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slovenly
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  • I blushed for my slovenly ways.†   (source)
  • On the bright side, I had quickly reverted to my premarriage (read: slovenly) lifestyle.†   (source)
  • She was an active church woman, did not drink, smoke, or carouse, defended herself mightily against Cholly, rose above him in every way, and felt she was fulfilling a mother's role conscientiously when she pointed out their father's faults to keep them from having them, or punished them when they showed any slovenliness, no matter how slight, when she worked twelve to sixteen hours a day to support them.†   (source)
  • You—all of you—are selfish and slovenly!†   (source)
  • I suspected that Moody was either deliberately discouraging them or that his brooding, slovenly presence scared them off.†   (source)
  • It made something down in the left side of poor Mandy's slovenly dress-bodice vibrate and tingle.†   (source)
  • The poor and slovenly people of De Koven Street — specifically Mrs. O'Leary and her cow — were the cause of the fire and the destruction of Chicago.†   (source)
  • The water was coated with the bilge oil of numberless ships, filth that would not evaporate in the low temperatures and that left a black ring on the rocky walls of the fjord as though from the bath of a slovenly giant.†   (source)
  • Inevitably, the chaplain's attention, as he cowered meekly before him, focused on Colonel Korn's midriff, where the shirttails bunching up from inside his sagging belt and ballooning down over his waist gave him an appearance of slovenly girth and made him seem inches shorter than his middle height.†   (source)
  • Wibird was "slovenly and lazy," yet—and here was the wonder—he had great "delicacy" of mind, judgment, and humor.†   (source)
  • She told Annie her life in "The Colonies" had given her vulgar, slovenly ways which she set about curing by sending her to bed with no supper and smacking her legs, for the most trivial of crimes, with a long-handled wooden spoon.†   (source)
  • The girl had blurred eyes, a perspiring face, an ermine cape and a beautiful evening gown that had slipped off one shoulder like a slovenly housewife's bathrobe, revealing too much of her breast, not in a manner of daring, but in the manner of a drudge's indifference.†   (source)
  • As an embodiment of conscious slovenliness, I had been a private for four consecutive years, and my classmates, demonstrating remarkable powers of discrimination, had consistently placed me near the bottom of my class.†   (source)
  • For the first time, I felt cold to her, like an ice sheet had fallen between us, and a picture of her began entering my mind, her dark form moving through the corridors of a dingy, slovenly house, peals of surly laughter trailing after her.†   (source)
  • The building manager on the first floor liked money; he would wake up the slovenly landlord in an hour or so.†   (source)
  • It bothers me to be slovenly and asymmetrical.†   (source)
  • Grant well recalled how Lee had scolded him because of his slovenly appearance.†   (source)
  • On the way back to the boat they passed three young Indians, loud spoken, ill-kempt and slovenly, and he felt the boys stiffen with enmity.†   (source)
  • I ordered a beer from the slovenly Irish waiter and waited for Sophie to return.†   (source)
  • In those days everything in the islands was done in a slovenly, slouching manner.†   (source)
  • The word had connotations of dirt and slovenliness and dishonor.†   (source)
  • At first Yura was foisted on the slovenly old chatterbox Ostromys-lensky, known among the clan as Fedka.†   (source)
  • She wears the dress into which she had changed for her drive to town, a simple, fairly expensive affair, which would be extremely becoming if it were not for the careless, almost slovenly way she wears it.†   (source)
  • It was unbearable to think that his house might be slovenly and unpainted, hidden by tall trees, that his mother and father might be shabby— dishonest-crippled-dead.†   (source)
  • I quickly realized that I had done her a disservice—to think of her as slovenly.†   (source)
  • The man started up the steps, a blunt man, weary of his day before it had begun … a slovenly man.†   (source)
  • Charles began to keep one slovenly woman after another.†   (source)
  • Swiftly he undoes the none-too-clean bibbed apron which she is wearing, and which he recognizes as the one habitually worn by slovenly Dora; then he unbuttons the front of her dress, noticing as he does so that there is a button missing, with the threads still hanging in place.†   (source)
  • Considering their slovenliness, their casual approach to personal hygiene and adornment, they ought to have fainted at the attention.†   (source)
  • Some people in town thought the Weary Soldier statue was too dejected-looking, and also too slovenly: they objected to the unbuttoned shirt.†   (source)
  • Her attitude seemed to improve by the day, and even her manner of walking and going about tasks - which during the first days had been so slovenly that one had to avert one's eyes - improved dramatically.†   (source)
  • As time went by I no doubt became, in her mouth, a slovenly harridan, a crazy old bat, a peddler of ratty old junk.†   (source)
  • It was the day of New Year's Eve, December 31, 1961, about two o'clock in the afternoon, and we were sitting in the grubby living room of Hester's apartment in Durham, New Hampshire; it was a living room we routinely shared with Hester's roommates—two university girls who were almost Hester's equal in slovenliness, but sadly no match for Hester in sex appeal.†   (source)
  • What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness or even generosity was in fact a full recognition of the legitimacy of forces other than good ones.†   (source)
  • Major Danby confided that Group was incensed with all flight surgeons because of Dr. Stubbs, the bushy-haired, baggy-chinned, slovenly flight surgeon in Dunbar's squadron who was deliberately and defiantly brewing insidious dissension there by grounding all men with sixty missions on proper forms that were rejected by Group indignantly with orders restoring the confused pilots, navigators, bombardiers and gunners to combat duty.†   (source)
  • But she saw lights in the windows of the cheap, garish structures that had acquired, within a few years, the slovenly dilapidation of slum hovels; the homes of people who had not moved, the people who never looked beyond the span of one week.†   (source)
  • A weaver works by the piece, but Mandy had been reproved too often for slovenly methods not to know that she might be fined for neglect.†   (source)
  • …herself about to the synthetic jitterbug music with more uninhibited pleasure than he had ever observed until he felt his legs falling asleep with boredom and yanked her off the dance floor toward the table at which the girl he should have been screwing was still sitting tipsily with one hand around Aarfy's neck, her orange satin blouse still hanging open slovenly below her full white lacy brassiere as she made dirty sex talk ostentatiously with Huple, Orr, Kid Sampson and Hungry Joe.†   (source)
  • The girls disrobed at once, pausing in different stages to point proudly to their garish underthings and bantering all the while with the gaunt and dissipated old man with the shabby long white hair and slovenly white unbuttoned shirt who sat cackling lasciviously in a musty blue armchair almost in the exact center of the room and bade Nately and his companions welcome with a mirthful and sardonic formality.†   (source)
  • It was a kind of desperate, slovenly clatter, suddenly muted on the rug.†   (source)
  • As slovenly as Hugo is neat, his clothes are dirty and much slept in.†   (source)
  • She looked poor white, shiftless, slovenly, trifling.†   (source)
  • He is slovenly dressed in a dirty shapeless patched suit, spotted by food.†   (source)
  • The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.†   (source)
  • A Model T Ford sedan and a two-wheel trailer were parked beside the shack, and about the camp there hung a slovenly despair.†   (source)
  • My heart turns rough; it abrades my side like a file with two edges: one, that I adore his magnificence; the other I despise his slovenly accents—I who am so much his superior—and am jealous.†   (source)
  • But no, it was a bunch of woman's hair that had been indolently tossed into a corner when some slovenly female toilet was made in this room.†   (source)
  • She looked offensively unkempt, with studied slovenliness as careful as grooming—and for the same purpose.†   (source)
  • Luke, the fourth to be attacked by the pestilence, was desperately ill with typhoid: Eugene was intrusted almost completely to a young slovenly negress.†   (source)
  • I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly all the same, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust.†   (source)
  • Her heavy breasts, sagging visibly against her blouse, stained by fruit juice and chocolate, flopped slovenly from side to side.†   (source)
  • All the great novelists like Thackeray and Dickens and Balzac have written a natural prose, swift but not slovenly, expressive but not precious, taking their own tint without ceasing to be common property.†   (source)
  • Cousin Anna, no less slovenly than in other days, had pancakes and coffee going and a big spread on the table.†   (source)
  • It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.†   (source)
  • Moreover, his own feeling for order was so great that he had a passionate aversion for what was slovenly, disorderly, diffuse.†   (source)
  • He had a long chest but his legs were relatively short; he walked quickly, toes in, slovenly in his double-breasted long jacket, a densely hairy, mild, even delicate person.†   (source)
  • Its eye, that would see through me, shuts—if I sleep now, through slovenliness, or cowardice, burying myself in the past, in the dark; or acquiesce, as Bernard acquiesces, telling stories; or boast, as Percival, Archie, John, Walter, Lathom, Larpent, Roper, Smith boast—the names are the same always, the names of the boasting boys.†   (source)
  • But neither the slight, long-nosed owner of the store, gnawing bitterly at his sallow mustache, nor his slovenly, red-haired wife glaring at him, nor their pimpled, frightened daughter in the rear moved to do his bidding.†   (source)
  • Thus stood the two Harrys, neither playing a very pretty part, over against the worthy professor, mocking one another, watching one another, and spitting at one another, while as always in such predicaments, the eternal question presented itself whether all this was simple stupidity and human frailty, a common depravity, or whether this sentimental egoism and perversity, this slovenliness and two-facedness of feeling was merely a personal idiosyncrasy of the Steppenwolves.†   (source)
  • The hideous houses and churches, the ill-kept farms and gardens, the slovenly, sordid aspect of the towns and country-side, which continually depressed Father Latour, he seemed scarcely to perceive.†   (source)
  • I don't believe Clem had many of the vices that lead to damnation, but such as they were they were very evident on this occasion--late rising, puffiness, double-breasted slovenliness of the kind that old gentleman La Bruyere thought so sordid, tobacco stink, lint, and cat hairs on him, kept up by dime-store purchase and cheap accommodation, as in aftershave lotion, Sta-comb, artificial silk socks, and so forth, besides his lordly self-abuse look.†   (source)
  • He wears old clothes and is slovenly.†   (source)
  • Like McGloin, he is slovenly.†   (source)
  • I mean not to be slovenly about her dress or untidy in leaving things about.†   (source)
  • Heavy, slovenly, she moved to awaken Jett with a kick of foot no less gentle than her mien.†   (source)
  • Whereas you can also use the word 'human' to cover up all sorts of weak-willed slovenliness.†   (source)
  • Sort of fruit not mentioned; their usual slovenliness in statistics.†   (source)
  • It isn't the thing: it's slovenly, ever so slovenly.†   (source)
  • He was clad in a professional but rather slovenly fashion, for his frock-coat was dingy and his trousers frayed.†   (source)
  • Upon it, and leaning against a hitching-rail, were men of varying ages, most of them slovenly in old jeans and slouched sombreros.†   (source)
  • She disapproved of all her neighbors because of their slovenly housekeeping, and the women thought her very proud.†   (source)
  • The master, being wroth with what he termed such slovenly and doltish work, did promise that he would soundly whip me for it—and—†   (source)
  • If he ever approached intoxication—or rather that ruddy warmth and comfortableness which precedes the more slovenly state—it was when individuals such as these were gathered about him, when he was one of a circle of chatting celebrities.†   (source)
  • Mr. Welland's sensitive domesticity shrank from the discomforts of the slovenly southern hotel, and at immense expense, and in face of almost insuperable difficulties, Mrs. Welland was obliged, year after year, to improvise an establishment partly made up of discontented New York servants and partly drawn from the local African supply.†   (source)
  • She fluttered toward the tailor shop, dashed into its slovenly heat with the comic fastidiousness of a humming bird dipping into a dry tiger-lily.†   (source)
  • Upon my soul, if the London folk only knowed of thee and thy slovenly ways, they'd swaller their milk and butter more mincing than they do a'ready; and that's saying a good deal."†   (source)
  • When driven with his mates to the new owners' camp, Buck saw a slipshod and slovenly affair, tent half stretched, dishes unwashed, everything in disorder; also, he saw a woman.†   (source)
  • Her voice became a little peremptory, and instinctively she suppressed inattention and corrected slovenliness.†   (source)
  • Hans Castorp was going to ask their purpose, and just as quickly forgot the question. right, and on your left is a Russian couple—they're rather slovenly, and loud, I must say, but there was nothing else we could do.†   (source)
  • You shave every morning, and in this season you shave by the sunlight; but since your shaving is less and less complete as we get farther back on the left side, until it becomes positively slovenly as we get round the angle of the jaw, it is surely very clear that that side is less illuminated than the other.†   (source)
  • In his hand he carried a basket; and there was a touch of slovenliness in his attire, together with that indefinable something in his whole appearance which suggested one who was his own housekeeper, purveyor, confidant, and friend, through possessing nobody else at all in the world to act in those capacities for him.†   (source)
  • Later, when the time for the baby grew nearer, he would bustle round in his slovenly fashion, poking out the ashes, rubbing the fireplace, sweeping the house before he went to work.†   (source)
  • Philip could not wrench out of his nature the instincts of the middle-class from which he came; and the penury, the hack work which Cronshaw did to keep body and soul together, the monotony of existence between the slovenly attic and the cafe table, jarred with his respectability.†   (source)
  • It took them half the night to pitch a slovenly camp, and half the morning to break that camp and get the sled loaded in fashion so slovenly that for the rest of the day they were occupied in stopping and rearranging the load.†   (source)
  • At five o'clock all the men went down into the dungeon with the table on trestles, and there they had tea, eating bread-and-butter on the bare, dirty boards, talking with the same kind of ugly haste and slovenliness with which they ate their meal.†   (source)
  • In that regard, it was Herr Settembrini who was pious and strict, and Naphta who was lax and slovenly, referring truth back to man and declaring that whatever profited man was true.†   (source)
  • It's been slovenly and bad.'†   (source)
  • For people to use informal pronouns or first names when they have no real reason to do so is a repulsively barbaric practice, a slovenly game, a way of playing with the givens of civilization and human progress, against both of which it is directed—shamelessly, insolently directed.†   (source)
  • "Yes, you're right," Joachim said, "of course I can't stand either slovenliness or weak-willed people.†   (source)
  • He thought it implied a general weak-willed slovenliness, and in that sense, then, a boundless guazzabuglio of tolerance.†   (source)
  • Nor was there anything to inspire greater reverence for suffering in his appearance; in its own way, this incident, too, bolstered Hans Castorp's impression that he was being exposed up here, against his will, to frivolous slovenliness, and, counter to all local custom, he hoped to offset this process by paying closer attention to those seriously ill and moribund.†   (source)
  • What was once a smooth-shaven lawn before the house, dotted here and there with ornamental shrubs, was now covered with frowsy tangled grass, with horseposts set up, here and there, in it, where the turf was stamped away, and the ground littered with broken pails, cobs of corn, and other slovenly remains.†   (source)
  • The whole had a slovenly, confined, and sleepy look, like a cage for a human dormouse; while he, looming dark and heavy in the shadow of a corner by the window, looked like the human dormouse for whom it was fitted up,—as indeed he was.†   (source)
  • I had let myself get too slovenly.†   (source)
  • It was annoying to come upon that everlasting slovenliness in the farm work against which he had been striving with all his might for so many years.†   (source)
  • It went along with other points of conduct in Mr. Farebrother which were exceptionally fine, and made his character resemble those southern landscapes which seem divided between natural grandeur and social slovenliness.†   (source)
  • Do you make sugar in this slovenly way?†   (source)
  • The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint; its floor is strewn with grey sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere fallen into long disuse; and it is easy to conclude, from the general slovenliness of the place, that this is a sanctuary into which womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom and mop, has very infrequent access.†   (source)
  • This business dispatched, a few slovenly lessons were performed, and Squeers retired to his fireside, leaving Nicholas to take care of the boys in the school-room, which was very cold, and where a meal of bread and cheese was served out shortly after dark.†   (source)
  • A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish—read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife.†   (source)
  • She could hardly endure the late Odintsov (she had married him from prudential motives, though probably she would not have consented to become his wife if she had not considered him a good sort of man), and had conceived a secret repugnance for all men, whom she could only figure to herself as slovenly, heavy, drowsy, and feebly importunate creatures.†   (source)
  • I would visit Mun Eddings, who lived in two very dirty rooms, and ask why little Lugene, whose flaming face seemed ever ablaze with the dark-red hair uncombed, was absent all last week, or why I missed so often the inimitable rags of Mack and Ed. Then the father, who worked Colonel Wheeler's farm on shares, would tell me how the crops needed the boys; and the thin, slovenly mother, whose face was pretty when washed, assured me that Lugene must mind the baby.†   (source)
  • His person showed marks of habitual neglect, his dress was slovenly; and yet there was something in the presence of the old Squire distinguishable from that of the ordinary farmers in the parish, who were perhaps every whit as refined as he, but, having slouched their way through life with a consciousness of being in the vicinity of their "betters", wanted that self-possession and authoritativeness of voice and carriage which belonged to a man who thought of superiors as remote…†   (source)
  • On the other hand, Hurry Harry, either from constitutional recklessness, or from a secret consciousness how little his appearance required artificial aids, wore everything in a careless, slovenly manner, as if he felt a noble scorn for the trifling accessories of dress and ornaments.†   (source)
  • That evening, on his return to his garret, Marius cast his eyes over his garments, and perceived, for the first time, that he had been so slovenly, indecorous, and inconceivably stupid as to go for his walk in the Luxembourg with his "every-day clothes," that is to say, with a hat battered near the band, coarse carter's boots, black trousers which showed white at the knees, and a black coat which was pale at the elbows.†   (source)
  • I found Richard thin and languid, slovenly in his dress, abstracted in his manner, forcing his spirits now and then, and at other intervals relapsing into a dull thoughtfulness.†   (source)
  • Being conversational, and in a reasonable flow of spirits, he then invited her attention to his coat as it hung behind the door: remarking that the Father of the place would set an indifferent example to his children, already disposed to be slovenly, if he went among them out at elbows.†   (source)
  • There was but one thing to mar Martin Poyser's pleasure in this dance: it was that he was always in close contact with Luke Britton, that slovenly farmer.†   (source)
  • He is a darkskinned gipsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman: that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire: rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure; and rather morose.†   (source)
  • Allowing for my learned friend's appearance being careless and slovenly if not debauched, they were sufficiently like each other to surprise, not only the witness, but everybody present, when they were thus brought into comparison.†   (source)
  • After a short suspense, it was opened by a tall, gaunt man, without neckerchief, and otherwise extremely slovenly; his features were lost in masses of shaggy hair that hung on his shoulders; and HIS eyes, too, were like a ghostly Catherine's with all their beauty annihilated.†   (source)
  • He had no theories about setting the world to rights, but he saw there was a great deal of damage done by building with ill-seasoned timber—by ignorant men in fine clothes making plans for outhouses and workshops and the like without knowing the bearings of things—by slovenly joiners' work, and by hasty contracts that could never be fulfilled without ruining somebody; and he resolved, for his part, to set his face against such doings.†   (source)
  • "Our liturgy," observed Crawford, "has beauties, which not even a careless, slovenly style of reading can destroy; but it has also redundancies and repetitions which require good reading not to be felt.†   (source)
  • Some things he knew thoroughly, namely, the slovenly habits of farming, and the awkwardness of weather, stock and crops, at Freeman's End—so called apparently by way of sarcasm, to imply that a man was free to quit it if he chose, but that there was no earthly "beyond" open to him.†   (source)
  • Dr. Todd and a slovenly-looking, shabby-genteel young man, who took tobacco profusely, wore a coat of imported cloth cut with something like a fashionable air, frequently exhibited a large French silver watch, with a chain of woven hair and a silver key, and who, altogether, seemed as much above the artisans around him as he was himself inferior to the real gentle man, occupied a high-back wooden settee, in the most comfortable corner in the apartment.†   (source)
  • Her attendant—for she had one—was a red-faced, round-eyed, slovenly girl, who, from a certain roughness about the bare arms that peeped from under her draggled shawl, and the half-washed-out traces of smut and blacklead which tattooed her countenance, was clearly of a kin with the servants-of-all-work on the form: between whom and herself there had passed various grins and glances, indicative of the freemasonry of the craft.†   (source)
  • He delivered himself with precision, as if he had been called upon to make a public statement; and the balanced sing-song neatness of his speech, occasionally corresponded to by a movement of his head, was the more conspicuous from its contrast with good Mr. Brooke's scrappy slovenliness.†   (source)
  • In truth, he was an odd fish; ignorant of common life, fond of rudely opposing receiv'd opinions, slovenly to extream dirtiness, enthusiastic in some points of religion, and a little knavish withal.†   (source)
  • To speak to him rashly, to do anything before him obscenely, slovenly, impudently, is to Dishonour.†   (source)
  • Go not ungirt and loose, Sancho; for disordered attire is a sign of an unstable mind, unless indeed the slovenliness and slackness is to be set down to craft, as was the common opinion in the case of Julius Caesar.†   (source)
  • *slovenly Why is thy lord so sluttish, I thee pray, And is of power better clothes to bey,* *buy If that his deed accordeth with thy speech?†   (source)
  • …a bridegroom; and his chin new reap'd Show'd like a stubble-land at harvest-home: He was perfumed like a milliner; And 'twixt his finger and his thumb he held A pouncet-box, which ever and anon He gave his nose, and took't away again; Who therewith angry, when it next came there, Took it in snuff: and still he smiled and talk'd; And, as the soldiers bore dead bodies by, He call'd them untaught knaves, unmannerly, To bring a slovenly unhandsome corse Betwixt the wind and his nobility.†   (source)
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