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Rotten   Listen
adjective
Rotten  adj.  Having rotted; putrid; decayed; as, a rotten apple; rotten meat. Hence:
(a)
Offensive to the smell; fetid; disgusting. "You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate As reek of the rotten fens."
(b)
Not firm or trusty; unsound; defective; treacherous; unsafe; as, a rotten plank, bone, stone. "The deepness of the rotten way."
Rotten borough. See under Borough.
Rotten stone (Min.), a soft stone, called also Tripoli (from the country from which it was formerly brought), used in all sorts of finer grinding and polishing in the arts, and for cleaning metallic substances. The name is also given to other friable siliceous stones applied to like uses.
Synonyms: Putrefied; decayed; carious; defective; unsound; corrupt; deceitful; treacherous.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Rotten" Quotes from Famous Books



... went over to the Continental House to see how Mr. Crane, the worthy secretary, looked with a rotten apple bandaged over each eye. Terrence was arrested for assault and battery, plead guilty, and the patriotic Democrats took up a collection and ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,

... smashing windows, Scattering through the air some thatchings, Tearing some old woman's clothing Till she signs the cross in praying! But you fir-trees know me better, Me, the fair Spring's thorough cleaner, Who what's mouldy sweeps afar off— Who what's rotten blows to pieces— Who the earth's domain well cleanses, That his radiant Lord and Master Worthily may make his entrance. And you, noble forest comrades, Who so oft, with bronze-like foreheads, Bravely ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel

... up of two things; hunting for big white grubs in the rotten barrels of dead trees, and looking at the yellow pebbles in the stream. This last was a habit that the wood-hen had taught him. She was the most inquisitive creature in the forest, and knew all that was going on beyond the great river, into which the creek fell, and as far away as the Inaccessible ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace

... that France should be divided among the other powers as Poland was: but Donne has given me pause: he says that France is the great counteracting democratic principle to Russia. This may be: though I think Russia is too unwieldly and rotten-ripe ever to make a huge progress in conquest. What is to be thought of a nation where the upper classes speak the language of another country, and have varnished over their honest barbarism with the poorest French profligacy and intrigue? Russia ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald

... great difficulty at first in satisfying the cravings of his appetite. He searches for the cranberries in the open bogs, and is driven even to eat the rank marshy grass. As the snow disappears, he seeks for wood-lice and other creatures in rotten trunks. Hungry as he is, he labours very patiently for his food. The prehensile form of his lips enables him to pick up with wonderful dexterity even the smallest insect or berry. As the ice breaks up in the lakes, he proceeds ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... sure that she was really unconscious, and unable to see or hear anything, so that it would be quite safe to tell her any story he pleased next day, he returned to his former position, and applying his shoulder to the partition, easily succeeded in freeing the ends of the rotten laths from the nails which held there, and, pushing them before him, made an aperture large enough to allow of his passing through into the next apartment. He applied himself to this task with such vigour, and became so absorbed in its accomplishment, that he entirely forgot the bag of twelve hundred ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... will help you, what do you expect me to do? Can I do anything which has not been done already? If so, I will do it. But I will not harness myself to a rotten cart, as the proverb says. It is quite useless to expect ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford

... than when I dream that I am in an old fort and chased by three rats, or that a snake is on my bed and my father kills it with a pitchfork, or strangest of all, that I throw an egg at the plug of a sap bucket which it hits and then flies to the left; it is rotten. Again, a very vague dream, I, see two eggs and then am climbing inside a kind of tower. A dream which immediately preceded the menstrual period, is as follows:—I pass a narrow, dark canal which seems to be under cover. On the ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... very little with us; the schooner was taken in tow. In the afternoon we sunk the Ayesha and we were all very sad. The good old Ayesha had served us faithfully for six weeks. The log showed that we had made 1,709 sea miles under sail since leaving Keeling. She wasn't at all rotten and unseaworthy, as they had told me, but nice and white and dry inside. I had grown fond of the ship, on which I could practice my old sailing manoeuvres. The only trouble was that the sails would go to pieces every now and then because they ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... man you want to camp out with those kids and lick 'em into shape. He'll be willing to come for his board and forty dollars a month, because he's engaged to a girl in Detroit and wants to save. I told him the food was rotten, but if he kicked enough, you'd probably get a ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster

... said Long Jim. "Caught my blasted foot in a lashin'—rotten sailcloth, that, Bucky. Make a stand of it 'ere as they come on an' we'll git ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore

... welsher; I was something that could feel the meaning of things and the reason for them, just like you can feel 'eat and cold. Could feel and know things such as nobody can't feel or know till 'e's done with this rotten bustle of livin' and doin' things. That's what I know, Miss; that's what I found out when I died ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon

... literature of the day, of eggs preserved in salt, for use on shipboard. "Haberdyne" (or dried salt cod) seems to have been a favorite and staple article of diet aboard ship. Captain Beecher minutes "600 haberdyne for the ship ARBELLA." Wood says: "Their fish was rotten." Smoked "red-herring" were familiar food to all the MAY-FLOWER company. No house or ship of England or Holland in that day but made great dependence upon them. Bacon was, of course, a main staple at sea. In its half-cooked state as it came from the smoke-house it was much relished ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames

... boy wanted to try it at once. But the boat proved to be too rotten for use. It would need to be repaired and tarred, and a mast and sails would have ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... zig-zags. Luckily, it was late at night, else we might have had the village about our ears, and, instead of flakes of snow and screeching weathercocks, we might have had a shower of dead cats and rotten eggs. Probably a rescue might have been attempted; at all events, we might have calculated on a volley of brickbats on our way to the boats. There would have been no end of commotion, uproar, confusion, and hubbub, possibly smashed ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien

... you got instruments, maybe we can track 'em. It wasn't a quarter of a mile from here, over toward the river. Plenty of rotten dumps down there." ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings

... reached the walnut-tree he hid behind its trunk and remained for a few moments watching his daughter's movements, hesitating, perhaps, between the course to which the obstinacy of his character impelled him and his natural desire to embrace his child. Sometimes he sat down on the rotten old bench where Charles and Eugenie had vowed eternal love; and then she, too, looked at her father secretly in the mirror before which she stood. If he rose and continued his walk, she sat down obligingly at the window and looked ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac

... among themselves, living in peace and luxury, these AEtolian curs were perpetually snarling, growling, barking and tearing at each other's throats: Nay, sometimes those of the best quality among them, were seen to quarrel with as much rancour for a rotten gut, as if it had been a fat haunch of venison. But what need we wonder at this in dogs, when the same is ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift

... real world? I worried over that as I was leaving the park. I seemed to be getting nearer to reality near Rotten Row. A reassuring policeman was in sight. Motor-cars that were humiliating with their enamel and crystal were threading about. The fashionable ladies and their consorts seemed to be in no doubt about the world they were in. I began to ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson

... there, remembering that in all probability the son of Reggie would be the grandson of William and Lydia Day—felon, and bankrupt grocer. The thought choked her. Had Francis remembered it? "Whoever marries Reggie will marry a rotten reed," she said impetuously. "I pity the girl who does ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann

... look down on your luck when I saw you in the quad. I can't think why anybody should take these wretched games so seriously; it seems to me a perfectly rotten thing to do." ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley

... grieved or angry when it was declared, after a thorough survey by Captain Hazard, Coffin, and himself, to be absolutely necessary to procure a new foremast and bowsprit for the ship before she sailed—the first being rotten, and the other badly sprung. As Captain Hazard placed the most implicit confidence in Morton's capacity to purchase and superintend the making of the requisite spars, the latter, to his great joy, was requested to take charge of the shore department. By this ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames

... Rather be unfrocked, driven out of the city, reviled, and spit upon, than admit such a shame as that other: to prove himself a vapourer before his slaves, to be pricked like a bulging bladder, slit open like a rotten bag—God of the love of women, never, never in life! The other course, then? He pictured himself, the tall and comely youth, standing up alone before the grim assembly of elders, flinty old men who knew nothing of my Lord Amor, how he rides afield in a rose-coloured ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... Toupillier; "all rotten! That last you brought me, more than six weeks ago, it is there in the cupboard; you can ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac

... being apparently unconscious of the fact that payment was necessary, and the three proceeded on board. The brig turned out to be about as bad a specimen of her class as could well be met with—old, rotten, leaky, and dirty beyond all power of description. Nevertheless her skipper waxed so astonishingly eloquent when he began to speak her praises, that the idea never seemed to occur to either Bill or Bob that to venture to sea in her would be simply tempting Providence, and it was consequently ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood

... miserable ferry-boat, over the broad mouth of the Pulundaga, where a pleasant road through a forest led us, in fifteen minutes, over the mountain-spur, Malanguit, which again projected itself right across our path into the sea, to the mouth of the Paracale. The long bridge here was so rotten that we were obliged to lead the horses over at wide intervals apart; and on the further side lies the place called Paracale, from which my companions continued their ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.

... makes a mournful rattle now and then in hopping on his perch, two inches high, or dropping from it; but neither sings nor chirps. There is a strange unwholesome smell upon the room, like mildewed corduroys, sweet apples wanting air, and rotten books. There could not well be more ink splashed about it, if it had been roofless from its first construction, and the skies had rained, snowed, hailed, and blown ink through the varying ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... with him, it might have been. But you drew him on, made him care for you in spite of himself. And then, when he was yours, body and soul, you turned him down! Turned him down—pretended you were surprised—you'd never meant anything! All the old rotten excuses a woman offers when she has finished playing with a man and got bored with him. . . . I've no place for your kind of woman. I tell you"—his tone deepening in intensity—"the wife of any common labourer, who cooks and washes ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler

... and much bodily labour, occasioned by the prodigious variety and numbers of climbers, briars, shrubs, and ferns, interwoven through the forests, and almost totally precluding access to the interior of the country. From the appearance of these impediments, and the quantity of rotten trees which had been either felled by the winds, or brought low from age, it is conjectured, and plausibly enough, that the forests in the southern parts of New Zealand had escaped the hand of human industry since the origin of their existence. But nature, we may ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr

... rotten stick we sprang the animal's tail again and again, till its supply of quills began to run low, and the creature grew uneasy. "What does this mean?" he seemed to say, his excitement rising. His shield upon his back, too, we trifled with, and when we finally drew ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs

... despatch-runner that she's stayin' in a hotel of sorts at Tweipans, where Brounckers has had his headquarters since he shifted Chief Laager from Geitfontein. And for any further information we may knock our rotten heads against a brick wall and twiddle our thumbs. Never you marry, Toby, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... to trying to serve God and leave off my evil courses. Bad words came to my mouth as natural as the very air that I breathed. What did I do to cure myself of that evil? Why, I resolved again and again, and found that my resolutions were always snapping like a rotten cable in a storm; and I was driven from my anchorage so often, that I almost began to despair. Then I prayed hard to be helped; and I said to myself, 'God helps those who help themselves, and maybe if I determine to do something that I should ...
— False Friends, and The Sailor's Resolve • Unknown

... seem to have crept over and through it, but of a delusive and unnatural kind. The corrosive properties of the acid still remain and gradually disintegrate the fibres until the whole mass becomes rotten. It may be fairly termed premature old age, as the lowering or toning down of the colour in wood and other materials seems to be caused by similar, if not identical, constituents of the ordinary atmosphere, ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick

... in on him now and simulating a terrific rage. Just imagine you're on the bridge of a steamer making up to a dock against a strong flood tide, with stupid mates fore and aft, and rotten lines that won't hold when you get them over the dolphins, and the tide has grabbed you and slammed you into the dock and done five hundred dollars' worth of damage—just feel ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne

... the month," said Billy that evening, looking up from Carlyle's "Revolution," to where Susan and Mary Lou were busy with last stitches, at the other side of the dining-room table. "You can't live with the rotten rich ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris

... "I need a little whiskey to keep me going. Tell her, won't you?—to let me have a little drink. My regular allowance was a pint a day, and I haven't had a drop for four weeks. Your Chicago whiskey is rotten bad, though, I tell you. I just stepped into a place to get a drink with Joe Campbell—his father owns a big pulp mill in Michigan—well—we had one or two drinks, and the first thing I knew there was shooting all over the place, and some one grabbed me, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... favourable circumstances, in order that the civilized world may take note thereof, and guide itself accordingly. It is, we know, a favourite theme with their demagogues, that the glory and virtue and happiness of Yankee-doodle-doo have inspired the powers of the rotten Old World with the deepest jealousy and hatred, and that every crown in Europe pales before the lustre of that unparalleled confederacy. Nothing can be wider of the truth, pleasing as the illusion ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various

... a scientific magazine, I'll certainly beg his most humble pardon on bended knee. He also crabbed about your artists. If he can do better, I advise you to hire him. He also says that the paper is rotten, and that after a few handlings goes to pieces. I still have all my magazines, and have lent them several times, and the paper is still there. On his fifth statement I agree with him: you should have an editorial. ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... this one was brown and peeled, the walls were covered with old newspapers, with here and there a scrap of brown wrapping-paper, making unsightly and hideous patterns; the whole was splashed with dirt and mildew; the floor was rotten at places, and black, and quite slippery with grease and dirt; the window had four panes, two of ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... the rotten surface of the national life thus broke under the Prophet he fell upon the deeper levels of the individual heart, and not only found the native sinfulness of this to be the explanation of the public and social corruption but discovered also soil for the seed-bed of new truths ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... the moon came walking red on the trail of the day, far down by Two Rivers I heard some of my friends trumpeting; therefore I pulled down young trees along the sides of the ravine, with great lumps of earth, and battered the rotten cliffs until they crumbled in a heap by ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al

... have hot work of it presently, Blagrove. The walls are absolutely rotten, and it would be absurd to call them fortifications; and if the French open fire at close quarters, they will make a breach in no time. If Phelypeaux's plans had been carried out, the place would have been in a position to make a serious defence; but I hear that he and Captain Miller ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty

... the madman spoke of? Fourth dimensionals are sometimes good. You should have reprints by Burroughs, Cummings and Merritt. I am eagerly waiting for the next issue. Do not enlarge the magazine because I cannot afford it. Don't publish stories like "From an Amber Block." They're rotten. Publish more future and interplanetary stories.—Joseph Edelman, 721 De ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... Sakalar did assiduously, and when he had once started under the guidance of the twinkling lights of the heavens, rarely was he many yards out at the next halt. He always chose the side of a hillock to camp, where there was a tree or two, and half-rotten trunks with bushes to ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various

... At length we forced an entrance. I thought I had never seen a more dreary interior. My father's old chaise was yet standing there, with both wheels off. The mouldy harness was dropping to pieces on the walls. The beams were festooned with cobwebs. The very ladder leading to the loft above was so rotten that I scarcely dared trust to it for ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards

... for a few moments, but stood watching, as I saw Morgan raise up the pole, and bring it down bang across the alligator's back, but without doing it the slightest injury, for the end struck a half-rotten log, and the pole snapped off a ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn

... crust and two tins of pineapple. The place had been already searched and emptied. In the bar I afterwards found some biscuits and sandwiches that had been overlooked. The latter I could not eat, they were too rotten, but the former not only stayed my hunger, but filled my pockets. I lit no lamps, fearing some Martian might come beating that part of London for food in the night. Before I went to bed I had an interval of restlessness, and ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... told him the news, he gave me a good meal, commended my dexterity, and caressed me highly. We afterwards went together to the forest, where we dug a hole for the elephant; my patron intending to return when it was rotten, and to take the teeth, etc., to ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon

... awaiting the shake of one fierce gust of wind to disappear in a cloud of mouldy dust. He left his horse with the reins hanging over its head behind the house and entered by the back door. One step past the threshold brought him misadventure, for his foot drove straight through the rotten flooring and his leg disappeared up to ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand

... said. "I've no wish to embarrass you nor to drag my husband into this rotten business. It seems he's as modern as the ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach

... made a marked difference on that point among ourselves, and doubtless it may hereafter act upon the United States; but the man who does not admit hospitality to be a most distinctive feature of the Republic, at the present time, must indeed be rotten in the brain ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... life by His commands Was ordered to a body's hands; But see! this corpus juris stands By a' forgotten; An' God's religion in a' lands Is deid an' rotten. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... There's nane may lean on a rotten staff, But him that risks to get a fa'; There's nane may in a traitor trust, And traitors black ...
— Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Third Series • Various

... seen the hapless Mary Ellen then, he would have believed her quite battered indeed. For another rotten mast ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope

... those leading up to Smith's final catastrophe was a quarrel, some time later, between the prophet and Francis M. Higbee. This resulted in a suit for libel against Smith, tried in May, 1844, in which much testimony disclosing the rotten condition of affairs in Nauvoo was given, and in the arrest of Smith in a suit for $5000 damages. The hearing, on a writ of habeas corpus, in Smith's behalf, is reported in Times and Seasons, Vol. V, No. 10. The court (Smith's Municipal Court) ordered Smith discharged, and pronounced ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... or put a finger in their purses. All this and much more is in him; that abhorring degrees and universities as reliques of superstition, hath leapt from a shop-board or a cloak-bag to a desk or pulpit; and that, like a sea-god in a pageant, hath the rotten laths of his culpable life and palpable ignorance covered over with the painted-cloth of a pure gown and a night-cap, and with a false trumpet of feigned zeal draweth after him some poor nymphs and madmen that delight more to resort to dark caves and secret places than ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... his way carefully over the half-rotten timbers till he had gained the middle of the bridge, then stopped, looked back at his companions and pulling off his cap, waved it around his head, "Hurrah! here I am: who's afraid? ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley

... that of their party, be no discouragement for the authors to proceed; but let them remember it is with wits as with razors, which are never so apt to cut those they are employed on as when they have lost their edge. Besides, those whose teeth are too rotten to bite are best of all others qualified to revenge that defect with ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift

... made the central citadel. Nearly all the stone has long ago been carried off to build Salisbury, and weeds and brushwood have overrun the remarkable fortress that has come down to us from such venerable antiquity. Under the English "rotten-borough" system Old Sarum enjoyed the privilege of sending two members to Parliament for three centuries after it ceased to be inhabited. The old tree under which the election was held still exists, and the elder Pitt, who lived near by, was first sent ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook

... I took the convict to the nearest public-house, let him discover that the new restrictions were in force, and brought the story to a novel conclusion by making him say with oaths to the recruiting officer that he would be jiggered if ever he formed fours for such a rotten ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various

... the Texan. "An' likewise, maintainin' weak reservoirs that lets go an' drowns other folks' cattle is a public nuisance, an' a jury's liable to figger up them damages kind of high—'specially again' you, Johnson, bein' ornery an' rotten-hearted, an' tight-fisted, that way, folks ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx

... whirling above the barn. Gleams kindled, faint as yet and hesitating. And, suddenly, as though set free, the flames shot up in angry spirals. The wind at once beat them down again. The roof of the house took fire. And, in a few minutes, it was a violent flare, accompanied by the quick blaze of the rotten beams, the dry thatch, the trusses of hay and straw heaped up by the hundred in the barn and in ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc

... I could do to keep from helping with the work 'cause some of your cooking was rotten and you did not wash the dishes clean but I knew if I worked you would not think me a real lord. I hope some day I may be able to repay you ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason

... It was rotten, yet it had corners as hard and sharp as pikes. It was rough, yet as slippery as ice. If there was a foot of level surface, that space would be one to break through under a horse's hoofs. It was seamed, lined, cracked, ridged, knotted iron. This lava bed resembled ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey

... the legislature, and a complete anarchy began to prevail. The public mind was inflamed by effigies, paintings, and incendiary articles in the newspapers. The parliament was represented as corrupt, the ministry as venal, the king as a tyrant, and England itself as a rotten, old, aristocratic structure, crumbling to pieces. The tide was so overwhelming in favor of resistance, that even moderate men were borne along in the current; and those who kept aloof from the excitement were stigmatized as timid ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... was not indeed to be anticipated nor prepared for; but what was the history of the ocean navy, on whose hasty creation such harmful boasts and confidence were and are based? They served their turn, for that enemy had no seamen, no navy, and few mechanics; but they were then swept from the list, rotten and broken down before their time. At this day nearly every ship that can carry the United States flag was built before the ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan

... motioned for him to jump; my conscience is clear on that point. The 44 was stumbling along, trying like a drunken man to hang to the rotten track. ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various

... perfection in your mistress, the idea that has been shattered. But when you understand that the first idea itself was human, small and restricted, you will see that it is little more than a round in the rotten ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset

... Upon Glacier Depot. Temp. -2 deg.. We climbed the ice slope this morning and found a very bad surface on top, as far as crevasses were concerned. We all had falls into them, Atkinson and Teddy Evans going down the length of their harness. Evans had rather a shake up. The rotten ice surface continued for a long way, though I crossed to and fro towards the land, trying ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott

... narrow for the passage of any larger vehicle, and stopped at a wall and a gate that were new objects to me. Opening the gate with her key, and leading the pony, Ariel introduced me to the back garden and yard of Miserrimus Dexter's rotten and rambling old house. The pony walked off independently to his stable, with the chaise behind him. My silent companion led me through a bleak and barren kitchen, and along a stone passage. Opening a door at the end, she admitted me to the ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins

... by a certain late Sunday evening train, Mr. Thomas Idle and Mr. Francis Goodchild, yielded up their tickets at a little rotten platform (converted into artificial touchwood by smoke and ashes), deep in the manufacturing bosom of Yorkshire. A mysterious bosom it appeared, upon a damp, dark, Sunday night, dashed through in the train to the music ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens

... spurred up his palfrey to kiss his young lady's hand, and to take his leave, it seemed to the bystanders as if Raoul so managed his bridle and spur, that Mahound jerked out his hoofs at the same moment, one of which coming in contact with the steward's thigh, would have splintered it like a rotten reed, had the parties been a couple of inches nearer to each other. As it was, the steward sustained considerable damage; and they that observed the grin upon Raoul's vinegar countenance entertained little doubt, that Mahound's heels then and there avenged certain nods, and winks, and wreathed ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... scoundrel. He was no more profligate, either in his literary or his private morals, than many a man who earns his hundreds, sometimes his thousands, a year, by prophesying smooth things to Mammon, crying in daily leaders "Peace! peace!" when there is no peace, and daubing the rotten walls of careless luxury and self-satisfied covetousness with the untempered mortar of party statistics and garbled foreign news—till "the storm shall fall, and the breaking thereof cometh suddenly in an instant." Let ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... sailor with a sigh, "you've good reason to yowl, for the half of a rotten fish ain't enough for a dog o' your appetite. Come, let's see if we can't find ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne

... ice had pushed or folded down, and not up, and the water had frozen over, making a streak of triple-thick ice, and on this streak he crossed the Hudson, the ice so far gone from the sun, so honeycombed and rotten, that he could stick his cane through on either side of his crack! Another time he was crossing in early April with his dog, and when in the middle of the river, which is a full half mile wide ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs

... leave his granny and his dominie.—Ay, and the scathed vault!" he said; "I would willingly have seen what havoc the explosion of so much gunpowder has made among Doctor Demetrius Doboobie's retorts and phials. I warrant me, my fame haunts the Vale of the Whitehorse long after my body is rotten; and that many a lout ties up his horse, lays down his silver groat, and pipes like a sailor whistling in a calm for Wayland Smith to come and shoe his tit for him. But the horse will catch the founders ere ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott

... he grumbled. "What does this fellow 'M' expect? The first one reached us after we'd been operating two months, the second a month later, and the third a month after that. What does he think this land is like? Three thousand miles! But then, I suppose the rotten Russians did it. Made ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell

... moment there came a violent assault on the door and the crazy lock parted from its rotten fastenings as a man attired in a police officer's uniform burst into the place. Behind him came two wide-eyed frightened girls. The leaping flames ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham

... world alive? No, thank you!" And the look of dark scorn on Seaton's face was astonishing in its almost satanic expression—"That is precisely what I wish to avoid! The world is over-ripe and over-rotten,—and it is over-crowded with a festering humanity that is INhuman, and worse than bestial in its furious grappling for self and greed. One remedy for the evil would be that no children should be born in it for the next thirty or forty ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli

... tone wounded Holroyd, who had hoped for some warmer response; and they walked on in silence until they turned into Hyde Park and crossed to Rotten Row, when Mark said, 'By the way, Vincent, wasn't there something you wanted to speak to ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey

... who had not seen what was happening, had crashed into us from behind. We lay all sprawled in a heap while the others hugged the banks, afraid to add their weight to the creaking ice, and Ongyatasse was beating about in the rotten sludge, trying to find a place firm ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al

... ne Shih, does away with rotten old customs. Wang Hsi-feng imitates in jest (the dutiful son), by getting herself up in ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... his half-blind eyes, but under his feet he felt a sudden giving way, and the fire-eaten tangle of earth and roots broke off like a rotten ledge, and with it both he and Black Roger went crashing into the depths below, smothered in an avalanche of ash and sizzling earth. At the bottom David lay for a moment, partly stunned. Then his fingers clutched a bit of living fire, and with a savage cry he staggered to his feet and looked to ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood

... would not have it supposed that the Tory laity were slack or backward in political activity. To verbal abuse one soon became case-hardened; but one had also to encounter physical violence. In those days, stones and cabbage-stalks and rotten eggs still played a considerable part in electioneering. Squires hid their gamekeepers in dark coppices with instructions to pelt one as one drove past after dark. The linch-pin was taken out of one's carriage while one was busy at a meeting; ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell

... And in all ages bore his name. Learned he was in med'c'nal lore; For by his side a pouch he wore, Replete with strange Hermetic powder, 225 That wounds nine miles point-blank wou'd solder; By skilful chemist, with great cost, Extracted from a rotten post; But of a heav'nlier influence Than that which mountebanks dispense; 230 Tho' by Promethean fire made, As they do quack that drive that trade. For as when slovens do amiss At others doors, by stool or piss, The learned write, a red-hot spit ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... William; "one gentleman remarked that he had been to the theatre all his life, but that your acting to-night was the most rotten thing he had ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew

... the greatest of pities that so noble and beautiful a civilization should have become so hollow and rotten at ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly

... natives however, prefer all food in a high stage of decomposition and it is some time before the very smell of it ceases to make one feel ill. To see them eating kwanga fish or the flesh of elephants, monkeys, antelopes or other animals generally both rotten and raw is most disgusting and brings home the fact sharply that man here is of a very ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman

... of the Cuckoo; "inside the tree. The beastly old thing's rotten, and I've tumbled to the ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil

... that interval the business of a servant of the Company was simply to wring out of the natives a hundred or two hundred thousand pounds as speedily as possible, that he might return home before his constitution had suffered from the heat, to marry a peer's daughter, to buy rotten boroughs in Cornwall, and to give balls in St. James's Square. Of the conduct of Hastings at this time little is known; but the little that is known, and the circumstance that little is known, must be considered as honorable ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... that quiet and beautiful witness of things so sacred and some so profane, was torn away. The whole of the choir was to be rearranged. But when the piers of the central tower were exposed by the removal of the screen, it was discovered that they were in a precariously rotten condition at the core. Other indications of weakness, which had been overlooked before, were now observed. Large and deep cracks and various earlier signs of apprehended weakness both in arches and piers were remarked. That the work now begun had given impetus to the fall has been denied ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Chichester (1901) - A Short History & Description Of Its Fabric With An Account Of The - Diocese And See • Hubert C. Corlette

... rotten deal," burst out Pan. "Haven't you any sense? If you could make it, you'd be outlawed in this country. Men won't stand for such things. You may be strong in Marco but I tell you even there you can't go too far. We planned this trap. We worked like dogs. And we made the drive. You might account ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey

... children's courage or sincerity would be thought of half so much importance as their way of coming in at a door; and when the whole system of society, as respects the mode of establishing them in life, is one rotten plague of cowardice and imposture—cowardice, in not daring to let them live, or love, except as their neighbours choose; and imposture, in bringing, for the purposes of our own pride, the full glow of the world's worst vanity upon a girl's eyes, at the very period when the whole happiness of ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin

... have been dead and rotten and no thanks to you, you—!" And thereat John Gordon delivered himself of a vigorous flood of English, terse, intensive, denunciative, and composed ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London

... the landing had been such a queer one that there was no time for any of the three to do the latter. Down on the roof of the pig sty they had come, crashing through it, for the place was old and rotten. ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis

... imagined sandwiches or knitting or powder-puffs or tea; but those also are rotten hypotheses. I have too much faith in the good sense of my fellow-countrywomen to believe that they would cart a horrible thing like a cheap attache-case about simply in order to convey a sandwich or a powder-puff from one end of London to the other. So I had to fall back on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various

... judge, "that you can make out a pretty bad case against those drains; but I'm going on to Ballymoy to catch salmon if they're twice as rotten as they are." ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham

... muttered, staring at Guy Little who stared butlerishly back, "are leeches, parasites, cursed bloodsuckers and hangers-on. They think I'm goin' to take this boy in an' give him all I got; they think they see a chance to marry him into their rotten crowd an' slip one over on me this way! That simperin', gigglin' fool of a girl try an' hook my gran'son! I'll show 'em, Guy Little; I'll show the whole cussed pack of 'em! I'll exterminate 'em, root an' branch an' withered leaf! By the Lord, but ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory

... me," Karl went on wildly. "I did not know myself; I did not dream that I could be so rotten." ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien

... how the Fly holds out, So rotten 'tis, within, without; So loaded too, through thick and thin, And with such heavy creturs IN. But, Lord, 't will last our time—or if The wheels should, now and then, get stiff, Oil of Palm's the thing that, flowing, [6] Sets ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer

... form of voting, and by dealing in what he calls this 'merchantable ware' he managed by lifelong efforts to wriggle into a peerage. The Dodingtons, that is, sold because they bought. The 'venal wretches' were the lucky franchise-holders in rotten boroughs. The 'Friends of the People'[3] in 1793 made the often-repeated statement that 154 individuals returned 307 members, that is, a majority of the house. In Cornwall, again, 21 boroughs with 453 electors controlled by about 15 individuals returned ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... the barque "Tropic," loaded with guano, bound for Cork, in Ireland. This vessel was a very rotten old thing, and in getting round Cape Horn we all had a very hard time, and did not know how soon the vessel would sink with us; but we got round the Cape and into the South Atlantic, where we had better weather and proceeded pretty well till ...
— Notes by the Way in A Sailor's Life • Arthur E. Knights

... Under the foremanship of B. P. Oliver it made a thorough investigation. Francis J. Heney was employed as special prosecutor and William J. Burns as detective. Heney and Burns formed an aggressive team. The Ring proved as vulnerable as it was rotten. Over three hundred indictments were returned, involving persons in every walk of life. Ruef was sentenced to fourteen years in the penitentiary. Schmitz was freed on a technicality, after being found guilty and sentenced to five years. Most of the ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth

... the witch expect? It was nothing, after all, but a scarecrow, stuck upon two sticks. But the strong-willed old beldam scowled, and beckoned, and flung the energy of her purpose so forcibly at this poor combination of rotten wood, and musty straw, and ragged garments, that it was compelled to show itself a man, in spite of the reality of things. So it stepped into the bar of sunshine. There it stood—poor devil of a contrivance that it was!—with only the thinnest ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... stress Mayo could figure out how it had happened. The spitter must have ripped all her rotten canvas off her spars as she rolled and there had been no brace to hold her on her beam-ends when ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... regard to its actual condition, I am inclined to think they would bring back a curious and not very favorable report. It wouldn't astonish me, if they should pronounce the whole apparatus of the State rotten from top to bottom, and only kept from falling to pieces by all sorts of ingenious contrivances of an external and temporary nature,—here a wheel, or pivot, or spring to be replaced,—there a prop or buttress to be set up,—here a pipe choked up,—there a boiler ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various

... he cried. "And a rotten, cowardly frame-up I call it! We never lacked for hospitality from her people. And this is the way you repay it. With your mouth full of talk about fair play, too. You ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner

... Pa detested this "rotten lot" and Pa was not always in a good temper. Lily "under age,"—again! Why, there were even managers who informed the police, so as to be on the safe side; "traveling with her parents; childish tricks; nothing difficult."... Ma's indignation knew no bounds: ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne

... possible I can make 'em hear with the trumpet, now they be to leeward,' he said, and proceeded with two or three others to grope his way out upon the pier, which consisted simply of a row of rotten piles covered with rotten planking, no balustrade of any kind existing to keep the unwary from tumbling off. At the water level the piles were eaten away by the action of the sea to about the size of a ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... reason. Meantime, up comes an old butterwoman.[23] At the very moment when she was passing, the horse in his panic steps back and deposits one of his hind legs in the basket of the butterwoman: down comes the basket with all its eggs, rotten and sound; and down comes the old woman, squash, into the midst of them. "Murder! Murder!" shouted the butterwoman; and forthwith every individual thing that could command a pair or two pair of legs ran out of the turnpike-house; the carriage of the princess drew up, to give the ladies ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... before him was to reform the state of Lu. Something was rotten in it; it needed some reforming.—The rotten thing, to begin with, was Marquis Ting himself; who was of such stuff as Confucius referred to when he said: "You cannot carve rotten wood." But brittle and crumbling as it was, it ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... fort was in bad condition. The gun-carriages were old and rotten. Some of the pieces had been loaded four years before and were dismounted at the first firing. One of them burst on the sixth or seventh day, killing the gunners and severely wounding the governor, who personally ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk

... Marthy Lewallen went a-gallivantin' out' n the mountains together. Hyeh's another flood, 'n' old Gabe's dugout gone agin." The miller raised a covert glance of suspicion from under his hat, but the Marcum was laughing. "Ye oughter put a trace-chain on this un," he added. "A rope gits rotten in the water, 'n' a tide is mighty ...
— The Last Stetson • John Fox Jr.

... of the iron posts which supported a railing that ran round the crescent and used it as a lever. The rotten planks gave way. One of them uncovered the lock, which he attacked with a big knife, containing a number of blades and implements. A minute later, the gate opened on a waste of bracken which led up to a long, dilapidated building, with a turret at ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc

... the English stage go on gloomily saying that there's something rotten in the state of Norway?.... I have run Shakespeare for more hundred nights than any man in the history of the British drama, and I venture to say that every man of eminence and every woman of beauty or charm has had at least a cigarette in this ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan

... other the journal, as I was saying, hit the taste of the Parisian public. It intimated, with the easy grace of an unpremeditated agreeable talker, that French society in all its classes was rotten; and each class was willing to believe that all the others were rotten, and agreed that unless the others were reformed, there was something very unsound ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the place where the first boat lay which I had made, but which I could not get into the water; he said that was big enough; but then, as I had taken no care of it, and it had lain two or three and twenty years there, the sun had split and dried it, that it was in a manner rotten. Friday told me, such a boat would do very well, and would carry "much enough vittle, drink, bread:" that was ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe

... feet, six feet, he dug his way down into the earth. The digging grew harder. His pick grated on broken rock. He examined the rock. "Rotten quartz," was his conclusion as, with the shovel, he cleared the bottom of the hole of loose dirt. He attacked the crumbling quartz with the pick, bursting the disintegrating ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London

... but her establishment was persecuted by every conceivable insult. She and her school were shut out from attendance at the Congregational Church, and religious services held in her own house were interrupted by volleys of rotten eggs and other missiles. At length the house was set on fire, but the blaze was ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland

... not," said Winn; "you don't see my point. She'd be all right with you. What I want for the girl is for her to be taken care of. She hasn't any people to speak of, and she's up here now with a rotten, unlicked cub of a brother. I fancy she's the kind of girl that would have a pretty hideous time with the wrong man. I've got to know she's being looked ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome

... walled round on the outside with an embankment of graves, half way to the eaves. The aperture of this horrible den of death would scarcely admit of the entrance of a common sized person. And into this noisome sepulchre living men, women, and children went down to die; to pillow upon the rotten straw, the grave clothes vacated by preceding victims and festering with their fever. Here they lay as closely to each other as if crowded side by side on the bottom of one grave. Six persons had been found in this fetid sepulchre at one time, and with one only able to crawl to the door to ask ...
— A Journal of a Visit of Three Days to Skibbereen, and its Neighbourhood • Elihu Burritt

... be the moon for all I care," interrupted William impatiently. "I got up gloomy, and likely as not I'll go to bed gloomy. Gee! this is a rotten ...
— William Adolphus Turnpike • William Banks

... always broken. Something or other is going wrong. Something is rotten—I think, in Denmark. End of ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay

... sacrificed at the stake for the Reformed doctrines, no one was burned for saying mass; the worst that happened, notwithstanding their fierce enactments, being the exposure in the pillory of a priest. Rotten eggs and stones are bad arguments either in religion or metaphysics, but not so violently ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... thinking as one from Cape Juby to the confines of China? Let a common wave pass over them, let a great soldier or organiser arise among them to use the grand material at his hand, and who shall say that this may not be the besom with which Providence may sweep the rotten, decadent, impossible, half-hearted south of Europe, as it did a thousand years ago, until it makes room ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle

... despite;" and quoth Shawahi, "How canst thou forcibly rescue them from her? Go and hide thyself, O my son, till Allah Almighty empower thee." Then Hasan showed her the rod and the cap, whereat she rejoiced with joy exceeding and cried, "Glory be to Him who quickeneth the bones, though they be rotten! By Allah, O my son, thou and thy wife were but of lost folk; now, however, thou art saved, thou and thy wife and children! For I know the rod and I know its maker, who was my Shaykh in the science of Gramarye. He was a mighty magician ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton

... fox-hunting of Great Britain.[406] Fielding's account of his voyage to Lisbon contains too much about his wife's toothache and his own dropsy.[407] Smollett, like Fielding, was a sick man at the time of his travels, and we can excuse his rage at the unswept floors, old rotten tables, crazy chairs and beds so disgusting that he generally wrapped himself in a great-coat and lay upon four chairs with a leathern portmanteau for a pillow; but we cannot admire a man who is embittered by the fact that he cannot get ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard

... anxiety surrounds me, I am conscious of a vague uneasiness, mingled with the nausea, the distaste for food, and abnormal longings common to my condition. If I am to speak candidly, I must confess, at the risk of disgusting you with the whole business, to an incomprehensible craving for rotten fruit. My husband goes to Marseilles to fetch the finest oranges the world produces—from Malta, Portugal, Corsica—and these I don't touch. Then I hurry there myself, sometimes on foot, and in a little back street, running down to ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac

... butt of a Martini in the small of your back hurts a great deal, and rotten, rain-soaked khaki tears easily when two men are ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... that did the work. What loyal heart could brook these terms? What minister of Christ, bent on preserving honor and conscience, could remain in charge of his church? In comparison with the Covenant, all earthly inducements were as rotten straw, in the judgment of those whose eyes took in the world of glory and ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters

... have Miss Mitford's own description. 'The Cross is not a borough, thank Heaven, either rotten or independent. The inhabitants are quiet, peaceable people who would not think of visiting us, even if we had a knocker to knock at. Our residence is a cottage' (she is writing to her correspondent, Sir William Elford), 'no, ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... of the people; it is the attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber. ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... time when the Advantages of this Law were more apparent. Would it not then be doing the most important Service to the Cause of Liberty if the Gentlemen of the Bill of Rights, who I pray God may be united in their Councils, would exert their utmost Influence to prevail upon the Constituents of such rotten Members to claim that privilege & make a good Use of it? If there is any Virtue among the people, I should think this might easily be done. If it be impracticable, I fear another general Election wd only serve to convince all of what many ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams

... mighty big bug amongst the Chinese," he whispered, glancing cautiously about him. "He's hellish clever and rotten with money. A man like that wants handling. I'm not telling you what I know. But call it fifty-fifty and maybe ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer

... flowery month of May; the scent of the hawthorn is in the air, and the tender flush of the new spring suffuses the Park, where the tide of fashion and pleasure and idleness surges up and down-the sauntering throng, the splendid equipages, the endless cavalcade in Rotten Row, in which Clive descries afar off the white plume of his ladylove dancing on the waves of an unattainable society; the club windows are all occupied; Parliament is in session, with its nightly echoes of imperial politics; the thronged streets roar with ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... a great network of legalized corruption. Laws for this and laws for that, and laws to offset other laws are enacted until the power of the human race is wasted, in either making or breaking the innumerable edicts made to uphold a weak and rotten system. ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson

... open to me, I should pack my bundle tomorrow and settle down in a German village; work I will as much as I can, but to sell my ware in this market is impossible to me. Artistic affairs here are in so vile a condition, so rotten, so fit for decay, that only a bold scytheman is required who understands the right cut. Dearest friend, apart from all political speculation, I am compelled to say openly that in the soil of the anti-Revolution no art can grow, neither perhaps could it for the ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)

... ships at home to pit against her. Her sailors were away serving in the merchant marine. She had no practised gunners, nothing but a huddle of dismantled vessels in her navy-yard, most of them half-rotten hulks without masts. Those that had standing rigging were even worse, for none of them had sails and the falling spars in battle lumbered up the decks and menaced the crew. But such as they were she made the most of them. Eighteen hulks were hauled ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis

... rotten?" said Alaric sympathetically. "I was a bit plungy myself—first one side and then the other." And he yawned and stretched languidly. "Hate to have one's night's rest broken," he concluded. Mrs. Chichester looked at ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners

... out for has just come in. Her skipper is a friend of mine, and although he's been mighty lucky, I've rotten bad news for him, and wish some one else could tell it to him. Damn all women, I say!—leastways, all those who don't stick to the ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke

... drunk, they were wiser than the others when sober; the one had astuteness enough for a great statesman (or what has passed for such in England) to hold the most discordant elements together, and to make what is rotten seem almost sound; and, indeed, without his chaplain's dextrous skidding, Carew would long ago have irretrievably lost social caste, and dissipated his vast means to the last shilling. On the other ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn

... sure don't hanker after bein' sent down to that port o' missin' men in no hurry. I'll stick it out on this line jest as long as you say an' try to keep from grumblin'. Thar goes the last o' the rotten stuff overboard, Boss, an' we're all clear again. While we're a'waitin' till the last speck o' daylight slickers away, wouldn't it be right smart if we set our teeth in some o' that fine grub I laid in, to keep us ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb

... Nevertheless, she lived through the five years' work, in the most stormy regions in the world, under Commanders Stokes and Fitz-Roy, without a serious accident. When re- commissioned in 1831 for her second voyage, she was found (as I learn from Admiral Sir James Sulivan) to be so rotten that she had practically to be rebuilt, and it was this that caused the long delay in refitting. The upper deck was raised, making her much safer in heavy weather, and giving her far more comfortable accommodation below. By these alterations and by the strong sheathing added to ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin



Words linked to "Rotten" :   bad, unsound, stinky, crappy, rottenness, colloquialism, shitty, icky, lousy, rotted



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