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Fad   Listen
noun
Fad  n.  
1.
A hobby; freak; whim. "It is your favorite fad to draw plans."
2.
A practise followed enthusiastically by a number of people for a limited period of time; as, the latest fad in fashion.
Synonyms: craze; mania.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Fad" Quotes from Famous Books



... opposite sides, but if allusions in Jonson's play the "Poetaster" have been properly interpreted, their friendly relations were not deeply disturbed. The trouble began in the first place by the London of 1600 suddenly rushing into a fad for the company of boy players, recruited chiefly from the choristers of the Chapel Royal, and known as the "Children of the Chapel." They had been acting at the new theater in Blackfriars since 1597, and their vogue became so great as actually to threaten Shakespeare's company and other ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... 'common,' she would always take care to remark to strangers, when Swann was mentioned, that he could easily, if he had wished to, have lived in the Boulevard Haussmann or the Avenue de l'Opera, and that he was the son of old M. Swann who must have left four or five million francs, but that it was a fad of his. A fad which, moreover, she thought was bound to amuse other people so much that in Paris, when M. Swann called on New Year's Day bringing her a little packet of marrons glaces, she never failed, if there were strangers in the room, to say to him: "Well, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... her present disheveled condition, she was beautiful—a trifle on the petite side, with black hair and black eyes that quirked up oddly at the outer corners. Her nails were black-lacquered and spotted with little gold stars, evidently a new feminine fad ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr

... output of the high schools, and equip them for leadership in society, and the point is clear. It is a new problem but coming to be a very real one. Going to college is getting to be the fashion—almost a fad in some places. We all know that a goodly number of students, boys and girls alike, enter the universities, East and West, every year who have no characteristics of leadership, who are not fitted for real university work, either in academic equipment, maturity of judgment, point of view, or earnestness ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd

... his squad who had a great habit of digging up unusual fads, generally in the matter of diet. At this particular time he had decided to live solely on grape nuts. As he was one of the best men on the team, Jack did not burden himself with trouble over this fad, although at several times Moakley told him that he might improve if he would eat some real food. However, when this man started a grape nut campaign among the younger members of the squad he aroused Jack's ire and upon his arrival ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards

... wonderful town, where, if you can't see everything you want to see, you can generally see a sample of it, even if your fad happens to be the ancientnesses of Egypt. We are at the Babylon Hotel, where we shall stay until it is time to start for Southampton, where we shall take the steamer for home. What we are going to do between here and Southampton I don't know yet; but I do know ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton

... of the Hill you go the more children you see. They are everywhere, and of all sizes and ages, in such reckless profusion that you no longer wonder if the world is to be depopulated through the coming of the fad of Eugenics. The Italian mother has but two thoughts—her God and her children, and it is to care for her children that she has brought from her native land the knowledge of cookery, and of those things that help to put life and strength ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords

... are all atheists. For at bottom, atheism is either a fad or a trade or a fatuity. And whether the one or the other, it is a sham more pernicious than the worst. To the young mind, it is a shibboleth of cheap culture; to the shrewd and calculating mind, to such ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... the weaknesses and foibles of the public, and there's nothing that appeals to them like a report of generosity. Of course, they never stop to think that the poor creatures are much better off dead than alive, and that they really have no hold on the sympathies of others. It's a fad among rich people to weep over the poor! Some of them will probably send flowers to the funeral of that woman, and think themselves angels of light for doing it! I tell you, religion is a trade mark in all lines of business, and ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon

... Miss Fairfield's fad. I didn't know you knew her so well. I thought you had just arrived here. Have you ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells

... very pre-occupied; perhaps engaged to some girl whose parents objected; rather mysterious, quand meme; she had heard some one say this Mr. David Williams was a cousin or something of Vivie Warren ... what if he were in love with Vivie and she had gone away because she had some fad or other about not wanting to marry? Well! All this could be looked into some other time, if it were worth bothering about at all. Or could Williams be spoony on Honoria? After her money? He was much younger—evidently—but ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... soothed the younger man. "I know all about the free swindles. This isn't one of them. It's just a fad of mine." ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... a dash of culture, caught the public fancy at once. The "Tatler" was the theme in every coffeehouse, and in the drawing-rooms, as well. Those who understood it laughed and passed it along to others who pretended they understood, and so it became the fad. Then the anonymity lent the charm of mystery—who could it be who was into all the secrets, and knew the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... quadrant, and chronometer. They were instruments I took from old Captain Barney in payment of some work I did for him. I wasn't usin' them, and Williamson had bought a catboat and was studying navigation; but he has given up that fad now and has promised me over and over to send me back my instruments, but he has never done it. If I'd thought of it I would have stopped and got 'em of him; but I didn't think, and now I expect he has gone to bed. However, I'll row in shore and ...
— The Stories of the Three Burglars • Frank Richard Stockton

... bitten with the fad of the moment, 'the simple life'?" he asked. "Let me assure you that it is beautiful only when you can look down upon it from the safe altitude of a comfortable income. I know, because I've been living it ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde

... who live in New York and come to New York in the winter season were willing to spend, let me say, one and three-quarter millions of dollars every year for this one form of entertainment. It would appear, also, that fad and fashion were not the controlling impulse in this vast expenditure; for the chief things which fad and fashion had to offer at the Metropolitan Opera House were noticeably absent from the Manhattan. On a score of occasions there were large gatherings representative of wealth ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... about six, and then picked up the party at Tournelle. They all went—the old Baron, and every one, except the Marquis's mother. We dropped the brougham there, and went on with them in a huge motor car (that is another fad of the Baron's). It is lovely motor-carring; you get quite used to the noise and smell, and you fly along so, it takes your breath away; even with your hat tied on with a big veil, you have rather the feeling you have got to screw up your eyebrows to keep it from blowing away. We seemed ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn

... carp ponds were quite a fad among farmers of the Central West. Americans have been slow to adopt the German ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall

... spend the day with us—her mother having gone to town—were eating timothy roots. Bertha Lawrence, a Charlottetown girl, who had visited Kitty Marr in June, and had gone to school one day with her, had eaten timothy roots, affecting to consider them great delicacies. The fad was at once taken up by the Carlisle schoolgirls. Timothy roots quite ousted "sours" and young raspberry sprouts, both of which had the real merit of being quite toothsome, while timothy roots were tough and tasteless. But timothy roots were fashionable, ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... may perhaps be said on the recent fashion—not to say fad—of suppressing in the printed play the traditional list of "Dramatis Personae." Bjoernson, in some of his later plays, was, so far as I am aware, the first of the moderns to adopt this plan. I do not know whether his example has influenced ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... came to town, They nailed the Colosseum down. A great Collector! Once his Fad Was Coins, but when in time he had Collected all the coin in sight, To Europe's Art his thoughts took flight. But let not Europe palpitate For fear of an Art Syndicate. There are more Rembrandts, strange to say, Than ever were in Rembrandt's ...
— Confessions of a Caricaturist • Oliver Herford

... virtue which Average Jones had cultivated to the point of a fad. Hence it was with some discountenance that his clerk was obliged to apologize for his lateness, first, at 4 P. M. Of July 23, to a very dapper and spruce young gentleman in pale mauve spats, who wouldn't give his name; then at 4:05 P. m. of the same day to Professor Gehren, of the ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... kind. This skirt isn't merely a fad. It has a fortune in it. I'm business woman enough to know that. You've got to let me do it. It isn't only for yourself. It's for T. A. and for the future ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber

... Market Affords. The moral from all this is plain. The human body needs all the foods which are ordinarily served on the table. Whenever, through fad or through fear, we leave out of our diet any standard food, we are running a risk of cutting the body down on some element which it needs. They say that variety is the spice of life. In the matter of food it is more than that, it is the essence ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

... and meachin. We didn't stay long in Saigon, but we visited the Whampoo garders and found that they were perfectly beautiful, made by Mr. Whampoo, a rich Chinaman. There wuz fifty acres under most perfect cultivation. Here the Chinese fad of dwarfing and training trees wuz carried to perfection; there wuz trees trained into all sorts of shapes. One wuz a covered carriage about three feet high, with a horse, all tree, but natural as life; and then there wuz ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley

... when I stood up and asked the girl where it was what do I care with it dropping out of me and that black closed breeches he made me buy takes you half an hour to let them down wetting all myself always with some brandnew fad every other week such a long one I did I forgot my suede gloves on the seat behind that I never got after some robber of a woman and he wanted me to put it in the Irish times lost in the ladies lavatory D B C Dame street finder return to Mrs Marion Bloom ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... was Rhoda's first remark, with nothing in particular to precede it. "Molly Delawarr's a darling! I don't much care for Gatty, and Betty I just hate. She's a prig and a fid-fad both. But Molly—oh, Phoebe, she's as smart as can be. Such parts she has! You know, she's really—not quite you understand—but really she's almost ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt

... message from thy glass That tells the truth, and says that all is gone; Fresh shalt thou see in me the wounds thou mad'st, Though spent thy flame, in me the heat remaining. I that have loved thee thus before thou fad'st, My faith shall wax when thou art in thy waning. The world shall find this miracle in me, That fire can burn when all the matter's spent; Then what my faith hath been thyself shalt see, And that thou wast unkind thou mayst repent. Thou mayst repent that thou hast ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles - Delia - Diana • Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable

... has a fad for ham and doesn't care who knows it, his bearing is all we have a right to expect that it should be. Among the group of arrivals, men of his own sort, he is speaking of the ever-shifting fashion ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson

... only give up their Irish fad—and bring in a bill to make it penal for any parson to hold any office in a public school or university or to presume to teach outside the pulpit—they should have ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley

... and though the fur-bearing animals were sensibly diminishing, yet the prices of peltries had risen by competition, whilst supplies had been correspondingly cheapened. It was a good marten country, and, as this fur was the fad of fashion, and brought an extravagant price, the animal, like the beaver, was threatened with extinction, the more so as the rabbits were then in ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair

... of economic independence. You're looking for a girl who will marry for a living. There are lots of them. Pretty, attractive girls, too. Your difficulty is, you want that sort. You really believe all girls are that sort at heart, and you think my independence a fad—something I shall get over. ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.

... Foster went on with the business of weighing themselves. That was in line with the latest fad. It was always something or other, and physical culture was in the air at this time with every other girl in Gloucester, so far as I could see—either Indian-club swinging or dumb-bell drilling, long walks, and things of that ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly

... the way, incapable of understanding this problem of fashion, and Mother almost slapped him one evening for suggesting that it "wouldn't make such a gosh-awful lot of difference if she didn't find some new fad to ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis

... that awful proprieties ought to regulate admission to it; that marriage is a real bond, making jealousy and marital revenge at the least highly pardonable; that vegetarianism and all pitting of animal against human rights is a silly fad; that on the other hand to save money to give yourself a fine funeral is not a silly fad, but a symbol of ancestral self-respect; that when giving treats to friends or children, one should give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them; that ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West

... is usually called a "warden." No thoughtful or informed person can look upon "bird study" as merely a pleasant pastime for children and a harmless fad for the outdoor man and woman. It is a matter that touches, not only the aesthetic, but the economic welfare of the country: a matter that has concern for legislators and presidents as well as for naturalists. In this connection it is helpful to read ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch

... compels all her lieges, under a penalty, to learn, and if possible to speak, French. So far from practising non-interference, she allows no one to fight but herself. This imperious, warlike, imperial attitude is what Africa wants. It reverses our Quaker-like 'fad' for peace. We allow native wars to rage ad libitum even at Porto Loko, almost within cannon-shot of Sierra Leone. On the Gambia River the natives have sneeringly declared that they will submit to the French, who ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... She did little else just now, for she was a creature of fads. Occasionally she got a new one, and with kindred spirits played that particular fad to death. ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe

... the caucus. In thousands of cases the older and more sober Liberals were driven out of the councils of their party in disgust, and more and more the extreme men, who were fighting in earnest for some special object or fad, became the predominant powers in Liberalism. This was the change that was gradually wrought in the Liberal party between 1875 ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.

... yet without any evil consequences that anyone thinks of tracing to it. In a hospital two generations of medical students way tolerate dirt and carelessness, and then go out into general practice to spread the doctrine that fresh air is a fad, and sanitation an imposture set up to make profits for plumbers. Then suddenly Nature takes her revenge. She strikes at the city with a pestilence and at the hospital with an epidemic of hospital gangrene, ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw

... is at Yale, wrote her that all the boys there wore their summer underwear all during the winter, and also went about with their heads wet and in low shoes on the coldest days. Now, Amory, I don't know whether that is a fad at Princeton too, but I don't want you to be so foolish. It not only inclines a young man to pneumonia and infantile paralysis, but to all forms of lung trouble, to which you are particularly inclined. You cannot experiment with your health. I have found that out. I will not make myself ridiculous ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... nickname Fayrhayr. Aguilar means needle-maker, Fr. aiguille, but Pinner is more often official (Chapter XIX). Culler, Fr. coutelier, Old Fr. coutel, knife, and Spooner go together, but the fork is a modern fad. Poynter is another good example of the specialization of medieval crafts: the points were the metal tags by which the doublet and hose were connected. Hence, the play on words when Falstaff is recounting his adventure with ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley

... and loyalty, so that to millions of men it is almost a religion, and on the other hand deep distrust, impatient contempt, or bitter hostility. Moreover, the movement is steadily growing; we must recognize that it is not a fad, but a deep current, an international brotherhood that numbers in its ranks many able and intellectual men. We may here disregard the inadequate economic theories that have hampered its earlier years, and the Utopian dreams that ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... is sometimes dismissed contemptuously as a pacifist fad or an unattainable ideal of universal brotherhood, it is as well to set the matter in its true light. It is true that the inventor of Esperanto, Dr. Zamenhof, of Warsaw, is an idealist in the best sense of the word, and that his language was directly inspired by his ardent ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark

... dear; he is not my style. You know I never like a gentleman who parts his hair on the left side. It's my fad. ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch

... pestered with visitors; nobles or wealthy idlers who take a fancy to me and think they are conferring a favor on me by intruding on me and wasting my time with their inquisitive questions and patronizing remarks. In particular I have a horror of the kind of women who have a fad for molesting with their attentions singers, actors, gladiators, beast-fighters, charioteers and so on; if one of them gets after me and the infection spreads to more I shall find life ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White

... with the opportunity. Taking up the different parcels.] Well, I've got an elegant pair of scissors for mother, marked down because of a flaw in the steel, but she's near-sighted, and she don't want to use 'em anyway—it's just to feel she has another pair. Scissors is mother's fad—sort of born in her, I guess, for my mother's mother was a kind of dressmaker. She didn't have robes and mantucks over her door, you know,—she was too swell for that,—she went out by the day! And this is a real bronze Louis ink-stand for my sister's husband, only cost thirty-nine cents ...
— Her Own Way - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch

... judgment on literary style it is this litterateur. Of the journals which profess letters The Academy has ever been my friend and I have still the honour of corresponding with it: we are called "faddists" probably from our "fad" of signing our articles and thus enabling the criticised to criticise ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... right! Clem—my nephew—has a fad in his head. He asked me yesterday for the living—in case you resigned. I tell him it's folly; a youngster oughtn't to play with his chances. But he insists that it will do him good to fling up Oxford and play parish-priest for a year ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... that many strong men who escape dying there return as wrecks to their own countries. It is also true that the natives of the Solomons are a wild lot, with a hearty appetite for human flesh and a fad for collecting human heads. Their highest instinct of sportsmanship is to catch a man with his back turned and to smite him a cunning blow with a tomahawk that severs the spinal column at the base ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various

... want to spoil it. I don't like your fad for cutting down the bust. The neck is nothing but a connecting link between the head and the bust. Now here you have a charming and youthful head and face—let the neck at least ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... only going to say that you do yourself no good by all those confoundedly unconventional ideas of yours. If you had your chance to-morrow, it's my belief you'd throw it away by insisting on some fantastic fad or other." ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey

... believed that somebody had been falsely informed that the emperor would visit the plant that day. "These great and frightening changes will probably turn out to be a new fad in abstract sculpture. Any change ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper

... pines and white fir. How sweet, fresh and beautiful they look,—the Christmas trees of the fairies. And how glad they make the heart of the real lover of his country, to whom "conservation" is not a fad, but an imperative necessity for the future—an obligation felt towards ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... According to her doctrine of might, everything can be attained by the mightiest. British advances she answered with battleships, simultaneously provoking France and Russia by increasing her army corps. The balance of power in Europe, Germany declares to be an out-of-date British fad, invented solely in the ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith

... shipping butter in an old roadster with a wagon bed thorax for a year. Two of our rural route mail carriers use small machines, except in wet weather, and good-roads societies in our vicinity are the latest fad. We raised one thousand five hundred dollars last spring to bring the Cannon Ball Trail from Chicago to Kansas City through our town, and our hotel-keeper contributed one hundred dollars of it. He says we'll be on the gas-line tourist route to the coast after the trail ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch

... see it!" I declared. "There's nothing to all this but a pipe dream! Why shouldn't two women like Eau de vie de Dantzic as a liqueur? It's very fashionable—a sort of fad, just now." ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells

... a strain on all the baby's vital organs and its delicate, fragile blood vessels and heart. There have been thousands of babies who have had irreparable damage done to their constitutions because of this cold-blooded, heartless fad of the doctors, to let ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter

... Greek under the care of Professor George Dunbar. Pillans had been a master at Eton, and at a later period Rector of the Edinburgh High School. He was a little man with rosy cheeks, and was a sound scholar and an admirable teacher, whose special "fad" was Classical Geography. Dunbar had begun life as a working gardener at Ayton Castle. He had compiled a Greek Lexicon which had some repute in its day, but he was not an inspiring teacher, and his gruff manners ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns

... his black-rimmed glasses more firmly on his big and bulging nose, Mr. Garrott looked at me closely. "In my country slumming has become a fad with a—a certain type of restless women who have to make their living, I suppose. But ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher

... have heard. They rant and froth, contradict themselves and one another, wander from the point and never get anywhere....That would give me hope if it were not for the fact that poor California is a magnet for the cranks of every fad as well as for the riff-raff and derelicts....My other hope is that even they—that is to say the least unbalanced of them—will come in time to realize that socialism is ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... characteristics of the German stage. One detects the cant of Dumas, fils, but not his genius; and, when this cant is mingled with German pessimism, it becomes at times unspeakably repulsive. The zeal for this new drama seems to me a fad, and rather a slimy fad. With all my heart I wish the Emperor success in his effort to keep the German ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... of course, that the "faddists" should be among Mr. Punch's most impatient critics, because "fad" and "cant" have always been Punch's pet ground-game that he loves to run to earth. It is perhaps from the Temperance party that he has had most sport, for he has always taken delight in the pictures they dislike ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... her sisters everywhere, Florence had an instinctive love of a fad. Realizing this fact, Scotty was not in the least deceived when, during a lull at the dinner-table one evening late in the Fall, she broke in with an ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge

... no more sentiment in her composition at present," he said to himself with a laugh that had some bitterness in it, "than a nether millstone. Her mind is so wrapped up in this confounded fad of hers that there is no room in it for anything else. I might have been a cousin, instead of a man she had refused, for any embarrassment or awkwardness she felt at our sudden meeting. It clearly made no impression at all upon her. She remembers, of course, that she met me at Newquay. I don't ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty

... had launched into abuse of what she called the latest masculine fad—prison reform, to wit—and a heated discussion between her and Polyhistor had ensued, in the midst of which she had happened to glance behind her, to find that very notable person who is the subject ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... this whole League is just a fad. It's like all these other organizations that start off with such a rush and let on they're going to change the whole works, and pretty soon they peter out and everybody forgets ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... a great "fad," and while not quite so popular, are pretty enough to deserve mention. A table is too often confused in its arrangement of color on account of its changes of courses. This can be entirely done away with by adopting some simple color scheme. A luncheon, or tea, is ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke

... self! beneath thy dart Lies slain the great Achilles' dearer part. Thou from the mighty dead those arms hast torn, Which once the greatest of mankind had worn. Yet live! I give thee one illustrious day, A blaze of glory ere thou fad'st away. For ah! no more Andromache shall come With joyful tears to welcome Hector home; No more officious, with endearing charms, From thy tired limbs ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... person, and fellow—no more: We must knight our dogs to get any lower. Brave Knights Kennelers then shall be, Noble Knights of the Golden Flea, Knights of the Order of St. Steboy, Knights of St. Gorge and Sir Knights Jawy. God speed the day when this knighting fad Shall go to the dogs and ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... republic, whose only asset now is climate that feels good, but contains germs of all diseases, and tobacco that smells good when it is in conflagration under your nose, and does not kill instantly if it is pasted up in a Wisconsin wrapper, that is the pure goods. If tobacco ever ceases to be a fad with the rich consumer of fifty-cent cigars, and beet sugar is found to contain no first aid to Bright's disease, Cuba will amount to about as much as Dry Tortugas, which has purer air, and the Isle of Pines, which has more tropical scenery and less ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck

... bravery; in addition, he must, upon the smallest pretext, draw his sword, must fight constantly, and especially with adversaries better armed and larger in force; the love of woman was for such men only. Adventure was the fad: it is said of one seigneur that he took pleasure in going every night to a certain corner and, from pure malice, striking with his sword the first person who chanced that way; this unique pastime he continued until he ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme

... hands, John," he said huskily. "I am a brute! There must be something in this new fad of yours after all. If you had spoken to me as I did to you just now, I should ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black

... visit them. And when I happened to mention, for something to say, that the Archdeacon had an eccentric cousin in America who was afraid of hotels and even of visiting at their house because of a fad about burglars, she offered to give him the better of her two spare rooms whenever he came to England. I never thought he'd accept, but he did, only ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... Japanese is that they are fickle; that they run from one fad to another, from one idea to another, quickly tiring of each in turn. They are said to lack persistence in their amusements no less than in the most serious matters ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... it was lucky I got him just as I did. I hadn't much more'n broke him in before I runs up against this new one. Understand, I ain't no fad chaser. I don't pine for the sporting-extra life, with a new red-ink stunt for every leaf on the calendar-pad. I got me studio here, an' me real-money reg'lars that keeps the shop runnin', and a few of the boys ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford

... the name of the ancient Name; Generous, courteous, gentle, patient under the yoke, Decent (hemmed in a harem land ye were ever a one-wife folk); Royal and brave and ancient—haply an hour has struck When the new fad-fangled peoples shall weary of raking muck, And turning from coward counsels and loathing the parish lies, In shame and sackcloth offer up the only sacrifice. Then thou who hast been neglected, who ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... the necessary fillip. "Because I knew him, smelled his stogy, and drank with him in Cedar Street. It was some time in the early '70s, when a passion for Corot's opalescences (with the Critic's permission) was the latest and most knowing fad. As a realist I half mistrusted the fascination, but I felt it with the rest, and whenever any of the besotted dealers of that rude age got in an 'Early Morning' or a 'Dance of Nymphs,' I was there among ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather

... country living, now so far flung as to be a characteristic of American life, is not just a fad. It has been a slow steady growth and has behind it a tradition of a century and more. When our larger commercial centers first began to change from villages to compact urban communities, there were those who found even these miniature cities far too congested. It was incomprehensible to them that ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley

... years Negro religion thus transformed itself and identified itself with the dream of Abolition, until that which was a radical fad in the white North and an anarchistic plot in the white South had become a religion to the black world. Thus, when Emancipation finally came, it seemed to the freedman a literal Coming of the Lord. His fervid imagination was stirred as never before, by the tramp of armies, the blood ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois

... fad of building air-castles. It is hard to laugh down this species of architecture—the erection of atmospheric mansions. Every one has it, in a way, but with me it had broken out in a very virulent form. It makes one feel mean, indeed, ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs

... ever Elizabeth did in Protestantism. But he did not represent truly the predominant feeling of America. Northern Democratic papers, warmly committed to the annexation of Texas, protested vehemently against the Secretary's private fad concerning the positive blessedness of Slavery being put forward as part of the body of political doctrine held by the United States. Even Southerners, who accepted Slavery as a more or less necessary evil, did not care to see ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton

... tendency to which I refer is no doubt partly the result of our growing humanitarianism and feeling of kinship with all the lower orders of creation, and partly due to the fact that we live in a time of impromptu nature study, when birds and plants and trees are fast becoming a fad with half the population, and when the "yellow" reporter is abroad in the fields and woods. Never before in my time have so many exaggerations and misconceptions of the wild life about us been current in the popular mind. ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs

... watermelon crops, a few long-shot winners at the New Orleans race-track, and the brilliant banquets given by the Indiana and Kansas citizens who compose the North Carolina Society have made the South rather a "fad" in Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp softly that your left forefinger reminds her so much of a gentleman's in Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a lady has to work now—the ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry

... used by a young person, if by reputable words already in the language he can express his meaning. And just as he should not be the first to take up an untried word, so the young writer should not be the last to drop a dead one. There is at present a sort of fad for old English. A large number of words that have been resting quietly in their graves for centuries have been called forth. Some may enjoy a second life; most of them will feel only the weakness of a second obsolescence. "Foreword" and "inwit" were good once; ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... kept by all classes of people. Many keep them for the profit in eggs and meat, others keep them as a fad, and others to gratify a craving for animal companionship. There are one hundred and seventy-five recognized breeds, varying in size from that of the Japanese bantam weighing ten ounces to that of the huge Brahma which weighs fourteen ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education

... Ransom, unacquainted with certain chapters of Verena's history, perceived without surprise to be Mrs. Burrage and her insinuating son. Apparently their interest in Miss Tarrant was more than a momentary fad, since—like himself—they had made the journey from New York to hear her. There were other figures, unknown to our young man, here and there, in the semicircle; but several places were still empty (one of which was of course ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James

... a leg over the bench and got up with cheerful alacrity. "I'll do it now, if you say so; I didn't know but what that was some new fad of ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower

... a curious fad, occasionally seen among the Wolves and Coyotes, of carrying in her mouth, for miles, such things as seemed to be interesting and yet were not tempting as eatables. Many a time had she trotted a mile or two with an old Buffalo-horn or a cast-off shoe, only to drop it when something ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton

... been absolutely uninterested in anything else. I don't believe he's read a book or a magazine since his school days, unless it had something to do with business or groceries. He hasn't a sign of a fad- -music, photography, collecting things—nothing. And he hates society. Jane has to fairly drag him out anywhere. Now, what I want to know is, what is the man going ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter

... this new fad of the old man's and our having a notion that we had better keep quiet for a spell and let things settle down a bit, we had a long steady talk, and the end of it was that we made up our minds to go and put in a month or ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood

... give a fine fresh colour where none existed. When iron is the chief colouring matter, rock-salt assumes a beautiful clear red tint; in other cases it is emerald green or pale blue. As a rule, salt is prepared from it for table by a regular process; but it has become a fad of late with a few people to put crystals of native rock-salt on their tables; and they decidedly look very pretty, and have a certain distinctive flavour of their ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... in a peculiar tone. "Do come in, Tita. It is a fad of mine—a silly one, no doubt—but I cannot bear to look at an open door. Besides, I wish to ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford

... Ralph said. "Honey's right. That business of taking care of their feet symbolizes the whole sex to me. They do the things they do just because the others do them—like sheep jumping over a wall. Their fad at present is pedicure. Peachy's at it just like the rest of them. Every night when I come home, I find her sitting down with both feet done up in one of those beautiful scarfs she's collected, resting on a cushion. It's rather amusing, though." Ralph struggled ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore

... my writing that down?" said the duke. "I have a fad for dialects and new phrases." He hastily scribbled the words in a tablet that he took from his pocket. "Do you like living in England?" he asked in ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... must use your common-sense. That fad about locking the gates is a pure and simple whim on the mother's part. Of course we'll humor it, but not to the extent of waking up old Tester. Come, Kitty, you shall give the old man any amount of blowing up in the morning, only now you really ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade

... the Translation Rooms had smelled of over-ionized electrodes as Destinyworkers arrived by the dozens from various Time Zones. Two thirds of the entire Past Division was being recalled and reassigned to a Condition 14 in the Twenty-Third—elimination of a teenage fad which was getting out of hand in North America. The Chief had smiled wanly as the young salesman shook hands and plunged into his ...
— The Amazing Mrs. Mimms • David C. Knight

... is not chief of the land instead of Belarab. A brave and foresighted man, however treacherous at heart, can always be trusted to a certain extent. One can never get anything clear from Belarab. Peace! Peace! You know his fad. And this fad makes him act silly. The peace racket will get him into a row. It may cost him his life in the end. However, Tengga does not feel himself strong enough yet to act with his own followers only and Belarab has, on my advice, disarmed all villagers. His men went into the ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad

... sure, Marie Antoinette and the ladies of her court played at farming in the Park of the Petite Trainon, at Versailles; but they wore silk gowns and powdered wigs. To be rustic was the fad of the day (there was a cult for gardening in England); but shepherdesses were confined to tapestries, and, while the aristocracy held the stage, it played the ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood

... I've had about an hour's talk with him, and that I knew him when we were children—at least when I was a child—he is a perfect stranger to me, and I do wish," she added in a tone of annoyance, "that you would give up that fad of yours, that every man who comes along is ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott

... "None of your business." She went up to the new selectors' floor, and found the plan running as smoothly as if it had been part of the plant's system for years. The elevator whisked her up to the top floor, where she met the plant's latest practical fad, the new textile chemist—a charming youth, disguised in bone-rimmed glasses, who did the honors of his little laboratory with all the manner of a Harvard host. This was the fusing oven for silks. Here was ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber

... sir; people would get back to Nature and raise beef after the world had been made safe once more for a healthy appetite. This here craze for substitutes would die out. You couldn't tell her there was any great future for the canned jack-rabbit business, for instance—just a fad; and whales the same. She knew and I knew that a whale was too big to eat. People couldn't get any real feeling for it, and not a chance on earth to breed 'em up and improve the flesh. Wasn't that the truth? And these here diet experts, with ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson

... he said, 'that is rather a capital scheme. The absent-minded league, as one might call them. Most ingenious. Summertrees, if he had any sense of humour, which he hasn't, would be rather taken by the idea that his innocent fad for Christian Science had led him to be suspected of obtaining money under false pretences. But, really, there are no pretensions about the matter at all. As I understand it, I simply call and receive the money through the forgetfulness of the persons on ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr

... He was late at the Works the next day—though not nearly so late as he often is; but Mr. Talbert has a perfect fad about every one's getting there on time; it's one of the things there's always been a tug about between him and Peter. I should think he'd have realized long ago that Peter NEVER will be on time, and just make up his mind to it, but he won't. ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo

... and development of the liberal and comprehensive policy which marked the climax of the career of Maurice Grau as an operatic director, I have witnessed since then, many of the fruits of wise endeavor and astute management frittered away by managerial incapacity and greed, and fad and fashion come to rule again, where for a brief, but eventful period, serious artistic interest and endeavor had ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... starve! Nobody need unless they have committed some folly, or, worse, some crime. There's bread enough for all who deserve to live. I have no sympathy with all this preposterous pauperising which goes by the name of charity. It's a fad, a fashion—nothing more." ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens

... Cumshaw softly, and he rose to his feet and held the door open for Moira to pass out. She led the way to the study and unlocked the door. It had been a fad of hers ever since the tragedy to keep the room sealed, and, as I saw no reason for gainsaying her, I had never interfered. She switched on the light and we stood for a moment on the threshold, dazzled by ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh

... of my pencil and waited, but nothing happened. Pretty soon my mind began to wander off on other things, decidedly unghostly and material things, such as my wife's shopping and how on earth I was going to cure her of her alarming tendency to take every new fad that came along and work it to death. But I realized that would never get me any place, so I went back ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough

... limitation. The evil is not in the restriction; but in the fact that nothing can ever restrict the restriction. The prohibitions are bound to progress point by point; more and more human rights and pleasures must of necessity be taken away; for it is of the nature of this futurism that the latest fad is the faith of the future, and the most fantastic fad inevitably makes the pace. Thus the worst thing in the seventeenth-century aberration was not so much Puritanism as sectarianism. It searched for truth not by synthesis but by subdivision. ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... skin. I looked eagerly for a ship's light, but not one could I see, or I would have borne down upon her and got the bearings of Jethou from her skipper. I did what best I could under the circumstances, resolving never again to be led away by any new fad, so as to be oblivious to everything else, as I had been in getting my new boat into trim. It was a dreadful time for me, as I knew Jethou to be surrounded by rocks on all sides, so that I had to keep a very sharp look out, for fear of running on them ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling

... been Sunday, he would have found himself making one of a fashionable throng of promenaders; it being at that time a fad with society people to walk to Forest park and back of a Sunday afternoon. Driving was then considered a respectable diversion only on the six work ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin

... Both rise from the deeps of an emotion, the emotion of compassion for misfortune, as such. This is really a very important point. Collectivism is not an intellectual fad, even if erroneous, but a passionate protest and aspiration: it arises as a secret of the heart, a dream of the injured feeling, long before it shapes itself as a definite propaganda at all. The intellectual philosophies ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... eunuchs' made a very reasonable objection. He had been appointed to see after the health of the lads, and had ample means at his disposal; and if they lost their health in this chase after what he could only think a superstitious fad, the despot whom he served would think nothing of making him answer with his head. His fear gives a striking side-light as to the conditions of service in such a court, where no man's head was firm between his shoulders. Why should the prince of the eunuchs have supposed ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... know, you ought to explain to me. A citizen of the world and a student of its purlieus, like myself, ought to know what there is to know! Now you're a man of sense, in spite of a few bad habits—such as myself, for example. Is this fad of yours madness?—which would be quite to your credit,—for gadzooks, I like a lunatic! Or is it the complaint of a man who has gathered too much data on the subject of Old Rye? Or is it, as I suspect, something more occult, and therefore ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie

... on a bright Sabbath afternoon in mid-autumn when Miss Janet Cragiemuir left her home in K Street and set out leisurely upon her walk to Bethany Church, where she revelled in her latest fad. She had recently taken a class in the Chinese Sunday-school. The good work began at three o'clock, and as it was nearly that hour, groups of Chinamen stood out on the sidewalk chattering as only Celestials can. They greeted Miss Cragiemuir with grave courtesy when she approached, ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald

... lieu of diplomatic action, are becoming somewhat of a fad with the Chinese. They have been practised with impunity and considerable success for the past fifteen or twenty years.... We wish to impress upon the Chinese people and Government that these anti-foreign agitations are becoming somewhat of a nuisance, ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte

... "Curious fad that is the mania for serious music," said Lady Gertrude. "You don't share your husband's taste for ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson

... enthusiasm of modern society, of civilisation, the fad of showing off, of exhibiting a life instead of living it, very largely comes, it is not too much to say, from the lack of normal egoism, of self-joy in civilised human beings. It has come over us like a kind of moral anaemia. People cannot get interested enough ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee

... every one's getting bitten. It's the latest fad. My dad had just three come to him early this morning to have wounds cauterized ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes

... tent-colony enjoyed a fad of his or her own. There was a little brown woman like the shrivelled inside of an old walnut, who believed that you should imbibe no fluid other than that found in the eating of fruits ... when she wanted a drink she never went to ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... his son and Grace? "Of course they'll be married," said Mrs Grantly. "It's all very well for you to say that, my dear; but the whole family are so queer that there is no knowing what the girl may do. She may take up some other fad now, and refuse him point blank." "She has never taken up any fad," said Mrs Grantly, who now mounted almost to wrath in defence of her future daughter-in-law, "and you are wrong to say that she has. She has behaved beautifully;—as ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope

... must use his own intelligence and common sense, avoiding so far as he can the mistake of following a "fad" and accepting a theory without sufficient evidence; and the opposite mistake of accepting as hygienic the customs about him simply because they are customs, and thus mistaking for fads any conclusions of science which are discordant ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk

... provocations, in which he never buried anything. He was not a "clever" dog; and guiltless of all tricks. Nor was he ever "shown." We did not even dream of subjecting him to this indignity. Was our dog a clown, a hobby, a fad, a fashion, a feather in our caps that we should subject him to periodic pennings in stuffy halls, that we should harry his faithful soul with such tomfoolery? He never even heard us talk about his lineage, deplore the length of his nose, or call him "clever-looking." We should ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy



Words linked to "Fad" :   craze, fad diet, cult, faddist, fashion, faddy



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