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Hack   Listen
verb
Hack  v. i.  To cough faintly and frequently, or in a short, broken manner; as, a hacking cough.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hack" Quotes from Famous Books



... hundred miles with an experienced guide and trailer, Hack, whom I interrogated upon many points in the practice of this art. Nearly all tracks I saw, either old or new, as a novice in the art, I questioned him about. In going to the Niobrara River crossed the track of an Indian pony. My ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis

... Pendennis and Warrington to dinner again. Bacon, when he found that Bungay was about to treat, of course, began to be anxious and curious, and desired to out-bid his rival. Was any thing settled between Mr. Pendennis and the odious house "over the way" about the new book? Mr. Hack, the confidential reader, was told to make inquiries, and see if any thing was to be done, and the result of the inquiries of that diplomatist, was, that one morning, Bacon himself toiled up the staircase of Lamb-court, and to the door on which ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray

... octavo volume, which fell with a dead thump at the feet of the public, and has never been picked up. A few persons turned over one or two of the leaves, as it lay there, and essayed to kick the volume deeper into the mud; for they were the hack critics of the minor periodical press in London, than whom, I suppose, though excellent fellows in their way, there are no gentlemen in the world less sensible of any sanctity in a book, or less likely to recognize an author's heart in it, or more utterly ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... editorial elder brother: cut out relentlessly a number of long tiresome passages that showed all too plainly the fagged, toiling brain, the heavy sluggish driven pen, and straightened out certain indecisions at the end. Except for that, I have done no more than hack here and there at clumsy phrases and repetitions. The worst thing in the earlier version, and the thing that rankled most in my mind, was the treatment of the relations of Helen Wotton and Graham. Haste in art is almost always vulgarisation, and I slipped ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells

... with a pension of one hundred marks a year. This, with his fees and returns from several noblemen, and the small earnings of his plays must have formed the bulk of his income. The poet appears to have done certain literary hack-work for others, as, for example, parts of the Punic Wars contributed to Raleigh's 'History of the World'. We know from a story, little to the credit of either, that Jonson accompanied Raleigh's son abroad in the capacity ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson

... were the various shouts greeting the cash customer. She was saluted eagerly, as hack-men hail the arrivals in the trains at a city station. Callie made no reply, but stubbed in a demure, dignified way, from table to table, finally halting where children's strongest passion is sure to take them, at the candy table. Here she ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand

... he replaced the cheque book with the tightened lips and the fixed gaze of a man who was thinking rapidly. He paid a visit to the library, where the secretary was engaged in making copies of Kara's correspondence, answering letters appealing for charitable donations, and in the hack words which fall to the secretaries ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace

... parts." [Compare Mozart's words as addressed to Michael Kelly: "Melody is the essence of music. I should liken one who invents melodies to a noble racehorse, and a mere contrapuntist to a hired post-hack."] ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden

... displays Long rows of desk and bench; the former stain'd And streak'd with blots and trickles of dried ink, Lumbered with maps and slates and well-thumb'd books, And carved with rude initials; while the knife Has hack'd and sliced the latter. In the midst Stands the dread throne whence breathes supreme command, And in a lock'd recess well known, is laid The dread regalia, gifted with a charm Potent to the rebellious. When the bell Tinkles the school hour, inward streams the crowd, And bending heads ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various

... some such directions as these: "Y-mynce it, smyte them on gobbets, hew them on gobbets, chop on gobbets, hew small, dyce them, skern them to dyce, kerf it to dyce, grind all to dust, smyte on peces, parcel-hem; hew small on morselyen, hack them small, cut them on culpons." Great amounts of spices were used, even perfumes; and as there was no preservation of meat by ice, perhaps the spices and ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle

... within the low door, but stood outside, speaking a few words, while Cummins' wife talked to him. But one morning, when the sun was shining down with the first promising warmth of spring, the woman stepped hack from the door and asked ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood

... past bring us very near to the heart and the life of Greece, and waken a kindly enthusiasm in every one who approaches them. In Humphrey Prideaux's letters there is not a trace of any such feeling. He does his business, but it is hack-work. In this he differs from the modern student, but in his caustic description of the rude and witless society of the place he is modern enough. In his letters to his friend, John Ellis, of the State Paper Office, it is plain that Prideaux wants ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang

... youth it shelter'd me, And I'll protect it now. Twas my forefather's hand That placed it near his cot. There, woodman, let it stand, Thy axe shall harm it not. That old familiar tree, Whose glory and renown Are spread o'er land and sea, Say, wouldst thou hack it down? ...
— Old Ballads • Various

... For want of fighting has grown rusty, And eats into itself for lack Of somebody to hew and hack." ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various

... Pete pushed hack his hat. "Well, I ain't no bronco-twister, but I reckon I could ride him a couple o' jumps. Who's keepin' time ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... fuss about; and what could Irwine do for him that he could not do for himself? He would go to Eagledale in spite of Meg's lameness—go on Rattler, and let Pym follow as well as he could on the old hack. That was his thought as he sugared his coffee; but the next minute, as he was lifting the cup to his lips, he remembered how thoroughly he had made up his mind last night to tell Irwine. No! He would not be vacillating again—he WOULD do what he had meant ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... gone far before the heat and the stifling air drove him hack, and rushing back to ...
— Piccaninnies • Isabel Maud Peacocke

... The gentleman hops the left foot well forward, then hack; and glissades half round. He then hops the right foot forward and back, and glissades the other half round. The lady performs the same steps, beginning ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... when Susan reached the house in Prince Street, Virginia, with her youngest child in her arms, was just stepping out of a dilapidated "hack," from which a grinning negro driver handed a collection of lunch baskets into the eager hands of the rector and Mrs. Pendleton, ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... away, with the chain in his right claw and the shoes in his left. He flew far away to a mill, and the mill went "Clipper, clapper, clipper, clapper, clipper, clapper." And in the mill there sat twenty millers, who chopped a stone, and chopped, "Hick, hack, hick, hack, hick, hack;" and the mill went, "Clipper, clapper, ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)

... sure it ud ill become me to hear my own corree—no, no, avourneen," she exclaimed, putting hack the glass; "I can't take it this—a—way; it doesn't agree wid me; you must put a grain o' shugar an' a dhrop o' bilin' wather to it. It may do very well hard for the sarvints, but I'm not used ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... boats pulled up to it, and threw a lariat over a glittering peak that flamed in the sun like a torch. Then we drew in the slack and made fast, while a half dozen of our men mounted the slippery mass, armed with ropes and axes, and began to hack off big chunks, which were in due ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard

... beating. Yet amid the wild confusion of her feelings, a mechanical intelligence guided her hand to follow Arthur Dayson's final sentences. And there shone out from her soul a contempt for the miserable hack, so dazzling that it would have blinded him—had ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... gayety, as in a state ball, where the impassive face and languid step are out of harmony with the evident object of the scene, then the nature we speak of feels chilled and dejected. Hence it really is that the more delicate and ideal order of minds soon grow inexpressibly weary of the hack routine of what are called fashionable pleasures. Hence the same person most alive to a dance on the green, would be without enjoyment at Almack's. It was not because one scene is a village green, and the other a room in King Street, nor is it because the actors in the one are of the humble, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... men, Webber never had a moment to spare. Except read, there was nothing he did not do; training a hack for a race in the Phoenix, arranging a rowing-match, getting up a mock duel between two white-feather acquaintances, were his almost daily avocations. Besides that, he was at the head of many organized societies, instituted ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... he has never had to write for a living. He has been writing for the fun of it ever since he was an apprentice in a big engineering shop in London twenty years ago. His profession deals with exacting and beautiful machinery, and he could no more do hack writing than hack engineering. And unlike the other English realists of his generation who have cultivated a cheap flippancy, McFee finds no exhilaration in easy sneers at middle-class morality. He has a dirk up his ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... incident, and was afraid it would prejudice Kate's uncle—if he had returned—against her, or if he had not, that his wife would be vexed. Before the hack was out of sight, I was sorry I had not permitted Kate to go. I talked the matter over with her, and with her kind friends, who thought I had been over-nice ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic

... or even happiness. The thoroughly vicious man is no doubt wretched enough; but the worldly, prudent, self-restraining man, with his five senses, which he understands how to gratify with tempered indulgence, with a conscience satisfied with the hack routine of what is called respectability,—such a man feels no wretchedness; no inward uneasiness disturbs him, no desires which he cannot gratify; and this though he be the basest and most contemptible slave of his own selfishness. Providence ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... little act of human kindliness to you two. You women are so much more ready to do such things than men are, but we are more apt to run up against the cases where it is needed. There's a pathetic little girl doing some hack work for the Star. Norris knows her. She's just one of those delicate creatures that ought to live in the sheltered corner of a garden, and she's out on a bleak prairie. She's about as much like the people she has to associate with as ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter

... subject upon which more misconception exists, even among service men, than as regards the real role of cavalry in warfare. My conception of the duties and functions of the mounted arm is not to cut and to hack and to thrust at your enemy wherever and however he may be found. The real business of cavalry is so to manoeuvre your enemy as to bring him within effective range of the corps artillery of your own side for which a position suitable for battle ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm

... tell you what I would do,' said the captain: 'I would have none of your fancy rigs with the man driving from the mizzen cross-trees, but a plain fore-and-aft hack cab of the highest registered tonnage. First of all, I would bring up at the market and get a turkey and a sucking-pig. Then I'd go to a wine merchant's and get a dozen of champagne, and a dozen of some sweet wine, rich and sticky and strong, something in the port or madeira line, ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... morning there rumbled up to the door of our boarding-house a hack containing a lady inside and a trunk on the outside. It was our friend the lady-patroness of Miss Iris, the same who had been called by her admiring pastor "The Model of all the Virtues." Once a week she had written a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... of Paula's inspiring him with an occasional facile caress to the writing of other love songs. She might have been a boarding-school girl to have thought of that. She smiled, too, though a little more tenderly, over his own attempt—naive he had called it—to go in harness, like a park hack, submissive to Paula's rein and spur. Pegasus at the plow again. She smiled in clear self-derision over her contemplated project of saving him from Paula. He didn't need saving from anybody. He was one of those spirits that couldn't be ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster

... was conveyed, in a stifling hack, (the fare had risen, under the unusual circumstances, about one hundred and ten degrees,) to a stifling little room under the hot roof of an hotel exposed to the sun on every side, and had taken an ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various

... his business, indifferent to praise or blame. He knew he was a way-faring man whose business it was to follow his own road, a road he had to hack out for himself; and somewhere on the horizon were the ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler

... knives, flash-lamps, top-boots (at a fabulous price), khaki shirts and collars, gramophone records, and the latest set of Kirchner prints. It was the delight of spending, rather than the joy of possessing, which made them go from one shop to another in search of things they could carry hack to the line—that and the lure of girls behind the counters, laughing, bright-eyed girls who understood their execrable French, even English spoken with a Glasgow accent, and were pleased to flirt for five minutes ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... got into the saddle, showed themselves, as usual, unmerciful riders; spurring on the little governor with harangues and petitions, and thwarting him with memorials and reproaches, in much the same way as holiday apprentices manage an unlucky devil of a hack-horse; so that Wilhelmus Kieft was kept at a worry or a gallop throughout the whole of ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... will try to make good as soon as our military aims have been attained. Anybody who is threatened as we are threatened and is fighting for his highest possessions can have only one thought—how he is to hack his ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck

... was the phrase commonly in use when men meant to say that they intended to enlist. Curtis met the idea with instant approval, if not with acclamation, and, suiting the action to the words, we obtained a hack and drove to the Presidio, where we underwent the examination for artillerymen. Curtis passed easily and was accepted, but I, owing to a wound in my ankle received during the war, ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady

... unguessed at by Rogers, the large body behind was approaching, and the next moment the whole place was echoing with triumphant yells, as the pursuing Rangers were met by a compact force outnumbering them by four to one, who sprang furiously upon them, trying to hack them ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green

... a certain sarcastic hardness. "I don't mean," said he, "that I am going to hack at him with a sword, because neither he nor I properly know how to use swords, and after the wonderful practice that I have seen, I would not want to prove myself a bungler even if the other man were a worse one. No, mother, ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton

... how a holy man of God looks after confessing to having forged a letter derogatory to a poor motherless working girl's reputation. As my father is a Christian preacher I feel I have a right to protest against his being placed on a clerical parity with bilkers of hack bills and crapulous associates of two-for-a-penny prostitutes. If Harman attempts to defile the Christian pulpit with his presence, I hope to the good Lord that the decent members of that denomination will tie him across a nine-rail fence and ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... he answered hack, thinking on the spur of the moment he was needed to look after the furnace or steam boiler, from which the hired girl did not always succeed in getting the best ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson

... nationhood. She is doing so now. Prussia fights for conquest, for world-power, and makes docile Germany imagine that she is fighting for these also; but what Germany is really fighting for, blindly and gropingly, is freedom and unity. She has indeed "to hack her way through." But it is not, as she supposes, hostile Europe which hems her in and keeps her from her "place in the sun"; it is the Prussian girdle and the Prussian chains which hamper the free movements of her limbs and hold her close prisoner in the shadow of the Hohenzollern castle. The overthrow ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... thin slices about 3 inches in width; hack them with a knife, and grate on them the nutmeg, mace, cayenne, and salt, and fry them in a little butter. Dish them, and make a gravy in the pan by putting in the remaining ingredients. Give one boil, and pour it over the collops; garnish with lemon and slices ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... replied Xenomanes, females in sex, mortal in kind, some of them maids, others not. The devil have me, said Friar John, if I ben't for them. What a shameful disorder in nature, is it not, to make war against women? Let's go back and hack the villain to pieces. What! meddle with Shrovetide? cried Panurge, in the name of Beelzebub, I am not yet so weary of my life. No, I'm not yet so mad as that comes to. Quid juris? Suppose we should find ourselves pent ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... it was four o'clock in the afternoon. His head was in a whirl and every muscle was twitching. He called Charley and sent for a doctor. The doctor saw the trouble at a glance. He called a hack and accompanied Rayder ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds

... to speak of a British Constitution is playing with words. Parliament, imperfectly and capriciously elected, is supposed to hold the common purse in trust; but the men who vote the supplies are also those who receive them. The national purse is the common hack on which each party mounts in turn, in the countryman's fashion of "ride and tie." They order these things better in France. As for our system of conducting wars, it is all done over the heads of the people. War is with us the art of conquering at home. Taxes are not raised to carry on wars, ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford

... Trappes set out to rejoin his travelling companions, who were some hours in advance of him, when, on reaching Dover he was arrested in his turn and brought hack to prison in London. Interrogated the same day, M. de Trappes frankly related what had passed, appealing to M. de Chateauneuf as to the truth of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... eloquence, and o'er the Jacobins Legendre frown'd dismay. The tyrants fled— They reach'd the Htel. We gather'd round—we call'd For vengeance! Long time, obstinate in despair, 140 With knives they hack'd around them. 'Till foreboding The sentence of the law, the clamorous cry Of joyful thousands hailing their destruction, Each sought by suicide to escape the dread Of death. Lebas succeeded. From the window 145 Leapt the younger Robespierre, but his fractur'd limb Forbade to escape. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... hogs under the mail hack make a picture with a heavy foreground. They fall into the "8" classification—half in ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing

... no writer with whose works his life and personality are more intimately connected. It is impossible to consider the one separate from the other. Defoe began to write novels as a tradesman, as a literary hack, and as a reformer. Being dependent on his pen for his bread, he wrote what was likely to bring in the most immediate return. He calculated exactly the value and quality of his wares. He gave to his fictions the same moral object which inspired his own ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... of words. Let these be joined in proper proportions, and his verse becomes ours and we hail him as a poet. But let him lack the power of words, and though he sweat with a desire to write he is a failure or a hack poet, making up by industry what he lacks in beauty. Suppose there is a man deeply passionate, thrilled by the beauty of women and desiring them with a fierce ardor, and yet he has strong inhibitions, great purposes ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... with its knobs and chintz-like variation of colors. In consequence of the irregularity of the forges, I found many specimens of this sublimation hanging within reach, so that, with our staves and a little contrivance, we were able to hack off a few, and to secure them. I saw in the shops of the dealers in lava similar specimens, labeled simply "Lava"; and I was delighted to have discovered that it was volcanic soot precipitated from the hot vapor, and distinctly exhibiting ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various

... "We must hack it," said he, tearing off in the direction of the nearest stand. "No time to be lost. You saw how I changed ground. No use in paying ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... minute, and I called out to him to stop. It did seem as if he would drop before he got me back to the hotel, and I bounced out in no time, and then I walked in front of him and turned around and looked at him. If it is possible for a human hack-horse to have spavins in two joints in each leg, that man had them; and he looked as if he couldn't remember what it was to have ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton

... deny he was licked. Most losers will odd things along till they sound even. I heard a lovely excuse down in Red Gap. Hyman Leftowitz, who does business there as Abercrombie, the Quality Tailor, made a suit for Eddie Pierce that drives the depot hack, and Eddie was slow pay. So Hyman lost his native tact one night and dunned Eddie when he was walking down Fourth Street with his girl. Eddie left his girl in at the Owl Drug Store and went back and used Hyman hard; and all Hyman did was to yell 'Help!' and 'Murder!' I was in his shop for a ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson

... feet planted wide on the log, leaned over, and began to hack the bark off where he wished to take out ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post

... it was, Dick rushed forward, drawing his heavy hunting knife from its sheath as he did so, and dashing in, began to hack desperately at the stem of the leaf, believing that if he could sever it from its parent plant, he would be able to deliver his friend from its stifling embrace. But he soon found that, stout as was the blade he was ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood

... the clown to a duel, in which the latter was to have his legs tied, and then both of them were to sit on the ground and hack at ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... so we came to the day appointed. We had a dawn as red as blood that morning, and tho it was clear, there was a feeling of oppression in the air—and another oppression of people's spirits. For the bride's party had the "hack," and Mrs. Dow had spoken for the only other polite conveyance, the Galloway barge, and what was to come of all the fine, hasty gowns in case it came on for a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... in, and then the building of my house began. First, the poles were cut the proper length, planted in a trench around four sides of a square of very small proportions, and secured at the top by string-pieces stretched from one angle to another, in which half-notches hack been made at proper intervals to receive the uprights. The poles were then made rigid by strips nailed on half-way to the ground, giving the sides of the structure firmness, but the interstices were large and frequent; ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 1 • Philip H. Sheridan

... hand into the space left by the stout Ussher, and fingered the hack of the shelf. "Pull," ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne

... hack away with our knives at the lanyards, and presently, after what appeared to have been a terribly protracted interval, but which was probably not more than a couple of minutes, the last lanyard parted with a twang, and the next instant, with a crash heard even through the terrific hubbub of ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood

... I hurried across a bend, so as to stand by the road-side as the carriage passed. I was in uniform, with a sword on, and was recognized by Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward, who rode side by side in an open hack. I inquired if they were going to my camps, and Mr. Lincoln said: "Yes; we heard that you had got over the big scare, and we thought we would come over and see the 'boys.'" The roads had been much changed and were rough. I asked if I might give directions to his coachman, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... continents like a statesman, and to dictate to his publishers like a despot; but perhaps he never worked again so supremely well as here, where he worked in chains. It may well be questioned whether his one hack book is ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton

... with your wonderings," said Peter and Paul both at once. "What wonder is it, pray, that a woodcutter should stand and hack ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various

... concerned with his acceptance of an invitation to dinner here with Charles Lloyd, who, at the end of the meal, walked off and left his guest to pay the bill. The other incident introduces the vicious William Kenrick, that hack-writer who slandered Goldsmith without cause on so many occasions, Shortly after the publication of one of his libels in the press, Kenrick was met by Goldsmith accidentally in the Chapter and made to admit that he had lied. But ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley

... doubtfully at the tough-looking citizen who reached for his suit case, and without replying stepped into the questionable looking hack standing nearby. The driver threw the suitcase into the vehicle after his passenger and climbing to his seat, ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright

... contradiction which also characterizes the art and science of that time, the contradiction between academic conformity to rules and the most arbitrary scroll work, the contradiction between the Pigtail and the Rococo. An old hack-blade of a German prince of the Empire, finding at a state dinner that a foreign prince had loaded too much meat upon his plate, without more ado took away half of it, and this incident admirably denotes the struggle of the age between arbitrariness and etiquette. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various

... literary aspirations. She had given the people of her best, and the people rejected it. Now she gave them of her most mediocre; the nearest to their own level of thought and feeling to which her hand could reduce itself. And the people accepted it. The rest of her life was hack-work; by that, she could at least earn a living for Dolores. Her "Antigone, for the Use of Ladies' Schools" still holds its own at ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen

... is so perfectly honest, open, home-bred English, that we claim him with pride—as belonging exclusively to England. His originality is of English growth; his satire broad, bold, fair-play English. He was no screened assassin of character, either with pen or pencil; no journalist's hack to stab in secret—concealing his name, or assuming a forged one; no masked caricaturist, responsible to none. His philosophy was of the straightforward, clear-sighted English school; his theories—stern, simple, and unadorned—thoroughly English; his determination—proved in his love as well as ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... of the way. The stroke which had prostrated her, at the outset, did not seem to be one from which she could very readily recover. The only thing which she did was to totter to the room early in the morning, so as to find out how the Earl was, and then to totter hack again until the next morning. Mrs. Hart thus was incapable; and Zillah was not very much better. Since her conversation with Hilda there were thoughts in her mind so new, so different from any which she had ever had before, ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille

... multitudinous groups, drifted towards the fair green. The spruce, well-mounted horse-jockey, with bottle-green coat closely buttoned, tight buckskin inexpressibles, long-lashed hunting-whip, and top-boots; the drover on his plump hack, pacing slowly after his fat beeves; the gentleman farmer, trundling along in his gig, or trotting smartly on a bit of half-blood. Here go a family group, the children with new hats and ruffles, grandfather a little behind, with the hand of an own pet boy or a girl in ...
— Lha Dhu; Or, The Dark Day - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... Miss Emily as she got out of the hack that day, a cool little figure clad in a thin black silk dress, with the sheerest possible white collars and cuffs. Her small bonnet with its crepe veil was faced with white, and her carefully crimped gray hair showed a wavy border beneath it. Mr. Staley, the station hackman, ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... to mind a friend of his, a lawyer in the town (I must not tell his name), and inquired of him. They said he was grown suddenly rich, and had a fine new house upon Waikiki shore; and this put a thought in Keawe's head, and he called a hack and drove to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... so excited about, Tom?" asked his friend, as the Hawk alighted near the shed hack of the young inventor's home. "Bless my scarf pin! but any one would think you'd just discovered the true method of ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton

... ordered Bob briefly, in reply to his queries, and led the old quartermaster hack to the ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney

... strict eye to them, and will add but one word—BEWARE OF A SURPRISE. I repeat it, BEWARE OF A SURPRISE—you know how the Indians fight us. He went off with that as my last solemn warning thrown into his ears. And yet!! to suffer that army to be cut to pieces, hack'd, butchered, tomahawk'd, by a surprise—the very thing I guarded him against!! O God, O God, he's worse than a murderer! how can he answer it to his country;—the blood of the slain is upon him—the curse of widows and orphans—the ...
— Washington in Domestic Life • Richard Rush

... to death, because it is his destiny. If he engages in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering discourtesy of better, perhaps, but less educated minds; who, like blunt weapons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who mistake the point in argument, waste their strength on trifles, misconceive their adversary, and leave the question more involved than they find it. He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he is too clear-headed to be unjust; he is as simple ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... fir-tree, green old fir-tree! I with thee would ne'er my lot change. Firmly rooted must thou stand there, And take everything that happens; Never canst thou quit thy station. And if ever Fate ordaineth. Thou to far-off lands shalt wander, Men have first to come with axes; With hard strokes they hack and cut thee, Deep into thy flesh, till falling; And then strip unmercifully All thy skin from off thy body; Throw thee next into the Rhine, and Make thee swim as far as Holland. And if e'er they pay the honour On a frigate to erect thee As ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel

... at eleven-fifteen o'clock. Charles hustled Devere up to the opera-house in a hack. The comedian went before the curtain and entertained the audience until midnight. When the company arrived not twenty people had left. The final curtain dropped at two-thirty o'clock before a delighted but weary crowd. The telegrams from the ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman

... was earning a scanty living by this hack-work, Meissonier found time to paint two pictures which he sent to the Salon of 1836. One of these attracted the attention of a clever artist, Tony Johannot, who introduced him to Leon Cogniet, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various

... of the forward coaches, and a late guest of the Grand Palace Hotel in the next car behind. Barnes took the time to assure himself of these facts, and smiled faintly as he drove away from the railway station after the departure of the train. Miss Cameron, her veil lowered, sat beside him in the "hack." ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon

... loud, glad snort of recognition, wheels herself around and then falls in alongside the front hack and gets ready to accompany us, all the time poking her snout over at me and uttering plaintive remarks in East Indian to me. Gents,' he says, 'you can see for yourselves, a thing like that, occurring right at the ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb

... do." It seems a currish fate that puts such men into the grasp of paltry and sordid cares like these! But there is something deeper to be felt than dissatisfaction at the author-publisher's feeble though annoying scheme of harnessing in this rare poet to be his unpaid yet paying hack. This deeper something is the pathos of such possibilities, and the spectacle of so renowned and strong-winged a genius consenting thus to take his share of worldly struggle; perfectly conscious that it is wholly beneath his plane, but accepting it as a proper part of the mortal ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... set off to the forest and began to hack and to hew with such a will that he soon had quite a large bundle, and with every faggot he cut he seemed to smell the savory Khichri and think of the feast that ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten

... sky taxis. And now he wanted a taxi. He was approaching a place where there was a hack stand. Just ahead, at the midway point, where the upward curve of the sidewalk leveled off and began to curve down, a narrow catwalk jutted into space with a small landing platform at its end. "TAXI" a luminescent ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye

... treasure of a stonecutter's cottage. This is the form of the curse: 'I pronounce ugliness upon you. That bloom or leaf may never grow on you, but the flame of the mountain fires and of bonfires be upon you. That you may get your punishment from Oscar's flail, to hack and to bruise you with the big sledge ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others

... experience. In passing, it may be added that an experienced "angel" would not accept Fogg for a Claude at any price. Handy had enough of both of them, with something to spare. In desperation he even expressed regret he did not have a hack at Armand himself and infuse some life into it. If he had there would have been fun, for Handy's lovers were ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville

... of Marse Frank Cayler. He's an ole time hack driver. I was his houseboy. I stay dere twel de year 1870, den I goes to Baltimore and jines de United States Army. We's sent to Texas 'count of de Indians bein' so bad. Dey put us on a boat at Baltimore and ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration

... spent the hunting season at Audley Court; not that he was distinguished as a Nimrod, for he would quietly trot to covert upon a mild-tempered, stout-limbed bay hack, and keep at a very respectful distance from the hard riders; his horse knowing quite as well as he did, that nothing was further from his thoughts than any desire to be ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon

... as he loved good wine, he was never so happy as when (in imagination) he was tying the legs of a Regicide under the belly of an ass. And when in the manner of a bookseller's hack he compiled a Comical and Tragical History of the Lives and Adventures of the most noted Bayliffs, adoration of the Royalists persuaded him to miss his chance. So brave a spirit as himself should not have looked complacently ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley

... a new thought, and make it at once familiar. It has the sturdy task of a pioneer, to hack away at the tall oaks and cut the rough granite, leaving future ages to declare what it has done. We made our first discovery of the adaptation of metaphysics to the treatment of disease in the winter of 1866; since then we have tested ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... carve out a little fire-fodder." He glanced up at Alice. "An' if cookin' of any kind has be'n inclooded in your repretwa of accomplishments, you might sizzle up a hunk of that sow-belly, an' keep yer eye on this here pot. An' if Winthrup should happen to recover from his locomotive attacksyou an' hack off a limb or two, you can get a little bigger blaze a-goin' an', just before that water starts to burn, slop in a fistful of java. You'll find some dough-gods an' salve in one of them canvas bags, an' when you're all set, holler. I'll throw the kaks on these cayuses, an' ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx

... the shooting, lost consciousness. He lay upon the floor of Hooven's house, bare to the waist, bandages of adhesive tape reeved about his abdomen and shoulder. His eyes were half-closed. Presley, who looked after him, pending the arrival of a hack from Bonneville that was to take him home, knew that he ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... Hack can scatter into flight Shakespere and Dante in a single Night! The Penny-a-liner is Abroad, and strikes Our ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess

... week at the farm, I found a sparrow's nest in a small bunch of hard-hack, a few rods from the cow-pasture bars, with four eggs, resembling, only a little larger than, speckled garden beans; and I visited it every morning, till the sprawling, skinny little chicks were hatched. But on the third morning the nest was empty; something had taken them. Addison ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... Miles, who knew him well) to be largely responsible for those wars. Yet who was this Lebrun? Before the Revolution he had to leave France for his advanced opinions, and took refuge at Liege, where Miles found him toiling for a scanty pittance at journalistic hack-work. Suffering much at the hands of the Austrians in 1790, he fled back to Paris, joined the Girondins, wrote for them, made himself useful to Dumouriez during his tenure of the Foreign Office, and, not long after his resignation, stepped into his shoes and ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... was going. She had begun to drink, indeed, she says she was partially intoxicated at that moment with drink that had been furnished her by the woman and a male companion. At least, she agreed to go, and at the depot in Chicago was met by a closed hack in which she was taken at once to one of the dives of Chicago's greatest vice preserve where the police, to whom she glibly told the story that she had been instructed to tell, speedily enrolled her as a ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various

... Not indeed that there is, as has sometimes been urged, any inherent strife between the creative and the critical spirit. A great poet, we can learn from Goethe and Coleridge, may also be a great critic. More than that: without some touch of poetry in himself, no man can hope to do more than hack-work as a critic of others. Yet it may safely be said that, if no critical tradition exists in a nation, it is not an age of passionate creation, such as was that of Marlowe and Shakespeare, that ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... in ancient histories more extreme than what we have proof of every day, but I cannot, any the more, get used to it. I could hardly persuade myself, before I saw it with my eyes, that there could be found souls so cruel and fell, who, for the sole pleasure of murder, would commit it; would hack and lop off the limbs of others; sharpen their wits to invent unusual torments and new kinds of death, without hatred, without profit, and for no other end but only to enjoy the pleasant spectacle of the gestures and motions, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... "L' me hack 'is damned head," Oncle Jazon pleaded. "I jes' hankers to chop a hole inter it. An' besides I want 'is scelp to hang up wi' mine an' that'n o' the Injun what scelped me. He kicked me in the ribs, the ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson



Words linked to "Hack" :   rugby, cut up, rugby football, plug, author, politico, slogger, plodder, hacker, saddle horse, hack-driver, hack saw, make out, motorcar, axe, ax, foul, political hack, gypsy cab, drudge, auto, unskilled person, taxicab, hack writer, machine politician, deal, fleet, grapple, automobile, ward-heeler, whoop, Equus caballus, cope, nag, rugger, literary hack, cough, hoops, cab, redact, hack driver, minicab, hack on, make do, political leader, manage, basketball, basketball game, horse, chop, get by, taxi, programme, machine, Grub Street, writer, jade, contend, riding horse, politician, pol, edit, mount



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