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gratuitous
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  • It was not a gratuitous description.†   (source)
  • I—I got 'em at Ginsberg's," she added gratuitously.†   (source)
  • I no longer believe this is a quid pro quo universe--I've counseled too many prisoners, worked with too many failed marriages, faced my own dilemmas too many times, and been loved gratuitously after too many failures.†   (source)
  • … Frankly, I don't care to see them, for I will not be compromised by gratuitous pretrial testimony that can be injurious to my position.†   (source)
  • A gratuitous image of my hands tightening around the Seeker's neck filled my head.†   (source)
  • Whatever her neighboring monarchs thought, she very rarely made hasty decisions, and she didn't engage in violence gratuitously.†   (source)
  • It was the knowledge that neither their marriage nor his love for her nor his insistence on holding her nor his love for that other woman nor this gratuitous adultery had any meaning whatever, that there was no shred of sense in any of it and no use to grope for explanations.†   (source)
  • ROS: Well, really-I mean, people want to be entertained-they don't come expecting sordid and gratuitous filth.†   (source)
  • Upon whose shoulders rests the blame for this gratuitous torture—mine, Leslie's, the Zeitgeist's?†   (source)
  • "Tell him about the gratuitous act, Millie," he said.†   (source)
  • Jinny Love was left behind in the heartless way people and incidents alike are thrown off in the course of a dream, like the gratuitous flowers scattered from a float-rather in celebration.†   (source)
  • But this does not mean, on the other hand, that love comes easily: the white world is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and, above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that.†   (source)
  • a gratuitous assumption
  • She is known for distributing gratuitous insults.
    gratuitous = unnecessary and unwarranted
  • I go around shooting people gratuitously and then I agonize about it afterward for hours to my girlfriend!†   (source)
  • It was serene, imperturbable, gratuitous: it was of course the look of "good country people" at such times.†   (source)
  • It had all happened too fast, this sudden gratuitous charity, for Sophie to make immediate sense of it, but soon she had an inkling and she was truly alarmed—alarmed as much by the way Wilhelmine had all but pounced upon her (for now she realized this is what she had done), lurking like a tarantula while she waited for her to emerge from the cellar, as by the precipitate offering of the rather ridiculous largess itself.†   (source)
  • …a biologist (I kept thinking of a prodigy like Julian Huxley, whose essays I had read in college)—this man who possessed so many literary references and allusions, both classical and modern, and who within the space of an hour could, with no gratuitous strain, weave together Lytton Strachey, Alice in Wonderland, Martin Luther's early celibacy, A Midsummer Night's Dream and the mating habits of the Sumatran orangutan into a little jewel box of a beguiling lecture which facetiously but…†   (source)
  • Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo.†   (source)
  • There is a general resemblance which one can hardly avoid seeing, because the most impressive event in Tolstoy's life, as in Lear's, was a huge and gratuitous act of renunciation.†   (source)
  • But in the humans the Enemy has gratuitously associated affection between the parties with sexual desire.†   (source)
  • He just walked on, erect, with the new hat cocked and carrying in his hand now that which must have seemed to them the final gratuitous bafflement and even insult, with the committee riding along in the street beside him and not quite parallel, and others who did not happen to have horses at the moment joining in and following the committee in the road, and ladies and children and women slaves coming to the doors and windows of the homes as they passed to watch as they went on in grim…†   (source)
  • Why, it was reasoned, should opponents of the extension of slavery try to exclude it from the territories by an act of Congress that would be a gratuitous insult to the South, if the same end could be served by letting geography and popular sovereignty have their way?†   (source)
  • I had not eaten the nuts; I was sorry that I had called her Aunt Addie; but I did not want to be singled out for gratuitous punishment.†   (source)
  • His spirit was piercing, but there has to be mentioned his poor color, age-impoverished and gray; plus the new flat's ugliness; dullness of certain hours, dryness of days, dreariness and shabbiness--mentioned that the street was bare, dim and low in life, bad; and that there were business thoughts and malformed growths of purpose, terrible, menacing, salt-patched with noises and news, and pimpled and dotted around with lies, both practical and gratuitous.†   (source)
  • …such as women wore, in a faint though unmistakable effluvium of scent such as women used, smoking a cigar almost as a woman might smoke it, yet withal such an air of indolent and lethal assurance that only the most reckless man would have gratuitously drawn the comparison (and with no attempt to teach, train, play the mentor on his part—and then maybe yes; maybe who could know what times he looked at Henry's face and thought, not there but for the intervening leaven of that blood…†   (source)
  • Don't you think it is destructive to a passion whose essence is its gratuitousness?"†   (source)
  • Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.†   (source)
  • They rebuild their houses for them gratuitously when they are ruined.†   (source)
  • Though his services were rendered quite gratuitously.†   (source)
  • He would never stand there again; it was gratuitous dreariness.†   (source)
  • A gratuitous ordeal was in store for her in the matter of her handwriting.†   (source)
  • Fearless and wicked as they are, they dare not attempt such open and gratuitous cruelty!†   (source)
  • [Footnote j: See the American budgets for the cost of indigent citizens and gratuitous instruction.†   (source)
  • It was not Mr. Bambridge's weakness to be a gratuitous flatterer.†   (source)
  • Equality has an organ: gratuitous and obligatory instruction.†   (source)
  • The nightingale is a gratuitous Elleviou.†   (source)
  • It was understood from the beginning that my services would be gratuitous.†   (source)
  • Lydgate had often been satirical on this gratuitous prediction, and he meant now to be guarded.†   (source)
  • As for Lord Antony and Sir Andrew Ffoulkes, their very hearts seemed to stand still with horror at this gratuitous insult.†   (source)
  • Observe, it was a perfectly gratuitous idea on his part, seeing there has never been any discussion of it between us!†   (source)
  • The aristocracy he defended, in spite of the political marriages by which it tried to secure breeding for itself, had its mind undertrained by silly schoolmasters and governesses, its character corrupted by gratuitous luxury, its self-respect adulterated to complete spuriousness by flattery and flunkeyism.†   (source)
  • "Dear father," he said sadly, "I wish you would not expose yourself to such gratuitous pain from scoundrels!"†   (source)
  • Passing the evening, therefore, in a desultory waiting about the town wherein he avoided the precincts of every cloister and hall, because he could not bear to behold them, he repaired to the tavern bar while the hundred and one strokes were resounding from the Great Bell of Cardinal College, a coincidence which seemed to him gratuitous irony.†   (source)
  • The burden of offence lying manifestly with Mrs. Dorset, this conjecture seemed on the face of it gratuitously unkind; but Selden knew that in the most one-sided matrimonial quarrel there are generally counter-charges to be brought, and that they are brought with the greater audacity where the original grievance is so emphatic.†   (source)
  • They were only women; they were not regular labourers; they were not particularly required anywhere; hence they had to hire a waggon at their own expense, and got nothing sent gratuitously.†   (source)
  • His chivalrous manners to women, and his elevated moral sentiments, being both gratuitous and unusual, strike them as being a little unfortunate; and though they find his vein of easy humor rather amusing when it has ceased to puzzle them (as it does at first), they have had to make him understand that he really must not tell anecdotes unless they are strictly personal and scandalous, and also that oratory is an accomplishment which belongs to a cruder stage of civilization than that…†   (source)
  • She would not have spent sevenpence on her children's schooling: the law had to force her to let them be taught gratuitously; but on death she spent all she had.†   (source)
  • To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to justify, and at best could only palliate.†   (source)
  • That is the only prosperity you see on the stage, where the workers are all footmen, parlourmaids, comic lodging-letters and fashionable professional men, whilst the heroes and heroines are miraculously provided with unlimited dividends, and eat gratuitously, like the knights in Don Quixote's books of chivalry.†   (source)
  • Even Hotspur, one would think, must have been patient in his slippers on a warm hearth, taking copious snuff, and sipping gratuitous brandy-and-water.†   (source)
  • The self-sacrifice of a father or mother, or self-sacrifice with the possibility of a reward, is more comprehensible than gratuitous self-sacrifice, and therefore seems less deserving of sympathy and less the result of free will.†   (source)
  • And it is for this state of things that we hold responsible that gratuitous mismanagement-wholly apart from the main substantial rights and merits of the question, to which alone it is to be ascribed; and which had its origin in its earlier stages, before the accession of Mr. Calhoun to the department of State.†   (source)
  • We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him.†   (source)
  • Permit me to inquire the name of the magistrate who offers a gratuitous and unprovoked insult to a respectable person, under the protection of the bench.'†   (source)
  • To no class of persons is the presentation of a gratuitous opera-box more acceptable than to the wealthy millionaire, who still hugs economy while boasting of carrying a king's ransom in his waistcoat pocket.†   (source)
  • Scorn, bitterness, unprovoked malignity, gratuitous desire of ill, ridicule of whatever was good and holy, all awoke to tempt, even while they frightened him.†   (source)
  • In Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris an edifying and gratuitous spectacle was provided for the people in the Hotel de Ville of Paris in the reign of Louis XI. in honor of the birth of the dauphin.†   (source)
  • …full of misery, but for a while she contemplated it firmly, allowing herself, nevertheless, as girls will, to dwell upon the happy life she would have enjoyed had Troy been Boldwood, and the path of love the path of duty—inflicting upon herself gratuitous tortures by imagining him the lover of another woman after forgetting her; for she had penetrated Troy's nature so far as to estimate his tendencies pretty accurately, but unfortunately loved him no less in thinking that he might soon…†   (source)
  • It's true that he doesn't appear to have had any tact whatever in trying to extract it; he has indulged in gratuitous suppositions.†   (source)
  • Expressing himself to this effect, Mr Squeers, who lost no opportunity of advertising gratuitously, placed his hands upon his knees, and looked at the pupils with as much benignity as he could possibly affect, while Nicholas, blushing with shame, handed round the cards as directed.†   (source)
  • But it is by no means certain that she did not feel it to be wrong that so little notice was taken of them and that her failure (really very gratuitous) to make herself important in the neighbourhood had not much to do with the acrimony of her allusions to her husband's adopted country.†   (source)
  • In 1831 $250,000 were spent in the State of New York for the maintenance of the poor, and at least $1,000,000 were devoted to gratuitous instruction.†   (source)
  • His own approbation was necessary to him, and it was not an approbation to be enjoyed quite gratuitously; it must be won by a fair amount of merit.†   (source)
  • My private opinion is, that this was entirely a gratuitous assumption, and that Pidger was altogether innocent of any such sentiments — to which he had never given any sort of expression that I could ever hear of.†   (source)
  • This distinction was rather a gratuitous concession made by the poorer and less polished part of the population than a right claimed by the favored few.†   (source)
  • The door opened, and a thick-set, heavy-looking young man entered, with the flushed face and the gratuitously elated bearing which mark the first stage of intoxication.†   (source)
  • Whether this is a gratuitous (the only gratuitous) part of the falsehood and trickery of such men's lives, or whether they really hope to cheat Heaven itself, and lay up treasure in the next world by the same process which has enabled them to lay up treasure in this—not to question how it is, so it is.†   (source)
  • He had hardly returned from the marquee with the prize in his hand, when it began to be understood that Wiry Ben proposed to amuse the company, before the gentry went to dinner, with an impromptu and gratuitous performance—namely, a hornpipe, the main idea of which was doubtless borrowed; but this was to be developed by the dancer in so peculiar and complex a manner that no one could deny him the praise of originality.†   (source)
  • …speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his "trotters," as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were eyed on him—for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl—wasting more time in delay and…†   (source)
  • For my part I wish the excellent and gifted young man every success; I trust that his youthful idealism and impulse towards the ideas of the people may never degenerate, as often happens, on the moral side into gloomy mysticism, and on the political into blind chauvinism—two elements which are even a greater menace to Russia than the premature decay, due to misunderstanding and gratuitous adoption of European ideas, from which his elder brother is suffering.†   (source)
  • Like many ladies of her country who had lived a long time in Europe, she had completely lost her native tact on such points, and in her reaction, not in itself deplorable, against the liberty allowed to young persons beyond the seas, had fallen into gratuitous and exaggerated scruples.†   (source)
  • Lucy felt a little nervous under her father's apparently gratuitous criticism of Mr. Wakem's expenditure.†   (source)
  • A gratuitous, entirely superfluous visit of that sort was sure to make a man disagreeable and ridiculous.†   (source)
  • I look upon the entire absence of gratuitous functionaries in America as one of the most prominent signs of the absolute dominion which democracy exercises in that country.†   (source)
  • Adam was not a man to be gratuitously superstitious, but he had the blood of the peasant in him as well as of the artisan, and a peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when he sees a camel.†   (source)
  • …put an end to the unjust farming out of the feeble by the strong, put a bridle on the iniquitous jealousy of the man who is making his way against the man who has reached the goal, adjust, mathematically and fraternally, salary to labor, mingle gratuitous and compulsory education with the growth of childhood, and make of science the base of manliness, develop minds while keeping arms busy, be at one and the same time a powerful people and a family of happy men, render property…†   (source)
  • It may be regarded as a gratuitous public school ever open, in which every juror learns to exercise his rights, enters into daily communication with the most learned and enlightened members of the upper classes, and becomes practically acquainted with the laws of his country, which are brought within the reach of his capacity by the efforts of the bar, the advice of the judge, and even by the passions of the parties.†   (source)
  • When a democratic republic renders offices which had formerly been remunerated gratuitous, it may safely be believed that the State is advancing to monarchical institutions; and when a monarchy begins to remunerate such officers as had hitherto been unpaid, it is a sure sign that it is approaching toward a despotic or a republican form of government.†   (source)
  • But this ill-tempered anticipation that she could desire visits which might be disagreeable to her husband, this gratuitous defence of himself against selfish complaint on her part, was too sharp a sting to be meditated on until after it had been resented.†   (source)
  • …fathers of families incarcerated for debt 1,000 " Addition to the salary of the poor teachers of the diocese …… 2,000 " Public granary of the Hautes-Alpes …… 100 " Congregation of the ladies of D——, of Manosque, and of Sisteron, for the gratuitous instruction of poor girls …… 1,500 " For the poor …… 6,000 " My personal expenses …… 1,000 " —— Total …… 15,000 " M. Myriel made no change in this arrangement during the entire period that he occupied the see of D—— As has been seen, he…†   (source)
  • We know it is said of late by the State of Georgia and by the Executive of the United States, that we have forfeited this right; but we think this is said gratuitously.†   (source)
  • Even the rumor of Reform had not yet excited any millennial expectations in Frick, there being no definite promise in it, as of gratuitous grains to fatten Hiram Ford's pig, or of a publican at the "Weights and Scales" who would brew beer for nothing, or of an offer on the part of the three neighboring farmers to raise wages during winter.†   (source)
  • He allots the imposts, taxes each person conscientiously, judges quarrels for nothing, divides inheritances without charge, pronounces sentences gratuitously; and he is obeyed, because he is a just man among simple men.†   (source)
  • —THE HOUSE IN THE RUE PLUMET she had not taken the vows, should have received her education gratuitously, he humbly begged the Reverend Prioress to see fit that he should offer to the community, as indemnity, for the five years which Cosette had spent there, the sum of five thousand francs.†   (source)
  • Why does she send out to purchase six sheets of note paper, when she has a "whole stationer's shop full of it?" etc. There exist beings who, for the sake of obtaining the key to these enigmas, which are, moreover, of no consequence whatever to them, spend more money, waste more time, take more trouble, than would be required for ten good actions, and that gratuitously, for their own pleasure, without receiving any other payment for their curiosity than curiosity.†   (source)
  • The Irishman is almost incapable of saying plain yes or no; he must always add some extra and gratuitous asseveration.†   (source)
  • This gratuitous contribution of a humorous character occasioned a fair amount of laughter among his entourage.†   (source)
  • A provisional failure to obtain renewal of an advertisement: to obtain a certain quantity of tea from Thomas Kernan (agent for Pulbrook, Robertson and Co, 5 Dame Street, Dublin, and 2 Mincing Lane, London E. C.): to certify the presence or absence of posterior rectal orifice in the case of Hellenic female divinities: to obtain admission (gratuitous or paid) to the performance of Leah by Mrs Bandmann Palmer at the Gaiety Theatre, 46, 47, 48, 49 South King street.†   (source)
  • The sensitive ear of Henry James detected an unpleasant /r/-sound in the speech of Americans, long ago got rid of by the English, so late as 1905; he even charged that it was inserted gratuitously in innocent words.†   (source)
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