mysteries, the giddy Romp, And all such folly I would fain eschew. But, propt on cushions of my long desire, Deep-buried in the vastest of armchairs, Let me recline what time the roaring fire Consumes itself and all my former cares. I shall not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various

... such flowers! The very peasants of our meanest villages would disdain them. Oh! why cannot someone tell these poor little women, who have it in their power to be so adorable, that the beautiful folds of their black veils give to them an exquisite and characteristic distinction, while this poor tinsel, which recalls the mid-Lent carnivals, makes of them objects ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... were, for all the world, just like ourselves, save that they walked more gracefully, and spoke in softer voice. But when the report went round that the cook was getting breakfast ready—out of doors, too!—we were more than compensated for the loss of such tinsel joys. Chattering and eager, we ran over to the dining-tent, and there, close beside it, found the little kitchen, its ovens smoking hot, and a man outside, aproned and capped, cutting up chops and steaks, with careless ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown

... but a night-gowne in respect of yours, cloth a gold and cuts, and lac'd with siluer, set with pearles, downe sleeues, side sleeues, and skirts, round vnderborn with a blewish tinsel, but for a fine queint gracefull and excellent fashion, yours ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... addresses. Mrs. Perkins had come fresh from the Women's Christian Temperance Union in Indianapolis, baptized with its earnest spirit of work. Rev. T. J. Vater appealed to the women to strive for solid excellence, leaving forever the tinsel and the show which have been held as appropriate to woman. His speech excited discussion, and added much interest to the afternoon session. The Business Committee reported the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... so much," said Miss Dassonville, "as the things I've seen the children make at school, with bits of coloured stone and broken china and rags of tinsel or whatever treasures, laid out in a pattern on ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin

... loved it, but William missed all that. Upon the many-colored platform the ineffable One drifted to and fro, back and forth; her little blonde head, in a golden net, glinting here and there like a bit of tinsel ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington

... all the men of the South, on their side, had made little altars between two trees, decked with white cloths and adorned with tinsel ornaments and little crosses and small carved images carefully brought, like household gods, from the far home, and treasured only next to their arms. The thin, dark faces of the men were fervent with southern faith, ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford

... the fact that now it was I who possessed at least all but the personal part of my brother's advantages? Our sweet illusions are half of them conscious illusions, like effects of colour that we know to be made up of tinsel, broken glass, ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot

... he said, "which troubled me little at the time, but which just lately have been on my mind. The first is that I am nearly fifty, and Lady Angela is twenty-one. The second is that I came home with all the tinsel and glamour of a popular hero. Heaven knows I loathed it, but the fact remains. The King's reception, the V.C., and all that sort of thing, I suppose, accounted for it. Anyhow, I am troubled with ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... even understand the love it excited, and was incapable of making any response. Its very life was little more than a mechanical life. The woman who fed it was far more to it than its father, and there was nothing excellent or noble in the world to which it would not prefer a glittering tinsel or a hideous doll. If the little thing had grown up, indeed, if it had developed human tastes and sympathies, and become a companion, an intelligence, a creature with affections and thoughts,—but that the whole house should thus be overwhelmed with miserable anxiety and pain ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant

... disguise—in private life he had a castle and retainers; and even Gygi, the gendarme, was a make-believe official who behind the scenes was a vigneron and farmer in a very humble way. Daddy, too, seemed sometimes but a tinsel author dressed up for the occasion, and absurdly busy over books that no one ever saw on railway bookstalls. While Mademoiselle Lemaire was not in fact and verity a suffering, patient, bed-ridden lady, but a princess who escaped ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... certain propositions of the orator, and among others at one concerning justification by faith alone in Christ—an old error, which, for many ages, has been trailed along in all the writings of heretics; often dead and resuscitated—and which Calvin, in Cop's discourse, dressed out in tinsel in order to give it some appearance of novelty. But our Franciscans had sight and hearing equally as good; they detected the heresy easily, and denounced to the parliament the evil-sounding propositions, which they had taken pains to note down in writing. Cop was greatly embarrassed by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... on hamely fare we dine, Wear hoddin gray, and a' that; Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, A man's a man for a' that! For a' that, and a' that, Their tinsel show, and a' that, The honest man, though, e'er sae poor Is king ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... will be glad to get rid of the pressure, by sacrificing the most dependent. The church should have stood on its own defence. The Gallican hierarchy was, beyond all question, the most powerful in Europe. Rome and her cardinals were tinsel and toys to the solid strength of the great provincial clergy of France. They had numbers, wealth, and station. Those things could give influence among a population of Hottentots. Let other hierarchies take ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... survival here is of the Hobby Horse, that once played so prominent a part in these boisterous masquerades, but such life as it still enjoys at Padstow is somewhat a galvanised existence, just as children still occasionally dress in poor tinsel and gaiety in order to collect a few coppers. Such exhibitions are melancholy ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... is best or worst, we desire merely to account for what may be called the taste for heroic literature at that time, and the taste for—we really hardly know what to call it—literature of the present, made up, as it too generally is, of shreds and patches—bits of gold and bits of tinsel—things written in a hurry to be read in a hurry, and never thought of afterward—suggestive rather than reflective, at the best; and we must plead guilty to a too great proneness to underrate what ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... black, except the gray of his hat with its golden cord and the tinsel of his clothes. There was something malignant in his make-up and even the unimaginative Jim was affected by the presence of the Mexican, while Juarez was very uneasy, and asked Jo and Tom to allow him to move up next to the Captain. ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt

... for gold and silver; men have dreamed at night of fame; In the heat of youth they've struggled for achievement's honored name; But the selfish crowns are tinsel, and their shining jewels paste, And the wine of pomp and glory soon grows bitter to the taste. For there's never any laughter, howsoever far you roam, Like the laughter of the loved ones in the happiness ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest

... indulgence, abnormal lusts, filthiness parading unabashed. He speaks of the horrors, the gruesome impalings; deprecating them in a general way; not daring to come down to particulars, and rebuke Nero. Well; Nero commanded the legions, and was kittle cattle to rebuke. If sometimes you see tinsel and tawdriness about poor Seneca, look a little deeper, and you seem to see him writing it in agony and bloody sweat. . . . He was among the richest men in Rome, when riches were a deadly peril: he might even, had he been another man, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... of good Tory folk, And common talk on King and loyalty Had in your ears a meaning and a place Quite strange to mine. For my Rhode Island stock, Grown far afield, and long acclimated, Had dropped all meanings for the name of King, Of Church, of mother country. Such appeals Were like a tinsel fringe of superstition, Alien imposture. It was ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman

... in the snare, And captive takes the unsuspicious hare; So the bold strangers with superior will Lay their base plans with disingenuous skill, Ope their stored treasures and with art display Their worthless figments to the air of day, Roll their large lids, and with grave gestures laud Each tinsel trinket and each painted gaud; With mystic signs of strange import apply Some gew-gaw bauble to the gloating eye; Touch with nice skill, yet craft-dissembled smile, Gems from the mine and spices from the Isle, Affect no care, yet hope a thrifty sale— The wealth of Empires in ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various

... days, I used to be a sort of safety-valve to that ardent spirit most like Benvenuto Cellini both in pen and tongue and person. Our dear Mr. Bennoch was the providence of his later years. They tell me that that powerful work has entirely stopped the sale of Moore's Life, which, all tinsel and tawdry rags, might have been written by a court newsman or a court milliner. I wonder whether they will print the other six volumes; for the four out they have given Mrs. Moore three thousand pounds. ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields

... of tinsel for a poor little woman to carry around! How it must have shocked you to find me so commonplace! None of us escape the common fates. It is always a surprise to me to discover how simple the men ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... little attention to matters outside of the law, though a little to a volunteer militia company of which I was a member; for a time a lieutenant, then in 1860 brigade-major on a militia brigadier's staff. We staff officers wore good clothes, much tinsel, gaudy crimson scarfs, golden epaulets, bright swords with glistening scabbards, rose horses in a gallop on parade occasions and muster days, yet knew nothing really military—certainly but little useful in war. ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer

... Anna Seward as “all tinkling and tinsel—a sort of Dr. Darwin in petticoats.” Edgeworth described her as “a handsome woman of agreeable manners, she was generous, possessed of good sense, and capable of strong affection”; and Sir Walter Scott thought that she must have been, “when young, exquisitely beautiful; for, ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin

... they were. Flora knocked, and was sent away. On the mantel was discovered a square lavender box, bearing a blazoned name well known in another city. Fresh flowers from Canning, these were; and Carlisle, removing the purple tinsel from the bound stems, carefully disposed the blossoms in a bowl of water. Once in her goings and comings, she encountered her reflection in the mirror, and then she quickly averted her eyes. One glance of recognition between herself and that poor frightened little ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... And yet she was the very last one to be dazzled by a fast, brilliant man of the world. She had been too well educated for that, and had been early taught to distinguish between solid worth and mere tinsel. Her native powers of observation were strong, and her father, and mother also before she died, had given her opportunities for exercising them. Instead of mere assertions as to what was right and wrong and general lecturing on the subject, they had aimed to show her right ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... undoubted land, swelling up from the bosom of the deep, with its plains, and hills, and forests, and rocks, and streams, and strange, new races of men;—these are incidents in which the authentic history of the discovery of our Continent excels the specious wonders of romance, as much as gold excels tinsel, or the sun in the heavens outshines ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... into the country, and passed the night weeping by the wayside. (Ah! how they have calumniated the love of Louis XV.'s time!) She was so unused to see the sunrise, that she hailed it with one of her finest songs. Her attitude, quite as much as her tinsel, drew the peasants about her; amazed at her gestures, her voice, her beauty, they took her for an angel, and dropped on their knees around her. If Voltaire had not existed we might have thought it a new miracle. I don't know ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac

... yonder fond [foolish] books of the Lutterworth parson at thy tongue's end, and make up a sad face, and talk of faith and grace and forgiving of sins and the like, and mine head to yon shred of tinsel an' she give thee not a gown ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt

... lovest him! That is not true to nature, Marion. I would not bid thee take a man's hand because he is rich and great if thou couldst not give him thy heart in return. I would not have thee break any law of God or man for the glitter of gold or tinsel of rank. But the good things of this world, if they be come by honestly, are good. And the love of an honest man, if thou lovest him thyself in return, is not of the less worth because he stands high in wealth and ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope

... of the line there was a truce for a quarter of an hour on Christmas Day, and a number of Englishmen and Germans jumped out and started talking together. A German gave one of our men a Christmas tree about two feet high as a souvenir. It is of the usual variety, covered with tinsel and adorned ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... copper-coloured Cupid entering and calling the virgins with a flute; these appeared from a green-room, to the number of thirty or forty, of all ages and sizes. Each had her hair dressed in a topknot, and her head covered with a veil; a scarlet petticoat loaded with tinsel concealed her naked feet, and over this was a short red kirtle, and an enormous white shawl was swathed round the body from the armpits to the waist. A broad belt passed over the right shoulder and under the left ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... monastries on solemn festivals, when there is station and indulgences granted in honour of the saint or patron; as also on occasion of signal victories, and other joyful tidings; and those garlands made up with hobby-horse tinsel, make a glitterring show, and rattling noise when the air ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn

... peak of the foremast floated the banner of Spain; on either side of the helm the flags of the governor and the bishop fluttered gaily—fraternal strips of emblazoned silk. It was a fair sight and a fair day, and there were proud eyes watching it; but, as is too often the case, the tinsel and show of human vain-glory ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan

... discovered the airman drops a smoke ball directly over it or lets fall some strips of tinsel, which glitter in the sun as they slowly descend to the earth. The range to the target is apparently ascertained by those near the guns by a large telemeter, or other range finder, which is kept trained on ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various



Words linked to "Tinsel" :   ornament, embellish, adorn, weave, contribute, lend, impart, ornamentation, decorate, decoration, add, grace, yarn, bestow, interweave, beautify, bring, thread



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