All 4 Uses of
shambles
in
Arrowsmith
- His mind was a shambles.†
Chpt 9 *
- He meditated that if science and public hygiene did remove tuberculosis and the other major plagues, the world was grimly certain to become so overcrowded, to become such a universal slavepacked shambles, that all beauty and ease and wisdom would disappear in a famine-driven scamper for existence.†
Chpt 12
- Martin and Leora came into a shambles of salutations and daughters.†
Chpt 19
- So Max Gottlieb took charge of the McGurk Institute of Biology, and in a month that Institute became a shambles.†
Chpt 30
Definitions:
-
(1)
(shambles as in: the place is a shambles) a condition of great disorder
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
In the past, shambles referenced a slaughterhouse (a building used to butcher animals) -- as when Joseph Conrad wrote in The Secret Agent, "I told him that I dreamt of a world like shambles, where the weak would be taken in hand for utter extermination."
Very rarely, shambles is used as a form of the verb shamble to indicate a type of awkward shuffling walk, as in "She shambles when she is nervous."