Slack

“ My eldest daughter was fortunate enough to get a place at a tailor's for four shillings a week, and the others sought washing and scrubbing. So each day we had bread, and at the end of the week rent. Bread and water alone formed our sustenance. But we were very grateful all the same. When the holidays came on, my daughter fell out of work. I heard a word 'slack.' I inquired, 'What is the meaning of the word "slack"?' Then my daughter told me that it means schlecht (bad) . There is nothing to be earned. ”

“ Every foot has one principal stress or accent, and this or the syllable it falls on may be called the Stress of the foot and the other part, the one or two unaccented syllables, the Slack. Feet (and the rhythms made out of them) in which the stress comes first are called Falling Feet and Falling Rhythms, feet and rhythm in which the slack comes first are called Rising Feet and Rhythms, and if the stress is between two slacks there will be Rocking Feet and Rhythms. These distinctions are real and true to nature ”

“ The word slacker, recently come into good usage in the United States as a designation for an unsuccessful shirker of conscription, is a substantive derived from the English verb to slack, which was born as university slang and remains so to this day. Brander Matthews, so recently as 1901, thought to hold up slang; it is now perfectly good American.
The contrary movement of words from the legitimate vocabulary into slang is constantly witnessed. ”

“ If the neck of the victim be broken by the alleged shrewd arrangement of knot and noose, and by the alleged shrewd calculation of the weight of the victim and the length of slack, then why do they manacle the arms of the victim? Society, as a whole, is unable to answer this question. ”

“ The fact was, the men who, at the slack season, had been compelled to fall back upon these kinds of work, became so beggared and broken down by it, notwithstanding the assistance of their wives and families, that they were never able to rise out of it. ”

“ The man who is handling the free end of the line must often slack a little—just enough to start the slipping—and then hold hard, so that it may go down easily, without giving any further slack. It looks easy, but it isn't. ”

“ Finally, one strong voice called out, ‘Is the man heer? If the man’s heer, Slackbridge, let’s hear the man himseln, ‘stead o’ yo.’ Which was received with a round of applause.
Slackbridge, the orator, looked about him with a withering smile; and, holding out his right hand at arm’s length (as the manner of all Slackbridges is) , to still the thundering sea, waited until there was a profound silence.
‘Oh, my friends and fellow-men!’ said Slackbridge then, shaking his head with violent scorn, ‘I do not wonder that you, the prostrate sons of labour, are incredulous of the existence of such a man. ”

“ In one bottle there were two living in friendly juxtaposition. This was not a case of matrimonial felicity, nor of Siamese twins, but of fission, or reproduction by division. The original inhabitant of the tube finding himself too fat, or impelled by causes we do not understand, quietly divided himself in two, and as the house was big enough, no enlargement was required. How many stout puffy gentlemen must envy this process; how convenient to have two thin lively specimens of humanity made out of one too obese for locomotion. ”

“ Ask any actor who’s been stranded and had to count railway sleepers from one town to another! he’ll tell you what sort of an awkward load a portmanteau is, especially if there’s a broken-hearted man underneath it. I’ve tried knapsack fashion—one of the least healthy and most likely to give a man sores; I’ve carried my belongings in a three-bushel sack slung over my shoulder—blankets, tucker, spare boots and poetry all lumped together. I tried carrying a load on my head, and got a crick in my neck and spine for days. ”

“ As an adjective, SLICK means rapidly, effectually, utterly; as a verb, it has the force of “to despatch rapidly,” turn off, get done with a thing.
SLICK A DEE, a pocket book.
SLING, to pass from one person to another.
SLIP, “to give the SLIP,” to run away, or elude pursuit. Shakespere has “you gave me the counterfeit,” in Romeo and Juliet. Giving the slip, however, is a Sea phrase, and refers to fastening an anchor and chain cable to a floating buoy, or water cask, until such a time arrives that is convenient to return and take them on board. ”

“ That little reflex twitch at the corner of his lips—I have seen it often in the old times. I should like to have had him stripped to the waist so that I could have seen his heart—the infallible test. At moments of mighty moral strain men can keep steady eyes and nostrils and mouth and speech; but they cannot control that tell-tale diaphragm of flesh over the heart. I have known it to cause the death of many a Kaffir spy.... But, at any rate, there was the twitch of the lips ... I deliberately threw weight into the scale of Mrs. Boyce's foolish question. ”

“ The streets however are nasty.
But it looks, I suppose, better than it smells—crack, crack—crack, crack—what a fuss thou makest!—as if it concerned the good people to be informed, that a man with pale face and clad in black, had the honour to be driven into Paris at nine o'clock at night, by a postillion in a tawny yellow jerkin, turned up with red calamanco—crack, crack—crack, crack—crack, crack,—I wish thy whip—
—But 'tis the spirit of thy nation; so crack—crack on. ”

“ Look at the same woman, or upon two women, alike except that the waist of the one shall be distorted and her motions cramped by corsets, and the other free, her motions natural, easy and graceful, and then tell me if a naturally full waist, rendered small artificially, is not a deformity?
But, this is but a small part of the reason why lacing renders a woman homely. Can a poor, scrawny, pale-faced, spare-featured ghastly-looking woman, possibly be handsome? ”

“ Some fifteen or twenty years ago, I recollect the word 'stays' was uttered as though a certain amount of disgrace attached to the wearer, and 'tight-lacing' was looked on as a crime; but I am glad to see that a reaction is setting in, and that ladies are not afraid to state openly that 'they lace very tightly,' and many of them declare the sensation of being laced as tightly as possible as positively a pleasurable one. ”

“ Their excited mind seeks relief in books, especially novels, which only increase their sufferings. The cause of these sufferings is a disordered mental temperament, and tight-lacing has a direct and necessary tendency to cause this predominance, first by retarding the action of the vital organs and hindering digestion, nutrition, and circulation ”

“ But we have already spoken of the evil of tight-lacing, and need not recur to it again here; we appeal to the experience of every lady who may read this, whether much that we have said has not fallen under her own observation. The extreme disfigurement to which the human body is liable may be seen by a reference to certain nations and races, in whom the deformity is great ”

“ ALL in a lordly garden ground
Is weeding hemp a maid,
A Lark addresses her and asks,
Why sad, and why afraid?
‘O how can I then joyful be,
Thou pretty little lark?
My lover they have ta’en from me,
And shut in dungeon dark. ”

“ He got on his feet, and divesting himself of his cloak hung it on the peg, going through all the motions mechanically. An incredible dullness, a ditch-water stagnation was sensible to his perceptions as though life had withdrawn itself from all things and even from his own thoughts. ”

“ I have known men cut off very suddenly in a land like this. A slip would do it sometimes—a single slip, and down you go through a crack, and only a bubble on the green water to show where it was that you sank. ”

“ This, says Hafen Slawkenbergius, constitutes the Catastrophe or Peripeitia of my tale—and that is the part of it I am going to relate.
We left the stranger behind the curtain asleep—he enters now upon the stage.
—What dost thou prick up thy ears at?—'tis nothing but a man upon a horse—was the last word the stranger uttered to his mule. It was not proper then to tell the reader, that the mule took his master's word for it; and without any more ifs or ands, let the traveller and his horse pass by. ”

“ I was returning home, thinking I might walk off an incipient chill, as depressed as no one but the baffled philanthropist can be, when I perceived a tattered and dejected man sitting on a bench, a clothes-basket between his feet, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and sobbing as if his heart would break. As the spectacle of a grown-up man crying bitterly in a public thoroughfare was somewhat remarkable, I paused, and then in order to see whether his distress was genuine, and also not to arouse his suspicions, I threw myself in an exhausted manner on the bench beside him. ”

“ Ah, of course, you were away."
"What do you do with 'em?"
"Oh, flog the worst, you know; but I don't flog more than a man a week, as a rule, and never more than fifty lashes. They're getting quieter now. Then we iron, and dumb-cells, and maroon them." ”

“ A. To me there is not the weakest motive for tight lacing. Everything but pride must revolt at the habit; and there is something positively disgusting and shocking in the wasp-like form, labored breathing, purple lips and hands of the tight lacer. ”

“ I grew angry. "Do you think," I exclaimed, "a man like myself allows himself to be made a fool of, and to have waited on this cold night for nothing?"
In three bounds I had reached him, seized him by his cloak, and cried still louder, whilst laying hold of my sabre with my other hand. His cloak, however, remained in my hand, and the stranger had disappeared round the nearest corner. I became calmer by degrees. I had the cloak at any rate, and it was this which would give me the key to this remarkable adventure. ”

“ The lark that sung up in the sky above her head, made no pleasant melody for her ear; a country boy crossing the opposite fields, and whistling as he went, pained her so much, and made her gentle heart feel so harsh towards him, that she schooled herself for such sensations, saying, "He cannot tell that I am so sorrowful! ”

“ The most efficient method of putting an end to the practice of tight lacing will be, not merely to point out its unhealthiness, and even dangerous consequences, because these, though imminent, are uncertain,—every lady who resorts to the practice hoping that she, individually, may escape the penalty,—but to prove that the practice, so far from adding to the beauty of the figure, actually deteriorates it. ”

“ And a very soft voice within seemed to say very softly, but very distinctly, "There are your crutches." "Oh," she gasped to herself as though it took away her very breath, "my crutches? I couldn't give my crutches; they're my life." ”

“ On each man's emaciated face, a look of agony, and on the canvas-clad back of one man, a great stain of wet blood from a raw wound caused by the cutting and rubbing of the stone-laden knapsack. Each man wore a fatigue-uniform, filthy beyond description. ”

“ I wish to make woman ashamed to lace tight, and this will do it. No woman who reads this will dare be seen laced tight, because she knows it to be true, both from experience and from physiology. My object in this allusion is, to break up this most pernicious fashion ”

“ Weaker and weaker!—the senses fail to retain impressions, and, like cracked vases, let their contents ooze out by slow degrees. Objects of sight become commingled with those of sound; and I can half understand the blind man Locke tells us of, who imagined “the colour scarlet to be like the sound of a trumpet.” ”

“ Others, e.g. Skeat, refer it to Swed. skalla, Icel. skjalla, to make a loud noise or clatter, and take the original sense to have been a “ loud talker.” This would link the word with “ scold," to rail at, find fault with, which is formed from Dutch schold, past tense of scheldan, cf. Ger. schelten, in the same sense.
Of different origin is the verb “ scald," to burn or injure the skin or flesh by hot liquid or steam (see Burns and Scalds) ; also to cleanse an object, or to remove hair, bristles, feathers &c., from an animal, by exposure to moist heat, such as boiling water, steam, &c. ”

“ In some the scowl is very pronounced, and in one he looks not unlike a professional prize-fighter. They betray a mind jaundiced, but defiant. A restless, fiery soul, his temper, never of the best, had grown daily more gnarled and perverse. ”

“ The evil effects of tight-lacing, or of lacing at all, and of binding the clothing around the hips, instead of suspending it from the shoulders, can never be fully realized without a thorough education in anatomy and physiology. ”

“ And if we now and then get a knock, or even a rather hard scratch from those corners of our neighbor's load, which are made up of little faults and odd tempers, we must try not to mind it, but think only of how tired those poor, weary shoulders must be of the weight they carry. ”

“ Asking to be forgiven after slamming a door is like touching off a Rodman gun, and then calling out to the fort in front to 'look out' 'take care!' 'do get out of the way.' A first class slam is cumulative long after the noise has ceased—the nerves go on slamming—the valves of the heart flap to and from—the tympanum roils a revelrie to all the shattered senses, the offender slammed at, at once subsides from rage to fear ”