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Cog   Listen
noun
Cog  n.  A trick or deception; a falsehood.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Cog" Quotes from Famous Books



... that known as the battle of Sluys, when Philip the Sixth sat on the throne of France. The English fleet consisted of only 260 ships fit for warfare. The French, whose fleet amounted to no less than 400 sail, lay securely, as they thought, in the harbour of Sluys. Edward embarked on board the cog Thomas, commanded by Richard Fyall, and attended by several noblemen. A cog was a craft larger than those usually designated ships—the cog John, which is spoken of, had a crew of eighty-two men, and probably she carried besides a considerable number of knights and soldiers. Many ships of the ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston

... seemingly endless columns of infantry on foot, all moving with us, along parallel roads, toward the firing-line. And most of these troops and supply columns belonged to my own division, one small cog in the British ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall

... welcome is touching, yet nought o' the faun— A warmth is express'd in the shake o' his han'; His cog and his bed, or ought in his biel, The lonely will share frae kind ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... destruction quicker than a system that can be mathematically demonstrated. It gives an air of business to gambling which is soothing to the conscience of a person brought up on statistics. The system generally works beautifully at first; then a cog slips and you are mangled in the machinery before you know where you are. As young Forme left the table he felt a hand on his shoulder, and looking around, met the ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr

... Hell, Nor hoped to find a spell, In some fine flourish of a pen, To make a better man Than long-considering Nature will or can, 280 Secure against his own mistakes, Content with what life gives or takes, And acting still on some fore-ordered plan, A cog of iron in an iron wheel, Too nicely poised to think or feel, Dumb motor in a clock-like commonweal. They wasted not their brain in schemes Of what man might be in some bubble-sphere, As if he must be other than he seems Because he was not what he should be here, 290 Postponing ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... this, when one stops to remember that this army of three hundred thousand men and a hundred thousand horses was merely one single cog of the German military machine; that if all the German war strength were assembled together you might add this army to the greater army and hardly know it was there—why, then, the brain refuses to wrestle with ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... with a smile, "no man can put complete reliance in blind fate; he must still cog ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson

... years of venturing, he might be said to have succeeded. He had no time for other games; this was his poker. They were always the schemes of little people, very complex in organization, needing a wheel here, a cog there, finally breaking down from the lack of capital. Then some "big people" collected the fragments to cast them into the pot once more. Dr. Leonard added another might-have-been and a new sigh to the secret chamber of his soul. But ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... that could be thrown in our way, wresting victory from defeat at every step; some of it with the enemy on the run. Take it all together, it is a long way. Much of it will not have to be travelled over again. The engine of municipal progress once started as it has been in New York, may slip many a cog with Tammany as the engineer; it may even be stopped for a season; but it can never be made to work backward. Even Tammany knows that, and gropes desperately for a new hold, a certificate of character. In the last election (1901) she laid loud claim to having ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis

... the Baroness, who had just arrived. The Baroness, was a very stout woman, about fifty, with a double chin, a considerable moustache, a low broad forehead, and bright, round, black eyes, very far apart. When introduced to Lady George, she declared that she had great honour in accepting the re-cog-nition. She had a stout roll of paper in her hand, and was dressed in a black stuff gown, with a cloth jacket buttoned up to neck, which hardly gave to her copious bust that appearance of manly firmness which the occasion almost ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope

... under the hose stream from the automatic with the precision of having been struck by an electric current. Not occupied, as he had been yesterday, with the business of keeping to his part as a physical cog in the machine, he was seeing war as a spectator—as Marta saw it, as only a privileged few ever see it. Society, he was thinking, took the trouble to bring boys through the whooping-cough and measles, pay for clothing and ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer

... more than twenty years since he had last seen Orde, his schoolmate, and their paths in the world had divided early. The one had quitted college to become a cog-wheel in the machinery of the great Indian Government; the other more blessed with goods, had been whirled into a similar position in the English scheme. Three successive elections had not affected Pagett's ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling

... times in life when Nature Seems to slip a cog an' go, Jes' a-rattlin' down creation, Lak an ocean's overflow; When de worl' jes' stahts a-spinnin' Lak a picaninny's top, An' yo' cup o' joy is brimmin' 'Twell it seems about to slop, An' you feel jes' lak a racah, Dat is trainin' fu' to trot— When yo' ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson

... threatened to interfere with the State, the politicians got alarmed and put him to death. Plato, much more cautious, wrote his "Republic," wherein everything is subordinated for the good of the State, and the individual is but a cog in a most perfectly lubricated machine. Aristotle saw that Socrates was nearer right than Plato—sin is the expression of individuality and is not wholly bad—the State is made up of individuals, and if you suppress the thinking-power ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... spring. Geraniums should put on their buffalo overcoats about the middle of November in our rigid northern clime, and in the spring they will have the same luxuriant foliage as the tropical hat-rack. Vines may be left in the room during the winter until the furnace slips a cog and then you can pull them down and feed them to the family horses. In changing your plants from the living rooms or elsewhere to the cellar in the fall, take great care to avoid injury to the pot. I have experienced some very severe ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... How long were the little band of Abolitionists despised! But they were the cutwater of the national ship. With their revolutionary idea, so opposed to the universal prejudice, they succeeded at last in moving the entire country, just as one cog-wheel set against another overcomes its resistance and puts the whole machinery in motion. The rills of thought, shooting from the heights of a few pure and lofty minds, have spread out into this sea of practical Abolitionism which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various

... in the compartment, soldiers and workers, each a cog in the big machine, each bound upon some important errand. Each had news to tell—tales of the fighting, or of the progress of preparation. For more than a year now America had been getting ready, and here, in the ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... desk regardless of changes of administrative heads. Old Kauffman instructed his new chief gradually in the knowledge of the department without seeming to do so, and kept the wheels revolving without the slip of a cog. ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry

... traversed in every thirty-five days—the time required by that swift boat to achieve two round trips. We discussed, and discussed, and discussed, and disputed and disputed and disputed; at any rate he did, and I got in a word now and then when he slipped a cog and there was a vacancy. He did his arguing with heat, with energy, with violence; and I did mine with the reserve and moderation of a subordinate who does not like to be flung out of a pilot-house that is perched forty feet above the water. He was fiercely ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain

... Fortune heard Pan railing thus. "Old Pan," said Fortune, "what's this fuss? Am I the patroness of dice? Is not she our fair cousin, Vice? Do I cog dice or mark the cards? Do gamesters offer me regards? They trust to their own fingers' ends: On Vice, not me, the game depends. So would I save the fools, if they Would not defy my rule by play. They worship Folly, and ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay

... a whip, snip, high cum diddledy, The cog-wheels of life have need of much oiling; Smack, crack,—this is our jubilee: Huzza, my lads! ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat

... individually prosperous and happy. In the same way, on a smaller scale, many people deplore the necessity of competition among organizations, saying that it is ruthless and selfish; that it stamps out the individual; that it makes every man a mere cog in a money-getting machine; that it brings about strife, hatred, jealousies, and sometimes murders; that, if it were not for competition, all men ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske

... that the lumber lord began to fear that some one had slipped a cog in sending him to first one and then another, ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde

... know them, yea, And what they weigh, even to the utmost scruple: Scrambling, outfacing, fashion-monging boys, That lie, and cog, and flout, deprave, and slander, Go anticly, and show outward hideousness, And speak off half a dozen dangerous words, How they might hurt their enemies if they durst; And this is all. 223 SHAKS.: Much ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various

... tenements. Why, his company gave me almost a hundred dollars, you know! I was lucky, for when Lizzie Sidel's man lost his hand in the cog wheels he went to law to sue the company, and three years afterward the case was thrown out of court and he had to pay the costs himself. But he was a picker-boss, and got nine ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... "A cog what?" asked Bill Cobb in a voice so low that he thought only his brother Jim could hear; but his ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin

... on the roof-tree. A heath-bed occupied one of the corners; a few grey embers were smouldering in the middle of the floor; a pot lay beside them, ready for use, half-filled with cockles and razor-fish, the spoils of the morning ebb; and a cog of milk occupied a small shelf that projected from the gable above. Such were the contents of the shieling. Its only inmate, a lively little old man, sat outside, at once tending a few cows grouped ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... vitality, the charm, the strength, the happiness of minors, especially of potential mothers, to carry on the processes of machine-dominated systems of manufacture and business. It takes so little physical strength or mental power to become a cog in these rapidly revolving wheels. It means such a waste to thus use the years of youth, meant for education and development and meant to attract toward successful family life ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... the National Coffee Roasters Association Home coffee mill, employing an improved set screw operating on a cog-and ratchet principle, was introduced to ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... a question of time when vice should get its clutches upon her, as a cog-wheel seizes whoever comes too near the machine. After whirling her around through a short life of shame and degradation, it would, with mechanical punctuality, have cast her off into some corner, there to drag out to the end, in sordid obscurity, ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland

... pitiable state of mind, Soames walked away from the Post Office. Gianapolis had hurried off in the direction of Victoria Station. Something was wrong! Some part of the machine, of the dimly divined machine whereof he formed a cog, was out of gear. Since the very nature of this machine—its construction and purpose, alike—was unknown to Soames, he had no basis upon which to erect ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer

... recommendation from men and women eminent in literary and scientific realms, and commendatory reviews in periodicals of high standard are, I think, sufficient cause for the belief that "The Tyranny of God" forms a necessary cog in the machinery of ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis

... forms of press by which great pressure can be applied, some working by various arrangements of cog-wheels, screws, and levers, others ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell

... has slipped a cog on the outfits for ladies recently," said Van apologetically, "but I reckon these ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels

... walking; it is not skating, which it seems to resemble; it is more like that of a person walking with two crutches besides his two legs. The machinery is simple enough: a strong spiral spring, three or four cog-wheels and pinions, a fly to regulate the motion as in a musical box, and the cams before mentioned. As a toy, it or she is very taking to grown people as well as children. It is a literal fact, that the police requested one of our dealers to remove Miss Autoperipatetikos from his window, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... with their task, I was much amused with the brisk way in which they trundled the huge hogs-heads along, running them up to the pier-head, slinging them to the chains of the crane, and then lowering them down into the launch. There was much creaking of cog-wheels and cheerful, "Yo-heave-hoing!" from the men in the boat below, as they stowed them away in the bottom of the craft as easily as if they were only so many tiny little kegs, the darkeys joining in the sailors' chorus ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson

... slipped a cog this time," said the doctor. "He sent that as a night message, but it was delivered as a straight message through error. He has got further north than I expected. We will turn out our pilot and take off. We should make Wilmington by daybreak. I'll telephone Washington ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... you haven't got. Aside from you, why should I call this place home? I work here, and get my board and clothes. Well, I can work other places, and get my board and clothes. If I've got to be a cog in a money-making machine, I will at ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead

... knack," replied Tom modestly. "Now I'll put a plug in there, and the cog wheel won't come loose again. The manufacturers of it ought to have done that. I imagine lots of people have this same trouble ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-cycle • Victor Appleton

... or, more precisely, a cog in the great fighting machine that was producing death and destruction to Belgium. Just as the Germans have put men through a certain mold and turned out the typical German soldier, in like manner through other molds they have turned ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams

... to rob, or cog, or plot. No fool so gross to bolt Scotch collops hot. From Donjon tops no Oroonoko rolls. Logwood, not Lotos, floods Oporto's bowls. Troops of old tosspots oft, to sot, consort. Box tops, not bottoms, schoolboys flog for sport. No cool monsoons blow soft on Oxford ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various

... a society for shaving or for saying your prayers. And further, goodwill is far less a process of performing acts than a process of thinking thoughts. To think, is it necessary to involve yourself in the cog-wheels of a society? Moreover, a society means fuss and shouting: two species of disturbance which are both futile and deleterious, particularly in an ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett

... were, indeed, nearly concerned in the fracas which their laziness occasioned, being no other than the faithful Mr. Fairservice, with his friend Mr. Hammorgaw, and another person, whom I afterwards found to be the town-crier, who were sitting over a cog of ale, as they called it (at my expense, as my bill afterwards informed me), in order to devise the terms and style of a proclamation to be made through the streets the next day, in order that "the unfortunate young gentleman," as they had the impudence to qualify me, might be restored to ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... Nina Carrington, was the cog that slipped. What she only suspected, what she really knew, we never learned. She was a chambermaid in the hotel at C—, and it was evidently her intention to blackmail Doctor Walker. His position at that time was uncomfortable: to pay the woman to keep quiet would be confession. He denied ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... "He didn't want to re-cog-nize me," she persisted, throwing a bitter emphasis on the middle of the word. "He didn't even ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic

... a burning ghat. Old Atasca, an untrained Indian nurse, sat near the door like a petrified statue of What's-the-Use, attending to her duties, which were, mainly, to see that time went by without slipping a cog. Sometimes I would fancy myself back in the Philippines, or, at worse times, sliding off the ...
— Options • O. Henry

... to the peak and shingles, with a window in each end. Clocks, dials, pendulums, and tiny cog-wheels of wood and brass were on a long bench by the street window. Thereon, also, were a vice and tools. The room was cleanly, with a crude homelikeness about it. Chromos and illustrated papers had been pasted ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller

... to the philosopher or the business man, to any one who is a cog in the wheel of some republic, all these things exist for the sake of something else. He must explain or make use of them, or define his relation to them. He spends the whole agony of his existence in an endeavor to docket them and deal with them. ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman

... cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin

... mayor and the judge on the hay-market question that has made every decent organization in the city look to you to begin the fight for a clean-up reorganization. They have all rallied to your support. Show your colors, boy, and, God willing, we will smash this machine to the last cog and get on a basis of ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess

... one eye for his leader and one for the possible dangers on his flank, was a mere automaton. There was no opportunity for displaying initiative—he was a cog in the wheel. ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace

... said, "was in the teaching, in making the thought clear, in tempting the boys to find out what they knew all the time; and the oftener I taught a subject the better I liked it; it was like a big cog-wheel, with a number of little cog-wheels turning with it. But the men who were always wanting to change their subjects were the men who thought of their own intellectual interest first, and very little of the small interests revolving upon it." The charm ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson

... it mean, this open defiance, not of himself, (he was a mere cog in the big wheel; so was the entire Forest Service,) this open defiance of law; this open theft of Government property? Connected with the outrage of the Range War, and the Senator's advice for him to stop suing for restitution of ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... proposed for reducing this to a certainty. Perhaps, after all, few plans are better than the old wedges, by tightening or loosening of which the chop is kept in the required position. Within the last few years, the machine has been considerably improved by being formed entirely of iron, cog-wheels being substituted in the place of straps and drums to move the riddle, and the riddle itself is now formed of two sieves, by which the chance of unpulped berries reaching the parchment is lessened. On some estates, ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... I cannot cog, I cannot prate (Mist[ris]. Ford) now shall I sin in my wish; I would thy Husband were dead, Ile speake it before the best Lord, I would make ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... such a day in spring as this, as Job came whistling down the trail, gun in hand, looking for deer-tracks, that he thought he heard the report of a gun up in the second tunnel. He had often been there before; had climbed the trail and the cog railroad, played around and over the deserted buildings, and gone swimming off the iron bridge where the torrent was deepest. Once he and Dolph Swartz, a neighbor boy, had slept all night in the tool-house shed, waiting for game, and had seen only what Dolph was sure was ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher

... hard—but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds that one only fits into one hole? One must get back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap—and ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton

... by the blazing ingle, or in the solitary barn, where the repercussions of thy iron flail half affright thyself, as thou performest the work of twenty of the sons of men, ere the cock-crowing summon thee to thy ample cog of substantial brose. Be thou a kelpie, haunting the ford or ferry, in the starless night, mixing thy laughing yell with the howling of the storm and the roaring of the flood, as thou viewest the perils and miseries of man on the foundering horse, or in the tumbling boat!—Or, lastly, be thou a ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... Andy, promptly. "Never could bear to let anything puzzle me long. Used to lie awake half the night trying to clinch a name that had just slipped a cog in my memory." ...
— The Airplane Boys among the Clouds - or, Young Aviators in a Wreck • John Luther Langworthy

... Then Charles asked if he could have some milk, but was informed that there was none in the house. The only beverage which seemed attainable was water, of which there was a supply in what Captain Donald Macdonald called an "ugly cog," which the landlord of the house used for throwing water out of his boat. This vessel though coarse, was clean. "The captain," relates Donald Roy, "had been taking a drink out of the cog, and he reached it to the Prince,[297] who took it out of his hand, and, after looking at the cog, he ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson

... have seen, an Atta worker is a member of the most implacable labor-union in the world: he believes in a twenty-four hour day, no pay, no play, no rest—he is a cog in a machine-driven Good-for-the-greatest-number. After studying these beings for a week, one longs to go out and shout for kaisers and tsars, for selfishness and crime—anything as a relief from such terrible ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

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

... railin's. 'Now, Mrs. Bowlin',' says I, 'it'll just be the ruin of you an' the death of me if you keep on makin' a picter of yourself like that lonely Indian a-sittin' on a pinnacle in the jographys, watchin' the inroads of civilization, with a locomotive an' a cog-wheel in front, an' the buffalo an' the grisly a-disappearin' in the distance. Now it'll be much better for all of us,' says I, 'if you'll git down from your peak, and try to make up your mind that the world has got to move. Aint there some place where you kin go an' be ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton

... [cog] Engaar, trampear; adular, lisonjear; puntear una rueda. Mangday, manghib; manuy, mamuri ng paimbabaw; isaayos ...
— Dictionary English-Spanish-Tagalog • Sofronio G. Calderon

... theatres and divorces out there somewhere, but we don't care. We've lost step with the world, we've dropped out. When the newspapers come, the first thing we look for is the Panama news. We're obsessed by this job. Even the women and the children feel it—you'll feel it as soon as you become a cog in the machine. Polite conversation at dinner is limited to tons of rock and yards of concrete. Oh, but I'm tired ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach

... investor, were supposed to, and did, control jointly the political destiny of the city. They had representatives, benchmen, spies, tools—a great company. Among them was this same Stener—a minute cog in the silent ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser

... of his attention to the problems of commerce and industry. He had a taste for machinery of every kind, and his sharp eye had more than once detected, with the precision of an expert, a missing cog-wheel in some vast and complicated engine. A visit to Liverpool, where he opened the Albert Dock, impressed upon his mind the immensity of modern industrial forces, though in a letter to Victoria describing ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey

... box, in which was wound the unexposed reel of film. From this it went over a roller, and the cog wheel, which engaged in the perforations, thence down by means of the "gate," behind the lens and shutter. There two claws reached up and grasped the film as the motor operated, pulling down three-quarters of an inch each time, to be exposed as ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the Coast • Victor Appleton

... As he let himself slowly down to his heels there was a sardonic grin on his brown face. In outguessing Tighe he had slipped one little mental cog, after all, and the chances were that he would pay high for his error. A man had been lying in the mesquite close to the creek watching him all the time. He knew it because he had caught the flash of light on the rifle barrel ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine

... night we get the corn in, O sweetly, then, thou reams the horn in! Or reekin on a New-year mornin In cog or bicker, An' just a wee drap sp'ritual burn in, An' ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... of the Post-Office Department is a system of cog-fitting wheels, in all its component parts; and were it not so, in the necessarily limited period and space allotted, the work in postal-cars could not be ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various

... this time, at the lowest ebb, that the smooth-running editorial machine broke down. A cog must have slipped or an oil-cup run dry, for the postman brought him one morning a short, thin envelope. Martin glanced at the upper left-hand corner and read the name and address of the Transcontinental Monthly. His heart ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... through the carelessness of the operator the brake of the great drum slipped, and on being applied again with reckless force, broke, and the car was off, bringing destruction to half a dozen men at the bottom of the shaft. Quick as a flash of light, Kalman sprang to the racing cog wheels, threw in a heavy coat that happened to be lying near, and then, as the machinery slowed, thrust in a handspike and checked the descent of the runaway car. It took less than two seconds to see, to plan, ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor

... Stringstriker. If Klaus were only a clever fellow, and knew how to say a private word or so to his godfather, he would soon make it all right with him again. Dwarfs must be managed. Bless you, I have one in my own mill. Every ninth night he hammers away on the twenty-first cog of the third wheel; and as soon as he begins, three honey cells must be put upon the millstone for him, if I don't wish the mill to stand still immediately, and all the grain to breed worms. It is nothing but Dwarf's roguery, and so I say let Klaus go quietly his way. I'll wager what you like, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various

... busied himself among his men and personally superintended them, but the large factory tends to displace the small workshop, the corporation takes the place of the individual employer, and the employee becomes as impersonal a cog in the labor system as is any part of the machine at which he works. It used to be the case that a thrifty workman might hope to become in the future an employer, but now he has become a permanent member of a distinct class, for the large capital required for manufacturing ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... man one is—upon one's values, upon one's will. The type of man who is a slave of things, who cannot raise himself out of the causal mechanism, who is not free, will never be able to conceive himself otherwise than as a cog in a wheel. Fichte accepts the ego, or spirit, as the ultimate and absolute principle, because it alone can give our life worth and meaning. Thus he grounds his entire philosophy upon a moral imperative which presents itself to the ego in an inner vision. He also tells us ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... which are raised or dropped into their places by beautiful machinery. To each gate is attached an immense screw, which stands perpendicularly, twenty feet long and ten inches in diameter. At its upper end, it passes through a matrix-worm in the centre of a large cog-wheel, lying horizontally The whole is set in motion by the slightest turning of a handle; and here I saw the application of the Turpin Wheel I spoke of before—no engine or complication, but a wheel fifteen feet in diameter, fixed horizontally, submerged ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various

... such matter, change your hue, I may cog and flatter, so may you; Religion is a widgeon, and reason is treason, And he that hath a loyal heart ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay

... double one, consisting of two wheels coupled together, exactly similar one with the other, and so fixed that the cogs of the one correspond with the void between the cogs of the others. As the catch, G, moves down it frees a cog in first wheel, and both wheels begin to turn, but the second wheel is immediately checked by catch, G, and the movement ceases. A catch again works the two wheels, turn half a cog, and so on. Each wheel contains as many cogs as there are contacts on transmitter disk, consequently as many ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various

... locomotive which was used for a time to transport metal and ore to the Pen-y-darran iron works in South Wales. The heavy engine so damaged the tracks that it was soon dismounted and degraded to the work of a steam pump. In 1812 a cog-wheel locomotive, invented by a Mr. Blenkinsop, began running in a colliery a few miles out of Leeds, and served very well its purpose to haul heavy trains almost as fast as a horse could walk. The next year a Derbyshire ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy

... certainly, Chafe, heat, decompose,; chafed, heated, Chaflet, platform, scaffold, Champaign, open country, Chariot (Fr charette), cart, Cheer, countenance, entertainment, Chierte, dearness, Chrism, anointing oil, Clatter, talk confusedly, Cleight, clutched, Cleped, called, Clipping, embracing, Cog, small boat, Cognisance, badge, mark of distinction, Coif, head-piece, Comfort, strengthen, help, Cominal, common, Complished, complete, Con, know, be able, ; con thanlt, be grateful, Conserve, preserve, Conversant, ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory

... the interior gloom of the shabby old building, could be seen piles of broken, twisted, and rusty things—twisted iron rods, broken cam-shafts, cog wheels with missing teeth, springs that had lost their elasticity—a miniature mountain of scrap iron each piece of which at some time had been a part of some smoothly working machine. In another pile were discarded household utensils—old pots and pans and burnt-out kettles, old stoves through ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... the series of triangles, and move from these to the circle as the conclusion of the whole series of representations. "From these forms approximating to the circle there is an easy transition to the representation of the different kinds of cog-wheels, and hence to a crude ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... pockets, he displayed a double-bladed knife containing several implements, including a corkscrew and an attachment for extracting stones from horses' feet, a piece of string, a watch spring, twenty or thirty shot, a button, a magnet, a cog-wheel, a pencil, a match-box, a case of foreign stamps all stuck together with salt water, a whistle, a halfpenny with a hole in it, and a soaked and swollen cigar which the ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas

... others. There were the petty tradesmen who in former years had prospered through George Henry's patronage, whose large bills had been paid with unquestioning promptness until came the slip of his cog in the money-distributing machine. They had not hesitated a moment. As the peccaries of Mexico and Central America pursue blindly their prey, so these small yelpers, Tray, Blanche and Sweetheart, of the trade world, had bitten at his heels persistently from the ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo

... 11, (see next page). The roll A has a series of boxes on its periphery m m, with movable bottoms which serve as moulds. The peat is carried into these boxes by the rolls c c. The iron projections n n of the large roll B, which work cog-like into the boxes, compress the peat gently and, at last, the eccentric p acting upon the pin z, forces up the movable bottom of the box and throws out the peat-block upon an endless band of cloth, which carries ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson

... others of us who travel on nerve and gall and never get any further! Just put this in your pipe, Bub, and don't forget it: Conrad is organised for whatever deviltry he is up to! There is no 'happen so' in his schemes. He is a cog in some political wheel, and it's a fifty-fifty gamble as to whether the wheel is German or Mexican, but it is no little thing, and is not to ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan

... matter very greatly, as shall be seen. Here, again, was an instance of an humble individual becoming a cog in the wheel of world politics. Within less than a month Schmidt was vituperated by half the chancelleries of Europe. A newspaper war raged over him. He became the object of an Emperor's Jovian wrath. "What's the matter with Schmidt? He's—all—right!" ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy

... our plans appear to have slipped a cog. There's the wagon broken down and the boy has gone with the horse. Two of our men were to stop him, you know, and keep him here while we ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman

... pride and joy to joy has been singing through the hearts of The Men Who Make, from the beginning of the world. The thing that was not, that now is, after all the praying with his hands ... iron and wood and rivet and cog and wheel—is it not more than these to him standing before it there? It is the face of matter—who does not know it?—answering the face of the man, whispering to him out of the ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee

... Gid asked. "Oh, no; they know what they've got to do and they do it. But let a cog slip and you can have all the trouble you want. I gad, you can't temporize with a negro. He's either ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read

... puzzled. "It don't work by gas. You wind it up with a cog arrangement, which acts on a spring coil, I'm told—just like the inside of a watch. But we can see by ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... his appointed task. He was a cog in the greatest machine the world has ever seen. He knew just what he was to do, and how much time had been allowed for the performance of his task. It was assumed he would not fail. The British army makes that assumption, ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder

... watching him," Forrest concluded. "He was a good man at first, but he's slipped a cog recently. Sure, send him down the hill. And send that other fellow—Hopkins, you said?—along with him. By the way, Mr. Hennessy." As he spoke, Forrest drew forth his pad book, tore off the last note scribbled, and crumpled it in his hand. "You've a new horse-shoer in the ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... unnecessary cog in a great machine for only a week," he told her, slowly. "And yet you will know that I am telling you the plain truth when I say that such a failure would bring to me the biggest disappointment ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory

... not an unnecessary part, or unreasonable "cog," anywhere in the whole of our bodies. It is true that there are a few little remnants which are not quite so useful as they once were, and which sometimes cause trouble. But for the most part, all we have to ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson

... There was arithmetic, back along the line somewhere, but it has been absorbed in the big quality which it helped to generate and develop. And it is better so. For if he were now solving decimals and square root he would be but a cog and not the great wheel itself. He has grown beyond his arithmetic as he has grown beyond his boyhood warts and freckles, for the larger life has absorbed them. Yet he feels no disdain either for freckles or arithmetic, ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... up the second flight of steps into the next chamber, which was wonderfully like the floor below, minus the millstones; but the roof, instead of being a flat ceiling of boards and beams, was a complication of rafters, ties, posts, and cog-wheels, while at one side was the large pivot passing out through well-greased and blackened bearings, which bore the five sails of the mill, balanced to a great extent by the projecting fan, which, acted upon by the ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn

... on the table, the dice as yet not appearing from under the box. The 'Dribble' was, when with an air of easy but ingenious motion, the caster poured, as it were, the dice on the board—when, if he happened to be an old practitioner, he might suddenly cog with his fore-finger one of the cubes. The 'Long Gallery' was when the dice were flung or hurled the whole length of the board. Sometimes the dice were thrown off the table, near a confederate, who, in picking them up, changed one of the fair for a false die with two sixes. This was generally ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... that, other things being equal, the simplest administrative mechanism is the best, and he knew also that he was helping to make an extremely complicated mechanism. Not only so, but at the heart of this complexity lay the gigantic cog of the judiciary, which was obviously devised to stop movement. He must have had a reason, beyond the reason he gave, for not only insisting on clothing the judiciary with these unusual political and legislative attributes, ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams

... cogged or corked or caulked joint, Fig. 265, is made by cutting out only parts of the notch on the lower piece, leaving a "cog" uncut. From the upper piece a notch is cut only wide enough to receive the cog. A cogged joint is stronger than a notched because the upper beam is not weakened at its point of support. It is ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes

... it and walked off, while the two boys remained comparing notes and lost in wonder at the result. "Sump'n slipped a cog in the Newsy, sure," said the first boy. But he couldn't tell why, and ran over to the NEWS office ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon

... and cantie wi' mair, Whene'er I forgather wi' sorrow and care, I gie them a skelp as they're creepin' alang, Wi' a cog o' gude swats, and ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp

... lifting eyebrows.) After all, why should you? You are only a cog in the machine. I, and the several men grouped with me, am the machine. You are a useful cog—too useful ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London

... hut he would wish to know at a glance what had happened when he returned. Judged by any standard it was a remarkably pretty little device, but when I learnt that it had been made from odds and ends, such as a cog-wheel or spring here and a cell or magnet there, begged from other departments, I began to realise that we had a very exceptional cook. Later when I found that Clissold was called in to consult on the ailments of Simpson's motor and that he was capable of constructing a dog ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott

... pretend my work on the lathe is a national asset, and I don't pretend I ought to have a statue for doing it," answered Nicholas; "but what I do say is that I am greater than my lathe and ought to get more attention according. I am a man and not a cog-wheel, and when Ironsyde puts cog-wheels above men and gives a dumb machine greater praise than the mechanic who works it—then it's wrong and I don't ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts

... Vice? Ere his words be half spoken, I am with him in a trice Here, there, and everywhere, as the cat is with the mice: True Vetus Iniquitas. Lack'st thou cards, friend, or dice? I will teach thee to cheat, child, to cog, lie, and swagger, And ever and anon to be ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... of Benton. She was treading the loose board-walk of the great and vile construction camp. She might draw back from leer and touch, but none the less was she there, a piece of this dark, bold, obscure life. She was a cog in the wheel, a grain of dust in the whirlwind, a morsel of flesh and blood for the hungry maw of a wild ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey

... and commaund all bailifes of Portes, at the which the Cog of Norway (wherein certaine of the king of Norwaie his souldiers, and certaine Marchants of Saxonie are comming for England) shall touch, that, when the foresaid Cog shall chance to arriue at any of their Hauens, they doe permit the said Cog safely to remaine ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt

... cog in the wheels of a great educational machine, glanced at the watch on his wrist. Again his thin shoulders were stooped, his voice tired. "My classes," he said. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various

... is times in life when Nature Seems to slip a cog an' go Jes' a-rattlin' down creation, Lak an ocean's overflow; When de worl' jes' stahts a-spinnin' Lak a picaninny's top, An' you' cup o' joy is brimmin' 'Twel it seems about to slop. An' you feel jes' lak a racah Dat is trainin' fu' to ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson

... enter the twin tabernacle sacred to Vulcan? The answer readily suggests itself: substantials before dessert—Mulciber before the Muses. Let us get the film of coal-smoke, the dissonance of clanking iron and the unloveliness of cog-wheels from off our senses before offering them to the beautiful, pure and simple. We come from the domain of finished products, complete to the last polish, silently self-asserting and wooing the almighty dollar with all their simpers. We pass to their noisy hatching- and training-ground, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various



Words linked to "Cog" :   gear wheel, join, cog railway, geared wheel, foot soldier, roll out, roll



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