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Rowdy   /rˈaʊdi/   Listen
Rowdy

adjective
1.
Disturbing the public peace; loud and rough.  Synonym: raucous.  "Rowdy teenagers"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Rowdy" Quotes from Famous Books



... their side wasn't as good as any other? The answer was crushing. "What can you do? Only French, and book-keeping and 'stinks'"—(the strictly Classical nickname for chemistry). "You can't put a man into the cricket or football field worth his salt; your houses are rowdy; your men do nothing at the University; two out of three of you are not even gentlemen." Whereupon the Moderns went in desperately for sports, and claimed to be represented in the School clubs. ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed

... mood, he eagerly accepted an invitation to spend the evening from a class-mate whose room in "Rowdy Row" had a reputation for conviviality. His own room, shared by a quiet and steady Richmond boy with whom he had a slight acquaintance at home, was in one of the cloister-like dormitories opening ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard

... civilization of these classes appears to a Frenchman, who has witnessed, in his own country, the considerable humanization of these classes by equality. To such an observer our middle class divides itself into a serious portion and a gay or rowdy portion; both are a marvel to him. With the gay or rowdy portion we need not much concern ourselves; we shall figure it to our minds sufficiently if we conceive it as the source of that war-song produced in ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... shouted Carson, starting forward with his stomach out and his fat shoulders thrown back, "what's all this conversation about? Why don't some one go up and get Canfield, and why isn't that young rowdy thrown out of the mine? I won't have ...
— Boy Scouts in the Coal Caverns • Major Archibald Lee Fletcher

... as well as your guardian. You must allow me to judge. There is a very bitter feeling abroad, after these—outrages—of the last few days. The village where you are going to speak has some rowdy elements—drawn from the brickfields near it. You will certainly want protection. I shall see that you ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... consequence which has attended the presence of women at the polls, is the uniform quiet and good order on election day. All the police that could be mustered, could not insure half the decorum that their simple presence has everywhere secured. No man, not even a drunken one, is willing to act like a rowdy when he knows the women will see him. Nor is he at all anxious to expose himself in their presence when he knows he has drank too much. Such men quit the polls, and slink out of the streets, to hide themselves ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... giving, finer because it requires discretion, nobler because it requires self-elimination. The more I saw of Miss Gore the more deeply was I impressed by her many amiable qualities. She had an ear for Jerry, but aware of my complete elimination by the rowdy upon my left, found time to relieve the awkwardness of my situation and contribute something to the pleasure of what for me would otherwise have been a ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs

... habitually restrained and critical manner, discussed contemporary literature, and what Plato and Aristotle, judging by; their writings, would have been likely to think of it. And once again I felt as if I were in the 'High' at Oxford, and was almost inclined to wish that Marnier was the rowdy type of undergrad, who ducks people in water troughs and makes ...
— Desert Air - 1905 • Robert Hichens

... the little station and the mellow golden glow of Sophie Forbes' yellow parlor lamp. Then he turned and looked straight down his own street, past the post-office, the tin shop, the dry-goods store to the spot where a faint light seeped through drawn curtains and faint rowdy noises came ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds

... undesirable in character—it was deemed expedient to issue a proclamation of martial law in Natal. This was followed by the seizure of the Transvaal National Bank at Durban, a most exciting episode, which caused quite a ferment in the town. All around the offices a curious and somewhat rowdy rabble congregated, and it was found necessary to guard the premises with Bluejackets and marines. However, after the place had been searched, the men, looking strangely transmogrified in their kharki, returned to Her Majesty's ship ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke

... reached Brotherton had, no doubt, given rise to a great deal of scandal and a great deal of amusement. Pountner and Holdenough were to some extent ashamed of their bellicose Dean. There is something ill-mannered, ungentlemanlike, what we now call rowdy, in personal encounters, even among laymen,—and this is of course aggravated when the assailant is a clergyman. And these canons, though they kept up pleasant, social relations with the Dean, were not ill-disposed to make use ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope

... a.m. It was a rowdy morning. The guns were still unusually lively. While we were having breakfast shells were bursting three or four hundred yards away from our hut, and we could hear occasional H.E. dropping as far ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd

... Lawless, du Maurier, Poynter, not to mention Holman Hunt and F. Leighton; and a host of new draughtsmen, most industrious apprentices, whose talk and example soon weaned Barty from a mixed and somewhat rowdy crew. ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... magnificence is sometimes sadly at variance with the style of the company that occupies it—for this splendid saloon is as much the property of the coarse "rowdy" as of the refined gentleman. You are startled by the apparition of a rough horse-skin boot elevated along the edge of the shining mahogany; and a dash of brown nicotian juice may have somewhat altered the pattern of ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid

... rhapsody; but he would have left, when all is said and done, as he leaves in that paltry fragment of the grumbling organist, the impression of a certain eternal human energy. Energy and joy, the father and the mother of the grotesque, would have ruled the poem. We should have felt of that rowdy gathering little but the sensation of which Mr. ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... of the afternoon I accompanied a flatboat-man and his family as far as Island No. 60, where we ran into a little bayou for the night. There was a rowdy settlement here, and many rough fellows were in the streets, shouting and fighting; but as I entered the bayou after dark, and secreted myself in the half submerged swamp, no one knew of my being there: so I felt safe from insult. The owner of the flatboat with whom ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop

... ones. Stout, sedate looking pigs, hurried by each morning to their places of business, with a preoccupied air, and sonorous greeting to their friends. Genteel pigs, with an extra curl to their tails, promenaded in pairs, lunching here and there, like gentlemen of leisure. Rowdy pigs pushed the passers by off the side walk; tipsy pigs hiccoughed their version of "We wont go home till morning," from the gutter; and delicate young pigs tripped daintily through the mud, as if, like "Mrs. Peerybingle," they plumed themselves upon their ankles, ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott

... together and won't give in. What bothers me about the fight that we're going to have is that the regulars are on the other side. Of course, being Indians too, regulars like these don't amount to much; but they are bound to be a long chalk better than this rowdy crowd of ours. We've got a pretty fair chance to win, because we're in a strong position, and because our people mean to wait until the other fellows come at 'em; but I tell you what it is, if ever they manage to get inside ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier

... utter incongruity of Enriquez' extravagant attentions if ironical, and their equal hopelessness if not, seemed to me plainer than ever. What had this well-poised, coldly observant spinster to do with that quaintly ironic ruffler, that romantic cynic, that rowdy Don Quixote, that impossible Enriquez? Presently she ceased playing. Her slim, narrow slipper, revealing her thin ankle, remained upon the pedal; her delicate fingers were resting idly on the keys; her head was slightly thrown back, and her narrow eyebrows prettily knit ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... kissed—but this undesired favour he affected not to see. He noted, too, that when Cossie accompanied him to the same little gate, Delia and Sandy lingered behind with alarming significance. He began to hate Cossie and to revolt against the slap-dash untidy menage, Delia and her train of rowdy boys, the shouting, the practical jokes, and the slang. Then suddenly the Levison cloud burst! One night, when he was flying upstairs to his sky parlour, his mother waylaid him on the landing and, with an imperative gesture, beckoned him ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker

... the pharmacy, or castor oil from the medicine room. I had to sit beside their beds when they heard the truth; I had to see the women crumple up and go limp; I had to tell the blind child's father that he did it, to bolster up the weak girl, to rebuild the wife's broken ideals, to suppress the rowdy and the roysterer, to hear the vows of the boy who was paying for his first mistake, and listen to the stories of the pimp and the seducer. What made syphilis terrible to the many really fine and upright spirits in the mass thus flung together in a common bondage? It was not the ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes

... To the rowdy tune of the Posthorn Polka the different couples were dashing to and fro—all a little drunk with emotion and champagne; and, as if fascinated, Alice's eyes followed the shoulders of a tall, florid-faced man. Doing the deux ...
— Muslin • George Moore

... Things— "Turkey trots" and rowdy Flings— For they made you overseas In politer times than these In an age when grace could please, Ere St. Vitus Clutched and shook us, spine and knees; Loosed a plague ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... It was a merry, rowdy meal they had; ham and eggs and coffee in an upper room, with the soft sea air blowing in on them through open windows. Nan and Barry chattered, and Kay took his cheerful part; only Gerda sparse of word, was quiet and dreamy, with her blue eyes opened wide against sleep, for she had ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay

... nature of the first predatory enemy which it sees. To Europeans the smooth-featured, slender, low-statured Japanese seemed like boys; and 'boy' is the term by which the native attendant of a Yokohama merchant is still called. To Japanese the first red-haired, rowdy, drunken European sailors seemed fiends, shojo, demons of the sea; and by the Chinese the Occidentals are still called 'foreign devils.' The great stature and massive strength and fierce gait of foreigners in Japan enhanced the strange ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn

... Conservative reaction in full swing, and who knows where it will land us? It seems to be leading to the vulgarest and most unintelligent form of chauvinism. In politics our need now is of brains. A stupid routine, or a rowdy excitability, had taken the place of the old progressive Liberalism, which kept ever in view the prime interests of civilisation. We want ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing

... pleasant period called the forenoon. Under modern conditions we spend the morning in bed, and to palliate our sloth call the forenoon and most of the rest of the day, the morning. These young men of Clement's Inn were a lively, not to say a rowdy, set. They would do anything that led to mirth or mischief. What passed when they lay all night in the windmill in St. George's Field we do not quite know; but we are safe in assuming that they did not go there to pursue their legal duties, or to grind corn. Anyhow, forty years after, ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell

... a man dwelling in a spot of such fairy loveliness should retain and indulge the most grovelling instincts of human nature's lowest grade?" What a delightful treat these passages must be to the rowdy Americans, and how the Duke must writhe under—what The Christian Advocate lauds as—the skinning operation ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... lawyer-crittur over yonder where we were this morning might—to mere proof; do we? We must have it; must we? How? From this Clissold's wanderings, and from what you say, it ain't hard to make out that there was a neat forgery of your writing committed by the too smart rowdy that was grease and ashes when I made his acquaintance, and a substitution of a forged leaf in your book for a real and torn leaf torn out. Now was that real and true leaf then and there destroyed? No,—for ...
— A Message from the Sea • Charles Dickens

... enough to provoke laughter even on the Sabbath and under Aunt Margaret's nose. He was the robin whose chief shouting-place was the hawthorn bush in the lane. John and Elizabeth had so named him because he always made such a noise, leaping about and calling "Hi, Hi! Whee! Whoo—Hoo!" in a most rowdy ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith

... so still and deserted, save for the buzzing of hornets around the rich blossoms in the heavy sunshine, has thus become a very rowdy spot, resounding with the noisy quarrels of the gipsies and the shrill cries of the urchins of the suburb. In one corner there is a primitive saw-mill for cutting the timber, the noise from which serves as a dull, continuous bass accompaniment ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola

... her husband three moves before she spoke. "Yes! yes! you'd make that boy a regular little rowdy if you had your ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White

... who had landed. And she had recognised him from that time when Davidson, who had been pearling himself in his youth, had been associating with Harry the Pearler and others, the quietest of a rather rowdy set. ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad

... another of these portly inhabitants of the deep came rolling along with a rowdy, swaggering gait, close to the surface of the water. The mate, cool and collected, took a careful aim, and again threw the iron, which entered his victim, and then shouted with the voice of a Stentor, "Haul in! Haul in!" And we did haul in; but the fish was strong and muscular, and struggled hard ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper

... I awaited at the Tuileries The issue, for I trusted the Nation's Common Sense; And although the rowdy Faubourgs tried a few of their Tom-fooleries, My soldiers soon let light ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various

... cold yet, and the children who swarmed upon the low door-steps were bareheaded and often summer- clad. The street was not nearly so well kept as the streets on the Back Bay that Lemuel was more used to, but he could see that it was not a rowdy street either. He looked up at a lamp on the first corner he came to, and read Pleasant Avenue on it; then he said that the witch was in it. He dramatised a scene of meeting those girls, and was very glib in it, and they were rather shy, and Miss Dudley kept ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells

... own search-parties when, on the information of some bribed rascal, a new den of villainy was exposed. But he carried his point. In little more than a year the thing was done, and London turned from the most rowdy to what it has ever since remained, the most law-abiding of European capitals. Has any man ever left a finer ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle

... goldfinches, blackbirds, thrushes, with their young—the plumpest, clumsiest, ruffle-feathered little blunderers, at the age ingrat, just beginning to fly, a terrible anxiety to their parents—and there were also (I regret to own) a good many rowdy sparrows. There were bees and bumblebees; there were brilliant, dangerous-looking dragonflies; there were butterflies, blue ones and white ones, fluttering in couples; there were also (I am afraid) a good many gadflies—but che volete? Who minds a gadfly or two in Italy? On ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... memories of my teens and early twenties were the same memories Jay Allison looked back on. I didn't think so. People forget and remember selectively. Week by week, then, and year by year, the dominant personality of Jay had crowded me out; so that the young rowdy, more than half Darkovan, loving the mountains, half-homesick for a non-human world, had been drowned in the chilly, austere young medical student who lost himself in his work. But I, Jason—I had always been the ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley

... bullock-man, you've 'eard the bugle blowed, There's a regiment a-comin' down the Grand Trunk Road; With its best foot first And the road a-sliding past, An' every bloomin' campin'-ground exactly like the last; While the Big Drum says, With 'is "rowdy-dowdy-dow!"— "Kiko kissywarsti don't you hamsher argy jow?" Oh, there's them Injian temples to admire when you see, There's the peacock round the corner an' the monkey up the tree, An' there's that rummy silver grass a-wavin' in the ...
— Barrack-Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling

... Mr. Whistler is often "rowdy" and unpleasant; in his last combat with Mr. Oscar Wilde—("Oscar, you have been down the area again")—he comes off a palpable second; his treatment of 'Arry dead and "neglected by the parish" goes far to prove that his sense of smell is not ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler

... on an explanation like that. Come now, Kettle, be sensible: put yourself in the authorities' place. They've got a town to administer—a big town—that not thirty years ago was the most murderous, fanatical, rowdy dwelling of slave-traders on the West Coast of Africa. To-day, by dint of careful shepherding, they've reduced it to a city of quiet respectability, with a smaller crime rate than Birmingham; and in fact made it into a model town suitable for a story-book. ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

... akin to that which makes some tribes of garden insects green? A race whose name is upon the frontier a memento mori; painted to him in every evil light; now a horse-thief like those in Moyamensing; now an assassin like a New York rowdy; now a treaty-breaker like an Austrian; now a Palmer with poisoned arrows; now a judicial murderer and Jeffries, after a fierce farce of trial condemning his victim to bloody death; or a Jew with hospitable speeches cozening some fainting stranger into ambuscade, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... say, bestow another thought upon him till I was sent for to afford him, at his own special request, the honor of knowing me. Were there no servants in the kitchen to be tormented? No cats in the back yard to be chased with wild halloo? No rowdy boys in the alley with whom to fraternize over pies of communistic mud? No little sister up stairs much nicer than any tall gentleman, even though he might have come from across the ocean and be thought a great deal of by the grown-up people, that I should go out of my way to see him, and abandon ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various

... hyperbolical terms of praise, and honoured with public monuments in the streets of our commercial centres. This is very bewildering to the moral sense. You have Joan of Arc, who left a humble but honest and reputable livelihood under the eyes of her parents, to go a- colonelling, in the company of rowdy soldiers, against the enemies of France; surely a melancholy example for one's daughters! And then you have Columbus, who may have pioneered America, but, when all is said, was a most imprudent ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson

... few candidates, after "sounding" them as to whether they were willing to join. But always, when election evening—the last Tuesday of term—drew near, he began to have his doubts about these fellows. This one was "rowdy"; that one was over-dressed; another did not ride quite straight to hounds; in the pedigree of another a bar-sinister was more than suspected. Election evening was always a rather melancholy time. After dinner, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... Some rowdy had crowded around the old cart and attempted to unscrew the axle tap. But some one reached over the head of the crowd and gripped him where his shoulder and arm met, and pulled him forward and twirled him ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore

... and noted the spurt of life-blood that followed; he saw two young men try to kill their uncle, one holding him while the other snapped repeatedly an Allen revolver which failed to go off. Then there was the drunken rowdy who proposed to raid the "Welshman's" house one dark threatening night—he saw that, too. A widow and her one daughter lived there, and the ruffian woke the whole village with his coarse challenges and obscenities. Sam Clemens ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... swear then, he might very well have sworn, and I'll be sworn but he did on that occasion; and it was very pardonable too. Well, he swears at the drunken man, not knowing his condition, and the drunken man rolls and reels like a rowdy, and gives it to him back, and then they get at it. Your nephew, who is a stout colt, buffets him well for a time, but Forrester, who is a mighty, powerful built fellow, he gets the better in the long run, and both come down together in the road. ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... Kramer of his son's grotesque and annoyingly expressed passion for her. Kramer takes his son to task and, in one of the noblest scenes in the modern drama, wrestles with the boy's soul. In the third act the inn is shown. Its rowdy, semi-educated habitues deride Arnold with coarse gibes. He cannot tear himself away. Madly sensitive and conscious of his final superiority over a world that crushes him by its merely brutal advantages, he is goaded to self-destruction. In the last act, in the presence of his dead son, Michael ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann

... assailant, the matter is at an end. In China, all the injured party has to do is to point out the village—or, if a town, the ward—in which he was assaulted. Then the headman of such town or ward is summoned before the authorities and fined, proportionately to the offence, for allowing rowdy behaviour in his district. The headman takes good care that he does not pay the fine himself. In the same way, parents are held responsible for the acts of their children, and householders for those of ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles

... went on till it was finished. Yes, I got tired. But no, I never grudged the work, thank God. I was glad to help the Adjutant, bless her! in my little way. To keep the hall in order, and to go on the door humouring the rowdy ones, not keeping anyone out, that was my work for the Adjutant, and I rejoiced to do it. And she was very thoughtful. When, after big demonstrations, the hall wanted extra cleaning, she would organize a scrubbing ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter

... know it if they did," he replied despondently, "at your age. And then your mother is so trustful and pleasant. Take those parties where she is so much—roof frolics and cocoanut groves and submarine cafes; they don't come to any good. Rowdy." Linda studied him coldly; if he criticized them further she would leave. He mopped a shining brow with a large colorful silk handkerchief. "It throws me into a ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer

... smiled, as he stopped to light a cigar from the pipe of a dirty admirer, and then, bowing obsequiously to the group, he stalked off in a rowdy way in the direction of ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... people more in earnest in this world. If you'd heard and seen them talking about it as I have, you'd not doubt their earnestness. Besides, you have no idea how needful you are to the community. The fact is, it is composed of such rough and rowdy elements—though of course there are some respectable and well-principled fellows among them—that nothing short of a power standing high above them and out o' their reach will have any influence with them ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne

... Bart Hodge on the cheek, sending him reeling. The blow was delivered by a large man, with a heavy black mustache and the manner and appearance of a "gentleman rowdy." His clothes were flashy, and he "sported" ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish

... for a Bacchanal, A feast of Pan or Colias or Genetyllis, The tambourines would block the rowdy streets, But now there's not a woman to be seen Except—ah, yes—this ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes

... whirling lean arms in an ecstasy of irritability, her shrill voice mounting from scream note to scream note. A sickness of soul cried from her restless over-taxed body. She was but one unit of a whole rowdy company. Even this night was used by them to grab at something to fool men—to smother God in their hearts. Just a play, a pretense, yes, a pretense of power, especially that; they had no thought beyond ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... colored Baptist preacher. I wore a white cotton dress and Missus Hill give me a pan of flour for a weddin' present. He give us a house of our own. My husband was good to me. He was a careful man and not rowdy. When we'd go anywhere we'd ride horseback and ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration

... Colin Laurent, Girard Gossouyn, and Jehan Marceau - if they were really his pupils in any serious sense - what can we say but God help them! And sure enough, by his own description, they turned out as ragged, rowdy, and ignorant as was to be looked for from the views and ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Christian duffer," cried Rupert, in a sort of rapture, "I don't wonder you couldn't be a judge. You think every one as good as yourself. Isn't the thing plain enough now? A doubtful acquaintance; rowdy stories, a most suspicious conversation, mean streets, a concealed knife, a man nearly killed, and, finally, a false address. That's what we ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton

... yer pardon, sir, what ken ye as to what they think? Ye may ken better, but maybe they dinna; for haena ye jist allooed that sic conduc' as I hae describit is no fit, whaever be guilty o' the same, whether rowdy laddies i' the streets, or craturs ye canna see i' the hoose? They may think they'll want their banes by an' by though ye ken better; an' whatever you wise folk may think the noo, ye ken it's no that lang sin' a' body, ay, the best o' folk, thoucht the same; an' there's no a doobt they a' did ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald

... to say, "It's not like you, nurse, staying so much with that rowdy crew...." The gallants ... I know! But one among them has grown quieter, and his ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold

... painfully distorted, nor that his words wounded him deeply. They had come to the Brandenburger Thor, and were walking over the Pariser Platz. Under the lindens they were surrounded at once by noise and bustle. The streets were full of rowdy bands of men who sang and shouted all together, now pushing one another in violent rudeness, now shouting "Health to the New Year," here knocking off an angry Philistine's hat, there surrounding and embracing some honest man who was wearily making his way homeward; ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau

... "nigger" in him asserting its humility, and he blushed and was abashed. And the "nigger" in him was surprised when the white friend put out his hand for a shake with him. He found the "nigger" in him involuntarily giving the road, on the sidewalk, to a white rowdy and loafer. When Rowena, the dearest thing his heart knew, the idol of his secret worship, invited him in, the "nigger" in him made an embarrassed excuse and was afraid to enter and sit with the dread white folks on equal terms. The "nigger" in him went shrinking and skulking here and there ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... drive over the Peninsula to the sea and back, the episode of the Spanish people, the rowdy supper party, had one effect, however: it had made so decided a break in the routine that Keith found himself thrust quite outside it. He had worked feverishly all the week, at about double speed; and in ordinary ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White

... she attracted their attention, which is improbable, it is almost inconceivable that they should connect her with the search being made for them. The only risk she runs is that of insult by some semi-intoxicated reveller, and even in a rowdy city like this, it must indeed be a strange locality in which she would be denied some protection. Of course I will be much relieved when Miss Talbot returns, but up to the present I see no reason for undue anxiety on our part. Indeed, we ought to congratulate ourselves ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy

... filled with people in their Sunday clothes,—the men in black, and the young women in white, with gay streamers, wending their way through the rear-entrance drive of Wedderburn, where one of Mr. Crewe's sprucest employees was taking up the invitation cards like tickets,—a precaution to prevent the rowdy element from Ripton coming and eating up the refreshments. Austen obediently tied Pepper in a field, as he was directed, and made his way by a path through the woods towards the house, where the Ripton Band could be heard playing the second air in the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... And now, sir, you would abandon her also. And you are angry, you storm and rave when a respectable person wants to save the unfortunate child from having her innocence corrupted, save her from withering away profitlessly in the claws of a pack of gross, rowdy, street-lounging, rake-hell young profligates, from living a life of wretchedness and shame, from dying abandoned and accursed, to say nothing of the fire of hell after death. And you even raise objections, sir! But, of course, ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai

... cannon for the soldier, the rope for the assassin, the fist for the rowdy; but, by Heaven! it's a ludicrous thing to squander gunpowder when insect powder will accomplish the same results. I told you, I had waited until I had the evidence," he said. "Now you are going to listen while ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter

... eh? Say, did yuh ever hear uh old Eagle Creek Smith, of the Cross L, or Rowdy Vaughan, or a fellow up on Milk ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower

... hunters and a private servant, and spent at the rate of a couple of thousands a year. But here was a creature who did not fit into any of these categories, and who was painfully irregular without being vicious or extravagant, or drunken, or abnormally rowdy. I was, in fact, a mental worry. I could not be fitted neatly ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... down the Castlereagh, and I'm a station hand, I'm handy with the ropin' pole, I'm handy with the brand, And I can ride a rowdy colt, or swing the axe all day, But there's no demand for a ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson

... March, 1891, a case in which several Manchus were sentenced by the magistrate of Chinkiang, at the instance of the local general, to a bambooing for rowdy ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles

... metropolis!—It was a man's work, anyhow, and he must put his back into it. Must organize—word of power—organize night classes, lectures with lantern slides, social evenings, a lads' club. Above all was there room and necessity for this last. The Deadham lads were very rowdy, very unruly. They gathered at corners in an objectionable manner; hung about the public-house. He must undersell the public-house by offering counter attractions. Amongst the men he suspected a sad amount ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... most fearful uproar coming from the guest-room, where a large and rowdy party are entertaining the chorus of a travelling revue company. I saw them when they arrived, horribly common-looking women, with legs ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon

... quickly, till by and by it would have been impossible to find standing room for a child. A student of human nature is never long in finding out the dominant characteristic of an audience,— whether its attitude be profane or reverent, rowdy or attentive, and the bearing of the four or five thousand here assembled was remarkable chiefly for its seriousness and evident intensity of purpose. The extreme orderliness of the manner in which the people found and took their seats,—the entire absence of all fussy movement, fidgeting, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... with droll effect. If the distinctly clever children of the home (Judy excepted) had been effectively put on the contraband list I should not have worried. They were unduly noisy (for art, not for life perhaps), and they overdid their parts, being not only rowdy in the absence, and abject in the presence, of authority, but different kinds of children—not merely the same ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various

... attempt that night. As our little, bannerless procession filed slowly back to headquarters, hoodlums followed us. The police of course gave us no protection and just as we were entering the door of our own building a rowdy struck me on the side of the head with a heavy banner pole. The blow knocked me senseless against the stone building; my hat was snatched from my head, and burned in the street. We entered the building to find that soldiers and sailors ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens

... of the members of Australian legislatures have to be considered in forming any just estimate of colonial politics. Unfortunately, the little that is known on the subject at home has revealed neither in a favourable light. The rowdy members and rowdy scenes have ipso facto attained prominence; but after carefully watching for myself, and taking the opinions of those best qualified to form them, I cannot but think that the generally-received opinion even in Australia is incorrect, ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny

... who were going north went down to the low tube level. It was nearly the last train. The station was half deserted, half rowdy, several fellows were drunk, shouting and crowing. Down there in the bowels of London, after midnight, everything ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence

... danger of a fight every moment, and if one had been started there is little doubt that it would have been short and bloody, for the conduct of the rowdy portion of the travellers had enraged the decent persons, to whom the thought of drunkenness and ribaldry at such a time was abhorrent, and they were quite ready to undertake the work of pitching the demoralized ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... a gentleman fighting a rowdy, the gentleman has all to lose and nothing to gain. If you don't live among your own class, Peter, your life will simmer down to an ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling

... by a dozen or so of its members, of whom young Billy Silver alone had any pretensions to the esteem of his fellow man. Kay's was the rowdiest house in the school, and the cream of its rowdy members had come to camp. There was Walton, for one, a perfect specimen of the public school man at his worst. There was Mortimer, another of Kay's gems. Perry, again, and Callingham, and the rest. A pleasant gang, fit for anything, if it ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse

... the boy heard a disturbance behind him, and turned, just in the nick of time. A fellow had thrust his way through the crowd toward him, a rowdy with a brutal, half-drunken face. And Samuel saw him raise his hand, with some dark object in it, and aim a smashing blow ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair

... Janzoon saw a group of boys in the distance. Hailing them in a rowdy style, common to boys of his stamp all over the world, weather in Africa, Japan, Amsterdam, or Paris, he scampered toward them, forgetting coachman, gingerbread, everything but the ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge

... countless shadowy figures who came and went as silently as ghosts. Spaceman's Row was where suspended spacemen and space rats, prospectors of the asteroids for uranium and pitchblende, gathered and found short-lived and rowdy fun. Here, skippers of rocket ships, bound for destinations in deep space, could find hands willing to sign on their dirty freighters despite low pay and poor working conditions. No questions were asked here. ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell

... 24th, 1889. Taken away from home at the age of eight years, and made his way to Texas. Here he took up life amongst the Ranches as a Cowboy, and varied it with occasional trips to sea, developing into a typical brass and rowdy. He had 2 years for mutiny at sea, 4 years for mule stealing, 5 years for cattle stealing and has altogether been in gaol for thirteen years and eleven months. He came over to England, got mixed up with thieves and casuals ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... rowdy boys are they, They will curse and swear an hurricane if you come in their way. They dash along the forest on black, bay, brown, or grey, And the stockmen of Australia, hard-riding boys ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson

... the selfishness of the habit is most apparent. I don't believe, other things being equal, there is any other class of men who show such a disregard in public for other people's comfort as tobacco users do. A man would be considered a rowdy or a boor who should wilfully spatter mud on the clothing of a lady as she passed him on the sidewalk. But a lady to whom tobacco fumes are more offensive than mud, can hardly walk the streets in these days, but that men who call themselves gentlemen—and who are gentlemen in most ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous

... is clear that I owe you fifty times ten pounds, which I know you have put in the bank at Chatteris for me, and which doesn't belong to me a bit. Now, to-morrow we will go to Chatteris, and see that nice old Mr. Rowdy, with the bald head, and ask him for it,—not for his head, but for the five hundred pounds: and I dare say he will send you two more, which we will save and pay back; and we will send the money to Pen, who can ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Bloomers are no worse than the sort of clothes she used to wear. Her swagger is no more pronounced now than it used to be in skirts. She has always had bloomer instincts. You don't pretend to declare, do you, that there never were unconventional women, ill-dressed and rowdy women, before the new woman was heard of? That is the great mistake you make. These women are not new women. We've always had them. We never, unfortunately, have been ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell

... were dealt with during the earlier stages of the business proved a wholesome lesson to others who would have wished to have gone and done likewise. A spirit of martial law reigned over the Great Picnic. And towards the end of the day fatigue kept the rowdy-minded quiet. ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse

... noise; Cannot play with quiet boys; Cannot play with quiet toys: Rowdy-dowdy loves ...
— The Nursery, March 1873, Vol. XIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest People • Various

... this establishment a little way open and looked at the rather rowdy company gathered round the zinc counter, all with flushed faces and all talking loudly. She did not venture inside, but in a clear voice asked, "Is M. Geoffroy here?" No definite answer was forthcoming, but the men turned round, ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... I can't lick him," says Ben—"I've proved that three times; but having to do it every so often, which is beneath the dignity of a high railroad official. I might as well be a common rowdy and be done with it, by doggie! And no telling what will happen if he don't get his mind back. The little devil is an awful scrapper. I noticed it more than ever this last time. One of these times he might get me. He might get ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson

... legs as if he wished to elongate his satisfaction, and stared Domini full in the face with eyes that confidently, naively, asked for her approval of his doctrine of the sun. She could not help liking him, though she felt more as if she were sitting with a jolly, big, and rather rowdy boy than with ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... village boys indorsed him heartily, and would, at his command, go to jail in squads of half a dozen with no escort but the sheriff himself. Had it not been that Charley occasionally went to prayer-meetings and church, not a rowdy at Bunkerville could have found any fault ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton

... welcome to drink and meat, A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest, A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons, Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion, A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker, Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... half drunk, who proved to be the local bully. The function of this person was to maintain his bullyship against all comers: accordingly, he soon picked on Roosevelt, who held his peace as long as he could. Then the rowdy, who grasped his pistols in his hands, ordered the "four-eyed tenderfoot" to come to the bar and set up drinks for the crowd. Roosevelt walked deliberately towards him, and before the bully suspected it, the "tenderfoot" felled him with a sledgehammer ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... conditions. Quiet people who read and work all day; rowdy people who never seem happy unless they are throwing cushions or pulling one another downstairs by the feet; painfully enterprising people who get up sports, sweeps, concerts, and dances, and are full of a tiresome, misplaced energy; bridge-loving ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas

... undoubtedly by way of being a tough sort of place. Its inhabitants incline to a robust type of humour, which finds a verbal vent in catch phrases and expends itself physically in smashing shop-windows and kicking policemen. He feared that the meeting at the Town Hall might possibly be a trifle rowdy. ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse

... with a chunk of slag for some small offence; I saw him die. And the young California emigrant who was stabbed with a bowie knife by a drunken comrade: I saw the red life gush from his breast. And the case of the rowdy young Hyde brothers and their harmless old uncle: one of them held the old man down with his knees on his breast while the other one tried repeatedly to kill him with an Allen revolver which wouldn't go off. I happened ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain

... until I see him again. You're a good nurse; you'll get him out." Dr. Archie smiled encouragingly. He glanced about the little garden and wrinkled his brows. "I can't see what makes him behave so. He's killing himself, and he's not a rowdy sort of fellow. Can't you tie him up someway? Can't you tell when these fits are ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather

... I'll not flatter him to that extent. A good American reserves his fists for a man-fight with a real man." He shook the captive, holding him at arm's-length. "Here's a young fool who has been throwing stones at windows. Here's a fresh rowdy who has been sticking out his tongue at authority. I ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day

... University Club was patronised by the elite of nobility and the professors and their families. Then came the Harmonie—respectable, but not aristocratic. Then another in a hotel, which was rather more rowdy than reputable; not really outrageous, yet where the gentlemen students "whooped it up" in grand style with congenial grisettes; and, finally, there was a fancy ball at the Waldhorn, or some such place, or several of them, over the river, where peasants and students with maids to match ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... wane; already cars were arriving and departing, laden with the very youngest and the oldest people; there was perceptibly more room on the dancing-floor of the veranda, which was populated chiefly by the younger set; in the supper-room the more rowdy crowd hung on with numbers undiminished and enthusiasm unabated if liberally dampened; about the grounds there was far less movement, far more lingering in sequestered nooks and shadows. Ecstatica, ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance

... dreading this evening," she confided to Sybil. "I was so afraid they'd forget their promises and begin that rowdy teasing. I believe we've broken the tradition of that, thank goodness. I hope it may never be ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil

... were, we must remember, only two theatres under Charles II., and there was a difficulty in supporting even two. Both depended almost exclusively on the patronage of the court and the courtiers. From the theatre, therefore, we can only argue directly to the small circle of the rowdy debauchees who gathered round the new king. It certainly may be true, but it was not proved from their behaviour, that the national morality deteriorated, and in fact I think nothing is more difficult than to form any trustworthy estimate of the state of morality in a whole nation, confidently ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... small flock of goats provides milk and occasionally fresh meat. There are two horses (one a native of the island) to perform casual heavy work; the boat has a shed into which she is reluctantly hauled by means of a windlass to spend the rowdy months; there is a buoy in the bay to which she is greatly attached when she is not sulking in the shed or coyly submitting to the caresses ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... fit for the likes of you, sir,' he grumbled, waving his hand. 'This lot smells and they swears, and they gets rowdy in their cups, so I won't answer as they ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume

... "When I heard it I 'lowed 'twas Pin Hook's rowdy new 'uns. Them Cashner boys was at the schoolhouse Drinkin' there at the ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters

... the end of the Beargarden,' said Lord Nidderdale with a peculiar melancholy. 'Dear old place! I always felt it was too good to last. I fancy it doesn't do to make things too easy;—one has to pay so uncommon dear for them. And then, you know, when you've got things easy, then they get rowdy;—and, by George, before you know where you are, you find yourself among a lot of blackguards. If one wants to keep one's self straight, one has to work hard at it, one way or the other. I suppose it all comes from the ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope

... her face dark with indignation. "Don't you dare come here another time. I never heard of anything more—more awful. You a rowdy! I'll never speak to you again. Go away! I ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland

... of which there are many qualities; some very costly and durable. (4) Soshi form one of the modern curses of Japan. They are mostly ex-students who earn a living by hiring themselves out as rowdy terrorists. Politicians employ them either against the soshi of opponents, or as bullies in election time. Private persons sometimes employ them as defenders. They have figured in most of the election rows which have taken place of late ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... admitted he might have been partially successful, for the English were a very yielding people and did not take much trouble to resist attempts of this kind. "Blackwood," however, was outdone in this rowdy style of reviewing by "Fraser's Magazine." From that periodical we learn that Cooper was "a passable scribbler of passable novels," a "bilious braggart," a "liar," a "full jackass," "a man of consummate and inbred vulgarity," "a bore of the first ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury

... were great cosmic systematisers like Spencer, great social philosophers like Bentham, great practical politicians like Bright, great political economists like Mill. The man who kept his head kept a head full of fantastic nonsense; he was a writer of rowdy farces, a demagogue of fiction, a man without education in any serious sense whatever, a man whose whole business was to turn ordinary cockneys into extraordinary caricatures. Yet when all these other children of the revolution went wrong he, by a mystical something in his bones, went right. He knew ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton

... his place might have run up a long and tearful account against Providence, fate, circumstances—whatever sentimentalists choose to arraign rather than themselves. Five-and-twenty years before, Jack Flood had been a rowdy undergraduate of Brasenose College, Oxford; in his third year of residence, with more than a fair prospect of being ploughed—or, in the language of that generation, "plucked"—at the end of it; a member of ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... passed hither and thither amid blazing fires of straw. In the early light the Regiment moved away from the pleasant camp of Awapuni, the first of many such abodes. In the middle of the morning, struggling engines creaked away with the long lines of horse-trucks and carriages of rowdy troopers who cheered wildly as they set out at last upon their adventures. They crawled along the low country of the Manawatu, then along the rough cliffs above the sea, over the hills, and at length ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie

... of Pete, don't go oh-ing and ah-ing like that. You've handed me the pickled visage since I got the rowdy-dow on my last job—good Lord! you acted like you thought I liked to sponge on you. Now let me tell you I've kept account of every red cent you've spent on me, and I expect to pay ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... do, you poor dear," said the other, kissing her. "But Garvington always asks people here who haven't two ideas. A horrid, rowdy lot they are. I wonder you ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume

... surrounded by her satellites in one corner of the girls' own special sitting-room, and Maggie was in a similar position at the farther end. Aneta's satellites were always quiet, sober, and well-behaved; Maggie's, it is sad to relate, were a trifle rowdy. There is something else also painful to relate—namely, that Merry Cardew cast longing eyes from time to time in the direction of that portion of the room where Maggie ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade

... telephones of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Attaining this power of sense-disconnection, the yogi finds it simple to unite his mind at will with divine realms or with the world of matter. No longer is he unwillingly brought back by the life force to the mundane sphere of rowdy sensations and restless thoughts. Master of his body and mind, the KRIYA YOGI ultimately achieves victory over ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... infliction of a multitude of disagreeable fellow passengers. So far, so well. But then the conductor locks you in when the train starts; there is no water to drink in the car; there is no heating apparatus for night travel; if a drunken rowdy should get in, you could not remove a matter of twenty seats from him or enter another car; but above all, if you are worn out and must sleep, you must sit up and do it in naps, with cramped legs and in a torturing misery that leaves ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... prejudices, with their opaque, heavy, unlofty minds! Give to any Africo-American equal chances with these props of darkness, and he very speedily will assert over them an unquestionable superiority. Are not the humble, suffering, orderly contrabands infinitely superior to the rowdy, unruly, ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski

... disturbing the rabbits busy in the dew, and bursting through the cables of gossamer that tried to stay her. A kestrel hovered over the gorse, and she marked a badger on the hillside shuffling home before Man and his Dogs began the old rowdy-dowdy game once more. ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant



Words linked to "Rowdy" :   muscleman, bullyboy, disorderly, assaulter, yobbo, muscle, assailant, attacker, tough guy, aggressor, hooligan, skinhead, plug-ugly, rowdiness



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