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limber
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  • His doctors had told him that his right leg would always be stiff, but if he stretched and stayed limber it wouldn't present too much of an obstacle.†   (source)
  • They were frozen solid but they thawed quickly by the fire and were as limber as they had been in the summer.†   (source)
  • Heaven knew what kind of infection you could get from a whip kept limber with oil and blood.†   (source)
  • More than one critic of the Seven Summits first to bag the Seven Summits vince of Irian Barat, Bass wasn't the kind limbers to follow in his guided bootprints, a swarm of other we and rudely pulled Everest into the postmodern era.†   (source)
  • You almost expected to see a long, limber stinger protruding from the rear of it.†   (source)
  • He was also incredibly limber.†   (source)
  • The black-and-white guy has been standing with his arms folded across his chest, like a man who is bored, who's been waiting for something, and now his arms drop to his sides, swing loosely at the shoulders, like an athlete limbering up.†   (source)
  • He picks up momentum as he limbers, and volume, too, and suddenly he is hunched over the keyboard and putting his shoulders into it, thunder-testing the walls of his new studio.†   (source)
  • I pulled the husband figure out, his limbs bouncing around excitedly, a dancer limbering up.†   (source)
  • This ceremony was repeated at odd intervals over the years, and while the faces of the surveyors changed nothing else did except that the hemlocks grew taller, their limber tips bent like green whips against the sky.†   (source)
  • …over the course of the next three years Perry had on several occasions run off, set out to find his lost father, for he had lost his mother as well, learned to "despise" her; liquor had blurred the face, swollen the figure of the once sinewy, limber Cherokee girl, had "soured her soul," honed her tongue to the wickedest point, so dissolved her self-respect that generally she did not bother to ask the names of the stevedores and trolley-car conductors and such persons who accepted what…†   (source)
  • Limber leg.†   (source)
  • Just limbering up.†   (source)
  • I scuffed a hollow in the sand and lay down in it to rest while I flexed my fingers in limbering exercises and kneaded the wrists as much as I could stand to prevent them from going stiff.†   (source)
  • I limbered my legs on the barre and started to practice.†   (source)
  • Murmurs ripple across the room, a lovely, high-ceilinged address on the second floor of stately Sayles Hall, with dark wood paneling, aged to perfection, narrow twelve-foot windows, and twenty students in Fieldwork and Seminar in High School Education who are just limbering up.†   (source)
  • It took a few minutes before his body began to feel limber and he settled into an easy pace.†   (source)
  • He needed a hot shower, which was not to be had at the Avenir, then mild exercise to limber up his body, therapies unnecessary only a few years ago.†   (source)
  • As he drove her back up the valley to the creek house, the sun was low and the rocks and limber pine on the slopes above them cast long shadows on the pale grass.†   (source)
  • Not me; I felt good, muscles warm and limber.†   (source)
  • A very limber man was Hizdahr zo Loraq.†   (source)
  • My legs are as cold and stiff as gunmetal, but they limber up real fast at the thought of being caught.†   (source)
  • Alessandro sat down at the typewriter and cracked his knuckles to limber them up.†   (source)
  • There is no thunder of artillery or jingle of a cavalry limber.†   (source)
  • The first Reb cannon were in position, limbering up easily, casually, getting the range.†   (source)
  • He didn't need to watch to see it all in bitter clarity: her long skinny legs, more agile than his, as ghostly white as the white silk nightie, the long, webbed feet as limber as the feet of an ape.†   (source)
  • Yet she was so lithe and limber that, like a cat, she could have twisted herself into any position.†   (source)
  • What I was going to try now was something I could have done with ease ten years before, but I had always been active, I was limber enough, and I had an idea I could do it now.†   (source)
  • Under her small black-freckled hand her cane, limber as a buggy whip, would switch at the brush as if to rouse up any hiding things.†   (source)
  • After rounding off his limbering-up exercises with a few vigorous arm swings, His Lordship begins dressing.   (source)
    limbering = warming (to get flexible)
  • He limbers up with special stretching exercises.†   (source)
  • He rolled his eyes and went through a limber, satiric buck-and-wing.†   (source)
  • "If I know anything about swinging an ax, it won't be long before he's as limber as a rag.†   (source)
  • After that, a man gets a limber to his feet.†   (source)
  • As Papa had said, in a little while the warm heat from the hard work limbered me up.†   (source)
  • He put the towel aside, flexed the hand for awhile (the first few times made him grimace with pain, but then the hand began to limber up), and started to write again.†   (source)
  • It was not uncommon for Nathaniel to retrieve his bass from the third-floor lockers and, while wrestling the bulky instrument to class, be forced to dodge a ballet dancer who was twirling through the hall, limbering up on the way to class.†   (source)
  • He was standing on the far side of the clearing, tall and limber-looking, with thick shocks of hair hanging across his forehead and over his eyes, all of which suggested youth, though in the bright sun his face seemed lined like an old man's.†   (source)
  • But he was limber.†   (source)
  • The limberness was gone.†   (source)
  • Tom had shown him how to hot-wire an ignition, how to use the thin and limber strip of metal car-thieves called Slim Jims to yank the lock on a car door, how to short out a car burglar alarm.†   (source)
  • She suddenly leaped at him with that limber ferocity, and although he felt certain she meant to hurt him as she had before, possibly because she couldn't get at the dirty birdie of a scriptwriter who had cheated Rocket Man out of the Hudson before it went over the cliff, he did not move at all , he could see the seeds of her current instability in the window of past she had just opened for him, but he was also awed by it , the injustice she felt was, in spite of its childishness,…†   (source)
  • The habit had become part of him, and he would need his fingers to be limber to have even half a chance of murdering Mance Rayder.†   (source)
  • The roads of central Virginia are now littered with the detritus of Lee's retreating army: guns, blankets, broken wagons, artillery limbers, dead horses, and dead men.†   (source)
  • Momma had been walking toward her, and now her hand flashed with sudden limber speed, a hard hand, laundry-callused and muscled.†   (source)
  • I kept reminding myself of the painful leg-limbering exercises that Teacher Gao had made us do all those years before.†   (source)
  • Tingle, tingle, tremble toes, she's a good fisherman, catches hens, puts 'em inna pens … wire blier, limber lock, three geese inna flock … one flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo's nest … O-U-T spells out … goose swoops down and plucks you out.†   (source)
  • After it was trimmed and the limber end cut off, I hung the lantern by the handle on the end of it and started easing it out on the ice.†   (source)
  • There was a sign, "Cross at Own Risk," and a plank limber as a hammock laid across to the bridge floor.†   (source)
  • Josie and Will sat waiting on the limber board in the front row, their feet hanging into the spice-clouds of sawdust.†   (source)
  • Her hands had begun to spring limberly open and then snatch closed again, catching air and squashing it.†   (source)
  • Maybe we can catch him before he limbers up.†   (source)
  • She seems to be watching the road as it unrolls between the limber ears of the mules.†   (source)
  • It's also full of all kinds of glib, limber Jewesses who can play the piano.†   (source)
  • Would you leave me in disgrace, nor hear at least one limber tongue?†   (source)
  • We're mighty limber when a hard wind's blowing, because we know it pays to be limber.†   (source)
  • The cool, limber April air was suddenly winy to his nostrils, teasing the breast into swelling.†   (source)
  • Then, as the last cannon and limber chest came groaning and splashing up, she saw him, slender, erect, his long silver hair wet upon his neck, riding easily upon a little strawberry mare that picked her way as daintily through the mud holes as a lady in a satin dress.†   (source)
  • Lancelot slammed the door behind him, shot the bar, took the figure's sword by the pommel in his padded left hand, jerked him forward, tripped him up, bashed him on the head with the stool as he was falling, and was sitting on his chest in a trice—as limber as he had ever been.†   (source)
  • Then Jewel is enclosed by a glittering maze of hooves as by an illusion of wings; among them, beneath the up-reared chest, he moves with the flashing limberness of a snake.†   (source)
  • I walked slowly to her desk, expecting to be lectured; but my heart quickened when I saw her go to the corner and select a long, green, limber switch and come toward me.†   (source)
  • She limbered up her fingers, glanced at the clock, was satisfied she had taken enough minutes, started the metronome, took her seat and the lesson began.†   (source)
  • They said how MacMurfee was a limber-back and a dead-head and how Joe Harrison was the tool of the city machine, and how they wanted that hick to step in and try to give some honest government.†   (source)
  • The leather was cold to his feet; against his bare legs the wet grass blades were like strokes of limber icicles.†   (source)
  • …gloom sweet and oversweet with the twice-bloomed wistaria against the outer wall by the savage quiet September sun impacted distilled and hyper-distilled, into which came now and then the loud cloudy flutter of the sparrows like a flat limber stick whipped by an idle boy, and the rank smell of female old flesh long embattled in virginity while the wan haggard face watched him above the faint triangle of lace at wrists and throat from the too tall chair in which she resembled a…†   (source)
  • Then there was food before him, appearing suddenly between long, limber black hands fleeing too in the act of setting down the dishes.†   (source)
  • And no one could have known that he had ever looked at her either as, without any semblance of progress in either of them, they draw slowly together as the wagon crawls terrifically toward her in its slow palpable aura of somnolence and red dust in which the steady feet of the mules move dreamlike and punctuate by the sparse jingle of harness and the limber bobbing of jackrabbit ears, the mules still neither asleep nor awake as he halts them.†   (source)
  • I have to move, to make up for that Kulmbach beer and limber up my wooden leg.†   (source)
  • A few hours of practice will limber up my wrist again.†   (source)
  • He pointed to the French guns, the limbers of which were being detached and hurriedly removed.†   (source)
  • Behind the guns were their limbers and still farther back picket ropes and artillerymen's bonfires.†   (source)
  • As the limber gunners went to the rear, his horse trod in a rabbit hole and came down, throwing him into a depression of the ground.†   (source)
  • I had no ropes, and could hit on nothing wherewith to make ropes; none of the abundant creepers seemed limber or strong enough, and with all my litter of scientific education I could not devise any way of making them so.†   (source)
  • After sleep, his face had resumed the ruddy brown of many Riviera summers, and to limber himself up he stood on his hands on a chair until his fountain pen and coins fell out.†   (source)
  • One may picture the orderly expectation, the officers alert and watchful, the gunners ready, the ammunition piled to hand, the limber gunners with their horses and waggons, the groups of civilian spectators standing as near as they were permitted, the evening stillness, the ambulances and hospital tents with the burned and wounded from Weybridge; then the dull resonance of the shots the Martians fired, and the clumsy projectile whirling over the trees and houses and smashing amid the…†   (source)
  • She made this sacrifice as a matter of religious etiquette; as a thing necessary just now, but by no means to be wrested into a precedent; no, a week or two would limber up her piety, then she would be rational again, and the next two dollars that got left out in the cold would find a comforter—and she could name the comforter.†   (source)
  • One morning when I went into the parlour with my books, I found my mother looking anxious, Miss Murdstone looking firm, and Mr. Murdstone binding something round the bottom of a cane — a lithe and limber cane, which he left off binding when I came in, and poised and switched in the air.†   (source)
  • She was such a limber maid that 'a could stand no hardship, even when I knowed her, and 'a went like a candle-snoff, so 'tis said.†   (source)
  • Chingachgook was already in the canoe, and he dipped the implement the other named into the water, just as Hurry's limber tongue ceased.†   (source)
  • The maple-tree's a precious one, 'Tis fuel, food, and timber; And when your stiff day's work is done, Its juice will make you limber, Then flow away, etc. "And what's a man without his glass.†   (source)
  • But seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good deal like polished ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed it proved to be.†   (source)
  • Now this was written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used in ladies' bodices.†   (source)
  • It was of a conical shape, some ten feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the right-whale.†   (source)
  • "Yes, yes," muttered Bagration as if considering something, and he rode past the limbers to the farthest cannon.†   (source)
  • Among the limbers lay several dead men.†   (source)
  • But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast.†   (source)
  • When having limbered up the only two cannon that remained uninjured out of the four, they began moving down the hill (one shattered gun and one unicorn were left behind), Prince Andrew rode up to Tushin.†   (source)
  • And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship's deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself could not catch.†   (source)
  • I saw Pooky come out of the crowd, unlimbering a .†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unlimbering means not and reverses the meaning of limbering. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
  • A primed athlete among the unlimbered mass of men.†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unlimbered means not and reverses the meaning of limbered. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
  • Renly will scarce have unlimbered his siege engines before Father takes him in the rear.†   (source)
  • "Is that your wolf, boy?" a skinny youth called, unlimbering a stone flail.†   (source)
  • Stygg unlimbered his axe.†   (source)
  • Lee can see it in the way the gun crews have unlimbered the cannons and howitzers and are now sighting them toward his lines.†   (source)
  • Here he dismounted, and stopped beside the farthest of the four unlimbered cannon.†   (source)
  • The gun he drove had been unlimbered near Horsell, in order to command the sand pits, and its arrival it was that had precipitated the action.†   (source)
  • He was not in a pleasant humor; and every time I hinted that perhaps this contract was a shade too hefty for a novice he unlimbered his tongue and cursed like a bishop—French bishop of the Regency days, I mean.†   (source)
  • When he reached the bridge he saw two unlimbered guns, the infantry crossing the bridge, several overturned carts, and frightened and laughing faces among the troops.†   (source)
  • But the guns remained loaded, the loopholes in blockhouses and entrenchments looked out just as menacingly, and the unlimbered cannon confronted one another as before.†   (source)
  • He was told by his fellow officers that the screams of the crowd and the shrieks of the woman were due to the fact that General Ermolov, coming up to the crowd and learning that soldiers were dispersing among the shops while crowds of civilians blocked the bridge, had ordered two guns to be unlimbered and made a show of firing at the bridge.†   (source)
  • And the young men
    limbered the bow, rubbing it down with hot grease,
    then struggled to bend it back but failed.†   (source)
  • So we young lords
    can heat and limber the bow and rub it down with grease
    before we try again and finish off the contest!"
    The goatherd bustled about to rake the fire
    still going strong.†   (source)
  • BIFF [who has been limbering up]: I want to go!†   (source)
  • Vocalism 1 Vocalism, measure, concentration, determination, and the divine power to speak words; Are you full-lung'd and limber-lipp'd from long trial? from vigorous practice? from physique?†   (source)
  • This is a full-grown lily's face, She speaks to the limber-hipp'd man near the garden pickets, Come here she blushingly cries, Come nigh to me limber-hipp'd man, Stand at my side till I lean as high as I can upon you, Fill me with albescent honey, bend down to me, Rub to me with your chafing beard, rub to my breast and shoulders.†   (source)
  • …apprentices, The swing of their axes on the square-hew'd log shaping it toward the shape of a mast, The brisk short crackle of the steel driven slantingly into the pine, The butter-color'd chips flying off in great flakes and slivers, The limber motion of brawny young arms and hips in easy costumes, The constructor of wharves, bridges, piers, bulk-heads, floats, stays against the sea; The city fireman, the fire that suddenly bursts forth in the close-pack'd square, The arriving…†   (source)
  • I could skip Out of my skin, now, like a subtle snake, I am so limber.†   (source)
  • You put me off with limber vows; but I, Though you would seek to unsphere the stars with oaths, Should yet say 'Sir, no going.'†   (source)
  • At once came forth whatever creeps the ground, Insect or worm: those waved their limber fans For wings, and smallest lineaments exact In all the liveries decked of summer's pride With spots of gold and purple, azure and green: These, as a line, their long dimension drew, Streaking the ground with sinuous trace; not all Minims of nature; some of serpent-kind, Wonderous in length and corpulence, involved Their snaky folds, and added wings.†   (source)
  • …is fine, One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same, A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live, A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth, A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian, A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye; At home on…†   (source)
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