Word: drift
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1870-1879
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...multiplied half its altitude by twenty; that gave forty-eight, my mark. I asked him to explain the principle on which he did it; but he replied that he had been a long time inventing the process, and knew it was the only fair one. I thought that "his drift was shady," and left...
...string, as I had seen a friend do here at college. I tried and succeeded. "Thank you," cried the little girl. "O, how nice!" said her older sisters. The cousin smiled contemptuously, and observed, "Quite an undergraduate accomplishment, - opening bottles!" The little girl did not understand his drift; the older sisters did, and looked compassionately towards me. I felt and looked guilty, and very soon took my leave...
Enough has now been quoted to show the reader the general drift of the article. The writer goes on to give heart-rending accounts of the experiences of Messrs. Taylor of Harvard, Driscoll of Williams, Francis of Columbia, and several other unfortunates. He concludes with a peroration replete with high moral sentiments, and attaches to the argument a kind of "preventer backstay" in the following quotation from Scripture: "The Lord delighteth not in the strength of the horse, and taketh not pleasure in the legs of a man." As an equally apposite argument, though not of so high authority...
...They may be used to go down the steepest hills, where no sled could stand the strain. And here all the fun comes in, since the danger is necessarily very great. Often a load will upset, and girls and boys will be flung together into a huge drift; then of course the screaming and laughing is immense, except when one has a leg or arm broken, and then the laugh is more likely to appear on the other side...
...become the subject of a rather warm discussion in certain college circles. What she has done, is doing, and is yet to do, - what Carlyle would denominate her "infinite conjugation of the verb To Do," - has been ruthlessly divulged. As every discussion of this kind sends up some drift-matter of questionable soundness, so we find now a couple of bits that we recognize as exceedingly familiar and as thoroughly worthless as when they first dropped into the tide of discussion that sets so regularly towards Harvard. In the first place we would in no way discourage...