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Fag   Listen
noun
Fag  n.  
1.
A knot or coarse part in cloth; a flaw. (Obs.)
2.
A cigarette. (slang)
3.
A fag end in a cloth.
4.
A drudge.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Fag" Quotes from Famous Books



... In his private conscience he says, "Honesty is a very good thing, perhaps, but it is by no means the best policy,—it is simply no policy at all,—it is sheer stupidity. What can be more politic than for me to pocket this windfall and turn the corner quick?"—So preacheth his crooked fag-end of a conscience, that very, very small still voice, in very husky tones; but he knows that a policeman, walking behind him, saw him pick up the purse, which alters the case,—which, in fact, completely sets aside his fag-end of a husky-voiced ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various

... large generic term, to express the condition of all overworked, ill-paid, badly-housed workers in our cities. It sums up the industrial or economic aspects of the problem of city poverty. Scarcely any trade in its lowest grades is free from it; in nearly all we find the wretched "fag end" where the workers are miserably oppressed. This is true not only of the poorest manual labour, that of the sandwich-man, with his wage of 1s. 2d. per diem, and of the lowest class of each manufacturing trade in East and Central London. It is true of the relatively ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson

... Church. PF for Polly Frazior. I have presented one piece of ribbin to my aunt as you directed. She gives her love to you, & thanks you for it. I intend to send Nancy Mackky a pair of lace mittens, & the fag end of Harry's watch string. I hope Carolus (as papa us'd to call him) will think his daughter very smart with them. I am glad Hon^d madam, that you think my writing is better than it us'd to be—you see it is mended just here. I dont know what you mean by terrible margins vaze. ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow

... children? Umm! Some folks and some fields never alter. But the People of the Hills didn't work any changeling tricks. They'd tiptoe in and whisper and weave round the cradle-babe in the chimney-corner—a fag-end of a charm here, or half a spell there—like kettles singing; but when the babe's mind came to bud out afterwards, it would act differently from other people in its station. That's no advantage to man or maid. So I wouldn't ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling

... hard for a minute, because it would be grand if I could say when Brian came back, "I have sold your cathedral for you." But I might have saved myself brain fag. Madame Mounet had settled everything in her head, and was merely playing me, like a ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... artful as some of their elders. What little monsters of cunning your frank schoolboys are! How they cheat mamma! how they hoodwink papa! how they humbug the housekeeper! how they cringe to the big boy for whom they fag at school! what a long lie and five years' hypocrisy and flattery is their conduct towards Dr. Birch! And the little boys' sisters? Are they any better, and is it only after they come out in the world that the little darlings learn a ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... in a race would reach the long'd-for goal, Must suffer much, do much, in youth, indeed, Must SWEAT and fag.' ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... would have diverted an elder to hear him, so slim and simple, discoursing so sweetly and reasonably on a theme on which few of us at the fag end of our days are ever able to utter one sensible syllable, but Lancelot always seemed to me wise beyond his time, so I listened, although dully enough and I fear sullenly. He slipped his hand into his breast and drew forth a small object ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... plates for him in his study, and Ferris watched him. Ferris was kind and talked about many things out of his great wisdom, and then he asked Peter whether he would always like to be his fag, and Peter, delighted, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole

... and even then they were so interesting. I mean the fish were. Or—or the things where they fixed them. And, beg pardon, Mrs. Stark, even if you looked at that water all day long you couldn't make it into a 'sea.' It's only a Basin, the fag end of Annapolis Basin. Yonder, where there are so many sails and steamers, is the Bay of Fundy, and to get to the really truly sea you must go beyond that. The reason I'm so wise, if you want to know, is that ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond

... brother—throw a rather lurid light upon the spiritual and intellectual limitations of the Bench? In respect of the British aristocracy, his social betters, he also kept an open mind. For had not Lord Bulparc's son and heir, little Oxley, acted as his fag, boot-black and bacon-frier, for the best part of a year at school? Notwithstanding which fact—Lord Oxley was of a mild, forgiving disposition—had not he, Tom, spent the cricket week several summers running ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... revolutionary type would be great, if only I could feel as I should so much like, that the Christian socialism to which you have consecrated the whole prime of your life, and the Marxian socialism, to which I have consecrated all of the little that remains of mine, the fag-end, are not utter incompatibilities, so much so that it is absolutely impossible that they can co-exist and co-operate to any ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown

... event, though it might be surprising to many people, would not be incredible, nor without many parallel cases. He was poor, a miserable fag, under the control of that mean wretch up there at the school, who looked as if he had sour buttermilk in his veins instead of blood. He was in love with a girl above his station, rich, and of old family, but strange in all her ways, and it was conceivable that he should become suddenly ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... man whose heart was weighted by a great woe. You have seen the eye darken, the soul fag, and the spirit congeal under the breath of an icy disaster. At ten-thirty of this particular evening Cowperwood, sitting alone in the library of his Michigan Avenue house, was brought face to face with the fact that he ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... men and they take the chance. By taking the collar of their coat and tucking it around their faces, lighting the match under their coat next to their ribs, burying their faces in their coat, they get a light without much danger of detection. In puffing it a man will hold the fag in his closed fist to his mouth, take the inhale, and, if there should happen to be a provo or other suspicious guardian of the rules in sight, down into his stomach would go the smoke. I don't know why it is but it has always seemed to me that the ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant

... wherein it has pleased a merciful providence to place him; and St. Peter would never be so churlish as to close the golden gates in the face of an ancient canon who sauntered to them jauntily, with the fag end of a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Let us cultivate our cabbages in the best of all possible worlds; and afterwards—Dieu ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham

... a Welsh baronet, and your estates are in the North, so you could hardly have known her as a child. She was educated in the utmost seclusion at home; no one ever saw her or heard of her until the fag end of the last London season, and she only arrived in Paris two days ago, and made her first appearance in public last night at the opera, where you were not. So where could you have ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... Hawthorne certainly exposes his Puritanic education, and he also places too high a value on the carving of buttonholes and shoestrings by Italian workmen. Such things are the fag-ends of statuary. ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns

... Others conceived it not impossible that the Army of the Valley might be on its way to Tennessee to take Memphis, or even to Vicksburg, to sweep the foe from Mississippi. The men lounged beneath the trees, or watched the weary Virginia Central bringing in the fag end of things. Fredericksburg was now the road's terminus; beyond, the line had been destroyed by a ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... curious the state I'm in before Aunt Paula sends me away," she said; "I was a nervous child, and though I've outgrown it, I still have attacks of nerve fag or something like it. I can feel them coming on and so can she. You know we've been together so much that it's like—like two bees in adjoining cells. The cell-wall has worn thin; we can almost touch. She knows it often before I do. She makes me go to bed ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin

... well known that they met not unfrequently in Bishopsgate Street in the course of the week. Colonel Albert and Endymion always stayed at Hainault from Saturday till Monday. It delighted the colonel to mount Endymion on one of his choice steeds, and his former fag ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli

... me stupid for leaving on the table the little bit of paper I was to enclose. This comes of being in love at the fag-end of a letter of business. You know you say they will not chime together. I had got you by the fire-side with the gigot smoking on the board, to lard your bare ribs, and behold, I closed my letter without taking the ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... was one of the pet ideas of the German patriots; the Government, however, held it in suspicion, inasmuch as the so-called "Turner" (gymnasts) cherished political ambitions. In time, however, the exercise of the muscles cured the revolutionary brain-fag, and the Government was enabled to assume a sort of protectorship over gymnastics. Though enthusiastically carried on to this very day in Germany, the movement no ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine

... was on board yesterday. He looks thin. The fag in a brig is very great; and I see no prospect of his either making prize-money, or being made post, at present: but, ...
— The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, Vol II. - With A Supplement Of Interesting Letters By Distinguished Characters • Horatio Nelson

... church, and at the point of the turn is a pretty low iron railing with a gate, and with a covered way, which leads up to the front door of the house which stands there, I will only say here, at this fag end of a chapter, that it is the Small House at Allington. Allington Street, as I have said, turns short round towards the church at this point, and there ends at a white gate, leading into the ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope

... fagged out; it did seem, as I told Tirzah Ann one day in confidence, "that I never knew the meanin' of the word 'fag' before." ...
— Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... most of all with his own hands at the work which is sometimes described as menial work; and it is contrary to the fundamental principle of the Mission that anyone should connect with the idea of white man the right to fag a black boy. ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... about two or three leagues from shore make the attempt to land a very dangerous piece of business. And another thing, I know. Let the natives boast as they will about their splendid climate, they are visited by the most frightful hurricanes. They get the fag-end of the storms that rage over the Antilles; and the fag-end of a storm is like the tail of a whale; it's just the strongest bit of it. I don't think you'll find a sailor listening much to your poets — ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne

... like a bull in a band, See how all the "So be I's" follow so grand, The fag and the artist, the plebian also, Have now chang'd their ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright

... clean his teeth, and he climbed into bed and lay there thinking about Mary. "I suppose," he said, "I ought to tell her about it. That ass, Ninian'll be sure to laugh if I tell him!" He sat up suddenly in bed. "Lord," he exclaimed, "I forgot to wash!" He got out of bed and washed himself. "Beastly fag, cleaning your teeth," he murmured, and ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine

... nature. All was accomplished by subtle change. He dressed leisurely and looked about for a comfortable breakfast. There was something stronger than work in the world, especially to-day. He longed to meet the sunlight and earthly blessedness; it was such a small thing to fag one's self out at the laboratory. Half unconsciously he strolled toward the livery stable where he kept his nag. And then a quarter of an hour later he found himself on the turnpike, trotting along the fresh-water meadows, sniffing the air and the scented ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick

... fell in with the fag-end of Barbarossa's; and it was Richard chiefly that managed to take Acre;—at least so Richard flattered himself, when he pulled poor Leopold of Austria's standard from the towers, and trailed it through the gutters: ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle

... exquisite and consummate artist in oratory, who could give such weighty and brilliant expression to the feelings of his hearers and the doctrines of his party, had less originating power, whether of intellect or of will, than any other man of equal eminence that ever lived. He adhered to the fag end of the old party, until it was absorbed, unavoidably, with scarcely an effort of its own, in Adams and Clay. From 1815 to 1825 he was in opposition, and in opposition to old Federalism revived; and, consequently, we believe that posterity will decide that his speeches of this period ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... I know. He's the fellow that coached you in your new business, isn't he? By-the-by, Harry, I think you've made a mess of it in changing your line. I'd have stuck to my governor's shop if I'd been you. You'd got through all the d——d fag of it, and there's the living that has always belonged to ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope

... walked in the Park looking perfectly lovely were there, and some of them are quite, quite old—much older than you—and all trimmed up! Aren't you astonished? And one has a grown-up son and daughter, and she danced all the time with Dolly Tenterdown, who was her son's fag at Eton, Lord Doraine told me. Isn't it odd? And another was the lady that Sir Charles Helmsford was with on the promenade at Nice, when you would not let me bow to him, do you remember? And she is as ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn

... get moor feeble an waik, An aw know sooin mi race will be run; Mi heart ommost feels fit to braik, When aw think what aw've left all undone. Nah, aw've nobbut th' fag end o' mi days To prepare for a world withaat end; Soa its time aw wor changin mi ways. For ther's noa time like ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley

... window of his fav'rite maid; Who from above his simple tale receives, Whilst stupid matrons start, and think of thieves, Now daily fools unbar the narrow soul, All wise and gen'rous o'er the nightly bowl. The haunted wood receives its motley host, (By trav'ller shun'd) tho' neither fag nor ghost; And there the crackling bonfire blazes red, While merry vagrants feast beneath the shed. From sleepless beds unquiet spirits rise, And cunning wags put on their borrow'd guise: Whilst silly maidens mutter o'er their ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie

... 'em all at my old 33 years desk yester morning; and deuce take me if I had not yearnings at leaving all my old pen and ink fellows, merry sociable lads, at leaving them in the Lurch, fag, fag, fag. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... never do to buoy the end and wait for a fresh supply, and the present poor cable would not bear the strain of picking up. But there was a clever man on board. He cut the cable a few fathoms from the ship, carried its fag-end to St. Mary's, and attached it to an old Morse instrument. Outwardly, things looked all right; there was the cable attached at Land's End, and here was its other end at Scilly. The difficulty was how to get messages ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... would like it well enough! Always at me to slave for him with stupid architectural drawings and stuff, as if I was only a sort of clerk or fag! And boring me to read great dull books, and preaching to me about them, expecting to know what I ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... or mace, or mack; Or moskeneer, or flash the drag; Dead-lurk a crib, or do a crack; Pad with a slang, or chuck a fag; Bonnet, or tout, or mump and gag; Rattle the tats, or mark the spot; You can not bag a single stag; Booze and ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... fag end of the summer, when all his well-laid plans had one by one gone agley, chance brought to Green an adventure—sheer chance and a real adventure. The circumstance of a deranged automobile was largely responsible—that and the added incident ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb

... from being recovered; on the contrary, I am worse and worse, weaker and weaker every day; for which reason I shall leave this place next Monday, and set out for Bath a few days afterward. I should not take all this trouble merely to prolong the fag end of a life, from which I can expect no pleasure, and others no utility; but the cure, or at least the mitigation, of those physical ills which make that life a load while it does last, is worth any trouble ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... Joliffe is very hard up. She hasn't said a word to me about it—she never would to anyone—but I happen to know it for a fact: she is hard up. She is in a chronic state of hard-up-ishness always, and that we all are; but this is an acute attack—she has her back against the wall. It is the fag-end of Martin's debts that bother her; these blood-sucking tradesmen are dunning her, and she hasn't the pluck to tell them go hang, though they know well enough she isn't responsible for a farthing. She has got it into her head that she hasn't ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner

... Fag today. Send her a postal order two shillings, half a crown. Accept my little present. Stationer's just here ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... are impregnable, and bestow on the hero their invincibility. "It was a great instruction," said a saint in Cromwell's war, "that the best courages are but beams of the Almighty." Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the other way,—Charles's Wain, Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules:—every god ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various

... rest, there is something of everything in this rag bag: bits of stubble, fag ends of rushes, scraps of plants, fragments of some tiny twig or other, chips of wood, shreds of bark, largish grains, especially the seeds of the yellow iris, which were red when they fell from their capsules and are now black ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... wrathful scorn for the English boy who makes another boy his fag, and you express a sneering pity for the boy who consents to fag. You have read Dr. Birch and His Young Friends, and you would like to break the head of Master Hewlett, who shies his shoe at the poor shivering, craven Nightingale, and you justly remark that close observation ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis

... the average in such cases) because he is a fool. Secondly, like the rest of the well-to-do world, he has suffered the summer, wherein warmth and sunshine are really to be had, to slip by, and has only the fag end of it in which to take holiday. It is now or never—or at all events now or next year—with him. All his friends, too, are out of town, flattening their noses against window panes; his club is under repair, his house in brown holland, his servants on board wages. Like ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn

... Mrs. Wilder upon one side, as March throws February to the fag end of winter, and rushes on to meet the primrose girl bringing spring in her wake. He had dealt simultaneously with Mrs. Wilder's little part in the drama and the part of Francis Heath, Priest in Holy Orders. How they had both stood the test of detection he did not trouble to analyse. "Detection" ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie

... big boys to introduce a system of fagging into the school, bind ourselves to resist such a proceeding by every means in our power, and under no consideration to obey any boy who may order any of us to fag for him." ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston

... who ate crocodiles, drank UP eisell, and committed other anomalies against nature in honor of their mistresses, belonged decidedly to a period of time anterior to that of Shakspeare, and went quite out with the age of chivalry, of which Shakspeare saw scarcely even the fag end. Your lover of Shakspeare's time was quite another animal. He had begun to take beer. He had become much more subtle and self-satisfied. He did sometimes pen sonnets to his mistress's eye-brow, and sing soft nothings to the gentle sighing of his "Lewte." He sometimes indeed looked ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 72, March 15, 1851 • Various

... Philosopher lately published. Is it looked into? I should hope not, merely for the sake of the taste, the sense, and learning of the present age.... I hope nobody will be so indiscreet as to take notice publicly of the book, though it be only in the fag end of an objection.—It is that indiscreet conduct in our defenders of religion that conveys so many worthless books from hand to hand.'—Letter to Mr. Birch in 1737. In Nichols' Literary Illustrations of ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... letting him sink, as I was his fag!' said Mr. Tartar. 'But the truth being that he was my best protector and friend, and did me more good than all the masters put together, an irrational impulse seized me to pick him up, or go ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens

... government was so well backed by the Irish members and the ministerial hacks who represented British constituencies, that they carried this and several other measures to which a similar opposition was offered. The remark that the railway scheme of Sir Charles Wood was the fag-end of Lord George Bentinck's measure, was received with loud cheers by the house, and was repeated much "out of doors." During these debates the grossest ignorance of Ireland, her people, resources, and financial relation to Great Britain, was evinced by ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... platform; for there seemed to be always something still to say, and we found it hard to part from our charming friends; realising, too, that this was the end of our holiday, and that before us lay merely the toil and bustle of a return to commonplace, everyday life. At last, though, the final fag-end of a cheroot was thrown away, the last hand-grips given, and ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne

... evening of our voyage, I walked on deck. It was the "fag-end" of a gale, and the rain was pouring down upon the slippery planks. Brightly a skyrocket whizzed upwards from a distant ship, and burst in a shower of flame, followed by two others, signalling our old acquaintance the Canada, bound from Liverpool ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... find out whether Lord Inglewold would be inclined to resume the fag-end. In such case, as the lease has been a long one, and land has risen much, he would doubtless pay a part of the difference. Then there's the stock, worth a good deal, I should think. I'll see what can be done. And then there's the stray ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald

... little about their school days. But, we think, we may safely venture to guess that, whenever Hastings wished to play any trick more than usually naughty, he hired Impey with a tart or a ball to act as fag in the worst ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... to her countenance; now exhibiting an obtrusive interest in the baby; now going round and round upon the hearth, and lying down as if he had established himself for the night; now getting up again, and taking that nothing of a fag-end of a tail of his out into the weather, as if he had just remembered an appointment, and was off at a ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens

... with white stripes, commandeered from a pair of civilian trousers that was hanging goodness knows where at the beginning of the war. As for Marthereau's puttees, they are not both of the same hue, for he failed to find two fag-ends of greatcoat equally worn and equally dirty, to be cut up ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... prognostication would have led to the expectation of an orator. Altogether, his conduct at Harrow indicated a clever, but not an extraordinary boy. He formed a few friendships there, in which his attachment appears to have been, in some instances, remarkable. The late Duke of Dorset was his fag, and he was not considered a very hard taskmaster. He certainly did not carry with him from Harrow any anticipation of that splendid career he was destined to run as ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... boy to be a man, And yet, in distant years, I pray that he'll have eyes that can Not quite keep back the tears When, coming from some foreign shore And alien scenes that fag, Borne on its native breeze, once more He sees ...
— When Day is Done • Edgar A. Guest

... pleasant nursing. There was never any real alarm; indeed, Armine was the least ill of the three, and Johnny the most, and each boy was perfectly delighted to have her to attend to him, her nephew almost touchingly grateful. The only other victim was Jock's most intimate friend, Cecil Evelyn, whose fag Armine was. He became a sharer of her attentions and the amusements she provided. She received letters of grateful thanks from his mother, who was, like herself, a widow, but was prevented from coming to him by close attendance on her mother-in-law, who was in a lingering state of decay when ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... disgust because it had not occurred to him before. There was now opened to him a new scope of inquiry, an altogether different matter of evidence. But the idea was by far too important to be brought in and explained at the fag-end of a chapter. ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope

... experience has gone, in no other way. He is generous enough to hate all oppression in every form, and therefore to hate the oppression exercised by a noble as heartily as oppression exercised by a king. He is a big boy ready to fight anyone who bullies his fag; but with no doubts as to the merits of fagging. But then he never chooses to look at the awkward consequences of his opinion. When talking of politics, an aristocracy full of virtue and talent, ruling ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... mental wealth as books seldom boast; his mind was indeed my library, and whenever it was opened to me, I entered bliss. Intellectually imperfect as I was, I could read little; there were few bound and printed volumes that did not weary me—whose perusal did not fag and blind—but his tomes of thought were collyrium to the spirit's eyes; over their contents, inward sight grew clear and strong. I used to think what a delight it would be for one who loved him better ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... ai per vos estat en greu preyzo Per vostra guerra e n'ai a vostro pro Fag maynt assaut et ars maynta maiso Et a Messina vos cobri del blizo; En la batalha vos vinc en tal sazo Que.us ferion pel pietz e pel mento Dartz e cairels, sagetas ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor

... twenty years' fag and toil on the materials of the History of the Roman Empire alone, and at a time when there were many aids not existing in Raleigh's day. Gibbon personally ransacked the libraries of Europe. Raleigh had scarcely four years to cover the four most ancient empires and a much longer ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens

... vessel, strong and bold, On her banner proudly streaming, California for gold! See a crowd around her gather, Eager all to push from land! They will have all sorts o' weather Ere they reach the golden strand. Rouse to action, Fag and faction; Ho, for mines of wealth untold! Rally! Rally! All for Cali- Fornia in search of gold! Away, amid the rush and racket, Ho for the ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton

... the Venetian scene, grow weary; it is always in the picture, and the large profiled action that lets the standing rowers throw themselves forward to a constant recovery has the double value of being, at the fag-end of greatness, the only energetic note. The people from the hotels are always afloat, and, at the hotel pace, the solitary gondolier (like the solitary horseman of the old- fashioned novel) is, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... the position of a beautiful satellite. His illness, he assured his visitor with a thin-lipped emphasis, was "quite temporary, quite the sort of thing that might happen to anyone." He had had a queer little benumbing of one leg, "just a trifle of nerve fag did it," and the slight asthma that came and went in his life had taken advantage of his condition to come again with a little beyond its usual aggressiveness. "Elly is going to take me off to Marienbad next week or the week after," he said. "I shall have a cure and she'll have a treat, and ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... beyond a joke, that no idea of trifling therewith enters into the most unsophisticated mind. Life is reduced to something very like a resignation of the sturdy substance of the day, and a diligent employment of the two fag-ends. The intervening hours must be slept away, or read away, or somehow employed without the requisition of corporeal activity. And, considering that these are the hours during which musquitoes vex not, and lesser tormentors of the rampant ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various

... appear in the sequel, are apposite to the parties whom I am about to introduce to the readers. As, however, they are people of some consequence, it may appear to be a want of due respect on my part, if I were to introduce them at the fag-end of ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat

... 'and neither will you find in Grubbers like myself, under Proprietors like this, pleasant qualities. I've been a Grubber from a boy. What has my life been? Fag and grind, fag and grind, turn the wheel, turn the wheel! I haven't been agreeable to myself, and I haven't been likely to be agreeable to anybody else. If I was a shilling a week less useful in ten years' time, this impostor would give ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... fear, and his terror was so manifest that the bully, who was threatening him with all manner of evils, began to enjoy himself. Chalkeye, returning from watering the horses, got back in time to hear the intemperate fag-end of the scolding. He glanced at Hughie, whose hands were trembling in spite of him, and then darkly at the brute who was attacking him. But he said ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine

... propensities, and I can feelingly recollect how miserable for nearly a year was that poor little helpless innocent of seven under the unrestricted tyranny of one Cooke (in after years a life convict for crime) who did all he could to pollute the infant mind of the little fag delivered over to his cruelty. Cowper's Tirocinium well expresses ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... resignation. "I can't lie to you. I have only a broken heart. Beyond friendship and gratitude, I have nothing to offer you. I can't even promise that I will ever stop loving—him. But—" her words came with the flatness of unending soul-fag—"I suppose I can give you the lesser things; fidelity, respect; all the petty allegiance that can go on without ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... with regard to the other Americans in the hotel. She imagined they slighted her, or disapproved of her, or watched her course with misgiving. With a family of good, simple people, who apparently had nothing to strive for with the restlessness which characterized the social fag-ends whom she was now in the habit of meeting, she would have been glad to establish relations; but she never got beyond an occasional bow or smile, generally over some incident connected with the children. ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King

... "licked a feller" for a false quantity, "that, by Jove! you couldn't sit down for a fortnight without squeaking;" and of the jolly mills they used to have with the town cads, who would lie in wait for you, and half kill you if they caught you alone; and of the fun it was to make a junior form fag for you, and do all your dirty work; - that Master Verdant's hair would almost stand on end at such horrors, and he would gasp for very dread lest such should ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede

... Never before or since have we tasted anything of its kind so good as a buttered roll toasted. It was a French roll buttered all over outside, and then skillfully grilled until the outside was a rich crisp brown. This was brought by the fag to his master "hot and hot," and, being cut open, eaten with butter. The rooms were warmed by immense open fireplaces, there being no limit to the expenditure of coal, which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various

... appeared to have received a sudden and marvellous increase. I seemed to tread on eider-down, and, cigar in mouth, strolled along Fleet-street and the Strand, towards my domicile in Half-Moon street—"nescio quid meditans nugarum"—sometimes humming the fag end of an Irish melody; anon stopping to stare in a print-shop window; and then I would trudge on, chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy as I conned over the various ups and downs that had chequered my life since Jack Withers and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various

... used to win money on that horse, for all she was so slow and always had the asthma, or the distemper, or the consumption, or something of that kind. They used to give her two or three hundred yards start, and then pass her under way; but always at the fag end of the race she'd get excited and desperate like, and come cavorting and straddling up, and scattering her legs around limber, sometimes in the air, and sometimes out to one side among the fences, and kicking up m-o-r-e dust and raising m-o-r-e racket with her coughing and sneezing ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various

... unconsciously, as a turkey-cock does when he intends to make himself very agreeable. He was walking rather fancifully up and down the room, partly singing, partly whistling 'The Bay of Biscay O,' and at the long-lived, but most nonsensical chorus, he shook the fag-ends of his divided coat tail, as if in derision of that fatal 'short sea,' so well known and despised in that salt-water burial-place. I was pretending to read a paper, when a carrier entered, and placed a play-bill ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various

... she's followed him over here, or got here first, tried the same game probably, met with a refusal, and this anonymous note is her revenge. The man she married was a crack-brained weakling who got into the army the fag end of the war, fell in love with her pretty face, married her, then they quarrelled, and he drank himself into a muddle-head. She ran him into debt; then he gambled away government funds, bolted, was caught, and would have been tried and sent to ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King

... than otherwise, and, indeed, took a real pleasure in some classical authors—Homer and Horace, for example—as any lad who has turned sixteen who has brains, and is not absolutely idle, is likely to do. He was strong, active, popular; he had passed from the purgatorial state of fag to the elysium of fagger. But still his blood seemed turned to champagne, and his muscles to watch-springs, when the cab, which carried him and his portmanteau, passed through the gate into the drive which curved up to the door of Holly Lodge. For Holly Lodge contained his mother ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough

... little Dot, who was rather of the dumpling's shape—"but I don't myself object to that"—and good, lumbering John Peerybingle, her husband, often so near to something or another very clever, according to his own account, and Boxer, the carrier's dog, "with that preposterous nothing of a fag-end of a tail of his, describing circles of barks round the horse, making savage rushes at his mistress, and facetiously bringing himself to sudden stops,"—all bear upon them unmistakably the ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... Facilitate faciligi. Facility facileco. Facsimile faksimilo. Fact fakto. Fact, in (adv.) ja. Faction sekto. Factious malpaca. Factor (agent) faktoro. Factory fabrikejo. Faculty fakultato. Faculty kapablo. Fade velki. Fading velkanto. Fag laboregi. Fagot brancxaro. Fail manki. Fail malprosperi. Fail (bankruptcy) bankroti. Failure malprospero. Failing (fault) kulpo. Faint sveni. Faint (swoon) sveno. Faint hearted timema. Fair (market) foiro. Fair (complexion) blonda. Fair justa. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... that this Dyckman chap ain't apt to get many credits by the sweat of his brow or the fag of his brain. There's plenty of folks would class him as so much plain nuisance, and I have it from him that his own fam'ly puts it even stronger. That's one of his specialties, confidin' to strangers how unpop'lar he is at ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford

... furia! I must get over so much writing, or I shall be too late for the summer's printing. If it isn't done by June, what will become of me? I shall go back to Italy in disgrace, and considerably poorer than I need be, which is of more practical consequence. So I fag. Then there's an hour and a half in the morning for Penini's lessons. We breakfast at nine, and receive nobody till past four. This will all prove to you two things, dearest friend—first (I hope) that I'm pardonable for making you wait a few days longer than should have been, and ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... is stimulating and does not fag one, while intellectual work which is uninteresting or displeasing is ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb

... goes on to bid me 'live and labor for the fallen, the neglected, the suffering, and the poor'; and finally ends by advising me to help upset any, or all, institutions, laws, and so forth, that bear hardly on the fag-ends of society; and tells me that what he calls 'a service to humanity' is worth more to the doer than a service to anything else, or than anything we can gain from the world. ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various

... beauty of the sex. With a neckerchief over her shoulders, her hair clumsily braided—though it was lovely hair, thick and black, you could see that it was badly brushed—she stretched out towards a chair hands like those of a servant, and removed an infant's robe, a knife, a fag-end of packe-bread, an empty flower-pot, and a greasy plate left on the seat, which she then moved ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... in Massachusetts. To us there was something hideous in the aspect of their mountains; but this may have been partly owing to our own hideous habitation, and low spirits. The same objects may have appeared charming in the eyes of a Scotch family, just arrived from the fag-end of the Island of ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse

... air-passages, and equally futile to attempt to arrest its course by treatment directed to the lung, or even the chest. The best place to wear a chest-protector is on the soles of the feet, and poulticing the chest for pneumonia is about as effective as shampooing the scalp for brain-fag. ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... moment, from out of the darkness, about fifty yards away, the cry rose again, but short and sudden, like a bit of the fag end of the shriek which had roused ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn

... although I tried. But I was extremely noisy, and I heard two or three of the bridesmaids, to say nothing of the maid of honor and the bridegroom's mamma, tapping their gentle hammers, at my expense, at the breakfast. It was a year afterward that I began to fag regularly for ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various

... these is 'appy days! An' 'ow they've flown— Flown like the smoke of some inchanted fag; Since dear Doreen, the sweetest tart I've known, Passed me the jolt that made me sky the rag. An' ev'ry golding day floats o'er a chap Like a glad dream ...
— The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke • C. J. Dennis

... to himself as usual and spilling half his beer on the table and floor. Presently some drunken utterances reached the doctor's ear, and he turned round in a surprised manner and looked at Bogg. The drunkard continued to mutter for some time, and then broke out into something like the fag-end of a song. The doctor walked over to the table at which Bogg was sitting, and, seating himself on the far corner, regarded the drunkard attentively for some minutes; but the latter's voice ceased, his head fell slowly on his folded ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... back. I had struck a snag, And must creep through the battle spume All a flamin' age, with a grinnin' jag In me thigh, for water, or jest a fag. Like a crippled snake I was forced to drag Shattered flesh till ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson

... page chance to fall under your eye, for my sake read, fag, subdue, and take up into your proper mind this chapter ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge

... suffice to maintain human stamina if we neglect other co-operatives—namely the obedience to the laws of abstinence, and those of ordinary gratification. We rise with a headache, and we set about puzzling ourselves to know the cause. We then recollect that we had a hard day's fag, or that we feasted over-bounteously, or that we stayed up very late: at all events we incline to find out the fault, and then we call ourselves fools for falling into it. Now, this is an occurrence happening almost every day; and these are the points that run away with the ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various

... the machinery of the system. Its basis is the tyranny of brain force, which, among civilized men, is allowed to do what muscular force does among schoolboys and savages. The schoolboy proposition is: 'I am stronger than you, therefore you shall fag for me.' Its grown up form is: 'I am cleverer than you, therefore you shall fag for me.' The state of things we produce by submitting to this, bad enough even at first, becomes intolerable when the mediocre or foolish descendants of the clever fellows claim to ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw

... end of a hard-fought game of football. In fact, he hardly knew what physical fatigue was; and only once, when he was suffering from a chill, and had to sit for his senior scholarship examination, do I recollect his exhibiting any sign of mental fag. He found rest in change of employment. Athletic exercises were a natural antidote to his strenuous intellectual work; and music lifted him into the region of pure emotion and soothed his soul with the concord ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... occupied, usually employed his time in committing to paper his thoughts upon men, manners, and things at sea in general; though, sooth to say, his was not an idle life. Being voted by unanimous consent "a junior," he was condemned to offices that the veriest fag in Eton or Harrow had rebelled against. In the morning, under the pseudonym of Mrs. Sparks, he presided at breakfast, having previously made tea, coffee, and chocolate for the whole cabin, besides boiling about twenty eggs at various degrees of hardness; ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... These outbreaks had the kind of morbid interest for the Pocket Hunter that a house of unsavory reputation has in a respectable neighborhood, but I always found the accounts he brought me more interesting than his explanations, which were compounded of fag ends of miner's talk and superstition. He was a perfect gossip of the woods, this Pocket Hunter, and when I could get him away from "leads" and "strikes" and "contacts," full of fascinating small talk about the ebb and flood of creeks, the pinon crop on Black Mountain, and the ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin

... buying cheap food results in the purchasing of foodstuffs which are deficient in nutrient properties. The main articles of diet are indifferent bread and butter, the fag ends of coarse meat, the outside leaves of green vegetables, and tea, and an occasional pennyworth of fried fish and potatoes. Children who are supplied with milk at school, or who are given breakfast and dinner, respond at once to the better feeding, and show distinct improvement ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes

... own, make everybody merry, and banish all discomforts due to frost and cold for ever. Thus the men thought, though most of our fellows are teetotallers. We get rum now, few (p. 035) drink it; we are sated with cigarettes, and smoke them as if in duty bound; the stolen delight of the last "fag-end" is a dream of the past. Parades are endless, we have never worked so hard since we joined the army; the minor offences of the cathedral city are full-grown crimes under long artillery range; a dirty rifle was only ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill

... at the fag end of my paper, to answer your question about Leonora Lavagna. I think, beyond all doubt, the sentiment Schiller makes her express as occurring to her at the altar perfectly natural. When the character and position of Leonora are considered, her love for Fiesco—however, chiefly composed of admiration ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... the most hopeless and uncultivated was always this good man's object. The Falkland Isles were dreary enough, but they were a paradise compared to the desolate fag-end of the American world,—a cluster of barren rocks, intersected by arms of the sea, which divide them into numerous islets, the larger ones bearing stunted forests of beech and birch, on the skirts of hills covered with perpetual snow, and sending down blue glaciers to the water's ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... a shocking length of time. It was dark when I reached it; having walked twelve miles after three p.m. There was only one inn, properly speaking, in the town, and since the old coaching time, it had contracted itself into the fag-end of a large, dark, seedy-looking building, where it lived by selling beer and other sharp and cheap drinks to the villagers; nineteen-twentieths of whom appeared to be agricultural laborers. ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt

... early life and parentage we know little, except that he was born in East Smithfield, near the Tower of London, and was poor. His education began at the Merchant Tailors' School in London and was continued in Cambridge, where as a poor sizar and fag for wealthy students he earned a scant living. Here in the glorious world that only a poor scholar knows how to create for himself he read the classics, made acquaintance with the great Italian poets, and wrote ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... faculties were sharpened into proper appreciation by privation, those congested windows teeming with jewels, with wearing apparel, with all things immoderately, set up a sort of mental dyspepsia that was distressing, and she was glad to turn away to relieve the consequent brain-fag. But by degrees she became accustomed to the tasteless profusion. It did not please her any better, but at all events it did not afflict her by always obtruding itself upon her attention. She saw it, not in detail, but as a part of the picture; and ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... proposed, with the understanding that we should spend more if it was wanted. I wrote to Chamberlain: "We always have two subjects—(a) Conference, (b) Gordon." And he wrote back: "The first always taking up two or three hours; and the second five minutes at the fag end of business." ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn

... reserve and a sort of sighing patience which one is often moved to admire. And again, the abstract butler never stoops to familiarity. But the coloured gentleman will pass you a wink at a time; he is familiar like an upper form boy to a fag; he unbends to you like Prince Hal with Poins and Falstaff. He makes himself at home and welcome. Indeed, I may say, this waiter behaved himself to me throughout that supper much as, with us, a young, free, ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... could live through the swarms of the Arabs around them. That I saw with my own eyes. I and my Spahis just reached him in time. Then who is it that saved the day, I pray you?—I, who just ran a race for fun and came in at the fag-end of the thing, or this man who lived the whole day through in the carnage, and never let go of the guidon, but only thought how to die greatly? I tell you, the Cross is his, and not mine. Take it back, and give it where ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... be made by the lowest personage in the house. In this instance, however, Lotta Luxa did answer the bell, and not the stout Bohemian girl who acted in the household of Madame Zamenoy as assistant and fag to Lotta. And Lotta found Nina at the door, enveloped in her cloak. "Lotta," she said, "will you kindly give this to my cousin Ziska?" Then, not waiting for a word, she started away so quickly that Lotta had not a chance of speaking to her, no ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope

... hope you are by yourself now, and relieved from the fag of entertaining guests. You do not complain, but I am afraid you have ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... nodded. The next moment she seemed to repent the nod, for she flared up and snapped: "Oh, shut up, for Christ's sake, cancher? Give any one the fair pip, you do. Ain't I answered enough damsilly questions from ev'body without you? Oo's got a fag?" ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... my horse was beginning to fag a bit, but the sun was setting, for the attack had taken place in the afternoon. I kept on till it was too dark for me to make out my pursuers, some of whom were not more than three hundred yards behind ...
— With Buller in Natal - A Born Leader • G. A. Henty

... a special diet-sheet, and talks of "proteids", notices a slight cloudiness in his urine, and underlines "The Uric-Acid Diathesis" in one of his pamphlets. Then his heart bumps, he diagnoses anew, and so goes on, usually ending by taking phosphorus for his "brain fag". Then he finds he has a disease unknown to the faculty, which discovery interests him as intensely as ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs

... masters, as a matter of course, as his natural enemies. Matters were not so comfortable in the house, either. The new praeposters of the Sixth Form were not strong, and the big Fifth Form boys soon began to usurp power, and to fag and bully ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... anyhow, I'll be bound," she said obstinately. She was fighting against the bare idea of being left with a remnant of life to live and no Sandro to fill it for her; what a miserable fag-end of empty waiting that would be! She glanced sharply at his wife; she did not know what his wife ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope

... helper, servitor, attendant, retainer; domestic, maid, menial, drudge, valet, flunky, groom, coistril, lackey, underling, fag, coolie, butler, factotum, orderly, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... possis si non quocunque modo," said Somers, the head of the school, whose fag Walter was, and who, passing by at the moment, caught the last sentence; "what is the excitement ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... fagots (fag' utz). Twigs. Fensalir (fen sa ler'). The home of Frigga. forget-me-not (for get'-me-not). A small herb bearing a blue flower, and considered the emblem of fidelity. Frigga (frig' ga). The supreme goddess of the ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd

... the English peasantry. In that light all sorts of things showed a new meaning. I looked with rather changed sentiments, for example, upon the noisome pigsties—for were they not a survival of a venerable thrift? I viewed the old tools—hoes and spades and scythes and fag-hooks—with quickened interest; and I speculated with more intelligence upon those aged people of the parish whose curious habits were described to me with so much respect. But of all the details that now gained significance, most to be noted were the hints of the comparative prosperity ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt

... highly-polished boots to the less elaborate wardrobe of us writers. That this noble and fashionable creature could descend to writing wrappers, and to waiting his turn with a bank-book in the long train of a sordid teller, passed all speculation and astonishment. He made a sorry fag of the office boy, and advised us every day to beware of cutting the files, as if that were the one vice of authors. To him we stole, with humiliated faces, and begged a trifling advance of salary. He sternly requested us not to encroach behind the counter—his own indisputable domain—but ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... English or he may not. This is a matter which cannot be decided. At all events he slowly raised his head and twisted his tail in a peculiar manner, stretched out his neck, and cocking his ears he sighed loudly a sigh like the fag-end of a long bray, all of which seemed to point to the fact that he felt himself to be a slave in leathern chains, gagged with a rusty bit, and at ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn

... towards man, especially in the season of youth, and too resolute in carrying out his own sense of good and justice, not to become a victim. To a devoted attachment to those he loved he added a determined resistance to oppression. Refusing to fag at Eton, he was treated with revolting cruelty by masters and boys: this roused instead of taming his spirit, and he rejected the duty of obedience when it was enforced by menaces and punishment. To aversion to the society of his ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley

... appertaining to the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, and about three miles, a furlong, and few odd yards from that oft-recorded good town, a dry stone wall, some thirty inches in height, runs from the lofty and perpendicular sea-banks, over a portion of what may be termed the fag-end of Lammermoor, and now forming a separation between the laws of Scotland and the jurisdiction of the said good town; and on crossing to the northern side of this humble but important stone wall, you stand on the lands of Lamberton. Rather more ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various

... majority. We can legislate upon no great question after we have ourselves declared that we do not represent the country. Do these gentlemen opposite mean to say that they will legislate on a question affecting the rights of people yet unborn, with the fag-end of a parliament dishonoured by its own confessions of incapacity?" Hincks in his "Reminiscences," printed more than three decades later than this ministerial crisis, still adhered to the opinion that the government was fully justified by established precedent in appealing ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot

... Valparaiso, the usual place of rendezvous for the English squadron in the Pacific; and doubtless, Wilson meant to put us on board, and send us thither to be delivered up. Should our conjecture prove correct, all we had to expect, according to our most experienced shipmates, was the fag end of a cruise in one of her majesty's ships, and a discharge ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville

... and hungry room in all this spare and hungry house there came, one morning, the tremulous tones of old Gride's voice, as it feebly chirruped forth the fag end of some forgotten song, ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... up my packet to the last shred and crumb, and I found a couple of fag ends in my pocket. We smoked silently. Mick's manner gradually affected me. We became somehow mentally detached from the place in which we sat. We were in a corner of the room, at the end of the longest table, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors

... He gets a fag issue from the government, if he is lucky, of two packets or twenty a week. This lasts him with care about two days. After that he goes smokeless unless he has friends at home to send him a supply. I had friends in London who sent me about five ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes

... groups like TGW, FLT, USA and the like. Structure makes them happy. [...] Warez d00dz will never have a handle like "Pink Daisy" because warez d00dz are insecure. Only someone who is very secure with a good dose of self-esteem can stand up to the cries of fag and girlie-man. More likely you will find warez d00dz with handles like: Doctor Death, Deranged Lunatic, Hellraiser, Mad Prince, Dreamdevil, The Unknown, Renegade Chemist, Terminator, and Twin Turbo. They ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... doubling or trebling may be counted the performance, on the same night, by a Mrs. Stanley, at the Coburg Theatre, of the parts of Lady Anne, Tressell, and Richmond, in "Richard III." A Mr. W. Rede once accomplished the difficult feat of appearing as Sir Lucius O'Trigger, Fag, and Mrs. Malaprop in a representation of "The Rivals," the lady's entrance in the last scene having been preceded by the abrupt exit of Sir Lucius and the omission of the concluding passages of his part. The characters of King Henry, Buckingham, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook

... A Gipsy will make four harvests in one year; first he goes 'up the country,' as he calls going into Middlesex, for 'peas-hacking.' That over, he goes into Sussex (Chichester—'wheat-fagging' or tying), and on that being done, returns toward Hampshire—North Hants—to 'fag' or tie, and that being done he enters Surrey for hop-picking (previously securing a 'bin' in one of the gardens). Some idea of his gross earnings may be obtained from the following fact:—Two able-bodied men, an old woman of about 75 years of age, and two women, earned on a farm in one harvest, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... golden noon hour is spent, standing, running, waiting, serving in the ill-smelling restaurant I shall name later; and not your dinner hour alone, but the long day's fag end! ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst

... down, and threading the well- known locality, through Bedford Place and across Theobald's Road, soon found himself at the door of his generous patron. Oh! how he hated the house; how he hated the blear-eyed, cross-grained, dirty, impudent fish-fag of an old woman who opened the door for him; how he hated Mr. Jabesh M'Ruen, to whom he now came a supplicant for assistance, and how, above all, he ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope

... I hear that you have been preaching at Chaldicotes," said the archdeacon, still rather loudly. "I saw Sowerby the other day, and he told me that you gave them the fag end of Mrs. ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope

... dissolved, and to set aside the Protector, who soon afterwards resigned. On the 21st April, Lenthall, the old Speaker, with as many members of the Long Parliament as could be brought together, met in the House, and opened their session. The Parliament thus formed, as being the fag-end of the old Long Parliament, obtained the name of the Rump Parliament. Lambert's hopes and aims were raised by his success against Sir George Booth in the August following, and jealousies soon arose between his party in the army and ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay

... him. He made the other boys laugh at him whenever he could. He bullied him in the play-ground. He proposed to introduce fagging at Mr. Gray's. He praised it as a splendid institution of the British schools, simply because he wanted Gabriel as his fag. He wanted to fling his boots at Gabriel's head that he might black them. He wanted to send him down stairs in his shirt on winter nights. He wanted to have Gabriel get up in the cold mornings and bring him his breakfast in bed. He wanted to chain ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis

... after dozing over those old pages which Homer (good soul!) dozed over before. God bless you, my child; write to me; no one, not even your mother, shall see your letters; and—and be sure, my fine fellow, that you don't fag too hard. The glass of life is the best book, and one's natural wit the only diamond that ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... out nightly into the town for the purpose of executing commissions; but this was not easy, as all the regular outlets were closed at an early hour. In such a dilemma, any route, that was barely practicable at whatever risk, must be traversed by the loyal fag; and it so happened that none of any kind remained open or accessible, except one; and this one communication happened to have escaped suspicion, simply because it lay through a succession of temples and sewers sacred to the goddesses Cloacina and Scavengerina. That of ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... Josie. And yet there is a bit more to this story—ten years more, if you must know—ten years, the end of which found Josie a sparse, spectacled, and agile little cripple, as alert and caustic as ever. It found Sid Hahn the most famous theatrical man of his day. It found Sarah Haddon at the fag-end of a career that had blazed with triumph and adulation. She had never had a success like "Splendour." Indeed, there were those who said that all the plays that followed had been failures, carried to semi-success on the strength of that play's glorious past. She eschewed low-cut gowns now. ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber

... begin to reckon. Twelve days' difference! Yes, I have already grasped that fact, but then in which direction must the deduction begin?—backward or forward? Such is the question that instantly arises, and if we are at the fag end of one month and the beginning of another, the amount of reckoning involved seems somewhat inadequate to the occasion. The Russian clergy, it is said—those, at any rate, of the lowest class, designated as "white priests," many of them peasants by birth and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various

... to saddle that the fag end of the dawn was still sweet in the air when he passed under the great limbs of the stragglers of the forests clothing his eastern hill-slopes. He noted how between the widely separated boles the grass was thick and rich ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory

... are no new thing belonging to the fag-end of this century. Young Adams wrote letters over the "nom de plume" of Pro Bono Publico, and then replied to them over the signature of Rex Americus. He did not adopt as his motto, "Let not thy left hand know what thy right ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... vision she saw what lay before her—the hurried preparations, the long tedious voyage on a steamer chosen at haphazard, the arrival in the deadly July heat, and the relapse into all the insufferable daily fag of nursery and kitchen—she saw it and her ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... that chink into the singer's extended hat show how fully his efforts are appreciated; but at this moment P——, with the free-and-easy command of a true John Bull, elbows his way through the throng, and calls out: "Holloa, Johnny! we only got the fag-end of that song. Tip us another, and here's five piastres for you" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various

... root div whence Devas, Deus, &c., but the root tap, in Latin tep (of tepere, tepefacere), Slavonic tepl, topl (for tep or top), in modern Persian tab. Thymele refers to the hearth as the place of smoke ([Greek], thus, fumus), but familia denotes household from famulus for fagmulus, the root fag being equated with the Sansk. bhaj, servira. Lucan's Hesus or Esus may fairly be compared with the Welsh Hu Gadarn by legitimate process, but no letter-change can justify his connection with Gaisos, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold

... that big lawyers do not want, and so they pass it over to the boys. Doctors are always turning pauper patients over to the youngsters, and so in successful law-offices there is more or less of this semi-charitable work to do. Business houses also have fag-end work that they give to beginners, as kind folks give bones to Fido. Wendell Phillips' law-work was exactly of this contingent kind—big business and big fees only go ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard



Words linked to "Fag" :   attend, shirtlifter, wash up, butt, cigaret, wear upon, depreciation, attend to, indispose, joint, tire out, pansy, tucker, assist, fag out, weary, queer, cubeb cigarette, fagot, brain-fag, faggot, labor, pall, spliff, wear out, derogation, travail, disparagement, work, overweary, fag end, poof, coffin nail, cubeb, wear down, stick, serve



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