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flotsam
in a sentence

show 42 more with this conextual meaning
  • Just some of the weird flotsam on a riverbank, but we keep everything in a search like that.†   (source)
  • The great river of a road grew clogged and choked with the flotsam of a hundred carts and pedestrians, dozens of wains and wagons and the occasional mounted man.†   (source)
  • and on a daily basis I continued to pry open his jaws and extract from the roof of his mouth all sorts of flotsam from our daily lives—potato skins and muffin wrappers, discarded Kleenex and dental floss.†   (source)
  • Much of this "new knowledge" is actually the flotsam of old thought, some of whose roots go back to Hellenism.†   (source)
  • A good fifty percent of it isn't real boat material at all, just a garble of ropes, cables, planks, nets, and other debris tied together on top of whatever kind of flotsam was handy.†   (source)
  • Tree bark, he would have guessed, or sewer-grate flotsam.†   (source)
  • What flotsam and jetsam we were, women of all accents and prospects washed up there boiling grits or pasta, whatever we knew as comfort, united by our effort not to think about our husbands' hands learning to cradle a gun.†   (source)
  • Fire and water collided, superheated steam, and I shot upward from the heart of the volcano in a huge explosion, just one piece of flotsam thrown free by a million pounds of pressure.†   (source)
  • He can't in good conscience send her back into it, to become flotsam on the subsocietal tide that washes up now and then in his office, depositing others like her.†   (source)
  • The Imperium, the CHOAM Company, all the Great Houses, they are but bits of flotsam in the path of the flood.†   (source)
  • It was all the dwarves could do to keep the rafts from being tossed like flotsam before the inexorable current and to avoid smashing into the trees that occasionally floated by.†   (source)
  • The piers did not project, but against each lay a little accumulation of flotsam, from which driftweed and sticks continually broke away to be carried through the bridge.†   (source)
  • In a little while the chaplain stepped back, and the beige crescent of human forms began to break up sluggishly, like flotsam.†   (source)
  • Today's Taxila contained the architectural flotsam of the ancient world.†   (source)
  • Then again, it wasn't as if she'd ever seen his bedroom at home, which presumably was covered with band posters, sports trophies, boxes of those games he loved to play, musical instruments, books—all the flotsam and jetsam of a normal life.†   (source)
  • Chapter 9 Flotsam and Jetsam†   (source)
  • Infinite waters cohabit with flotsam on this side of the breakwater and the luxury liners and Maldive fishing vessels steam out to erase calm sea.†   (source)
  • I kept working, gathering the flotsam with the long net.†   (source)
  • First the traffic struck me like a tidal wave and carried me along, a bit of shiny flotsam bounded in front by a gasoline truck half a block long.†   (source)
  • On a reconnaissance foray into the bowels of the great closet that harbored the jetsam and flotsam washed into the schoolroom over the years, I unearthed a brand-new automatic movie projector.†   (source)
  • It was the type of flotsam and jetsam (a pair of words I had just learned from the dictionary) that washes up on your coffee table, lies around for a week or so, and then makes way for whatever comes in on the next tide.   (source)
    flotsam = things of low value (originally floating debris -- especially wreckage of a ship)
  • But all these suggestions were but flotsam and jetsam cast to the surface by a more profound disturbance...   (source)
  • ...all the flotsam and jetsam of wild spirits from the madly complicated modern world.   (source)
  • The city was leveled: rubble and dust for miles, the Thames choked with flotsam.†   (source)
  • We spent a busy time after that, searching the flotsam, and rummaging about.†   (source)
  • Remnants of the vessels are often found as flotsam on the beaches of the two islands.†   (source)
  • You are welcome to it; it came from the flotsam of Isengard.†   (source)
  • The children scan the terrain, stoop, pick up flotsam; then they deliberate among themselves, keeping some items, discarding others; their treasures go into a torn sack.†   (source)
  • Trapped in its weave was a kaleidoscope of ice floe, dead fish, plastic garbage bags, car tires, grocery carts, and other assorted flotsam.†   (source)
  • The raging wind was too strong for Saphira to resist, and she continued to rise and fall in the cycling air, like a piece of flotsam caught in a whirlpool.†   (source)
  • Gaea opened the earth, and I was consumed, exiled here in the belly of my father Tartarus, where all the useless flotsam collects—all the bits of creation he does not care for.†   (source)
  • He stood at the edge of the glacier, leaning on the staff with the golden eagle, gazing down at the wreckage he'd caused: several hundred acres of newly open water dotted with icebergs and flotsam from the ruined camp.†   (source)
  • Maybe a toe here, a nostril there, or a mustache, floating like a little curl of seaweed among the other flotsam.†   (source)
  • The black colonial-era Morris, flotsam abandoned in 'Pindi by the ebbing tide of British empire, purled quietly along still-sleeping streets.†   (source)
  • It was through our search for man-food that Pippin discovered the prize of all the flotsam, those Hornblower barrels.†   (source)
  • A dazzling breaker of sunlight burst over his head, swamped him in reeling blur of brilliance, and then receded ...A row of frame houses half in thin shade, a pitted gutter, a yawning ashcan, flotsam on the shore, his street.†   (source)
  • It spins now, fading, without progress, as though turned by that final flood which had rushed out of him, leaving his body empty and lighter than a forgotten leaf and even more trivial than flotsam lying spent and still upon the window ledge which has no solidity beneath hands that have no weight; so that it can be now Now.†   (source)
  • it was the wife that had got his father even that far West) on the mountain had broken and now the whole passel of them from the father through the grown daughters down to one that couldn't even walk yet, sliding back down out of the mountains and skating in a kind of accelerating and sloven and inert coherence like a useless collection of flotsam on a flooded river moving by some perverse automotivation such as inanimate objects sometimes show, backward against the very current of the stream, across the Virginia plateau and into the slack lowlands about the mouth of the James Rivet He didn't know why they moved, or didn't remember the reason if he ever knew it—whether it was optimism, hop†   (source)
  • It clucks and murmurs among the spokes and about the mules' knees, yellow, skummed with flotsam and with thick soiled gouts of foam as though it had sweat, lathering, like a driven horse.†   (source)
  • I took my mind, my being, the old dejected, almost inanimate object, and lashed it about among these odds and ends, sticks and straws, detestable little bits of wreckage, flotsam and jetsam, floating on the oily surface.†   (source)
  • I found some of it hard to endure, though I am a mild-tempered man; but, certainly, when I told the captain to "shut up" I had forgotten that I was merely a bit of human flotsam, cut off from my resources and with my fare unpaid; a mere casual dependant on the bounty, or speculative enterprise, of the ship.†   (source)
  • The unexpected discovery of an object of great monetary value (precious stone, valuable adhesive or impressed postage stamps (7 schilling, mauve, imperforate, Hamburg, 1866: 4 pence, rose, blue paper, perforate, Great Britain, 1855: 1 franc, stone, official, rouletted, diagonal surcharge, Luxemburg, 1878), antique dynastical ring, unique relic) in unusual repositories or by unusual means: from the air (dropped by an eagle in flight), by fire (amid the carbonised remains of an incendiated edifice), in the sea (amid flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict), on earth (in the gizzard of a comestible fowl).†   (source)
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