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noun
Cog  n.  A small fishing boat.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Cog" Quotes from Famous Books



... Rip Van Winkle look. His hair hung down his back, and his clothes were threadbare and green with age. His shoes were tied to his feet with wire, and stockings he had none. Doc had studied in a Medical College until the eve of his graduation. Then he slipped a cog and went down, down, down, until he landed at Halloran's dive. For twelve years he had been selling penny song-sheets on the streets and in saloons. He was usually in rags, but a score of the wildest ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine

... Pelican, Sir. I am threescore years and six,—six; mark me, Sir: but I can play Polonius, which, I believe, few of your corre—correspondents can do, Sir. I suspect tricks, Sir; I smell a rat: I do, I do. You would cog the die upon us: you would, you would, Sir. But I will forestall you, Sir. You would be deriving me from William the Conqueror, with a murrain to you. It is no such thing, Sir. The town shall know better, Sir. They begin to smoke your flams, Sir. Mr. Liston may be born where he pleases, Sir; but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... with a parcelled hand.) No thoroughfare. Close shave that but cured the stitch. Must take up Sandow's exercises again. On the hands down. Insure against street accident too. The Providential. (He feels his trouser pocket) Poor mamma's panacea. Heel easily catch in track or bootlace in a cog. Day the wheel of the black Maria peeled off my shoe at Leonard's corner. Third time is the charm. Shoe trick. Insolent driver. I ought to report him. Tension makes them nervous. Might be the fellow balked me this morning with that ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... 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 ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt

... an atomic engine inspector, his work was most uncreative. He was a small cog in a large cog-laden machine. A government worker helping to produce engines that would send supplies and immigrants and tourists to the U.S. Sector ...
— The Odyssey of Sam Meecham • Charles E. Fritch

... 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 rather than ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... say that the coercion used did not appear to originate from any feeling of regard for the children, for they were allowed to climb, and push, and run over the sky-lights, and over the engine, and I every moment expected that some of them would be provided for either by the cog-wheels ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... loft, open 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 on ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller

... the fauld!—Be thou a brownie, set, at dead of night, to thy task 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 ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... taken Plank only a few minutes to perceive that something had occurred to change a point of view which he had believed it impossible for Quarrier to change. Something had gone wrong in his own careful calculations; some cog had slipped, some rivet given way, some bed-plate cracked. And Harrington evidently had not been aware of it; but Quarrier knew it. ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... thickset person, who spoke with a harsh, cockney accent, and whom Merriton introduced as his "batman", "Whatever that might be," said Borkins, holding forth to Dimmock, one of the under-grooms. James Collins soon became a necessary part of the household machinery, a little cog in fact upon which the great wheel of tragedy was soon ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew

... a green bay tree; ships and railways carry all before them, and the days of the caravan are numbered. Well, now we shall move on to the Royal lakes and Dalhousie Park, and see all we can, for, after to-day, you won't have much spare time for doing the tourist—you will be a cog in ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker

... offered' did he? Well, whenever Ben Stark 'kindly' offers anything, I'm in on the play. He's had his eye on you for the last three months, and he wants you, but he slipped a cog when he gave me the oars. You needn't be afraid, though, I'm going to do the square thing by you. We'll stop in at the Mission and be married, and then we'll see whether we want to go to St. Michael's or not, though personally I'm for ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach

... said: "Just the same I am glad to know you. My name seems to have got away from me for the time being. My mind's slipped a cog, as you might say. What ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison

... has a peculiar genius for organization, not only in elaborating minute detail, but in the grasp of a coherent whole. She knows the art of giving a brain to a machine, of transmitting power to the uttermost cog-wheel, and at the same time of concentrating responsibility in a supreme centre. She has a small navy, but very effective for its purpose, built, trained, and manned on methodical principles, for defined ends, and backed by an inexhaustible reserve of men from ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers

... machinery. At the time of our visit the whole establishment had been abandoned for some years and was rapidly going to decay. The frames had been torn from the windows, and both the floor of the building and the ground in its vicinity were strewn with fragments of expensive machinery, broken cog-wheels, shafts, etc. This building is shown in Pl. XLV, and may serve as an illustration of the contrast between Tusayan masonry and modern stonemason's work carried out with the same material. The comparison, however, is not entirely fair, as applied to the pueblo builders ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff

... 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) ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis

... rest, with the rare and slight exceptions mentioned, they flit like shadows ticketed with more or less beautiful names. Even Philidaspes, the most prominent male character after the hero by far, is, whether he be "in cog" as that personage or "out of cog" as Prince and King of Assyria, merely a petulant hero—a sort of cheap Achilles, with no idiosyncrasy at all. It is the fault, and in a way the very great fault, of all the kind: and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... there is a nebula computed to be two trillion two hundred thousand billions of times larger than the sun. Oh, be at peace with the God who made all that and controls all that—the wheel of the constellations turning in the wheel of galaxies for thousands of years without the breaking of a cog or the slipping of a band or the snap of an axle. For your placidity and comfort through the Lord Jesus Christ I charge you, "Seek Him that maketh the ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... cog the dice to my advantage any more than you!" said Perion. He drew the sword of Charlemaigne and brandished it and cast it as far as even strong Perion could cast, and the sea swallowed it. "Now God alone is arbiter!" cried Perion, "and I ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al

... Universe, in the cosmos of which our earth is but an infinitesimal speck. Even our sun, round which a system of worlds revolve and which appears so mighty and majestic to us, is but an atom, a very small one, in the infinitude of matter and as a cog, would not be missed in the ratchet wheel which fits into the grand machinery ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing

... 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 and have a couple of destroyers ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... 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 winters in my life, but ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... 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 ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston

... mechanician, and regard ourselves as cogs on the wheels, watching all the other wheels go round and through the maze of machinery catching sight of the mechanician standing by and watching his handiwork. A cog on the wheel as it revolved would be rigidly confined in its operations: it would have no choice as to what means it should employ to carry out its end. Yet even plants have the power of choice, as we have seen, and use ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband

... produced by it. The machines are too expensive to be obtained by anyone but a government or a great banknote company and there are very few men who thoroughly understand operating them. A turn of a screw or a variation of a single cog will change the result entirely. Finally the work of the lathe is often reversed, so that the line which is cut by the graver and should print in color prints white, and vice versa. It would not be possible to imitate this by ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff

... pulley which was fastened at the base of the apparatus. Through this pulley, the cable passed to the cylinder of a windlass which was held to the ground by massive beams. This windlass which can be operated by only two hands, multiplies man's strength by means of a series of cog-wheels. Although there is a gain in force, there is of course ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal

... year—a matter of 360,000,000 miles more or less—and it makes the journey in an exact time and arrives on the stroke of the clock, no washout on the line; no hot box; no spread rail; no taking on of coal or water; no employees' strike. It never drops a stick; it never slips a cog; and whirls in through space always on the minute. And that without any help from either you or me! ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung

... complain unto the king, That I forsooth am stern, and love them not? By holy Paul, they love his grace but lightly, That fill his ears with such dissentious rumours: Because I cannot flatter and look fair, Smile in men's faces, smooth, deceive, and cog, Duck with French nods, and apish courtesy, I must be held a rancorous enemy. Cannot a plain man live, and think no harm, But thus his simple truth must be abus'd With ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt

... much just now about the result of a House match. He had lost a friend. Armour had lost a cog ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh

... a rough sketch, not worth reproduction. The Persian wheel is suitable for use in wide-mouthed wells. It may be described as a mill-wheel with buckets on the circumference, which are filled and emptied as the wheel revolves. It is worked by bullock-power acting on a rude cog-wheel. ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... and would seem to lack a 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 drawing ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various

... brought him a cog of brose. Sim stared at it and sickened: he was too far gone for food. Young Harden passed, and looked curiously at him. "Here's a man that has na spared himsel'," he said. "A drop o' French cordial is the thing for you, Sim." And out of a leathern flask he poured a ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... thy brain, like mine, of old perplexed, Still yearning for the truth, hath sought the light of day. And in the twilight wandered, sorely vexed? Ye instruments, forsooth, ye mock at me,— With wheel, and cog, and ring, and cylinder; To nature's portals ye should be the key; Cunning your wards, and yet the bolts ye fail to stir. Inscrutable in broadest light, To be unveil'd by force she doth refuse, What she reveals not to thy mental sight, Thou wilt not ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... 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 position with ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... 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 ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... 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- ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various

... the 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. ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton

... winning my spurs; nay, perchance never had I sunk lower in my own conceit. Till this hour I had been, as it were, the hinge on which my share of the world turned, and now I was no more than a wheel in the carriage of a couleuvrine, an unconsidered cog in the machine of war. I was to be lost in a multitude, every one as good as myself, or better; and when I had thought of taking service, I had not foreseen the manner of it and the nature of the soldier's trade. My head, that I had ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang

... things went spinningly. The bank and the staff became a machine and the parts thereof, as if incited to action by the combustion of certain gas-mixtures in the place. Especially the teller's head took on the character of a metallic organism: he could almost hear the wheels buzzing. Occasionally a cog somewhere grated, as, for instance, when a drover brought in a cheque for $500 and had to wait in line behind the wife of a neighbor whom he hated, until she got $1.79 for her produce ticket, and had deposited $1 to the credit of Janet Jorgens in trust for little ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen

... 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

... old-time male politicians, and so enroll themselves in the great political parties. A woman who joins one of these parties simply becomes an imitation man, which is to say, a donkey. Thereafter she is nothing but an obscure cog in an ancient and creaking machine, the sole intelligible purpose of which is to maintain a horde of scoundrels in public office. Her vote is instantly set off by the vote of some sister who joins the other camorra. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... after scrimmage, on Bannister Field during practice; as yet, no one had dared to give it form, by voicing his thought, but though no youth dared admit it, something was wrong, there was a defective cog in the machinery of that marvelous machine, the Gold ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice

... caduceus, olive-branch, books and easel. Asia has a spear and a couch with elephant heads. Africa is a negress, with the characteristic grass-rope basket containing dates. North America is an Indian, but the civilization of the land is indicated by an anchor, beehive and cog-wheel. Australia is a gin, with a waddy, boomerang and kangaroo. South America sits on a cotton-bale, has a condor by her side, and at her feet are tropical fruits—pineapples, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various

... insured, and Lazard, the adjuster for the company, both of whom had had more or less to do with her in connection with settling up for other fires, recognised her. She was a very clever woman, was Miss Wend, and a very important cog in the Stacey enterprises. And to think she was the firebug, after all. I ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve

... 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

... and sniffing. Then Number two, in a broken voice: "You silly fool, why did you go laughing like that right under his snout? You might have known he'd cog it." ("Cog." I had not heard the word since 1876.) "There'll be an awful row to-morrow. Look here, I ...
— The Five Jars • Montague Rhodes James

... this primitive lure of war still persists. But, fortunately, the glory and excitement of hand-to-hand conflict, the picturesque valor and visible achievement of earlier battles, are now gone. The soldier is but a cog in a machine, usually at a considerable distance from his enemy. He does not know whether his shot has hit or not; if he is wounded it is by an invisible hand. All the strain and fatigue and pain of war remain, but little of its ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... the Promised Land presents itself as a tremendous enterprise in transportation, unparalleled in the modern world. What transportation? It is a complex of all human enterprises which we shall fit Into each other like cog-wheels. And in the very first stages of the enterprise we shall find employment for the ambitious younger masses of our people: all the engineers, architects, technologists, chemists, doctors, and lawyers, those who have emerged in the last thirty years from the ghetto ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl

... a modestly opulent office on Madison Avenue, where he did his modest best to pretend to the world at large that he was only a small cog—indeed, an almost invisible cog—in a large advertising machine. His best was, for ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett

... Basket Quilt Block Album Brickwork Quilt Carpenter's Rule Carpenter's Square Churn Dash Cog Wheel Compass Crossed Canoes Diagonal Log Chain Domino Double Wrench Flutter Wheel Fan Fan Patch Fan and Rainbow Ferris Wheel Flower Pot Hour Glass Ice Cream Bowl Log Patch Log Cabin Necktie Needle Book New Album Pincushion and ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster

... that was so. But there came a moment when it appeared as if her almost mechanical and rhythmical action of internal effort began to grip something. It was as when an engine after running free clenches itself again upon some wheel or cog. ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson

... to-day, however, was to cost a life. The mill, which had been repaired after the mishap to the cog-wheel the other day, was set going again. In the afternoon a couple of the puppies began fighting over a bone, when one of them fell underneath one of the cog-wheels on the axle of the mill, and was dragged in between it ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... not difficult to picture the result. Thrown into the midst of a slow-moving machinery, alone in his estimate of the potential greatness of the School, supremely conscious of his mission, he found himself a solitary. There are two methods of progress. One to oil the old cog-wheels and pray for progression. Another to point out the clogging nature of the machinery and propose a new device. He chose the latter method. It was bold and dangerous. But he went through with it courageously. The numbers dropped ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell

... final. It took no account of the risks of a peradventure. Madame Gala was a mere cog in the great wheel of Sally's progress through life. Even Toby had at first no place in her survey. Then she wondered if he knew Regent Street. He could come one Saturday and wait for her outside Madame Gala's. ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton

... "he who would play poker with dishonest men should never put all cards on table too soon. Or in other words, Confusion is the better part of valor. The garbage made them think that the Cow had sprung a cog somewhere, without ever guessing ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond

... 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 Ado, Act ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various

... 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 ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

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

... [Biol.], spiculum^; needle, hypodermic needle, tack, nail, pin; prick, prickle; spur, rowel, barb; spit, cusp; horn, antler; snag; tag thorn, bristle; Adam's needle^, bear grass [U.S.], tine, yucca. nib, tooth, tusk; spoke, cog, ratchet. crag, crest, arete [Fr.], cone peak, sugar loaf, pike, aiguille^; spire, pyramid, steeple. beard, chevaux de frise [Fr.], porcupine, hedgehog, brier, bramble, thistle; comb; awn, beggar's lice, bur, burr, catchweed^, cleavers, clivers^, goose, grass, hairif^, hariff, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... "You'll tell me next that they can make shoes by machinery—cut out and peg and sew and fix the treads and all? No, damn it, that can only be done by human hands directed by human intelligence. Shoemaking is work for men only. Perhaps I myself might be replaced by a machine—by a few cog-wheels that go round and round! Bah! A machine is dead, I know that, and it can't think or adapt itself to circumstances; you may have to shape the boot in a particular way for a special foot, on account of tender toes, or—here I ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... driving is by means of chains, which run round sprocket (cog) wheels on the ends of a shaft crossing the frame just behind the gear-box, and round larger sprockets attached to the hubs of the driving-wheels. In such a case the axles of the driving-wheel are ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams

... 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

... that General Dhenin, who has repulsed a charge of the enemy and whose thigh is fractured by a cannon-ball, has just passed over to the enemy. The mechanism which, for fifteen years, has worked so well, breaks down of itself through its own action; its cog-wheels have got out of gear; cracks show themselves in the metal which seemed so sound; the divinations of popular instinct verify this; the exaggerations of the popular imagination expand it and suddenly the whole machine rattles down to ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... plaything of the gods or a cog in the wheels of the universe this was the problem which life offered to the thinking Greek; and in undertaking its solution, he set in motion the forces that have made our modern civilization. That the problem remains unsolved is nothing in comparison ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... shocked nor particularly interested. His expression was that of one disappointed. It suddenly flashed across Ralph, he could scarcely have told why, that the young inventor had indeed been "inventing" something, that something had slipped a cog, and that he was responsible for the catastrophe of the moment. Now Archie looked about him in a stealthy, baffled way, as though he was anxious to ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman

... them. It is they who make us, who give us our habits of mind and body, our very thoughts; it is these mechanical monsters who control our fates and drive us along whither they mean us to go. We are caught in their cog-wheels—in a process as inevitable as the revolution of the planets. No use lamenting a cosmic phenomenon! Were it otherwise, I should certainly mope myself into a green melancholy over the fact, the most dismal fact on earth, that ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... forward to a Canada stretching from ocean to ocean, and to take the necessary legal steps to secure the broad acres of the West as part of the Dominion. But just when everything seemed to be going well a cog in the diplomatic equipment of the Canadian Government power-house slipped and taking advantage of the occasion, one Louis Riel, the son of the old hot-headed agitator on the Red River, threw a ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth

... schemes 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, water-wheels have been put up to drive several pulpers at one ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... nodded their heads slowly, in precisely the same way, and both went on with their employment as steadily and stiffly as though they worked by machinery. The old man puffed, puffed, and his vrouw clicked her knitting needles, as if regulated by internal cog wheels. Even the real smoke issuing from the motionless pipe gave no convincing proof that they ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge

... 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' mammy says de blessin' An' ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... Morse, Hoe, and McCormick, and a dozen others, whose inventions were just beginning to be criticised, and often condemned, were really the chief factors in the making of a new and greater democracy: that the cog, the drill, the grate-bar, and the flying shuttle would ere long supplant the hoe and the scythe; and that when the full flood of this new era was reached their old-time standards of family pride, reckless hospitality, and even their old-fashioned courtesy would well-nigh be swept into ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith

... Although I had passed through the canal on a ship and rode up and down it on the train it was only after talking an hour with this engineer and then going into the control station tower and watching boats taken through the Gatun lock system, going into the tunnels below and watching the gigantic cog wheels and wonderful machinery, that I began to appreciate the real ingenuity and brain work of this ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols

... associates with those from everywhere, perhaps, except his own neighbourhood. Only when he is in college, in his club or in his secret society lodge or the quarters of his ward boss does he find himself in intimate social relations with human beings of like mind and a similar social status. He is a cog in a wheel, a thing, a point of potential, a lonely and numerical unit, instead of a gregarious human animal rejoicing in his friends and companions, and working, playing and quarreling with them, as God made him and meant him ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... mine below, when 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 ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor

... worker is a mechanical drudge, whose work has no quality save that of dogged fidelity to the task. Now, this power of keeping the whole before the mind while dealing with the parts, of seeing the completed machine while shaping a pin or a cog, of getting the complete effect of the argument while elaborating a minor point, resides in the imagination. It is the light which must shine upon all toil that has in it intelligence, prevision, and freshness; and its glow is as essential in mechanical as in purely artistic work. Whenever, ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... stuffin out of him. The policeman told him that would be all right, and I led Pa away. He was offul mad. But it was the best fun when the lights went out. You see the electric light machine slipped a cog, or lost its cud, and all of a sudden the lights went out and it was as dark as a squaw's pocket. Pa wanted to know what made it so dark, and I told him it was not dark. He said boy don't you fool me. You see I thought it would be fun to make Pa believe he was struck blind, so I told him ...
— Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa - 1883 • George W. Peck

... 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

... 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? ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy

... harries the petty officer, and so it goes up to the highest,—a well-planned system on the part of the superior to bring the inferior to a high point of material efficiency. The propelling spirit is devotion to the Fatherland: each believes himself a cog in the machine chosen of God to achieve His purposes on earth. The world hears of the Kaiser's "Ich und Gott," of his mailed fist beating down his enemies, but those who have lived in Germany know that exactly ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch

... representatives received 1000 pounds. Another thousand is paid to the heirs of a poor dyer who fell into a vat of boiling liquor; while, in regard to smaller matters, a warehouseman, whose finger caught in the cog-wheel of a crane, received 30 pounds. And, again, here is 1000 pounds to a gentleman killed in a railway accident, and 100 pounds to a poor woman. The latter had insured for a single trip in an excursion train at a charge of two-pence, while the former ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne

... of marble stairs led from one of Coo-ee-oh's private rooms down to the basement, but when the party arrived all were puzzled by what they saw. In the center of a broad, low room, stood a mass of great cog-wheels, chains and pulleys, all interlocked and seeming to form a huge machine; but there was no engine or other motive power to make ...
— Glinda of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... rest of the day wasn't fascinatin'. No; I'd had about all of Barnes I could stand. A few more of his cheerin' observations, and I'd want to jam his head into his typewriter and then tread on the keys. Nor I wasn't goin' to be fed on any more cog-wheel statistics by the ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford

... 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 ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn

... adaptable; she would be a tremendous social success with a little expert coaching, and he——? A petroleum engineer, a mere cog in the wheel of a great corporation, without prospects other than might lie in the success of his present doubtful mission, could be of no ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant

... exclamations, the Live Children were dragged towards the blue workshops, where each of the little inventors set his machine going. It was a great blue whirl of disks and pulleys and straps and fly-wheels and driving-wheels and cog-wheels and all kinds of wheels, which sent every sort of machine skimming over the ground or shooting up to the ceiling. Other Blue Children unfolded maps and plans, or opened great big books, or uncovered azure statues, ...
— The Blue Bird for Children - The Wonderful Adventures of Tyltyl and Mytyl in Search of Happiness • Georgette Leblanc

... with the men 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 most desperate ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... 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 would live together ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske

... stove with it; "I told myself she would be marryin' one of the boys most likely; I kep' that in mind steady, as you may say. I thought I was so used to the idee that it wouldn't jar me much of any when it come to the fact. But it did; yes siree, it did, sure enough. 'Peared as if a cog slipped somehow, and my whole works was jolted out ...
— The Wooing of Calvin Parks • Laura E. Richards

... 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 ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine

... 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

... 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

... about 1803, a Cornishman named Trevithick had produced a 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

... deliverance of my native land. So that, although I rose from the rock whereon I was sitting, in the clear conviction that our array would be scattered like chaff before the wind, I yet had a blessed persuasion that the event would prove in the end a link in the chain, or a cog in the wheel, of the hidden enginery with which Providence works ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt

... Service, were moved to make him an offer. This offer he stolidly considered and at last stolidly accepted. He became an official with the weight of the Federal authority behind him. He became an investigator with the secrets of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving at his beck. He found himself a cog in a machinery that seemed limitless in its ramifications. He was the agent of a vast and centralized authority, an authority against which there could be no opposition. But he had to school himself to the knowledge that he was a cog, and ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer

... the cleaning done without shadow of inconvenience to him. So long as these processes were not forced upon his consciousness and were faultlessly performed, he accepted the results without comment. But let one cog of the wheel slip, setting the mechanism of his comfort awry, and he was sure ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett

... The cog railroad running nearly to the top has been badly damaged a number of times in recent years and the occupants of the meteorological observatory on or near the summit have had several ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... gettin' plumb alarmed about myse'f," observed the Old Cattleman, as we drew together for our usual talk. "I've been sort o' cog'tatin' tharof, an' I begins to allow I'm a mighty sight too garrulous that a-way. This yere conversation habit is shore growin' on me, an', if I don't watch out, I'm goin' to be a bigger ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis

... trial at extracting the fibre failed on account of our having no proper machine to bruise the stems. We extemporized a two-roller mill; but as it had no cog-gearing to cause both rollers to turn together, the only one on which the handle or crank was fixed turned, with, the result of grinding the stems to pulp instead of simply ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... 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 trot— When you' mammy ses de blessin' ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson

... of Mars the ashment came, the best paving surface known to man. And what was Mars but mines? With all their grand talk, who wanted to leave Mother Earth? What was Venus but a sanctuary, a vacation spot, and what was Mars but mines? When a big cog like the Chief could send a lonely man all the way to Dubbinville because of a neighbor's summons, how could they expect little cogs to ...
— The Mighty Dead • William Campbell Gault

... and letters of 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 ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis

... of 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 a computation ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... words to say. Only vague yearnings and emotions and a heartfelt wish to put my shoulder to the great wheel of good. What could I say? Every prayer seemed based on the idea that God was a magnified man—that He needed asking and praising and thanking. Should the cog of the wheel creak praise to the Engineer? Let it rather cog harder, and creak less. Yet I did, I confess, try to put the agitation of my soul into words. I meant it for a prayer; but when I considered afterwards the "supposing thats" and ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro

... Mistris Ford, 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



Words linked to "Cog" :   subsidiary, underling, gear, roll, geared wheel, subordinate, cogwheel, roll out, tooth



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