"Boorish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with a more boorish air than he had before manifested, and muttered something about a cow that needed his attention, and that he could not spare the time from his herd for all that the Prioress was like ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... up the lost time. Mrs. Malling's round face shone again in her relief, and a sigh of content escaped her. Word was sent at once to the bride, and all was enthusiasm again. Then followed a terrible shock. Peter Furrer, more long-sighted than the rest, delivered it in a boorish fashion all his own. ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... happiness of his family circle, the splendour of an imperial court, the luxuries of enormous wealth, the refined society of statesmen, and the ennobling intercourse of philosophers for the savage wastes of a rocky island and the society of boorish illiterate islanders, or at the best, of a few other political exiles, all of whom would be as miserable as himself, and some of whom would probably ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... something between butler and buffoon to a dog-fancier.... In short, Fate drove poor Tihon to drink drop by drop to the dregs the bitter poisoned cup of a dependent existence. He had been, in his time, the sport of the dull malignity and the boorish pranks of slothful masters. How often, alone in his room, released at last 'to go in peace,' after a mob of visitors had glutted their taste for horseplay at his expense, he had vowed, blushing with shame, chill tears of despair ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... more comfortable and beautiful surroundings than the ordinary townsman of our day. Further, there was a community of interests, and many people collected together in the fortified villages, with the result that little by little they attained to an importance never acquired by the boorish French peasants or the German serfs; they bore arms, they had a common treasury, they elected their own magistrates, and whenever they went out to fight, it was to save ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... worn in ailes de pigeon, and duly powdered every morning by the barber from the Ecole Polytechnique, described five points on his low forehead, and made an elegant setting to his face. Though his manners were somewhat boorish, he was always as neat as a new pin and he took his snuff in a lordly way, like a man who knows that his snuff-box is always likely to be filled with maccaboy, so that when Mme. Vauquer lay down to rest on the day of M. Goriot's installation, ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... away his hand and burst into his noisy, boyish laughter, so reminiscent of things rural and boorish, of the coarse, strong spirits of the happy-go-lucky, irresponsibles that work as field hands and wood-haulers. "By cracky, Grant, I just got sight of the remnants of that dig I gave you. It ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... history of the movement in its palmy days—the brutal and cowardly baiting of a penalised class; the boorish insult to ideals held sacred by sensitive devotees; the deliberate cultivation of intra—parochial blood-feud; the savage fostering of hate for hate's own sake; the thousand squalid details of affray, ambuscade, murder, maltreatment, malicious injury to property—these, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... no subject, but them Bernilillo hold-ups snatches onto him in spite of his protests, an' passes him up onto the stage to the professor. They're plenty headlong, not to say boorish, them Bernilillo ruffians be; speshully if they've sot their hearts on anythin', an' pore Emil stands about the same show among 'em as a cottontail rabbit among a passel ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... and felt boorish. He had never liked and disapproved of Lady Sunderbund so much as he did at that moment. And he had no words ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... illiterate, boorish, ignorant man! That at forty years of age you should know so little of the workings of a ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... in the parlor and found them standing near the window. Stanley had tried to kiss Dorothy, and she had slapped his face. Fortunately he had taken the blow good-humoredly, and was pouring into her unwilling ear a fusillade of boorish compliments when. I ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... known by the generic name of Arya, [449] and those coming from Hindustan into the Nerbudda valley as Pardeshi, while in the same locality the Brahmans and Rajputs of Central India are designated by the Marathas as Rangra. This term has the signification of rustic or boorish, and is therefore a fairly close parallel to Kamathi, if the latter word has the meaning given above. In the Thana District of Bombay [450] people of many classes are included under the name of Kamathi. Though they do not marry ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... Aytta van Zuichem was a learned Frisian, born, according to some writers, of "boors' degree, but having no inclination for boorish work". According to other authorities, which the President himself favored, he was of noble origin; but, whatever his race, it is certain that whether gentle or simple, it derived its first and only ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... miss. That was a fine answer of Sophocles to a man who asked him, when in extreme old age, whether he was still a lover. "Heaven forbid!" he replied; "I was only too glad to escape from that, as though from a boorish and insane master." To men indeed who are keen after such things it may possibly appear disagreeable and uncomfortable to be without them; but to jaded appetites it is pleasanter to lack than to enjoy. However, he cannot ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... little window, and who, several times, in despair, had threatened to shoot. Tsiganok would retort, coarsely and derisively, and the quarrel would end peacefully because the dispute would soon turn into boorish, unoffending abuse, after which shooting would ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... was 'Lina'a angry reply. "He hates young ladies. So you may as well save your postage to New Orleans, and write at once to Miss Johnson that she cannot come on account of a boorish clown." ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... irony at his own presumptuousness. Now he understood Leonora's mocking tone, and the violence she had used in repulsing all boorish liberties he had tried to take. But despite the contempt he began to feel for himself, he lacked the strength to withdraw now. He had been caught up in the wake of seduction, the maelstrom of love that followed the actress everywhere, enslaving men, casting them, ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... occasion. Mr. Bob Wheeler had departed to his work that morning in a condition which his family, who were fond of homely similes, had likened to a bear with a sore head. The sisterly attentions of Emma Wheeler were met with a boorish request to keep her paws off; and a young Wheeler, rash and inexperienced in the way of this weary world, who publicly asked what Bob had "got the hump about," was sternly ordered to finish his breakfast in the washhouse. ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... spot in Europe—it was rarely possible for anyone to obtain permission to approach it. Even to Miss Durham, friend of the Albanians, this people sent a decided refusal. But now, under the guidance of the Yugoslav authorities, they have abandoned these boorish ways; Miss Durham could go there at any time, but maybe the village no longer ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... over in my head and wondering what their boorish conduct could mean, when I saw, as I rode from the village, a great T new carved upon a tree. I had already seen more than one in my morning's ride, but I had given no thought to them until the words of the beer-drinker gave them an importance. It chanced that a respectable-looking person ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... went out regularly once every four weeks. He fell very naturally into the ways of the house, and although his manner often amused Alice Merton greatly, and caused even her father to smile, he was never awkward or boorish. ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... (the flower springing up side down from the leaves), the whole being traversed at random by spirals, which are utterly foreign to the spirit of such a style, and all this at the caprice of uncultured, boorish designers. Once we see that the original of the form was a plant, we shall ever in the developed, artistic form cling, in a general way at least, to the laws of its organization, and we shall at any rate be in a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... indeed bore the same name. As he was now safe from violence, it was resolved to take the audacious step of accusing him of the murder of his father. Outrageous as it seems, the plan held out some promise of success. The accused was a man of singularly reserved character, rough and boorish in manner, and with no thoughts beyond the rustic occupations to which his life was devoted. His father, on the other hand, had been a man of genial temper, who spent much of his time among the polished circles of the Capitol. If there was no positive estrangement between ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... lawn, reaching through an elaborate iron fence to get it as he went cross-lots back to school. He would call it stealing now to do that same, but then it had been in the nature of a holy rite offered to a vestal virgin. Yet he must have cast it down with the grin of an imp, boorish urchin that he was; and he remembered blushing hotly in the dark afterwards at his presumption, as he thought of it alone at night. And all the time she had been liking it. The little girl—the little sweet girl! She had kept it in her ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... whether the woman was married or single, she would have been thought very churlish and boorish if she refused any favor asked by a male ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... could not produce a Moliere, a Racine, a Rousseau, a Voltaire, a Massillon, a Beaumarchais, or a Diderot, people must make up their minds to it, and accept the fact that great men had upholsterers and clockmakers and cutlers for their fathers. She said that genius was always noble. She railed at boorish squires for understanding their real interests so imperfectly. In short, she talked a good deal of nonsense, which would have let the light into heads less dense, but left her audience agape at her eccentricity. And in these ways ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... great composer is said to have had an unlimited admiration for a well-made and well-carried (bien porte) dress. Now what a totally different picture presents itself when we turn to George Sand, who says of herself, in speaking of her girlhood, that although never boorish or importunate, she was always brusque in her movements and natural in her manners, and had a horror of gloves and profound bows. Her fondness for male garments is as characteristic as Chopin's connoisseurship of the female toilette; it did not ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... it is generally considered decidedly boorish to utter complaints against the ladies. But I am for the present a bachelor, and in that capacity claim freedom of speech as my peculiar privilege. In virtue of my unhappy position, then, I proceed to utter the first of ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... So this was what you wished to speak to me about. This was why you were so—so boorish and disagreeable in that shop. Tell me—was that the reason? Was that why you followed me there? Did you think—did you presume to think of preventing my buying what I ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... "It is just because I respect religion that I do not like to see it burlesqued and parodied. Let a true angel appear and I am ready to render him homage; but I am enraged when I see great seraph's wings tied with white strings to the shoulders of wicked, boorish, little thieves, liars, cowards, slaves, and rascals. Their hypocritical airs do not impose on me, for I read their base natures in their eyes. I detest all affectations, all shams. I have the misfortune of being able ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... and there he is full of fun, bright and cheerful; when alone with his wife he has scarcely a word to say; he moves about the house with the lofty indifference of a lord, and with a heartless disregard of every member of the household. At home he is cold and cross and boorish, in other women's parlors he is polite and considerate and engaging. He has a smile and a compliment for other women, none for his wife. If they attend an evening reception, he brings his wife there, and he takes her home; during the interval she ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... with the art with which he forced salads from the boorish soils, found him favour and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... was not much regarded. Her place was by no means lofty. If the virgin, the ideal woman, rose higher from age to age, the real woman was held of little worth among these boorish masses, in this medley of men and herds. Wretched was the doom of a condition which could only change with the growth of separate dwellings, when men at length took courage to live apart in hamlets, or to build them huts in far-off ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... superiority in chemical production because trained chemists, willing to work at one semi-mechanical task, can be hired for less than a Fifth Avenue butler is paid in America, and a certain pre-eminence in military affairs reached by subjecting the mass of the people to the brutal, boorish, non-commissioned officers and the galling yoke of ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... which some individuals and some newspapers have spoken of the enemy. I suppose there are few gentlemen who have not winced at such remarks. But let Mr. Methuen glance at the continental press and see the work of the supporters of the enemy. It will make him feel more charitable towards his boorish fellow-countrymen. Or let him examine the Dutch press in South Africa and see if all the abuse is on one side. Here are some appreciations from the first letter of P.S. (of ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... childishness of childhood she won all hearts. Her little people are the beau-ideal of nursery propriety—clean, good-tempered, happy small gentlefolk. For, though they assume peasants' garb, they never betray boorish manners. Their very abandon is only that of nice little people in play-hours, and in their wildest play the penalties that await torn knickerbockers or soiled frocks are not absent from their minds. Whether they really interested children as they delighted their elders is ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... their intended stay, an incident occurred which furnished a proper termination to their frolic. A rough, boorish fellow came to visit them, who evidently "hailed" from remote country districts, into which the civilizing influences of education had not penetrated. All his utterances, for his words should scarcely be dignified with the name of conversation, showed him to be ignorant ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... injured her, he had meant only to be kind: she was grateful to him. She knew nothing of him, save that he was a musician, and that he was much maligned: but, in her ignorance of life and men, she had a natural intuition about people, which unhappiness had sharpened, and in her queer, boorish companion she had recognized a quality of candor equal to her own, and a sturdy kindness, the mere memory of which was comforting and good to think on. The evil she had heard of him did not at all affect the confidence which Christophe had inspired in her. Being herself a victim she had no doubt ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... towards the young king at St. Germains, whose right to the throne was undeniable, and whose accession to it, at the death of his sister, by far the greater part of the English people would have preferred, to the having a petty German prince for a sovereign, about whose cruelty, rapacity, boorish manners, and odious foreign ways, a thousand stories were current. It wounded our English pride to think, that a shabby High-Dutch duke, whose revenues were not a tithe as great as those of many of the princes of our ancient English nobility, who could not speak a word of our ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... he returned, gazing hard into her smiling face. As her smile grew brighter, his own face darkened, until she began to look embarrassed at his boorish temper. "I want you to tell me, once for all, Miss Sheldon, that you are here of your own choice and free will," he blurted out. "If I'm uncivil or rude, excuse me. I can't feel any other way until I know this. Ever since ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... question," said Raven curtly, in his disaffection, "of how much you're worth. It's simply yours, that's all, and you've got to have it. Well, I can refuse it, I suppose. Only that's so boorish. It drags everybody out into the open. What made her! Oh, ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... she knew how to take care of herself, although her only protectress was a perfectly inoffensive mother. On the occasion of the Prince of Wales's visit to Lahore, had she not boxed the ears of a burly and somewhat boorish swain, who had chosen the outside of an elephant as an eligible locale for a proposal, the uncouth abruptness of which did not accord with her notion of the ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... looked on me with grave, kind eyes. But the woman's heart within her sent the red blood flaming to her cheeks. It was then given to me to fathom the lowest depth of boorish stupidity I ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... Now the style of outward movements pertains to the beauty of honesty. For Ambrose says (De Offic. i, 18): "The sound of the voice and the gesture of the body are distasteful to me, whether they be unduly soft and nerveless, or coarse and boorish. Let nature be our model; her reflection is gracefulness of conduct and beauty of honesty." Therefore there is a virtue about ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... could bandy words with the fighters on the galleries inside the walls. Among La Tour's fighters were Swiss mercenaries—men who fight for the highest pay. Did Charnisay in the language of the day "grease the fist" of the Swiss sentry, or was it a case of a boorish fellow refusing to fight under a woman's command? Legend gives both explanations; but on Easter Sunday morning Charnisay's men gained entrance by scaling the walls where the Swiss sentry stood. Madame La Tour rushed her men to an inner fort loopholed with guns. Afraid of a final defeat that would ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... country way of expressing themselves, is not easily understood—it is so strangely altered. It is true that it is so in many parts of England besides, but in none in so gross a degree as in this part. This way of boorish country speech, as in Ireland it is called the "brogue" upon the tongue, so here it is called "jouring;" and it is certain that though the tongue be all mere natural English, yet those that are but a little acquainted with them cannot understand one-half of what they say. It ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe
... by no means to be confounded with the obstreperous conceit of ages of mannerism, who, out of vanity, introduce the fleeting modes and fashion of the day into art, because to them everything like noble simplicity seems boorish and rude. The latter impropriety is now abolished: but, on the other hand, our poets and artists, if they would hope for our approbation, must, like servants, wear the livery of distant centuries and foreign nations. We are everywhere at home ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... trouble just the moment before I ran against your chair, Miss Earle, and I hope you will excuse me on the ground of temporary insanity. Why, you know, they even let off murderers on that plea, so I hope to be forgiven for being careless in the first place, and boorish in the second." ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... own interminable correspondence with my lawyers and the agents of all my various property; took a hand at piquet or backgammon of evenings with me and my mother; or, being an ingenious lad enough (though of a mean boorish spirit, as became the son of such a father), accompanied my Lady Lyndon's spinet with his flageolet; or read French and Italian with her: in both of which languages her Ladyship was a fine scholar, and with which he also ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to Court the day after, but to me and some others not a syllable of any description was uttered, and when some more English were shewn in who were, I presume, as respectable as myself, his behaviour was quite boorish, he did not condescend to look towards the door. These things went on till a throng of Spaniards with Stars and orders came in; with these he appeared tolerably intimate, and also with three Englishmen who afterwards appeared. We were about 24 in number, and all I had to do in the half-hour ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... claim, whose ability and worth had so raised him from the lower degrees of the social scale. You would turn from such propositions with abhorrence, and the servants in your kitchen and stable—the ignorant and boorish refuse of foreign populations, in whose countries no such prejudice exists, imbibing it with the very air they breathe here—would shrink from eating at the same table with such a man, or holding out the hand of common ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... touched her on the shoulder—the left shoulder. It was an ill-bred and thoughtless act, but as I knew, when I had pondered the matter more calmly, Miss Harding has too much sense and poise to exhibit such anger at what at its worst was merely a boorish indiscretion. It was the only straw on which I could float an apology for a concrete act, but I thought later on I did not help my ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... one of the painter's fixed principles: he does not, with German sentimentality, make shepherds and peasants graceful or sublime, but he purposely vulgarizes them, not by making their actions or their faces boorish or disagreeable, but rather by painting them ill, and composing their draperies tamely. As far as I recollect at present, the principle is universal with him; exactly in proportion to the dignity of character is the beauty of the painting. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... would hardly have a quiet hour here: for great herds of cattle come crowding down every day to my lake for water; the noisy ploughman, driving his team afield, disturbs the morning hour with his boorish shouts; and boys and dogs keep up a constant din, and make life in this place ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... of speaking of Clarendon Beverley!" he exclaimed, almost fiercely. "These Yankees have no respect for any thing on earth, but their own boorish selves." ...
— Hurrah for New England! - The Virginia Boy's Vacation • Louisa C. Tuthill
... without raising his hat. A denizen of Heydon Hay who had taken off his hat in the open air to a woman would have been scoffed by his neighbors, and would probably have startled the woman herself as much as his own sense of propriety. But all the same Reuben's salute seemed mutilated and boorish to the man of more finished breeding, and helped to mark him as unworthy to be the suitor of so charming a ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... the Spanish Bourbons was a situation that Napoleon could readily utilize in order to have his way both in Portugal and in Spain. On the throne of Spain was seated the aging Charles IV (1788- 1808), boorish, foolish, easily duped. By his side sat his queen, a coarse sensuous woman "with a tongue like a fishwife's." Their heir was Prince Ferdinand, a conceited irresponsible young braggart in his early twenties. And ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... Handsell; and, in the Expansion of his Liking towards me, he began to give me instruction in the vocation in which a portion of my life has since (with no small Distinction, though I say it that should not) been passed. Of scientific Navigation this very Rude and Boorish person knew little, if any thing; but as a Practical Seaman he had much skill and experience. Indeed, if the Hands had not enjoyed a lively Faith in the solid sea-going Qualities of "Foul-Weather Bob," as they called him when they did not choose to give him ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... 600 The mares which led, lead still, and he who drives Eumelus is, the same who drove before. To whom the Cretan Chief, angry, replied. Ajax! whom none in wrangling can excel Or rudeness, though in all beside thou fall 605 Below the Argives, being boorish-rough, Come now—a tripod let us wager each, Or caldron, and let Agamemnon judge Whose horses lead, that, losing, thou may'st learn. He said; then sudden from his seat upsprang 610 Swift Ajax Oiliades, prepared For harsh retort, nor had the contest ceased Between them, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... baptism, than he insisted that this his only child—and he had no more afterwards—should be suckled by his own mother, and that in his tender years he should have his character formed in the house of his parents, rather than learn less gentle or even boorish ways and habits in the houses of peasants or common people. When he was well grown, he began to exercise him in painting, seeing him much inclined to such an art, and possessed of a very beautiful genius: wherefore not many years passed before Raffaello, still a boy, became a great ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... grain, atom, speck, mote, whit, iota, tittle, scintilla. Bluff, blunt, outspoken, downright, brusk, curt, crusty. Boast, brag, vaunt, vapor, gasconade. Body, corpse, remains, relics, carcass, cadaver, corpus. Bombastic, sophomoric, turgid, tumid, grandiose, grandiloquent, magniloquent. Boorish, churlish, loutish, clownish, rustic, ill-bred. Booty, plunder, loot, spoil. Brittle, frangible, friable, fragile, crisp. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... a neat, precise stroke of his penknife, lit the cigar and blew a cloud of blue smoke out of his mouth. All the time I was staring at him I could feel Moira's eyes on me, and I knew that she was wondering what made me so boorish and morose. Or, perhaps, with a woman's keen instinct for ferreting out the things she shouldn't know anything about, she guessed just what was the matter. To tell the truth I was just beginning to feel a little jealous. Frankly I considered that she ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... of this strange character was that of an overgrown country lout with boorish manners and silly mind. He did not and would not go to school, and he asserts now that if he had done so he "would have become as big a fool as other people." A shiftless fellow, left to his own devices, he performed some wonderful feats, and among the many stories connected with this period of ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... compare him. There were indeed among the ancients some, though very few, faithful and economical, but still they were stained by some vice or other; and among the chief faults which they had either by nature or habit, they were apt to be either rapacious or else boorish, and on that account contemptible; or else ill-natured and mischievous; or fawning too much on the powerful; or too elated with power, and therefore arrogant. But of any one so universally accomplished and prudent, I confess ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... native. The men of the lowest class emigrate to more favoured provinces, since their own is too poor to support them; they work hard, and return with their savings to their native hills. Their fellow-countrymen consider them boorish in manners, uneducated, and of a low class; but they are good-natured and docile, hard-working, temperate, and honest. "In your life," wrote the Duke of Wellington, "you never saw anything so bad as the Galicians; ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... remember," continued Eleanor, "that first sight of the great Earl. My brothers had teased me for going so far north, and told me the English were mere rude islanders—boorish, and unlettered; but, child as I was, scarce eleven years old, I could perceive the nobleness of the Earl. 'If all thy new subjects be like him,' said my brother to me, 'thou wilt reign over a race of kings.' And how good he was to me when I wept at leaving my home and ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the end at which she aims, the means which she employs in the present war? Is it enough to explain this contrast, to allege that in spite of all their science the Germans are but slightly civilized, that in the sixteenth century they were still boorish and uncultivated and that their science, an affair of specialists and pundits, has never penetrated their soul or influenced ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... very boorish way of thanking you for the premiere representation of your little poem. "To Delia in Girton" you call it, "recommending her to avoid the Muses, and seek the society of the Graces and Loves." An old-fashioned ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... struck by the intense bitterness in his tone. Truly this man, with his lightning changes from boorish incivility to whole-hearted hospitality, from apparently impenetrable reserve to an almost desperate outspokenness, was as incomprehensible as ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... proportion of rational discussion is larger in the conversation of the French. Both the French and the Italians combine natural and easy good manners with great punctiliousness in small matters of etiquette. Only very arrogant or very boorish people find it difficult to get ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... cover the whole ground. I want to get people to understand that in the future we shall not divide water, in this petty way, into potty little ponds and lakes and rivers: it will be one big satisfying thing, the same everywhere. Apres moi le Deluge. Belloc in his boorish boozy way may question my knowledge of French; but I fancy ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... of them. "Among your fraternity, I understand, there is a certain holy and benevolent blacksmith; a man of iron, in more senses than one; a rough, cross-grained, well-meaning individual, rather boorish in his manners, as might be expected, and by no means of the highest intellectual cultivation. He is a philanthropical lecturer, with two or three disciples, and a scheme of his own, the preliminary step in which involves a large purchase of land, ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and hungry, and hunger alone makes a man angry. He looked at the girl for whose sake he had raced all these miles of wild-goose chase, and a boorish longing to hurt her, to let her ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... barbarous in theirs. They had neither so many ways nor so many means of sinning; but the sum of their moral turpitude was greater than ours. We have a sort of decency and good breeding, which lay a certain restraint on our passions; they were boorish and beastly, and their bad passions ever in full play. Civilization prevents barbarity and atrocity; mental cultivation induces decency of manners—those primitive times were generally without these. Who that knows them would wish such ages ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... Virginia. The others he would willingly have dispensed with, especially the shipping clerk, whom he had sized up with one quick glance. He winced as he took note of the man's cheap, ready-made clothes and boorish manners. Decidedly he was quite impossible, but for the pleasure of a few moment's tete-a-tete with Virginia, he was ready to make any sacrifice—even to meet on equal social ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... odious mixture of mauvaise honte and impudence, a clumsiness, a slyness, and a consciousness in his bearing and countenance, not distinctly boorish, but low, which turned his good looks into an ugliness more intolerable than that of feature; and a corresponding vulgarity pervading his dress, his demeanour, and his very walk, marred whatever good points his figure possessed. ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... every sentence he overthrew an idol, or lowered my estimation of a friend. I saw everything with new eyes, and could only marvel at my former blindness. How was it possible that I had not before observed A's false hair, B's selfishness, or C's boorish manners? I and my companion, methought, walked the streets like a couple of gods among a swarm of vermin; for every one we saw seemed to bear openly upon his brow the mark of the apocalyptic beast. I half expected that ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shouted:—"Be off! I know you're an obstinate fellow! Go and look after the business; else I shall scold you severely; But don't fancy I'll ever allow you to bring home in triumph As my daughter-in-law any boorish impudent hussy. Long have I lived in the world, and know how to manage most people, Know how to entertain ladies and gentlemen, so that they leave me In good humour, and know how to flatter a stranger discreetly. But ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... an occasion when it would have been boorish in me to refuse to meet them halfway. I even told them an excellent wheeze I had long known, which I thought they might not, have heard. It runs: "Why is Charing Cross? Because the Strand runs into it." I mean to say, this is comic providing ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... Slavery fixed a brutalising mark on generation after generation that is not yet entirely erased. In the first half of the nineteenth century the knights of the shuttle—intellectual, disputatious, and lyrical—looked down with infinite contempt on the ignorant and boorish slaves of the pick. Poetry has, in consequence, little to say about the digger for coal. The song of "The Collier Laddie," attributed to Burns, is one of the very few pleasant pieces of verse ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... truth of this final assertion, I call you to witness the sticks at the door, Where they make it a daily, a 'manly' diversion, To ogle each woman, and sometimes do more, Who passes the hotel that's named by a saint, Where boorish bad manners give room ...
— Nothing to Eat • Horatio Alger [supposed]
... cooling his fires, we ordered our steeds out, and prepared to return, the whole personnel of the convent came to assist, with the inhabitants of a little village adjoining, which finds protection and Christian charity from the convent. The monks, excepting two or three, seemed of an ignorant and boorish quality, but hard-working and kind-hearted. Here, evidently, a certain kind of bliss was in ignorance, and the most learned were not wise enough to be accused of much folly. The Hegoumenos, in bidding us good by, begged us warmly to come again and stay long,—a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... Tee-Tee editor had half the gumption of a Kansas Gopher he would know that neither Mrs. Davis nor any other American woman made such "demand." Perhaps he did not know it,—if it be possible for the editor of such a quintessential extract of utter idiocy to know anything—but couldn't resist the boorish impulse to insult an aged woman, because he's built that way. The case of Senorita Cisneros appealed to the sympathy of every manly man and noble woman throughout the world—to every living creature within whose hide there pulses one drop of ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... was a success—he was a good bear—. But then, it was objected, that he was an objectless bear—a bear that meant nothing in particular, signified nothing,—simply stood there snarling over his shoulder at nothing—and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-natured intruder upon the fair page. All hands said that—none were satisfied. They hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as much to have him there when there was no paint to him. But presently Harte took a pencil and drew these two simple lines under his feet and behold he was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... manner. I had eaten nothing, not even a crust of the black bread, for fifty-four hours. Little wonder that I could scarcely keep my feet. My gaoler observed my condition, but said nothing, although he modified his customary boorish ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... were taught to walk by faith, not by sight, and to love One whom they did not see. And thus it came about that they trod no shore however desolate, went to no land however distant, dealt with no people however boorish, without carrying ever with them the thought, The Master ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... that made it materially acceptable, should rule us where the gift is something so precious as a word; and when we receive one from another people, gratitude, as well as sense of grace in the form of the gift itself, should make us watchful that it be not dimmed by the boorish breath of ignorance or cacophanized by unmusical voices. We therefore protest against a useful and tuneful noun-substantive, a native of France, the word bouquet, being maimed into boquet, a corruption as dissonant to the ear as were to the eye plucking a ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... have existed among the uneducated Romans that irregularity in the use of h which marks the language of the English cockney to-day. Nigidius Figulus, the grammarian, said: "Your speech becomes boorish if you aspirate wrongly." Catullus in one of his epigrams ridicules the cockneyism of a person who said chommoda for commoda, and hinsidiae for insidiae. [3] In later Latin, the varying spelling shows the growing irregularity of usage. H seems to have been omitted ...
— Latin Pronunciation - A Short Exposition of the Roman Method • Harry Thurston Peck
... fails to give his son at least a modicum of education falls under a public contempt, which involves no slight penalty. Practically all Athenians are at least literate. In Aristophanes's famous comedy, "The Knights," a boorish "sausage-seller" is introduced, who, for the purposes of the play, must be one of the very scum of society, and he is made to cry, "Only consider now my education! I can but barely read, just in a ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... not tell you," she said at length, "how greatly your boorish conduct of last night surprised me. To insult a guest, and especially to do so without provocation, is not the part ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... words, "creating delights for the gods to enjoy." He played at that time many of Bach's compositions, such as the "Well Tempered Clavicord," with his young assistant, Hans Richter, who had been recommended to him from Vienna as a copyist. What cared he for all this wild whirl of silly fancies and boorish conceit, so long as he, a genuine Prometheus, could create something new after the grandest models! In speaking of "Tannhaeuser" he tells us how supremely happy he was when occupied with the delightful work of real creation. ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... impudent dog; but I've always been accustomed to a boorish sort of insolence from my youth up. The 'classe ouvriere'—that is, the working people in Belgium—bear themselves brutally towards their employers; and by brutally, Joe, I mean brutalement—which, perhaps, when ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Samoa. Something in the very magic of the place seems to subdue or soften the evil in men. Heaven forbid I should deny that mean and treacherous and cruel acts of white men and brown are on record. But as a rule the greedy or the boorish, once they settle there, appear to mellow and grow quiet. Between this sea and sky even a trader becomes almost a gentleman, even a Prussian almost lovable, and the very missionaries are betrayed by beauty, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... France can doubt the powers of the commercial traveller; that intrepid soul who dares all, and boldly brings the genius of civilization and the modern inventions of Paris into a struggle with the plain commonsense of remote villages, and the ignorant and boorish treadmill of provincial ways. Can we ever forget the skilful manoeuvres by which he worms himself into the minds of the populace, bringing a volume of words to bear upon the refractory, reminding us of the indefatigable ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... shoulder he turned about, showing to the merchant a ruddy, sea-tanned skin, light brown hair, gray eyes, and a chin and mouth hidden by a two months' beard, still too bristly to give him other than an unkempt, boorish look. ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... as a freshman to Oriel. His career as an undergraduate was externally distinguished by nothing uncommon, and promised nothing remarkable. He describes himself as shy, awkward, boorish, and mentally shapeless and inert. In 1833, however, he felt what he describes as the first stirrings of intellectual life within him. 'Hitherto I have had no mind, properly so-called, merely a boy's intelligence, receptive ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... No man is so boorish or stupid or awkward, that he cannot, by God's grace, unite his will wholly and entirely with God's will. And nothing more is necessary than that he should say with earnest longing: O Lord, show me Thy dearest will, and strengthen me to do it. And God does ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... first, progressive as a stream they seek The middle field: but, scatter'd by degrees, Each to his choice, soon whiten all the land. There from the sun-burnt hay-field homeward creeps The loaded wain: while lighten'd of its charge, The wain that meets it passes swiftly by; The boorish driver leaning o'er his team Vociferous ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... serenade me, but I distinctly heard sounds of hissing. My niece De Nevers was greatly upset; she would eat no supper, but began to cry. "What are you worrying about?" quoth I to this excitable young person. "Don't you see that we are stopping the night on the estates of the Princess Palatine,—[The boorish Bavarian princess, the Duc d'Orleans's second wife. EDITOR'S NOTE.]—and that it is to her exquisite breeding that we ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... could not be prevailed upon to avail himself of her generosity; but following her to the other end of the room, thrust it into her sleeve without ceremony, exclaiming, "I'll be d—d to hell if I do." Peregrine, having checked him for his boorish behaviour, sent him out of the room, and begged that Miss Sophy would not endeavour to debauch the morals of his servant, who, rough and uncultivated as he was, had sense enough to perceive that he had no pretension to any such acknowledgment. ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... after this morning you will permit your whiskers to grow. Out here water is too precious to waste it shaving every morning. I suggested that point last night, but you ignored my polite hint. I hate to appear boorish, but I must remind you that these jacks are mine, that the four little kegs of water that they're carrying are mine, that this mozo—I beg your pardon—that this Indian is mine, and lastly—forgive me if I ascend once more into the realm of romance and improbability—this ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... well up the next morning when the procession of buckboards was ready to start for Gold City. Andrew Malden and the shrewd fellow had gone an hour before, the rest were off, and only the boorish Devonshire was left to ride down with Tony. Job stood, with heart palpitating and conscience goading him, down by the big pasture gate to let them through. All his peace of mind was gone. A few moments and the crime would ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... rapturous, soul-entrancing fire Of the celestial Muse; whose savage ears 70 Ne'er heard the sacred rules, nor even the names Of the Venusian bard, or critic sage Full-famed of Stagyra: whose clamorous tongues Stun the tormented ear with colloquy, Vociferate, trivial, or impertinent; Replete with boorish scandal; yet, alas! This, this! he must endure, or muse alone, Pensive and moping o'er the stubborn rhyme, Or line imperfect—No! the door is free, And calls him to evade their deafening clang, 80 By private ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... Galicians of the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain leave their poor country for a time for the richer provinces of Portugal and Spain, where they become porters, water-carriers and scavengers, and are known as boorish, but industrious and honest. The women from the neighboring mountain province of Asturias are the professional wet-nurses of Spain. They are to be seen in every aristocratic household of Madrid, but return to the mountains with their savings ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... Erie was close by, and it is so much better to accept asphyxia, which takes only three minutes by the watch, than a mesalliance, that lasts fifty years to begin with, and then passes along down the line of descent, (breaking out in all manner of boorish manifestations of feature and manner, which, if men were only as short-lived as horses, could be readily traced back through the square-roots and the cube-roots of the family stem on which you have hung the armorial bearings of the De Champignons or ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... matters little in these wilds. With all their faults our Whalen friends were just and generous in their dealings, though occasionally disquieting during their periods of festivity. The Eskimo we found boorish and surly at all times, and the treachery of these people is shown by the fact that a few years previously they had brutally murdered Mr. Lopp's predecessor by shooting him with a whale-gun. A monument on the cliff facing the Straits bears the ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... you did not think the thing too boorish to be pardoned. On the face of it it was rude ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... ill-behaving drugs. In truth, he hated to give anything noxious or loathsome to those who were uncomfortable enough already, unless he was very sure it would do good,—in which case, he never played with drugs, but gave good, honest, efficient doses. Sometimes he lost a family of the more boorish sort, because they did not think they got their money's worth out of him, unless they had something more than a taste of everything he carried in ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... complaints made by them against our mariners. I found him and the president of their factory very impatient, calling us insolent English, threatening that our pride would have a fall, with many other disgraceful and opprobrious words.[134] Such was the entertainment we received from that boorish general, named Garrat Reynes, in his own house. He had formerly shewn the like or worse to Mr Ball, on going aboard his ship at Banda: And four of our men, who took passage with him from thence to Cambello, were brought ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... our broken language, our ignorant curiosity, and, on the part of many our boorish manners, would have been nauseating in the extreme to men and women accustomed to refined association. Of course these failings are passing away: but the polished among you have often been made ashamed at the uncouth antics of some ignorant Negroes, courting the attention of the ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... asked you to. And knowing that, I can't accept what you do for me as from a friend, for I don't feel friendly toward you in the least." His face flushed painfully. "I'm not trying to insult you or be boorish," he said; "I just want you to understand how I feel about it. And now that you know, I suppose you'd better let the matter go, although I'm much obliged to you for ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... everyone volatile. The customs officials, careless of the position of those whom they dealt with, either inspected every cubic inch of luggage with boorish suspicion and resultant damage or else waved the proffered handbags airily aside with false geniality. The highways, repeating a pattern I had cause to know so well, were nearly impassable with brokendown cars and other litter. The streets of Queens, cluttered with wreckage and ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... he would gurgle. "I don't see how they can be so boorish." He thought there was no sadder sight than his six brothers and sisters jostling one another over their food, while he couldn't find a place to ...
— The Tale of Grunty Pig - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... Sir Oliver, that had you killed him after what happened I could not hold you guilty of having done more than punish a boorish ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... he told you! Alice, he is a perfectly unknown and untrained young—creature. All young men talk that way. He is perfectly gauche and boorish in his manner—" ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... may prove so. But of this I am certain (for I know my countrymen) that until every other country in the Christian world, even to barbarian Muscovy and the hamlets of the boorish Germans, have its playhouse at the public charge, England will never adventure. And she will adventure then only because it is her desire to be ever in the fashion, and to do humbly and dutifully whatso she seeth everybody else doing. In the meantime you must content yourself as best you can ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... man. The presence of women always disconcerted him, and made him feel awkward and boorish. He had been too much of a student in higher art to acquire the smaller art of the drawing-room. He felt ill at ease in society, and seemed to have a fatal predilection for saying the wrong thing, and suffered the torture afterwards of remembering what the right ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... rude, uncivil, disrespectful, saucy, insolent, impertinent, churlish, brusque, unamiable, surly, gruff, boorish. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the strong fighter, the rugged accomplisher the boisterous enthusiast, among their men. Whether these are atheistic, immoral, boorish, cruel, are considerations of secondary importance. The daughters marry them with little hesitation. Men are men, supreme, to be adored. Women are to be tolerated, stepped on, sat upon. Man is the master, woman is the ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... mean to put up with it no longer; and in consequence I take the boorish liberty of suggesting that this is none of ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... marry this woman. Therefore, you clown, abandon,—which is in the vulgar, leave,—the society,—which in the boorish is company,—of this female,—which in the common is woman,—which together is abandon the society of this female; or, clown, thou perishest; or, to thy better understanding, diest; or, to wit, I kill thee, make thee away, translate thy life into death, thy liberty into bondage: I will deal in ...
— As You Like It • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... inspired by indignation, on this topic: "He affected German downrightness, to which he was a stranger; and followed, under a deceitful show of piety, all the principles of Machiavel. With the most sordid love of money he combined boorish manners. Lies [of the distilled kind chiefly] had so become a habit with him, that he had altogether lost notion of employing truth in speech. It was the soul of a usurer, inhabiting now the body ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... fire glowed in the grate. On a table beside the couch tea was spread. Even as yesterday, the nearest chair to the couch was at least six feet away, making it necessary for any one who did not wish to appear boorish to share the couch with her. There was something else that he had noticed on entering: while he had been away she had made a complete change of toilet. She was now dressed in a filmy gown of emerald green, with shoes, stockings ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... constant necessity of maintaining an aspect of authority and dignity, before his men, had left refining marks upon his face, which distinguished it as a different sort from the countenances about him with their expressions of pathetic stolidity, or boorish shrewdness. In a word, although they knew old Elnathan Hamlin to be one of themselves, they instinctively felt that this son of his ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... he even made jokes in a Catonian manner; jokes that were not peculiarly witty, but somewhat gruff and boorish, yet significant of a resigned and self-contented mind. One morning he ordered Ratcliffe to take an iron-clad ship of war and attack the Sioux in Montana, seeing that he was in charge of the army and navy and Indians at once, and Jack of all trades; and again he told ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... have known a few persons who have once been in society, but who have allowed themselves to remain away from all sorts of gatherings, for a number of years. In every case, the result has been openly noticeable. They have become boorish in manners, unsympathetic in nature, and suspicious in spirit. Thus they have grown out of harmony with the ideas and ways of those about them, have come to take distorted and erroneous views of affairs and of men. Man is a composite ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... it was a remembrance of his own youth which made Dr Trevor pass his hand through Betty's arm and lead her ahead, so that his son should have the pleasure of a talk with this very charming little lady. Miles was the best of good fellows, all solid goodness and worth, but he was still in the boorish stage, and it would do him good to be drawn out of himself, and forced to ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... that the wrong was all on one side. There were employers who were unjust and cruel when they had the power, unreasonable in argument, and boorish and exasperating in their manners. Many seemed to think they were a different class of beings because they had more money than their workmen, and they resented the idea of the latter rising above the station in which they ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... neither boorish nor blunt, but even these are preferable to simpering and crawling. I wish every English youth could see those of the United States of America; always civil, never servile. Be obedient, where obedience is due; for, it is no act of meanness, and no indication of want of spirit, to yield implicit ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... he sir? Clo. He sir, that must marrie this woman: Therefore you Clowne, abandon: which is in the vulgar, leaue the societie: which in the boorish, is companie, of this female: which in the common, is woman: which together, is, abandon the society of this Female, or Clowne thou perishest: or to thy better vnderstanding, dyest; or (to wit) I kill thee, make thee away, translate thy ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... said about the tactics of renewing the broken tie. There is needed a certain tactful considerateness. In all such questions the grace of the act depends as much on the manner of it, as on the act itself. The grace of the fairest act may be hurt by a boorish blemish of manner. Many a graceful act is spoiled by a graceless touch, as a generous deed can be ruined by a grudging manner. An air of condescension will destroy the value of the finest charity. There is a forgiveness which is no forgiveness—formal, constrained, ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... robbers proceeded to further lengths. They took upon themselves to appoint a high priest; selected a family which had no claim whatever to the distinction and, drawing lots among them, chose as high priest one Phannias—a country priest, ignorant, boorish, and wholly unable to discharge the function of the office. Hitherto, the people had submitted to the oppression of the Zealots, but this desecration of the holy office filled them with rage and ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... Salvator, "now I see it all; now I see it all. What threatens to be your ruin, Antonio, is this man's hatred against me. For I must tell you that this nephew of the Pope's, a proud, coarse, boorish clown, was amongst the animals in my picture to whom the Goddess of Fortune is dispensing her gifts. That it was I who helped you to win your Marianna, though indirectly, is well known, not only to this man, but to all Rome,—which ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... (additional misfortune!) had inspired him with such a silly reverence for Plato and Socrates, Aristotle and Theophrastus, that he had been induced to make them his models. "Whatever manners," says the emperor, "I may have previously contracted, whether gentle or boorish, it is impossible for me now to alter or unlearn. Habit is said to be a second nature; to oppose it is irksome, but to counteract the study of more than thirty years is extremely difficult, especially when it has been imbibed with so ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... slavish way, that his master's clothes were finer than the Northern captain's, his hands whiter, and proud that it was so,—holding Lamar's foot daintily, trying to see himself in the shoe, smoothing down the trousers with a boorish, affectionate touch,—with the same fierce whisper in his ear, Would the shoes ever be cleaned again? would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... you remember the night that I came home and told you and father how Dakota had rescued me from the quicksand? Well," she continued, noting his nod and the frown which accompanied it, "you were cross that night—almost boorish. You moped and went off to bed without ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... other defects. Take two men possessing equal advantages in every other respect; if one be gentlemanly, kind, obliging, and conciliating, and the other disobliging, rude, harsh, and insolent, the former will become rich while the boorish ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... will generally heed such hints, which a moment's reflection will teach him are meant to preserve the library book clean and presentable for his own use, as well as for that of others. But there will always be some rude, boorish people who will persist in their brutal and destructive treatment of books, in the face of whatever warnings. How to deal with such unwelcome persons is an ever-present problem with the librarian. ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... most boorish dialect and pronunciation, the stranger to Christina's ears, because intercourse with foreign merchants, and a growing affectation of Latinism, had much refined the city language to which she was accustomed; and she was surprised to perceive by her ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... physical rope-dancing and nimble boldness, of which all the Gods have learnt to be afraid. If any one wishes to see the "German soul" demonstrated ad oculos, let him only look at German taste, at German arts and manners what boorish indifference to "taste"! How the noblest and the commonest stand there in juxtaposition! How disorderly and how rich is the whole constitution of this soul! The German DRAGS at his soul, he drags at everything he experiences. He digests his events badly; ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... want of discretion I dare say we took too much to drink, and I know we talked too much. We became particularly hot upon some boorish sneer of Drummle's, to the effect that we were too free with our money. It led to my remarking, with more zeal than discretion, that it came with a bad grace from him, to whom Startop had lent money in my presence but a ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... to give to the world, bequeathed to it also a consciousness of its nerves and a pride in its very defects. When Coleridge had taught his successors to glorify the poetic perception and vision, to give to the secret feelings a new warrant and value, they came to think it boorish to conceal their fine feelings, and they acquired the habit of expressing feelings which the common man scarcely experiences without a sense of shame. The poet came to be essentially the man who felt ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... concerning the relations between his daughter and his tenant's herd-boy. To describe his feelings at the bare fact that such a hint was possible, would be more labour than the result would repay.—What! his own flesh and blood, the heiress of Glashruach, derive pleasure from the boorish talk of such a companion! It could not be true, when the mere thought, without the belief of it, filled him with such indignation! He was overwhelmed with a righteous disgust. He did himself the justice of making himself certain before ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... in the works after "Timon." There is practically no humour, no wit, the clowns even are merely boorish-stupid with the solitary exception of Autolycus, who is a pale reflex of one or two characteristics of Falstaff. Shakespeare's humour has disappeared, or is so faint as scarcely to be called humour; all the heroines, too, are now vowed away ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... want a bullet through our skulls," he answered in boorish derision; and the man between ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... to be such a source of trouble. He was grateful enough, but reluctant. Carr, however, went about it in a way that permitted nothing short of a boorish refusal, and presently Mr. Thompson found himself, with a crutch made of a forked willow, crossing the meadow ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... scanty dues willingly contributed to the hunted priests of his own prescribed religion. His resident upper class—though we must allow for many honourable exceptions—was the Squirearchy, satirized by Arthur Young as petty despots with the vices of despots; idle, tyrannical, profligate, boorish, fit founders of the worst social system the modern civilized world has ever known. The slave-owning planters of Carolina were by no means devoid of similar faults, which are the invariable products of arbitrary control over ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... almost equal facility. If whatever speech we hear is well spoken, correct, and beautiful, so will our language be; if it is vulgar, or incorrect, or slangy, our speech will be of this kind. If the first manners which serve us as models are coarse and boorish, ours will resemble them; if they are cultivated and refined, ours will be like them. If our models of conduct and morals are questionable, our conduct and morals will be of like type. Our manner of walking, of dressing, ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... of his triumph and exultation, had not leisure to recollect, nor perhaps penetration to perceive, the effect that this little sally might have upon his interests. Despotic and boorish as was the genius of Mr. Hartley, it cowred under that of Sophia with the most abject servility. And that lady now vowed eternal war against the ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... dudgeon, and he was left to curse his ill-timed jest. What a blundering fool he had been! Her first, timid little advance,—and he had met it with boorish, clownish wit! A scurvy jest, indeed! She was justified in ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... patient oxen; but not, if you mean only a delicate, compact, penetrative nudge with the toe of a tight-fitting gaiter,—addressed rather to the conscience than the sole, to the sensibilities rather than the senses. The kick masculine is coarse, boorish, unmitigated, predicable only of Calibans. The kick feminine is expressive, suggestive, terse, electric,—an indispensable instrument in domestic discipline, as women will bear me witness, and not at all incompatible with beauty, grace, and amiability. But, right or wrong, after all this ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... Cymbeline, King of Britain, has lost his two sons. His only remaining child, a daughter named Imogen, is married to Posthumus. His second wife, a cruel and scheming woman, plots to destroy Posthumus so that her son, the boorish Cloten, may marry Imogen. ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... city without much fashion or style then, and this aspect has intensified itself. The peasant is the born enemy of the town, and whilst he may be perfect in the country he is a boorish and non-comprehending fellow when he comes to the capital to rule. The peasant in power has very little use for the brighter side of civilization. The more the latter is cut down the better for him. He has, unfortunately, grasped ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... poets felt justified in neglecting it in their scanning. It was probably scarcely pronounced at all by the less educated Romans, since it is often wholly omitted in inscriptions, and has been lost in modern Italian. Cicero, Orator 161, says that the neglect to pronounce final s is 'somewhat boorish' (subrusticum), though formerly thought 'very refined' (politius). Even Lucretius sometimes disregards it in his scanning. In the ordinary literary Latin a large number of words has lost an original s; e.g. ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... with a self-conscious dignity and some chagrin at their boorish clatter, their absolute ignorance of discipline. "I shall ring the bell in ten minutes," she told them while they scuffled to the door. "I shall give you two minutes after the bell rings to get into your seats and be prepared for duty. Every ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... the clearest invalidation of marriage, the frustration of the noblest and most divine ends of the institution; an essentially worse frustration, he dares to say in one place, than even that conjugal infidelity which "a gross and boorish opinion, how common soever," would alone resent or recognise. It is marvellous with what richness of varying language he paints to the reader the horrible condition of a man tied for life to a woman with whom he can hold no rational or worthy conversation. "A familiar ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... impressive than the meekness of the saint. The mischief is that we like anything from a man of power. If he is insolent, we think it grand; if he is stupid, we think it a sort of condescension; if he is mild and polite, we think it marvellous; if he is boorish, we think it is simple-minded. It is power that we admire, or rather success, and both can be inherited. If a man gets a big position in England, he is always said to grow into it; but that is because we care about the position more than we ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Sicinius Clarus, and with this end in view threatened to exclude her sons, whose guardian he was, from the possession of any of their father's property, if she married elsewhere. She therefore suffered herself to be betrothed to Sicinius Clarus, 'a boorish and decrepit old man,' but put off the marriage, until her father-in-law's death released her from all embarrassment. Pontianus and Pudens succeeded to the property, and Pudentilla felt herself free to take a husband of her own choice. She informed ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... think so?" replied Mrs. Sefton, indifferently. "Richard is always terribly boorish in appearance; and as to his manners, nothing will polish them. But what can you expect, when he affects the company of farmers? Neville is worth a hundred of him," she continued, as she rose, with a discontented expression, to ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... colt. untutored, unschooled (ignorant) 491. unkempt. uncombed, untamed, unlicked[obs3], unpolished, uncouth; plebeian; incondite[obs3]; heavy, rude, awkward; homely, homespun, home bred; provincial, countrified, rustic; boorish, clownish; savage, brutish, blackguard, rowdy, snobbish; barbarous, barbaric; Gothic, unclassical[obs3], doggerel, heathenish, tramontane, outlandish; uncultivated; Bohemian. obsolete &c. (antiquated) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... young men, countrymen, who had entered from the New Sanderson car, and sat next the German woman, eyed him at the gesture, and their eyes fell with a sort of dull dissent upon his handsome coat. One said something to the other, and both laughed with boorish malice. Then one, after glancing at the conductor, whose back was turned as he talked to one of the pretty girls with pompadours, bent his head hastily to the floor. Then he scraped his foot, and looked aloft with an innocent and unconcerned expression. One of the pretty girls had observed him, ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... began to be thawed into a father. But the fear of a rival in the King's favour—some gallant soldier—and dozens of them were reported every week—made him resolve once more to bring his daughter's beauties into play. The king had seen her, and, in his boorish way, had expressed his admiration; and Gyllenborg felt assured, that if he should marry his daughter according to the King's wishes, his influence would be greater than ever; and, in fact, that the premiership ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... precisely you," I continued. "You persist, in a rude and boorish manner, in interrupting my conversation with the other ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... within an ace of driving his fist into the face of his boorish visitor, but held himself awkwardly in check. Everybody rose. Lake lost his head and caught himself on the verge of saying, 'Must you go?' Then began the farrago of leave-taking. 'So nice of you—' 'I am awfully sorry' 'By Jove! how things ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London |
