All 10 Uses of
liability
in
David Copperfield
- "I do not deny that he has kept me in the dark as to his resources and his liabilities both," she went on, looking at the wall; "but I never will desert Mr. Micawber!"
Chpt 10-12 *liabilities = debt and other financial obligations
- Under these circumstances, alike humiliating to endure, humiliating to contemplate, and humiliating to relate, I have discharged the pecuniary liability contracted at this establishment, by giving a note of hand, made payable fourteen days after date, at my residence, Pentonville, London.†
Chpt 16-18
- Under the temporary pressure of pecuniary liabilities, contracted with a view to their immediate liquidation, but remaining unliquidated through a combination of circumstances, I have been under the necessity of assuming a garb from which my natural instincts recoil — I allude to spectacles — and possessing myself of a cognomen, to which I can establish no legitimate pretensions.†
Chpt 34-36
- I had often thought of the Micawbers, but chiefly to wonder what 'pecuniary liabilities' they were establishing in Canterbury, and to recall how shy Mr. Micawber was of me when he became clerk to Uriah Heep.†
Chpt 49-51
- Where, for the first time in many revolving years, the overwhelming pressure of pecuniary liabilities was not proclaimed, from day to day, by importune voices declining to vacate the passage; where there was no knocker on the door for any creditor to appeal to; where personal service of process was not required, and detainees were merely lodged at the gate!†
Chpt 49-51
- The victim, from my cradle, of pecuniary liabilities to which I have been unable to respond, I have ever been the sport and toy of debasing circumstances.†
Chpt 52-54 *
- 'I could not receive it as a gift,' said Mr. Micawber, full of fire and animation, 'but if a sufficient sum could be advanced, say at five per cent interest, per annum, upon my personal liability — say my notes of hand, at twelve, eighteen, and twenty-four months, respectively, to allow time for something to turn up —'†
Chpt 52-54
- Traddles, with a perceptible lengthening of his face, explained that he had not been able to approach this subject; that it had shared the fate of Mr. Micawber's liabilities, in not being comprehended in the terms he had made; that we were no longer of any authority with Uriah Heep; and that if he could do us, or any of us, any injury or annoyance, no doubt he would.†
Chpt 52-54
- How the emigrants never wrote home, otherwise than cheerfully and hopefully; how Mr. Micawber had actually remitted divers small sums of money, on account of those 'pecuniary liabilities', in reference to which he had been so business-like as between man and man; how Janet, returning into my aunt's service when she came back to Dover, had finally carried out her renunciation of mankind by entering into wedlock with a thriving tavern-keeper; and how my aunt had finally set her seal on…†
Chpt 58-60
- Suffice it to observe, that it was a masterpiece of eloquence; and that those passages in which he more particularly traced his own successful career to its source, and warned the younger portion of his auditory from the shoals of ever incurring pecuniary liabilities which they were unable to liquidate, brought a tear into the manliest eye present.†
Chpt 63-64
Definitions:
-
(liability as in: liabilities on the balance sheet) the cash value that an accountant would place on things that are owed; or the things owed
-
(liability as in: she is a liability to our cause) any negative trait or thing that creates a problem