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Fad   Listen
noun
Fad  n.  
1.
A hobby; freak; whim. "It is your favorite fad to draw plans."
2.
A practise followed enthusiastically by a number of people for a limited period of time; as, the latest fad in fashion.
Synonyms: craze; mania.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Fad" Quotes from Famous Books



... school fad," said the Tennessee Shad, as Doc disappeared. "Every piece is different, collected from all sorts of places—swap 'em around like postage stamps, don't you know. We've got rather tired of the ordinary ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson

... in which he used to arrange his orchestra was really very irrational. From his old days in Paris he had retained the habit of placing the two oboists immediately behind him, and although this was a fad which owed its origin to a mere accident, it was one to which he always adhered. The consequence was that these players had to avert the mouthpiece of their instruments from the audience, and our excellent oboist was so angry about this arrangement, that it was only by ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... in a lodge, or any organization, whether worn by man or woman, is more honored in the breach than the observance. Better drape the departed member's seat in black, or hang crepe on the charter than follow this foolish fad. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... fam'ly!" mourned Strong, shaking his head. "M' poor fam'ly! Thish'll be awful blow to m' fam'ly, Recky. They all like so mush to see me sober—always—'s their fad, Recky. Don't blame 'em, Recky, 's natural to 'em. Some peop' born ...
— A Good Samaritan • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... uncle has always been a very unpractical man; he has wasted his life following up ideas which he thought would bring him success and riches, but which always turned out failures. He always has some fresh fad, and it always brings him fresh trouble. I don't think he would wilfully wrong any one, but from being always in difficulties and under the weather, his temper has been soured and his judgment warped, and he ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery

... represents. He will then marry, in order that he may attend Mothers' meetings by deputy, and cause his wife to make lavish purchases at a local bazaar, which he will have opened. Shortly afterwards he will select an unpopular fad, which certain members of his own party approve, and will take a vigorous stand against it on principle, thus earning the commendation of all parties as a man of ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various

... and armies tremble at thy sight, As at Achilles' self! beneath thy dart Lies slain the great Achilles' dearer part. Thou from the mighty dead those arms hast torn, Which once the greatest of mankind had worn. Yet live! I give thee one illustrious day, A blaze of glory ere thou fad'st away. For ah! no more Andromache shall come With joyful tears to welcome Hector home; No more officious, with endearing charms, From thy tired ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... wonnerful, and I canna mind hearing the like o' yon at the tables; but I wes sorry to see the Doctor sae failed. He wes bent twa fad; a' doot it's a titch o' rheumatism, or ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren

... the heart will let no expedient of the ingenuity be left untried. But both ingenuity and courage will find their real source in a health which has not yet exhausted the resources of the body. Firmness which is not obstinacy, health which is not the fad of the valetudinarian, adaptability which is not weakness, enterprise which is not rashness—these are the qualities which will preserve men in those evil days when the "blast of the terrible ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook

... teachers had set up primary schools at Rome to supplement the home training, and had begun the introduction of the pedagogue as a fashionable adjunct to attract attention to their schools. These schools, however, were only a fad at first, and were patronized only by a few of the wealthy citizens. Up to about 250 B.C., at least, Roman education remained substantially as it had been in the preceding centuries. Reading, writing, declamation, chanting, and the Laws of the Twelve Tables still constituted the subject-matter of ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... sometimes dismissed contemptuously as a pacifist fad or an unattainable ideal of universal brotherhood, it is as well to set the matter in its true light. It is true that the inventor of Esperanto, Dr. Zamenhof, of Warsaw, is an idealist in the best sense of the word, and that his language was directly inspired by his ardent ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark

... faithfully, to carry ridiculous things and foolish people to and fro between Salissa and England; but that he in no way approved of the waste of a good ship, quantities of coal and the energies of officers like himself over the silly fad of a wealthy ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham

... was always such a fad of yours," sighed Mary thoughtfully. "Never mind! They are sure to ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... Spain, many years' generous mint and watermelon crops, a few long-shot winners at the New Orleans race-track, and the brilliant banquets given by the Indiana and Kansas citizens who compose the North Carolina Society have made the South rather a "fad" in Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp softly that your left forefinger reminds her so much of a gentleman's in Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a lady has to work now—the war, ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry

... of practical politics in the remote future; but Mr. Grayson can certainly claim that his achievement at Colne Valley brought the question of Socialism in to the very forefront at one bound. It is difficult to ignore Socialism, to dismiss it as a mere fad and fancy of a few hare-brained enthusiasts, after Mr. Grayson's success. The verdict of Colne Valley may be the verdict of many another constituency where the so-called working-class electors are numerically predominant. ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... get back to Nature and raise beef after the world had been made safe once more for a healthy appetite. This here craze for substitutes would die out. You couldn't tell her there was any great future for the canned jack-rabbit business, for instance—just a fad; and whales the same. She knew and I knew that a whale was too big to eat. People couldn't get any real feeling for it, and not a chance on earth to breed 'em up and improve the flesh. Wasn't that the truth? And these ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson

... else could interest him. He was not what would be called in America a rich man, but he had made money enough to travel, to allow himself any reasonable relaxation, to cultivate a taste for art, music, literature or the drama, to indulge in any harmless fad, such as collecting etchings, china or bric-a-brac, or even to permit himself the luxury of horses. In the place of all these he found himself, at nearly sixty years of age, forced again into the sordid round of business as the only ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris

... quash, He'll hint that raised Tariffs trade rivals must smash, And his eloquence sounds neither rabid nor rash, At night, at night! But oh! what a difference In the morning! He vows he merely meant a friendly warning, But fuss and fad 'twill boom. And his colleagues growl with gloom O'er the "Times" upon their tables, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various

... anybody what its purpose was, but merely said it was an amusement. In fact, he had found that his fads added to his reputation as a pudd'nhead; there, he was growing chary of being too communicative about them. The fad without a name was one which dealt with people's finger marks. He carried in his coat pocket a shallow box with grooves in it, and in the grooves strips of glass five inches long and three inches wide. Along the lower edge of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... are kept by all classes of people. Many keep them for the profit in eggs and meat, others keep them as a fad, and others to gratify a craving for animal companionship. There are one hundred and seventy-five recognized breeds, varying in size from that of the Japanese bantam weighing ten ounces to that of the huge Brahma which weighs fourteen ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education

... laughs, telling me that I must always go in for any new fad, whatever it may be, and that she expects some day to see several makes of airship tethered on the lawn at Liliendaal, or tied to our chimneys at The Hague in winter. There's something in her jibe, perhaps; but it would be a queer thing, indeed, if a son ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... digging up unusual fads, generally in the matter of diet. At this particular time he had decided to live solely on grape nuts. As he was one of the best men on the team, Jack did not burden himself with trouble over this fad, although at several times Moakley told him that he might improve if he would eat some real food. However, when this man started a grape nut campaign among the younger members of the squad he aroused ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards

... childish, inept, inane, insane one at best—is not set forth in the Dutchman. The only other possible one is that self-sacrifice is a worthy and beautiful thing in itself. In itself, I say, for Senta's self-sacrifice is purely a fad: she knows nothing of Vanderdecken save a rumour shaped into a primitive ballad. Such self-sacrifice is not worthy, not beautiful; but, on the contrary, a very ugly and detestable form of lunacy. In truth, not only ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... into abuse of what she called the latest masculine fad—prison reform, to wit—and a heated discussion between her and Polyhistor had ensued, in the midst of which she had happened to glance behind her, to find that very notable person who is the subject of this narrative vouchsafing a silent attention ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... settlements that I know are filled with workers who are charming women, too good to be stenographers or clerks or housekeepers. They come to the settlements, where they receive a good salary and keep their social position, which they feel they could not do if they worked. You see it's rather a fad to be a social settlement worker, and most of the women couldn't make their living to save their soul at work that really took trained ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper

... drapery of a would-be artistic nature. It was stuffy and airless. Cecilia wrinkled her pretty nose as she entered. Mrs. Rainham held pronounced views on the subject of what she termed the "fresh-air fad," and declined to let London air—a smoky commodity at best—attack her cherished carpets; with the result that Cecilia breathed freely only in her little attic, which had ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce

... observation all along the line. I've got fifteen little memorandum books packed with observations. Taken by myself. It's the only way to keep clear of fads and theories. Look at the nonsense that's talked in other departments, about microbes, for instance. Fiddlesticks! A microbe's an abstraction, a fad. But take a man like myself, take a man of even ordinary intelligence, who has faced the facts, don't tell me that he hasn't a better working knowledge of the subject than a fellow who calls himself a bacteriologist, or ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair

... of you doubtless know, I am credited with a fad as regards this label business. But I do not see why I should be, seeing that so many frauds have been perpetrated in relation to old instruments, aye, and to new ones—my own not excepted. If I write with my own hand all that is written on all labels appearing in my violins, etc., ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson

... same size, with saddle between them, upon a suitable frame, the pedals propelling the rear wheel through a chain and sprocket gearing. An old invention, that of inflated or pneumatic tires of rubber, coupled with more hygienic saddles, gave great impetus to cycling sport. The fad dwindled, but the bicycle remained in general use as a convenience and ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews

... "Four Hundred," lost his hat in some way and rode to his home without one. The ubiquitous reporter saw him, and photographed him, bareheaded, and his paper, the New York ——, gave a column the following day to a description of the new fad of going without a hat. Thus the fashion started, and the amazing spectacle was seen the summer following of men and women of fashion riding and walking for miles without hats. This is beyond belief, yet it attracted no attention from the common people, ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous

... spirits in California had not discovered James for themselves long since; but James as a definite entity, known and approved by Society, awaited the second advent of Helena. He immediately became the fad; rather, Society split into two factions and was threatened with disruption. One young woman of the disapproving camp even went so far as to call an ardent advocate a "Henry James fool." All of which was doubtless ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... a fad of Mr Ensler's. He went to a lot of expense over it. I don't suppose you noticed it, but just out over the cut-water close to the bowsprit, there's a great cut-glass silver star, fitted inside with a set of the most wonderful silver reflectors, ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn

... protect the House from one clamorous aspect of the new problem. The members went about Westminster with an odd, new sense of being beset. A good proportion of us kept up the pretence that the Vote for Women was an isolated fad, and the agitation an epidemic madness that would presently pass. But it was manifest to any one who sought more than comfort in the matter that the streams of women and sympathisers and money forthcoming marked far deeper and wider things than an idle fancy for the ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... a fad which affected only the wealthy classes it would be reprehensible enough, but it curses rich and poor alike, and almost every day we saw heavily laden coolie women steadying themselves by means of a staff, hobbling stiff-kneed along ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews

... spendthrifts who paid fourpence for their chairs, when the music could be perfectly well heard without charge outside. It was, in fact, heard there by a large audience of bicyclers of both sexes, who stood by their wheels in numbers unknown in New York since the fad of bicycling began to pass several years ago. The lamps shed a pleasant light upon the crowd, after the long afterglow of the sunset had passed and the first stars began to pierce the clear heavens. ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... living, now so far flung as to be a characteristic of American life, is not just a fad. It has been a slow steady growth and has behind it a tradition of a century and more. When our larger commercial centers first began to change from villages to compact urban communities, there were those who found even these miniature cities far too congested. It ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley

... This ranching fad was entirely Jim's, for Phil looked with Lord Nelson's blind eye when it came to seeing any quick fortune in fruit farming. But knowing that the Brantlock Ranch was a sheer give-away at the price they had paid for it and not being ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson

... of propaganda, "movements," "causes" and agitations the statesman-inventor and the political psychologist find the raw material for their work. It is not the business of the politician to preserve an Olympian indifference to what stupid people call "popular whim." Being lofty about the "passing fad" and the ephemeral outcry is all very well in the biographies of dead men, but rank nonsense in the rulers of real ones. Oscar Wilde once remarked that only superficial people disliked the superficial. Nothing, for example, ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... and talked of generalities. Then an idea occurring to her, she conducted the conversation by devious paths to ties and asked Alwyn if he had heard of the fad of collecting ties. He had not, and she ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... thing more than another upon which Martha Foote prided herself it was the Senate Hotel bed coverings. Creamy, spotless, downy, they were her especial fad. "Brocade chairs, and pink lamps, and gold snake-work are all well and good," she was wont to say, "and so are American Beauties in the lobby and white gloves on the elevator boys. But it's the blankets on the beds that ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber

... Italy, and that was that it could not catch the ear of the common people. If for the churchman it was a heresy, and for the free-thinker a superstition, for the "general public" of ordinarily educated persons it was an aristocratic fad. Those who did embrace its doctrines and read its books, and they were not a few of the second-rate humanists, cherished it as their fathers had cherished the neo-Platonism of Pico della Mirandola, as an esoteric philosophy. So little inclined ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... muffled as she continued quiveringly—"while he—he's not dependent on me at all!" After a little interval, she went on, more firmly, but with the voice of despair. "That's the pity of it. That's what makes us women nowadays turn to something else—to some other man, or to some work, some fad, some hobby, some folly, some madness—anything to fill the void in our hearts that our husbands forget to fill, because their whole attention is concentrated on business.... But I'm not going to be that wife, I give ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan

... that those who did not finish at Malta had to work hard to get their cards off at Constantinople, and so on through the trip. The chariot of Aurora would hardly hold their output at a single port. At the start it was a mild, pleasurable fad, but later it absorbed the victim's mind to such an extent that he thought of nothing but the licking of stamps and mailing of cards to friends—who get so many of them that they are for the most part considered a nuisance and after a hasty ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne

... fad, and it was dogs. His dog had caused trouble between Diamond and Merriwell early in their college career by taking a strip out of Frank's trousers. That dog had received mortal injuries in a fight, and ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish

... is as harsh as the old, whether or no it is as high. The freest fad, as much as the strictest formula, is stiff with authority. It is because the humane father thinks soldiers wrong that they are forbidden; there is no pretense, there can be no pretense, that the boy would think so. The average boy's impression ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton

... Cumshaw softly, and he rose to his feet and held the door open for Moira to pass out. She led the way to the study and unlocked the door. It had been a fad of hers ever since the tragedy to keep the room sealed, and, as I saw no reason for gainsaying her, I had never interfered. She switched on the light and we stood for a moment on the threshold, dazzled by the unaccustomed radiance. Nothing ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh

... starve. It's his own fault. Let him starve! Nobody need unless they have committed some folly, or, worse, some crime. There's bread enough for all who deserve to live. I have no sympathy with all this preposterous pauperising which goes by the name of charity. It's a fad, a ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens

... will be asked, will not a fifty times millionaire give employment to as many men as will 500 men with $100,000 each. No. Not even if madam and himself are at home from toadying up and down through Europe in search of a princeling. (Stop this fad of the spoiled darlings of fortune and you stop a leak through which over $1,000,000,000 of American money has already disappeared. We will sustain this with facts in its proper place.) One million dollars divided among ten men will do ten times more good than if owned by one ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood

... I are going in a little deal with Mr. Schwartz," I explained. "He knows the real estate business backwards. Mr. Schwartz has a fad for collecting apartment houses. He owns the largest assortment of People Coops in the city. All the modern improvements, too. Hot and cold windows, running gas and noiseless janitors. Mr. Schwartz is the inventor of the idea of having ...
— You Should Worry Says John Henry • George V. Hobart

... you that it has been a fad with the ladies here to spell out their dates, and, though the fashion is waning, Mrs. Makely is a woman who would remain in such an absurdity among the very last. I will let you make your own conclusions concerning this, for though, as an Altrurian, I cannot ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells

... more and more interest in my progress and career: he was at pains to explain the meaning of music to me—the ideas of the composers. Many fashionable people took lessons of him, for to study with Pugno had become a fad; but he called me his only pupil, saying that I alone understood him. I can truly say he was my musical father; to him I owe everything. We were neighbors in a suburb of Paris, as my parents' home adjoined his; we saw a great deal of him and we made ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower

... Shop as a minor social event and so in the succeeding days all those who hadn't been invited and couldn't talk French with the waitresses crowded into the store. It was a Novelty,—the New Thing,—and became overnight a popular fad. M. Paul was hard pressed to turn off enough of his delectable tid-bits—they had to employ assistants for him almost at once, and one may suspect that the fairylike melt-in-the-mouth quality of his best work began to deteriorate from the second day. He had never baked cakes on ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick

... she lets me visit them. And when I happened to mention, for something to say, that the Archdeacon had an eccentric cousin in America who was afraid of hotels and even of visiting at their house because of a fad about burglars, she offered to give him the better of her two spare rooms whenever he came to England. I never thought he'd accept, but he did, only ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... nothing that appeals to them like a report of generosity. Of course, they never stop to think that the poor creatures are much better off dead than alive, and that they really have no hold on the sympathies of others. It's a fad among rich people to weep over the poor! Some of them will probably send flowers to the funeral of that woman, and think themselves angels of light for doing it! I tell you, religion is a trade mark in all lines of business, and I've decided in the last few ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon

... master's got a new fad—crazy to mount the hunt on white horses. I've old Sol here, and Jack has a pair of handy white ones for the two whips, but where to get a white mount for Jack stumps us. Jogged over to see if you could ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson

... he commented, "it certainly sounds to me like you've got the right dope on this party. But listen, Mr. Green, how do you figure in this here party's fad for getting himself manicured as a part of the lay-out—I can see ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb

... cut in. "The tickler is the newest fad for increasing worker efficiency. Once, I read somewheres, it was salt tablets. They had salt-tablet dispensers everywhere, even in air-conditioned offices where there wasn't a moist armpit twice a year and the gals sweat only champagne. A decade later people wondered what all those dusty white pills ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... fruit. His drink is almost entirely water, milk, and chocolate, and he condemns the use of tea, coffee, liquors, and tobacco. He has almost a perfect set of natural teeth and his sight is excellent. Like most men who live to a great age, Dr. Baynes has a "fad," to which he attributes a chief part in prolonging his life. This is the avoidance of beds, and except when away from home he has not slept on a bed or even on a mattress for over fifty years. He has an iron reclining chair, over which he spreads a ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... notorious fondness for cats was a fad which he shared with Paul de Koch, the novelist, who, at one time, kept as many as thirty cats in his house. Many descriptions of them are to be found scattered through his novels. His chief favorite, Fromentin, lived eleven ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow

... cut, or abrasion and plants malignant ulcers, and that many strong men who escape dying there return as wrecks to their own countries. It is also true that the natives of the Solomons are a wild lot, with a hearty appetite for human flesh and a fad for collecting human heads. Their highest instinct of sportsmanship is to catch a man with his back turned and to smite him a cunning blow with a tomahawk that severs the spinal column at the base ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various

... to state first what does not constitute an industry. Power, transportation facilities, fine buildings, fine machinery and a group of skilled workmen, a complete office staff and an elaborate system of fad management do not constitute an industry. Such an aggregation might be likened to a cargo ship all ready for service excepting that it lacks a captain and navigating officer and some one to determine what kind of a cargo to take, where to go ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness

... a pavilion that flanked a corner of the veranda, and with her some other young people, all of whom were busily engaged with the new fad of basket making. They were just on the point of having light refreshments and heartily welcomed her to their circle, where the time slipped unheeded by until a clock, somewhere, striking the half hour after twelve, warned ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... much more sincerely than ever Elizabeth did in Protestantism. But he did not represent truly the predominant feeling of America. Northern Democratic papers, warmly committed to the annexation of Texas, protested vehemently against the Secretary's private fad concerning the positive blessedness of Slavery being put forward as part of the body of political doctrine held by the United States. Even Southerners, who accepted Slavery as a more or less necessary ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton

... brute. The animals disappeared one by one, passing through the channel of death, into the world beyond the Spot of Life, leaving behind only these tiny survivors, playthings, kept in existence longer than all others because of a mere fad. ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... any apparent break with his convictions. In "society" one met all sorts of eccentrics—"babus" and "yogis", Christian Scientists, spiritualists and theosophists, Fletcherites, vegetarians and "raw-fooders". And there would be ample room for his fad—it was quite "English" to be touched with Socialism. All that one had to do was to be entertaining in one's presentation of it, and to confine one's self to its literary aspects—not setting forth plans for the expropriation of ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... parasitic {meme} embedded in a {sig block}. There was a {meme plague} or fad for these on Usenet in late 1991. Most were equivalents of "I am a .sig virus. Please reproduce me in your .sig block.". Of course, the .sig virus's memetic hook is the giggle value of going along with the gag; this, however, was a self-limiting phenomenon ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... Arithmetic and Reading.' Prizes were given; but what prize would be so conciliatory as this boyish little joke? It may read thin here; it would smack racily in the playroom. Whenever his sons 'started a new fad' (as one of them writes to me) they 'had only to tell him about it, and he was at once interested and keen to help.' He would discourage them in nothing unless it was hopelessly too hard for them; only, if there was any principle of science involved, they must understand the principle; ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson

... says Lady Rylton in a peculiar tone. "Do come in, Tita. It is a fad of mine—a silly one, no doubt—but I cannot bear to look at an open door. Besides, I wish to ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford

... is not a bore, because he will always trot out his conscientious objections with a half-humorous, half-deprecating smile. This same capacity for avoiding the slavery of serious fanaticism enables an Irishman to cease quite joyfully from the pursuit of his own particular fad in order to corner an obnoxious opponent. Thus Augusta Goold and her friends were genuinely desirous of striking a blow at England, and really believed that their volunteers might do it; but this did not prevent them from finding infinite relish ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham

... "fad," intended to do what it never does—viz, keep your fingers from sticking, and "your tongue from evil speaking" about the "messiness" of ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne

... come to stay. It has nothing to do with superstition at all. It's part of Advanced Thought — quite scientific, you know, while Spiritualism was just a fad. ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis

... only a fad of modern medicine to say that cholera and typhoid and diphtheria are caused by bacilli and germs; nonsense. Cholera is caused by a frightful pain in the stomach, and diphtheria is caused by trying to cure a ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock

... a fad of mine. It's an opportunity of yours—one that you're throwing away in the most foolish way, that you might regret all your life. At any rate, I'm not going to be the cause of giving that poor darling another moment's annoyance or uneasiness. The idea of the ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson

... to this disloyal, slanderous, sacrilegious ANDY? He hints that Golf is a mere modish fashion—even a fin de siecle fad!!! How many ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand

... the professor had given me no assistance at all. He would not be interested in my cases, and would not enter the empty room in his house in Chelsea where we had had so many discussions. It was a fad of his that he could think more clearly in this room, which had only three chairs and an old writing table in it, yet perhaps I ought not to call it a fad, remembering the results of ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner

... well. Although the death of her husband had left her a widow at twenty-nine, with four small daughters to bring up, she had gone on determinedly. Naturally smart and able, Madge was always running to town, keeping up with all her friends and with every new fad and movement there, although she made fun of most of them. Twice she had taken her girls abroad. But Edith was quite different. In a suburb she would draw into her house and never grow another inch. And Bruce, poor devil, would commute and take work home from the office. But Roger couldn't ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole

... somewhat artificially inaugurated at Court by Wyatt and Surrey seems to have largely subsided, like any other fad, after some years, but it vigorously revived, in much more genuine fashion, with the taste for other imaginative forms of literature, in the last two decades of Elizabeth's reign. It revived, too, not only among the courtiers ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... slope of the Hill you go the more children you see. They are everywhere, and of all sizes and ages, in such reckless profusion that you no longer wonder if the world is to be depopulated through the coming of the fad of Eugenics. The Italian mother has but two thoughts—her God and her children, and it is to care for her children that she has brought from her native land the knowledge of cookery, and of those things that help to put life and strength in ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords

... Morgan came to town, They nailed the Colosseum down. A great Collector! Once his Fad Was Coins, but when in time he had Collected all the coin in sight, To Europe's Art his thoughts took flight. But let not Europe palpitate For fear of an Art Syndicate. There are more Rembrandts, strange to say, ...
— Confessions of a Caricaturist • Oliver Herford

... and the figures that had loomed up seemed to melt away. But as soon as the rifle had flashed there was the fad, fad, fad of hurried steps, something whizzed in at the window, and with a dull thud a spear stuck in the ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn

... the only art that succeeds. The true artistic genius, who will not cater to accepted notions, who exercises originality, and strives to be true to life, leads an obscure and wretched existence. His work may some day become the fad of the mob, but not until his heart's blood had been exhausted; not until the pathfinder has ceased to be, and a throng of an idealless and visionless mob has done to death the heritage ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... nothing about the restaurant business. If they did, they would probably be engaged in it instead of in their different trades. All experiments along this line of which we have heard have failed. The so-called "democratic idea," purely a fad, never ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... to show up to-morrow night, and then we can slip away unnoticed in the dark," said the lieutenant. "I've kept tabs on the weather conditions, as it's always been a fad with me; and I'm happy to say there seems to be no storm in prospect, while the winds are apt to be favorable, coming from the east, a rare thing these fall days. So-long, boys, and here's success to our jolly ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach

... somewhat with the work, but the rains were gratefully received. I spent much of my time at Four Oaks, often going every day, and never let more than two days pass without spending some hours on the farm. To many of my friends this seemed a waste of time. They said, "Williams is carrying this fad too far,—spending too ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter

... little box," she replied with a laugh. "It's like a cell. A friend of ours who has the anti-germ fad insisted on it. But my sitting-room ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips

... said he, shaking his venerable head, "really most exasperating—I particularly wished to secure a sample of that fellow's pills—the collection of quack remedies is a fad ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol

... learn, and if possible to speak, French. So far from practising non-interference, she allows no one to fight but herself. This imperious, warlike, imperial attitude is what Africa wants. It reverses our Quaker-like 'fad' for peace. We allow native wars to rage ad libitum even at Porto Loko, almost within cannon-shot of Sierra Leone. On the Gambia River the natives have sneeringly declared that they will submit to the French, ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... gleams. And if I should try to render The tissues of fugitive splendour That fled down the wind of living, Will they read it some day in the future, And be conscious of an awareness In our old lives, and the bareness Of theirs, with the newest passions In the last fad of ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott

... distribution of a letter of news is that of the letter purporting to be addressed by Prester John to the Emperor Manuel, which circulated through Europe about 1165. "How great was the popularity and diffusion of this letter," writes Sir Henry Yule, "may be judged in some degree from the fad that Zarncke in his treatise on Prester John gives a list of close on 100 mss. of it Of these there are eight in the British Museum, ten at Vienna, thirteen in the great Paris Library, and fifteen at Munich. ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville

... amongst the old "Lakers." It was, of course, a great fur country, and though the fur-bearing animals were sensibly diminishing, yet the prices of peltries had risen by competition, whilst supplies had been correspondingly cheapened. It was a good marten country, and, as this fur was the fad of fashion, and brought an extravagant price, the animal, like the beaver, was threatened with extinction, the more so as the rabbits were then in their period ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair

... of it; but it's a fad of hers. She likes to wear it on state occasions. I have often wondered if it is really the Nana Sahib's ruby, as her uncle claimed. Driver, the Savoy, and remember ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath

... been a great "fad," and while not quite so popular, are pretty enough to deserve mention. A table is too often confused in its arrangement of color on account of its changes of courses. This can be entirely done away with by adopting some simple ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke

... know nought," said Dixon, evasively. "Only that Dunster fellow is not to my mind, and I think he potters the master sadly with his fid- fad ways." ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell

... present government would only give up their Irish fad—and bring in a bill to make it penal for any parson to hold any office in a public school or university or to presume to teach outside the pulpit—they should have ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley

... downtown, the night being fine. He set his foot to a long, swinging stride. An elephant on his hands, truly. Poor devil, for a fad! Nobody wanted him, not even those who wished him well. Wanted to become an American citizen. He would have been tolerably safe in England. Here he would never be free of danger. A ranch. The beggar would have a chance out there in the West. The anarchist and the Bolshevik ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath

... for association, for they had their clubs, societies, and learned fellowships. Still less could a mere curiosity to learn certain signs and passwords have held such men for long, even in an age of quaint conceits in the matter of association and when architecture was affected as a fad. No, there is only one explanation: that these men saw in Masonry a deposit of the high and simple wisdom of old, preserved in tradition and taught in symbols—little understood, it may be, by many members of the order—and this it was that ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... your business." She went up to the new selectors' floor, and found the plan running as smoothly as if it had been part of the plant's system for years. The elevator whisked her up to the top floor, where she met the plant's latest practical fad, the new textile chemist—a charming youth, disguised in bone-rimmed glasses, who did the honors of his little laboratory with all the manner of a Harvard host. This was the fusing oven for silks. Here was the drying oven. This delicate scale ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber

... her son, he is at Yale, wrote her that all the boys there wore their summer underwear all during the winter, and also went about with their heads wet and in low shoes on the coldest days. Now, Amory, I don't know whether that is a fad at Princeton too, but I don't want you to be so foolish. It not only inclines a young man to pneumonia and infantile paralysis, but to all forms of lung trouble, to which you are particularly inclined. You cannot experiment ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... well, that old trouble with her heart, only worse? They'd been obliged to hire a maid—how in the world were the La Rues going to exist on American cooking? Cousin Parnelia said she could cure Madame with some Sanopractic nonsense, a new fad that Cousin Parnelia had taken up lately. Professor Kennedy had been elected vice-president of the American Mathematical Association, and it was funny to see him try to pretend that he wasn't pleased. Mother's garden ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... be Society's latest fad? We notice that somebody's Skin Food is being advertised ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various

... much while he was examining a paper I had written, and as my writing was not as legible as his he tacitly told me I was his inferior, and that I should therefore treat him with some degree of respect. I laughed at this fad, and, not thinking him incorrigible I took him into my service. If it had not been for that odd notion of his I should probably have merely given him a louis, and no more. He said that spelling was of no consequence, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... of the sheet first, maybe, and turns it over with interest to see what it is. He grins a good-humoured grin as he reads—poor old Bill is just as thick-headed and obstinate as ever—just as far gone on his old fad. It's rather rough on Jim, because he's too far off to argue; but, if he's very earnest on the subject, he'll sit down and write, using all his old arguments to prove that the man who wrote that rot was ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... is a capital thing, too; it is being taken up by the profession. I use it. It is a curious thing that he should have hit on that when he is not a surgeon. He had studied anatomy as a sort of fad, as he does everything. One of Haile Tabb's boys was bedridden, and he was a great friend of his, and ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page

... never gives her right hand to anybody. She has some fad about spoiling the magnetic current of Apollo or something. ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie

... postpone the trial until after dinner. It must be ready by this time, I think," said Mr. Fenwick, as he led the way back to the house. It was magnificently furnished, for the inventor was a man of wealth, and only took up aeroplaning as a "fad." An excellent dinner was served, and then the three returned once more to the shed where ...
— Tom Swift and his Wireless Message • Victor Appleton

... class has its fad; its propaganda for a crusade against the most startling evils of the world. One year, the sacred outlines of the human figure are protected against disfigurement by an ardent group of young classicists in Grecian draperies. The next, a ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley

... difficulties in which Aniela's mother was and is still involved. According to Kromitzki, a great deal of her fortune might still be saved if she would part with the estate. Kromitzki looks upon the reluctance to part with ancestral lands as a mere fad. He said he might be able to understand it if she had the means to prevent it, but as the case stood it ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... I got him just as I did. I hadn't much more'n broke him in before I runs up against this new one. Understand, I ain't no fad chaser. I don't pine for the sporting-extra life, with a new red-ink stunt for every leaf on the calendar-pad. I got me studio here, an' me real-money reg'lars that keeps the shop runnin', and a few of ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford

... everywhere, Florence had an instinctive love of a fad. Realizing this fact, Scotty was not in the least deceived when, during a lull at the dinner-table one evening late in the Fall, she broke in with an irrelevant though seemingly ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge

... yacht and sporting arrangements and that—make himself generally useful, as you might say. He had the spending of a lot of money, I should think. The other was confined entirely to the office affairs, and I dare say he had his hands full. As for his being English, it was just a fad of Manderson's to have an English secretary. He'd had several ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley

... said. "Put the thing away! It's a sheer fad to mend it at all. I don't care what I wear, and ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell

... lost the faith. The same principle applies in our home-life, in education, in literature. The family altar is almost extinct; learning is more easy than sound; and in literature as in other forms of art any passing fad is able to gain followers and pose as worthy achievement. All along the line we need more uprightness—more strength. Even when a man has committed a crime, he must receive justice in court. Within recent years we have heard too much about "speedy trials," which ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... might, everything can be attained by the mightiest. British advances she answered with battleships, simultaneously provoking France and Russia by increasing her army corps. The balance of power in Europe, Germany declares to be an out-of-date British fad, invented solely in the interests ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith

... to the public, and became a sort of fashionable fad. It was commended, and after Parliament had voted ten thousand pounds toward it, it was everywhere accepted as the correct thing. The charter was given in June, 1732, and a suitable design was not wanting for the corporation seal—silkworms, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne

... clicking typewriting machines. Cameron had never seen so many of these machines during the whole period of his life. The typewriter began to assume an altogether new importance in his mind. Hitherto it had appeared to him more or less of a Yankee fad, unworthy of the attention of an able-bodied man of average intelligence. In Edinburgh a "writing machine" was still something of a new-fangled luxury, to be apologised for. Mr. Rae would allow no such finicky instrument in his office. Here, however, ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor

... had he—no fad, except A tendency to strum, In mode at which you would have wept, ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert

... Thoreau, and the passage in THE WEEK, is perhaps a fad, but it is sincere and stable. I am still of the same mind five years later; did you observe that I had said 'modern' authors? and will you observe again that this passage touches the very joint of our division? It is one that appeals to me, deals with that part of life ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... episodes, the humor is broad, as the humor of a pessimist always is, and the reader finds himself laughing at a practical joke on the heels of a catastrophe. Mr. Black knows his London, especially the drawing-room aspect of it, and his latest novel is sure to have the latest touch of fad and fashion, although white heather does not cease to grow nor deer to be stalked, nor flies to be cast in Highland waters. We cannot admit that he is exceptionally fortunate in the heroines of these novels, however, for they are perfectly beautiful and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... grown comparatively long, his closely-trimmed mustachios, and his head-cloth, worn like a turban, made me take him at first sight for a Moslem. He has a cunning eye, which does not belie his reputation. His fad is to take money and to do no work for it; he now wants us to pay for the clearing of an uncleared path. The villagers fear him on account of certain fetish-practices which, in plain English, mean poison; and he keeps ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron

... of fad," Clayton went on, "it's a national move, in a way. You don't owe any gratitude. We need our babies, you see. More than we do hats! If this war goes on, we shall need a good ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... several degrees. Now Augustin never went higher than a simple auditor in the Manichean Church. What attracted specially fine minds to the Manichees, was that they began by declaring themselves rationalists. To reconcile faith with natural science and philosophy has been the fad of heresiarchs and free-thinkers in all ages. The Manicheans bragged that they had succeeded. They went everywhere, crying out: "Truth, Truth!" That suited Augustin very well: it was just what he was looking for. He hastened ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... grandson whose calling was indefinite. He was named for his grandfather, to whom fishing is a fad. During my rest season I go fishing almost every day. While I make an exception of Sunday I can appreciate the minister who was a great fisherman. On his way to an appointment Sunday morning he came upon a lad fishing in a wayside stream. Halting he said: "My boy, ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain

... pass, And thou with careful brow sitting alone Received hast this message from thy glass That tells the truth, and says that all is gone; Fresh shalt thou see in me the wounds thou mad'st, Though spent thy flame, in me the heat remaining. I that have loved thee thus before thou fad'st, My faith shall wax when thou art in thy waning. The world shall find this miracle in me, That fire can burn when all the matter's spent; Then what my faith hath been thyself shalt see, And that thou wast unkind thou mayst repent. Thou mayst repent that thou ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles - Delia - Diana • Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable

... in numbers—studios were the fad that year—and as soon as Mrs. Palmer Pence understood that Abner was to be met with somewhere in the Burrow she hastened to ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller

... married," she said, "I do not think you have any right to risk your life and your position for a fad." ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman

... He's going baldheaded for some temperance fad and is backed by a score or so of Presbyterian ministers. We'll have to ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham

... none existed. When iron is the chief colouring matter, rock-salt assumes a beautiful clear red tint; in other cases it is emerald green or pale blue. As a rule, salt is prepared from it for table by a regular process; but it has become a fad of late with a few people to put crystals of native rock-salt on their tables; and they decidedly look very pretty, and have a certain distinctive flavour of their own ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... else just now, for she was a creature of fads. Occasionally she got a new one, and with kindred spirits played that particular fad to death. ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe

... having no fads. Few men are without some foible or hobby; Crowl felt almost lonely at times in his superiority. He was a Vegetarian, a Secularist, a Blue Ribbonite, a Republican, and an Anti-tobacconist. Meat was a fad. Drink was a fad. Religion was a fad. Monarchy was a fad. Tobacco was a fad. "A plain man like me," Crowl used to say, "can live without fads." "A plain man" was Crowl's catchword. When of a Sunday morning he stood on Mile-end Waste, which was opposite his shop—and held forth to the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill

... idea; idee fixe; mentis gratissimus error [Lat.]; fool's paradise. [causes of misjudgment. 2] esprit de corps, party spirit, partisanship, clannishness, prestige. [causes of misjudgment. 3] bias, bigotry, warp, twist; hobby, fad, quirk, crotchet, partiality, infatuation, blind side, mote in the eye. [causes of misjudgment. 4] one-sided views, one-track mind, partial views, narrow views, confined views, superficial views, one- sided ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... In her spare time she should lie under the trees and enjoy nature or a good book, or she should go to some gathering where she will meet those who will refresh her intellectually. Keep the mind open to all the impressions of nature. Love the open air. Fresh air is not a fad, it is a necessity if one would keep young. Occasionally read a book of travel or a biography of some well-known person. Keep mentally alert. An intellectual back number adds years to her seeming age. Nothing makes for youth as a young ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry

... though I cannot see that even that was so servile and superstitious as the more modern ideal of "non-resistance" even to a foreign and lawless power. But the seventeenth century was an age of sects, that is of fads; and the Filmerites made a fad of divine right. Its roots were older, equally religious but much more realistic; and though tangled with many other and even opposite things of the Middle Ages, ramify through all the changes we have now to consider. The connection can hardly be stated better ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton

... for a generation. Goethe's Werther inspired a pose. They would both now be ridiculed. Favorite heroes in novels have often set a pose. Carlyle inspired a literary pose ("hatred of shams," etc.). He and Ruskin set a certain cant afloat, for every fad and pose which pretends to be sober and earnest must have a cant. Zola, D'Annunzio, Wagner, Ibsen, Gorky, Tolstoi, Sudermann, are men who have operated suggestion on the public mind of our time. They get a ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... father's one of the steel crowd. We've a saying that there are millionaires, and then multi-millionaires, and then Pittsburg millionaires. Anyhow, the two of them spend all their income in entertaining. It's Robbie's fad to play the perfect host—he likes to have lots of people round him. He does put up good times—only he's so very important about it, and he has so many ideas of what is proper! I guess most of his set would rather go to Mrs. Jack Warden's any day; ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair

... the minister, moved by a sudden impulse, coming he knew not whence, "what you think of this new fad, if it be nothing worse, of the English clergy—I mean about the duty of confessing to the priest.— I see they have actually prevailed upon that wretched creature we've all been reading about in the papers lately, to confess the murder of her little brother! Do you think they had any right to ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald

... the French champion runner and high-jumper, and captain of a football team. He competed with a number of other crazy, reckless, rich young men like himself in ridiculous, wild motor races. Finally he threw up everything for the latest fad, and was drawn into the popular craze for flying machines. At the Rheims meetings he shouted and wept for joy with three hundred thousand other men; he felt that he was one with the whole people ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... surprising. In trying these dishes I would remind you that few of us cared for oysters, olives, celery—almost any fruit or vegetable one could mention on first trial. Try several times and be sure you prepare dishes exactly right before condemning them as either fad or fancy. These are very real, nourishing and delicious foods that are being offered you. Here is a salad that would have intrigued the palate of Lucullus, himself. If you do not believe me, try it. The vegetable is slightly known by a few native mountaineers and ranchers. Botanists ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter

... war broke out women have done a great deal of knitting. Looking at this great army of women struggling with rib and back seam, some have seen nothing in it but a "fad" which has supplanted for the time tatting and bridge. But it is more than that. It is the desire to help, to care for, to minister; it is the same spirit which inspires our nurses to go out and bind up the ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung

... to him, smiling, well aware that Souris was to be the subject of the chat, and anxious to gratify her second husband's harmless fad. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant

... course, that the "faddists" should be among Mr. Punch's most impatient critics, because "fad" and "cant" have always been Punch's pet ground-game that he loves to run to earth. It is perhaps from the Temperance party that he has had most sport, for he has always taken delight in the pictures they dislike the most—the incomparable drawings of Leech and Keene, ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... of the high schools, and equip them for leadership in society, and the point is clear. It is a new problem but coming to be a very real one. Going to college is getting to be the fashion—almost a fad in some places. We all know that a goodly number of students, boys and girls alike, enter the universities, East and West, every year who have no characteristics of leadership, who are not fitted for real university work, either in academic ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd

... he had been at times a little swift. One afternoon we were out in the country riding and he became very animated in his conversation about taste and style of young ladies' dresses, and from that went on to say what a fad it was among young men to notice and admire the bright hosiery which young ladies wore when bicycle riding, and continued in that style of talk, saying what good taste I displayed in my dress; he was sure ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge

... with the use of books. One girl came to the library because "it was a very handy library"; another, because she "saw it was a nice place to come to on a rainy day." Still another frankly avows that "it was the fad among the boys and girls of our neighborhood; we used to meet at the library." A postman reported that he entered the library first in the line of his duty, but was attracted by it and began to take out books. A clergyman had his attention called to the library by requests from choir-boys ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... rich aunts and uncles in the fam'ly, and duckin' real work while you wait for notice from the Surrogate to come on and take your share. It wa'n't a case of hustle with Clifford. I suspicioned that his bein' an architect was more or less of a fad; but he was makin' the most of it, there was no discountin' that. He'd laid out a week to put in seein' how New York was built, high spots and low, and he went at it like he ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford

... the fad of the moment, 'the simple life'?" he asked. "Let me assure you that it is beautiful only when you can look down upon it from the safe altitude of a comfortable income. I know, because I've been living it for ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde

... never drink oatmeal-water unless they are paid to do it. If they are paid extra beer-money and oatmeal water is made for them gratis, some will, of course, imbibe it, especially if they see that thereby they may obtain little favours from their employer by yielding to his fad. By drinking the crotchet perhaps they may get a present now and then-food for themselves, cast-off clothes for their families, and so on. For it is a remarkable feature of human natural history, the desire to proselytise. The spectacle of John ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies

... not appear to so much advantage. These comprised old Karka, young Dam Zeneb, Sallaamto, Fad-el-Kereem, Marrasilla, and Faddeela. They had learnt to wash, but could never properly fold the linen. Ironing and starching were quite out of the question, and would have been as impossible to them as algebra. Some ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker

... Rhoda's first remark, with nothing in particular to precede it. "Molly Delawarr's a darling! I don't much care for Gatty, and Betty I just hate. She's a prig and a fid-fad both. But Molly—oh, Phoebe, she's as smart as can be. Such parts she has! You know, she's really—not quite you understand—but really she's almost ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt

... Young Company's sewing machine the demand and supply for women's comfort was again called out in the combined dressing table and sewing machine, a good invention for flats, the fad of the day, ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission

... this new way in health culture seem to require something of professional autobiography, that it may be seen that it is a matter of evolution and not of chance, not a fad that ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey



Words linked to "Fad" :   craze, rage, fashion, faddy, furore, cult, furor, fad diet



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