All 5 Uses of
breech
in
Arrowsmith
- You can lick anybody in the class, and when I think of how you're going to bully the poor heathen when you get to be a missionary, and make the kids put on breeches, and marry off all the happy lovers to the wrong people, I could bawl!†
Chpt 2
- She was intimidated by the luminous cases of mahogany and plate glass, by the opera hats and lustrous mufflers and creamy riding breeches.†
Chpt 7 *
- She was wearing a tweed jacket, with a tam, a flamboyant scarf, and the first breeches any girl had dared to display in Nautilus.†
Chpt 20
- He walked out of the McGurk Building in a melancholy, deprecatory way, with one breeches leg bulging over his riding-boots; and however piously he tried, he never remembered to button his blouse over the violet-flowered shirts which, he often confided, you could buy ever so cheap on Eighth Avenue.†
Chpt 27
- Except for the balcony, where one lunches and looks down on squatting breech-clouted Hindu beggars, and unearthly pearl-pale English children at games in the savannah, all of the Ice House is a large and dreaming dimness wherein you are but half conscious of Moorish grills, a touch of gilt on whitepainted walls, a heavy, amazingly long mahogany bar, slot machines, and marble-topped tables beyond your own.†
Chpt 31
Definition:
-
(breech) rear
Most commonly used today in the phrase breech birth in reference to a baby who comes out of the birth canal butt-first rather than head-first.More-archaic senses seen in classic literature include:- breechcloth -- a form of loincloth consisting in a strip of material passed between the thighs and held up in front and behind by a belt or string
- breeches -- pants
- a cannon's breech -- the rear of a gun