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Flabby   /flˈæbi/   Listen
Flabby

adjective
1.
Out of condition; not strong or robust; incapable of exertion or endurance.  Synonyms: flaccid, soft.  "Flabby around the middle" , "Flaccid cheeks"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Flabby" Quotes from Famous Books



... rise—then suddenly to fall, flabby again. There was a light hiss like an inspiration and expiration of air, ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve

... ladder, in spite of his fat and flabby muscles quivering in terrible spasms, he ran up the long steel structure with a supreme ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England

... chosen two very respectable young women in Christchurch, one as a cook, and the other as a housemaid. The cook, Euphemia by name, was a tall, fat, flabby woman, with a pasty complexion, but a nice expression of face, and better manners than usual. She turned out to be very good natured, perfectly ignorant though willing to learn, and was much admired by the neighbouring ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker

... wilderness to tame and a new land to develop. For these ends they sacrificed much. It is for us to attack with equal courage the evils of the present. Life has outwardly become easy for many of us; our spiritual muscle easily becomes flabby. But there are new tasks equally importunate, equally worthy of our loyalty and sacrifice, hard enough to stir our blood. The times call for new idealism, new courage, new effort; the purpose of this book will not ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... greater difficulty in recognizing the little and shrunken senora who was near the poet. Her flabby flesh was hanging from her skeleton like the ragged fringe of past splendor; her head was small; her face had the wrinkled surface of a winter apple or plum, or of all the fruits that shrink and wither when they lose their juices. "Dona Pepa!..." The two ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... fingers—the expensive-looking, gold-tipped cigarette of the old days. Peter was Peter. Ten years had made little difference. There were queer little hollow places in his cheeks, and under the jaw-bone, and at the base of the head, and a flabby, parchment-like appearance about the skin. That was all that made him different from the ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber

... permeating fragrance in the air, it came to him vaguely that he had never in his life known a more perfectly delightful moment. If this, he said to himself vaguely, was what they meant by wine in the old days, then so far as his own experience went, the best "nitzy" Burgundy was no more than a flabby, vin ordinaire beside it. Not that "flabby" was what he meant to call it, but that was the word that came. For he felt as if no less than six men were flowing in his veins, he summed it up to ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale

... and flabby-cheeked Writer to the Signet who laid down his pen after reading and signing this lucid document. He stalked solemnly to the door, and then with a chastened air ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston

... six-shooters hung in the handiest way, on a sort of disappearing gun-carriage arrangement. Shortly one of the cowboys of the street scene floundered in. He was two-thirds drunk, with brutal, shifty eyes and a flabby lower lip. ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington

... but he rolled his big eyes sideways at me in his flabby face (it was easier than moving his ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock

... through, automatic in hand. He was fresh from the light inside, and he could not see well. He was quite unconscious of what was oozing down on him from above, of the flabby heap that was carefully stretching down for him. He peered into the gloom, looking for the three he had deserted, and all the time an arm from the mass above crept nearer. Sue Guinness's nerves suddenly gave, and she shrieked; but ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various

... soil and before you or I know it he will have crops and that is what he will live on. He comes from a hard country, is tough, and when you and I are going around shivering in an overcoat, he will be going around in his shirt sleeves. That is the stuff we want here, not the first kind, with flabby hands and sapped vitality.' Sure enough the bookkeeper did not wear well, and falling into the hands of the police, some months later, he was deported under the three-year limitation law, and the ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose

... it stood M. Gournay-Martin, a big, round, flabby hulk of a man. He was nearly as red in the face as M. Charolais; and he looked a great deal redder owing to the extreme whiteness of the whiskers which stuck out on either side of his vast expanse of cheek. As he came up, it struck the ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson

... appeared Mr. Sleary: a stout man as already mentioned, with one fixed eye, and one loose eye, a voice (if it can be called so) like the efforts of a broken old pair of bellows, a flabby surface, and a muddled head which was never sober ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*

... a sickly, depleted aspect elsewhere, and altogether was most flabby and unreliable looking; yet this, as I learned subsequently, was her normal appearance. Being in the business of spying she practiced deceit, with the deliberate intent of seeming to be what, emphatically, she was not. ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... represents all fishes, amphibia, reptiles, birds, etc., as travelling along their respective lines of developmental progress and differentiation, from points far back in geologic time, and constantly working their way up from cold and flabby creatures into those of higher cerebral activity, and brighter and more varied life, until gigantic winged reptiles mounted into the air and ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... whenever one of them pressed me too closely I felt as if the nerves in that particular portion of my body had been literally drawn out, absolutely depleted of vitality, and then immediately replaced—but replaced dead, flabby, useless. ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... are not interested in the Lloyd George theory of the poor plundering the prosperous, because every man or woman who tries in Canada can succeed. He may hoe some long hard rows. Let him hoe! It will harden flabby muscle and give backbone in place of jawbone! Help the innocent children—yes! There is a child saving organization in every province. But if the adult will not try, let him die! If he will not struggle to survive, let him die! The sooner the better! No theoretical parasites for Canada, ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... same evening she had made up her mind to go, and now he seemed not so shiftless and worthless, but run down and beaten upon by chance. His eyes were not keen, his face marked, his hands flabby. She thought his hair had a touch of grey. All unconscious of his doom, he rocked and read his paper, while she glanced ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser

... side, Pulls off with care, and first displays 'em, Then in a play-book smoothly lays 'em. Now dext'rously her plumpers draws, That serve to fill her hollow jaws, Untwists a wire, and from her gums A set of teeth completely comes; Pulls out the rags contrived to prop Her flabby dugs, and down they drop. Proceeding on, the lovely goddess Unlaces next her steel-ribb'd bodice, Which, by the operator's skill, Press down the lumps, the hollows fill. Up goes her hand, and off she slips The bolsters that supply her hips; With gentlest touch she next ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... of our arrival, Don Guillermo, Chonita, and I were on the long middle corridor of the house: in Santa Barbara one lived in the air. The old don sat on the long green bench by the sala door. His heavy, flabby, leathery face had no wrinkles but those which curved from the corners of the mouth to the chin. The thin upper lip was habitually pressed hard against the small protruding under one, the mouth ending in straight lines which seemed no part of the lips. ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... was empty and his tissues seemed to absorb the liquor like a dry sponge; his fatigue fell away, he became suddenly strong and vigorous again. But before he had gone a hundred yards the reaction followed. First his mind grew thick, then his limbs became unmanageable and his muscles flabby. He was drunk. Yet it was a strange and dangerous intoxication, against which he struggled desperately. He fought it for perhaps a quarter of a mile before it mastered him; ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various

... the woman at the birth saw that something was the matter with the child. It was little and frail, and as weak as threads of cotton. Its body was flat, and its legs and arms were helpless and flabby. Then all the men said, "That ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,

... their characters. In Joe's case even a shorter time was needed. He was so ready to go down that it needed but a gentle push to start him, and once started, there was nothing within him to hold him back from the depths. For his will was as flabby as his conscience, and his pride, which stands to some men for conscience, had no definite ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... tavern keeper stopped Vlasova on the street. He was a dapper old man, who always wore a black silk neckerchief around his red, flabby neck, and a thick, lilac-colored waistcoat of velvet around his body. On his sharp, glistening nose there always sat a pair of glasses with tortoise-shell rims, which secured him ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky

... of timidity in the repulsive faces of the waiting creatures, this newcomer was of a different type. He opened flabby thin lips to give one sharp note of command. It was as sibilant as the hissing of a snake. The man with the weapon returned it to a holder at his side; the whole group cringed before the power and authority of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... what's got into me tonight," he muttered, slapping a very high and shining forehead with a very soft, flabby hand. "I clean forgot you boys hadn't had supper. An' now ... the grub's all in the kitchen an' ... she's in there, all curled up in a quilt an' mos' ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory

... lean. A fat bust and a bony countenance. His nails were channelled and short, his fingers knotted, his thumbs flat, his hair coarse, his temples wide apart, and his forehead a murderer's, broad and low. The littleness of his eye was hidden under his bushy eyebrows. His nose, long, sharp, and flabby, nearly met his mouth. Barkilphedro, properly attired, as an emperor, would have somewhat resembled Domitian. His face of muddy yellow might have been modelled in slimy paste—his immovable cheeks were like putty; he had all kinds of ugly refractory wrinkles; the angle of his jaw ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... butternuts for the chipmunks; caught skunks in a trap, just to demonstrate that a skunk can be carried by the tail with impunity, if you only do it right (and, though succeeding one day, got the worst of the bargain the next); and waged war early and late on the flabby woodchucks which one could see almost any hour in the day undulating across the fields. We called these boys "John of Woods," and "John of Woodchucks"; and it was sometimes difficult to say which was the veriest boy, the one of eleven or ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus

... day, at dusk, she received a visit from Monsieur Lherueux, the draper. He was a man of ability, was this shopkeeper. Born a Gascon but bred a Norman, he grafted upon his southern volubility the cunning of the Cauchois. His fat, flabby, beardless face seemed dyed by a decoction of liquorice, and his white hair made even more vivid the keen brilliance of his small black eyes. No one knew what he had been formerly; a pedlar said some, a banker at Routot according to others. What was certain was ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert

... propagation of their faith, but this is not altogether a correct way of stating a fact. The young man who makes good use of the muscular power given to him by Nature acquires greater strength, whereas he who fails to do so finds that he has to pay the penalty of his neglect in having his muscles grow flabby and feeble. And so it is with faith. The unselfish man who starts with a weak faith, but is determined to let others derive as much benefit as possible, finds his faith growing stronger and stronger, as he continues to witness evidences of the ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill

... He caught the flabby body by the collar, spinning the dignity of the law round face down prone upon the log. "A'll not take my fist t' y' as A wud t' a Man! Ye dastard, drunken, poltroon, coward, whiskey sodden lout an' scum o' filth, an'," each word was emphasized ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... temperament other than their own. Raddled faces with heavy eyes and rouged lips. Ragged lips that had been chewed by every mad dog in the world. What lips there were everywhere! Bright scarlet splashes in dead-white faces. Thin red gashes that suggested rat-traps instead of kisses. Bulbous, flabby lips that would wobble and shiver if attention failed them. Lips of a horrid fascination that one looked at and hated and ran to. . . . Looking at him slyly or boldly, they passed along, and turned after a while and repassed him, and turned ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... in the cabin and on deck, but he was not the same man. His illness seemed to have robbed him permanently of what was left him of the spring of manhood. It was as if his juices had been sucked from his veins and arteries and tissues, leaving him flabby, irresolute, compared to his former self. Even as Lund shadowed Rainey, so ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn

... Batangas and Cavite; the worst from Mindanao. The latter, in consequence of careless treatment, is very impure, and generally contains a quantity of bad beans. The coffee beans of Mindanao are of a yellowish-white color and flabby; those of Laguna are smaller, but much firmer ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.

... in an instinctive effort to catch itself. Evelyn was thrown clear. And Tommy, standing alone in the blackness of a carboniferous jungle upon an alien planet, sent bullet after bullet into the shaking, obscenely flabby body of the thing. The bullets penetrated, and exploded. Great masses of flesh upheaved and fell away. Great gouts of awful smelling fluid were flung out and blown to mist by the explosions. The thing did not so much die as disintegrate under the ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... were times during that stormy spell when it seemed as if we had grown wholly and hopelessly flabby as a people. All the outcry against the programme of order did not come from the lawless and the disorderly, by any means. Ordinarily decent, conservative citizens joined in counselling moderation and virtual compromise with the lawbreakers—it ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis

... Ivan Nikiforovitch glanced up also—No, I can do no more—Give me a fresh pen with a fine point for this picture! mine is flabby. Their faces seemed to turn to stone whilst still retaining their defiant expression. Each beheld a long familiar face, to which it should have seemed the most natural of things to step up, involuntarily, as to an unexpected friend, ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... village street the exotic figure of a fat man in a flat cap and a dark blue costume, with very wide baggy trousers down to the ground. He was reading a newspaper as he walked with an easy slouch. His fat shaven face was large and round and wrinkled, yet not flabby. Altogether there was something irresistibly Chinese about him. Strange that this curious figure should be the typical English sailor, the legendary Hero of the British People, and the person on whose existence that of the English ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis

... stroke it, and play with the silver flowers. It was little fatigue, now, except to the spirits, to nurse poor George. He was shrunk to skin and bone, and so light as to startle those who had been accustomed to lift him. It was grievous, however, to look at the ghastly stretched features, the flabby tremulous little arms, and the suffering expression of countenance. To hear his feeble cry was worse still. Oliver was really glad to take Mildred away from seeing and hearing him, as long as the child would be quiet with Roger: so he asked her to filter more water through the gravel. ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau

... photography has done much to diminish the unpleasantness of the operation. In the old days of crude and direct posing, there was no escape for the sitter. He had to stand up, backed by a rustic stile and a flabby canvas sheet covered with exotic trees, glaring straight into the camera. To prevent any eleventh-hour retreat, a sort of spiky thing was shoved firmly into the back of his head leaving him with the choice of being taken as he stood or having an inch of steel jabbed into his skull. Modern ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... the other aunt, might almost have been convinced that such determination must be for an object. However, Gillian encountered the fog in vain, though she walked up and down the path till her clothes were quite limp and flabby with damp. All the view that rewarded her was the outline of the shrubs looming through the mist like distant forests as mountains. Moreover, she got a scolding from Aunt Ada, who met her coming in, and was ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge

... see him." Her voice got a little harder and cooler. "Mother'll never be well, Rose. She's got an incurable disease. There's a long name for it that I can't remember. What it means is that her heart is getting flabby—degenerating, he called it. He says we can't do anything except to retard the progress of the disease. It may go fast, or it may go slowly. That attack she had was just a symptom, he said. She'll have others. And by and by, of course, a ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... fellow, who saw no further than the tip of his nose, incapable of rebelling, flabby, fat, steeped in devotion, and thinking too much about heaven to see what a plot was being hatched against him, in our unhappy vale of tears, as ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... with a yawn, "but I'm thinking that after we see all the folks, and play with Mat's little boys awhile, and eat Aunty Boone's good stuff till we begin to get flabby-cheeked and soft-muscled, and our jaws crack from smiling so much when we just naturally want to get out and cuss somebody—about that time I'll be ready to run away, if I have to turn Dog ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter

... in a bally place like this. It mostly goes in tips. You see, the peasants about here think anything under a purse of gold stingy. But it certainly struck me the last time I went to the Counting-house that what sacks there were looked a bit flabby. When do you expect ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey

... roseate aura of hopefulness and expectation. Under easy living he had grayed and fattened; his eyes were small and colorless, his cheeks full and veined with tiny sprays Of purple, his hands soft and limber. What had once been a measure of good looks was hidden now behind a flabby, indefinite mediocrity which an unusual carefulness in dress could not disguise. He was big-hearted in little things; in big things he was small. He told an excellent story, but never imagined one, and his laugh was hearty though insincere. ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach

... tangled purple worms. The blood-vessels seemed distended almost to bursting now. The gruesome face, with popping eyes and that gaping mouth, showed a horrible travesty of terror. From where its ears should have been, a crooked little arm of flabby, gray-white flesh came down, one on each side and braced the table. And I saw now that it had a shriveled body, or at least little legs, bent, almost crushed under ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings

... my impressions were corrected by subsequent observation. First of all impressions was its enormous size; the girth of its body was some fourscore feet, its length perhaps two hundred. Its sides rose and fell with its laboured breathing. I perceived that its gigantic, flabby body lay along the ground, and that its skin was of a corrugated white, dappling into blackness along the backbone. But of its feet we saw nothing. I think also that we saw then the profile at least of the almost brainless head, with its fat-encumbered neck, its slobbering omnivorous mouth, ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... his chair to their table, first taking off his wide cap and saying gravely: "Con permiso de ustedes." His broad, slightly flabby face was very pale; the eyes under his sparse blonde eyelashes were large and grey. He put his two hands on their shoulders so as to draw their heads together and ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... impossible to describe a "good" vegetable plant, but he who gardens will come soon to distinguish between the healthy, short-jointed, deep-colored plant which is ready to take hold and grow, and the soft, flabby (or too succulent) drawn-up growth of plants which have been too much pampered, or dwarfed, weazened specimens which have been abused and starved; he will learn that a dozen of the former will yield more than fifty of the latter. Plants may be bought of the florist or market gardener. ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell

... the other Loons seemed much impressed by his defiance. But suddenly there came a sharp report and Panta Loon instantly disappeared, to the great astonishment of the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and Woot the Wanderer, who saw on the spot where the big fellow had stood a little heap of flabby, wrinkled skin that looked like a ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... note or two, to clinch that idea of ours in the right shape." He dashed off a few lines with pencil in his play at several points, and then he said: "There! I guess I shall get some bones into those two flabby idiots to-morrow. I see just how I can do it." He looked up and met his wife's ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells

... around the kitchen, and teasing the magpie, which was following his footsteps with inquisitive anxiety. Finally, he went up to the old man Vincart, who was lying stretched out in his picture-lined niche. He took the flabby hand of the paralytic old man, pressed it gently and endeavored to get up a little conversation with him, but he had it all to himself, the invalid staring at him all the time with uneasy, wide-open eyes. Returning to Reine, he ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... Who knows which of us is right ?—or if our difference of opinion may not be a difference in our years? If all who love one another were of the same opinion, living would be monotonous, and conversation flabby. So cheer up. You are content. Allow me ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich

... amused by watching the habits of the Diodon antennatus, which was caught swimming near the shore. This fish, with its flabby skin, is well known to possess the singular power of distending itself into a nearly spherical form. After having been taken out of water for a short time, and then again immersed in it, a considerable quantity both of water and air is ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... I had an opportunity of watching the process of destruction among the plums, and it was as follows—Before or soon after the segments of the corolla had fallen off, the ovarium had become greenish yellow, soft, and flabby. As the fruit continued to increase in magnitude, its colour grew darker and of a more ruddy yellow, and at the end of a fortnight or three weeks the size of the abortive fruit rather exceeded that of a ripe walnut. In fact, an observer might imagine himself to be walking amongst ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters

... literally? I was assured of the fact the other day by a very intelligent physician, who practised twenty years among them, and informs me that few of the richer sort live to be fifty, but die of a sort of atrophy, their cold blood just stagnating by degrees among their flabby fat. They eat too much, he says; take little exercise; and, above all, have no nervous excitement. The affection is known in this part of the country by the name of the Quaker's disease, and more than one-half ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various

... stood upright, and he was the man whose obtrusive figure and sordid expression had so revolted me in the beginning. There was no colour now in his flabby and heavily fallen cheeks. The eyes, in whose false sheen I had seen so much of evil, were glazed now, and his big and burly frame shook the door it pressed against. He was staring at a small slip of paper he held, ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green

... in, the muscular system suffers,—the muscles become weak and flabby; the patient develops weariness and languor and loses his mental and physical vigor. He is no longer forceful or energetic, his efficiency is impaired and as a consequence his nervous system begins to show signs of depleted strength. He cannot concentrate his thoughts, he falls behind ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

... had not improved during his illness: his face, over the lower half of which a black beard had grown rankly, was puffy with convalescent fat. His hands that drummed idly against the couch were white and flabby. As he half rose and extended his hand to the doctor, he betrayed, indefinably, remote traces of ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... as he went through the familiar motion of lighting a second cigarette from the first one. In the half-light of the cabin, I had not at first perceived how ill he looked; now, I saw the dark patches under the eyes, the livid and flabby face, the shaking hand. And for the first time, with a little shock, I realized how near ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson

... and one coughs, and another has the nosebleed, and another loses his shoes under the bench, and another bellows because he has pricked himself with his pen, and another one cries because he has bought copy-book No. 2 instead of No. 1. Fifty in a class, who know nothing, with those flabby little hands, and all of them must be taught to write; they carry in their pockets bits of licorice, buttons, phial corks, pounded brick,—all sorts of little things, and the teacher has to search them; but they conceal these objects even in their shoes. And they are not attentive: a fly enters ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis

... stream's chieftain[93] Is trailing to land, So flabby, so grimy, So sickly, so slimy,— The spots of his prime he Has rusted with sand; Crook-snouted his crest ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... aims; a yellow wooden bedstead furnished with a mattress of "excelsior" (calculated to induce early rising), a dingy white spread, a gray blanket of coarse wool, a pair of cotton sheets which had too obviously done duty since passing through the hands of the laundress, and a pair of flabby little pillows in the same state, in respect to their cases, as the sheets. On the floor was a much used and faded ingrain carpet, in one place worn through by the edge of a loose board. A narrow strip of unpainted pine nailed to the wall carried six or seven wooden ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott

... course with education and all that accordingly. It's beautiful to hear them. You'll see a little fellow in a wig, and he'll get up; and there'll be a man in the box before him,—some swell dressed up to his eyes, who thinks no end of strong beer of himself; and in about ten minutes he'll be as flabby as wet paper, and he'll say—on his oath, mind you,—just anything that that little fellow wants him to say. That's power, mind you, and I ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope

... a clear dark red, the fat firm and white, and not too much of it; when touched the meat should feel crisp yet tender. If the fat is yellow and the lean flabby and damp, it is bad. A freshly scraped wooden skewer run into the meat along the bone will speedily enable anyone to detect staleness. For roasting mutton scarcely can be hung too long, as long as it is not tainted; but ...
— The Story of Crisco • Marion Harris Neil

... It's them that's fat and flabby do be wrinkled young, and that whitish yellowy hair she has does be soon turning the like of a handful of thin grass you'd see rotting, where the wet lies, at the north of a sty. (Turning to go out on right.) Ah, it's a better thing to have a simple, seemly face, the like of my face, for two-score ...
— The Well of the Saints • J. M. Synge

... of half a dozen newspaper reporters, of a dozen wealthy young men who had fully intended to place large sums on Brophy, and before the eyes of his horrified manager and backer, Jimmy, at the end of ninety seconds, landed a punch that sent the flabby Mr. Brophy through the ropes and into dreamland for a much longer period ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... presses on me with a hundredweight. Often I bleat like a calf for its stable and for the udder of its life-giving mother. How lonely I am amongst these people! My poor wife! I have had no news as yet, and I feel deathly soft and flabby at every remembrance. Let me soon have good news of my wife! With all my courage, I am often the most miserable coward. In spite of your generous offers, I frequently consider with a deadly terror the shrinking of my cash after my doubly prolonged journey ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)

... his employer in the face and felt a sudden pang of sympathy. Mr. Weatherley was certainly not looking as hale and prosperous as a few months ago. His cheeks were flabby, and there was a worried look about him which the head of the firm of Weatherley & Co. ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... bidding good-night. There was the thin girl in the chair, then two boys who were entirely nondescript, with noisy throats cut out of the same copper plate, a soft billowy shadow of a woman under a floppy hat and exuding a ghastly sweet, cloying perfume. Her bare arm was as soft and flabby as jelly as she stretched it out to Myrtle. After her came another man, rather hesitantly, and keeping in the shadow. His voice was good, rather deep, rather strong. As he passed, he called Joe by name. Twisting ...
— Stubble • George Looms

... ATROPHY. (Malignant Jaundice).—This is fortunately a rare disease. There is rapid progress, and it is fatal in nearly all cases. The liver is very small and flabby. The symptoms are many and are hard to differentiate. You must depend upon your physician. The only thing for him to do is to meet the symptoms and relieve ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... I said, "and a devout follower of the Gods, and searcher into the higher mysteries; but, as a ruler, he was always a flabby fellow." ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne

... essential, as opposed to the material, welfare of the poor, it can easily be over-valued. Extreme thrift, like extreme cleanliness, has often a singularly dehumanising effect. It hardens the nature of its votaries, just as gaining what they have not earned most frequently makes men flabby. Thrift, as highly recommended, leads the poor man into the spiritual squalor of the lower middle-class. It is all right as a means of living, but lamentable as an end of life. If a penny saved is a penny earned, then a penny earned by ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... trailing in forests, Prospecting, gold-digging, girdling the trees of a new purchase, Scorch'd ankle-deep by the hot sand, hauling my boat down the shallow river, Where the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead, where the buck turns furiously at the hunter, Where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock, where the otter is feeding on fish, Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou, Where the black bear is searching for roots or honey, where the beaver pats the mud with his paddle-shaped tall; Over the growing sugar, over ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... I tell you!" almost shouted the man, rising from his desk and revealing himself a short, pudgy figure, with flabby face and shining bald head. "Can't you ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor

... the flabby gang That tricked your taste with cards and drink, When out of independence sprang A silly downfall. Think, Tom, think! While stupid lads debase their worth In feather-headed Folly's thicket, Get back your muscle and your mirth Beneath the ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale

... followed, his mild little voice that ever seemed to be teetering on the edge of the laugh into which he fell a score of times during an hour, became a familiar sound about the office, and the soft, flabby little hand which the other printers laughed about, during the first week of his employment with us, has rested on most of the shoulders in the shop guiding us ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White

... women. With more knowledge of the world than wit, with no reading, though he had a vast and exact acquaintance with noble houses, their births and marriages, he was good for nothing. Nobody was so flabby in body and mind, no one so weak, so timid, so open to deception, so led by the nose, so despised by his favourites, often so roughly treated by them. He was quarrelsome in small matters, incapable ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... their like are hot for saving the workingman from John Barleycorn! Imagine the advantage to them of operating upon a flabby horde of timorous and joyless slaves, afraid of all fun and kicking up, horribly moral, eager only to live as long as possible! What mule-like fidelity and efficiency could be got out of such a rabble! But how many Lincolns would ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken

... has probably already heard the terms vein and artery employed. In the rabbit a vein is a vessel bringing blood towards the heart, while an artery is a vessel conducting it away. Veins are thin-walled, and therefore flabby, a conspicuous purple when full of blood, and when empty through bleeding and collapsed sometimes difficult to make out in dissection. They are formed by the union of lesser factors. The portal breaks up into lesser branches within the liver. ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells

... shrivelled old gentleman whom it represented, and to whom it bore much the same resemblance as a balloon soaring skywards, fully inflated, bears to that same object with half the gas let out of it in a condition of flabby and ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... quick jerk, strained every muscle to hold on, and found she had conquered. He was in her hands. For how long was a question, for he was strong enough to walk away and drag her by the bridle perhaps, and she knew little about tricks of management. Moreover her muscles were so flabby and sore with the long ride that she was ill-fitted to cope with the wise and wicked little beast. She dreaded to get upon his back again, and doubted if she could if she tried, but it seemed the only way to get anywhere, or to keep company with the pony, for she could ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill

... guests Mdlle. Selpdorf alone stood erect, forgetting, in her indignation, to join in the general obeisance. The Grand Duke, looking up, found her flushed and flashing, and superlatively handsome. His flabby cheeks twitched, and ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard

... hasn't time to make one's shell ideally hard. Firm and bright—firm and bright!—the devilish thing has a way, sometimes, of being bright without being firm. When I rap it with my knuckles it doesn't give the right sound. There are horrible little flabby spots where I have taken the second-best word, because I could n't for the life of me think of the best. If you knew how stupid I am sometimes! They look to me now like pimples and ulcers on ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James

... way through the crowd and pushed through the court-room door. The Judge was just taking his seat—a dull, heavy-looking man with a bald head, a pair of flabby, clean-shaven cheeks, and two small eyes that looked from under white eyebrows. Half-way up his forehead rested a pair of gold spectacles. The jury had evidently been out for luncheon, for they were picking their teeth and settling themselves ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith

... followed by a flabby groan and a straining and squeaking of the jerry-built staircase as Kasheed Hassoun vigorously applied a lath to the horny backsides of ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train

... He's in love with her, too. Seems to be glad she shot him. Says he's ashamed of himself for ever suspecting her of anything but being a genuine angel. Why, he's got as flabby as a rabbit ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson

... he sat musing thus foolishly and pessimistically, who should loom upon his horizon but—of all people in the world—the Haddock, the fishy, flabby, stale, unprofitable Haddock! Most certainly Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like this. A beautiful confection of pearly-grey, pearl-buttoned flannel draped his droopy form, a pearly-grey silk tie, pearl-pinned, encircled his lofty collar, pearly-grey ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren

... the country by him, leaving his father unavenged? What opinion is he to form of the perfectly idiotic, complex conspiracy between the King and Laertes to get rid of Hamlet? Why should Hamlet appeal to him, except as a melodrama with a flabby hero, a feeble heroine, a very small amount of comic relief, and far too much dialogue, much of which is almost unintelligible? What can he make of the great soliloquies, of the purple patches, written in involved sentences, embellished by curious archaic terms ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... the point of the hock, which may run up along the tendons and muscles of the leg. Repeated injuries cause the hock to enlarge and become flabby, and in some cases it contains ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek

... on. You perceive that the style is actually worse than in the sample quoted before; it has become flabby whereas that other was at any rate nervous? But now suppose that, having practised it, our candidate was ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... a rotund, flabby man, whom long indulgence in rubber-tired broughams and double-springed private cars had softened until he reminded one of a ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day

... had redd up her house for the last time and put on her black merino. Her mouth was wide open while she listened. If yon had, addressed her you would have thought her polite and stupid. Look at her. A flabby-faced woman she is now, with a swollen body, and no one has heeded her much these thirty years. I can tell you something; it is almost droll. Nanny Webster was once a gay flirt, and in Airlie Square there is a weaver with an unsteady head who thought ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie

... an old man, but there was a very different note in his voice from the flabby sympathy of the other men. He put out his pipe with a horny thumb, and gave a rather contemptuous look round the lounging group of longshoremen. "Royal Navy" was written all over him—in his keen eyes, his upright carriage, and his kindly, respectful manner. At the confidence ...
— Troublesome Comforts - A Story for Children • Geraldine Glasgow

... league, white front and flabby face Bent o'er the groaning board. Twelve brave men droned the grace; But with instinctive tact, in courtesy to their Host, Omitted God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, And to the God of Battles raised their humble prayers. Then, then, like thunder, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... time we were ready, for he let himself down from the attic quite spry, and made us all laugh by the remarks he passed. But one could see he just forced himself to do it, and his face looked powerful haggard and flabby in the lantern light, and he moved queer on his legs, like a push would ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne

... his eloping daughter in the arms of stalwart youth, with the clergy looking on approvingly; another of Mr. John Drew assuming a commanding posture as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew; some ennuied flabby angels riding on the clouds; a child of unhealthy pink clasping lovingly an inflammable dog; on the mantel a miniature ship, under glass, and some lady ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers

... the loathly flock had left the others. The orbit of his swing had carried him across the road and over Squire Gathers' land. He was sailing right toward and over the squire now. Craning his flabby neck, the squire could make out the unwholesome contour of the huge bird. He could see the ragged black wings—a buzzard's wings are so often ragged and uneven—and the naked throat; the slim, naked head; the big feet folded up against the dingy belly. And he could see a bell ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb

... Venus! When I think that I only touched two dangling flabby breasts, I feel as if I did not ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... The flabby muscles of a self-indulgent man may sometimes perform a single prodigious feat of strength. Wherein they have an infinite advantage over the far flabbier resolutions of a self-indulgent man. And ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco

... absurd!" she exclaimed, shaking his arm with characteristic vigour. "How can you be so disgustingly flabby? You're worse than old Squinny, who sends for Dad or me every other day to see him die. He's fearfully keen on going to heaven, but that's all he ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell

... not at the sight of the blood, but at the exertion to which his flabby muscles had been put. His body was moist with sweat. His asthmatic throat seemed stifling his lungs. A faint nausea crept through him, a dim ventral revolt at the thought that such things could take place so easily, ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer

... women, there were four standing at one of the open windows, holding on to the iron bars. They were making signs and shouting to the convicts whom Maslova had met when returning to prison, and who were now passing through the yard. One of these women was big and heavy, with a flabby body, red hair, and freckled on her pale yellow face, her hands, and her fat neck. She shouted something in a loud, raucous voice, and laughed hoarsely. This woman was serving her term for theft. Beside her stood an awkward, dark little woman, no bigger than a child of ten, with a ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy

... I've got a little list Of social offenders who might well be underground, And who never would be missed - who never would be missed! There's the pestilential nuisances who write for autographs - All people who have flabby hands and irritating laughs - All children who are up in dates, and floor you with 'em flat - All persons who in shaking hands, shake hands with you like THAT - And all third persons who on spoiling TETE-E-TETES insist - They'd none of 'em ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert

... hung about her, her hands and wrists were shrunken, her flesh was soft and flabby, and she had dark shadows in her face. Nursing her child seemed to draw all strength from her, and her nervous depression increased; she was too weary and ill to think of the future, and for a whole week her physical condition held her, to the exclusion of every other ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore

... the demands of the situation in which he is placed." This statement is big with meaning for all who have a true conception of pedagogy and of life. In this sentence we see the finger-board that points toward high achievements in teaching. If the hurdles are too low, the boy becomes flaccid, flabby, sluggish, and lethargic. The hurdles should be just high enough to engage his full strength, physical, mental, and moral. They should ever be a challenge to his best efforts. But they should never be so high that they will invite discouragement, ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... in fact none was needed, for at that moment Tom's eyes fell upon the object which had arrested his companion's action, to wit, the flabby, unpleasant-looking face of Thorpeley, the constable, that individual being seated by the low bushes smoking his pipe in a position where he must have been watching the lads ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn

... He became inactive, and more cowardly and prudent than ever. He grew fat and flabby. No one who had studied this great body, piled up in a lump, apparently without bones or muscles, would ever have had the idea of accusing the man of ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola

... dance about at each motion. His face, composed of red and white, like that of the Madonna of Vandyke, was furrowed by two silver rivulets which had dug their beds in his cheeks, as full formerly as they had become flabby since his grief began. At each fresh arrival, Mousqueton found fresh tears, and it was pitiful to see him press his throat with his fat hand to keep from bursting into sobs and lamentations. All these visits were for the purpose of hearing the ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas

... room. Jim, looking sidewise, recognized Jake Hibbard, and began covertly to study his face. He knew that this flabby-faced, dirty man, with the little screwed-up eyes, and the big screwed-up mouth, stained brown at the corners with tobacco, was Pete Lamoury's lawyer. Familiar for many years to his contemptuous young eyes, Jake now looked sinister and dangerous. What ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson

... Heine, and himself. Why did he exclude the one by Loeben? He made an ardent appeal in his preface to his colleagues to inform him of any other ballads that had been written on these themes. The question must be referred to those who like to skate on flabby ice in things literary. ...
— Graf von Loeben and the Legend of Lorelei • Allen Wilson Porterfield

... be so interfered with as to cause softening and bending, with the evolution of a state of rickets. Between bone and muscle, too, we find a close relationship. We do not find powerful muscles with softened bone, nor flabby muscle with ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron

... Macnamara had lost all her pluck, and half her colour, and some even of her fat. She was like one of those portly dowagers in Numbernip's select society of metamorphosed turnips, who suddenly exhibited sympathetic symptoms of failure, grew yellow, flabby, and wrinkled, as the parent bulb withered and went out of season. You would not have known her ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... suffered in his mind. The flesh of his strong face hung in folds as if his skin had suddenly become many sizes too large for him. His eyes had retreated deeper into the sockets, and his thick lips, once so firm and domineering, were loose and flabby. Black Hoof stirred him contemptuously with his foot. Dale dragged himself to a sitting posture and began shivering ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter

... other hand over the land agent's flabby body, poking the folds of fat here and there over Major Stover's ribs. At each thump the ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens

... and lily and green-lit spaces. They came out in a clearing, before dusk. Beside the clearing was a brook, with a crude cradle—sign of a not very successful gold miner. Before a log cabin, in a sway-sided rocker, creaked a tall, white, flabby woman, once nearly beautiful, now rubbed at the edges. She rose, huddling her wrapper about her bosom, as they drove into the clearing and picked their way through ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis

... which this drama is given, urging that they contain an insult which can be wiped out only with blood or ballots. I sympathize with this feeling, yet, as I said before, there are extenuating circumstances. Wagner was born a hundred years ago. In his time the hand of woman, though white, was flabby and inert from years of darning, patching, stirring the pot, buttoning and unbuttoning, feeding and spanking man's perennial progeny. He had no conception how that frail hand would be steadied and strengthened by dropping ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... thin, flabby fellow was a poor compensation for vigorous Bourbaki. He was set to work on the plantation, and as the Government was never informed of the affair, he is probably there to this day, and ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... each side rose the nearly perpendicular rocks that blocked our view of the country immediately beyond. The ground beneath our feet was covered with small bits of lava from the crevices of which the moist flabby leaves of the nupu plant stuck up like fat ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer

... A flabby abdomen indicates disposition to hernia and stagnation of the blood, frequently causing hemorrhoids or inflammation of the prostate gland in men, and all kinds ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann

... an insult to return a cordial grasp of the hand, and hearty greeting, by a cold bow or a flabby extension of a portion of the hand. Even if you do not approve of the familiar greeting you should return it ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost

... faces told a very different story. The girl was paler than usual; her eyes were dark, the colour seemed to have faded from round about them, and her swiftest glance was as intent as a stare. The appearance of the Admiral, on the other hand, was rosy, and flabby, and moist; his jowl hung over his shirt-collar, his smile was loose and wandering, and he had so far relaxed the natural control of his eyes, that one of them was aimed inward, as if to catch the growth of the carbuncle. We are warned against bad judgments; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson

... which should be forgiven to those who suffer night and day and are as if drunk with an exalted unhappiness, I went on: "For the sake of an old cast-off glove; for I suppose a disdained love is not much more than a soiled, flabby thing that finds itself on a private rubbish heap because it ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... of the Dix' nurses I saw in Fredericksburg, and her large, flat, flabby face was almost hideous with its lack of eye-brows and lashes; but this hideousness must have been her recommendation, as she could not have been more ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm

... Language] (Synonymous with {evil}.) A weak, verbose, and flabby language used by {card walloper}s to do boring mindless things on {dinosaur} mainframes. Hackers believe that all COBOL programmers are {suit}s or {code grinder}s, and no self-respecting hacker will ever admit to having learned the language. Its very name is seldom uttered without ritual ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... family entrance door, admitting MARTHY. She might be forty or fifty. Her jowly, mottled face, with its thick red nose, is streaked with interlacing purple veins. Her thick, gray hair is piled anyhow in a greasy mop on top of her round head. Her figure is flabby and fat; her breath comes in wheezy gasps; she speaks in a loud, mannish voice, punctuated by explosions of hoarse laughter. But there still twinkles in her blood-shot blue eyes a youthful lust for life which hard usage has failed to stifle, a sense of humor mocking, but good-tempered. ...
— Anna Christie • Eugene O'Neill

... hands idle and laid out along the chair sides. They were ringless hands and full of years, with a great network of veins across their backs and the aging fingers large at the knuckles. But where the hands betrayed the eyes belied. Deep in Mrs. Meyerburg's soft and scarcely flabby face her gaze was straight and ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst

... She was more incisive than her sister. Both were below the medium height, and stout, but Sophia was firm where Amanda was flabby. Amanda wore a baggy old muslin (it was a hot day), and Sophia was uncompromisingly hooked up in a starched and boned cambric over her high ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

... Julia, I remembered, had been cashier in a city restaurant, and had, when I was little more than a boy, almost inveigled me into an engagement. I found myself getting hot at the recollection of the spooney rhapsodies I had hoarsely poured into her powder-streaked ear while holding her flabby hand ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome

... with a diamond pin in his scarf—walked up and down Fitz's office awaiting his arrival—a short, thick-set, large-paunched man with a heavy jaw, a straight line of a mouth, two little restless eyes wobbling about in a pulp of wrinkles, flabby cheeks, a nose that was too small for the area it failed to ornament, and a gray stubbly beard shaven so closely at its edges that it looked as if its owner might either wear it on his chin or put it in his ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith

... impressions I had already received of him were deepened. His fine manly vigour, and the simple honesty of his countenance, were such as became a healer of men. It seemed altogether more likely that health might flow from such a source, than from the pudgey, flabby figure of snuff-taking Dr. Wade, whose face had no expression except a professional one. Mr. Armstrong's eyes looked you full in the face, as if he was determined to understand you if he could; and there seemed ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald

... hand in the flabby stuffed glove that served the Scarecrow for a hand, and the Scarecrow pressed it so cordially that the straw in ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... guardians of this northern frankincense, chatter and squabble! With their blue petticoats tucked up above their knees, how they pick off the stray pieces of raw haddock, or cod, and, with creaking jaws, chew them; and while they ruminate, bask their own flabby carcasses in the sun! With the dried tail of a herring sticking out of their saffron-coloured, shrivelled chops, Lord! how they gaped when I passed by, hurriedly, like ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross

... one elbow on the chairback, another on the table, flabby jowls quivering as he mumbled the indispensable cigar, puffy hands clasped across his ample chest, he sat for many minutes by the side of his unheeded drink, pondering, turning over and over in his mind the one idea it was capable of harboring at ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance

... six feet tall, round-shouldered, knock-kneed, and weighed about two hundred pounds of flabby flesh, mostly covered by filthy garments. His head was pyramidal in shape, and covered by a mass of unkempt red hair. He had practically no forehead. His eyes were dull and bloodshot. His nose was flat and bent to one side, and his whole face was covered with pimples. His mouth ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson

... possessed. I was not unaware that few wives come to their husbands with affection. Certainly I did not expect affection from you at the first, but hoped that it might ensue. So even Lapo Cercamorte became a flabby fool, when he met one in comparison with whom all other women seemed mawkish. Since it was such a fit of drivelling, let us put an end to it. At sunrise the horses will ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various

... the bamboo chairs, the tables with ash-trays, the revolving fish, the attendant knitting behind six or seven chocolate boxes (often she was quite alone with the fish for hours at a time) remained in the mind as part of the monster shark, he himself being only a flabby yellow receptacle, like an empty Gladstone bag in a tank. No one had ever been cheered by the Aquarium; but the faces of those emerging quickly lost their dim, chilled expression when they perceived that it was only by standing in a queue that one could ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... patronising. She looked younger than her years in spite of her little cap and the sedateness of attire then common to women past their youth. Lady Constance Mortlake had the high bust and stomach of advanced years; her flabby cheeks were streaked with good living. Her expression was shrewd and humorous, however, and her eyes were kinder than her tongue. Mrs. Nunn rose with vast ceremony and presented her niece to these two august dames, and as Anne courtesied, Lady Hunsdon said, smiling, but with a penetrating ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton

... time seem well. The typical syphilitic child, however, is thin, weak, and wasted. Syphilis hastens old age even in the strong. It turns the young child into an old man or woman at birth. The skin is wrinkled, the flesh flabby. The face is that of an old man—weazened, pinched, pathetic, with watery, bleary eyes, and snuffling nose. The mother often says that all the baby's trouble started with a bad cold. The disease attacks ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes

... the first time, Wally ran into trouble. The bandage became flabby. Quickly he pulled it apart and began again. The Fox and Eagle patrols jumped to their feet and pleaded for their respective teams to hurry. Wally calmly ran the bandage up the calf of ...
— Don Strong, Patrol Leader • William Heyliger

... anyhow? I began a series of cautious experiments, designed to discover the trouble. My arms were weak and of a strange, flabby limpness, but they moved. So did my left leg; but when I came to the right one I was baffled. It wouldn't stir; it was heavily encased in something. Good heavens! now I knew! It ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti



Words linked to "Flabby" :   soft, flabbiness, unfit, flab



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