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Crude   Listen
adjective
Crude  adj.  (compar. cruder; superl. crudest)  
1.
In its natural state; not cooked or prepared by fire or heat; undressed; not altered, refined, or prepared for use by any artificial process; raw; as, crude flesh. "Common crude salt." "Molding to its will each successive deposit of the crude materials."
2.
Unripe; not mature or perfect; immature. "I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude."
3.
Not reduced to order or form; unfinished; not arranged or prepared; ill-considered; immature. "Crude projects." "Crude, undigested masses of suggestion, furnishing rather raw materials for composition." "The originals of Nature in their crude Conception."
4.
Undigested; unconcocted; not brought into a form to give nourishment. "Crude and inconcoct."
5.
Having, or displaying, superficial and undigested knowledge; without culture or profundity; as, a crude reasoner.
6.
(Paint.) Harsh and offensive, as a color; tawdry or in bad taste, as a combination of colors, or any design or work of art.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Crude" Quotes from Famous Books



... asked, a little abruptly, "if I started a crusade against the British and Imperial, outside the Stock Exchange altogether, if I embarked in a crude and illegal scheme to break them up, would ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... reasons about the things of life in the same way as about the conditions of crude matter. Nowhere is the confusion so evident as in discussions about individuality. We are shown the stumps of a Lumbriculus, each regenerating its head and living thence-forward as an independent individual; ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... very soft at the thought of Tony's boyishly crude effort to protect her from the possible consequence of their night's sojourn at the hotel. "I'm afraid Tony let him think that on my account—in order to shield me.... I should have told you all about it at the time," she ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler

... was a strangely crude efficiency. The prototype had been built by his father bit by bit and step by step as its design demanded. Sections were added as needed, and other sections believed needed were abandoned as the research showed them unnecessary. Louis ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith

... the manufacture of the finer kinds of soap, and by "Rosin the Bow." It commands, ordinarily, nearly five times the price of the common article. When barrelled, the turpentine is frequently sent to market in its crude state, but more often is distilled on the plantation, the gatherers generally possessing means ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore

... years, would vary according to the supplies which each brought from Holland or England; in some families there were sheets and "pillow-beeres" with "clothes of substance and comeliness," but other households were scantily supplied. A somewhat crude but interesting ballad, called "Our Forefathers' Song," is given by tradition from the lips of an old lady aged ninety-four years, in 1767. If the suggestion is accurate that she learned this from her mother or grandmother, its date ...
— The Women Who Came in the Mayflower • Annie Russell Marble

... published in 1905, was not made up according to the age-grade plan. It consisted merely of 30 tests, arranged roughly in order of difficulty. Although Binet nowhere gives any account of the steps by which this crude and ungraded scale was transformed into the relatively complete age-grade scale of 1908, we can infer that the original and ingenious idea of utilizing age norms was suggested by the data collected with the 1905 scale. However the discovery was made, it ranks, perhaps, ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman

... Bruce had taken upon his young affections, but he could not help showing, too, the sore spot of his valuation of Steering's regard for Miss Madeira. Though they mentioned Miss Madeira between them only casually, Bruce knew for himself that Piney, in his crude but vehement way, was living through a boy's own high tragedy of love for a woman older than he and beyond his reach, and Piney knew for himself that Steering, in the most perfect flower of his capacity, had attained his destiny as a perfect lover, under circumstances most unpropitious. The ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young

... eulogy at the time they appeared "in the seventies." "Worthy to be hung at the Academy beside the best pictures of Millais or Sandys," one fatuous critic observed. Looking over their pages again, it seems strange that their very weak drawing and crude colour could have satisfied people familiar with Mr. Walter Crane's masterly work in a not dissimiliar style. "Ridicula Rediviva" and "Mores Ridiculi" (both Macmillan), were illustrations of nursery rhymes. To "The Fairy Book" (1870), a selection of old stories re-told ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White

... twain was what he schemed: Cortana clave the skull like a true brand, And pagan Passamont died unredeemed; Yet harsh and haughty, as he lay he banned, And most devoutly Macon still blasphemed[343]; But while his crude, rude blasphemies he heard, Orlando thanked the Father ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... our seeing; Taught by him a twelvemonth, we confess Earth once robed in crude barbaric splendor, Has put on a softer ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman

... we may say that his background is always the home, and here he paints his portraits, often like those of Hogarth for strength and grotesque effect. Here, too, he limns the scenes of his comedy-tragedy, and depicts the changing fashions of the time. The color is sometimes a little crude, laid on occasionally with too coarse a brush; but the effect is always lifelike, and our interest in it is never known ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... least one or two of his songs had the artistic finish as well as the spontaneity of genuine poetry. In all that he had done, 'puerile and silly,' to quote his own criticism of Handsome Nell, or at times halting and crude, there was the ring of sincerity. He was not merely an echo, as too many polished poetasters in their first attempts have been. Such jinglers are usually as happy in their juvenile effusions as ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun

... street-corners, in tram-cars, and in conversations with railway men, mechanics, policemen, and others who were soldiers a year ago, or stay-at-homes, thinking hard over the meaning of the war. I am certain that millions of men are thinking these things, because I found the track of those common thoughts, crude, simple, dangerous, among Canadian soldiers crossing the Atlantic, in Canadian towns, and in the United States, as I had begun to see the trail of them far back in the early days of the war when I moved among French soldiers, Belgian soldiers, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... rude writing table on which were a few official papers. Ranged about the room were a dozen or more rawhide-seated chairs, each standing stiffly at "attention" against the wall scrupulously equidistant order. Glaring at me in crude lettering from a broad rafter facing the door was the grimly patriotic sentiment, "Libertad o Muerte." (Liberty or Death!) In the southwest corner of the room stood a low and narrow cot, beneath whose thin serape covering a tall, gaunt ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson

... subjects of Holland, whom they considered as ungrateful interlopers. In the house of peers, however, the bill met with a formidable opposition from the earl of Winchelsea and lord Sandys, who justly observed, that it was a crude indigested scheme, which in the execution would never answer the expectations of the people; that in contending with the Dutch, who are the patterns of unwearied industry and the most rigid economy, nothing could be more absurd than a joint-stock company, which ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... commerce is a matter of only the last four centuries, and that they are unknown to a very large part of the human race to-day. It seems strange that such a labor-saving device should have struggled for nearly a thousand years after its system of place value was perfected before it replaced such crude notations as the one that the Roman conqueror made substantially universal in Europe. Such, however, is the case, and there is probably no one who has not at least some slight passing interest in the story of this struggle. To the mathematician and the student of civilization the ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith

... violated it, for on the Sabbath rested the entire superstructure of the Temple itself, and all belief might topple if the Sabbath was not maintained, and rigorously. In the houses of the Sadducees Joseph heard these very words, and their crude scepticism revolted his tender soul: he was drawn back to his own sect, the Pharisees, for however narrow-minded and fanatical they might be he could not deny to them the virtue of sincerity. It was with a delightful sense of community of spirit ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore

... That in itself is no light inducement—but I get more. I get Mr. Inglesby's personal backing, which means an assured future to me; as it will mean to you and your father, if you have got the sense you were born with. This is business. Kindly omit melodrama—crude, and not at all your ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler

... canoe was roughly shaped, they had to spend much more time on it, rendering it water-proof by smearing the seams with pitch and gum which exuded from several trees near at hand. They had used withes of willow to bind the boat together, and, though it was a very crude looking affair, the boys thought it would serve for what ...
— Frank Roscoe's Secret • Allen Chapman

... different from those of the planter. For instance, some years ago an arrangement was offered by the San Francisco sugar refineries by which these agreed to take two-thirds of the product of the plantations in crude sugar, to furnish bags to contain this product, and to pay cash for it in Honolulu. Under this system the planter was saved the heavy expense of sugar kegs, and the cost of two agencies of five per cent. each, besides getting cash in Honolulu, ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff

... three hundred and ninety-three against sixty. On the bringing up of the report, Mr. Cobbett moved that the whole of the address should be rejected, and that another which he had concocted should be adopted. This crude amendment was negatived by an overwhelming majority: only twenty-three in a full house voted ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... and remorse, as lessening his last chance of saving his patient's life; and yet to him— young, full of energy, and hope, and resolution, though no nearer perfection and tried wisdom than any other man with crude beliefs and enthusiasms and untested powers for good or evil—to him death still appeared one of the most awful facts in life, and he could not think unmoved of the task of announcing to such a man as this, ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter

... looked up. Her cheeks were flaming with excitement, for any bit of print, however crude, had the power to move her as reality could not. At eleven she shivered and glowed over pseudo-sentiment, while a tragedy in the mine—whose tall chimneys she could see from her window—was as intangibly distant ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson

... it is necessary first to remove the top layer of sand and then a layer of clay. Underneath this is found a layer of soft, whitish material called "nitrate." The crude nitrate is sent to the nitrate ports to be crushed and boiled in sea-water. After boiling, the solution is drawn off into shallow vessels and exposed to the heat of ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson

... sufficiently sorry for this to hope that, if the story meets with the success that I should certainly predict for it, a lady of such unusual gifts may allow us to know her name. Of these gifts I have no doubt whatever. As a tale Helen of Four Gates is crude, unnatural, melodramatic; but the power (brutality, if you prefer) of its telling takes away the critical breath. Whether in real life anyone could have nursed a lifelong hatred as old Mason did (personally I cherish the belief that hatred is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 30, 1917 • Various

... perceived; there must be a suggestion of something beyond these, and an ennobling suggestion, if not a combination, that amounts to a new creation. Now, it seems to me that the transmutation of the crude and heretofore unpoetical materials which he found in the New World into what is as absolute a creation as exists in literature, was a distinct work of the imagination. Its humorous quality does not interfere with its largeness of outline, nor with its essential poetic coloring. For, whimsical ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... a girl past sixteen, somewhat tallish, and a little awkward; her hair was light, her eyes blue, and her face not yet developed, but there were the crude elements of a possible beauty in her features. When her temper was aroused, and she gathered up the habitual slovenly expression of her face into a look of vigor and concentrated resolution, she was "splendid," in the vocabulary ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston

... profit at all. Nisbet, however, who had long been familiar with the business, insisted there was a profit, in the fact that the gold-dust or bullion shipped was more valuable than its cost to us. We, of course, had to remit bullion to meet our bills on New York, and bought crude gold-dust, or bars refined by Kellogg & Humbert or E. Justh & Co., for at that time the United States Mint was not in operation. But, as the reports of our shipments came back from New York, I ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... produce all manner of curios, the great majority of which appear to command a ready sale among the visitors, crude and commonplace as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various

... thrown crudely across the axle-trees. Rouletabille gave the man who was seated in it thee roubles, and jumped into the planks beside him, and the two little Finnish horses, whose manes hung clear to the mud, went like the wind. Such crude conveyances are necessary on such crude roads, but it requires a strong constitution to make a journey on them. Still, the reporter felt none of the jolting, he was so intent on the sea and the coast ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux

... tempered in him with inherited self-control, the moderation of judgment bred by wide historical knowledge, and a pervasive atmosphere of literary good-breeding which constantly substitutes allusive irony for crude statement, the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... The hole must be pretty well filled up by to-day, for last night the rain came down in awful torrents. For the last two days the evening light has been very strange and disquieting—a whitish glare in the sky, the trees and bare ground a burnt-sienna red, and the vegetation a strong crude green with a delicate white bloom. The rain is still pouring and the whole world is damp ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez

... what he is talking about, and both from conscience and from disposition is anxious above all to be accurate and discriminative. If he fails, as he often seems to us to do, in the justice and balance of his appreciation of the phenomena before him, if his statements and generalisations are crude and extravagant, it is that passion and deep aversions have overpowered the natural accuracy of his faculty ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church

... rejected particles, and then the matter which flows forth is blackish. It may also come from a cold in the head, or from any other decayed or corrupted member, but if the discharge be white, the cause lies either in the stomach or loins. In the stomach, by some crude substance there, and vitiated by grief, melancholy or some other mental disturbance; for otherwise, if the matter were only crude phlegm and noways corrupt, being taken into the liver it might be converted into the blood; for phlegm in the ventricle is called nourishment half ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous

... reward your many anxious moments of thought and work—string your fiddle, for, be assured, you will be rewarded, be your instrument somewhat crude in tone; and he is of a miserably cold, prosaic temperament indeed, who does not warm up at this juncture—this climax, this crisis. It may be the tone is good, very good; with what pride it is shown and tried; should it be mediocre, or even ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson

... 1960's, this country had a surplus capacity of crude oil which we were able to make available to our trading partners whenever there was a disruption of supply. This surplus capacity enabled us to influence both supplies and prices of crude oil throughout the world. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Gerald R. Ford • Gerald R. Ford

... and old things are confounded. I know not whether I am sitting on the ruins of a wall, or on the material which is to compose a new one. Nature is an instructed and impartial teacher, spreading no crude opinions, and flattering none; she will be neither radical nor conservative. Consider the moonlight, so civil, yet ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various

... know, I'm terribly frightened of Savile," said Jasmyn. "He's such a man of the world that I feel positively crude ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson

... tingling with that sensitive emotion which makes many a young artist, or poet, shrink in real agony, when the crude first-fruits of his genius are brought to light—Olive stood by, while the painter's kind little sister turned over a portfolio filled with a ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)

... that bran has remarkable food value is a delusion; it actually makes the protein of the grain less digestible. As for mineral matter, 'to build up bone and teeth and brawn,' there is enough of it in almost any mixed diet, without swallowing a lot of crude fiber. ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts

... became detached. The bark is the only part used, and this was beaten on two previously prepared blocks, each consisting of two logs lashed together, with flattened upper sides. On either side of these crude tables stood as many men as could find room, beating earnestly with sticks upon the bark, singing head-hunting songs the while with much fervour. Occasionally they interrupted the procedure to run about animatedly, returning ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz

... the square hall, the scene of the night's revelry, and glanced about him, the crude bareness and reckless disorder that the merciful glow of the gas-light and its attendant shadows had kindly concealed, stood out in bold relief under the white light of the day now streaming through an oval skylight immediately above the piano. The floor was strewn with the various ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith

... my dear Mrs. Hawkins, having the silver, as your own eyes show you, beside the ores of lead, manganese, and copper, and above all this gossan (as the Cornish call it), which I suspect to be not merely the matrix of the ore, but also the very crude form and materia prima of all metals—you mark me?—If my recipes, which I had from Doctor Dee, succeed only half so well as I expect, then I refine out the luna, the silver, lay it by, and transmute the remaining ores into sol, gold. ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... how two fine writers, Thackeray and Stendhal, have brought that famous battle into the plot of their masterpieces (Vanity Fair and La Chartreuse de Parme), will have noticed that they carefully avoid the crude and undisguised employment of detail, either in words or incidents; they allow fiction to interfere very constantly with fact in all petty matters of this sort; their art consists, not in historical accuracy, but in verisimilitude; they discard authentic phrases and incidents; they ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... dust-stained walls, and the scant and crude furniture of her home. A clock, in a splintered and battered oblong box of varnished wood, she suddenly regarded as an abomination. She noted that it ticked raspingly. The almost vanished flowers in the carpet-pattern, she conceived ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane

... six moralities or comedies, a farce, epistles, elegies, philosophical poems, and the Heptameron, her principal work—a collection of prose tales in which are reflected the customary conversation, the morals of polite society, and the ideal love of the time. They are a medley of crude equivocalities, of the grossness of the fabliaux, of Rabelais, and of the delicate preciosity of the seventeenth century. Love is the principal theme discussed—youth, nobility, wealth, power, beauty, glory, love for love, the ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme

... of being bored, yet with an irrepressible curiosity, Mrs. De Peyster, piano-lover, awaited during the morning and early forenoon Mary's first assault upon the instrument. She would be crude, no doubt of it; no technique, no poetic suavity of touch, ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott

... writers, and certain explicit statements in others, which tend to show that the Fathers would not have been prepared to deal so harshly with usurers, did usurers not treat their debtors so cruelly.... Of keen philosophical analysis there is none.... On the whole, we find the teachings of the Fathers crude and undeveloped.'[6] ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien

... Jane and Gertie had each five. One of Jane's was a marvellous creation so heavy that she promptly investigated what lay beneath the flowers, finding a fat little box of candy hidden away. Another was a crude little pasteboard affair fairly overflowing with dainty spring beauties, and this, too, contained an offering in the shape of a jolly little homemade whistle. Still ...
— Chicken Little Jane • Lily Munsell Ritchie

... the mother-tongue, our dear mother-tongue, had laid all the nations under contribution to enrich her treasury,—gathering from one its strength, from another its stateliness, from a third its harmony, till the harsh, crude, rugged dialect of a barbarous horde became worthy to embody, as it does, the love, the wisdom, and the faith ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... drawn to the philosophical opinions of antiquity, that the doctrines which we still retain as true came to the knowledge of the old philosophers, not so much by processes of legitimate investigation as by mere guessing or crude speculation, for which there was an equal chance whether they were right or wrong; but a closer examination will show that many of them must have depended on results previously determined or observed by the Africans or Asiatics, and ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... that, and guided only by chance, she read a number of other novels, most of which were of antediluvian date, thus accounting, she supposed, for their sentiments, which she found old fashioned. We should be wrong, however, if we supposed that Jacqueline's crude judgment of these books had nothing in common with true criticism. Her only object, however, in reading all this sentimental prose was to discover, as formerly she had found in poetry, something that applied to her own case; but she soon discovered ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... have passed; another war has called its roll of martyrs; again the old bell tolls from the crude latticed tower of the settlement church; another great pouring of sympathetic humanity, and this time the body of a son, wrapped in the stars and stripes, is lowered to its everlasting rest beside that of the father who sleeps ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various

... hazard of a visit to Chelsea Town Hall, had become obsessed by a single idea, an idea which his natural apprehensions had well nourished. A common phenomenon! George had met before the man obsessed by one idea, with his crude reasoning, his impatience, and his flashing eye. As for himself he did not pretend to be an expert in politics; he had no time for politics; but he was interested in them, and held strong views about them; and among his strongest views was the ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... lined up for this at dawn before an old warehouse which had been fitted with crude showers. We were turned in twenty in a batch and were given four minutes to soap ourselves all over and rinse off. I was in the last lot and had just lathered up good and plenty when the water went dead. If you want to reach the acme of stickiness, ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes

... he said, rather disappointed. "After that dinner I thought it only fair to read it, and although I detect considerable crude power in it, still I am very sorry it was ever published. The presentation of Judaism is most ignorant. All the mystical yearnings of the heroine might have found as much satisfaction in the faith of her own race as they find expression in ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... up to the crude mantel shelf, brought down a wooden spoon, and wiped it on a handkerchief he ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton

... bearings with our crude and inaccurate instruments; we searched the chart; we cudgeled our brains; and at last it was Bradley who suggested a solution. He was in the tower and watching the compass, to which he called my attention. The needle was pointing straight toward the land. Bradley swung the ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... look forward as the extreme goal of political advancement, and which still prevailed among other subterranean races, whom they despised as barbarians, the loftier family of Ana, to which belonged the tribe I was visiting, looked back to as one of the crude and ignorant experiments which belong to the infancy of political science. It was the age of envy and hate, of fierce passions, of constant social changes more or less violent, of strife between classes, of war between state and state. This phase of society lasted, however, ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... language. Their books were originally made of sheepskin, but paper is now used. The art of printing was unknown, and many books are said to have been lost. The books are illustrated, but the drawings are extremely crude."[T] ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... night blue of the sky. If she strained her ears, Helen could hear the singing of Halkett's stream and it said things she had not heard before. A sound of voices came from the road and she knew that some faithful Christians of the moor were returning from their worship in the town: she remembered them crude and ugly in their Sunday clothes, but they gathered mystery from distance and the night. Perhaps they came from that chapel where Zebedee had spent his unhappy hours. She turned and her hands swept the heather flowers. This was now his praying place, as it had always been hers, and when the Easter ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young

... print, but I know without reading it that it is all perfectly familiar to me. There is, of course, the other woman, the drink, the push, the blow, the bruise, the sympathetic sister or landlady. The crudest of writers could invent nothing more crude." ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... commence flapping and beating the air with a reciprocal motion. First, he would buffet the air downwards with the left arm and right leg simultaneously, and while these recovered their position would strike with the right hand and left leg, and so on alternately. With this crude method the enterprising inventor succeeded in raising himself by short stages from one height to another, reaching thus the top of a house, whence he could pass over others, or cross a ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon

... the preaching of our fathers, crude enough, much of it, no doubt; lacking, perhaps, many of the literary excellencies and graces of the preaching of our later days, yet mighty because of its very sureness, because of its splendid dogmatism. The complaint goes that the pulpit of our time lacks this positive note; that by ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson

... overture is described as being "in his own style, fresh and cheerful, foreshadowing his symphonies. The songs are in the Italian manner, very inferior in originality and expression to Handel's music; the quartet is crude in form and uninteresting in substance." [See Miss Townsend's Haydn, ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden

... forces of nature—the tallow-dip, the candle, the oil lamp, years later a more refined type of oil, gas, electricity, the latest tungsten lights, radium—and we may be still only at the beginnings. Our finest electric lights of today may seem—will seem—crude and the quality of their light even more crude, twenty years hence, even less. Many other examples of our gradual passing from the coarser to the finer in connection with the laws and forces of nature occur readily to the ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine

... voices, husky from neglect and crude from lack of culture, joined in the chorus, with a heartiness ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels

... is; or if you like so to call it, a belief qualified with scorn in all things extant. The tastes and habits of such a man prevent him from being a boisterous demagogue, and his love of truth and dislike of cant keep him from advancing crude propositions, such as many loud reformers are constantly ready with; much more of uttering downright falsehoods in arguing questions or abusing opponents, which he would die or starve rather than use. It was not in our friend's nature to be able to utter certain lies; nor was he strong enough ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray

... himself had passed away, but the wonder and mystery of woman's love for man remained. He felt himself to be an honest man, but a man big, crude and coarse compared to her beauty and delicacy. He marveled at her bravery and her magnanimity. Leaving Susanna he leaped upon a fresh horse and set off, riding fast toward the divide. The wind had risen and was blowing from ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland

... for his ability to read some Hebrew, without knowing the meaning of the words, he enjoyed a considerable degree of native intellectual alertness, and in his crude, untutored way ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan

... to herself again, she was lying on the bed in Elisabeth's room at the hotel. Some one had drawn the blinds, shutting out the crude glare of the sunlight, and in the semi-darkness she could feel soft hands about her, bathing her face with something fragrantly cool and refreshing. She opened her eyes and looked up to find Elisabeth's face bent over her—unspeakably kind and tender, like that ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler

... with the axe and a block of basswood to hew out a trough for a wash bowl. With adequate tools he might have made a good one; but, working with an axe and a stiff arm, the result was a very heavy, crude affair. It would indeed hold water, but it was almost impossible to dip it into the water hole, so that a ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton

... on a subject, Richard, that has often occupied my mind. But knowest thou anything of this mystery, or are they only the crude conjectures of ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper

... who promises to execute the vendetta. In these passages his humour, his delicacy, his grace, his tenderness, his voice and, most wonderful of all, his apparently intense belief in the reality of everything he says and does make one forget how crude and transpontine the bare ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones

... table, his two bottles before him, trying to produce something. It annoyed me dreadfully that a whole swarm of little flies and gnats, upon which I depend for my subsistence, had settled upon the artificial sun and were staring into it in that crude, stupid, ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels

... John Burroughs. Forty years ago, I met him at Richard Watson Gilder's. He was young then, and delightfully "homely" in the sense in which the Englishman used the word. Some of the refined ladies at Mrs. Gilder's objected to his "crude speech," for even in the eighties there were still pr['e]cieuses. The truth is that his rural use of the vernacular was part of the charm. It never spoiled his style; but it gave that touch of homeliness to it which smelt of the good soil ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan

... was drowned by the interjectory din from the rear of the building, where lads and men stood chock-a-block, the former, and the latter too, making right royal use of their licence to be rowdy; but such a good-natured crowd could not often be seen. There were no altercations, only laughter and the crude repartee of ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin

... he acknowledged to himself, that while he could mock at them as poetry, he could not ignore their power. The intensity of their hatred, and of their sincerity, made itself felt, as the light of the sun will shine through the crude commonness of a vulgar ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... fleece from her, procuring by this process great patches of wool and hair. Then the hairs are plucked out and thrown away and the wool is ready to be spun. During the spinning the woman also sits upon the ground with legs outstretched, with the crude wool by her left side within easy reach. This she draws out with her left hand and feeds to her right, in the amount necessary to form the required size of thread. As it is received between the palm of the right hand and the right thigh, it is rolled from the body and falls ...
— Aboriginal American Weaving • Mary Lois Kissell

... thank a pretty girl for a favor done, but still it was a scoffing whisper, with a tinge of resentfulness, but resentfulness tempered by courtesy. Underlying all this was a flavor of independence, but not such crude independence that it killed the delicate tone that implied that the hearer of the whisper was a very pretty girl, and that that fact was granted even while her interference in the whisperer's affairs was misliked, and her suspicions of dishonest acts on his part ...
— The Cheerful Smugglers • Ellis Parker Butler

... a third flavor of its own, perfectly distinct from Cod or Turbot, which it must be owned may to some not injudicious palates render it acceptable—but to my unpractised tooth it presented rather a crude river-fish-flavor, like your Pike or Carp, and perhaps like them should have been tamed & corrected by some laborious & well chosen sauce. Still I always suspect a fish which requires so much of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... Uncle Tom very long, experienced as he was, to bring the three children back to consciousness. As it was, they had been more affected by the cold and the fright than anything else, for the raft, crude as it was, had kept them above the surface of the waves ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler

... monomania of gifted minds was realized. Upcott had every possible autograph from every known hand in his collection: Palissy succeeded in making glazed china; but Vertue left his ore to the hands of others to work out into shape, and the man who moulded his crude materials was Horace Walpole, and Vertue's forty volumes were shaped into a readable work, as curious and accurate in facts as it is flippant and prejudiced in ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton

... earliest attempt at 'poetry always dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine,' which I have since written according to a scheme less extravagant and scale less impracticable than were ventured upon in this crude preliminary sketch—a sketch that, on reviewal, appears not altogether wide of some hint of the characteristic features of that particular dramatis persona it would fain have reproduced: good draughtsmanship, however, and ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... coldness, with a surpassing meekness. But it is here that the artistic quality really emerges; these beautiful, stainless hearts are preoccupied with what they receive rather than with what they give. In that crude, ingenuous book The Professor, the hero, who is a good instance of how Charlotte Bronte confused rigidity of nature with manliness, surprised by an outbreak of passionate emotion on the part of his quiet and self-contained wife, and still ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... but always attributed to others, and, as a rule, to the Governor. It is true that the English Government, though actuated by a sincere desire to benefit and assist the rising community, often aggravated these troubles by its crude and ill-informed efforts to alleviate them. And as Sir George Gipps considered it his chief duty to obey literally and exactly all the orders sent out by his superiors in England, however much he privately ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland

... above them in coloured sparkles. Gold! Gold! The opera house is a treasure-box of gold. Gold in a broad smear across the orchestra pit: Gold of horns, trumpets, tubas; Gold—spun-gold, twittering-gold, snapping-gold Of harps. The conductor raises his baton, The brass blares out Crass, crude, Parvenu, fat, powerful, Golden. Rich as the fat, clapping hands in the boxes. Cymbals, gigantic, coin-shaped, Crash. The orange curtain parts And the prima-donna steps forward. One note, A drop: transparent, iridescent, A gold bubble, It floats... floats... ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell

... the moment when the routine of leave for our soldiers was established, such novices, accompanied by damsels (called flappers) often as innocent as themselves, crowded the theatres to the doors. It was hardly possible at first to find stuff crude enough to nurse them on. The best music-hall comedians ransacked their memories for the oldest quips and the most childish antics to avoid carrying the military spectators out of their depth. I believe that this was a mistake as far as the novices were concerned. Shakespeare, or the dramatized ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw

... time, so there is room here for astronomical ages, cycle upon cycle. There was time enough in that beginning for the present system of planets to be arranged from a single nebulous mass. In it we have a picture of matter in a crude condition, without fixedness of form, surrounded with darkness. Then comes the commencement of the great work of preparing our planet for the home of man, by the spirit of God moving over the chaos. There is nothing in this statement that should perplex any man, unless he is ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880

... this. The chief defect of previous publications has been that they were mere collections of rules, applicable to particular cases only, based on no established principles, and therefore as impracticable for general purposes as crude and unphilosophical in design. Ignorance was at the root of this. The authors did not understand the nature of the animal about which they professed to teach so much, and their rules were quite as applicable to the bear or the hyena. The agent employed by the old masters ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... ships, and now this final victory, flooded the land with wealth and triumph. The internal improvement, the intellectual advance of the people, were prodigious. The "Elizabethan Age" is the most famed in English literature. The first English theatre was built in 1570, a crude and queer affair for cruder, queerer plays.[21] Yet, in perhaps that very armada year of 1588, Shakespeare began writing his remarkable plays. In 1601 the drama rose to its perfection in his Hamlet, the flower of English literary genius, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various

... reflecting light? And so it is also with the other precious gems. Their varied tints are nothing without light. If they are many-sided, they reflect more light, and display more beauty. If you put paste beside a diamond there is no brilliancy in it. In its crude state it does not reflect light at all. So we are in a crude state and are of no use at all until God comes and shines upon us. The light that is in a diamond is not its own possession; it is the beauty of the sun. What beauty is there in the child of God? Only the beauty of Jesus. ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson

... bitter thoughts. All the leisure which his school life left him was passed in the company of subversive writers whose jibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings. ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce

... that house, O now what change has come to it. Its crude red-brick facade, its roof of slate; What imperceptible swift hand has given it A new, a wonderful, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various

... characteristics of the Western penitentials are their minute division of sins, their exact determination of penances for each sin, and the great extent to which they were used in the practical work of the Church. They serve as the first crude beginnings of a moral theology of a practical character, such as would be needed by the poorly trained parish clergy of the times in dealing with their flocks. On account of the nature of these works, it is hardly necessary or expedient to give more than a few brief extracts in addition ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.

... (f.o.b., 1994 est.) commodities: asphalt, metals and metallic ores, electricity, crude oil, vegetables, fruits, tobacco partners: Italy, US, Greece, The Former ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... candour and simplicity. "Is that man," I asked myself, "capable of wasting other people's money, abusing their confidence, being disposed to sponge on them?" And now this question, which had once seemed to me grave and important, struck me as crude, petty, and coarse. ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... long at my hotel, before (though it was near upon midnight) I conveyed myself to Lord Bolingbroke's lodgings. Knowing his engagements at St. Germains, where the Chevalier (who had but a very few weeks before returned to France, after the crude and unfortunate affair of 1715), chiefly resided, I was not very sanguine in my hopes of finding him at Paris. I was, however, agreeably surprised. His servant would have ushered me into his study, but I was ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Architecture in its higher form is an unknown quantity. Painting is beginning to struggle towards the light, chiefly in the form of water-colour drawings. Political satire finds expression in cartoons, for the most part of that crude sort which depicts public men as horrific ogres and malformed monsters of appalling disproportions. Music, reading, and flower gardening are the three chief refining pastimes. The number and size of the musical societies is worthy of note. So are the ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... sympathise with his view, and admit to the full the sacredness, not to say the solemnity, of the marriage ceremony, yet it is to be hoped that it still retains a naturally mirthful side, of which such public merriment is but the crude expression. ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne

... The author is at war with all the practices of French grammar; subject and object, numbers, moods, and tenses, are in consummate confusion. Even readers of his own day must at times have been fain to guess his meaning. Italian words are constantly introduced, either quite in the crude or rudely Gallicized.[5] And words also, we may add, sometimes slip in which appear to be purely Oriental, just as is apt to happen with Anglo-Indians in these days.[6] All this is perfectly consistent with the supposition that we have in this MS. a copy at least ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... quite a young man, but a little crude in his manner of expressing himself. He sits there and looks at Pelle with a curious expression in his eyes. "Cobbler's patch!" he says contemptuously, and thrusts his tongue into his cheek so as to make it bulge. Pelle says nothing; he knows he ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... an army of men to adjust electric fans, turn patent ventilators, and even to do so crude a ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... have looked upon all this we have no means of determining. Possibly, engrossed as he was with his hawks and his hounds, he may have been stupidly blind to his own dishonour, at least as far as Bertrand was concerned. Another than Charles might have chosen the crude course of opening his eyes to it. But Charles was too far-seeing. Precipitancy was not one of his faults. His next move must be dictated by the decision of Avignon ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... hastens home to publish some contemptuous account of the people whom he does not really know, or some hasty if not fallacious description of the country which he has not really seen. I am sure that, however crude my description may be, Victorians will not be offended with what I have said of themselves and their noble colony; for, small though the sphere of my observation was, they will see that I have written merely to the extent of my knowledge, ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles

... overdrawn picture many of my readers will bear witness, and my brother practitioners can amply corroborate the statement, for they fully recognize the vital importance of removing the waste from the system. The pity of it is that they still persist in employing such a crude and ineffective method. ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell

... Cardinal Tournon's request to interrupt it, i. 522; her premature delight at the reported accord in the Conference of Saint Germain, i. 541; her financial success with the prelates, i. 543; her crude notion of a conference, i. 547; is compared by Roman Catholic preachers to Jezebel, ii. 5; causes the retirement of Constable Montmorency, ii. 18; sends for the Guises, ib.; after the massacre of Vassy, orders the Duke of Guise to enter Paris, but invites him to ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... shooting of a presidential candidate, Dodgson could see the man with his grimy hands and torn collar, crumpling up as the volley from the firing party caught him. The editor himself had never come in contact with crude realities such as this—a London County Councillor escaping by a hair's breadth from a fully-deserved conviction for corruption over a tramway contract was the nearest approach he had witnessed—but he understood the value of Jimmy's reminiscences, and, without a moment's hesitation, ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt

... Italy, France, Germany and England. This fact reminds us that when we were travelling in Southern Hungary and were asked to dine with a Magyar farmer, out on the windy Pasta, instead of their usual highly coloured pottery, gay with crude, but decorative flowers, they honoured us by covering the table with American ironstone china! The Hungarian crockery resembles the Brittany and Italian ware, and some of it is most ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood

... type, so that as often as he had finished his labor of love new facts have turned up which he had not the heart to reject. So he has incorporated them one after another as best he could. The results are more inartistic and crude than he could have wished, but he hesitates not on that account to invite lovers of and believers in the Truth of History to the banquet ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens

... wheels, master, call upon the wheels, They are deaf to demagogues, deaf to crude appeals; Are our hands our own, master?—how the doctors doubt! Are our legs our own, master? wheels can run without— Prove the points are delicate—they will understand. All the wheels are loyal; see how still ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton



Words linked to "Crude" :   c, petroleum, early, blunt, rude, stark, unconditional, resid, unskilled, crudeness, residual oil, fossil oil, indecent, refined, crudity, crude oil, unanalyzed, raw, unconditioned, rock oil, earthy, unrefined, gross, vulgar



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