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More "Flaccid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Paresi followed Ives' flaccid, shocked gaze to the bulkhead where there had been the outline of the closed port, and beside it the hole which had held the axle of the manual wheel, and which now was a smooth, seamless curtain of impenetrable black. But Hoskins looked ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... suffered from sleeplessness. Having undressed, she seated herself at the window in a Voltaire armchair, and dismissed her maids. The candles were taken away, and once more the room was left with only one lamp burning in it. The Countess sat there looking quite yellow, mumbling with her flaccid lips and swaying to and fro. Her dull eyes expressed complete vacancy of mind, and, looking at her, one would have thought that the rocking of her body was not a voluntary action of her own, but was produced by the action of some ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... that hung about the water, foot-sore from their long journeyings to the distant hills and too weary to return. At the spring-hole at Carrizo they found them gathered, the runts and roughs of the range; old cows with importunate calves bunting at their flaccid udders; young heifers, unused to rustling for two; orehannas with no mothers to guide them to the feed; rough steers that had been "busted" and half-crippled by some reckless cowboy—all the unfortunate ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... sun, she saw for the first time signs of years in Eugenia's exquisite small face. There was not a line visible, nor a faltering of the firmness of the well-cared-for flesh, but over it all was a faint, hardly discernible flaccid fatigue of texture. ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... largely in that visit to Amelia's parents. (The girl had a mother; large, flaccid, and, on this occasion, partly dissolved in tears.) But the episode immediately preceding our departure is what overshadowed everything else for me that day, and for several subsequent nights. Amelia and the tearful mother took me up the dark little stairway, ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... slower and rarer, the pauses longer, by which it is made much more easy to perceive and unravel what the motions really are, and how they are performed. In the pause, as in death, the heart is soft, flaccid, exhausted, lying, as ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... dusty with the night's driving, looking dilapidated and forlorn; the tired horses drooped their heads in the flaccid and empty canvas nose-bags. The extinguished lamps were black with the smoke from the last flare of their sputtering wicks. The coachman lay inside, snoring,—a mere heap of cloth and brass buttons surmounted by a shapeless fez. On the stone steps leading down to the church sat the kavass; his ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... rigour into which this man had fallen, lasted for an unprecedented length of time, and then he passed slowly to the flaccid state, to a lax attitude suggestive of profound repose. Then it was his eyes could ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... are occasionally seen also in boys. For example, Breschet, in the year 1820, reported the case of a boy three years of age who exhibited all the signs of puberty. His voice resembled that of a young man of sixteen to eighteen. The length of the flaccid penis was 9.6 cm. (3-3/4 inches), its diameter at the root was 7.2 cm. (2-3/4 inches); the length of the organ when erect was 13.5 cm. (5-1/4 inches). In the presence of girls or women the boy's penis became erect, his whole ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... if fresh air had been blown into it; or what is the same thing, it swelled in proportion as the weight of the column of air which pressed upon it diminished. When again brought down, it became more and more flaccid, and, when it reached the bottom, it resumed its original condition. In the nine chapters of which the treatise consists, he shows that all the phenomena or effects hitherto ascribed to the horror of a vacuum, arise from the weight of the mass of air; and after explaining the variable ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... is immersed in a very strong, almost concentrated, solution of carbonate of ammonia, the glands are instantly blackened, and they secrete copiously; but no movement of the tentacles ensues. Two leaves thus treated became after 1 hr. flaccid, and seemed killed; all the cells in their tentacles contained spheres of protoplasm, but these were small and discoloured. Two other leaves were placed in a solution not quite so strong, and there ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... finds in the proletariat its material weapons, so the proletariat finds in philosophy its intellectual weapons, and as soon as the lightning of thought has penetrated into the flaccid popular soil, the elevation of Germans ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... felt in her heart. She looked, therefore, with a cold and calm eye on the prince as he entered, and for the first time he seemed no longer the handsome man, the being endowed with numberless fascinations, of former days. She read only in his flaccid features the sad history of the past. The charm was broken which had held her eyes captive. Her vision was clear again, and she shuddered before this wild, demoniacal beauty which she had once adored as God's image in man. ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... flaccid flood of faces, blanched with doom, And raucous cries from out a blinking dark Crowd on the callous dusk. With haunting bark Death hunts his hapless victims. Heaven's sick bloom Swoons in the frost. Through droning twilight—hark! ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... individual appeared: a somewhat flaccid-looking individual, with colorless hair and eyes, one who seemed to exhale an air of apology, as it were, from the hobnailed boot upon the floor to the grimy forefinger that touched the strawlike ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... strength in its perfection, and so mighty were the proofs of his powers that the rest of the kings of the Danes were called after him by a common title, the SKIOLDUNG'S. Those who were wont to live an abandoned and flaccid life, and to sap their self-control by wantonness, this man vigilantly spurred to the practice of virtue in an active career. Thus the ripeness of Skiold's spirit outstripped the fulness of his strength, and he fought battles at which ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... and flaccid, like the unbaked loaves into which I had poked inquiring fingers in my childhood, and there was an unwholesome look of fear in his little bright eyes. The Baron had been badly scared, and lacked the manhood to ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... group nearly at once established its influence over the more flaccid part of the assembly. Through its club organization it packed the public galleries of the house, and from that point directed the current of opinion by the judicious application of applause or disapproval. This was reinforced by the appel nominal, the manner of voting whereby each individual ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... the silver-framed portrait and placed it in the flaccid hand. The fingers closed over it. The filmiest wraith of a smile played about the ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... are subject to become weak and flaccid, and want support; for which purpose some gardeners have thought of splintering them up with birchen Twigs, which has seem'd of some service for the present, tho' the plants have very soon come to the same or a more drooping ...
— The Ladies Delight • Anonymous
... listened to those various accents, those foreign intonations, gruff or faltering, as one gazed upon those widely different physiognomies, some violent, barbarous, vulgar, others hyper-civilized, worn, suggestive only of the Boulevard and as it were flaccid, one noted that the same diversity was evident also among the servants who, some apparently lads just out of an office, insolent in manner, with heads of hair like a dentist's or a bath-attendant's, busied themselves among Ethiopians ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... Death. He was surprised that the contemplation of it did not freeze the blood in his veins. Yes. He put it clearly before him. He had given his word to Peggy that he would go and expose himself to Death. Death. What did it mean? He had been brought up in orthodox Church of England Christianity. His flaccid mind had never questioned the truth of its dogmas. He believed, in a general sort of way, that good people went to Heaven and bad people went to Hell. His conscience was clear. He had never done any harm to anybody. As far as he knew, he had broken none of the Ten Commandments. ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... of a Difficulty of making Water.—After Death I had her Body opened, when the only Thing particular which we could observe, was the urinary Bladder about four times the natural Size; it seemed to be flaccid, and in a State of Relaxation; the Kidneys were sound, and no Signs of any Distemper could be observed about the Uterus or Rectum, or near the os coccygis.—When she was first in the Hospital, I desired her always to examine her Urine; but she never observed that she passed any Sand, ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro
... looking forward to "joining the crew," trains for months beforehand, walking, running, rowing, until the flaccid muscles become as firm ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... Gailey," she said, with a kind and even very cordial smile, and heartily shook the flaccid, rheumatic hand that was primly held out to her. And yet in spite of herself, perhaps unknown to herself, there was in her tone and her smile and her vigorous clasp something which meant, "Poor old ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... mighty obsession that was slowly withdrawing itself from his heart. It was all so wonderful; all so incredible. Long contact with misfortune had sapped the natural resiliency of his character. It had been subjected to so much pressure that it had become flaccid. The pressure removed, it would be some time before the heart could act upon the message of good tidings the brain had conveyed to it. For a long time he remained silent. And Drake respected his silence to the letter. Then Garrison uncovered ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... can't ignore. When I say terrific I don't mean that I'm afraid of it. I'm not. It seems to me too strengthening to be afraid of. With all you can say against it, it strikes me as a tonic in our rather flaccid life, like iron in the blood. I've sympathy with it, too, to some extent; I've sympathy with him. You know, I do belong to the people. I'm glad we know him, and that in a way we've a right to get near to him. It puts ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... should marry Arthur; firstly, because she would have nearly two thousand pounds a year on the death of her parents; and, secondly, because she was a capable person with plenty of common-sense. These two adjuncts—namely, money and common-sense—Mrs. Agar wisely looked for in candidates for the flaccid ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... lately been filled in a tavern near Tres Pinos by an Irishman who sold had American whisky under that pleasing Castilian title. Nevertheless Concho had already nearly emptied the bottle, and it fell back against the saddle as yellow and flaccid as his own cheeks. Thus reinforced Concho turned to look at the valley behind him, from which he had climbed since noon. It was a sterile waste bordered here and there by arable fringes and valdas of meadow land, but in the main, ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... growth. There is some difficulty in ascertaining the exact structure of the species just noticed, as the fruit-bearing cells, or sporophores, are very small, and when the spicules are developed the substance becomes so flaccid that it is difficult to cut a proper slice, even with the sharpest lancet. I have, however, satisfied myself as to the true structure by repeated observations. But should any difficulty arise in verifying it in the species in question, there will be none in doing so in Lycoperdon ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... what other fiction can this be said? Richardson and even Fielding have their longueurs. Miss Austen is too prone to linger over the tea-table beyond all human patience. And even Scott's descriptions of his loved hills grow sometimes unreadable, especially when they are told in a flaccid and slovenly style. But Vanity Fair is kept up with inexhaustible life and invention, with a style which, for purity and polish, was beyond the reach of Fielding, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... that the obese should be divided into two groups, a most practical one, for some are strong and vigorous—great eaters, perhaps even gluttons—while others, on the contrary, are feeble and debilitated, with flesh soft and flaccid; and upon the former may be imposed all the rigors of the reducing system, while the latter must be dealt ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... corresponding reverse process has been at work in Germany: the German soil that Napoleon ploughed yielded a Moltke and a Bismarck,[226] while to-day, however mistakenly, the German Press is crying out that only another war—it ought in honesty to say an unsuccessful war—can restore the nation's flaccid muscle. It is yet too early to see the results of the Russo-Japanese War, but already there are signs that by industrial overstrain and the repression of individual thought Japan is threatening to enfeeble the physique and to destroy ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... She sat, flaccid, her hands loose on her lap. She felt incapable of movement, but Charles was speaking to her, telling her to get out and run home quickly. She looked at him. She was holding his friendly hand. What would she have done ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... I would not bother him any more just now," Saxham interposed, noting the droop of the piteous, flaccid mouth, and feeling the flutter of the uneven pulse. The Mayor's wife broke into helpless sobbing. The Mother-Superior drew her swiftly out of the sick child's hearing and sight. And a shadow fell upon the thin light coverlet, and a crisp, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... is a hard grazer, a difficult and obstinate feeder—no skillful man will purchase it—such a creature must go to a novice, and even to him at a price so low as to tempt him to become a purchaser. On the other hand, the skin must not be thin, like paper, nor flaccid, nor loose in the hand, nor flabby. This is the opposite extreme, and is indicative of delicateness, bad, flabby flesh, and, possibly, of inaptitude to retain the fat. It must be elastic and velvety, soft and pliable, ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... general tone. When the splanchnic vessels are dilated there is also a lack of proper tone to the cerebral vessels, and this may be a cause of mental weariness and neurasthenia. While ptosis of organs in the abdomen and a flaccid condition of the musculature of the abdomen are frequent causes of this splanchlnic stasis, and therefore hypotension, especially in women, it is quite possible that suprarenal insufficiency will allow this condition of the ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... Mr. Pumblechook, leaning back in his chair, quite flaccid with admiration, "that's the way you know 'em, sir!" (I don't know who Sir was, but he certainly was not I, and there was no third person present); "that's the way you know the noble-minded, sir! Ever forgiving and ever affable. It ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... delighted in his splendid patriotism, in the days of his manly strength, mental as well as physical, and who held him in high esteem as a patriot orator and the staunchly loyal tribune of the New World peoples. In these days of flaccid patriotism and moral declension in public life, his example may well stimulate and inspire. In his wholehearted devotion to the hopes as well as to the interests of the Colonies most notable was the polemical fervor with which he espoused their ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... expand themselves under the pressure of a gross atmosphere. I have found dulness to quicken into sentiment in a thin ether, as water, tho not very hot, boils in a receiver partly exhausted; and heads, in appearance empty, have teemed with notions upon rising ground, as the flaccid sides of a football would have swelled out into ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... piece of cheap music played over and over again on a scratched phonograph record, talking in the voice that is a composite of a dozen voices; a fat man comfortable on a club lounge laying down the law as if he were carefully smearing the shine out of something brilliant with a flaccid heavy finger; a thin sour woman telling children playing together "don't, don't, don't," in the ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... unwearied sweep of wood thy cliffs that scales, The never-ending waters of thy vales; The cots, those dim religious groves enbow'r, Or, under rocks that from the water tow'r 125 Insinuated, sprinkling all the shore, Each with his household boat beside the door, Whose flaccid sails in forms fantastic droop, Bright'ning the gloom where thick the forests stoop; —Thy torrents shooting from the clear-blue sky, 130 Thy towns, like swallows' nests that cleave on high; That glimmer hoar in eve's last ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... faith in the coming of another Saturday was flaccid and lustreless. Those Japanese lovers who were promised a reunion after ten thousand years in separate hells were brighter with hope than he was. On Monday Penrod was virtually ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... wine had one virtue—bravery. But civilisation pressing upon their frontiers had brought Oom Sam greedy for ivory and gold, and Oom Sam had bought rum and strong waters. The nerve of the savage had gone, and his muscle had become a flaccid thing. When they had risen from the long grass with a horrid yell and had rushed in upon the hated intruders with couched spears only to be met by a blinding fire of Lee-Metford and revolver bullets their bravery vanished like breath from the face of a looking-glass. ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to enlist Lyman's help in the matter of Wilbur's future. Lyman was flaccid in the matter. The boy had once stolen into the Penniman parlour while Lyman and Winona were out rifling the ice box of delicacies, and enticed by the glitter of Lyman's flute had thrillingly taken it into his hands to see what made it go, dropping it in his panic, from the centre table ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... a low tone, "there's something the matter with Swain," and I motioned to where he sat, flaccid and limp, apparently half-asleep. "He is suffering from shock, or something of that sort. It's something more, anyway, than over-wrought nerves. He seems to ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... to carry through a plan of brilliant treason, modelled on an antique Roman tragedy. But there was not moral force in the protagonist to render that act salutary, not public energy sufficient in his fellow-citizens to accomplish his drama of deliverance. Lorenzo was corrupt. Florence was flaccid. Evil manners had emasculated the hero. In the state the last spark of independence had ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... whipped the laurels into strange shapes, shook the brown seed pods from the bare boughs of the acacias, and froze the water that dripped from the Medicean balls on the old wall of the Fortezza. Even in summer a little breeze would spring up towards sunset, and the leaves that had hung heavy and flaccid on the trees in the blazing heat of noon would be stirred by it to some semblance of life, while the shadows lengthened, and the incessant maddening scream of the locusts died down into silence. The gardens were a favourite resort. As the church bells rang the Ave Maria the people came to them ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... Cornea, with a transparent humour, and with a uvea or retina, that the Figure of each of the small Hemispheres are very Spherical, exactly polish'd, and most vivid, lively and plump, when the Animal is living, as in greater Animals, and in like manner dull, flaccid, and irregular, or shrunk, when the Animal ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... there was no real harm in the drug, and that Mr. Spielhagen would be all right if left to wake naturally and without shock. However, as his present attitude was one of great discomfort, they decided to carry him back and lay him on the library lounge. But before doing this, Mr. Upjohn drew from his flaccid grasp the precious manuscript, and carrying it into the larger room placed it on a remote table, where it remained undisturbed till Mr. Spielhagen, suddenly coming to himself at the end of some fifteen minutes, missed the sheets from his hand, and bounding up, crossed the ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... refuge in God there is nothing left to struggle with. My point is that whatever there may be to struggle with there is nothing to be afraid of. Freedom from struggle would profit us not at all. On the contrary, it would render us nerveless, flabby, flaccid, and inert. ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... well worship one another cut one another's throats, when Cruelty and Self-righteousness and Lying and Injustice and all the Powers of Destruction rule the human heart, the world is devastated, the fibre of the whole organism, of society grows flaccid, and all the ideals of civilisation are debased. If the world is not now sick of Hate we may be sure it never will be; so whatever may happen to the world let us remember that the individual is still left, to carry ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... discovered the bag sloped upward, and there were signs that their quarry found the ground harder to cover. The second discard lay in open sight—again a leather bag which Nalik'ideyu sniffed and then began to lick eagerly, thrusting her nose into its flaccid interior. ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... all disagreeable in the clover-scented air; and his shrill whistle, as he takes to his hole or defies the farm dog from the interior of the stone wall, is a pleasant summer sound. In form and movement the woodchuck is not captivating. His body is heavy and flabby. Indeed, such a flaccid, fluid, pouchy carcass I have never before seen. It has absolutely no muscular tension or rigidity, but is as baggy and shaky as a skin filled with water. Let the rifleman shoot one while it lies basking on a sideling rock, and its body slumps off, and rolls and spills ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... to test the value of the great patriotic passions which are the mainsprings of history by the mere calculus of abstract concepts which satisfied Mill. Fitzjames, like Henry VIII., 'loved a man,' and the man of Mill's speculations seemed to be a colourless, flaccid creature, who required, before all things, to have some red blood infused ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... knowing in advance how Mrs. Tarrant would take a thing, and even Verena, who, filially, was much less argumentative than in her civic and, as it were, public capacity, had a perception that her mother was queer. She was queer, indeed—a flaccid, relaxed, unhealthy, whimsical woman, who still had a capacity to cling. What she clung to was "society," and a position in the world which a secret whisper told her she had never had and a voice more audible reminded her she was in danger ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... colicky pain. In the chronic cases there is mental depression; the horse is sluggish and dull. The abdomen gradually becomes small, giving a "tucked up" appearance, or, on the other hand, it becomes flaccid and pendulous. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... organism. The waxy tones were in all the visible parts of her flesh. The neck and shoulders explained by their blanched paleness the wasted arms, flung forward and crossed upon the table. Her feet seemed enervated, shrunken from illness. Her night-gown came only to her knees and showed the flaccid muscles, the blue veins, the impoverished flesh of the legs. The cold, to which she paid no heed, turned her lips violet, and a sad smile, drawing up the corners of a sensitive mouth, showed teeth that were white as ivory and quite small,—pretty, transparent teeth, in keeping with the delicate ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... the other. Into this opening several bamboo canes had been inserted and the other ends of these canes were in contact with conical clay funnels which collected the gas bubbling up through the mud of the geyser. Soon the flaccid organ began to slowly expand and show such a tendency to upward movements that Challenger fastened the cords which held it to the trunks of the surrounding trees. In half an hour a good-sized gas-bag had been formed, and the jerking and straining upon the thongs showed ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... those who are intrinsically vulgar. Their treasury is empty of spiritual coin, and their storehouse contains no world-thoughts. We can send a caravan across the desert, a ship across the sea, but we cannot send a Thought into a flaccid or a ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... these sweets: the course of years, her loss of teeth, her eyes dimmed to an unusual degree, the sprouting of a mustache or bristles on her sunken-in mouth, which was three inches wide, dull gray locks fluttering above her sallow temples, a neck flaccid and livid as the crest of the turkey when in a good temper.—In short, I did not take the lozenges. Ugh! A feeling of indignation, a manly protest rose in ...
— First Love (Little Blue Book #1195) - And Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life • Various
... at an open page of a textbook, but not studying; not even reading; not even thinking. Nor was he lost in a reverie: his mind's eye was shut, as his physical eye might well have been, for the optic nerve, flaccid with ennui, conveyed nothing whatever of the printed page upon which the orb of vision was partially focused. Penrod was doing something very unusual and rare, something almost never accomplished except by ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... which has animated every department of life and business, puffing them up like gas in a balloon, since about '35 has departed and left the fiscal system perfectly flaccid and lifeless. The rage for speculation in real estate has absorbed all loose cash, and the country is now groaning for its fast-locked circulating medium. A friend at Detroit writes: "With fifty thousand dollars of productive ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... staring at her; she was mildly stupid, except for an over-developed curiosity which made her at times sharp beyond belief. Her eyes glittered, red spots came on her flaccid cheeks; she kept opening her mouth to speak, making little abortive motions. Finally she could endure it no ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... gratifying wants, frugal as they are, without once more being compelled to fight with the beasts at some Australian Ephesus. Rather than clog our minds with the thought of such conflict and of fighting with flaccid muscles, dispirited and almost surely ingloriously, we choose to laugh and be glad of our liberty, to put summary checks upon arrogant desires for the possession of hosts of things which would materially add to comforts without infringing ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... of the Action of the Biceps Muscle.*—Place the fingers upon the tendon of the biceps where it connects with the radius of the forearm. With the forearm resting upon the table, note that the tendon is somewhat loose and flaccid, but that with the slightest effort to raise the forearm it quickly tightens. Now transfer the fingers to the body of the muscle, and sweep the forearm through two or three complete movements, noting ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... the woman in the doorway had relaxed her frozen immobility and was between Paul and me as we rubbed the thin, icy hands and forced brandy between the flaccid lips. We all three thought her dead or dying, and labored over her with the frightened thankfulness for one another's living presence which always marks that dreadful moment. But even as we fanned ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... habitable land, and still the waters gushed through the narrow crevices roaring seaward. But the Devil had one sorrow. All his children born before the catastrophe were crabbed, unregenerate, stiff-tailed fiends. After that event every new-born imp wore a flaccid, invertebrate, despondent tail—the very last insignium of ignobility. So runs the legend of The ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... situation of Mr. Simon Pinski at 9 P.M. on the second evening following the introduction of the ordinance, in the ward house of the Fourteenth Ward Democratic Club. Rotund, flaccid, red-faced, his costume a long black frock-coat and silk hat, Mr. Pinski was being heckled by his neighbors and business associates. He had been called here by threats to answer for his prospective high crimes and misdemeanors. By now it was pretty well understood that nearly all ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... up" in honour of his second descent of the stairs; and Walter repeated his fragment of objectionable song; but these jocularities were rendered pointless by the eventless evening that followed; and in the morning the carnations began to appear tarnished and flaccid. ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... hesitated. She was an elderly woman with flaccid yellow cheeks, watery eyes, and a ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... in bewilderment. It had been too easy, he thought. Something had to be wrong. The imprisoned hand twitched and was flaccid. He let ...
— Alarm Clock • Everett B. Cole
... glorious day in the late September, a man rode out from the west port of the city, a fat man flaccid of body, pale and tallowy of complexion. A couple of serving-men went behind him, with the Douglas arms broidered on their coats. They looked no little terrified, and shook upon their horses, as indeed well they might. This little cavalcade rode ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... "Khunsa" flexible or flaccid, from Khansbending inwards, i.e. the mouth of a water-skin before drinking. Like Mukhannas, it is also used for an effeminate man, a passive sodomite and even for a eunuch. Easterns still believe in what Westerns know to be an impossibility, human beings with the parts and proportions of both ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... so scrupulously as Hardy the effect of emotion on inanimate things, or has ever seen emotion so visually in people. For instance: 'Terror was upon her white face as she saw it; her cheek was flaccid, and her mouth had almost the aspect of a round little hole.' But so intense is his preoccupation with these visual effects that he sometimes cannot resist noting a minute appearance, though in the very moment of assuring us that the person looking on did not see it. 'She hardly observed that ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... would live—if naught happened to him to-night. If naught—but ah, the thought pierced him to the heart. He who had proved himself in old days no mean soldier in the field, who had won honour in more than one fight, felt his brow grow damp, his knees grow flaccid, knew himself a coward. For the life which he must risk was not the old life, but the new one which he had bought so dearly; the new one for which he had given his soul, his country, and his friends. And he dared ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... its legs doubled beneath, was a large camel, evidently in the last stage of weakness and disease, its ragged coat and flaccid hump hanging over to one side, bowing its head slowly at the waiting vultures, that calm, bald-headed and silent, sat about with their weird heads apparently down between their shoulders—a great gathering, waiting for the banquet ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... the first glimpse of that abhorred uniform brought my knife down upon the rope. In two seconds I had slashed through the strands, and the flaccid machine lifted and bore us from their ken. But I see their faces yet, as in basso relievo: round-eyed, open-mouthed; honest country faces, and boyish, every one: an awkward squad of recruits at drill, fronting a red-headed sergeant; the sergeant, with cane held horizontally across ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... noise. It was my last sight of the Calabrian hillsmen; to the end they held my interest and my respect. When towns have sucked dry their population of strength and virtue, it is such folk as these, hardy from the free breath of heaven and the scent of earth, who will renew a flaccid race. ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... leaf and to cure or dry it with the least delay. Hence, the leaves are not exposed to the sun, but are first dried in the air for a short time. They are next exposed to artificial heat, which renders them flaccid and pliable, and prepares them for the third operation of rolling, which twists the yielding leaf as seen in manufactured tea, rolls it up into balls, and squeezes out a considerable portion of its watery juices. It is a singular fact that in the ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... beauty— sehnlich wunschte zur Kenntniss des Schonen zu gelangen. He had to shorten his nights, [181] sleeping only four hours, to gain time for reading. And here Winckelmann made a step forward in culture. He multiplied his intellectual force by detaching from it all flaccid interests. He renounced mathematics and law, in which his reading had been considerable,—all but the literature of the arts. Nothing was to enter into his life unpenetrated by its central enthusiasm. At this time he undergoes the charm of Voltaire. Voltaire belongs to that ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... of his beautiful mother, who, her dark skin pale as death, had drawn herself up to her full height preparing to throw herself upon her enemy. Rosario, meanwhile, was struggling to shake off a number of women who were holding her pinioned by her weak, flaccid arms. ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... follows: tobacco, though it may, indeed, give a momentary fillip to the faculties, lessens their power of endurance; for by lowering the action of the heart, it diminishes the blood supply to the brain, leaving it imperfectly nourished, and flaccid, and unable, there-fore, to make due response to the demands of its owner, the man within, who seeks to manifest himself through the organism. Of an organism thus affected, as of an underpitched musical ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... wash and cleanse them thoroughly from dust, dirt, and insects: this requires great attention. Pick off all the outside leaves, trim them nicely, and, if not quite fresh gathered and have become flaccid, it is absolutely necessary to restore their crispness before cooking them, or they will be tough and unpleasant: lay them in a pan of clean water, with a handful of salt in it, for an hour before ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... air ballonets were contained in the envelope at bow and stern and the ascent and descent of the ship was regulated by the quantity of air pumped into these. A most curious device was the utilization of heavy cloth for the propeller blades. Limp and flaccid when at rest, heavy weights in the hem of the cloth caused these blades to stand out stiff and rigid as the result of the centrifugal force created by their rapid revolution. One great military advantage of the Parseval was that she could be quickly deflated in the presence of danger at her moorings, ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... From strenuous toil his hours of sweetest ease. The sedentary stretch their lazy length When custom bids, but no refreshment find, For none they need: the languid eye, the cheek Deserted of its bloom, the flaccid, shrunk, And withered muscle, and the vapid soul, Reproach their owner with that love of rest To which he forfeits even the rest he loves. Not such the alert and active. Measure life By its true worth, the comforts it affords, And theirs alone seems worthy of the name Good health, and, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... finds his buried treasure replaced by a stone, the poet whose greatest work has perished in the flames, have not a more desolate air. The blood left her countenance, and it became as of marble; her arms fell by her side, as if their muscles had become flaccid; and she leant against a pillar, for her limbs refused to support her. As for me, with a livid face bathed as if in the dews of death, I bent my tottering steps towards the church door. The air seemed ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... need help, possibly a lancet, possibly a pocket-pistol, possibly hot blankets, possibly somebody to knead these lifeless lungs and pommel this flaccid body, until ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... each side, with flaccid legs just able to move in turn, Melchard was guided to a bench some way down the platform, and seated between two bolstering forms to which the ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... of the car and going into the theater. At these tidings Mrs. Makebelieve roused for a moment from her strange apathy. Since tea-time she had sat (not as usual upright and gesticulating, but humped up and flaccid) staring at a blob of condensed milk on the outside of the tin. She said she thought she would go out and see the great actor, although what all the women saw in him to go mad about she did not know, but in another moment she settled ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... in comminuted fractures of the long bones was the degree of local shock; the limbs were often quite powerless, the muscles flaccid, and common sensation lowered. This was of importance in two ways; firstly, shortening of the limb was often absent as a sign, and, secondly, pain was sometimes not at all pronounced even when the patient was moved. The primary absence of shortening, even persisting ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... unfolds, with slow, patient tenderness, her beauties; not like our Northern spring, which rushes to verdure and bloom as soon as the winter snows have disappeared. And hence, though the few trees along the road had only put forth their first leaves, tender and flaccid as butterfly's wings, the grass was ready to be cut down and was thickly starred with wild flowers. Horace of old said that one could not travel rapidly along the Appian Way, on account of the number and variety of its objects of interest; and the same remark holds good ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... and tremble, anticipating the rending thunder-crash which never came. And always was the air hot and dry, and the wind, when it blew, was as a breath from the mouth of a volcano. The grass, withered and brown, fell away into dust; the leaves hung limp and flaccid on the trees; the cultivation areas of the selections were parched and dismal; and to add to the tribulation of the selectors, swarms of grasshoppers were abroad, swooping down in clouds, made up of myriads, upon everything that was ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... in the wall. He made out the flaccid form of Farley, outstretched upon the stone floor in a drunken stupor. The man evidently had been on the verge of unconsciousness when he leered through the hole. The chance was slight that he would ever remember anything of what ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... grave type of the disease, the blebs are loose and flaccid, with milky or puriform contents, rupturing and drying to crusts, which are cast off, disclosing the reddened corium. New blebs appear on the sites of disappearing or half-ruptured lesions, and the whole surface ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... your begetting was indulged in by two whose genes and chromosomes united to produce a male rather than a female child. For think, Weener, if you had been born a woman, with what gusto would you have peddled your flaccid flesh upon the city streets and offered your miserable dogsbody to the reluctant use of undiscriminating customers. You are the paradigmatic whore, Weener, and I weep for the physiological accident ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... was resting quietly on his knee. It lay in hers, flaccid and inert, its dreadful passivity stinging her into realization of the truth. Patrick was dead. And, judging from his expression, he had found death "a very good sort of thing," just ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... with regular privileges attached, and fixed rules to be observed,—might perhaps be the notablest point, and the SEMI-lamentablest, to a man or demon in the habit of lamenting. [Preuss, i. 426.] For the rest, a considerably dreadful place this Potsdam, to the flaccid, esurient and disorderly of mankind;—"and strict as Fate [Demon correct for once] ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... type. By exquisite analysis the artist attains clearness of idea, then, by many stages of refining, clearness of expression. He moves slowly over his work, calculating the tenderest tone, and restraining the subtlest curve, never letting his hand or fancy move at large, gradually refining flaccid spaces to the higher degree of expressiveness. Culture, at least, values even in transcendent works of art the power of the understanding in them, their logical process of construction, the spectacle of supreme intellectual ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... recitatives of the younger—to see a wild man of the woods and hear him sing; but the novelty gone, they passed on" to Egyptian crocodiles, Iroquois hunters," and left him stranded with "unquiet fire" and "flaccid face." "O foulest Circaean draft," exclaimed his old admirer in his fine dirge, "thou poison of popular applause, madness is in thee and death, thy end is Bedlam and the grave," and with the fixed resolve, "De me fabula non narrabitur," he shut the book on this ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... search long and diligently, and our efforts are blessed with an unwonted success. By the time that the sun has attained height enough in the heavens to make his power tyrannically felt, our baskets are filled. Tou Tou has to throw away her wild-roses, limp and flaccid, into the dust of the lane. We walk home, singing, and making poor jokes, as is our wont. As we draw near the house with joyful foretastes of breakfast in our minds, with redly-flushed cheeks and merry eyes, I see Sir Roger leaning on the stone balustrade of the terrace, ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... careful note, as well as of the laboratory address. By this time the hissing of the fumigating apparatus had ceased. The two men went to the conservatory and gazed in upon a ruin of limp leaves and flaccid petals, killed by the powerful gases. Suddenly, with an exclamation of astonishment, the investigator stooped and lifted from the floor a marvel of ermine body and pale green wings. The moth, spreading nearly a foot, ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... am here still,' he answered Evan's greeting, with a flaccid gesture. 'Don't excite me too much. A little at a time. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... crucial in his life, though he could not wholly understand it. It was the darkening of his spirit; the death of boyish gentleness; the concluding step from youth into a forced manhood. The desert regeneration had not stopped at turning weak lungs, vitiated blood, and flaccid muscles into a powerful man; it was at work on his mind, his heart, his soul. They answered more and more to the call of some outside, ever-present, ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... crept on. It was half-past nine. Hannah sat lethargic, numb, unable to think, her strung-up nerves grown flaccid, her eyes full of bitter-sweet tears, her soul floating along as in a trance on the waves of a familiar melody. Suddenly she became aware that the others had risen and that her father was motioning to her. Instinctively ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... afraid, a large, corpulent man, of a loose and heavy build, with a flaccid face and bright little inexpressive eyes like a bird's, sat on a bench within the glow ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... his knuckles into the corners of his eyes, emitting that snore final and querulous of a middle-aged man awakened rudely. With a gesture brusque but flaccid he plucked aside the net and peered around. The bales of cotton cloth, the beads, the brass wire, the bottles of rum, had not been spirited away in the night. So far so good. The faithful servant of his employers was now at liberty to care for his own interests. He regarded ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... on Maria Theresa's side, deluded by shadows from Vienna, and getting into Russian Partition-Treaties; anon tickled by Belleisle into the reverse posture; then again reversing. An idle, easy-tempered, yet greedy creature, who, what with religious apostasy in early manhood, what with flaccid ambitions since, and idle gapings after shadows, has lost helm in this world; and will make a very bad ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... every day more involved in the pacification of Italy, in the humiliation of Austria, and in the supremacy of the army. There was only one man who could secure all three; could give consistency to the flaccid and visionary policy of the Directory; could repress the frightful robberies of its civil agents in Italy; could with any show of reason humble Italy with one hand, and then with the other rouse her to wholesome energy; could enrich and glorify France while crushing ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... had gathered about Eudemius and Marius, who held hasty consultation. Felix, pale, nursing carefully his wounded arm, was on the outskirts of the group. His face all unconsciously betrayed his state of mind. It was white and flaccid; and at every yelp of the hounds outside who clamored for his life, he cringed and quivered. But he was very quiet, and the talk surged over his head as though he had not been there. Men cast glances of scorn unveiled ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... balloon—the reader, however impatient, must listen to this allusion—whoever has seen a balloon, may have observed that in its flaccid state it can be folded and unfolded with the greatest ease, and it is manageable even by a child; but when once filled, the force of multitudes cannot restrain, nor the art of man direct its course. Such is the human mind—so tractable before, so ungovernable after ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... face burning like sunset, and, seeing nobody, stooped to pick up the flaccid lumps. Jim, with a pale face, departed as invisibly as he had come. He had proved the bandsman's tale to be true. On his way back he formed a resolution. It was to beard the lion in his den—to call on ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... that Failed' is an organic whole—a book with a backbone—and stands out boldly among the nerveless, flaccid, invertebrate things that enjoy an expensive but ephemeral existence ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... sympathy. His lack of humour has alienated the interest of thousands. His ardent advocacy of toleration in the noblest of his prose treatises has been belittled by a generation which prides itself on that flaccid form of benevolence, and finds the mere repeal of the Licensing Act the smallest part of it. His pamphlets on divorce and on government have earned him the reputation of a theorist and dreamer. The shrewd practical man finds it easy to despise him. The genial tolerant man, whose geniality ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... liked his looks or was greatly attracted by him. He was not prepossessing. Fair, with a flaccid unwholesome complexion, foxy haired, his beard cut to a point, small moustaches curled upward showing thin pale lips, and giving his mouth a disagreeable curve also upwards, a sort of set smile that was really a sardonic sneer, conveying distrust and disbelief in all around. ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... reasonably expected to find it. He had, however, been completely unsuccessful; the hollows appeared to have been dry for a very long time; he travelled tolerably well to our camp, where he was immediately killed, skinned, quartered, and cut up. His meat was not quite so flaccid and watery as that of our last bullock; but it was by no means good. He was an old, and a heavy beast, and the experience we had of him strongly corroborates my observations, that such beasts can neither bear the fatigues of ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... Mortemart, "in convents girls of intelligence are all too rare. The greater number of them are colourless persons, devoid of imagination or fire. To exiles like these, any country, any climate would seem good; to flaccid, crushed natures of this type, every belief would seem authoritative, every religion holy and divine. Fifteen hundred years ago these nuns would have made excellent vestal virgins, watchful and resigned. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... point,—not a perfect point neither, but blunt and unfinished, by no means a creditable or apparently much-cared-for example of Nature's workmanship, made, only to be trodden on to-day, and to-morrow to be cast into the oven,—and a little pale and hollow stalk, feeble and flaccid, leading down to the dull brown fibres of roots. And yet, think of it well, and judge whether, of all the gorgeous flowers that beam in summer air, and of all strong and goodly trees, pleasant to the eyes, or good for food,—stately palm and pine, strong ash and ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... horrible voice that had somehow established itself in my throat, "surely this thing is a dream!" Almost as quickly as if I did it involuntarily, I thrust my fingers into my mouth. My teeth had gone. My finger-tips ran on the flaccid surface of an even row of shrivelled gums. I was ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... repugnance by a visible effort. "Is it ... is it worth while?" she asked, regarding the flaccid, tumbled, wax-like thing, with its bloated, white globe of a skull. Every muscle of it was relaxed and limp, its eyes shut, its tiny jaw hanging. "Wouldn't it be better to let ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... mask. The wig came with it. Benjamin was revealed the owner of a big, bald, shiny head with a face which was puffed and purple. "You were right, Benjamin," said Harry sadly, "You were kind. To wear a mask was charity, nay, decency—what breeches are to other men. That obese and flaccid nose—pah, let us talk of something else." He lay upon Benjamin and tugged at his sword-belt. Benjamin writhed and groaned. His sword was caught underneath him, the hilt deep in the small of his back. Harry hauled the sword-belt off at last and ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... at the most horrible, the most abominable sight: a woman's body, half-dressed, bent in two in the safe, crammed in, like an over-large parcel ... and fair hair hanging down ... and blood ... clots of blood ... and livid flesh, blue in places, decomposing, flaccid. ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... There was enough of it, however: there is not always. She was hungry,—one could see that easily enough,—and not drunk, as most of her companions would have been found at this hour. She did not drink, this woman,—her face told that, too,—nothing stronger than ale. Perhaps the weak, flaccid wretch had some stimulant in her pale life to keep her up,—some love or hope, it might be, or urgent need. When that stimulant was gone, she would take to whiskey. Man cannot live by work alone. While she was skinning the potatoes, and munching ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... began to plead that she had no one to help her with her flowers, to carry the pots for her, did he wrench himself from the contemplation of the flashing steel mechanism that had for him such wonderful fascination and lend his flaccid baby muscles to the fiction of help. He began zealously to toil to and fro, carrying the smallest pots wherever she bade him. Her own interest in the occupation was enhanced by the colloquy that ensued whenever she passed her small guest. "Hello, ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... it very well myself," said Ernest, "I have two first-rate new ones hanging up in the play-room; they only want refilling. Come with me, and we will douse them in the pond." Two large footballs, but very flaccid-looking, were brought out, and by tying a stone and a line to them they were both very soon thoroughly soaked. He then took them out, and brought them into the house. First he took one, and undoing ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... that education should embrace the means of discipline, for without discipline the mind will remain inefficient, just as surely as the muscles of the body, without exercise, will be left flaccid. That should seem to be a self-evident truth. Now it may be possible to derive a certain amount of discipline out of any study, but it is a fact, nevertheless, which cannot be gainsaid, that some studies lend themselves to this use more readily and effectively ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... posture, is an important factor in general physiologic disturbances or lack of general tone. When the splanchnic vessels are dilated there is also a lack of proper tone to the cerebral vessels, and this may be a cause of mental weariness and neurasthenia. While ptosis of organs in the abdomen and a flaccid condition of the musculature of the abdomen are frequent causes of this splanchlnic stasis, and therefore hypotension, especially in women, it is quite possible that suprarenal insufficiency will allow this condition of the splanchnic ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... tree, it becomes sap, properly so called, which passes downwards through this cellular tissue, slowly and secretly; and then upwards, through the great vessels of the tree, violently, stretching out the supple twigs of it as yon see a flaccid waterpipe swell and move when the cock is turned to fill it. And the tree becomes literally a fountain, of which the springing streamlets are clothed with new-woven garments of green tissue, and of which the silver spray stays in the sky,—a spray, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... Pumblechook, leaning back in his chair, quite flaccid with admiration, "that's the way you know 'em, sir!" (I don't know who Sir was, but he certainly was not I, and there was no third person present); "that's the way you know the noble-minded, sir! Ever forgiving and ever affable. It might," said the servile Pumblechook, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... difficult and obstinate feeder—no skillful man will purchase it—such a creature must go to a novice, and even to him at a price so low as to tempt him to become a purchaser. On the other hand, the skin must not be thin, like paper, nor flaccid, nor loose in the hand, nor flabby. This is the opposite extreme, and is indicative of delicateness, bad, flabby flesh, and, possibly, of inaptitude to retain the fat. It must be elastic and velvety, soft and pliable, ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... wound, now stays his fleeting breath, "With herbs apply'd; but all his arts are vain; "Incurable the hurt. Just so, when broke, "The violet, poppy, or the lily hang, "Whose dark stems in a water'd garden spring; "Flaccid they instant droop; the weighty head "No longer upright rais'd, but bent to earth. "So bent his dying face; his neck, bereft "Of vigor, heavy on his shoulder laid. "Phoebus exclaim'd;—Fall'st thou, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... Joe Bullitt, designed to express cordiality, suddenly became flaccid and died. If Mr. Crooper had been a sensitive person he might have perceived the chilling disapproval in their glances, for they had just begun to be most unfavorably impressed with him. The careless loudness—almost the notoriety—with which he had uttered Miss Pratt's name, demanding loosely ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... towards Killorglin, is harrowing and startling. The whole potato crop is literally destroyed, while over a very wide surface the oat crop presents an unnatural lilac tinge to the eye; at the same time, in too many instances, the head is found flaccid to the touch, and possessing no substance. The barley crop, too, in many places, exhibits the effect of a powerful blight. In some places, also, where turnips have been grown, they present—as, indeed, has been the case in other parts of the county—a healthier exterior in top and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... theatre as often as the critics, I well know; but I am too well equipped for the strife to be deterred by it, or to bear malice towards the losing side. In trying to produce the sensuous effects of opera, the fashionable drama has become so flaccid in its sentimentality, and the intellect of its frequenters so atrophied by disuse, that the reintroduction of problem, with its remorseless logic and iron framework of fact, inevitably produces at first an overwhelming impression of coldness and inhuman rationalism. But this will soon pass ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... in a tavern near Tres Pinos by an Irishman who sold had American whisky under that pleasing Castilian title. Nevertheless Concho had already nearly emptied the bottle, and it fell back against the saddle as yellow and flaccid as his own cheeks. Thus reinforced Concho turned to look at the valley behind him, from which he had climbed since noon. It was a sterile waste bordered here and there by arable fringes and valdas of meadow land, but in the ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... surround him; he will restrain himself in his pleasures, in order that he may be enabled truly to enjoy them; he will know that money cannot re-establish a soul worn out with enjoyment; cannot give fresh elasticity to organs enfeebled by excess; cannot give fresh tension to nerves grown flaccid by abuse; cannot invigorate a body enervated by debauchery; cannot corroborate a machine, from thenceforth become incapable of sustaining him, except by the necessity of privations; he will know that the licentiousness of the voluptuary ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... On this flaccid group Buzz burst, bomb-like. He hung his hat on the hook, wordlessly. The noise he made woke his father, as he had meant that it should. There came a muttered growl from the old man. Buzz leaned against the stairway door, negligently. The eyes of ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... lineaments encaged the embryo of the world-spanning mind of man. Man's nature, brimful of passions and affections, would have had an home in that little heart, whose swift pulsations hurried towards their close. His small hand's fine mechanism, now flaccid and unbent, would in the growth of sinew and muscle, have achieved works of beauty or of strength. His tender rosy feet would have trod in firm manhood the bowers and glades of earth— these reflections were now of ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... it was quite full and swollen, as if fresh air had been blown into it; or what is the same thing, it swelled in proportion as the weight of the column of air which pressed upon it diminished. When again brought down, it became more and more flaccid, and, when it reached the bottom, it resumed its original condition. In the nine chapters of which the treatise consists, he shows that all the phenomena or effects hitherto ascribed to the horror of a vacuum, arise from the weight of the mass of air; and after explaining the ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... rather uninteresting, but the result may be glorious. Yet a good many of them were good honest, kind, common girls, only demoralized by long lying around in a waiting posture. It had taken the fire and sparkle out of them. They were not in a healthy state. They were degraded, contracted, flaccid. They did not hold themselves high. They knew that in a market-point of view there was a frightful glut of women. The usually small ratio of men was unusually diminished by the absence of those who gone to the war, and of those who, as was currently reported, were ashamed ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... development are occasionally seen also in boys. For example, Breschet, in the year 1820, reported the case of a boy three years of age who exhibited all the signs of puberty. His voice resembled that of a young man of sixteen to eighteen. The length of the flaccid penis was 9.6 cm. (3-3/4 inches), its diameter at the root was 7.2 cm. (2-3/4 inches); the length of the organ when erect was 13.5 cm. (5-1/4 inches). In the presence of girls or women the boy's penis became erect, his whole manner became ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... in, slid into the driver's seat, and went through the operation of starting. Only, he didn't start. The self-starter hummed as it spun the flywheel, but nothing whatever was elicited save a profane phrase from Foster and a growl from Mert. Bud sat back flaccid, his whole body ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... elder Annandale youth—as to the recitatives of the younger—to see a wild man of the woods and hear him sing; but the novelty gone, they passed on" to Egyptian crocodiles, Iroquois hunters," and left him stranded with "unquiet fire" and "flaccid face." "O foulest Circaean draft," exclaimed his old admirer in his fine dirge, "thou poison of popular applause, madness is in thee and death, thy end is Bedlam and the grave," and with the fixed resolve, "De me fabula non narrabitur," ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... menstrual flow may occur too often, continue too long, or be too profuse. It induces a feeble pulse, cold extremities, weak respiration, general debility, and may occur in opposite states of the system, i.e., in women who have a plethoric and robust habit, or in those of flaccid muscles and bloodless features. When the menstrual discharge is natural, it is so gradual that by mixing with the vaginal secretions it is prevented from coagulating, while in this disease, clots are ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... sleeplessness. Having undressed, she seated herself at the window in a Voltaire armchair, and dismissed her maids. The candles were taken away, and once more the room was left with only one lamp burning in it. The Countess sat there looking quite yellow, mumbling with her flaccid lips and swaying to and fro. Her dull eyes expressed complete vacancy of mind, and, looking at her, one would have thought that the rocking of her body was not a voluntary action of her own, but was produced by the action of ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... Ennui was upon him. This goodly promontory, the earth—particularly that portion of it known as Quicksand—was to him no more than a pestilent congregation of vapours. Overtaken by the megrims, the philosopher may seek relief in soliloquy; my lady find solace in tears; the flaccid Easterner scold at the millinery bills of his women folk. Such recourse was insufficient to the denizens of Quicksand. Calliope, especially, was wont to express his ennui ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... solvent for lies, what surprises would be in store for us! Nearly everybody who now appears to us to be upright, inflexible, and to hold his chest high, would be disclosed as a flaccid, weak person, presenting in reality ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... car at the stage door, when they could have a good look at him getting out of the car and going into the theater. At these tidings Mrs. Makebelieve roused for a moment from her strange apathy. Since tea-time she had sat (not as usual upright and gesticulating, but humped up and flaccid) staring at a blob of condensed milk on the outside of the tin. She said she thought she would go out and see the great actor, although what all the women saw in him to go mad about she did not know, but in another moment she settled ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... of a glorious day in the late September, a man rode out from the west port of the city, a fat man flaccid of body, pale and tallowy of complexion. A couple of serving-men went behind him, with the Douglas arms broidered on their coats. They looked no little terrified, and shook upon their horses, as indeed well they might. This little cavalcade rode directly out of the city ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... to the bank. Wright, Delbridge, and the clerks and stenographers seemed unreal creatures, with flaccid, vacuous faces, as he shook hands with them and answered their conventional queries about his vacation. "Vacation!" The word was not in his vocabulary. "Business! "That, too, was a corpse of a word floating on the still waters of past usage. "Money, ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... to his eyes because he had dropped his green spectacles into the crevasse. Presently, a dreadful sense of weakness seized him, that mountain sickness which produces the same effects as sea-sickness. Exhausted, his head empty, his legs flaccid, he stumbled and lost his feet, so that the guides were forced to grasp him, one on each side, supporting and hoisting him to the top of that wall of ice. Scarcely three hundred feet now separated them from the summit of the Jungfrau; but although the ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... and son of Lucifer, 890 His forehead chapleted green with wreathy hop, Sunburned all over like an AEthiop. And when my Cotnar begins to operate And the tongue of the rogue to run at a proper rate, And our wine-skin, tight once, shows each flaccid dent, 895 I shall drop in with—as if by accident— "You never knew, then, how it all ended, What fortune good or bad attended The little lady your Queen befriended?" —And when that's told me, what's remaining? 900 This world's too hard for my explaining. The ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... him arms in the back court, when they made a mighty comely pair, the child being so lean, and light, and active, and the laird himself a man of a manly, pretty stature, his hair (the periwig being laid aside) showing already white with many anxieties, and his face of an even, flaccid red. But this day Francie's heart ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which is particularly noticeable in him, he is much dissatisfied with Oxford—thinks it (as we all do) terribly fallen off since his days. Perhaps the infusion of Dissenters' sons (it is just at the time of the first Commission in 1854) may brace its flaccid sinews, though the middle-class, he confesses, is abominably disagreeable. He sees a good deal of this poor middle-class in his inspecting tours, and decides elsewhere about the same time that "of all dull, stagnant, unedifying entourages, that of middle-class Dissent is the stupidest." ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... bare boughs of the acacias, and froze the water that dripped from the Medicean balls on the old wall of the Fortezza. Even in summer a little breeze would spring up towards sunset, and the leaves that had hung heavy and flaccid on the trees in the blazing heat of noon would be stirred by it to some semblance of life, while the shadows lengthened, and the incessant maddening scream of the locusts died down into silence. The gardens were a favourite resort. As the church bells rang the Ave Maria the people came to them ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... Roses all their glory yield To crown the Votary of Love and Joy, Misfortune's Victim hails, with many a sigh, Thee, scarlet POPPY of the pathless field, Gaudy, yet wild and lone; no leaf to shield Thy flaccid vest, that, as the gale blows high, Flaps, and alternate folds around thy head.— So stands in the long grass a love-craz'd Maid, Smiling aghast; while stream to every wind Her gairish ribbons, smear'd with dust and rain; But brain-sick ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... the realization of her own apprehensive foreboding in former times. He looked upon her as a species of imposter; a guilty woman in the guise of an innocent one. Terror was upon her white face as she saw it; her cheek was flaccid, and her mouth had almost the aspect of a round little hole. The horrible sense of his view of her so deadened her that she staggered, and he stepped forward, thinking she was going ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... livid, with flat nose, prominent forehead, and long, long lashes; the mouth was half open, with thick lips which were turning blue, between which the widely spaced teeth gleamed white. His neck was slender, flaccid as a wilted stem, and seamed with tiny creases. The jointure of the arms at the shoulder looked feeble. The arms themselves were fragile, and covered with a down similar to the fine plumage which clothes the bodies of newly hatched birds. The whole outline of the ribs was distinctly visible; ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... strength, is well worth observing. Birds residing constantly in the atmosphere, surrounded by oxygen, and respiring it in greater proportions than any other species of animals, are endowed with a superior degree of muscular strength, whilst the muscles of fish, on the contrary, are flaccid and oily; these animals are comparatively feeble in their motions, and their temperature is scarcely above that of the water in which they live. This is, in all probability, owing to their imperfect ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... this be said? Richardson and even Fielding have their longueurs. Miss Austen is too prone to linger over the tea-table beyond all human patience. And even Scott's descriptions of his loved hills grow sometimes unreadable, especially when they are told in a flaccid and slovenly style. But Vanity Fair is kept up with inexhaustible life and invention, with a style which, for purity and polish, was beyond the reach of ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... one of those rare hours in which the deep confessed the amazing numbers of its own living and swarming constellations. Not a fish could leap or dart, not a sinuous thing could turn, but it became an animate torch. Every quick movement was a gleam of green fire. No drifting, flaccid life could pulse so softly along but it betrayed itself in lambent outlines. Each throb of the water became a beam of light, and every ripple that widened over the strand—still whispering, "I have gone astray"—was edged ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... arm midway between the shoulder and elbow, with the thumb and fingers of the opposite hand. When the arm is bent, the inside muscle will become hard and prominent, and its tendon at the elbow rigid, while the muscle on the opposite side will become flaccid. Extend the arm at the elbow, and the outside muscle will swell and become firm, while the inside muscle and its tendon at the elbow will ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... have united to popularise among us a flaccid latitudinarianism, which thinks itself a benign tolerance for the opinions of others. It is in truth only a pretentious form of being without settled opinions of our own, and without any desire to settle them. No one can ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... followed Ives' flaccid, shocked gaze to the bulkhead where there had been the outline of the closed port, and beside it the hole which had held the axle of the manual wheel, and which now was a smooth, seamless curtain of impenetrable black. But Hoskins looked at the ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... the knowledge of beauty— sehnlich wunschte zur Kenntniss des Schonen zu gelangen. He had to shorten his nights, [181] sleeping only four hours, to gain time for reading. And here Winckelmann made a step forward in culture. He multiplied his intellectual force by detaching from it all flaccid interests. He renounced mathematics and law, in which his reading had been considerable,—all but the literature of the arts. Nothing was to enter into his life unpenetrated by its central enthusiasm. At this time he undergoes the charm of Voltaire. Voltaire belongs ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... represent this as a piece of impolitic narrowness, and to say that its surly bigotry was rightly punished by the evils that it brought down on the returning exiles. The temper of much flaccid Christianity at present delights to expand in a lazy and foolish 'liberality,' which will welcome anybody to come and take a hand at the building, and accepts any profession of unity in worship. But there is no surer way of taking the earnestness out ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... evil, hell with hell, and advise submission to outrage, or at least taking the risk of being forced into resigned submission. The believers in the religion of valor, on the other hand, proclaim that war is a good thing in itself, that it develops the best human virtues, invigorates a nation become flaccid through ease and luxury, and puts in command the strong, dominating spirit of a valid nation or race. What is the just mean between these two extremes? Is it not that war is always a hideous and hateful evil, but that a nation ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... great master hand which sweeps over the whole Of this deep harp of life, if at moments it stretch To shrill tension some one wailing nerve, means to fetch Its response the truest, most stringent, and smart, Its pathos the purest, from out the wrung heart, Whose faculties, flaccid it may be, if less Sharply strung, sharply smitten, had fail'd to express Just the one note the great final harmony needs. And what best proves there's life in a heart?—that it bleeds? Grant a cause to remove, grant an end to attain, Grant both to be just, and what mercy in pain! Cease the ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... placed his feet upon the floor when Gratz opened his eyes, awakened partly by the sounds of rising and partly by his tumult of snores, and in an instant the flaccid mask descended over his face, and Gratz ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... consider that what might cost little in other lands as a natural growth, might cost far too much in Russia as a forced growth. In lack, then, of quick brain and sturdy spine and strong arm of paid workmen, he forced into his manufactories the flaccid muscle of serfs. These, thus lifted from the earth, lost even the little force in the State they had before; great bodies of serfs thus became slaves; worse than that, the idea of a serf developed toward the idea of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... AND HARDNESS OF THE ABDOMEN.—This is very characteristic of pregnancy. When a lady is not pregnant the abdomen is soft and flaccid; when she is pregnant, and after she has quickened, the abdomen; over the region of the ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... clover-scented air; and his shrill whistle, as he takes to his hole or defies the farm dog from the interior of the stone wall, is a pleasant summer sound. In form and movement the woodchuck is not captivating. His body is heavy and flabby. Indeed, such a flaccid, fluid, pouchy carcass I have never before seen. It has absolutely no muscular tension or rigidity, but is as baggy and shaky as a skin filled with water. Let the rifleman shoot one while it lies basking on a sideling rock, ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... seems to be to expel the watery juices of the leaf and to cure or dry it with the least delay. Hence, the leaves are not exposed to the sun, but are first dried in the air for a short time. They are next exposed to artificial heat, which renders them flaccid and pliable, and prepares them for the third operation of rolling, which twists the yielding leaf as seen in manufactured tea, rolls it up into balls, and squeezes out a considerable portion of its watery juices. It is a singular fact that in the ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... lead him back and up to the plane of high resolves. To remind him of indomitable courage and perseverance he selects William the Silent, Christopher Columbus, and Moses. When his courage is waning and he is becoming flaccid and indolent, their very presence is a rebuke, and a survey of their achievements restores him to himself. As examples of patriotic thinking and action he invites into his world Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. They remind him that he is a ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... quarts of these little figs. When a sufficient quantity is prepared, the leaves of the Etou are well wetted in it, and then laid upon a plantain leaf, where they are turned about till they become more and more flaccid, and then they are gently squeezed, gradually increasing the pressure, but so as not to break them; as the flaccidity increases, and they become spungy, they are supplied with more of the liquor; in about five minutes the colour ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... its feeble and flaccid old age, seemed to have lost all capacity for making war. Theodoric the Amal performed his share of the compact; but when with his weary army, encumbered with many women and children, he emerged from the passes of the Balkans he found no Imperial generals ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... which accords well with the fleshy habit and mode of growth. There is some difficulty in ascertaining the exact structure of the species just noticed, as the fruit-bearing cells, or sporophores, are very small, and when the spicules are developed the substance becomes so flaccid that it is difficult to cut a proper slice, even with the sharpest lancet. I have, however, satisfied myself as to the true structure by repeated observations. But should any difficulty arise in verifying ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... you—as when I saw you blow a fly from the forehead of Philoctetes in the propylea. The wing, with which Sophocles and the statuary represent him, to drive away the summer insects in his agony, had wearied his flaccid arm, ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... where the wind ruffled the olive-orchards; and beyond, the rolling hills that grew gradually flatter until they sank into the yellowish plain of Castile. As he made the gesture his fingers were stretched wide as if to grasp all this land he was showing. His flaccid cheeks were flushed as he turned to us; but we should see it in May, he was saying, in May when the wheat was thick in the fields, and there were flowers on the hills. Then the lands were beautiful and rich, in May. And he went on ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... their firm, sinewy proportions, their strong grasp, my heart swelled with pity and with passionate devotion. Often I felt as if I could have held these cold hands to my heart for warmth, and given of my own warm blood to fill those flaccid veins. ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... parted. Next day, however, they visited the Secretary again, and found him more dismal and flaccid ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... been observed, that Corpulent Persons in some Diseases, that seize on them, do fall away to wonder, not only in the Wast, but in the Arms, Legs, and Thighs; and the very Calves of the Legs have been observed so flaccid and loose, that one might wrap the skin about the bones. The reason whereof, according to the opinion deliver'd, may be easily rendred to be, A great Consumption of the Stock of Liquors, that in Health kept ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... from ministering to holiness, that is to wholeness, parasitism ministers to exactly the opposite. One by one the spiritual faculties droop and die, one by one from lack of exercise the muscles of the soul grow weak and flaccid, one by one the moral activities cease. So from him that hath not, is taken away that which he hath, and after a few years of parasitism there ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... coral garden to advantage you must pass over it—not through it. Drifting idly in a boat in a calm clear day, when the tips of the tallest shrubs are submerged but a foot or so, and all the delicate filaments, which are invisible or lie flat and flaccid when the tide is out, are waving, twisting and twining, then the spectacle is at its best. Tiny fish, glowing like jewels, flash and dart among the intricate, interlacing branches, or quiveringly poise about some slender point—humming-birds of the ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the larvae. Dry food is, as a rule, the best, though the larvae of one or two of the foreign Saturnidae require their food to be sprinkled with water, and sometimes even with the addition of salt, to make them thrive. Moths on emergence should not be killed at once, as they are then too flaccid, and have not sufficiently purged themselves. Yet they should not be left too long or over night, as they often fly at that time, and knock themselves about in the cage, to the detriment of their beauty; destroying, in ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... observed that she had again "dressed up" in honour of his second descent of the stairs; and Walter repeated his fragment of objectionable song; but these jocularities were rendered pointless by the eventless evening that followed; and in the morning the carnations began to appear tarnished and flaccid. ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... of strain were telling on Jesse Purvy. The robust, full- blooded face was showing deep lines; his flesh was growing flaccid; his glance tinged with quick apprehension. He told his intimates that he realized "they'd get him," yet he sought to prolong his ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... tendrils deliriously through the warm water. They swept past Priscilla's drooping hands, touching them with their yielding bodies and brushing them softly with their tendrils. Now and then she lifted one from the water, watched it lie flaccid on the palm of her hand and then dropped it ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... there were signs that their quarry found the ground harder to cover. The second discard lay in open sight—again a leather bag which Nalik'ideyu sniffed and then began to lick eagerly, thrusting her nose into its flaccid interior. ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... the other side of human experience is set forth in that other word. For most men have not only to work, but to bear; not only to toil, but to sorrow. There are efforts that need to be put forth, which task all our energy, and leave the muscles flaccid and feeble. And many of us have, at one and the same moment, to work and to weep, to toil whilst our hearts are beating like a forge-hammer; to labour whilst memories and thoughts that might enfeeble any worker, are busy with us. A burden of sorrow, as well as effort and toil, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... a balloon—the reader, however impatient, must listen to this allusion—whoever has seen a balloon, may have observed that in its flaccid state it can be folded and unfolded with the greatest ease, and it is manageable even by a child; but when once filled, the force of multitudes cannot restrain, nor the art of man direct its course. Such is the human mind—so ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... blonde lady. "Home?" The sagging lines about her flaccid chin took on a new look of firmness and resolve. The light of ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... wallop on the side of her jaw. Her head snapped up and her knees caved in. She folded from the hips and went down bonelessly. From her throat came the bubbly sound of air being forced painfully through a flaccid wet tube. ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... era, without regard and honor among those who delighted in his splendid patriotism, in the days of his manly strength, mental as well as physical, and who held him in high esteem as a patriot orator and the staunchly loyal tribune of the New World peoples. In these days of flaccid patriotism and moral declension in public life, his example may well stimulate and inspire. In his wholehearted devotion to the hopes as well as to the interests of the Colonies most notable was the polemical fervor with which he espoused their cause and noble ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... applauded; she returns all radiant with joy. Anon the applauses wax fainter, or threaten to cease; she is heavy of heart, the light of her face has fled. Is Sovereignty some poor Montgolfier; which, blown into by the popular wind, grows great and mounts; or sinks flaccid, if the wind be withdrawn? France was long a 'Despotism tempered by Epigrams;' and now, it would seem, the Epigrams ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... modelled on an antique Roman tragedy. But there was not moral force in the protagonist to render that act salutary, not public energy sufficient in his fellow-citizens to accomplish his drama of deliverance. Lorenzo was corrupt. Florence was flaccid. Evil manners had emasculated the hero. In the state the last spark of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... mere tourist's experience. In the difference between this London and that you fully realize the moral and physical magnitude of the season. The earlier London throbbed to bursting with the tide of manifold life, the later London lies gaunt, hollow, flaccid, and as if spent by the mere sense of what it has been through. The change is almost incredible, and the like of it is nowhere to be witnessed with us. It seems a sort of bluff to say that a city which still holds all ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... to black tea, on the other hand, it may be observed, 1st, That after being gathered, the leaves are exposed for a considerable time; 2d, That they are tossed about until they become soft and flaccid, and are then left in heaps; 3d, That after being roasted for a few minutes and rolled, they are exposed for some hours to the air in a soft and moist state; and 4th, That they are at last dried slowly over charcoal ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... which at that unspoilt hour seemed always to sojourn for a space in the belvedere. The sun glinted joyously on the golden ornament of the dome, and on Hugo's smooth hair, but it revealed without pity the stains on Ravengar's flaccid collar and the disorder of his ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... proofs of this—a curious, a comic, but a most conclusive proof—is the dependence of the great daily papers on the headline. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred retain this and nothing more, because the matter below is but a flaccid expansion of ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... enough of it, however: there is not always. She was hungry,—one could see that easily enough,—and not drunk, as most of her companions would have been found at this hour. She did not drink, this woman,—her face told that, too,—nothing stronger than ale. Perhaps the weak, flaccid wretch had some stimulant in her pale life to keep her up,—some love or hope, it might be, or urgent need. When that stimulant was gone, she would take to whiskey. Man cannot live by work alone. ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... Taillefer loathed having to administer to them such remedies as he had to give; and at one part of the voyage even his stock of drugs was depleted, so great was the demand upon his resources. Their joints became stiff, their muscles flaccid and contracted, and the utter prostration to which they were reduced made him regret that they retained so much of their intellectual faculties as to make them feel keenly the weight of despair.* (* ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... the island of Deemsters, and Keys, and Kirk Maughold, and Port y Vullin. Here at the Lague lived ADAM FATSISTER, the Deputy Governor, who had been selected for that post because he owned five hundred hungry acres, six hungrier sons, a face like an angel's in homespun, a flaccid figure, and a shrewd-faced wife, named RUTH. Hither came STIFFUN, to beg shelter. The footman opened the door to him, but would have closed it had not ADAM, with a lusty old oath, bidden him to let the man in. Hereupon STIFFUN's face softened, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... ought to pay, Uncle," declared Patsy, somewhat nettled by this flaccid reception of her pet scheme. "All the children will insist on being taken to a place like that, for we shall show just the pictures they love to see. And, allowing there is no money to be made from the venture, think of the joy we shall ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... Matthias appeared upon the scene. The Estates had already been in communication with him, better hopes, for the time at least, being entertained from him than from the flaccid Rudolph. Moreover a kind of compromise had been made in the autumn between Matthias and the Emperor after the defeat of Leopold in the duchies. The real king had fallen at the feet of the nominal one by proxy of his brother Maximilian. Seven thousand men of the army of Matthias now ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... A Cetonia-grub, pricked away from the centre on a level with the fore-legs, has her right side flaccid, spread out, incapable of contracting, while the left side swells, wrinkles and contracts. Since the left half no longer receives the symmetrical cooperation of the right half, the grub, instead of curling into the normal volute, closes its ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... of her approach Laid by his orbed shield, his vizor-helm, His buckler and his corset he laid by, And bade that none attend him; at his side Two faithful dogs that urge the silent course, Shaggy, deep-chested, crouched; the crocodile, Crying, oft made them raise their flaccid ears And push their heads within their master's hand. There was a brightening paleness in his face, Such as Diana rising o'er the rocks Showered on the lonely Latmian; on his brow Sorrow there was, yet nought was there ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... success which has animated every department of life and business, puffing them up like gas in a balloon, since about '35 has departed and left the fiscal system perfectly flaccid and lifeless. The rage for speculation in real estate has absorbed all loose cash, and the country is now groaning for its fast-locked circulating medium. A friend at Detroit writes: "With fifty thousand dollars of productive real estate in the ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... involuntarily find its way into the stomach, where its pernicious properties soon manifest themselves, being frequently followed by nausea, vomitings, loss of appetite, and impaired digestion. The drain of the juices has a tendency to injure the muscles of the face, to render them flaccid, to furrow and corrugate the skin, and to give a gaunt, withered, and jaundiced appearance to ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... he did not know. The other he recognised at once. It seemed to be the same familiarly shabby black coat which he wore, the same many-stained waistcoat, the identical silk hat, ruffled and rain-spotted. The same pads of flesh hung flaccid from his jaws; the red, cracked knuckles of his hands, well remembered, were enormous still. Only the furrows on the face seemed to be ploughed deeper and wider, and a few more stiff hairs curled over the general ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... flexible or flaccid, from Khansbending inwards, i.e. the mouth of a water-skin before drinking. Like Mukhannas, it is also used for an effeminate man, a passive sodomite and even for a eunuch. Easterns still believe in what Westerns ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... inimical group, this man was the only one for whom Don Marcelo felt a vague attraction. "Although a German, he appears a good sort," meditated the old man, eyeing him carefully. In times of peace, he must have been stout, but now he showed the loose and flaccid exterior of one who has just lost much in weight. Desnoyers surmised that the man had formerly lived in tranquil and vulgar sensuousness, in a middle-class happiness suddenly cut ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... large figure in his dusty boots, coarse trousers and flannel shirt, and weather-beaten black slouch hat. The inevitable revolver hung at his thigh. His pursed lips spurted a jet of tobacco juice as he keenly surveyed me with small, shrewd, china-blue eyes squinting from a broad flaccid countenance. But the countenance was unemotional while he offered a thick hand which proved singularly soft and flatulent ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... entered. She was very tall and pale, her dress was a little dowdy. Like her father and Millicent, she carried her head forward and had a tendency to look downwards, and her spine seemed flaccid. Ethel was beautiful, or about to be beautiful; Millicent was pretty; Rose plain. Rose was deficient in style. She despised style, and regarded her sisters as frivolous ninnies and gadabouts. She was the serious member of the family, and for two years had been studying ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... prior to respiration are negative and positive. A negative opinion may be formed when evidence is found of the child having undergone intra-uterine maceration. In this case the body will be flaccid and flattened; the ilia prominent; the head soft and yielding; the cuticle more or less detached, and raised into large bullae; the skin of a red or brownish-red colour; the cavities filled with abundant bloody serum; the umbilical cord straight ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... the attributes of sex in him are developed, but not matured by use. The Night, for whom no symbolism of maternity was needed, is a woman who has passed through many pregnancies. Those deeply delved wrinkles on the vast and flaccid abdomen sufficiently indicate this. Yet when we turn to Michelangelo's sonnets on Night, we find that he habitually thought of her as a mysterious and shadowy being, whose influence, though potent ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... evil which the decrepit but still vigorous institution arrogated to itself. They adapted its anachronisms with singular adroitness to the needs of modern society. They transfused their throbbing blood into its flaccid veins, until it became doubtful whether the Papacy had been absorbed into the Jesuits, or whether the Jesuits had remodeled the Papacy for contemporary uses. But this tendency in the aspiring order to identify itself with Rome, this ambition to command the prestige of Rome ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the natives of marshy districts who permanently reside in them lose their whole bodily and mental constitution, contaminated by the poison they inhale. Their aspect is sallow and prematurely senile, so that children are often wrinkled, their muscles flaccid, their hair lank, and frequently pale, the abdomen tumid, the stature stunted, and the intellectual and moral character low and degraded. They rarely attain what in more wholesome regions would ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... recovered his senses, but seemed to be puzzled to recall the circumstances connected with his first view of the snake. After a mental effort he explained, while the cold sweat poured from his face, and his limbs were flaccid as an infant's, that the sound of a rattle had caused him to stop short—that a pleasant halo danced before his eyes, and sweet sounds met his ears—and that from that instant until the conclusion of the trance, "he was as happy as he ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... the leaves had been pinned open, and next morning five of them were found much browned. The plant was a large one, and none of the free leaves, which were asleep and depended vertically, were browned, excepting four very young ones. But three other leaves, though not browned, were in a rather flaccid condition, and retained their nocturnal position during the whole of the following day. In this case it was obvious that the leaves which were exposed horizontally to the zenith suffered most. This same pot was afterwards exposed for 35 - 40 m. on a slightly colder night, and ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... round, her face burning like sunset, and, seeing nobody, stooped to pick up the flaccid lumps. Jim, with a pale face, departed as invisibly as he had come. He had proved the bandsman's tale to be true. On his way back he formed a resolution. It was to beard the lion in his den—to call ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... journeyings to the distant hills and too weary to return. At the spring-hole at Carrizo they found them gathered, the runts and roughs of the range; old cows with importunate calves bunting at their flaccid udders; young heifers, unused to rustling for two; orehannas with no mothers to guide them to the feed; rough steers that had been "busted" and half-crippled by some reckless cowboy—all the unfortunate and incapable ones, standing ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... represents a terrific movement, doesn't he? and one we can't ignore. When I say terrific I don't mean that I'm afraid of it. I'm not. It seems to me too strengthening to be afraid of. With all you can say against it, it strikes me as a tonic in our rather flaccid life, like iron in the blood. I've sympathy with it, too, to some extent; I've sympathy with him. You know, I do belong to the people. I'm glad we know him, and that in a way we've a right to get near to him. It puts us in touch with our own national realities as perhaps ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... red-faced gentleman ran. His mode of progression might best be described as a succession of short and unwieldy jumps, which, as he was a rather stout gentleman, appeared to indicate some very urgent and pressing need for hurry. His face was bathed in perspiration, and his collar had become flaccid and shapeless from the same cause. It appeared to Tom, as he gazed at those rubicund, though anxious, features, that they should be well known to him. That glossy hat, those speckless gaiters, and the long ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Spain and San Justo a little earlier; to wave the coming Jesuitries away, as with a flaming sword; to forbid beforehand the doleful Thirty-Years War, and the still dolefuler spiritual atrophy (the flaccid Pedantry, ever rummaging and rearranging among learned marine-stores, which thinks itself Wisdom and Insight; the vague maunderings, flutings; indolent, impotent daydreaming and tobacco-smoking, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... by a visible effort. "Is it ... is it worth while?" she asked, regarding the flaccid, tumbled, wax-like thing, with its bloated, white globe of a skull. Every muscle of it was relaxed and limp, its eyes shut, its tiny jaw hanging. "Wouldn't it be ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... Lucifer, {890} His forehead chapleted green with wreathy hop, Sunburned all over like an Aethiop. And when my Cotnar begins to operate And the tongue of the rogue to run at a proper rate, And our wine-skin, tight once, shows each flaccid dent, I shall drop in with—as if by accident— "You never knew, then, how it all ended, What fortune good or bad attended The little lady your Queen befriended?" —And when that's told me, what's remaining? {900} This world's too hard for my explaining. The same wise judge of matters ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... sister hesitated. She was an elderly woman with flaccid yellow cheeks, watery eyes, and a more than incipient ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... and deposited his plump body on the extreme edge of a chair. It was easy to see that he was much depressed—his usually rosy cheeks hung flaccid, his mustachios drooped limply, his little black eyes were suffused and needed frequent wiping—a service performed by a hand that ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... friends, at least he would live—if naught happened to him to-night. If naught—but ah, the thought pierced him to the heart. He who had proved himself in old days no mean soldier in the field, who had won honour in more than one fight, felt his brow grow damp, his knees grow flaccid, knew himself a coward. For the life which he must risk was not the old life, but the new one which he had bought so dearly; the new one for which he had given his soul, his country, and his friends. And he dared not risk that! He dared not let the winds of heaven blow too roughly on ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... since the heroic war for Liberty in 1881. From the Limpopo as far as Cape Town the Second Majuba has given birth to a new inspiration and a new movement amongst our people in South Africa. A new feeling has rushed in huge billows over South Africa. The flaccid and cowardly Imperialism, that had already begun to dilute and weaken our national blood, gradually turned aside before the new current which permeated our people. Many who, tired of the slow development of the national idea, had resigned themselves ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... into something quite different. The brilliant eyes became sleepy, and, from a habit of narrowing the lids over them, possibly to shut out the bright sun, receded more and more beyond the full and flaccid cheeks, and even contracted a Mongolian ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... how great was her love for her friends. It bore her through; it made her arm steady and tireless to bathe them. What exhausted her was the sight of Bea and Olaf turned into flaccid invalids, uncomfortably flushed after taking food, begging for the healing of sleep ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... charity, but they had bread only for themselves. The child was always hungry. It was winter. He did not cry. You could see him approach the stove, in which there was never any fire, and whose pipe, you know, was of mastic and yellow clay. His breathing was hoarse, his face livid, his limbs flaccid, his belly prominent. He said nothing. If you spoke to him, he did not answer. He is dead. He was taken to the Necker Hospital, where I saw him. I was house-surgeon in that hospital. Now, if there are any fathers among you, fathers whose happiness it is to stroll on Sundays holding ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... word came in different keys, their flaccid bodies stiffened into upright eagerness— ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... drooped to one side, his mouth was partly open, and the expression upon his face was one of weak and sickly contentment. Now and then he sang a few notes in a withdrawn and unnatural voice, slightly shook his large and flaccid body, and allowed his head to tremble almost as if he were seized with palsy. Despite his breadth, his large limbs, and his beard, there was about his whole person an indescribable effeminacy, which seemed heightened, rather than diminished, by his bulk and his virile contours. ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... ready to pay it out. Under me I felt the basket heave gently. Looking up I saw that the balloon was no longer a crooked sausage. She had become a big, soft, yellow summer squash, with an attenuated neck. The flaccid abdomen flinched in and puffed out, and the ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... woman in the doorway had relaxed her frozen immobility and was between Paul and me as we rubbed the thin, icy hands and forced brandy between the flaccid lips. We all three thought her dead or dying, and labored over her with the frightened thankfulness for one another's living presence which always marks that dreadful moment. But even as we fanned and rubbed, and cried out to one another to open the windows and to bring ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... he answered Evan's greeting, with a flaccid gesture. 'Don't excite me too much. A little at a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that it is! But thought is a tonic which sometimes restores a man's enfeebled self-respect. I was beginning to lose that particular condition of health and sanity, Roger!—my self-respect was becoming a flaccid muscle—a withering nerve;—but a little thought- exercise has convinced me that my mental sinews are ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... The confluent small-pox consists of numerous pustules, which appear on the third day of the fever, flow together, are irregularly circumscribed, flaccid, and little elevated; the fever continuing after the eruption is complete; convulsions do not precede this kind of small-pox, and are so far to be ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... whose back hair, by reason of her prominent position, so challenged inspection. Her face was not easily discernible, but the aforesaid cunning tress-weavings, the white ear and poll, and the curve of a cheek which was neither flaccid nor sallow, were signals that led to the expectation of good beauty in front. Such expectations are not infrequently disappointed as soon as the disclosure comes; and in the present case, when the lady, by a turn of the head, at length revealed herself, she was not so handsome as ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... on the bared shoulders. Magda winced away from them, shivering. For a moment Sister Agnetia's arm hung flaccid, the cords of the ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... to the park early in the day were driven for refuge from the blazing sun to the trees and bushes, where prostrated by the heat they lay limp and flaccid upon the grass. Miss Hazel Sleighter, who for some reason which she could not explain to herself had joined the first contingent of picnickers, was cross, distinctly and obviously cross. The heat was trying to her nerves, but worse, it made her face red—red all over. Her ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... a day of queer experiences. He had never before realized with how many miracles mere everyday life is besieged. Here in this small punctilious packet lay a Sesame—a power of transformation beside which the transformation of that rather flaccid face of the noonday into this tense, sinister face of midnight was but as a moving from house to house—a change just as irrevocable and complete, and yet so very normal. Which should it be, that, or—his ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... a minute silent, and then began to pour forth that which was really his speech on the occasion. Those flaccid half-pronounced syllables in which he had declared that he had resigned,—had been studiously careless, purposely flaccid. It was his duty to let the House know the fact, and he did his duty. But now he had a word to say in which he himself could take some little interest. Mr. Daubeny ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... attention. When he had finished his prolonged interview with Blandford Sikes, sidling back to the waiting-room to gather up various impedimenta, he had encountered the unfortunate clergyman whom he had kept waiting. Marcus Harding was the man. They exchanged only a couple of words, but the sight of the flaccid bulk, the hanging cheeks and hands, the eyes in which dwelt a sort of faded despair, whipped up into keen alertness every faculty of the professor's mind. As he walked into Cavendish Square he ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... indulges in as many flights of fancy. He speaks his mind out quite honestly, like a thorough Briton.... He holds Frenchmen in light esteem. A bloated 'Mossoo' walking in Leicester Square, with a huge cigar and a little hat, with 'billard' and 'estaminet' written on his flaccid face, is a favourite study with him; the unshaven jowl, the waist tied with a string, the boots which pad the Quadrant pavement, this dingy and disreputable being exercises a fascination over Mr. Punch's favourite artist. We trace, too, in ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... excellence in speech. Scarcely ever do we find a thought clothed in clear, precise, closely-fitting words, or a metaphor which really corresponds to the abstract idea that is represented by it. We take up sentence after sentence of verbose and flaccid Latin, analyse them with difficulty, and when at last we come to the central thought enshrouded in them, we too often find that it is the merest and most obvious commonplace, a piece of tinsel wrapped in endless folds of tissue paper. Perhaps ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... contemporary fiction, his finer perception blunted by the daily and raucous yell of the New York press, his imagination too long over-strained by Broadway drama and now flaccid and incapable of further response to its leering or shrieking appeal, the din of twentieth-century art fell on nerveless ears and on a ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... side, while the clouds gather, and the sun vanishes at last, so the form and face on which I looked changed from exuberant youth into infirm old age,—the discoloured wrinkled skin, the bleared dim eye, the flaccid muscles, the brittle sapless bones. Nor was the change that of age alone; the expression of the countenance had passed into gloomy discontent, and in every furrow a passion or a vice had sown the ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the Iguana family, which bears no resemblance to the fabulous basilisk of the Greeks, got up at our approach, puffed out its throat, and shook the membranous crest on the top of its head. Its bright eye seemed to scan the horizon; no doubt it caught sight of us, for its flaccid body stiffened out, and with a rapid bound it sprang into the stream. The reptile raised its chest in swimming, beating the water with its fore paws as if with oars. We soon lost sight of it, to Lucien's great sorrow, for he wanted ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... moment, thought of opening the carriage-door. There was a pause while Felipe looked into the carriage, and Rosa and her mother ran towards him. Rosa helped Felipe to assist an old man to alight. He was a very fat man, with grey and flaccid cheeks, with shiny black hair and a good deal of gold chain and ring about him. He seemed only half-conscious of the assistance proffered to him, and walked slowly across the road to the shade ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... with pity, and glanced for a moment at his neighbor's red face, his short, thick neck, his "corporation," as Chenet called it to himself, that hung down between two flaccid, fat legs, and his apoplectic rotundity of the old, flabby official, and, lifting the white Panama hat which he wore, from his head, he ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... had set ball rolling, might have got in first, but was so excited as to be momentarily speechless; could only paw at the air in direction of Treasury Bench where STANHOPE sat, PAT O'BRIEN, ARTHUR O'CONNOR, the wily WEBB, and the flaccid FLYNN, all shouting together. But SEXTON beat them all, and will duly figure in Parliamentary Report as Vindicator of Nationality, Defender of St. Patrick, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various
... Leaves.—It is a very mild restringent, and may, in some degree, be serviceable in disorders proceeding from a weak flaccid state of the viscera: the virtue which it has been most celebrated for, it has little title ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... state varies considerably in size, due not only to varying conditions of temperature but also to individual peculiarities. The organ may vary between 2-1/2 inches and 6 inches in length in the flaccid state and between 5 inches and 8 inches in the erected condition. The size of the generative organs is not an index of virility ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... impoverish; decimate; extenuate; reduce in strength, reduce the strength of; mettre de l'eau dans son vin [Fr.]. Adj. weak, feeble, debile^; impotent &c 158; relaxed, unnerved, &c v.; sapless, strengthless^, powerless; weakly, unstrung, flaccid, adynamic^, asthenic^; nervous. soft, effeminate, feminate^, womanly. frail, fragile, shattery^; flimsy, unsubstantial, insubstantial, gimcrack, gingerbread; rickety, creaky, creaking, cranky; craichy^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... through the hole in the wall. He made out the flaccid form of Farley, outstretched upon the stone floor in a drunken stupor. The man evidently had been on the verge of unconsciousness when he leered through the hole. The chance was slight that he would ever remember anything of what he ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... once the body Hath passed away, admit we must that soul, Shivered in all that body, perished too. Nay, even when moving in the bounds of life, Often the soul, now tottering from some cause, Craves to go out, and from the frame entire Loosened to be; the countenance becomes Flaccid, as if the supreme hour were there; And flabbily collapse the members all Against the bloodless trunk—the kind of case We see when we remark in common phrase, "That man's quite gone," or "fainted dead away"; And where there's now a bustle of alarm, And ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... we turned, and, resting on our oars, drifted slowly back with the current. The evening was indescribably brilliant and serene. The sky was cloudless, of a greenish blue, and full of light. The river was clear as glass. We could see the flaccid water-weeds swaying languidly with the current far below, and now and then a shoal of tiny fish shooting along half-way between the weeds and the surface. A rich fringe of purple iris, spear-leaved sagittarius, and tufted meadow-sweet (each blossom ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... begins to flag, to move more slowly, and, as it were, to die: the movements then become slower and rarer, the pauses longer, by which it is made much more easy to perceive and unravel what the motions really are, and how they are performed. In the pause, as in death, the heart is soft, flaccid, exhausted, lying, as it ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... sufficiently hard, so as to exert a tolerable degree of friction upon the teeth, without, at the same time, injuring the enamel of the teeth, will, in most cases, almost always prevent the tartar accumulating in such a degree as to cause subsequent injury to the teeth; and a flaccid, spongy, relaxed condition of the gums may be prevented or overcome by adding to such a tooth powder, some tonic and astringent ingredient. A tooth powder containing charcoal and cinchona bark, will accomplish these results in most cases, and therefore dentists generally recommend such. ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... Verona, or in the gargoyles of Notre Dame. There is no deformity about it, probably very little exaggeration. It is sheer uncompromising ugliness; rendered by the cavernous mouth, the blear eyes, the flaccid complexion, the unrelieved cranium—all carried to a logical conclusion in the sloping shoulders and the simian arms. But the Zuccone is not "revenged of nature": there is nothing to "induce contempt." On the other hand, indeed, there is a tinge of sadness and compassion, objective ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... Partition-Treaties; anon tickled by Belleisle into the reverse posture; then again reversing. An idle, easy-tempered, yet greedy creature, who, what with religious apostasy in early manhood, what with flaccid ambitions since, and idle gapings after shadows, has lost helm in this world; and will make a very bad voyage for ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... flesh. The neck and shoulders explained by their blanched paleness the wasted arms, flung forward and crossed upon the table. Her feet seemed enervated, shrunken from illness. Her night-gown came only to her knees and showed the flaccid muscles, the blue veins, the impoverished flesh of the legs. The cold, to which she paid no heed, turned her lips violet, and a sad smile, drawing up the corners of a sensitive mouth, showed teeth that were white as ivory and ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
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