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More "Twaddle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... read—not connecting it however with her right-hand neighbour; and while I strained my ear for his reply I heard him, to my stupefaction, call back gaily, with his mouth full of bread: "Oh, it's all right—it's the usual twaddle!" ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... Rousseau's Confessions. Macaulay thought the Prelude a poorer and more tiresome Excursion, with the old flimsy philosophy about the effect of scenery on the mind, the old crazy mystical metaphysics, and the endless wilderness of twaddle; still he admits that there are some fine descriptions and energetic declamations. All Macaulay's tastes and habits of mind made him a poor judge of such a poet as Wordsworth. He valued spirit, energy, pomp, stateliness of form and diction, and actually thought Dryden's ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... snakes, they think it is smart to laugh at all the sweet and beautiful things in life, and to sneer at people who believe in ideals, and to talk about mankind being merely a fortuitous product of fermentation, and twaddle of that ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... first toast was drunk the company braced themselves to the mental work of the afternoon, and although, as a matter of course, a good deal of twaddle was spoken, there was also much that threw light on the subject of ocean telegraphy. One of the leading merchants said, in his opening remarks: "Few of those present, I daresay, are really familiar with the history ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... the fiddlesticks!" interrupted Endicott. "Wherever did you get all that, rot? It sounds as if you had been attending society functions and listening to their twaddle. It doesn't matter what you are the child of, if you're a mind to be a man. This is a free country, son, and you can be and climb where you please. Tell me, where did you get all ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... fire," over the burning words of some Brontean Pythoness, but when you open the last thrilling work of Maggie Marigold, and are immediately submerged "in a weak, washy, everlasting flood" of insipidity, twaddle, bosh, and heart-rending sorrow, you do not shut the book with a jerk. Why not? Because in the dismal distance you dimly descry two figures swimming, floating, struggling towards each other, and a languid soupon of curiosity detains you till you have ascertained, that, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... at Fenchurch Street by half-past nine. He rather expected to see old Grogan on the platform, and was not sure whether he was relieved or disappointed by his absence. On the one hand, he could hardly have borne Grogan's twaddle on the journey to Tilbury, his mind being engrossed as it was. On the other, he looked to him to cover ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... heaven 'meetin's over,'" whispered Sibley, as Miss Burton rose from the piano. "I'm sick of all this pious twaddle, and would a thousand-fold rather listen to the music of your ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... you think of that, my reader, as a specimen of embittered eloquence and nervous pith? It is something to read massive and energetic sense, in days wherein mystical twaddle, and subtlety which hopelessly defies all logic, are sometimes thought extremely fine, if they are set out in a style which is refined into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... novel into chapel to read, not out of any respect for some people's old-womanish twaddle about the sacredness of the place,—but because some of the blues might see you.—Yale Lit. Mag., Vol. ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... Elizabeth again, surrounded by a circle of admirers—men and women—an oasis of intelligence, it seemed to him as he listened, in a desert of twaddle. She smiled at him with her eyes, as he looked at her through the press, and just as he had won to a place by her side, the tide was sent flooding into a large room where, it was announced, Professor Blatherwick and Madame le Claire were doing ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... hotel proprietors there might be something in it. Perhaps it helped a man into Parliament, Parliament still being a confused retrogressive corner in the world where lawyers and suchlike sheltered themselves from the onslaughts of common-sense behind a fog of Latin and Greek and twaddle and tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go into Parliament, unless I meant to be a lawyer. Did I mean to be a lawyer? It cost no end of money, and was full of uncertainties, and there were no judges nor great solicitors among my relations. "Young chaps ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... by passion or prejudice, he showed neither fear nor favor, denouncing bad work by the most illustrious hands and commending obscure merit. The "impudent literary cliques" who puffed each other's books; the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings who manufactured verses for the "Annuals;" and the twaddle of the "genial" incapables who praised them in flabby reviews—all these Poe exposed with ferocious honesty. Nor, though his writings are unmoral, can they be called in any sense immoral. His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness as Bryant's in ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... lightened any burden, purified any taste? Does he play any real part in our lives? When we are in love, do we whisper him in our lady's ear? When we sorrow, does he ease our pain? Can he calm the strife of mental conflict? Has he had anything to say, which wasn't twaddle, on those subjects which, elude analysis as they may, and defy demonstration as they do, are ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... explain the true character of note-writing—how compressed and unrambling and direct it ought to be, and illustrate by the villainous twaddle of many Shakespearian notes. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... paper describing Sir G. Bonham's investiture as K.C.B., and advises me to imitate him for my own interest, rather than Sir J. Davis, who was recalled. Davis, says Yeh, insisted on getting into the city, and Bonham gave up this demand. Hence his advice to me. All through the letter is sheer twaddle. ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... o' Wales,' he said. (That interesting young man had arrived on the Harriet Lane that morning and ridden up Broadway between cheering hosts.) 'I've got a sketch of him here an' it's all twaddle. Tell us something new about him. If he's got a hole in his sock ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... could conceive and write the character of Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot, as Scott has conceived and written it, had not only splendid romantic, but splendid tragic gifts. How comes it, then, that he could so often fob us off with languid, inarticulate twaddle? ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... famed Mademoiselle Scudery, whose voluminous romances were their code; and it is supposed these tomes preserve some of their lengthened conversaziones. In the novel system of gallantry of this great inventor of amorous and metaphysical "twaddle," the ladies were to be approached as beings nothing short of celestial paragons; they were addressed in a language not to be found in any dictionary but their own, and their habits were more fantastic than their language: a sort of domestic chivalry formed their ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... to Sidonia, who dashed it away, crying—"Stuff! nonsense! you have learned all this twaddle from the priest, who, I know, is nephew to the shoe-maker in Daber, and therefore hates any one who is ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... Review wants me to 'do' a series on famous English bishops," he reported, humbly. "I had meant to refuse, because it would all have to be dull High-Church twaddle. And the English Gentleman wants some rather outrageous lying done in defense of the Corn Laws. You would not despise me too much—would you, Mildred?—if I undertook it now. I really have no choice. And there is plenty of hackwork of that sort available ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... somewhat startled: "Eh, what's that?" he said, then he settled back in his chair and looked hard at us. His eyes were as keen as frost; but they twinkled—just a little, as I have discovered they can and do twinkle if one isn't afraid to say right out what one means, without unnecessary fuss and twaddle. ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... performances. But here, too, the old leaven of Oxford burst forth sometimes. Of course, we generally performed the music of Handel and other classical authors; Mendelssohn's compositions were still considered as mere twaddle by some of the old school. At one of these evenings, the old organist of New College, with his wooden leg, after sitting through a rehearsal of Mendelssohn's Hymn of Praise, which I was conducting at the pianoforte, walked up to me, as I thought, to ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... "Celestial twaddle, sir!" cried Mr. Obstinate hoarsely. "He went stark, staring mad, and now is dust, as we shall ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... wandering in Dreamland in the beautiful twilight. Delighted to find that you are neither reading nor writing,—the absurd dolt! as if a man weren't at work unless he be wielding a sledge-hammer!—he will preach out, and prose out, and twaddle out another hour of your golden eventide, "because he is your friend." You don't care whether he is judge or jury,—whether he talks sense or nonsense; you don't want him to talk at all. You don't want him there anyway. You want to be alone. If you don't, why are ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... so very honest. Namby-pamby in these days is not thrown away if it be introduced in the proper quarters. Divine peeresses are no longer interesting, though possessed of every virtue; but a pattern peasant or an immaculate manufacturing hero may talk as much twaddle as one of Mrs Ratcliffe's heroines, and still be listened to. Perhaps, however, Mr Sentiment's great attraction is in his second-rate characters. If his heroes and heroines walk upon stilts, as heroes and heroines, I fear, ever must, their attendant satellites are as natural ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... asleep. Then the sky darkens, the Flying Dutchman comes in, and the storm music rages once more. It is woven into Vanderdecken's magnificent scena (surely the greatest opera scena written up to the year 1842); and then disappears. In its place we get pages of (for Wagner) wearisome twaddle. The reason is obvious. For the purpose of explaining the subsequent movement of the drama there is a lot of conversation which Weber, in the Singspiel, would have left to be spoken, and Mozart would have set to ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... nigger sandwich man advertising baths, and a sweep looking at him, and saying: 'It's enough to tempt one, he looks so jolly clean hisself.' That's the way with you, always firing out Wordsworth's silly twaddle, and objecting to a piece of genuine poetry because it's in a reader. The pig-headed impudence of ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... tankard of beer from which he had been drinking. "You talk sometimes that white-livered stuff about not hitting a man back if he wants to hit you, and you drag in your conscience, and prate about all men being brothers, and that sort of twaddle. A full-blooded Englishman don't like it, because we are all of us out to protect what we've got, any way and anyhow. But that doesn't alter the fact that there's something wrong in the world when we're driven to do this ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "Why, all this twaddle, farce, travesty and by- play regarding Tommy! You know I warned you, over and over, and you mustn't blame me for the deception. I never thought you'd take it so in earnest!" and here the jovial Major again ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... Wordsworth's case, on the other hand, is that his contemplative tendencies not only coexisted with, but were implicated with, the most precise and vivid apprehension of small realities. There was no proportion in his mind; and vaticination and twaddle rolled off his eloquent tongue as chance would have it. At one time he would discourse like a seer, on the slightest instigation, by the hour together; and next, he would hold forth with equal solemnity, on the pettiest matter of domestic economy. I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... the time how deeply your letter to M. about the Symphonic Poems had rejoiced me. The twaddle which dulness, triviality, and spite have talked about it is ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... Your...? Twaddle! You'll simply refuse the challenge! You're not going to let yourself be killed for the sake ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... choice bit from William Morris: 'Marriage under existing conditions is absurd. The family, about which so much twaddle is talked, is hateful. A new development of the family will take place, as the basis not of a predetermined lifelong business arrangement to be formally held to irrespective of conditions, but on ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... laughing; "cease this weak, washy, everlasting flood of twaddle, and tell us whether you'll ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... have we to take their place?" It is not until an age has receded into history, and all its mediocrity has dropped away from it, that we can see it as it is—as a group of men of genius. We forget the immense amount of twaddle that the great epochs produced. The total amount of fine literature created in a given period of time differs from epoch to epoch, but it does not differ much. And we may be perfectly sure that our own age will make a favourable impression upon that excellent judge, posterity. Therefore, ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... Isoldes, the Romeos and Tristans, might be our mothers and fathers. Not so the English actress. The heroine she impersonates is not allowed to discuss the elemental relations of men and women: all her romantic twaddle about novelet-made love, all her purely legal dilemmas as to whether she was married or "betrayed," quite miss our hearts and worry our minds. To console ourselves we must just look at her. We do so; and her beauty feeds our starving emotions. Sometimes we grumble ungallantly ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... very disappointingly. Fanny indeed had no literary gift, but it was new to Miss Winchelsea to find herself deploring the want of gifts in a friend. That letter was even criticised aloud in the safe solitude of Miss Winchelsea's study, and her criticism, spoken with great bitterness, was "Twaddle!" It was full of just the things Miss Winchelsea's letter had been full of, particulars of the school. And of Mr. Snooks, only this much: "I have had a letter from Mr. Snooks, and he has been over to see me ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... arabs, for the want of education, ambition, animation, and push, are indulging in practices that are fast working their own destruction and those they are brought into contact with, and a great deal of this may lay at the door of flattery, twaddle, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... foot upon the floor, and then jumped up from his seat. "I hate all that sort of twaddle about childhood's friends, and you know I do. You'll make me swear that I'll never come ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... angrily before her, and (not without courage, for it is hard to deal with the darker powers) I recited to her slowly that familiar verse which the well-known Satyricus Empiricius was for ever using in his now classical attacks on the grammarians; and without any Alexandrian twaddle of accents I intoned to her—and so left her astounded to repentance ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... all this well-meant twaddle was misery indeed. Perhaps, upon the whole, good honest dullness does unknowingly inflict more grievous wounds ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... kind of Socialism I care much about,' he continued, with the air of giving a solid reason. 'It seems to me that Westlake's going off on a road of his own, and one that leads nowhere. All that twaddle to-day about the development of society! I don't think he spoke of me as he might have done. You'll see there won't be half a report in the ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... Peace Conference, as it is called, I think the merest twaddle—and I use the term with entire respect to the members—the merest twaddle that ever was presented to a thinking people. The proposition of the Senator from Kentucky has some sense in it. If he chooses to desert his own, I shall ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... along the crest into the ridgeway, which they followed till it intersected the high-road at the Brown House aforesaid, the spot of his former fervid desires to behold Christminster. But he forgot them now. He talked the commonest local twaddle to Arabella with greater zest than he would have felt in discussing all the philosophies with all the Dons in the recently adored university, and passed the spot where he had knelt to Diana and Phoebus without remembering that there were any such people ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... do you pick up such vulgar twaddle?" Kate demanded with her clear face. "How does such stuff, in this hole, get ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... that life is ended; to wish existence, too, had ceased; and so to sit down, an aching hollow, and take a part and sham an interest in twaddle to please others; such are woman's feats. How like nothing at ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... have, as I think, justly been called a Scripture style. One of their most striking characteristics, by the way, is a severely simple taste; a uniform freedom from the vulgarities of conception, the exaggerated sentiment, the mawkish nonsense and twaddle, which disfigure such an infinitude of volumes of religious biography and fiction which have been written since. Could such men attain this uniform elevation? Could such men have invented those extraordinary fictions,—the miracles and the parables? Could they, in spite ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... appeal for the marsupial martyr Is based upon an ancient nursery model; But he will find that he has caught a Tartar, Who hints that Punch is talking heartless twaddle. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... of difficulties. To prevent or attempt to prevent the owner of a garden from shooting the bullfinches or blackbirds and so on that steal his fruit, or destroy his buds, is absurd. It is equally absurd to fine—what twaddle!—a lad for taking a bird's egg. The only point upon which I am fully clear is that the birdcatcher who takes birds on land not his own or in his occupation, on public property, as roads, wastes, commons, and so forth, ought to be rigidly ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... invited to adorn the scene, when David Jost advanced smilingly, evidently sure of a friendly recognition. For had not the King, when Crown Prince and Heir-Apparent, hunted game in his preserves?—yea, had he not even dined with him?—and had not he, Jost, written whole columns of vapid twaddle about the 'Royal smile' and the 'Royal favour' till the outside public had sickened at every stroke of his flunkey pen? How came it, then, that his Majesty seemed on this occasion to have no recollection of him, and looked over and beyond him in the airiest way, as though ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... and connived with the Czar; His Bulgarian twaddle once caused a great war, Where thousands were slain, but what did he heed, He still went to ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... love the essence of the lowest lust! Priapus—worshipping obscenity. Rant and rubbish. Linguistic silliness. Inhumanly insolent. Apotheosis of Sweat. Mouthings of a mountebank. Venomously malignant. Pretentious twaddle. Degraded helot of literature. His work, like a maniac's robe, bedizened with fluttering tags of a thousand colors. Roaming, like a drunken satyr, with inflamed blood, through every field of ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... Frost—not only talking but in a manner so familiar that it must have been extremely nauseating to the cultured young women. The three were standing under the electric light at the corner, and the young women instead of appearing annoyed at the heathen's twaddle, seemed to be highly amused. Only the greatest exercise of self-restraint kept Mr. Hamshaw from kicking Sago into the middle ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... from repetition of this ancient twaddle exactly that sort of satisfaction the French or Roman peasant wins from a babble of a dead language over beads, Billy retired with many a ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... down to the waterhole, it's cool there, and better fun than listening to an old woman's twaddle. The sun's ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... those for whom all this is unmitigated twaddle and bosh. To mention abnegation, sacrifice, etc., to such people is to speak in a language no more intelligible than Sanskrit. Naturally one of these will expect his children to appreciate the ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... looking on these torsos of the haberdasher, one is not brought to thoughts of sad mortality. Their joy is so exultant. And all the things that they hold dear—canes, gloves, silk hats, and the newer garments on which fashion makes its twaddle—are within reach of their armless sleeves. Had they fingers they would be smoothing themselves before the glass. Their unbodied heads, wherever they may be, are still smiling on the world, despite their divorcement. Their tongues are still ready with ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... nations: we marvel, we wonder at them exceedingly. Greece we shall omit, because to talk of the arts, and Phidias, and Pericles, and 'all that,' is the surest way yet discovered by man for tempting a vindictive succession of kicks. Exposed to the world, no author of such twaddle could long evade assassination. But Rome is entitled to some separate notice, even after all that has been written about her. And the more so in this case, because Mr. Finlay has scarcely done her justice. He says: 'The Romans were a tribe of warriors. All their institutions, even ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... and it needed all my diplomacy to enable me to conceal my sense of triumph. Forty odd letters! There must be an enormous amount of information in forty odd letters; unless the woman wrote the direst twaddle ever ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... the twaddle," said Jekyl to himself, "he is too old and too fat to be treated after the manner of Professor Jackson; and, on my life, I cannot tell what to make of him.—He is a residenter too—I must tip him the cold shoulder, or he will be pestering ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... Doggett's one of the liberal merchant princes of that city. The result of that day's cogitation was one of the most cutting speeches that the "Gentle Anna," as the Tribune called her, ever made. It was a severe, but just criticism of all the twaddle of the Western press after the Chicago Woman's Suffrage Convention. Liberty Hall was crowded with a most enthusiastic audience, and although the press was not very complimentary the next day, the people who listened were ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... characters that he has created which symbolize vices, virtues, follies, and the like almost as well as the characters in Bunyan; and therefore I think the wise thing to do is simply to skip the bosh and twaddle and vulgarity and untruth, and get the benefit out of the rest. Of course one fundamental difference between Thackeray and Dickens is that Thackeray was a gentleman and Dickens was not. But a man might do some mighty good work and not be ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... Reptile was extremely attentive to all that was said, though he had heard the same stories every night for twenty years, and upon all occasions winked oracularly to his nephew to particularly mind what passed. About ten the innocent twaddle closed by a man coming in with a lantern to light home old Bickerstaff. They were simple and happy times that Steele describes with such kindly humour; and the London of his days must have been full of such quiet, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... has! We are souls, and we shall be angels, with blue wings on our shoulder-blades. Do come to my assistance: is it not Tertullian who says that the blessed shall travel from star to star? Very well. We shall be the grasshoppers of the stars. And then, besides, we shall see God. Ta, ta, ta! What twaddle all these paradises are! God is a nonsensical monster. I would not say that in the Moniteur, egad! but I may whisper it among friends. Inter pocula. To sacrifice the world to paradise is to let slip the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... could regulate its proper degree of indifference or abjectness to the exact state of the case; he could make it almost satisfactory to the receiver, without being very disagreeable to the giver; he could twaddle about honour for ever without causing bloodshed; and would, if possible, protect a man's reputation and body at ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... him that he is a fool. Stimulate your child by all the love and appreciation at your command, but let it be intelligent appreciation, not blind admiration or prejudiced disapproval. Do you recollect how you felt and dreamed and gushed when you were a girl, the pages of sentimental twaddle (as you now call it) which you confided to the diary which you burned in disgust at twenty-one? Do you remember how genuine your distresses then seemed? You can smile at the girl you once were, but still you find it in your heart ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... utilize them properly. The water front, Telegraph hill, the ocean shore, Sutro Heights, and Lincoln Park are all waiting to be developed in such a way as the Exposition suggests. The talk of cost is idle twaddle. If the Exposition, as an artistic investment, pays - and I see no reason whatever why it should not pay for itself - then we cannot do anything better than to invest our money wisely in other artistic improvements of ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... settled nation,—words like basket (to take an instance which all the world knows) form a much larger body in our language than is commonly supposed; it is said that a number of our raciest, most idiomatic, popular words—for example, bam, kick, whop, twaddle, fudge, hitch, muggy,—are Celtic. These assertions require to be carefully examined, and it by no means follows that because an English word is found in Celtic, therefore we get it from thence; but they have not yet had the attention which, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... a dozen pages of similar twaddle, meant to show that the mayor of Amiens was a most tolerant prince, in that he had not ordered the destruction of every cross set ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... contempt and antipathy which such an athletic and boisterous genius as Fielding's must have entertained. He couldn't do otherwise than laugh at the puny Cockney bookseller, pouring out endless volumes of sentimental twaddle, and hold him up to scorn as a moll-coddle and a milksop. His genius had been nursed on sack-posset, and not on dishes of tea. His muse had sung the loudest in tavern choruses, had seen the daylight streaming in over thousands of emptied bowls, and reeled home to chambers on the ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... have put in this chapter on fighting of malice prepense, partly because I want to give you a true picture of what everyday school life was in my time, and not a kid-glove and go-to-meeting-coat picture, and partly because of the cant and twaddle that's talked of boxing and fighting with fists nowadays. Even Thackeray has given in to it; and only a few weeks ago there was some rampant stuff in the Times on the subject, in an ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... [here Miss Rita smiled artfully.] Then he asked me all about you heretics, and he told me you were all going to—be burned up, as soon as you died; for the Inquisition couldn't do it for you in these degenerate days. After a great deal more twaddle like this, I asked him why you heretics all had such hard names, that we others never could speak them? Then he looked mysterious, so! [here Miss Rita diabolically winked one eye,] and said he: 'I will tell you, per Bacco! hush, it's because ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... feeling of misery crept over me, as I reflected that perchance I had left those most dear to return to them no more. But I forget; a description of private feelings is, to uninterested readers, only so much twaddle, besides being more egotistical than even an account of personal adventures could extenuate; so, with the exception of a few extracts from my "log," I shall jump at once from the English Channel to the more ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... say to you; let an author of renown fill a book with twaddle, and if it is not praised by the critics, you may tar and ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... awful many will never understand. Their conception of my skill is altogether on a level with their conceptions of music, of literature, of painting. For wall decorations they love autotypes; for literature, harmless volumes of twaddle that leave no vivid impressions on the mind; for dinners, harmless dishes that are forgotten as they are eaten. My dinners stick in the memory. I cannot study these people—my genius is all too imperative. If I needed ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... about that. I know many eminent saints in the church who will eat lobster salad for supper, and then send for the doctor and minister before morning. There is a precious twaddle about 'mysterious Providence.' Providence isn't half so mysterious as people make out. The doctor is expected to look serious and sympathetic, and call their law-breaking and its penalty by some outlandish Latin name that ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... I can hev the pleasure o' bein' rid o' you, Copernicus Droop, it'll be cheap at the price—but the's no sech luck. Ef you think ye can fool us any more with yer twaddle 'bout cuttin' meridians, ye're mistaken—that's all ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... tracts made up of thin exhortations and goodish maxims. A nerveless treatise on commerce or science in that style would be crumpled up by the first merchant and thrown into his waste-basket. Religious twaddle is of no more use than worldly twaddle. If a man has nothing to say, he had better keep his pen wiped and his tongue still. There needs an infusion of strong Anglo-Saxon into religious literature, and a brawnier manliness and ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... the State! Are you mad, John Perkins, that you come to me with such insufferable twaddle as this? Why, do you think if you HAD been capable of rising at the bar, I would have taken so much trouble about getting you a place? No, sir; you are too fond of pleasure, and bed, and tea-parties, and small-talk, and reading novels, and playing the flute, and writing sonnets. ...
— The Bedford-Row Conspiracy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... treating the whole affair as a huge joke, "how romantic it sounds! Fancy meeting you again after all this time, and saving your life! I suppose the papers will be full of it if they get to know—gallant rescue, and all that kind of twaddle." ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... Carlyle thought it "a human book, written out of the heart of a live man, not merely out of the brain of an author, full of tenderness and pathos, without a scrap of sentimentality, of sense without dogmatism, of earnestness without twaddle—a book that makes one feel friends at once and for always with the man or woman who wrote it." She guessed the author was "a man of middle age, with a wife, from whom he has got those beautiful feminine ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... and a freedom from all effort, that were in their way the perfection of breeding. I have seen these often in the peasantry, in the poor. It is your middle classes, with their incessant flutter, and bluster, and twitter, and twaddle; with their perpetual strain after effect; with their deathless desire to get one rung of the ladder higher than they ever can get; with their preposterous affectations, their pedantic unrealities, their morbid dread of remark, their everlasting ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... you loafers all, You vex me with your twaddle, You own a nag or big or small, A bridle and a saddle; I you advise at once be wise And waste no time in talking, Procure some bags of damaged rags And make ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson
... hate it—and I love it. It's my poison and my medicine. Most of all I hate the society twaddle. And, of course, that's what ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... Twaddle of this sort was being bandied about when Trimalchio came in; mopping his forehead and washing his hands in perfume, he said, after a short pause, "Pardon me, gentlemen, but my stomach's been on strike for the ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... lived by sea-power, and peoples who, like the Russians and Chinese, have neither sea-power nor a sea-folk's blood, never use sea terms in their ordinary talk. They may dress up a landsman and put him on the stage to talk the same sort of twaddle that our own stage sailors talk—all about "shiver my timbers," "hitching his breeches," and "belaying the slack of your jaw." But they do not talk the real sea sense we have learnt from the handy man of whose strange ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... superseded by new sources of mechanical energy. We got rich by pursuing our own immediate advantage instinctively; that is, with a natural childish selfishness; and when any question of our justification arose, we found it easy to silence it with any sort of plausible twaddle (provided it flattered us, and did not imply any trouble or sacrifice) provided by our curates at L70 a year, or our journalists at a penny a line, or commercial moralists with axes to grind. In the end we became fatheaded, and not only lost all intellectual ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... for days together I was rushing about town paying calls and listening to compliments which my soul abhors. Alas and alack! In Petersburg I am becoming fashionable like Nana. While Korolenko, who is serious, is hardly known to the editors, my twaddle is being read by all Petersburg. Even the senator G. reads me.... It is gratifying, but my literary feeling is wounded. I feel ashamed of the public which runs after lap-dogs simply because it fails to notice elephants, and I am deeply convinced that ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... this mockery of reasoning and argument, and of all this empty twaddle. If it was your intention to pass an examination before me, I give you five with plus. You have fluent speech, and quite a rich vocabulary of words. But I have no time for those things and proceed to facts and figures. ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... who makes all the wars," he said. "It's you and me, my dears: we make the wars. We love them. That's why we open our mouths and swallow all the twaddle that the papers give us; and cheer the fine, black-coated gentlemen when they tell us it's our sacred duty to kill Germans, or Italians, or Russians, or anybody else. We are just crazy to kill something: it doesn't matter what. If it's to be Germans, we shout 'A Berlin!'; ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... doubt that he meant this melodramatic twaddle. It did not seem twaddle or melodramatic to her—or, for that matter, to him. She clasped him more closely. "What's the matter, dear?" she asked, her ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... see the whole scheme of letter-writing; you sit down every day and pour out an equable stream of twaddle. ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... desire to make Francis stop this maddening twaddle; also the events of the morning were beginning to take on an air of reality, and as this grew he felt the need of sympathy of some kind. Francis might not be able to give him anything that was of any use, but it would do no harm to see if his cousin's buoyant unconscious ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... line; and all sorts of stories are told about winter passages, the importance of boats especially built for strength, and the advantages of experience. Now, the history of the American line is a perfect refutation of all this twaddle. The truth is, that all voyaging is connected with exposedness to some danger; and up to this moment the Americans have had, in all their ocean steam voyages, the full measure of success. They have lost no boat, they have sacrificed no lives, and they present a fleet of steamships ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... in the proceedings of the Antiquarian Society. It is a brilliant specimen of the pedantic pottering of the learned body which enables me to append to my name the A.S.S., fraudulently inverted into S.S.A. Such twaddle always excites me into feverishness. ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... doctor, old boy,' he said; 'all that about thought-transference is just simply twaddle. You've been over-working. Take a holiday. Go ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... inartistic, and helplessly, childishly stupid as to any literary merits,—a mere mass of gossip and twaddle; but after all, when one remembers the taste of the thousands of circulating-library readers, it must not be considered the less likely to be widely read on that account. It is only once in a century that a writer of real genius has the art to tell his story so as to take both the cultivated few ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... with a strident laugh; "and where did you pick up your sense of right, madam, I should like to know? From what Methodist parson's hypocritical twaddle have you learnt to lay down the law to your poor old father about the sense of right? 'Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land,' miss, that's what your Bible ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... I'm going to Fomishka's and Fimishka's oasis. And do you know what I should like to say? There's twaddle here and twaddle there, only that twaddle, the twaddle of the eighteenth century, is nearer to the Russian character than the twaddle of the twentieth century. Goodbye, gentlemen. I'm drunk, so don't be offended at what I say, only a better woman than my sister Snandulia... is not to ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... the two long fingers and the hair kind of scrambly, he just said, 'Ah, you young scamp of a socialist!' as if he were saying, 'Oh, fie on you!' Merle can talk the whole bunch down when he gets to shooting on all six—sounds good, but I've no doubt it's just wise twaddle. ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... window to her face, and she paused and looked up. There was a faint dash of color on Mr. Vernon's cheeks, and a tightening of the lips. It seemed to Nell, judging by his expression, that he had suddenly become impatient of the twaddle, and she instantly dropped the paper on her lap. But Mrs. Lorton was enjoying herself too much to permit of such ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... presently began to laugh. "So she begins to fear we have been somewhat hasty, asks a little time for reconsideration of her precise sentiment toward me, and feels meanwhile in honour bound to release me from our engagement! Yet if upon mature deliberation—eh, oh, yes! twaddle! and commonplace! and dashed, of course, with a jigger of ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... me out—wore everybody out. He kept on pouring out his lamentable twaddle, and hawking it up and down the place till he became a thing of terror. I tried to wean him from writing—oh, ever so gently, you understand, by throwing him with agreeable people, giving him a chance to make himself felt, to come to a sense of what he really ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... of "Charles Guiteau" was spelled, Who threatened to materialize before me. I rose and fled from the room bare-headed Into the dusk, afraid of my gift. And after that the spirits swarmed— Chaucer, Caesar, Poe and Marlowe, Cleopatra and Mrs. Surratt— Wherever I went, with messages,— Mere trifling twaddle, Spoon River agreed. You talk nonsense to children, don't you? And suppose I see what you never saw And never heard of and have no word for, I must talk nonsense when you ask me ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... enough," said Bernard, his features relaxing into a broad grin. "I may be planked down in a country village for the rest of my very unnatural life, but I'll be shot if I'll regulate mine or my wife'& behaviour by the twaddle they talk! I'll have that dagger." Slipping it slowly into its sheath he watched it travel home, the supple female curve gliding and yielding as a woman yields to a man's caress. "Voluptuous, I call it. Under the left breast, eh?" He drew ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... rule, I call a spade a spade. When I mean The Times, I say The Times, and I condemn the old-fashioned twaddle of talking about "a morning contemporary." But to-day I depart from my rule and content myself with saying that I lately read in an important newspaper a letter dealing with Mr. Asquith's distinction between "Prussian Militarism" and "German Democracy." For my own part, I did ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... blemishes in the admirable beauty and brilliance of the poem. The successive scenes are given with so firm and clear a touch—there is such a sense of form, the language is such a dexterous elevation of the ordinary social twaddle into the mock-heroic, that it is impossible not to recognize a consummate artistic power. The dazzling display of true wit and fancy blinds us for the time to the want of that real tenderness and humour, which would have softened ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... I know," was the testy interruption; "but the world is not so easily led in matters of religion. The message, as you say, is divine; but it may sound like meaningless twaddle to the world at large. If we are to heal mankind and dispel the heresy of disease and death, why can't Holiest Mother save herself? Mind you, I am looking at this thing with the eyes of ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... his Recollections, for there are few men who have had the opportunities of seeing so much of life and character as he has, and still fewer who at an advanced age could write an Autobiography in which we have opinions without twaddle, gossip without malice, and stories not marred in the ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... days, with their excess of vital emotions, had worn Denas out. Never before had the life into which she was born looked so unlovely to her. She preferred the twitter and twaddle of Priscilla's workroom to the intense realities of an existence always verging on eternity. She dared to contrast those large, heroic fishers, with their immovable principles and their constant fight with all the elemental forces for their daily bread, with Roland Tresham; ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... counter-revolutionaries, traitors!" Because of this attitude the conference, which ought to have had the character of an assembly deciding affairs of state, took on the character of a boisterous meeting, which lasted several days of unending twaddle. What the Bolsheviki wanted was a verbal victory—to have shouted more loudly than their opponents. The same speeches were repeated every day. Some upheld a power exclusively Socialist, others—the majority composed of delegates ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... Moss.—Have the fire scene take place in the first act, and let all the dramatis personae perish in the flames. Thus shall the audience be spared the vulgar profanity of STODDART'S "Comic Villain," the absurdity of WALLACK'S "Coram," the twaddle of HIELD'S "Virtuous Banker," and the impossible imbecility of FISHER'S "Unprincipled Clerk." Miss GERMON in trowsers, and Miss HENRIQUES in tears, are very nice; but they do not quite redeem the wretchedness of the play. The sooner Mr. Moss ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... his elegant talents in writing German and Italian twaddle with all the rawness of a Yankee. He ought never to have left America, at least in literature; there was an uncontested and glorious field for him. He should have been managing director of the Hudson Bay Company, and lived all his life among ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... "This is awful twaddle!" he said. "Why should you care to hear about all this? I was ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of reading aloud with ease and grace. Great are the sufferings inflicted on a sensitive ear by listening to one's favourite passages, touching in pathos, or glorious in sublimity, travestied into twaddle by the false taste or the want of practice of the reader. For it is not always from false taste that the species of reading above complained of proceeds; on the contrary, there may be a very correct perception of the writer's meaning and object, while ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... burden of her song, till at last I got very tired of it, and on the third evening I broke away from her, saying, "Law, granny how you do twaddle!" upon which she called me a good-for-nothing young blackguard, and felt positively sure that I should be hanged. The consequence was, that granny and I did not part good friends; and I sincerely ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... telling your child how wicked he is; what a naughty boy he is; that God will never love him, and all the rest of such twaddle and blatant inanity! Do not, in point of fact, bully him, as many poor little fellows are bullied! It will ruin him if you do; it will make him in after years either a coward or a tyrant. Such conversations, like constant droppings of water, will make an impression, ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... our sign of parting!" cried DUNRAVEN, swift upstarting; "Sweating's an accursed system, but if now our toil is o'er, We leave twaddle as sole token of the swelling words we've spoken. Public faith in us is broken! Bah! I quit, I "bust", boil o'er! Take my seat, sign your Report, about such bosh my ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... setting afire of grain elevators, the enciting of Mexico—has been the honorless skill with which they have fed the American mind upon the idea of a disgruntled Germany, a starving Germany, and all such twaddle! Can't you see why such tales are being circulated? Simply to inject into our minds the poison of national inertia, so that when war comes—as it some day shall—every fellow will be likely to think: 'Oh, it can't last long now!—let the other boys ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... an American book," said Bart, laughing. "But your question is a good answer to my solemn twaddle on literature." ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... why not! An Inca can do nothing. He is tied hand and foot. A constitutional monarch is openly called an India-rubber stamp. An emperor is a puppet. The Inca is not allowed to make a speech: he is compelled to take up a screed of flatulent twaddle written by some noodle of a minister and read it aloud. But look at the American President! He is the Allerhochst, if you like. No, madam, believe me, there is nothing like Democracy, American Democracy. Give the people voting papers: good long voting papers, American ...
— The Inca of Perusalem • George Bernard Shaw
... threw himself back in his cab and smoked his cigar he cursed vigorously. "Damn the cursed half-breed of a fellow! He's clever enough, and all that; but what the devil Helen can see in him to make me invite him down to Te Ariri I don't know. Curse her infernal twaddle about the rights of humanity and such fustian. Once you are my wife, my sweet, romantic cousin, I'll knock all that idiotic bosh on the head. It's bad enough to sit in the House and listen to this fellow frothing, without having to bring a quarter-bred savage into one's own family. However, ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... never have been published, if they had not received the patronage of the Bombay Government. However interesting the Brahmanas may be to students of Indian literature, they are of small interest to the general reader. The greater portion of them is simply twaddle, and what is worse, theological twaddle. No person who is not acquainted beforehand with the place which the Brahmanas fill in the history of the Indian mind, could read more than ten pages without being disgusted. To the historian, however, and to the philosopher they are of infinite importance—to ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... Union men and Union men. They're mainly good, but some are bad. That's one of the bad ones there. His name is Neverwork, and he never worked in his life. He's a blowhard, a gasbagger, a balloon full of curses and twaddle. This bloke thinks we're fools. He's kidded his Union on that he's a smart fellow—a sort of High Priest of Salvation. He's talked himself into a job, and he's drawing about five hundred a year out of another fellow's pockets. He's called a Socialist to-day, but he'd ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... pointed out, setting down the tankard of beer from which he had been drinking. "You talk sometimes that white-livered stuff about not hitting a man back if he wants to hit you, and you drag in your conscience, and prate about all men being brothers, and that sort of twaddle. A full-blooded Englishman don't like it, because we are all of us out to protect what we've got, any way and anyhow. But that doesn't alter the fact that there's something wrong in the world when we're driven to do this protecting business wholesale and being forced into murdering on a scale ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was that relating to Moulin, the Frenchman. Three, indeed, of the members, (Messrs. Voorhees, of Indiana, Potter, of New York, and Peters, of Maine,) said it was a shame and disgrace that such ridiculous and monstrous twaddle should be listened to for a moment; but a majority considered it their duty, under the order of reference, to hear the matter patiently. They had, therefore, allowed Hastings the widest latitude and listened to everything that his ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... command, but let it be intelligent appreciation, not blind admiration or prejudiced disapproval. Do you recollect how you felt and dreamed and gushed when you were a girl, the pages of sentimental twaddle (as you now call it) which you confided to the diary which you burned in disgust at twenty-one? Do you remember how genuine your distresses then seemed? You can smile at the girl you once were, but still you find it in your heart ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... of that, my reader, as a specimen of embittered eloquence and nervous pith? It is something to read massive and energetic sense, in days wherein mystical twaddle, and subtlety which hopelessly defies all logic, are sometimes thought extremely fine, if they are set out in a style which is refined into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... should learn from original, intellectually keen men than they should learn from perfectly respectable men, or perfectly orthodox men, or perfectly nice men. The vital thing to consider about your son's schoolmaster is whether he talked lifeless twaddle yesterday by way of a lesson, and not whether he loved unwisely or was born of poor parents, or was seen wearing a frock-coat in combination with a bowler, or confessed he doubted the Apostles' Creed, or called himself a Socialist, or any disgraceful thing like ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... 'And upon twaddle,' said Lady Maulevrier. 'Well you told Mr. Hammond about Steadman's old uncle. What ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... smiled at the fierce monosyllable. "All that lot—the poor devils you despise—are mostly made from the wrong sort of both races—in point of breeding, I mean. And that's a supreme point, in spite of the twaddle that's talked about equality. Women of good family, East or West, don't intermarry much. And quite right too. I'm proud of my share of India. But I think, on ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... And I'm going to Fomishka's and Fimishka's oasis. And do you know what I should like to say? There's twaddle here and twaddle there, only that twaddle, the twaddle of the eighteenth century, is nearer to the Russian character than the twaddle of the twentieth century. Goodbye, gentlemen. I'm drunk, so don't be offended at what I say, only a better woman than my sister Snandulia... is not to ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... I say to you; let an author of renown fill a book with twaddle, and if it is not praised by the critics, you ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... cultivated of the cultivated, points at America as a nation composed of all social excrescences; the friars and their enslaved Spaniards want again to cajole and cheat us with offers of participation in public affairs, recognition of the military grades of ex-rebel chiefs, and other twaddle degrading to those who would listen to it. In fact, they have called into their councils the sons of the country, whilst they exclusively carry out their own ideas, and reserve to themselves the right to set aside all ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... it needs polishing and practice and all that; but I'm sure it is oceans better than half the sentimental twaddle we see in the papers, and I KNOW that some of those pieces ARE paid for, because I have a friend who is in a newspaper office, and he told me so. Yours are quaint and simple and some very original. I'm sure that ballad of ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... than it is, and then things would find their true level, and an original work would be properly appreciated, and a set of people who have no pretensions to write, having nothing to communicate but tea-table twaddle, could no longer be palmed off upon the public as mighty lions and lionesses. But to the question: What are your intentions with respect to "The Bible in Spain"? I am a frank man, and frankness never offends me. Has anybody put you out ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... Scripture style. One of their most striking characteristics, by the way, is a severely simple taste; a uniform freedom from the vulgarities of conception, the exaggerated sentiment, the mawkish nonsense and twaddle, which disfigure such an infinitude of volumes of religious biography and fiction which have been written since. Could such men attain this uniform elevation? Could such men have invented those extraordinary ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... of as the surest helper under a difficulty, as a monitor who is encouraging rather than severe. Mr. Cleves has the wonderful art of preaching sermons which the wheelwright and the blacksmith can understand; not because he talks condescending twaddle, but because he can call a spade a spade, and knows how to disencumber ideas of their wordy frippery. Look at him more attentively, and you will see that his face is a very interesting one —that there is a great deal of humour and feeling playing ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... you will, the truth is, we all struggle on in hope of living in a dream some day. This is my dream. Dreadfully, horribly wicked, is it not, in an age that preaches thrift and—twaddle? No joy like waste in London streets; happy waste, imaginative extravagance; to and ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... surrounded by a circle of admirers—men and women—an oasis of intelligence, it seemed to him as he listened, in a desert of twaddle. She smiled at him with her eyes, as he looked at her through the press, and just as he had won to a place by her side, the tide was sent flooding into a large room where, it was announced, Professor Blatherwick and Madame le Claire were ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... them at pleasure. I will be measured for a conscience after the newest fashion, one that will stretch handsomely as occasion may require. Am I to blame? It is the tailor's affair? I have heard a great deal of twaddle about the so-called ties of blood—enough to make a sober man beside himself. He is your brother, they say; which interpreted, means that he was manufactured in the same mould, and for that reason he must needs be sacred in your eyes! To what absurd conclusions must this notion of a sympathy ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Pennine Alps, stoopid! From their name they would seem a suitable residence for a person who scribbles twaddle in Magazines—ahem! No personal allusion, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... hold that no power can deprive us of the right to administer our functions as a body comprising electors from all parts of the country, associated together because their country is dearer to them than drowsy twaddle, unmeaning routine, or ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... he cursed vigorously. "Damn the cursed half-breed of a fellow! He's clever enough, and all that; but what the devil Helen can see in him to make me invite him down to Te Ariri I don't know. Curse her infernal twaddle about the rights of humanity and such fustian. Once you are my wife, my sweet, romantic cousin, I'll knock all that idiotic bosh on the head. It's bad enough to sit in the House and listen to this fellow frothing, without having to bring a quarter-bred ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... whose indecencies stink in the nostrils. Its liberty is the wildest license; its love the essence of the lowest lust! Priapus—worshipping obscenity. Rant and rubbish. Linguistic silliness. Inhumanly insolent. Apotheosis of Sweat. Mouthings of a mountebank. Venomously malignant. Pretentious twaddle. Degraded helot of literature. His work, like a maniac's robe, bedizened with fluttering tags of a thousand colors. Roaming, like a drunken satyr, with inflamed blood, through every field of lascivious thought. Muck ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... a hovel, Twiddle had a palace; Twaddle said: "I'll grovel Or he'll think I bear him malice"— A sentiment as novel As ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... coincidence; but you couldn't drive that into an Oriental skull. This is what makes the study of precious stones so interesting. There is always some enchantment, some evil spell. To handle the drums is to invite a minor accident. Call it twaddle; probably is; and yet I have reason to believe that there's something ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... from the window to her face, and she paused and looked up. There was a faint dash of color on Mr. Vernon's cheeks, and a tightening of the lips. It seemed to Nell, judging by his expression, that he had suddenly become impatient of the twaddle, and she instantly dropped the paper on her lap. But Mrs. Lorton was enjoying herself too much to permit ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... "Twaddle," said Clayton Spencer, and put the book away. That was the sort of stuff men like Rodney lived on. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Tilde (ASCII 1111110, ''). Also called 'squiggle', 'sqiggle' (sic — pronounced /skig'l/), and 'twaddle', but twiddle is the most common term. 2. A small and insignificant change to a program. Usually fixes one bug and generates several new ones (see also {shotgun debugging}). 3. /vt./ To change something in a small way. Bits, for example, are often twiddled. Twiddling a switch or knob implies ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... here, too, the old leaven of Oxford burst forth sometimes. Of course, we generally performed the music of Handel and other classical authors; Mendelssohn's compositions were still considered as mere twaddle by some of the old school. At one of these evenings, the old organist of New College, with his wooden leg, after sitting through a rehearsal of Mendelssohn's Hymn of Praise, which I was conducting at the pianoforte, walked up to me, as I thought, to thank me; but no, he burst out in a torrent ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... a settled nation,—words like basket (to take an instance which all the world knows) form a much larger body in our language than is commonly supposed; it is said that a number of our raciest, most idiomatic, popular words—for example, bam, kick, whop, twaddle, fudge, hitch, muggy,—are Celtic. These assertions require to be carefully examined, and it by no means follows that because an English word is found in Celtic, therefore we get it from thence; but they ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... to explain the true character of note-writing—how compressed and unrambling and direct it ought to be, and illustrate by the villainous twaddle of many Shakespearian notes. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... a pinch, but are wholly out of place here. The slavery that Lessing had really taken on him was that of a great library, an Alcina that could always too easily witch him away from the more serious duty of his genius. That a mind like his could be buried in a corner is mere twaddle, and of a kind that has done great wrong to the dignity of letters. Where-ever Lessing sat, was the head of the table. That he suffered at Wolfenbuettel is true; but was it nothing to be in love and in debt at the same time, and to feel that his fruition of the one must be postponed ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... Madame: it nearly killed her. She burst into tears; and Madame de Maintenon very quietly and demurely began to represent to her the contents of the letter in all its parts, especially as it was addressed to a foreign country. Madame de Ventadour interposed with some twaddle, to give Madame time to breathe and recover sufficiently to say something. The best excuse was the admission of what could not be denied, with supplications for pardon, expressions of repentance, prayers, promises. But Madame de Maintenon had not finished yet. Having got rid of the commission ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... "More twaddle! Anybody might think that the man was going to be robbed!" cried Lousteau. "Why, my dear boy, if the minister buys the newspaper, the druggist may make twenty thousand francs in six months on an investment of thirty thousand. Matifat is not looking at the newspaper, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... darkens, the Flying Dutchman comes in, and the storm music rages once more. It is woven into Vanderdecken's magnificent scena (surely the greatest opera scena written up to the year 1842); and then disappears. In its place we get pages of (for Wagner) wearisome twaddle. The reason is obvious. For the purpose of explaining the subsequent movement of the drama there is a lot of conversation which Weber, in the Singspiel, would have left to be spoken, and Mozart would have set to dry recitative. Wagner was ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... to the waterhole, it's cool there, and better fun than listening to an old woman's twaddle. The sun's down now. ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... polyglot discussions in the old, oak-lined dining-room at Hunsden Wood, where a singular insight was given of the sentiments entertained by resolute minds respecting old northern despotisms, and old southern superstitions: also, I have heard much twaddle, enounced chiefly in French and Deutsch, but let that pass. Hunsden himself tolerated the drivelling theorists; with the practical men he ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... read any of the twaddle that is written about Whitman's grossness, his materialism, and so forth? If so, read his poems now, and tell me how they impress you. Is he not all spirit, rightly understood? For to him the body with its energies is but manifestation of that something ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... Ibsen, Maeterlinck, and Shaw, And Wilde's Salome, none has ever reached me. Back to their native land they must have gone, Or else you have them here in Germany. Only to me come down real British plays, The mid-Victorian twaddle, the false gems Which on the stretched forefinger of oblivion Glitter a ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... or sentimental, or both. She was at once flattered and annoyed, flattered, because, as a woman, Stephen had conceded her a mind. Many of the young men she knew had minds, but deemed that these were wasted on women, whose language was generally supposed to be a kind of childish twaddle. Even Jack Brinsmade rarely risked his dignity and reputation at an intellectual tilt. This was one of Virginia's grievances. She often argued with her father, and, if the truth were told, had had more than one ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... utter twaddle, and what may all this nonsense have signified, pray? If it had any meaning at all!" said Mrs. Epanchin, cuttingly, after having ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the fact that he was beginning to give vent to a lot of twaddle, and speedily, pleading fatigue, she paid no further notice to him. This compelled Pao-y to at last be quiet and go to sleep. By the morrow, all recollection of the discussion ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... humbug you are"—he gave the dead man words—"what a colossal humbug. You and your nice Sunday go-to-meeting thoughts. It's so easy, isn't it? to dress up one's rottenness in pretty sentimental twaddle. But you don't deceive anybody. You don't even deceive yourself, not for three minutes at a stretch. You know that underneath all your humbugging pretenses the black sin is unchanged. You are no better and no worse than I was. You are ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... consequences of our public acts and institutions in moulding the next generation. It will not, I think, be amiss to pass beyond policy for a space, and to insist—even with heaviness—that however convenient an institution may be, however much it may, in the twaddle of the time, be a "natural growth," and however much the "product of a long evolution," yet, if it does not mould men into fine and vigorous forms, it has to be destroyed. We "save the state" for the sake of our children, that, at least, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... "So she begins to fear we have been somewhat hasty, asks a little time for reconsideration of her precise sentiment toward me, and feels meanwhile in honour bound to release me from our engagement! Yet if upon mature deliberation—eh, oh, yes! twaddle! and commonplace! and dashed, of course, with a jigger of ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... that a great deal of unnecessary twaddle is abroad as to the extreme cruelty of branding. Undoubtedly it is to some extent painful, and could some other method of ready identification be devised, it might be as well to adopt it in preference. But in the circumstance of a free range, thousands of cattle, and hundreds of owners, any ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... not so sure about that. I know many eminent saints in the church who will eat lobster salad for supper, and then send for the doctor and minister before morning. There is a precious twaddle about 'mysterious Providence.' Providence isn't half so mysterious as people make out. The doctor is expected to look serious and sympathetic, and call their law-breaking and its penalty by some outlandish Latin name that no one can understand. I give 'em the square truth, ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... Mr. Cockayne," said his wife, "this Mr. Karr, whose book about the garden—twaddle, I call it—you used to think so very fine and poetic, is just a market-gardener and nothing more. He is positively ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... the Prince o' Wales,' he said. (That interesting young man had arrived on the Harriet Lane that morning and ridden up Broadway between cheering hosts.) 'I've got a sketch of him here an' it's all twaddle. Tell us something new about him. If he's got a hole in his sock we ought to ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... can understand the hearty contempt and antipathy which such an athletic and boisterous genius as Fielding's must have entertained. He couldn't do otherwise than laugh at the puny Cockney bookseller, pouring out endless volumes of sentimental twaddle, and hold him up to scorn as a moll-coddle and a milksop. His genius had been nursed on sack-posset, and not on dishes of tea. His muse had sung the loudest in tavern choruses, had seen the daylight streaming in over thousands of emptied bowls, and reeled home to chambers on the shoulders ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... without a tongue I ne'er had prayed To have an earless head. Since she did not, Bear me, ye whirlwinds, to some favored spot— Some mountain pinnacle that sleeps in air So delicately, mercifully rare That when the fellow climbs that giddy hill, As, for my sins, I know at last he will, To utter twaddle in that void inane His soundless organ he will play ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... ground. He will go no farther than he can see, and he sees truly enough the evil and imperfection in the world. He notes the weakness and failures of the best intentioned, takes cognizance of the low motives that so often dominate, and bases his conclusions on them. He spurns the idealistic twaddle of those who, he says, are guided by their hopes rather than by ordinary good sense, and fancies himself a practical man. He expects ...
— Hidden from the Prudent - The 7th William Penn Lecture, May 8, 1921 • Paul Jones
... illustrious hands and commending obscure merit. The "impudent literary cliques" who puffed each other's books; the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings who manufactured verses for the "Annuals;" and the twaddle of the "genial" incapables who praised them in flabby reviews—all these Poe exposed with ferocious honesty. Nor, though his writings are unmoral, can they be called in any sense immoral. His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness as Bryant's ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... this day forth, acquired an interest in Danyers's eyes. She was like a volume of unindexed and discursive memoirs, through which he patiently plodded in the hope of finding embedded amid layers of dusty twaddle some precious allusion to the subject of his thought. When, some months later, he brought out his first slim volume, in which the remodelled college essay on Rendle figured among a dozen, somewhat overstudied "appreciations," ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... break away from their tiresome old ways and habits, and wonder why all the world is not as pleased with their personalities as they are themselves, suggesting, if you are willing to waste your time listening to their twaddle, that there is something radically wrong in any innovation, that both "Church and State" will be imperilled if things are altered. No blight, no mildew is more fatal to a plant than the "complacent" are to the world. They resent any ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... I can see in a demonstration of the truth of 'spiritualism' is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a 'medium' hired at ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... not a doubt that he meant this melodramatic twaddle. It did not seem twaddle or melodramatic to her—or, for that matter, to him. She clasped him more closely. "What's the matter, dear?" she asked, her head ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... to bring us up on tracts made up of thin exhortations and goodish maxims. A nerveless treatise on commerce or science in that style would be crumpled up by the first merchant and thrown into his waste-basket. Religious twaddle is of no more use than worldly twaddle. If a man has nothing to say, he had better keep his pen wiped and his tongue still. There needs an infusion of strong Anglo-Saxon into religious literature, and a brawnier manliness and ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... school-girl she cannot write a clever book if gifted that way, is a condition of non-intelligence I fail to fathom! You speak of this author as a 'he.' Do you think only a male creature can produce a work of genius? Look at the twaddle men turn out every day in the form of novels alone! Many of them are worse than the worst weak fiction by women. I tell you I've lived long enough to know that a woman's brain can beat a man's if she cares to test it, so long as she does ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... and their wigs bobbing at each other, discussing the events and tendencies of their time. And how they must have talked—no wonder Frederick, though the idol of his subjects, withdrew for such discourse from the society of the day, with its twaddle of the tea-cups and its ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... Jane's "panegyric," which she had read—not connecting it however with her right-hand neighbour; and while I strained my ear for his reply I heard him, to my stupefaction, call back gaily, with his mouth full of bread: "Oh, it's all right—it's the usual twaddle!" ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... extended her hand to Sidonia, who dashed it away, crying—"Stuff! nonsense! you have learned all this twaddle from the priest, who, I know, is nephew to the shoe-maker in Daber, and therefore hates any one who is above ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... written. If the opening of the D symphony is thin, unreal, an attempt at pastoral gaiety which has resulted merely in lack of character, at anyrate the second theme is delightful; if the opening of the slow movement is also twaddle, there are pleasant passages later on; the dainty allegretto is as fresh and fragrant as a wild rose; and the finale, though void of significance, is full of an energy rare in Brahms. Then there are many of the songs in which Brahms' astonishing felicity of phrase, ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... much twaddle for him," he had said in reply to Ethelyn's questions as to whether he would like to see what Aunt Van Buren ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... believe in all that silly love-making," he rejoined roughly, "it is good enough for the loutish peasants of the alfold (lowlands); they are sentimental and stupid: an educated man does not make use of a lot of twaddle when he woos the ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... ascertains, whether the one can be accepted, or the other is required. This contemptuous neglect arises from two causes, first because it is out of place, and secondly because it too often contains a great deal of twaddle. Unfortunately, one half of what is said in this world is unmeaning compliment. A man who wishes to mark his respect for you, among other inconvenient methods of shewing it, offers to accompany you to the Hall. You are in consequence arrested in your progress. You are compelled ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... law or prejudice that dooms woman to an inferior position, and makes her the victim of miserable wages and fatal competitions with herself. It means that he must clear himself of this senseless twaddle about "woman's sphere," a matter surely no more for his legislation, than his "sphere" is for hers; and one upon which, at this stage of their experience, it is unbecoming in either to dogmatize; and it means that as a simple ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... never believed any of that twaddle. Only, I've got a sore head to-day. If you knew Nora as well ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... the Peace Conference, as it is called, I think the merest twaddle—and I use the term with entire respect to the members—the merest twaddle that ever was presented to a thinking people. The proposition of the Senator from Kentucky has some sense in it. If he chooses to desert his own, ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... them, "Kornilovist, counter-revolutionaries, traitors!" Because of this attitude the conference, which ought to have had the character of an assembly deciding affairs of state, took on the character of a boisterous meeting, which lasted several days of unending twaddle. What the Bolsheviki wanted was a verbal victory—to have shouted more loudly than their opponents. The same speeches were repeated every day. Some upheld a power exclusively Socialist, others—the majority composed of ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... better idea of the scope we try to cover at the other kind, but perhaps this will be more entertaining." She turned more directly to Frank. "A business meeting here always makes me think of the 'Antis,' and their twaddle about woman's sphere, which they would like to reduce to ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... then he settled back in his chair and looked hard at us. His eyes were as keen as frost; but they twinkled—just a little, as I have discovered they can and do twinkle if one isn't afraid to say right out what one means, without unnecessary fuss and twaddle. ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... disappeared in the mud to which it naturally belonged. The lady praised its 'poignancy' and 'grave beauty'. I assented and congratulated myself on my second escape—for if the question had been put to me I should have described it as God-forgotten twaddle. ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... dear Ellen, you would tell me what is the "twaddle about my marrying, etc.," which you hear. If I knew the details I should have a better chance of guessing the quarter from which such gossip comes—as it is, I am quite at a loss. Whom am I to marry? I think I have scarcely seen a single man with whom such a union would ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... honoured Titiano!' she wrote, some years later; 'how that name recalls the happy, happy hours I passed with you at Eartham; when by the title 'Muse' you summoned me to the morning walk!' Amongst the drossy twaddle which passed current as poetry at Eartham, a sonnet in Romney's honour by a true poet—William Cowper—may ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... when David Jost advanced smilingly, evidently sure of a friendly recognition. For had not the King, when Crown Prince and Heir-Apparent, hunted game in his preserves?—yea, had he not even dined with him?—and had not he, Jost, written whole columns of vapid twaddle about the 'Royal smile' and the 'Royal favour' till the outside public had sickened at every stroke of his flunkey pen? How came it, then, that his Majesty seemed on this occasion to have no recollection of him, and looked over and ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... sees, in the history of letters, so many writers go to pieces. They suddenly find, after their first great success, that they have arrived, by a tortuous and secret path, at being a sort of public man. They are dazzled by contact with the world. They go into society, they make speeches, they write twaddle, they drain their energy, already depleted by creation, in fifty different ways. Now I am strongly of Ruskin's opinion that the duty of the artist is to make himself fit for the best society, and then to abstain from it. Very fortunately I have no sort of taste for these things, beyond ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... think you were such a fool, Hammond," said Dick Merton testily. "If you try to fix a literal meaning on the twaddle that every drunken man talks, you will come to some queer conclusions. Let us follow their example, and go on deck. You need fresh air, I think. Depend upon it, your liver is out of order. A sea-voyage will do you a ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... rational souls, has contrived to crowd into his definition of person more errors of conception and of language,—more insult to common sense,—than one could have believed it possible to put together in such space. And this ridiculous old twaddle, after six and twenty years, he has deliberately re-written and lately republished as something "adapted to the schools of America." It stands thus: "Person is a distinction which is made in a noun between its representation of its object, either as spoken to, or spoken of."—Chandler's E. Grammar; ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... removed from the average drawing-room medley of twaddle and rattle that the music interpreted the words into its own universal language, ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... lay her best at her guest's disposal, a perfect composure, and a freedom from all effort, that were in their way the perfection of breeding. I have seen these often in the peasantry, in the poor. It is your middle classes, with their incessant flutter, and bluster, and twitter, and twaddle; with their perpetual strain after effect; with their deathless desire to get one rung of the ladder higher than they ever can get; with their preposterous affectations, their pedantic unrealities, their morbid dread of remark, their everlasting imitations, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... publicly that no such earnestness in religious, matters had ever been exhibited there. The plan of Mission work was simple, practicable, commended itself to hard-headed men of business. Many came to hear who had been disgusted with the usual sentiment- alism and twaddle, the absence of knowledge of human nature, the amount of conventional prejudice, &c. They were induced to come by friends who represented that this was something quite different, and these men went away convinced in many cases, seconding ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Playing on the signification of the name,—"king of the city." This piece of twaddle has not been omitted by ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... To prevent or attempt to prevent the owner of a garden from shooting the bullfinches or blackbirds and so on that steal his fruit, or destroy his buds, is absurd. It is equally absurd to fine—what twaddle!—a lad for taking a bird's egg. The only point upon which I am fully clear is that the birdcatcher who takes birds on land not his own or in his occupation, on public property, as roads, wastes, commons, and so forth, ought to be rigidly put down. But as for the ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... words together regardless of meaning, should so bewilder men and deprive them of all wise and sober judgment! By my faith! ... I would as soon listen to the gabble of geese in a farmyard as to the silly glibness of such inflated twaddle, such mawkish sentiment, such turgid ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... "Ah, but her twaddle isn't half as bad as the chaffing I get. It takes a deal of pluck to hold out when you are told you are tied to an apron string, and all that sort of ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... in Wordsworth's case, on the other hand, is that his contemplative tendencies not only coexisted with, but were implicated with, the most precise and vivid apprehension of small realities. There was no proportion in his mind; and vaticination and twaddle rolled off his eloquent tongue as chance would have it. At one time he would discourse like a seer, on the slightest instigation, by the hour together; and next, he would hold forth with equal solemnity, on the pettiest matter of domestic economy. I have known him ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... The Unconquered, The Intrepid, or The Dissonant, The Sterile, The Insipid, The Obtuse, The Astray, The Stunned, and they were all devoted to one purpose, namely, the production and the perpetuation of twaddle. It is prodigious to think of the incessant wash of slip-slop which they poured out in verse; of the grave disputations they held upon the most trivial questions; of the inane formalities of their sessions. ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... A man of an original and truly powerful mind never deals in anecdotes, unless it be for the purpose of illustrating some general principle. Women and weak men are all addicted to the vice. If a person of this description begins to annoy a company with his or her twaddle, the only cure for it is to affect deafness—a very convenient ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various
... kings, and connived with the Czar; His Bulgarian twaddle once caused a great war, Where thousands were slain, but what did he heed, He still went to Church the ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... honesty of their convictions. They had trusted the North until trusting had ceased to be a virtue. They wished peace, but feared not war. All this idle talk, so common since the war, of a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight" is the merest twaddle and vilely untrue. ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... other ancestors of the youth, and their stud of horses, and their victory at the Pythian games, and at the Isthmus, and at Nemea with four horses and single horses—these are the tales which he composes and repeats. And there is greater twaddle still. Only the day before yesterday he made a poem in which he described the entertainment of Heracles, who was a connexion of the family, setting forth how in virtue of this relationship he was hospitably received by an ...
— Lysis • Plato
... should ask how long an hour is, so that people would think that you were completely mad. Stop this twaddle and let us elders talk together.—Listen, my dear Jeppe Berg! Do you think it is wise for these two young people to marry before he ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... prattle, babble, gabble, jabber, tattle, twaddle, blab, gossip, palaver, parley, converse, mumble, mutter, stammer, stutter.> (With this group compare the Say and ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... great battle. Even to one who hates the most brutalising of amusements, the spirit of the writer is impressibly contagious. We condemn, but we applaud; we are half disposed for the moment to talk the old twaddle about British pluck; and when Hazlitt's companion on his way home pulls out of his pocket a volume of the 'Nouvelle Heloise,' admit for a moment that 'Love of the Fancy is,' as the historian assures us, 'compatible with a cultivation of sentiment.' If Hazlitt had thrown as much into ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... behaving and thinking like a fashionable doll. Isn't that true? I appeal to your intelligence, to your mind, to everything in you that lifts you out of the ordinary ruck. Your precious word compromised is only the twaddle of a countrified miss. ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... the marsupial martyr Is based upon an ancient nursery model; But he will find that he has caught a Tartar, Who hints that Punch is talking heartless twaddle. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... divinest cat alive, but entitled to respect, if only as an embodiment and representative of cat-hood in the abstract, which was a most important element in the economy of the universe. It was when Aunt Charlotte stigmatised these philosophical reflections as a pack of impertinent twaddle that Austin had had the audacity to say that she was like ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... children, these children and roadside arabs, for the want of education, ambition, animation, and push, are indulging in practices that are fast working their own destruction and those they are brought into contact with, and a great deal of this may lay at the door of flattery, twaddle, petting, and fear. ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... and knew it depended on the features, and that, if I could copy the features exactly, the likeness would follow just as surely as the blood follows the knife. I found early that all the talk about catching the expression was mere twaddle; the expression would take care of itself if ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... is a conversation that betrays the presence of one of the currents of public feeling below the smooth surface of well-bred twaddle: ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... true. He is cheerful, but he does not sing, "Tra la la, all the things that are, are good." He says, "There are bad things, but I must carry on and fight the good fight." His is a philosophy of courage and endurance, but not of optimistic twaddle. He is too wide-brained to speak of life as "all good" when he knows of inherited disease, cruelty, preventable poverty, gross neglect and unmerited misfortune. Yet he lends hope and comfort to the afflicted, and he has an unvarying ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... of Sermons preached at Hookham-cum-Snivey Church, by the Reverend Peter Twaddle, on the occasions, of building a dusthole for the national schools; of outfitting the missionaries who are exported annually to be eaten by the Catawampous Indians; on the death of Mr. Grubly, the retired cheesemonger, who ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... difficulty of getting a suitable governess for her little boy. She said she objected to meeting people "one would not care to invite to one's house." She swamped me with tea and ruled the conversation, so that Dunstone and I, who were once old friends, talked civil twaddle for the space of one hour—theatres, concerts, and assemblies chiefly—and then parted again. The furniture had all been altered—there were two "cosy nooks" in the room after the recipe in the Born Lady. It was plain to me, it is plain to everyone, I find, ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... second-rate matter. I am very fond of him. There are innumerable characters that he has created which symbolize vices, virtues, follies, and the like almost as well as the characters in Bunyan; and therefore I think the wise thing to do is simply to skip the bosh and twaddle and vulgarity and untruth, and get the benefit out of the rest. Of course one fundamental difference between Thackeray and Dickens is that Thackeray was a gentleman and Dickens was not. But ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... soul are all on fire," over the burning words of some Brontean Pythoness, but when you open the last thrilling work of Maggie Marigold, and are immediately submerged "in a weak, washy, everlasting flood" of insipidity, twaddle, bosh, and heart-rending sorrow, you do not shut the book with a jerk. Why not? Because in the dismal distance you dimly descry two figures swimming, floating, struggling towards each other, and a languid soupon of curiosity detains you till you have ascertained, that, after infinite distress, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... are yet felt only as blemishes in the admirable beauty and brilliance of the poem. The successive scenes are given with so firm and clear a touch—there is such a sense of form, the language is such a dexterous elevation of the ordinary social twaddle into the mock-heroic, that it is impossible not to recognize a consummate artistic power. The dazzling display of true wit and fancy blinds us for the time to the want of that real tenderness and humour, which would have softened some harsh passages, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... Queene," already alluded to, is a step in the wrong direction, but not a step long enough to carry us altogether outside of the charmed circle. The child's instinct of selection being vast and cordial,—he will make a grain of true imagination suffuse and glorify a whole acre of twaddle,—-we may with security leave him in that fantastic society. Moreover, some children being less imaginative than others, and all children being less imaginative in some moods and conditions than at other seasons, the elaborate compositions of Tasso, Cervantes, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... not know it," returned Lamotte, sulkily. "Vandyck don't seem to realize that I have a prior claim, and that his twaddle, therefore, only ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Not to review it, I hope. I have had a sniff of it already in the proceedings of the Antiquarian Society. It is a brilliant specimen of the pedantic pottering of the learned body which enables me to append to my name the A.S.S., fraudulently inverted into S.S.A. Such twaddle always excites me into feverishness. I ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... muddle, bull; Irishism|!, Hibernicism|!; slipslop[obs3]; anticlimax, bathos; sophism &c. 477. farce, galimathias[obs3], amphigouri[obs3], rhapsody; farrago &c (disorder) 59; betise[Fr]; extravagance, romance; sciamachy[obs3]. sell, pun, verbal quibble, macaronic[obs3]. jargon, fustian, twaddle, gibberish &c (no meaning) 517; exaggeration &c 549; moonshine, stuff; mare's nest, quibble, self-delusion. vagary, tomfoolery, poppycock, mummery, monkey trick, boutade[Fr], escapade. V. play the fool &c. 499; talk nonsense, parler a tort et ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... is, when I joined Dubedat after his conversation with Mr Walpole, he said the Jews were the only people who knew anything about art, and that though he had to put up with your Philistine twaddle, as he called it, it was what I said about the drawings that really pleased him. He also said that his wife was greatly struck with my knowledge, and that she always admired Jews. Then he asked me to advance him 50 pounds on ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... subject, which was Herself—her experiences, her reminiscences: and bad sense enough to stick to it. Until the moment when she took "the liberty of chipping in," to use her own expression, the amount of twaddle talked had been appalling. The bishop had told us all he had learnt about China during a visit to San Francisco, while the man who had spent the last twenty years of his life in the country was busy explaining his views on the subject of the English drama. Our hostess had been endeavouring to ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... that it must have been extremely nauseating to the cultured young women. The three were standing under the electric light at the corner, and the young women instead of appearing annoyed at the heathen's twaddle, seemed to be highly amused. Only the greatest exercise of self-restraint kept Mr. Hamshaw from kicking Sago into the middle of ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... by a circle of admirers—men and women—an oasis of intelligence, it seemed to him as he listened, in a desert of twaddle. She smiled at him with her eyes, as he looked at her through the press, and just as he had won to a place by her side, the tide was sent flooding into a large room where, it was announced, Professor Blatherwick and Madame le Claire were doing ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... of him that he is an optimist, but this is not true. He is cheerful, but he does not sing, "Tra la la, all the things that are, are good." He says, "There are bad things, but I must carry on and fight the good fight." His is a philosophy of courage and endurance, but not of optimistic twaddle. He is too wide-brained to speak of life as "all good" when he knows of inherited disease, cruelty, preventable poverty, gross neglect and unmerited misfortune. Yet he lends hope and comfort to the afflicted, and he has an unvarying comfort ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... Dutchman comes in, and the storm music rages once more. It is woven into Vanderdecken's magnificent scena (surely the greatest opera scena written up to the year 1842); and then disappears. In its place we get pages of (for Wagner) wearisome twaddle. The reason is obvious. For the purpose of explaining the subsequent movement of the drama there is a lot of conversation which Weber, in the Singspiel, would have left to be spoken, and Mozart would have set to dry recitative. ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... and great by skill, and greater by a writer's soul honestly flung into its pages, "Uncle Tom," to the surprise of many that twaddle traditional phrases in reviews and magazines about the art of fiction, and to the surprise of no man who knows anything about the art of fiction, was all the rage. Not to have read it was like not to have read ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... see an end of these bad things? And observe further, these bad things live on and affect the human mind for ever. Bad things are born of bad. Who can tell what may be the effect of seeing day by day an hideous building, of hearing day by day indifferent music, of constantly reading a lot of feeble twaddle? Surely one effect will be that we shall gradually lose our appreciation of what is good and beautiful. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." Ah! but we must have eyes to see it. This springtime is lovely, if we have the eyes to see it; but, if we have not, its loveliness ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... may have thrown off Mr. Boyle's "principles of religion," but he was none the less a very honest man, perfectly open and candid, and the last person to use ambiguous phraseology, among his friends; unless, indeed, he saw no other way of putting a stop to the intrusion of unmannerly twaddle amongst the bitter-sweet memories stirred in his affectionate nature by so ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... Rochon method of double-image, but by thin wedges cut to given angles. I have told Mr. Alvan Clark my "experiences." and I hope he will apply his excellent mind to the scheme. I am insisting upon this point in some astronomical twaddle which I am now printing, and of which I shall soon have to request your acceptance of ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... ice,—that these two indications, leading to the same conclusion, go far to convince me he was a profoundly immoral and irreligious spirit, with as rare faculties of intelligence as ever belonged to any one. All this may be mere goody weakness and twaddle, on my part: but it is a persuasion that I cannot escape from; though I should feel the doing so to be a deliverance from a most painful load. If you could help me, I heartily wish you would. I never take him up without ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... said his wife, "this Mr. Karr, whose book about the garden—twaddle, I call it—you used to think so very fine and poetic, is just a market-gardener and nothing more. He is positively ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... in your own house, so long as you do not attempt to interfere with my plans. Sit up, girl, if you choose, and talk. I am prepared to listen even though your twaddle bores me." ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... cat alive, but entitled to respect, if only as an embodiment and representative of cat-hood in the abstract, which was a most important element in the economy of the universe. It was when Aunt Charlotte stigmatised these philosophical reflections as a pack of impertinent twaddle that Austin had had the audacity to say that she was ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... materialize before me. I rose and fled from the room bare-headed Into the dusk, afraid of my gift. And after that the spirits swarmed— Chaucer, Caesar, Poe and Marlowe, Cleopatra and Mrs. Surratt— Wherever I went, with messages,— Mere trifling twaddle, Spoon River agreed. You talk nonsense to children, don't you? And suppose I see what you never saw And never heard of and have no word for, I must talk nonsense when you ask me What it ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... very accomplished and clever writer. Her criticisms on subjects relating to art, and especially her original and sparkling remarks on painting and architecture, although qualified by Mr Boas as twaddle, stamp her at once as a woman of no common order. She has profound and poetical conceptions of Beauty, and at times a felicity of expression in presenting the effects of nature and art upon her own mind, that strikes and startles by its novelty ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... measure. He got what he expected—cynicism. Begin afterwards issued a letter to the press in which he tried to set the clergy above the law of conscription. No doubt the Cardinal came at Hughes with the twaddle invented by the Nationalists and later adopted by Laurier, about enforcing the Militia Act which provided for nothing ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... describing Sir G. Bonham's investiture as K.C.B., and advises me to imitate him for my own interest, rather than Sir J. Davis, who was recalled. Davis, says Yeh, insisted on getting into the city, and Bonham gave up this demand. Hence his advice to me. All through the letter is sheer twaddle. ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... artfully.] Then he asked me all about you heretics, and he told me you were all going to—be burned up, as soon as you died; for the Inquisition couldn't do it for you in these degenerate days. After a great deal more twaddle like this, I asked him why you heretics all had such hard names, that we others never could speak them? Then he looked mysterious, so! [here Miss Rita diabolically winked one eye,] and said he: 'I will tell you, per Bacco! hush, it's because they are so abominably wicked, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... from good," sighed old gentleman No. 2; "but we will continue to endure our hardships for months, or for years if need be, rather than allow the Prussians to enter Paris." This sort of Lacedemonian twaddle went on during the whole time of my visit, and my cousin evidently was proud of being surrounded by such Spartans. I give a specimen of it, as I think these worthies ought to be gratified by their heroic sacrifices being made public. "I'd rough it in a ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... dislike of "those great formal dinners, which unite all the stiffness of a levee to all the disorder and discomfort of a two-shilling ordinary. Nothing can be duller. Nobody speaks except to the person next him. The conversation is the most deplorable twaddle, and, as I always sit next to the lady of the highest rank, or, in other words, to the oldest, ugliest, and proudest woman in the company, I am worse off ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... on these torsos of the haberdasher, one is not brought to thoughts of sad mortality. Their joy is so exultant. And all the things that they hold dear—canes, gloves, silk hats, and the newer garments on which fashion makes its twaddle—are within reach of their armless sleeves. Had they fingers they would be smoothing themselves before the glass. Their unbodied heads, wherever they may be, are still smiling on the world, despite their divorcement. Their tongues are still ready ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... both. She was at once flattered and annoyed, flattered, because, as a woman, Stephen had conceded her a mind. Many of the young men she knew had minds, but deemed that these were wasted on women, whose language was generally supposed to be a kind of childish twaddle. Even Jack Brinsmade rarely risked his dignity and reputation at an intellectual tilt. This was one of Virginia's grievances. She often argued with her father, and, if the truth were told, had had more than one victory ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... intense feeling of misery crept over me, as I reflected that perchance I had left those most dear to return to them no more. But I forget; a description of private feelings is, to uninterested readers, only so much twaddle, besides being more egotistical than even an account of personal adventures could extenuate; so, with the exception of a few extracts from my "log," I shall jump at once from the English Channel to the ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... retorted—"Dante was, like all poets, a regular humbug. Any peg served to hang his stuff on,—from a child of nine to a girl of eighteen. The stupidest thing ever written is what he called his 'New Life' or 'Vita Nuova.' I read it once, and it made me pretty nigh sick. Think of all that twaddle about Beatrice 'denying him her most gracious salutation'! That any creature claiming to be a man could drivel along in such a style ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... said Walter positively, "call them boys; to call them young men is all bosh; we shall have 'young gentlemen' next, which is awful twaddle." ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... and therefore let there be an end of it. I hate the twaddle talk of love, whether it's about myself or about any one else. It makes me feel ashamed of my sex, when I find that I cannot talk of myself to another woman without being supposed to be either in love or thinking of love cither ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... shall not now, however, proceed to show how the universe of Astral Light may be considered under the symbol of an Icosahedron. I shall only state that this conception of the Aryan philosophers is not to be looked upon as mere "theological twaddle" or as the outcome of wild fancy. The real significance of the conception in question can, I believe, be explained by reference to the psychology and the physical science of the ancients. But I must stop here and proceed to consider the ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... her song, till at last I got very tired of it, and on the third evening I broke away from her, saying, "Law, granny how you do twaddle!" upon which she called me a good-for-nothing young blackguard, and felt positively sure that I should be hanged. The consequence was, that granny and I did not part good friends; and I sincerely hoped that when I had come back again, I should ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... repeated the patient, with a short laugh. "Well, I've heard that it would do great things, but I never took any stock in it; it seemed like so much twaddle to me. You are sure you're ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... disappointingly. Fanny indeed had no literary gift, but it was new to Miss Winchelsea to find herself deploring the want of gifts in a friend. That letter was even criticised aloud in the safe solitude of Miss Winchelsea's study, and her criticism, spoken with great bitterness, was "Twaddle!" It was full of just the things Miss Winchelsea's letter had been full of, particulars of the school. And of Mr. Snooks, only this much: "I have had a letter from Mr. Snooks, and he has been over to see me on two Saturday ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... there might be something in it. Perhaps it helped a man into Parliament, Parliament still being a confused retrogressive corner in the world where lawyers and suchlike sheltered themselves from the onslaughts of common-sense behind a fog of Latin and Greek and twaddle and tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go into Parliament, unless I meant to be a lawyer. Did I mean to be a lawyer? It cost no end of money, and was full of uncertainties, and there were no judges nor great solicitors among my relations. "Young chaps think they get on by themselves," said my uncle. ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... now said are wise and thoughtful words. Young as you are, you are nevertheless, so far as the true perception of art is concerned, a long way ahead of many of our old and much vaunted masters, who have a good deal of stupid foolish twaddle about their painting, but never get at the true root of the matter. Body alive, man! When you were talking about my pictures, I then began to understand myself for the first time, I believe; and because you do not imitate my style,—do not, like a good many others, take ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... passion or prejudice, he showed neither fear nor favor, denouncing bad work by the most illustrious hands and commending obscure merit. The "impudent literary cliques" who puffed each other's books; the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings who manufactured verses for the "Annuals;" and the twaddle of the "genial" incapables who praised them in flabby reviews—all these Poe exposed with ferocious honesty. Nor, though his writings are unmoral, can they be called in any sense immoral. His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness as ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... said publicly that no such earnestness in religious, matters had ever been exhibited there. The plan of Mission work was simple, practicable, commended itself to hard-headed men of business. Many came to hear who had been disgusted with the usual sentiment- alism and twaddle, the absence of knowledge of human nature, the amount of conventional prejudice, &c. They were induced to come by friends who represented that this was something quite different, and these men went away convinced in many cases, seconding resolutions ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Claudia, my fair one—a cup of wine next. And after that shall Rome make Senators of her women and thou shalt be Brutus, for, by the gods, thou makest a ripe speech. Here's to thee, Claudia, my love. A Roman thou art though much taken with the twaddle of a Jew. And here is to the Jew. May he live long to oil his beard, haggle over fish in the market place, cry 'Unclean' at sight of a Gentile and pray in musty synagogues for the kingdom greater than that of Rome. Let us now to bed and see thou hast no dreams to disturb ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... difficulty, as a monitor who is encouraging rather than severe. Mr. Cleves has the wonderful art of preaching sermons which the wheelwright and the blacksmith can understand; not because he talks condescending twaddle, but because he can call a spade a spade, and knows how to disencumber ideas of their wordy frippery. Look at him more attentively, and you will see that his face is a very interesting one —that there is a great deal of humour and feeling playing in his ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... think I'd made a kind of a start that time—only I got pulled up too short. I dare say I quite deserved it. That's no way of liking a woman. When you do really, you know all the rest's been half twaddle and half greed. Your father and mother are all right—so are mine really, though they do blow each other's heads off—still, there's something ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... together I was rushing about town paying calls and listening to compliments which my soul abhors. Alas and alack! In Petersburg I am becoming fashionable like Nana. While Korolenko, who is serious, is hardly known to the editors, my twaddle is being read by all Petersburg. Even the senator G. reads me.... It is gratifying, but my literary feeling is wounded. I feel ashamed of the public which runs after lap-dogs simply because it fails to notice elephants, and I am deeply ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... in the nostrils. Its liberty is the wildest license; its love the essence of the lowest lust! Priapus—worshipping obscenity. Rant and rubbish. Linguistic silliness. Inhumanly insolent. Apotheosis of Sweat. Mouthings of a mountebank. Venomously malignant. Pretentious twaddle. Degraded helot of literature. His work, like a maniac's robe, bedizened with fluttering tags of a thousand colors. Roaming, like a drunken satyr, with inflamed blood, through every field of lascivious ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... But here, too, the old leaven of Oxford burst forth sometimes. Of course, we generally performed the music of Handel and other classical authors; Mendelssohn's compositions were still considered as mere twaddle by some of the old school. At one of these evenings, the old organist of New College, with his wooden leg, after sitting through a rehearsal of Mendelssohn's Hymn of Praise, which I was conducting at the pianoforte, ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... program night, for you would have had a better idea of the scope we try to cover at the other kind, but perhaps this will be more entertaining." She turned more directly to Frank. "A business meeting here always makes me think of the 'Antis,' and their twaddle about woman's sphere, which they would like to reduce ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... you; let an author of renown fill a book with twaddle, and if it is not praised by the critics, you may ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... twaddle I ever saw," said Mr. Malcolm. "If the American people talk like that, how fatiguing it would be to live among them! I could not write so badly, or such bad English. I must take a successful English novel as ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... 'That's twaddle, Dora. Fools will be fools to the world's end. Answer a fool according to his folly; supply a simpleton with the reading he craves, if it will put money in your pocket. You have discouraged poor Whelpdale in one of the most notable projects of ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... not thrown away if it be introduced in the proper quarters. Divine peeresses are no longer interesting, though possessed of every virtue; but a pattern peasant or an immaculate manufacturing hero may talk as much twaddle as one of Mrs Ratcliffe's heroines, and still be listened to. Perhaps, however, Mr Sentiment's great attraction is in his second-rate characters. If his heroes and heroines walk upon stilts, as heroes and heroines, I fear, ever must, their attendant ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... so sure about that. I know many eminent saints in the church who will eat lobster salad for supper, and then send for the doctor and minister before morning. There is a precious twaddle about 'mysterious Providence.' Providence isn't half so mysterious as people make out. The doctor is expected to look serious and sympathetic, and call their law-breaking and its penalty by some outlandish Latin name that no one can understand. ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... the testy interruption; "but the world is not so easily led in matters of religion. The message, as you say, is divine; but it may sound like meaningless twaddle to the world at large. If we are to heal mankind and dispel the heresy of disease and death, why can't Holiest Mother save herself? Mind you, I am looking at this thing with the eyes of ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... chair and looked hard at us. His eyes were as keen as frost; but they twinkled—just a little, as I have discovered they can and do twinkle if one isn't afraid to say right out what one means, without unnecessary fuss and twaddle. ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... never been tired, as to the death of convicted criminals: the impressive scene, the chaplain—who has always converted the victim—the hardened criminal preaching to his fellow convicts, the battery of guns, the convicts on their knees; and then the twaddle and reflections which never lead to any change in the management of the prisons where eighteen hundred ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... makes me drink. Too much Nature's been my ruin. I'd be sober enough in a big town with lively streets and bustle and riot and row. I wouldn't drink there. I'd show them the pace, I'd go it myself once more and be d——d to all this rot and twaddle about Nature! Nature doesn't care for me. So careful of the type she seems, but so careless of the single life. She doesn't bother her head about me, or you, or Henry ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... the hearty contempt and antipathy which such an athletic and boisterous genius as Fielding's must have entertained. He couldn't do otherwise than laugh at the puny Cockney bookseller, pouring out endless volumes of sentimental twaddle, and hold him up to scorn as a moll-coddle and a milksop. His genius had been nursed on sack-posset, and not on dishes of tea. His muse had sung the loudest in tavern choruses, had seen the daylight streaming in over thousands ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... returned Lamotte, sulkily. "Vandyck don't seem to realize that I have a prior claim, and that his twaddle, therefore, only serves to render ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... your child by all the love and appreciation at your command, but let it be intelligent appreciation, not blind admiration or prejudiced disapproval. Do you recollect how you felt and dreamed and gushed when you were a girl, the pages of sentimental twaddle (as you now call it) which you confided to the diary which you burned in disgust at twenty-one? Do you remember how genuine your distresses then seemed? You can smile at the girl you once were, but still you find it in your heart to pity her, poor, silly child, foolishly ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... avoid him. What is the last rose of summer to do under such circumstances? What, indeed, but retire into the country? A man may shine there long after he is voted a bore in town, provided none of his old friends are there to proclaim him. Country people are tolerant of twaddle, and slow of finding things out for themselves. Puff now turned his attention to the country, or rather to the advertisements of estates for sale, and immortal George Robins soon fitted him with one of his earthly paradises; a mansion replete with every modern ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... said that your degree was not in the least a proof of your abilities: he said that you knocked up and got flurried in examinations. Oh!"—her cheek flushed,—"I wish I was a man. The whole world lies before them. They can do anything. They aren't cooped up with servants and tea parties and twaddle. But where's this ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... lifted their heads wearily, and gazed at each other wistfully, dreamily, dazed; then presently began to twaddle to each other in a wandering and childish way. At intervals they lapsed into silences, leaving a sentence unfinished, seemingly either unaware of it or losing their way. Sometimes, when they woke out of these silences they ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... yourself, my friend," she interrupted him remorselessly. "See, come to the window. Now look at me—and then don't talk any more twaddle about care and ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... in the world. He notes the weakness and failures of the best intentioned, takes cognizance of the low motives that so often dominate, and bases his conclusions on them. He spurns the idealistic twaddle of those who, he says, are guided by their hopes rather than by ordinary good sense, and fancies himself a practical man. He expects ...
— Hidden from the Prudent - The 7th William Penn Lecture, May 8, 1921 • Paul Jones
... with hearty acquiescence, not to say enthusiasm. Rosmer interrupts the Rector's tete-a-tete with the fascinating Rebecca, and declines the proffered editorship, because he is a Radical, and an atheist. End of Act I.,—no action to speak of, but a good deal of wordy twaddle. In Act II. we learn that the late Mrs. Rosmer has committed suicide, because she was informed that the apostate Pastor could only save his villainy from exposure by giving immediately the position of wife to her friend Rebecca. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 14, 1891. • Various
... institutions in moulding the next generation. It will not, I think, be amiss to pass beyond policy for a space, and to insist—even with heaviness—that however convenient an institution may be, however much it may, in the twaddle of the time, be a "natural growth," and however much the "product of a long evolution," yet, if it does not mould men into fine and vigorous forms, it has to be destroyed. We "save the state" for the sake of our children, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... the publishers' files. This man is an honour to the profession, and I believe there are many such. Certainly there are many who sigh wistfully when they must lay aside some cherished writing of their own to devote an evening to illiterate twaddle. Five book manuscripts a day, thirty a week, close to fifteen hundred a year—that is a fair showing for the head reader ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... cultivation of the mind interferes with a woman's moral, sentimental, or motherly qualities is foolish twaddle. ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... moment. Our starting-point lay 350 geographical miles from Scott's winter quarters in McMurdo Sound, so there could be no question of encroaching upon his sphere of action. Moreover, Professor Nansen, in his direct and convincing way, has put an end once for all to this twaddle, so that I need not dwell upon it ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... you were she. No music, thanks; I have never listened to it since she died. Your mother played beautifully, children; she played and she sang. I liked her songs; I hate the twaddle of the present day. Now I am returning to my Virgil. My renderings of the original text become more and more full of light. I shall secure a vast reputation. Music! I hate music. Don't disturb me, any ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... for the marsupial martyr Is based upon an ancient nursery model; But he will find that he has caught a Tartar, Who hints that Punch is talking heartless twaddle. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... the public may, without injury to Art or history, employ the painters who make the prettiest pictures of them; it doesn't matter to the future, if Mr. Jenkins, or even the Hon. Mr. Twaddle, has employed the promising Mr. Mahlstock to perpetuate him with a hundred transitory and borrowed graces,—if the talented young litterateur, Mr. Simeah, has been found by his limner to resemble Lord Byron amazingly, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... put our man into a pulpit, and we virtually tell him 'Now, you may stand there and talk to us for half-an-hour. We won't interrupt you by so much as a word! You shall have it all your own way!' And what does he give us in return? Shallow twaddle, that, if it were addressed to you over a dinner-table, you would think 'Does the man take ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... States was breaking with its past and engaging in European quarrels; as a consequence of the war it would acquire territories and embark on a career of "imperialism." Page was impatient at this kind of twaddle. He declared that the Spanish War was a "necessary act of surgery for the health of civilization." He did not believe that a nation, simply because it was small, should be permitted to maintain indefinitely a human slaughter ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... more wisely and sensibly than their friends report them to do, I put them in the same category. The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of "Spiritualism" is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a seance. [(Quoted from a review in the "Daily News," October 17, 1871, of the Report on Spiritualism of the Committee of the London ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... Gipsy children, these children and roadside arabs, for the want of education, ambition, animation, and push, are indulging in practices that are fast working their own destruction and those they are brought into contact with, and a great deal of this may lay at the door of flattery, twaddle, petting, and fear. ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... Lady Jane's "panegyric," which she had read—not connecting it however with her right-hand neighbour; and while I strained my ear for his reply I heard him, to my stupefaction, call back gaily, his mouth full of bread: "Oh, it's all right—the usual twaddle!" ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... enforced. The question is full of difficulties. To prevent or attempt to prevent the owner of a garden from shooting the bullfinches or blackbirds and so on that steal his fruit, or destroy his buds, is absurd. It is equally absurd to fine—what twaddle!—a lad for taking a bird's egg. The only point upon which I am fully clear is that the birdcatcher who takes birds on land not his own or in his occupation, on public property, as roads, wastes, commons, and ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... in the admirable beauty and brilliance of the poem. The successive scenes are given with so firm and clear a touch—there is such a sense of form, the language is such a dexterous elevation of the ordinary social twaddle into the mock-heroic, that it is impossible not to recognize a consummate artistic power. The dazzling display of true wit and fancy blinds us for the time to the want of that real tenderness and humour, which would ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... him out. He has letters not only from his Government, but from some of its most prominent men whom it would be unwise to offend at this time. Just listen to his twaddle about universal peace and that sort of thing, and then pass him on to Graves with a quiet warning such ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... infamous creatures as Raeburn had no business to have daughters. No doubt she would stand it very well anything, you know, for a little notoriety. Such people lived for notoriety. Of course the papers had put in a lot of twaddle that he had said on his death bed 'always had tried to work entirely for the good of humanity,' and that sort of nonsense. This coffee ice is excellent. Let me get you another," after which the subject would be dropped, and ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... "cease this weak, washy, everlasting flood of twaddle, and tell us whether you'll ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... and Freedom and English Misrule, but Mr. Quinn waved his hands before his face and made a wry expression at him. "All your talk about the freedom of Ireland is twaddle, John Marsh ... if you don't mind, I'll begin callin' you John Marsh this minute ... an' I may as well tell you I don't believe in the tyranny of England. The English aren't cruel—they're stupid. That's what they are—Thick! As thick as they can be, ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... afternoon I had more trouble with the Germans. The German military party 'fear' that the Entente may, perhaps, be inclined to agree to a general peace, and could not think of ending the war in this 'unprofitable' fashion. It is intolerable to have to listen to such twaddle. ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... to the fact that he was beginning to give vent to a lot of twaddle, and speedily, pleading fatigue, she paid no further notice to him. This compelled Pao-y to at last be quiet and go to sleep. By the morrow, all recollection of the discussion had vanished from ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... it "a human book, written out of the heart of a live man, not merely out of the brain of an author, full of tenderness and pathos, without a scrap of sentimentality, of sense without dogmatism, of earnestness without twaddle—a book that makes one feel friends at once and for always with the man or woman who wrote it." She guessed the author was "a man of middle age, with a wife, from whom he has got those beautiful feminine touches in his book, a good many children, and a dog that ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... admiramur, both of these nations: we marvel, we wonder at them exceedingly. Greece we shall omit, because to talk of the arts, and Phidias, and Pericles, and 'all that,' is the surest way yet discovered by man for tempting a vindictive succession of kicks. Exposed to the world, no author of such twaddle could long evade assassination. But Rome is entitled to some separate notice, even after all that has been written about her. And the more so in this case, because Mr. Finlay has scarcely done her justice. He ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... degradation, was likely to convict them of their mistake. But if bearing a grudge be the sure mark of a small mind in the individual, can it be a proof of high spirit in a nation? If the result of the present estrangement between the two countries shall be to make us more independent of British twaddle (Indomito nec dira ferens stipendia Tauro), so much the better; but if it is to make us insensible to the value of British opinion in matters where it gives us the judgment of an impartial and cultivated outsider, if we are to shut ourselves out from the advantages of English culture, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... in this chapter on fighting of malice prepense, partly because I want to give you a true picture of what everyday school life was in my time, and not a kid-glove and go-to-meeting-coat picture, and partly because of the cant and twaddle that's talked of boxing and fighting with fists nowadays. Even Thackeray has given in to it; and only a few weeks ago there was some rampant stuff in the Times on the subject, in ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... she gets a mocking letter telling her that he is married already; when the remorseless turn of Fortune's wheel loses her the real lover whom she at last really does love—then it is not mere sentimental-Romantic twaddle; it is a slice of life, soaked in the wine ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... 34,000 kindred hulks on outdoor relief, lifting each an ounce of mould with a shovel, while 5000 lads are pretending to break stones," and exclaims, "Can it be a charity to keep men alive on these terms? In face of all the twaddle of the earth, shoot a man rather than train him (with heavy expense to his neighbours) to be a deceptive human swine." Superficial travellers generally praise the Irish. Carlyle had not been long in their country when he ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... silence; that she was in deadly earnest he recognized, she was no hysterical fool or given to sentimental twaddle. ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... compliments; they would be immoral. You have behaved badly, badly, badly. I have never had such a right-about-face in my life. You will deserve the stigma: you will be notorious: you will be called Number Two. Think of that! Not even original! We will break the conference, or I shall twaddle to extinction. I think I heard ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was talking that ridiculous twaddle. It was trying to flirt with a silly school-girl. What will do for fifteen is somewhat ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... have read any of the twaddle that is written about Whitman's grossness, his materialism, and so forth? If so, read his poems now, and tell me how they impress you. Is he not all spirit, rightly understood? For to him the body with its energies is but manifestation of that something invisible which we call human soul. And ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... all. As soon as the nurse came Mrs. Orde gave up her post. I tell you," cried Doctor McMullen with as near an approach to enthusiasm as he ever permitted himself, "there's a sensible woman! None of your story-book twaddle about nursing through the illness, and all that. When her usefulness was ended, she knew enough to step aside gracefully. There was not much danger as far as she was concerned. I had vaccinated her myself, you know, last year. But she MIGHT take ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... morals than full occupation of the mind with useful labor. Fashionable idleness is a foe to virtue. The young man or the young woman who wastes the precious hours of life in listless dreaming, or in that sort of senseless twaddle which forms the bulk of the conversation in some circles, is in very great danger of demoralization. Many of the usages and customs of fashionable society seem to open the door to vice, and to insidiously, and at first unconsciously, ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... baffled and sombre, biting his pen and wondering what was meant by the "rewards" of literature, he generally ended by tossing away the composition deflowered by Mr. Locket and trying his hand at the sort of twaddle that Mrs. Ryves might be able to set to music. Success in these experiments wouldn't be a reward of literature, but it might very well become a labour of love. The experiments would be pleasant enough for him if they were pleasant ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... my ears; and it needed all my diplomacy to enable me to conceal my sense of triumph. Forty odd letters! There must be an enormous amount of information in forty odd letters; unless the woman wrote the direst twaddle ever penned by ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... I wish the state of the trade were ten times worse than it is, and then things would find their true level, and an original work would be properly appreciated, and a set of people who have no pretensions to write, having nothing to communicate but tea-table twaddle, could no longer be palmed off upon the public as mighty lions and lionesses. But to the question: What are your intentions with respect to "The Bible in Spain"? I am a frank man, and frankness never offends me. Has ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... penny-in-the-slot machines that you see at stations. You insert your penny. You set your prize subject. In the former case you hope for wax vestas, and you get butterscotch. In the latter, you hope for something at least readable, and you get the most complete, terrible, uninspired twaddle that was ever written on paper. The boy mind'—here the ash of his cigar fell off on to his waistcoat—'the merely boy ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... an admiring reader of the Albums, the Souvenirs, the Keepsakes, and all that flood of Christmas-present lore which yearly irrigated England, with pretty covers and engravings; and floods of elegant twaddle—the milk, not destitute of water, on which the babes of literature were then fed. On this, my genius throve. I had a little album, enriched with many gems of original thought and observation, which I jotted down in suitable language. Lately, turning ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... copy of the Gospel Hymns, walked out of one of the meetings after hearing this hymn-tune, and on reaching home, tore out the leaves that contained the song and threw them into the fire, saying he had "never heard such twaddle" in all his life. ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... no promise that she would not go. They had parted, the evening before, after a bitter quarrel; and he had left her, vowing that he would not return till she sent for him. He had waited the whole day, in vain, for a sign. What was Dove with his pompous twaddle to him? Every slight sound on the stairs or in the passage meant more. He was listening, listening, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... belonging to them, and consequently of the conversation of lady politicians, made up as it is of these details and personalities. And the more interested I am in the thing itself, the more angry I am with the nonsense they talk about it, and had rather listen to the most humdrum domestic twaddle. Mind, I mean the regular hardened lady politicians who talk of nothing else, of whom I could name ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... have married a man whom she both dislikes and despises. And, further, she must be proof against the weakness which some of her sex exhibit, of growing fond of husbands who, without being Admirable Crichtons, treat them kindly and with forbearance. Next, she must have thrown overboard all the twaddle about domestic duties and responsibilities. If her child sickens of the measles just as she is starting for her bivouac in Norway, or a course of dinners in the Palais Royal, her duty is to call in the ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... translation of the Sentimental Journey that Shandy had been read by a good many Germans, but follows this remark with the query, "How many have understood it?" "One finds people," he says, "who despise it as the most nonsensical twaddle, and cannot comprehend how others, whom they must credit with a good deal of understanding, wit, and learning, think quite otherwise of it," and he closes by noting the necessity that one be acquainted with the follies of the world, and especially of the British world, to appreciate the ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... nationalities was discussed in a newspaper which Durtal showed him. The abbe shrugged his shoulders, putting aside the patriotic twaddle. "For me," he said calmly, "for me my country is that ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... in all that silly love-making," he rejoined roughly, "it is good enough for the loutish peasants of the alfold (lowlands); they are sentimental and stupid: an educated man does not make use of a lot of twaddle when he woos the ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... historians like Stubbs and Maitland, etc., etc. But they are all dead now, and whom have we to take their place?" It is not until an age has receded into history, and all its mediocrity has dropped away from it, that we can see it as it is—as a group of men of genius. We forget the immense amount of twaddle that the great epochs produced. The total amount of fine literature created in a given period of time differs from epoch to epoch, but it does not differ much. And we may be perfectly sure that our own age will make a favourable impression upon that excellent judge, posterity. Therefore, beware of ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... cultured old relic, unshakably made sure of his high name for scholarship by the fact that he had written dozens of books which nobody else had even read. So he said, friendlily enough: "Then that would seem to settle your pretensions. To have talked twaddle in Paff's beer-cellar is the one real proof of literary merit, no matter what sort of twaddle you may have written in your book, or in many books, as I am here in this academy to attest. Moreover, I am old enough to remember when cookery-books were sold openly upon the newsstands, and ...
— Taboo - A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Saevius Nicanor, with - Prolegomena, Notes, and a Preliminary Memoir • James Branch Cabell
... prose of such a book as Rousseau's Confessions. Macaulay thought the Prelude a poorer and more tiresome Excursion, with the old flimsy philosophy about the effect of scenery on the mind, the old crazy mystical metaphysics, and the endless wilderness of twaddle; still he admits that there are some fine descriptions and energetic declamations. All Macaulay's tastes and habits of mind made him a poor judge of such a poet as Wordsworth. He valued spirit, energy, pomp, stateliness of form ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Well, why not! An Inca can do nothing. He is tied hand and foot. A constitutional monarch is openly called an India-rubber stamp. An emperor is a puppet. The Inca is not allowed to make a speech: he is compelled to take up a screed of flatulent twaddle written by some noodle of a minister and read it aloud. But look at the American President! He is the Allerhochst, if you like. No, madam, believe me, there is nothing like Democracy, American Democracy. Give the people ...
— The Inca of Perusalem • George Bernard Shaw
... in architecture, is not so in fact, as Quicherat has very clearly demonstrated, and, since him, Lecoy de la Marche. The study of archives has, on this point, completely overset the hobbies of architects, and demolished the twaddle of the Bonzes. Besides, there is abundant evidence of the employment of the pointed arch side by side with the round arch in a perfectly systematic design, in the construction of many Romanesque churches; in the Cathedrals ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... these lectures without being charmed by their singular freshness and originality of thought, their earnest, simple eloquence, and their manly piety. There is no mawkish sentiment, no lukewarm, semi-religious twaddle, smacking of the Record; no proclamation of party views or party opinions, but a broad, healthy, living, and fervent exposition of one of the most difficult books in the Bible. Every page is full of personal ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... adorn the scene, when David Jost advanced smilingly, evidently sure of a friendly recognition. For had not the King, when Crown Prince and Heir-Apparent, hunted game in his preserves?—yea, had he not even dined with him?—and had not he, Jost, written whole columns of vapid twaddle about the 'Royal smile' and the 'Royal favour' till the outside public had sickened at every stroke of his flunkey pen? How came it, then, that his Majesty seemed on this occasion to have no recollection of him, and looked over ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... Street by half-past nine. He rather expected to see old Grogan on the platform, and was not sure whether he was relieved or disappointed by his absence. On the one hand, he could hardly have borne Grogan's twaddle on the journey to Tilbury, his mind being engrossed as it was. On the other, he looked to him to cover his presence at ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... sharply featured faces, and their wigs bobbing at each other, discussing the events and tendencies of their time. And how they must have talked—no wonder Frederick, though the idol of his subjects, withdrew for such discourse from the society of the day, with its twaddle of the tea-cups and ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... repeating the same idiotic words: 'You can't create art out of science,' says one; 'Mechanical appliances kill poetry,' says another; and a pack of fools wail over the fate of the flowers, as though anybody wished the flowers any harm! I'm sick of all such twaddle; I should like to answer all that snivelling with some work of open defiance. I should take a pleasure in shocking those good people. Shall I tell you what was the finest thing I ever produced since I first began to work, and the one ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... abounded in them. They bore names fanciful or grotesque, such as The Ardent, The Illuminated, The Unconquered, The Intrepid, or The Dissonant, The Sterile, The Insipid, The Obtuse, The Astray, The Stunned, and they were all devoted to one purpose, namely, the production and the perpetuation of twaddle. It is prodigious to think of the incessant wash of slip-slop which they poured out in verse; of the grave disputations they held upon the most trivial questions; of the inane formalities of their sessions. ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... the wife of Mr. Pierce Butler, a wealthy slave-owner, in 1834. The next year her Journal appeared, in which she criticised what she had seen and heard with a free hand, but "'twas pretty Fanny's way," and no one got angry over her silly twaddle. One of the fair author's predictions concerning the fate of our polity yet awaits fulfillment. "It is my conviction," said she, "that America will be a monarchy before I am a skeleton." Fifty years have passed since these words were written, and the prophetess has developed into a portly ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... prevailing over form. It is far more important that boys should learn from original, intellectually keen men than they should learn from perfectly respectable men, or perfectly orthodox men, or perfectly nice men. The vital thing to consider about your son's schoolmaster is whether he talked lifeless twaddle yesterday by way of a lesson, and not whether he loved unwisely or was born of poor parents, or was seen wearing a frock-coat in combination with a bowler, or confessed he doubted the Apostles' Creed, or called himself a Socialist, or any disgraceful thing ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... a doubt that he meant this melodramatic twaddle. It did not seem twaddle or melodramatic to her—or, for that matter, to him. She clasped him more closely. "What's the matter, dear?" she asked, her head ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... you love me well enough.' She longed to be told by him that he loved her. He had no objection to tell her so, but, without thinking much about it, felt it to be a bore. All that kind of thing was trash and twaddle. He desired her to accept him; and he would have wished, were it possible, that she should have gone to her father for his consent. There was something in the big eyes and heavy jaws of Mr Melmotte which he almost feared. 'Do you really love me ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... Flew she down to Ealing. "GEORGIE, stop it! Pray you, drop it; Hark to my appealing: To this foolish Papal rule-ish Twaddle put an ending; This a swerve is From ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... Captain, with a strident laugh; "and where did you pick up your sense of right, madam, I should like to know? From what Methodist parson's hypocritical twaddle have you learnt to lay down the law to your poor old father about the sense of right? 'Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land,' miss, that's what your Bible teaches you; but the Bible has gone out of fashion, I dare say, since I ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... in its results thus far than the blowing up of munition factories, the setting afire of grain elevators, the enciting of Mexico—has been the honorless skill with which they have fed the American mind upon the idea of a disgruntled Germany, a starving Germany, and all such twaddle! Can't you see why such tales are being circulated? Simply to inject into our minds the poison of national inertia, so that when war comes—as it some day shall—every fellow will be likely to think: 'Oh, it can't last long now!—let the ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... how long an hour is, so that people would think that you were completely mad. Stop this twaddle and let us elders talk together.—Listen, my dear Jeppe Berg! Do you think it is wise for these two young people to marry before ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... interrupted. My mood would not tolerate twaddle about "the cause" and "promises" from Burbank—Burbank, whose "cause," as he had just shown afresh, was himself alone, and who promised everything to everybody and kept only the most advantageous promises after he had made absolutely sure how his advantage lay. "It's ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... forth, acquired an interest in Danyers's eyes. She was like a volume of unindexed and discursive memoirs, through which he patiently plodded in the hope of finding embedded amid layers of dusty twaddle some precious allusion to the subject of his thought. When, some months later, he brought out his first slim volume, in which the remodelled college essay on Rendle figured among a dozen, somewhat overstudied "appreciations," he offered ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... from Ramsgate, Mrs. Finch began to drift into, what you call, Twaddle. She had just discovered (exactly as Oscar had supposed) that she had lost my letter. She would keep her own letter back until the next day, on the chance of finding it. If she failed she must try ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... and, in addition to keeping your journal, keep it locked up, for it is quite enough to endure all the children's twaddle, ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... in his power to prevent an absolute effusion of lead. He was a great hand at an apology, and could regulate its proper degree of indifference or abjectness to the exact state of the case; he could make it almost satisfactory to the receiver, without being very disagreeable to the giver; he could twaddle about honour for ever without causing bloodshed; and would, if possible, protect a man's reputation and body at ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... 719: Playing on the signification of the name,—"king of the city." This piece of twaddle has not been omitted by Plato ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... classics is pat in, Suggests to our writers, as test of their "style," Just to turn their equivocal prose into Latin, As DRYDEN did. Truly the plan makes one smile! Reviewers find Novelists' nonsense much weary 'em. Writers of twaddle Take DRYDEN a model— Turn your books into some great "dead ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 20, 1891 • Various
... helplessly, childishly stupid as to any literary merits,—a mere mass of gossip and twaddle; but after all, when one remembers the taste of the thousands of circulating-library readers, it must not be considered the less likely to be widely read on that account. It is only once in a century that a writer of real genius has the art to tell ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... great by skill, and greater by a writer's soul honestly flung into its pages, "Uncle Tom," to the surprise of many that twaddle traditional phrases in reviews and magazines about the art of fiction, and to the surprise of no man who knows anything about the art of fiction, was all the rage. Not to have read it was like not to have read the ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... you would tell me what is the "twaddle about my marrying, etc.," which you hear. If I knew the details I should have a better chance of guessing the quarter from which such gossip comes—as it is, I am quite at a loss. Whom am I to marry? I think I have scarcely seen a single man with whom such a union would be possible ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... review it, I hope. I have had a sniff of it already in the proceedings of the Antiquarian Society. It is a brilliant specimen of the pedantic pottering of the learned body which enables me to append to my name the A.S.S., fraudulently inverted into S.S.A. Such twaddle always excites me into feverishness. I ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... those words our sign of parting!" cried DUNRAVEN, swift upstarting; "Sweating's an accursed system, but if now our toil is o'er, We leave twaddle as sole token of the swelling words we've spoken. Public faith in us is broken! Bah! I quit, I "bust", boil o'er! Take my seat, sign your Report, about such bosh my spirit ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... want of education, ambition, animation, and push, are indulging in practices that are fast working their own destruction and those they are brought into contact with, and a great deal of this may lay at the door of flattery, twaddle, petting, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... had turned from the window to her face, and she paused and looked up. There was a faint dash of color on Mr. Vernon's cheeks, and a tightening of the lips. It seemed to Nell, judging by his expression, that he had suddenly become impatient of the twaddle, and she instantly dropped the paper on her lap. But Mrs. Lorton was enjoying herself too much to permit of ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... distance, an intense feeling of misery crept over me, as I reflected that perchance I had left those most dear to return to them no more. But I forget; a description of private feelings is, to uninterested readers, only so much twaddle, besides being more egotistical than even an account of personal adventures could extenuate; so, with the exception of a few extracts from my "log," I shall jump at once from the English Channel to the ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... carry a novel into chapel to read, not out of any respect for some people's old-womanish twaddle about the sacredness of the place,—but because some of the blues might see you.—Yale Lit. Mag., ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... far Mr. Tiralla had not said a word, but now he started up from his seat and banged the table with his fist. "Stop that twaddle!" He [Pg 125] raised his hand as though he were going to box the child's ears. She shrank back ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... place discreetly and on tiptoe, talking twaddle as she went and bending her head and her eyeglass over various objects with an air of imperfect comprehension that didn't prevent Nick's private recall of the story of her underhand, commercial habits told ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... had the organ-grinders play. But such organs are noisy and draw people to the windows and into the street. And why butcher the victim, since so many strong men could easily have strangled him? Show me the medical report. Monsieur, does it not speak of a gash rather than a stab? And what twaddle, that about the funeral train, what betraying arrangements in a country where every sign-post has eyes! I am accused of having rushed into my uncle's house the following day and stolen some papers. Where are those papers? My uncle died almost poor. His claim against me was transferred to President ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... the whole, but they were a little too strong, too violent against the Bill,' because Harrowby had declared that he felt the same objection to the measure he had felt before. Sefton was outrageous, talked a vast deal of amusing nonsense, 'that he had never heard such twaddle,' 'but that the success was complete, and he looked on Harrowby and Wharncliffe as the two most enviable men in the kingdom.' I have no doubt that all the ultras will be deeply mortified at the moderation of Lord Grey and of the Duke of Wellington, and at the success so far ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... later and less skillful hand, and we should be sorry to have anyone lay the book aside and lose the pleasure of reading Snorre's and Olaf's charming work, because he became disgusted with what seemed to him mere silly twaddle. And yet these Forewords and Afterwords become interesting enough when taken up in connection with a study of the historical anthropomorphized Odin. With a view of giving a pretty complete outline of the founder of ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... Thorn," I repeated with emphasis. I knew he had in mind that abominable twaddle about ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... cheerful, but he does not sing, "Tra la la, all the things that are, are good." He says, "There are bad things, but I must carry on and fight the good fight." His is a philosophy of courage and endurance, but not of optimistic twaddle. He is too wide-brained to speak of life as "all good" when he knows of inherited disease, cruelty, preventable poverty, gross neglect and unmerited misfortune. Yet he lends hope and comfort to the afflicted, and he has an unvarying comfort ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... one can understand the hearty contempt and antipathy which such an athletic and boisterous genius as Fielding's must have entertained. He couldn't do otherwise than laugh at the puny Cockney bookseller, pouring out endless volumes of sentimental twaddle, and hold him up to scorn as a moll-coddle and a milksop. His genius had been nursed on sack-posset, and not on dishes of tea. His muse had sung the loudest in tavern choruses, had seen the daylight streaming in over thousands of emptied bowls, and reeled home to chambers ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... look with astonishment and distrust at any one trying to break away from their tiresome old ways and habits, and wonder why all the world is not as pleased with their personalities as they are themselves, suggesting, if you are willing to waste your time listening to their twaddle, that there is something radically wrong in any innovation, that both "Church and State" will be imperilled if things are altered. No blight, no mildew is more fatal to a plant than the "complacent" ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... you read, "Last week's baby will surely talk some day," and you are amazed, as at a brilliant discovery. And you cannot but ask: To whom are these exhortations addressed? To children or to idiots? The grown men and women of the United States, can hardly regard such poor twaddle as this with a serious eye. And what of the writers? How can they reconcile their lofty tone, which truly is above suspicion, with the shameful sensationalism of their news-columns? They know not the meaning of sincerity. If they really believed that "a baby ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... cheek flush and your eye sparkle, till "heart, brain, and soul are all on fire," over the burning words of some Brontean Pythoness, but when you open the last thrilling work of Maggie Marigold, and are immediately submerged "in a weak, washy, everlasting flood" of insipidity, twaddle, bosh, and heart-rending sorrow, you do not shut the book with a jerk. Why not? Because in the dismal distance you dimly descry two figures swimming, floating, struggling towards each other, and a languid soupcon of curiosity detains you till you have ascertained, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... VERE DE VERE, I vow that you were not a flirt, The daughter of a hundred Earls Would not a single creature hurt. "Kind hearts are more than coronets," What abject twaddle, on my word; And then the joke is in the end,— We know they made the bard ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... artistic shape, there came to the hands of Boiardo and Ariosto, of Tasso and Spenser, only a strange, trumpery material, muddled by jongleurs and romance writers, and reduced to mere fairy stuff, taken seriously only by Don Quixote, and by the authors of the volumes of insane twaddle called after Amadis of Gaul and ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... mind never deals in anecdotes, unless it be for the purpose of illustrating some general principle. Women and weak men are all addicted to the vice. If a person of this description begins to annoy a company with his or her twaddle, the only cure for it is to affect deafness—a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various
... at Hookham-cum-Snivey Church, by the Reverend Peter Twaddle, on the occasions, of building a dusthole for the national schools; of outfitting the missionaries who are exported annually to be eaten by the Catawampous Indians; on the death of Mr. Grubly, the retired cheesemonger, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... of these nations: we marvel, we wonder at them exceedingly. Greece we shall omit, because to talk of the arts, and Phidias, and Pericles, and 'all that,' is the surest way yet discovered by man for tempting a vindictive succession of kicks. Exposed to the world, no author of such twaddle could long evade assassination. But Rome is entitled to some separate notice, even after all that has been written about her. And the more so in this case, because Mr. Finlay has scarcely done her justice. He says: 'The Romans were a tribe of warriors. All their institutions, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... handle it with antiseptic precautions. When a critic who has risen high enough to be allowed to sign his reviews in a daily paper calls a new book "a great human novel," you may be absolutely sure that the said novel consists chiefly of ridiculous twaddle. Mr. Whitten is not a humanist in that sense. He has no sentimentality, and a very great deal ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... of Elizabethan literature, and I rashly concluded at once that he must be most delightful. He likewise came. I showed him my few poor books, which he condemned, and I found that such observations as I could make he considered as mere twaddle. I knew nothing, or next to nothing, about the editions or the curiosities, or the proposed emendations of obscure passages, and he, too, departed abruptly. I began to think after he had gone that my study ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... drunkard or the women slovenly or the whole family was just naturally vicious. Ignorance may excuse some of this but not all of it. Perhaps I'm not what you'd call sympathetic but I've heard a lot of men talk about these people in a way that sounds to me like twaddle. I never ran across a family down here in such misery as that which Steve Bonnington's wife endured for ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... your fancy, and, in addition to keeping your journal, keep it locked up, for it is quite enough to endure all the children's twaddle, ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... to see Cardinal Begin. For an Orangeman like Hughes that was a desperate measure. He got what he expected—cynicism. Begin afterwards issued a letter to the press in which he tried to set the clergy above the law of conscription. No doubt the Cardinal came at Hughes with the twaddle invented by the Nationalists and later adopted by Laurier, about enforcing the Militia Act which provided for ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... set aside the proposed discussion on "The Effects of High Intellectual Culture on the Efficiency and Respectability of Manual Labor," and take up pressing questions. When one man was indulging in a lot of the senseless twaddle about his wife which many of them are fond of introducing in their speeches, she called him to order saying that the kind of a wife he had, had nothing to do with the subject. She introduced again the resolution ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Cross pointed out, setting down the tankard of beer from which he had been drinking. "You talk sometimes that white-livered stuff about not hitting a man back if he wants to hit you, and you drag in your conscience, and prate about all men being brothers, and that sort of twaddle. A full-blooded Englishman don't like it, because we are all of us out to protect what we've got, any way and anyhow. But that doesn't alter the fact that there's something wrong in the world when we're driven to do this protecting business ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... whether you have read any of the twaddle that is written about Whitman's grossness, his materialism, and so forth? If so, read his poems now, and tell me how they impress you. Is he not all spirit, rightly understood? For to him the body with its energies is but ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... babble, gabble, jabber, tattle, twaddle, blab, gossip, palaver, parley, converse, mumble, mutter, stammer, stutter.> (With this group compare the ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... it, but there were a great many vulgar suggestions and unpleasant innuendoes. As a dramatic critic said in my hearing a day or two later, when discussing the popular entertainments of London, 'Most of these shows consist of vulgar, brainless twaddle.' Still, the audience laughed and cheered, and when the curtain finally fell, there was a good deal of applause. Certainly the entertainment would be a great contrast to the experiences which the lads who were home on leave had been going through. But as I reflect ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... far removed from the average drawing-room medley of twaddle and rattle that the music interpreted the words into its own universal language, and ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... degree, not of kind. The Pharisees of Scripture pretended to be what they were not, and got roundly denounced as hypocrites for their pains. As a fact, they were only incipient actors. The talk about teaching is, to my thinking, undiluted twaddle. The inherent desire to simulate grows, or it does not grow. You cannot make it grow. If a naturally awkward man can simulate the graces of a dancing master, if a naturally graceful man can simulate the limp ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... of "those great formal dinners, which unite all the stiffness of a levee to all the disorder and discomfort of a two-shilling ordinary. Nothing can be duller. Nobody speaks except to the person next him. The conversation is the most deplorable twaddle, and, as I always sit next to the lady of the highest rank, or, in other words, to the oldest, ugliest, and proudest woman in the company, I am worse ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... else does the poor man work for? But I'm not going to argue that kindergarten twaddle of the college highbrows, Wayland. I'm out for all I can make; so is the Smelter; so are you; but the point is you've fought this timber thing; you have filed and filed and filed your recommendations for suit to be instituted; so have the Land Office ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... conversation of lady politicians, made up as it is of these details and personalities. And the more interested I am in the thing itself, the more angry I am with the nonsense they talk about it, and had rather listen to the most humdrum domestic twaddle. Mind, I mean the regular hardened lady politicians who talk of nothing else, of whom I could name several, ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... is the wildest license; its love the essence of the lowest lust! Priapus—worshipping obscenity. Rant and rubbish. Linguistic silliness. Inhumanly insolent. Apotheosis of Sweat. Mouthings of a mountebank. Venomously malignant. Pretentious twaddle. Degraded helot of literature. His work, like a maniac's robe, bedizened with fluttering tags of a thousand colors. Roaming, like a drunken satyr, with inflamed blood, through every field of lascivious thought. Muck ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... interest, and presently began to laugh. "So she begins to fear we have been somewhat hasty, asks a little time for reconsideration of her precise sentiment toward me, and feels meanwhile in honour bound to release me from our engagement! Yet if upon mature deliberation—eh, oh, yes! twaddle! and commonplace! and dashed, of course, with ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... these torsos of the haberdasher, one is not brought to thoughts of sad mortality. Their joy is so exultant. And all the things that they hold dear—canes, gloves, silk hats, and the newer garments on which fashion makes its twaddle—are within reach of their armless sleeves. Had they fingers they would be smoothing themselves before the glass. Their unbodied heads, wherever they may be, are still smiling on the world, despite their divorcement. Their tongues are still ready with a jest, their lips still parted ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... 'meetin's over,'" whispered Sibley, as Miss Burton rose from the piano. "I'm sick of all this pious twaddle, and would a thousand-fold rather listen to the music of your voice ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... toast was drunk the company braced themselves to the mental work of the afternoon, and although, as a matter of course, a good deal of twaddle was spoken, there was also much that threw light on the subject of ocean telegraphy. One of the leading merchants said, in his opening remarks: "Few of those present, I daresay, are really familiar with the history ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... wrote, some years later; 'how that name recalls the happy, happy hours I passed with you at Eartham; when by the title 'Muse' you summoned me to the morning walk!' Amongst the drossy twaddle which passed current as poetry at Eartham, a sonnet in Romney's honour by a true poet—William Cowper—may be counted ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... wretched twaddle I ever did read," he exclaimed, "this is positively the worst. Why, the rag would have the police arrest ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... paid no attention to the innocent twaddle of poor old Katie, though at a less horrible moment it might have served to amuse her. She hurried as fast as her agitation would permit her from the scene of the dreadful tragedy, unconscious how closely this poor murdered girl's fate would be connected with her own future destiny. She ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... good fortune when the propagandist of the New Ideas is something more than a bookish philosopher,—when he is a thorough 'man of the world,' and is what we emphatically call 'practical.' Yes, you owe me much that I secured to you such tuition, and saved you from twaddle and sentiment, the poetry of Wordsworth and the muscular Christianity of ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... no literary gift, but it was new to Miss Winchelsea to find herself deploring the want of gifts in a friend. That letter was even criticised aloud in the safe solitude of Miss Winchelsea's study, and her criticism, spoken with great bitterness, was "Twaddle!" It was full of just the things Miss Winchelsea's letter had been full of, particulars of the school. And of Mr. Snooks, only this much: "I have had a letter from Mr. Snooks, and he has been over to see me on two Saturday afternoons running. He talked about Rome and you; we ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... is possible to push altruism too far, and for Margaret, at her age and with her attractions, to go fooling around with medicine, with the mistaken idea that she was benefiting humanity, was nothing more or leas than damned twaddle. If she wanted to do something why not take up her ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... cant words, of no very definite, and of merely conventional, meaning, for any thing said or done in ignorance of the true propriety of the matter in question. "C'est du rococo," it is mere stuff, or nonsense, or rather twaddle. It was born on the stage, about ten years ago, at one of the minor theatres at Paris, though probably borrowed from a wine-shop, and most likely will have as brief an existence as our own late "flare-up," ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... freedom from all effort, that were in their way the perfection of breeding. I have seen these often in the peasantry, in the poor. It is your middle classes, with their incessant flutter, and bluster, and twitter, and twaddle; with their perpetual strain after effect; with their deathless desire to get one rung of the ladder higher than they ever can get; with their preposterous affectations, their pedantic unrealities, their morbid dread of remark, their everlasting imitations, their ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... answered, Paul. Of course, in a sense, you are right. I am an old woman, and the twaddle of a London drawing-room would fall strangely upon my ears now, but I had my share of it before Arthur was born. If I were a man, I should want variety,—a little sauce,—and you are right to seek for it. And now, won't you go and have a ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the burden of her song, till at last I got very tired of it, and on the third evening I broke away from her, saying, "Law, granny how you do twaddle!" upon which she called me a good-for-nothing young blackguard, and felt positively sure that I should be hanged. The consequence was, that granny and I did not part good friends; and I sincerely hoped that when ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... friend questioned his late uncle, through Mr. Manchester, and the late uncle wrote down his replies, using Mr. Manchester's hand and pencil for that purpose. The following is a fair example of the questions asked, and also of the sloppy twaddle in the way of answers, furnished by Manchester under the pretense that it came from the specter. If this man is not the paltriest fraud that lives, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... distinctive characteristic of an era in architecture, is not so in fact, as Quicherat has very clearly demonstrated, and, since him, Lecoy de la Marche. The study of archives has, on this point, completely overset the hobbies of architects, and demolished the twaddle of the Bonzes. Besides, there is abundant evidence of the employment of the pointed arch side by side with the round arch in a perfectly systematic design, in the construction of many Romanesque churches; in the Cathedrals of Avignon and Frejus, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... all this interesting enough! But why expect me to wade through pages of twaddle about Scottish peasants and their doings—for it is evident that is what it will ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... go. They had parted, the evening before, after a bitter quarrel; and he had left her, vowing that he would not return till she sent for him. He had waited the whole day, in vain, for a sign. What was Dove with his pompous twaddle to him? Every slight sound on the stairs or in the passage meant more. He was listening, listening, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... mocking letter telling her that he is married already; when the remorseless turn of Fortune's wheel loses her the real lover whom she at last really does love—then it is not mere sentimental-Romantic twaddle; it is a slice of life, soaked in the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... every English agent, of course, goes out in behalf of the old line; and all sorts of stories are told about winter passages, the importance of boats especially built for strength, and the advantages of experience. Now, the history of the American line is a perfect refutation of all this twaddle. The truth is, that all voyaging is connected with exposedness to some danger; and up to this moment the Americans have had, in all their ocean steam voyages, the full measure of success. They have lost no boat, they have sacrificed ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... his cab and smoked his cigar he cursed vigorously. "Damn the cursed half-breed of a fellow! He's clever enough, and all that; but what the devil Helen can see in him to make me invite him down to Te Ariri I don't know. Curse her infernal twaddle about the rights of humanity and such fustian. Once you are my wife, my sweet, romantic cousin, I'll knock all that idiotic bosh on the head. It's bad enough to sit in the House and listen to this fellow frothing, without having to bring a quarter-bred ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... Parliament, Parliament still being a confused retrogressive corner in the world where lawyers and suchlike sheltered themselves from the onslaughts of common-sense behind a fog of Latin and Greek and twaddle and tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go into Parliament, unless I meant to be a lawyer. Did I mean to be a lawyer? It cost no end of money, and was full of uncertainties, and there were no judges nor great solicitors among my ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... ailments and cossetings. Griffiths, luckily, was a woman of much the same tastes as her ladyship, only somewhat of a more active temperament; and they were most stedfast friends. It was such a comfort to Lady Cashel to have some one to whom she could twaddle! ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... with a short laugh. "Well, I've heard that it would do great things, but I never took any stock in it; it seemed like so much twaddle to me. You are sure you're not guying ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... certainly, that his daughter should have seen it all, but such infamous creatures as Raeburn had no business to have daughters. No doubt she would stand it very well anything, you know, for a little notoriety. Such people lived for notoriety. Of course the papers had put in a lot of twaddle that he had said on his death bed 'always had tried to work entirely for the good of humanity,' and that sort of nonsense. This coffee ice is excellent. Let me get you another," after which the subject would be dropped, and the speakers ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... to take this trouble. I always contemplate the possibility that hereafter my journal will be read by the public, always greedy of such things, and I regard with alarm and dislike the notion of its containing a heap of twaddle and trash concerning matters appertaining to myself which nobody else will care three straws about. If therefore I discard these scruples and do what I meditate (and very likely after all I shall not, or only for a very short time), the next ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... the only charge which had made any impression upon the minds of the committee was that relating to Moulin, the Frenchman. Three, indeed, of the members, (Messrs. Voorhees, of Indiana, Potter, of New York, and Peters, of Maine,) said it was a shame and disgrace that such ridiculous and monstrous twaddle should be listened to for a moment; but a majority considered it their duty, under the order of reference, to hear the matter patiently. They had, therefore, allowed Hastings the widest latitude and listened to everything ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... vixen night before last, or Einar of Brekka caught a brown dog-fox yesterday. Or if a man stepped over to a neighbour's for a moment: Any hunting? Anyone shot a fox? Our Gisli here caught a grayish brown one last evening. Such incessant twaddle! ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... Rebecca, angrily, "ef I can hev the pleasure o' bein' rid o' you, Copernicus Droop, it'll be cheap at the price—but the's no sech luck. Ef you think ye can fool us any more with yer twaddle 'bout cuttin' meridians, ye're mistaken—that's all I ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... unsound as his statement that he could bring the Trust to terms. Yet Gordon seemed thoroughly in earnest. Either he expected to fool his present hearer, or else he had become hypnotized by the spell of his own magnificent twaddle— O'Neil could not ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... to Europe by McKinley to talk a little twaddle about international bi-metallism has completed its alleged labors, and the net product is nothing—just as the people knew it would be when saddled with the expense of this high-fly junketing trip to enable the administration to make a pretense ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... on dinner invitations. And because he was a son of Vondeplosshe the same family friends endured his conceited twaddle and his knock-kneed, wicked little self, and sighed with relief when he went away. It would be so much easier to send these dethroned sons of rich men a supply of groceries and an ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... her, and (not without courage, for it is hard to deal with the darker powers) I recited to her slowly that familiar verse which the well-known Satyricus Empiricius was for ever using in his now classical attacks on the grammarians; and without any Alexandrian twaddle of accents I intoned to her—and so left her astounded to repentance or ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... denouncing bad work by the most illustrious hands and commending obscure merit. The "impudent literary cliques" who puffed each other's books; the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings who manufactured verses for the "Annuals;" and the twaddle of the "genial" incapables who praised them in flabby reviews—all these Poe exposed with ferocious honesty. Nor, though his writings are unmoral, can they be called in any sense immoral. His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness as ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... on the fat o' the land, and wears the best of everything, and they does nothing for it but talk a lot of twaddle two or three times a week. The rest of the time they spend cadgin' money orf silly old women who thinks it's a sorter ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... things live on and affect the human mind for ever. Bad things are born of bad. Who can tell what may be the effect of seeing day by day an hideous building, of hearing day by day indifferent music, of constantly reading a lot of feeble twaddle? Surely one effect will be that we shall gradually lose our appreciation of what is good and beautiful. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." Ah! but we must have eyes to see it. This springtime is lovely, if we have the eyes to see it; but, if we have not, its loveliness is nothing to ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... are all of whom the writer has ever heard, in such circles, and two of these many believed to be unwarrantably suspected. After following in Miss Martineau's track, and discovering all the falsehood, twaddle, gossip, old saws, and almanac stories, which have been strung together in her books, no charitable mode of accounting for the medley remains, but to suppose her the pitiable dupe of that love of hoaxing so often found ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... unpleasant, no doubt, but I rather fancy it will affect more important people than you. There is no use whining about it.... No, I couldn't possibly. You must take your chance.... That's enough, sir. Nonsense! I have something more important to do than to listen to such twaddle." ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... for these old themes, to try to recognise them whenever they crop up, is not only to lose one's enjoyment of the music, but to run a fair risk of misapprehending it altogether, and the drama as well. This jack-fool twaddle about there being not a single phrase in an opera which has not grown out of another is manifestly absurd—for out of what does the first one grow?—and utterly untrue. In every scene of Tristan an enormous amount of new material is added; it is the ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... alive, but entitled to respect, if only as an embodiment and representative of cat-hood in the abstract, which was a most important element in the economy of the universe. It was when Aunt Charlotte stigmatised these philosophical reflections as a pack of impertinent twaddle that Austin had had the audacity to say that she ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... out. He kept on pouring out his lamentable twaddle, and hawking it up and down the place till he became a thing of terror. I tried to wean him from writing—oh, ever so gently, you understand, by throwing him with agreeable people, giving him a chance to make himself felt, to come to a ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... was inartistic, and helplessly, childishly stupid as to any literary merits,—a mere mass of gossip and twaddle; but after all, when one remembers the taste of the thousands of circulating-library readers, it must not be considered the less likely to be widely read on that account. It is only once in a century that a writer of real genius ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... "Eh, what twaddle!" said one of them, a thin, stern-looking man. "When one's head is gone one doesn't weep for one's hair! Take what any of you like!" And flourishing his arm energetically he turned sideways to ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... are apprehensive of an invasion,—not an impossible event; some writing odes to the Duke of Wellington; and I am putting my good friend to sleep with the flattest prose that ever dropped from an English pen. I wish that it were better; I wish that it were even worse; but it is the most undeniable twaddle. I must go to bed, and invoke the Muses in the morning. At present, I cannot touch ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... muddle, bull; Irishism^, Hibernicism^; slipslop^; anticlimax, bathos; sophism &c 477. farce, galimathias^, amphigouri^, rhapsody; farrago &c (disorder) 59; betise [Fr.]; extravagance, romance; sciamachy^. sell, pun, verbal quibble, macaronic^. jargon, fustian, twaddle, gibberish &c (no meaning) 517; exaggeration &c 549; moonshine, stuff; mare's nest, quibble, self- delusion. vagary, tomfoolery, poppycock, mummery, monkey trick, boutade [Fr.], escapade. V. play the fool &c 499; talk nonsense, parler a tort et a travess [Fr.]; battre la campagne [Fr.]; hanemolia ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... needs polishing and practice and all that; but I'm sure it is oceans better than half the sentimental twaddle we see in the papers, and I KNOW that some of those pieces ARE paid for, because I have a friend who is in a newspaper office, and he told me so. Yours are quaint and simple and some very original. I'm sure ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... threatened to materialize before me. I rose and fled from the room bare-headed Into the dusk, afraid of my gift. And after that the spirits swarmed— Chaucer, Caesar, Poe and Marlowe, Cleopatra and Mrs. Surratt— Wherever I went, with messages,— Mere trifling twaddle, Spoon River agreed. You talk nonsense to children, don't you? And suppose I see what you never saw And never heard of and have no word for, I must talk nonsense when you ask me ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... it—and I love it. It's my poison and my medicine. Most of all I hate the society twaddle. And, of course, that's what ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... could wish. The purport of these messages, which were written rather quickly, and without perceptible thought or hesitation, changing from one handwriting to another without the least apparent difficulty, was in some instances the veriest twaddle, while others contained tolerably good sense, even in language rather above the Medium, unless appearances were misleading, for she looked the embodiment of ignorant simplicity, ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... chap that's defending Australia. But there's Union men and Union men. They're mainly good, but some are bad. That's one of the bad ones there. His name is Neverwork, and he never worked in his life. He's a blowhard, a gasbagger, a balloon full of curses and twaddle. This bloke thinks we're fools. He's kidded his Union on that he's a smart fellow—a sort of High Priest of Salvation. He's talked himself into a job, and he's drawing about five hundred a year out of ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... It was the mighty moment when Clemens was building his engines of war for the destruction of Christian Science, which superstition nobody, and he least of all, expected to destroy. It would not be easy to say whether in his talk of it his disgust for the illiterate twaddle of Mrs. Eddy's book, or his admiration of her genius for organization was the greater. He believed that as a religious machine the Christian Science Church was as perfect as the Roman Church and destined to be, more formidable in its ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the waterhole, it's cool there, and better fun than listening to an old woman's twaddle. The sun's down now. ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... reached its acme," he finds "30,000 paupers in a population of 60,000, and 34,000 kindred hulks on outdoor relief, lifting each an ounce of mould with a shovel, while 5000 lads are pretending to break stones," and exclaims, "Can it be a charity to keep men alive on these terms? In face of all the twaddle of the earth, shoot a man rather than train him (with heavy expense to his neighbours) to be a deceptive human swine." Superficial travellers generally praise the Irish. Carlyle had not been long in their country when he formulated ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
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