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Obsolete   Listen
adjective
Obsolete  adj.  
1.
No longer in use; gone into disuse; disused; neglected; as, an obsolete word; an obsolete statute; applied chiefly to words, writings, or observances.
2.
(Biol.) Not very distinct; obscure; rudimental; imperfectly developed; abortive.
Synonyms: Ancient; antiquated; old-fashioned; antique; old; disused; neglected. See Ancient.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Obsolete" Quotes from Famous Books



... preacher, he had kept within the strict bounds of pulpit-oratory, he would scarcely have been much distinguished among his Calvinistic brethren: as a mere author, he would have excited attention rather by his quaintness and affectation of an obsolete style and mode of thinking, than by any thing else. But he has contrived to jumble these several characters together in an unheard-of and unwarranted manner, and the fascination is altogether irresistible. Our Caledonian divine is equally an anomaly in religion, in literature, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... returned the polite operator, "the term you use is quite obsolete in our profession." He rose from his knees, and added modestly: "I ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins

... they are. And allow me to point out that the word 'ain't' is becoming obsolete in polite conversation, giving place to 'are not' or to 'is not' as the case may be. Now, returning to our grammar—" And forthwith I began to decline for her benefit verbs regular and irregular, together with their ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol

... early and modern lexicographers give the word, which, though now obsolete, was in common use in parts of New England ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames

... begirt with iron, existed in the city of New Amsterdam. This is but a lofty and gigantic mode, in which we heroic writers always talk of war, thereby to give it a noble and imposing aspect; equipping our warriors with bucklers, helms, and lances, and such-like outlandish and obsolete weapons, the like of which perchance they had never seen or heard of; in the same manner that a cunning statuary arrays a modern general or an admiral in the accoutrements of a Caesar or an Alexander. ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... strikes. Fuel is produced by chemical and physical processes. Tariffs and wars are abolished: aerial navigation, that helped itself to chemicals as motor power, pronounced the sentence of death upon those obsolete habits. The whole problem of industry then consists in discovering sources of power, that are inexhaustible and resortable to with little labor. Until now we have produced steam through the chemical energy of burning mineral coal. But mineral coal is hard to get and its supply decreases daily. ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... national, one family or clan or nation fancied one, another another. While this one became fixed and classical, all others became useless, remained perhaps here and there in proverbial sayings or in sacred songs, but were given up at last completely, as strange, obsolete, and unintelligible. ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... childhood (such as licking things, clicking with the tongue, grinding the teeth, biting the nails, shrugging corrugations, pulling buttons, or twisting garments, strings, etc., twirling pencils, etc.) are relics of past forms of utilities now essentially obsolete. Ancient modes of locomotion, prehension, balancing, defense, attack, sensuality, etc., are all rehearsed, some quite fully and some only by the faintest mimetic suggestion, flitting spasmodic tensions, gestures, or ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... obsolete," Minver said. "They only play the flute in the orchestras now. I always look at the man who plays it and think of my uncle. He used to be very nice to me as a child; and he was very fond of my father, in a sort of filial way; my father was so much older. I ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells

... therefore can write no other, whereas the pedant has read much more bad Latin than good, and consequently writes so too. He looks upon the best classical books, as books for school-boys, and consequently below him; but pores over fragments of obscure authors, treasures up the obsolete words which he meets with there, and uses them upon all occasions to show his reading at the expense of his judgment. Plautus is his favorite author, not for the sake of the wit and the vis comica of his comedies, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... her father dressing in his ancient suit of rusty black and pulling on his obsolete boots. She stole into the dining-room and looked at the table. Three ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers

... from the shelf again, she remained standing at some distance from him, stretching her arms downwards and clasping her fingers tightly as she looked with a sad dreariness in her young face at the lifeless objects around her—the parchment backs, the unchanging mutilated marble, the bits of obsolete ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... incanus, foliis oppositis lineari-oblongis obsolete triplinerviis obtusis, pedunculis axillaribus folio multo bevioribus apice divaricato-bifidis 6-floris, floribus pentameris aequalibus, petalis linearibus, antheris linearibus ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... doubt that twenty-five hundred years ago the daily life and social customs in the north of India, which had been under undisputed Aryan control long enough for the Sanscrit language to spring up, come to perfection and finally become obsolete, were more like ours than like those of modern India after the, many—and especially the Mohammedan—conquests and after centuries of ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles

... a motley personality, which is sufficiently evident in his portraits. There was in him the Puritan, the man of the world, and the vagabond. There was something too of the obsolete soldier of fortune, with the cocked and feathered hat, worn audaciously on one side. There was also a touch of the elfin, the uncanny—the mysterious charm that belongs to the borderland between the real and the unreal world—the element so conspicuous and so indefinable in the art of Hawthorne. ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... narration which is rarer than all others in the nineteenth century. In our love of stimulants, and our numbness of taste, which craves the red pepper of a biting vocabulary, we of the present generation are apt to overlook this almost obsolete and unobtrusive quality; but we doubt if, since Chaucer, we have had an example of more purely objective narrative than in "The Courtship of Miles Standish." Apart from its intrinsic beauty, this gives the poem a claim to higher and more thoughtful consideration; and we feel sure that posterity ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell

... has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher

... ii., p. 247., your correspondent, NOCAB, quotes (without reference) the remark en passant of a previous correspondent "that the word bacon had the obsolete signification of 'dried wood.'" I have searched in vain for this allusion in your preceding Numbers.[2] The information is too curious, however, to be lost sight of. The Saxon word bacon is, without doubt, simply ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 64, January 18, 1851 • Various

... trans-Alantic expedition, Gondemar fiercely denounced him to the King as the worst enemy of Spain. The usual threat was made, the wand was waved, and the noblest head in England fell upon the block, in pursuance of an obsolete sentence fourteen ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... his sojourn at Cambridge that the short-lived but brilliant venture of Knight's Quarterly was launched. He was about four years resident at Trinity in the first instance; after which, according to a practice then common enough but now, I believe, obsolete, he returned to Eton as private and particular tutor to Lord Ernest Bruce. This employment kept him for two years. He then read law, was called to the Bar in 1829, and in 1830 was elected to Parliament for the moribund borough of St. Germans. He was re-elected next year, contested St. ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... allow any necessity for Chaucer's poetry, especially the Canterbury Tales, being considered obsolete. Let a few plain rules be given for sounding the final e of syllables, and for expressing the termination of such words as ocean, and natioen, &c. as dissyllables,— or let the syllables to be sounded ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge

... nothing but beds to hear the Word of God on," said Bishop Corbet. The notion of a priesthood had died out of people's minds. They looked upon their clergy as preachers merely—the cure of souls was an obsolete term. ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone

... their point of view he had acquired in England a reputation for originality. Philip had read some of his articles. He had formed a style for himself by a close imitation of Sir Thomas Browne; he used elaborate sentences, carefully balanced, and obsolete, resplendent words: it gave his writing an appearance of individuality. Leonard Upjohn had induced Cronshaw to give him all his poems and found that there were enough to make a volume of reasonable size. He promised to use his influence with publishers. Cronshaw was in want of money. Since his ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... of Preuss's), p. 340. Rodenbeck, i. 14 ("3d June").] Legal Torture, "Question" as they mildly call it, is at an end from this date. Not in any Prussian Court shall a "question" try for answer again by that savage method. The use of Torture had, I believe, fallen rather obsolete in Prussia; but now the very threat of it shall vanish,—the threat of it, as we may remember, had reached Friedrich himself, at one time. Three or four years ago, it is farther said, a dark murder ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... with the worn-out and obsolete ideas of the past, and will give children false religious and scientific notions. But one does not rule out Paradise Lost because Milton's cosmogony is so purely fanciful, nor Dante because of his equally fantastic structure of the Inferno. Neither children nor older readers ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... to which their posterity or the national genius might return. (To know, and to admire only, the literature and the tastes of our own age, is a species of elegant barbarism.)[344] Spenser was considered nearly as obsolete as Chaucer; Milton was veiled by oblivion, and Shakspeare's dramas were so imperfectly known, that in looking over the play-bills of 1711, and much later, I find that whenever it chanced that they were acted, they were always announced to have been "written by Shakspeare." Massinger ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... ballad-maker in 1719, telling the tale of a yesterday's tragedy in Russia, should throw the time back by a hundred and fifty years, should change the scene to Scotland (the heart of the sorrow would be Mary's exile), and, above all, should compose a ballad in a style long obsolete. This is not the method of the popular poet, and such imitations of the old ballad as Hardyknute show that literary poets of 1719 had not knowledge or skill enough to mimic the ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang

... ago, just before their marriage, and after an ecstatic, swift inspection of it, had raced like children to the agent, to crowd into his willing hand a deposit on the first month's rent. Anne had never kept house before, she had no eyes for obsolete plumbing, uneven floors, for the dark cellar sacred to cats and rubbish. She and Jim chattered rapturously of French windows, of brick garden walks, of how plain little net curtains and Anne's big brass bowl full of nasturtiums would look on the landing of the absurd little stairway that led ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris

... vines; not that the buildings throughout the city should be detached from each other, only in some parts of it; thus elegance and safety will be equally consulted. With respect to walls, those who say that a courageous people ought not to have any, pay too much respect to obsolete notions; particularly as we may see those who pride themselves therein continually confuted by facts. It is indeed disreputable for those who are equal, or nearly so, to the enemy, to endeavour to take refuge within their walls—but since it very often happens, that those who make the ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle

... Obsolete slang for a cudgel 'carried by one who walked en cuerpo, and thus facetiously assumed to take the place of a cloak'. Fuller (1661), Worthies, 'Devon' (1662), 248, 'A Plimouth Cloak. That is a Cane or a Staffe whereof this the occasion. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn

... in an obsolete fashion: or rather, was not so much dressed as put into a case of inferior pepper-and- salt cloth, made horrible by means of shining buttons. I observed that these buttons went, in a double row, over each shoulder of the young ghost, and appeared to descend his ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens

... feature in the approaching action was that the Essex was armed almost entirely with carronades, and her principal enemy with long guns. The carronade, now a wholly obsolete arm, was a short cannon, made extremely light in proportion to the weight of the ball thrown by it. The comparative lightness of metal in each piece allowed a greater number to be carried, but at the same time so weakened the gun as to compel the use of a small charge of powder, in consequence ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan

... almost renders the laws nullities. If any alteration of old customs is thought of, the opinion of the old country is required and maturely considered. I have several times had occasion to observe that, fearing to appear tyrannical, laws are allowed to become obsolete which ought to be put in force or better substituted in their stead; for this mistaken moderation, which borders on timidity, favours the least respectable part of ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft

... absurdity in respect of reason, and to sayings shocking to the moral sense," there is, he declares, in literal truth no reason why any of Christ's words should ever pass away in the sense of becoming obsolete. And it is this absence from the biography of Christ of any doctrines which the subsequent growth of human knowledge—whether in natural science, ethics, political economy, or elsewhere—has had to discount which seems to him one of the strongest ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson

... But this time, curiously enough, the thing does not sound quite so flat. After repeated playings, it even begins to rival the "Fashion Plate March" in its appeal. And it keeps on growing in grace until within a year the "Fashion Plate March" is as obsolete as fashion plates have a habit of growing within a year, while "Tannhaeuser" has won the distinction of being the best-wearing record in ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... perceive, not only his unusually thorough knowledge of Chaucer, for example, whose couplets flowed as trippingly from his pen as if 'The Canterbury Tales' and 'The Romaunt of the Rose' were his daily mental food, but to find him quoting as naturally and easily from 'Piers Plowman' and scores of the half-obsolete ballads of the ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... the transition from Communism in 1989 with a largely obsolete industrial base and a pattern of output unsuited to the country's needs. The country emerged in 2000 from a punishing three-year recession thanks to strong demand in EU export markets. Despite the global slowdown in 2001-02, strong domestic activity in construction, agriculture, ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... and obsolete, priests are aristocrats, wealthy oppressors of the People, the Church but ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... which came to the language from Celtic sources, find their cognate in the Gothic jugga-lauths, "young lad, young man," where jugga means "young," and lauths is related to the verb liudan, "to grow, to spring up," from which root we have also the German Leute and the obsolete English leet, for "people" were originally "the grown, the ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... its upper hinge. The chief editor had a long-tailed black cloth frock-coat on, and white linen pants. His boots were small and neatly blacked. He wore a ruffled shirt, a large seal ring, a standing collar of obsolete pattern, and a checkered neckerchief with the ends hanging down. Date of costume about 1848. He was smoking a cigar, and trying to think of a word, and in pawing his hair he had rumpled his locks a good deal. He was scowling ...
— Editorial Wild Oats • Mark Twain

... moment did she entertain the cheap consolatory thought that she would get over it; or would, in time, give some good man the husk of her heart in exchange for the first-fruits of his own. She held the obsolete opinion that marriage unconsecrated by love was a deadlier sin than the one into which she had fallen unawares; and which, at least, need not tarnish or sadden any life save her own. This last brought her sharply into collision with practical issues. In ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver

... hundred horses were in the collection, some of them of rare value. Later, we visited the elephant stalls and the leopard and tiger cages. In another locality the observatory, covering a large open space, was filled with the quaint old devices, now obsolete, for studying ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck

... Orestes—what are they to mine? He wasn't tied to his Furies. They did hover a little above him; but as for me, I'm scorched; and I mustn't say where: my mouth is locked; the social laws which forbid the employment of obsolete words arrest my exclamations of despair. What ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... obsolete in Egypt) is preserved in Afghanistan where the learned wear turbans equal to the canoe- hats of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... building. In the first place, the office, although it was located in the sunniest corner of the building, preserved nevertheless a kind of cathedral gloom. Dark shades in the windows reduced the light across Mr. Wintermuth's obsolete roll-top desk to never more than that of a dull afternoon. No impertinent rays of the sun could further fade the faded rug which clothed the center of the room. On the wall hung likenesses of the former heads ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble

... addresses to the public, "lay before me in a confused arrangement. It consisted of about ninety thousand words. This multitudinous mass I reduced to about five thousand, by separating the parcels, and removing the obsolete words, ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton

... rusty. But there seems no sufficient reason for removing the date of the composition of these lines to an earlier year than 1393; and poets as well as other men since Chaucer have spoken of themselves as old and obsolete at fifty. A similar remark might be made concerning the reference to the poet's old age "which dulleth him in his spirit," in the "Complaint of Venus," generally ascribed to the last decennium of Chaucer's life. If we reject the evidence of a further passage, in the "Cuckoo and ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward

... head-quarters of Jewish learning. But for that very cause, the Scriptures were not left inaccessible to the mass of mankind, like the old Pehlevi liturgies of the Zend-avesta, or the old Sanscrit Vedas, in an obsolete and hieratic tongue, but were translated into, and continued in, the then all but world-wide Hellenic speech, which was to the ancient world what ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley

... any doubt that the coming of the Loyalists hastened the advent of free institutions. It was the settlement of Upper Canada that rendered the Quebec Act of 1774 obsolete, and made necessary the Constitutional Act of 1791, which granted to the Canadas representative assemblies. The Loyalists were Tories and Imperialists; but, in the colonies from which they came, they had been accustomed to a very advanced type ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace

... too far an argument, the tendency of which is to prove, that the introduction of an humorist, acting like Sir Piercie Shafton, upon some forgotten and obsolete model of folly, once fashionable, is rather likely to awaken the disgust of the reader, as unnatural, than find him food for laughter. Whether owing to this theory, or whether to the more simple and probable cause of the author's failure in the delineation of the subject he had ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... of knowledge gained by base experience practical (A thing that's wholly obsolete and laid upon the shelf): Don't waste your time in aiming at exactitude syntactical, Or hold that he who teaches Greek should know that Greek himself: For if you wish to face the truth, and fact no more to see awry— Who strives to wake the dormant mind of ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley

... stranger to travel to Padstow on May-Day to see it. Very likely he would not see it; it is a thing that may be discontinued at any time. If we were devoting our attention to Cornwall as it used to be, much would come into this book which is now utterly obsolete, and would cause as great surprise to ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... procedure. The talent required to make adventures of this order interesting is a rare one, how rare may be inferred from the fact that almost the only famous example of the kind in English letters is the trial in that obsolete novel, 'Ten Thousand ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post

... academic process whatever. It is only by an unfettered access to the whole body of Fine Art: that is, to the whole body of inspired revelation, that we can build up that conception of divinity to which all virtue is an aspiration. And to hope to find this body of art purified from all that is obsolete or dangerous or fierce or lusty, or to pick and choose what will be good for any particular child, much less for all children, is the shallowest of vanities. Such schoolmasterly selection is neither possible nor desirable. Ignorance ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw

... have been called a game of cards. He carried a deck forever next his heart. Sometimes he gambled with other vehicles—stocks, shares, currency—but the cards were still his mainstay, and he was well acquainted with every known or obsolete game. There was no trick, nor fraud, nor waggery which he ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend

... Norman form of the famous name Poussin, i.e. Chick. Or, coming to native instances, le wenchel, a medieval prototype of Winkle, is explained as for "periwinkle," whereas it is a common Middle-English word, existing now in the shortened form wench, and means Child. The obsolete Swordslipper, now only Slipper, which he interprets as a maker of "sword-slips," or sheaths, was really a sword-sharpener, from Mid. Eng. slipen, cognate with Old Du. slijpen, to polish, sharpen, and Ger. schleifen. Sometimes a very simple problem is left unexplained, e.g. in the case of the name ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley

... the parlour, where he examined the holy candle for a while, with a tipsy gravity, and then with something of that reverential feeling for the symbolic, which is not uncommon in rakes and scamps, he thoughtfully locked it up in a press, where were accumulated all sorts of obsolete rubbish—soiled packs of cards, disused tobacco pipes, broken powder flasks, his military sword, and a dusky bundle of the "Flash Songster," and ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu

... alive? when and where? What is the character of the addresses? What articles are deposited with it; and why? Is food put in the grave, or in or near it afterwards? Is this said to be an ancient custom? Are persons of the same gens buried together, and is the clan distinction obsolete, or did it ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow

... book from which even in this present day war a great deal may be learned. Caesar is by no means as obsolete as you seem to think. I ask you to consider, for instance, that the trenches which have gained so much importance in this war date back ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... me also in the dark," replied Legrand, "for a few days; during which I made diligent inquiry in the neighborhood of Sullivan's Island, for any building which went by name of the 'Bishop's Hotel'; for, of course, I dropped the obsolete word 'hostel.' Gaining no information on the subject, I was on the point of extending my sphere of search, and proceeding in a more systematic manner, when, one morning, it entered into my head, quite suddenly, that this 'Bishop's Hostel' ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... mystical meaning, created by the peculiar circumstances for one separate and peculiar ear, the daughter meaning, or echo meaning. This mode of augury, through secondary interpretations of chance words, is not, as some readers may fancy, an old, obsolete, or merely Jewish form of seeking the divine pleasure. About a century ago, a man so famous, and by repute so unsuperstitious, as Dr. Doddridge, was guided in a primary act of choice, influencing his whole after life, by a few chance words from a child reading aloud to his ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... upstairs, Ursula was aware of the house, of her home round about her. And she loathed it, the sordid, too-familiar place! She was afraid at the depth of her feeling against the home, the milieu, the whole atmosphere and condition of this obsolete ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... there are several short poems under one entry. These notes (first included in 1920, whereas the selections were made in 1919) combined with the searchability of electronic texts, renders the original Indexes of Authors and of First Lines obsolete, and so both have been dropped. Occasionally, relevant comments follow in angled brackets. — ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse

... quite deserts this matiere de France. It is always the Gesta Francorum at home, or the Gesta Dei per Francos in the East, that supply the themes. When this subject or group of subjects palled, the very form of the chanson de geste was lost. It was not applied to other things;[18] it grew obsolete with that which it had helped to make popular. Some of the material—Huon of Bordeaux, the Four Sons of Aymon, and others—retained a certain vogue in forms quite different, and gave later ages the inexact and bastard notion ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... it had, as Warburton argued, formed an 'alliance' with the dominant church. The spirit of toleration was spreading throughout the century. The old penal laws, due to the struggles of the seventeenth century, were becoming obsolete in practice and were gradually being repealed. The Gordon riots of 1780 showed that a fanatical spirit might still be aroused in a mob which wanted an excuse for plunder; but the laws were not explicitly defended by reasonable persons ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... I believe there is, in every nation, a stile which never becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology so consonant and congenial to the analogy and principles of its respective language as to remain settled and unaltered; this stile is probably to be sought in the common intercourse of life, among those who speak only to be understood, without ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson

... put justice before all, was alive in him, almost rejoicing in its regained governance. The new Charley was as dead as the old had been of late, and this clarifying moment left the grim impression behind that the old law was not obsolete. He felt that in the abandonment of her indignation she had mercilessly told the truth; and the irreducible quality of mind in him which in the old days made for justice, approved. There was a new element ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... an allusion to a custom, nearly obsolete, originating in the feast of tabernacles, of sacrificing to Vacina at the harvest home. The Papists substituted St. Bartholomew for the heathen goddess. Upon his day, the harvest being completed, an image of straw was carried ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... "The ... characteristics of the poetry are the use of archaic forms and words, such as mec for m, the possessive sn, gamol, dgor, swt for eald, dg, bld, etc., after they had become obsolete in the prose language, and the use of special compounds and phrases, such as hildendre (war-adder) for 'arrow,' gold-gifa (gold-giver) for 'king,' ... goldwine gumena (goldfriend of men, distributor of gold to men) for 'king,'" etc.—Sw. Other ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.

... heroine. I did not even admit the plea of destiny, irresistible passion, or entrainement, as in all cases sufficient excuse for all errors and crimes. Moreover, I excited astonishment by calling things by obsolete names. I called a married woman's having a lover a crime! Then I was no judge of virtues, for I thought a wife's making an intimate friend of her husband's mistress was scandalous and mean; but this I was told is the height of delicacy ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth

... inclined to think that a heathen like the Chinaman possessed more moral worth than a dozen Christians of the type of Mosely. From youth he had preyed upon the community, and his aim had been to get a living in any way that did not involve labor. Honesty was an obsolete word in his vocabulary, and a successful theft yielded him a satisfaction such as other men derive from the consciousness of well-doing. In fact, Mosely's moral nature was warped, and there was very little ...
— Ben's Nugget - A Boy's Search For Fortune • Horatio, Jr. Alger

... actually live. A thing must be gone by before you can see it, just as it must be printed before it is read. This little bit of weather-stained board may serve, perhaps, to throw up the present into a picture so that it may be visible. For this inhuman law still holds good, and is not obsolete or a mere relic of barbarism. The whipping, indeed, is abrogated for very shame's sake; so is the reward to the informer; but the magistrate and the imprisonment and the offence remain. You must not sleep in the open, either in a barn or a cart-house or in a shed, in the country, or on a door-step ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... bairn; a very pretty bairn! a boy, or a child, I wonder?" For some hundred years, editorial ingenuity has been strained to the utmost to explain why child should be thus used in opposition to boy; and nothing would do but to surmise an obsolete custom of speech which made child signify girl. The simple explanation is, that boy is a misprint for god. For this felicitous restoration we are indebted to Mr. R.G. White, of New York, who was guided to it by the corresponding passage of the novel: "The shepherd, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... known at the not very remote epoch of its construction, is now pronounced absolutely incapable of resisting the novel modes of assault which may be brought to bear upon it. It can only be the flexible talent of a young man that will evolve a new efficiency out of its obsolete strength. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... demonstrated, is needless for the detailed working out of the theory. Butler failed to impress the biologists of his day, even those on whom, like Romanes, he might have reasonably counted for understanding and for support. But he kept alive Hering's work when it bade fair to sink into the limbo of obsolete hypotheses. To use Oliver Wendell Holmes's phrase, he "depolarised" evolutionary thought. We quote the words of a young biologist, who, when an ardent and dogmatic Weismannist of the most pronounced type, was induced to read "Life and Habit": ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler

... without a taste for partridge-shooting the ordeal was a trying one. Sir Patrick got through the day with the help of his business and his books. In the evening the rector of a neighboring parish drove over to dinner, and engaged his host at the noble but obsolete game of Piquet. They arranged to meet at each other's houses on alternate days. The rector was an admirable player; and Sir Patrick, though a born Presbyterian, blessed the Church of England from the bottom of ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins

... for once," Gibson said. "The Bees set up this colony as a control unit to study the species they were invading, and they had to give their specimens a normal—if obsolete—background in order to determine their capabilities. The fact that their experiment didn't tell them what they wanted to know may have had a direct bearing on their decision to ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee

... walking about with letters most of the day. There are farriers and wheelers also at work in this yard, so that one can always light one's pipe or make a cup of tea at the forge fire. Just outside are ranged a row of antiquated Boer guns of obsolete types; I expect they are the lot they used to show to our diplomatic representative when he asked vexatious questions about the "increasing armaments." I believe the Boers also left quantities of good stores here when Pretoria was abandoned. These are fine new barracks scarcely finished. They ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers

... permissible; but the writer who jumbles two languages together indiscriminately is but a pedantic prig. It were bad enough if Du Maurier mixed good English with better French; but he employs in his bilingual book the very worst of both—obsolete American provincialisms and the patois of the quartier latin side by side. To the cultured American who knows only the English of Lindley Murray and scholastic French, the book is about as intelligible as Greek to Casca or the "dog-latin" of the American ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... must understand that the world of thought in those days was in the strangest condition, it was choked with obsolete inadequate formulae, it was tortuous to a maze-like degree with secondary contrivances and adaptations, suppressions, conventions, and subterfuges. Base immediacies fouled the truth on every man's lips. I was brought up by my mother in a quaint old-fashioned ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... forms of power generation had become obsolete. Who would buy electric power when he could generate his own for next to nothing? Billions upon billions of dollars worth of generating equipment were rendered valueless. The great hydroelectric dams, the hundreds of steam turbines, the heavy-metal atomic reactors—all ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett

... length of time that has elapsed since the writings of Johnson were first published, has amply developed their intrinsic merits, and destroyed the personal and party prejudices which assail a living author: but the years have been too few to render the customs and manners alluded to so obsolete as to require much illustrative research.[a] It may be satisfactory to subjoin, that care has been exercised in every thing that we have advanced, and that when we have erred, it has been on the ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... better than any other scheme of landholding would have done. It was only when the administration of the country came into new and alien hands that Canadian seigneurialism became a barrier to economic progress and an obsolete system which had ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro

... either as indispensable to the discipline or to the enlargement of the mind, we are not called on to defend the methods of a generation ago. The study of Greek is no longer an exercise in the study of linguistics or the inspection of specimens of an obsolete literature, but the acquaintance with historic thought, habits, and polity, with a portion of the continuous history of the human mind, which has a vital relation to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... recite so well, you have restored and perhaps even created; yet you do not feel that it is the national language; this powerful instrument of a new era, which invades and besieges yours on all sides like the last fortress of an obsolete civilisation." ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles

... returned to pinch you again, and that you defy the foul fiend. The weather is but lukewarm, and I should choose to have all the windows shut, if my smelling was not much more summerly than my feeling; but the frowsiness of obsolete tapestry and needlework is insupportable. Here are old fleas and bugs talking of Louis Quatorze like tattered refugees in the park, and they make poor Rosette attend them, whether she will or not. This is a woful account of an evening in July, and which Monsieur de St. Lambert ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... this original wolfish attitude of nations is already obsolete, if it ever existed. The expansion and growth of political and moral relations is a gradual process, and the fact that for the sake of brevity and clearness we fix and describe certain arbitrary points in that process must not be taken to imply that ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato

... once, to speak English, and said that he would prefer to speak that language, for the sake of practice. His pronunciation, although queer, was fairly intelligible, and I had little difficulty in understanding him; but his talk had a strange, mediaeval flavour, due, apparently, to the use of obsolete idioms and words. In the course of half an hour, I became satisfied that he was talking the English of the fifteenth century—the English of Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher—but how he had learned such English, in the nineteenth century and in the capital of eastern Siberia, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... arrive at years of discretion, and that I should have known better than to include in my book anything, however well founded, of a nature tending to continue the wordy strife touching this vexed question of Mission Work, and that no matter how strikingly set forth, this is an old and obsolete story, fit only to be finally done with. It is for such to bear with me in what I shall say. There are thousands of men in the West who are entirely ignorant of men in China other than the ordinary Han Ren, and if I enlighten ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... every page of the precious document. I soon flung it from me, thinking it worthy of the fate of many a better production in the olden times, that of being burned by the common hangman; but, happily, the office of hangman has become obsolete in Canada, and the editors of these refined journals may go on ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... emoluments in case of forfeiture stimulated their natural and irregular vivacity to enforce laws which had become obsolete, and they pounced upon American property as they would have gone to war in quest of prize-money. Even at first their acts were equivocal, and they soon came to be as illegal as they were oppressive. There ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson

... be pointed at by the finger of scorn as the man who had refused to do so, and this was nearly as unthinkable as the other. Bitterly he blamed himself for having made a friend (and worse than that, an enemy) of one so obsolete and old-fashioned as to bring duelling into modern life.... As far as he could be glad of anything he was glad that he had taken a single, not a ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson

... The use of the subjunctive with when and until, now obsolete, was correct English until the present century was some thirty ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt

... from one family into another needed in old days the sanction of the Comitia Curiata. When that assembly became obsolete, the priests summoned a formal meeting of thirty lictors, and their sanction of an act of adoption was still called lex curiata. Galba was ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus

... the Ravanastron, Omerti, etc., are longer, and being more slender, have a certain amount of flexibility, but it does not appear that this latter qualification is sought for or considered indispensable. On the other hand, the now nearly obsolete Kokiu of Japan had a bow of about forty-five inches in length that was extremely elastic. It was made in sections after the manner of a fishing-rod, and the hair was tightened by the finger of the player, as in some of the early viol ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George

... mysterious death-dealing weapons as evidence of his supernatural origin and superior creation, the facts have generally pointed to the reverse. Elijah Martin was not long in discovering that when the Minyo hunter, with his obsolete bow, dropped dead by a bullet from a viewless and apparently noiseless space, it was NOT considered the lightnings of an avenging Deity, but was traced directly to the ambushed rifle of Kansas Joe, swayed by a viciousness quite as human as their own; the spectacle of ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte

... testimony that can be impeached or controverted. It forms part of the report of these well-known and trusted Socialists to their comrades in Russia and elsewhere. The claim that the elections to the Constituent Assembly were held on the basis of an obsolete register, before the people had a chance to become acquainted with the Bolshevist program, and that so long a time had elapsed since the elections that the delegates could not be regarded as true representatives of the people, was first put ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... in that it is formed from a corresponding feminine which is no longer used. It is not connected historically with our word duck, but is derived from ened (duck) and an obsolete suffix rake (king). Three letters of ened have fallen away, ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell

... another, science shows the way of attainment. Philosophy thus has a double task: that of criticizing existing aims with respect to the existing state of science, pointing out values which have become obsolete with the command of new resources, showing what values are merely sentimental because there are no means for their realization; and also that of interpreting the results of specialized science in their bearing on future social endeavor. It is impossible that it should have any success in ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... all the civilized world. New Holland seems to be the only uncivilized part of this watery ball, but New Holland holds out no temptations to the missionary; the inhabitants are a little too cannibally given, and martyrdom is altogether obsolete; besides, it is doubted by our soundest theologians whether Christianity was ever intended for a people so brutal ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames

... century, dying in 1400. He is designated the father of English poetry. The obsolete phraseology of his writings, though presenting a barrier to general appreciation and popularity, will never deter those who truly love the "dainties that are bred in a book" from holding him in affection and reverence. His chief work, the "Canterbury Pilgrimage," "well ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... a feeling for those ships, Each worn and ancient one, With great bluff bows, and broad in the beam: Ay, it was unkindly done. But so they serve the Obsolete— Even so, ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville

... and irregularly, by the alteration of the root vowel as well as by the change of initial. This, however, though mentioned by Lhuyd and occasionally found in MSS., was practically obsolete long ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner

... sometimes inveigh against any and every change from the strict letter of the printed music—ignorant of the possibility, that only in this way can its spirit be respected—the changes in a multitude of cases are essential because due (1) to reverential deciphering of an obsolete musical notation, (2) to improvements in musical instruments, or (3) to the sanction and authority ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam

... appear, somehow, to have been overlooked by philosophers. Yet the evidence for them is sufficiently good. Its excellence is proved by its very uniformity, assuredly undesigned. An old, nay, an obsolete theory—that of degeneration in religion—has facts at its basis, which its very supporters have ignored, which orthodoxy has overlooked. Thus the Rev. Professor Flint informs the audience in the Cathedral ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang

... too soon. I am old-fashioned, very likely, but I do believe in the almost obsolete doctrine of early marriage. I love her with all my heart." His kindling eyes and softened voice betrayed it. "Thank Heaven she has accepted me. Without her my life would not be worth ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming

... of October Palmerston died. Had he taken the precautions usual at the age of eighty, he might have lived longer, but in private as in public life, he despised caution. He was one of those statesmen whom modern critics, on the watch for the partially obsolete and with the complexity of present problems always before them, tend to depreciate. He had the first quality which is necessary for popularity: he was readily intelligible. In addition he was prompt, combative, and magnanimous; ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... pernicious influence over her 60 judgement—she was taught to fear dangerous commotions in the Capital, she was intreated to prevent the bloodshed of the deluded citizens, and thus overawed she reluctantly consented to permit the reinforcement of an obsolete law, and—— ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... not quite obsolete, and has a practical as well as antiquarian interest. Though the analogy to the attacks of ancient unbelievers must be sought in pagan countries in the objections of modern heathens, yet some resemblance to them may be found in the unbelief of Christian lands. Such parallels ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... together. Philological treatises were numerous. There were dictionaries and grammars for explaining the Sumerian language to Semitic pupils, interlinear translations of Sumerian texts, phrase-books, lists of synonyms, and commentaries on difficult or obsolete words and passages, besides syllabaries, in which the cuneiform characters were catalogued and explained. Mathematics were diligently studied, and tables of squares and cubes have come to us from the library of Larsa. Geography was represented by descriptions of the countries and cities known ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce

... the trouble to consult Perrault's Cendrillon in the original French, he or she will find that Cinderella went to the ball with her feet encased in "des pantoufles de vair." Now, vair means grey or white fur, ermine or miniver. The word is now obsolete, though it still survives in heraldry. The translator, misled by the similarity of sound between "vair" and "verre," rendered it "glass" instead of "ermine," and Cinderella's glass slippers have become a British tradition. What would "Cinderella" be as a pantomime without the scene where ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton

... consoled herself that she could secure the bench of bishops from any audacious invasion of Frank Wentworth's hopes, it is true, notwithstanding, that Miss Leonora sent her maid next morning to London with certain obsolete ornaments, of which, though the fashion was hideous, the jewels were precious; and Lucy Wodehouse had never seen anything so brilliant as the appearance they presented when they returned shortly after reposing upon beds of white satin ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... scepticism with anything like fairness, their continual bickering among themselves; but I cannot forgive them the harm they are doing to religion, the discredit they are bringing upon it by their bigoted views and obsolete ideas. They busy themselves doing good—that is the worst of it; they mean well, but they do not see that, in the mean while, their Church is being left unto them desolate; though perhaps, after all, the Church having come to be what it is, that is the best ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley

... grand merci; or I thank ye, Je vous remercie. In this sense it is constantly used by our first writers. A very great critic pronounces it an obsolete expression of surprise, contracted from grant me mercy; and cites a passage in "Titus Andronicus" to illustrate his sense of it; but, it is presumed, that passage, when properly pointed, confirms the ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various

... down by one of the Swiss with a fierce "Giu, signore, giu!" Otherwise the guard kept good order in the chapel, and were no doubt as useful and genuine as any thing about the poor old Pope. What gorgeous fellows they were, and, as soldiers, how absurd! The weapons they bore were as obsolete as the excommunication. It was amusing to pass one of these play-soldiers on guard at the door of the Vatican—tall, straight, beautiful, superb, with his halberd on his shoulder—and then come to a real warrior outside, a little, ugly, red-legged ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells

... own western variant. (Part I. The Pageant of Experiments with Civilization.) In Part II I have undertaken a social analysis of civilization as a past and present life style. In Part III, Civilization Is Becoming Obsolete, I have tried to check our thinking about civilization with the sweep of present day historical trends. Part IV, Steps Beyond Civilization, is an attempt to list some of the alternatives and opportunities presently ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... effort and the upper rooms easily? What possessed his predecessor to put such an impossible paper on the study and to stuff the room with book-shelves? A row of Puritan divines offended him—a wooden, obsolete theology—but he also pitched a defence of Queen Mary into a cupboard—she had done enough mischief already. The garden looked squalid and mean, without flowers, with black patches peeping through the thin covering of snow, with a row of winter ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren

... thinking, while she was talking, of your and my uncle John's dear Guilford). What a curious thing it would be if this poor, obscure, old, ugly, half-insane woman were really entitled to such a property! She is tolerably well educated too, a good French and Italian scholar, and a reader of obsolete books. She ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... Sensibility are only inferior when they are contrasted with the Elizabeth and Jane of Pride and Prejudice; and even then, it is probably because we personally like the handsome and amiable Jane Bennet rather better than the obsolete survival of the sentimental novel represented by Marianne Dashwood. Darcy and Bingley again are much more 'likeable' (to use Lady Queensberry's word) than the colourless Edward Ferrars and the stiff-jointed Colonel Brandon. Yet it might ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... heartily reciprocate. It is, notwithstanding, much to be regretted that two nations whose productions are of such a character as to invite the most extensive exchanges and freest commercial intercourse should continue to enforce ancient and obsolete restrictions of trade against each other. Our commercial treaty with France is in this respect an exception from our treaties with all other commercial nations. It jealously levies discriminating duties both on tonnage and on articles the growth, produce, or manufacture ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson

... instance of the use of a common word in the original and obsolete sense of its derivation may be cited from the unfortunately truncated and scanty fragment of a prayer for the court: "Oh Lord, be thou a husband" (house-band) "to that great household ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... was announced by Prof. Avenarius of Austria, a method of dividing the electric current, by the insertion of a polariser in a secondary circuit connected with each lamp, a method, it need not be said to electricians, now utterly obsolete. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... with the exception of a silicol plant at Kingsnorth, now of obsolete type, and a small electrolytic plant at Farnborough, there was no facility for the production of hydrogen in this country for ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale

... as to the cause of this anomalous state of things; and there were people to doubt its being so much due to obstinacy on the part of the shells as to inexperience on the part of the Boers. One wiseacre held that the missiles were antique and obsolete relics of the 'eighty-one struggle. Others questioned whether "the Boer" then knew that shells were invented. A lot more contended that "the Boer" was unacquainted with the mysteries of a fuse, and knew as little about "timing" a shell as he did about discipline. One or two suggested, tentatively, ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan

... and dialogues, in a series of pictures set in the brilliant frame of a plot which holds the reader's interest. The Novel, which demands sentiment, style, and imagery, is the greatest creation of modern days; it is the successor of stage comedy grown obsolete with its restrictions. Facts and ideas are all within the province of fiction. The intellect of an incisive moralist, like La Bruyere, the power of treating character as Moliere could treat it, the grand machinery ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac

... as I lay there on that contracted place, and the half-smothery sensation began to make life miserable, I remembered some of the lessons we were taught at school about requiring so many cubic feet of fresh air, and began to wonder if such laws were obsolete ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young

... Jackson smiled once more upon the company, and, applying his left thumb to the tip of his nose, worked a visionary coffee-mill with his right hand: thereby performing a very graceful piece of pantomime (then much in vogue, but now, unhappily, almost obsolete) which was familiarly denominated 'taking a grinder.' (Imagine a modern solicitor's clerk "Taking ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald

... but the preference in some circles is for the former. A blunt "yes" or "no" is not thought polite from a child; he should say "yes, father," "no, mama," "yes, Mrs. Smith." "Ma'am" as a form of address is quite obsolete. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... as a judicial body was, in the seventeenth century, a waning institution, its competence and functions becoming rapidly obsolete; but occasionally it awakened suddenly to life, took on a new aspect, and became of unwonted importance. This occurred when a summons was issued for a new parliament, for the county court was the electing body of the knights of the shire, and to the next session ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney

... period a relatively enormous quantity of banking capital had located itself in and near Wall Street. The Bank of New York existed before 1800, and later, although not long after, the Street witnessed the erection of buildings of a now obsolete, and yet at that time an attractive, style of architecture, devoted to the uses of the Manhattan Banking Company, the Bank of America, the Merchants, the Union, the Bank of Commerce, and others. Were it not that land in the banking district is so ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various

... their fellows share in its benefits and its hopes. They confronted, nay, they welcomed martyrdom, at one time to maintain their own Christianity, at another to make others Christians around them; propagandism was for them a duty almost as imperative as fidelity. And it was not in memory of old and obsolete mythologies, but in the name of recent deeds and persons, in obedience to laws proceeding from God, One and Universal, in fulfilment and continuation of a contemporary and superhuman history,—that ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... was Henry Wallace Mills. He was in the middle thirties, temperate, studious, a moderate smoker, and—one would have said—a bachelor of the bachelors, armour-plated against Cupid's well-meant but obsolete artillery. Sometimes Sidney Mercer's successor in the teller's cage, a sentimental young man, would broach the topic of Woman and Marriage. He would ask Henry if he ever intended to get married. On such occasions Henry would look at him in a manner which was a blend of scorn, amusement, ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse



Words linked to "Obsolete" :   disused, noncurrent



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