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Twaddle   Listen
noun
Twaddle  n.  Silly talk; gabble; fustian. "I have put in this chapter on fighting... because of the cant and twaddle that's talked of boxing and fighting with fists now-a-days."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Twaddle" Quotes from Famous Books



... evidently sure of a friendly recognition. For had not the King, when Crown Prince and Heir-Apparent, hunted game in his preserves?—yea, had he not even dined with him?—and had not he, Jost, written whole columns of vapid twaddle about the 'Royal smile' and the 'Royal favour' till the outside public had sickened at every stroke of his flunkey pen? How came it, then, that his Majesty seemed on this occasion to have no recollection of him, and looked over and beyond ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... rose and fled from the room bare-headed Into the dusk, afraid of my gift. And after that the spirits swarmed— Chaucer, Caesar, Poe and Marlowe, Cleopatra and Mrs. Surratt— Wherever I went, with messages,— Mere trifling twaddle, Spoon River agreed. You talk nonsense to children, don't you? And suppose I see what you never saw And never heard of and have no word for, I must talk nonsense when you ask me What it is ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters

... of which was a hot coal to the girl addressed. Nothing would stop him, apparently. He even made the most stupid repetitions. Nora finally stamped her foot formidably. "Will you stop? Will you stop ? " she said through her clenched teeth. " Do you think I want to listen to your everlasting twaddle about her? Why, she's-she's no better than other people, you ignorant little mamma's boy. She's no better than other people, you ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane

... hand to Sidonia, who dashed it away, crying—"Stuff! nonsense! you have learned all this twaddle from the priest, who, I know, is nephew to the shoe-maker in Daber, and therefore hates any one who is above ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold

... cant words, of no very definite, and of merely conventional, meaning, for any thing said or done in ignorance of the true propriety of the matter in question. "C'est du rococo," it is mere stuff, or nonsense, or rather twaddle. It was born on the stage, about ten years ago, at one of the minor theatres at Paris, though probably borrowed from a wine-shop, and most likely will have as brief an existence as our own late "flare-up," and such ephemeral ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various

... regardless of meaning, should so bewilder men and deprive them of all wise and sober judgment! By my faith! ... I would as soon listen to the gabble of geese in a farmyard as to the silly glibness of such inflated twaddle, such mawkish sentiment, such ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... army. They showed by their deeds the truth and honesty of their convictions. They had trusted the North until trusting had ceased to be a virtue. They wished peace, but feared not war. All this idle talk, so common since the war, of a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight" is the merest twaddle and vilely untrue. ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert

... of the State! Are you mad, John Perkins, that you come to me with such insufferable twaddle as this? Why, do you think if you HAD been capable of rising at the bar, I would have taken so much trouble about getting you a place? No, sir; you are too fond of pleasure, and bed, and tea-parties, and small-talk, and reading novels, and playing the flute, ...
— The Bedford-Row Conspiracy • William Makepeace Thackeray

... personal application from the dean and chapter respecting the sermon till the violence of the storm had expended itself; but they left Mr. Slope behind them nothing daunted, and he went about his work zealously, flattering such as would listen to his flattery, whispering religious twaddle into the ears of foolish women, ingratiating himself with the few clergy who would receive him, visiting the houses of the poor, inquiring into all people, prying into everything, and searching with ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... to break the hush and remind one of a sentient world. Perhaps the author and his Indian guides occasionally exchanged a word, or the two white companions and himself indulged in a laugh that started the rattling echoes of the hills, but there was no chatter, no twaddle, no dissensions. The narrative reads like a story. Reading it, one longs to start for LAKE GLAZIER to-morrow, and thence descending, halt not in his long course until his faithful canoe slips out into the waters of the Southern Gulf, three thousand miles away. A man with a soul in ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens

... to explain the true character of note-writing—how compressed and unrambling and direct it ought to be, and illustrate by the villainous twaddle of ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... into chapel to read, not out of any respect for some people's old-womanish twaddle about the sacredness of the place,—but because some of the blues might see you.—Yale Lit. Mag., Vol. XV. ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall

... and annoyed, flattered, because, as a woman, Stephen had conceded her a mind. Many of the young men she knew had minds, but deemed that these were wasted on women, whose language was generally supposed to be a kind of childish twaddle. Even Jack Brinsmade rarely risked his dignity and reputation at an intellectual tilt. This was one of Virginia's grievances. She often argued with her father, and, if the truth were told, had had more than ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... he cared little for Voltaire and Rousseau, and was unmoved even by Diderot, whose so greatly praised Salons he found strangely saturated with moralizing twaddle and futility; in his hatred toward all this balderdash, he limited himself almost exclusively to the reading of Christian eloquence, to the books of Bourdaloue and Bossuet whose sonorously embellished periods were imposing; but, still more, he ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... organ-grinders play. But such organs are noisy and draw people to the windows and into the street. And why butcher the victim, since so many strong men could easily have strangled him? Show me the medical report. Monsieur, does it not speak of a gash rather than a stab? And what twaddle, that about the funeral train, what betraying arrangements in a country where every sign-post has eyes! I am accused of having rushed into my uncle's house the following day and stolen some papers. Where are those papers? My ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various

... at Fenchurch Street by half-past nine. He rather expected to see old Grogan on the platform, and was not sure whether he was relieved or disappointed by his absence. On the one hand, he could hardly have borne Grogan's twaddle on the journey to Tilbury, his mind being engrossed as it was. On the other, he looked to him to cover his presence ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan

... friend," she interrupted him remorselessly. "See, come to the window. Now look at me—and then don't talk any more twaddle about care and ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler

... "Eh, what twaddle!" said one of them, a thin, stern-looking man. "When one's head is gone one doesn't weep for one's hair! Take what any of you like!" And flourishing his arm energetically he turned sideways ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... amiable and cultured old relic, unshakably made sure of his high name for scholarship by the fact that he had written dozens of books which nobody else had even read. So he said, friendlily enough: "Then that would seem to settle your pretensions. To have talked twaddle in Paff's beer-cellar is the one real proof of literary merit, no matter what sort of twaddle you may have written in your book, or in many books, as I am here in this academy to attest. Moreover, I am old enough to remember when cookery-books were sold openly upon the newsstands, ...
— Taboo - A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Saevius Nicanor, with - Prolegomena, Notes, and a Preliminary Memoir • James Branch Cabell

... these torsos of the haberdasher, one is not brought to thoughts of sad mortality. Their joy is so exultant. And all the things that they hold dear—canes, gloves, silk hats, and the newer garments on which fashion makes its twaddle—are within reach of their armless sleeves. Had they fingers they would be smoothing themselves before the glass. Their unbodied heads, wherever they may be, are still smiling on the world, despite their divorcement. ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks

... returned Lamotte, sulkily. "Vandyck don't seem to realize that I have a prior claim, and that his twaddle, therefore, only serves to render ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch

... pretty pause in the happy scene of the play before the villain comes in and tumbles things about. When I've been on the bridge," he continued, "of a night that set my heart thumping, I knew, by Jingo! it was the devil playing his silent overture. Don't you take in the twaddle about God sending thunderbolts; it's that old war-horse down below.—And then I've kept a sharp lookout, for I knew as right as rain that a company of waterspouts would be walking down on us, or a hurricane racing to catch us broadsides. And what's gospel for sea is good for ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... describing Sir G. Bonham's investiture as K.C.B., and advises me to imitate him for my own interest, rather than Sir J. Davis, who was recalled. Davis, says Yeh, insisted on getting into the city, and Bonham gave up this demand. Hence his advice to me. All through the letter is sheer twaddle. ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin

... glass, ruby. Go home; don't bother about romance outside of books. There it is safe. The English are right. They may be snobs when they travel abroad, but they travel securely. Romance, adventure! Bah! So much twaddle has been written about the East that cads and scoundrels are mistaken for Galahads and D'Artagnans. Few men remain in this country who can with honor leave it. Who knows what manner ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath

... intellectually and physically. He classifies minerals or blasts out a tunnel. Woman creates physiologically; she supplies the essential, the raw material; her noblest product is a child. I get on splendidly with women, because we both realize the stupidity of the average sex-twaddle. We have no illusions about each other. We know exactly what we are after. We know exactly how to attain it. I tell you what, Phipps, Female Emancipation is going to do away with a lot of cant and idealism. Knock the silly male on the head. There'll be an end of your chastity-worship, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... could wish. The purport of these messages, which were written rather quickly, and without perceptible thought or hesitation, changing from one handwriting to another without the least apparent difficulty, was in some instances the veriest twaddle, while others contained tolerably good sense, even in language rather above the Medium, unless appearances were misleading, for she looked the embodiment of ignorant simplicity, and spoke ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission

... Cardinal Begin. For an Orangeman like Hughes that was a desperate measure. He got what he expected—cynicism. Begin afterwards issued a letter to the press in which he tried to set the clergy above the law of conscription. No doubt the Cardinal came at Hughes with the twaddle invented by the Nationalists and later adopted by Laurier, about enforcing the Militia Act which ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... all, three words before we quit the subject. I have put in this chapter on fighting of malice prepense, partly because I want to give you a true picture of what every-day school life was in my time and partly because of the cant and twaddle that's talked of boxing and fighting with fists now-a-days. Even Thackeray has given in to it; and only a few weeks ago there was some rampant stuff in the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... the universe of Astral Light may be considered under the symbol of an Icosahedron. I shall only state that this conception of the Aryan philosophers is not to be looked upon as mere "theological twaddle" or as the outcome of wild fancy. The real significance of the conception in question can, I believe, be explained by reference to the psychology and the physical science of the ancients. But I must stop here and proceed ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... chapters in which Melmoth endeavours to obtain substitutes: and in one of these the love interest of the book—the, of course, fatal love of Melmoth himself for a Spanish-Indian girl Immalee or Isidora—is related with some real pathos and passion, though with a good deal of mere sentiment and twaddle. Maturin is stronger in his terror-scenes, and affected his own generation very powerfully: his influence being so great in France that Balzac attempted a variation and continuation, and that there are constant references ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... justly been called a Scripture style. One of their most striking characteristics, by the way, is a severely simple taste; a uniform freedom from the vulgarities of conception, the exaggerated sentiment, the mawkish nonsense and twaddle, which disfigure such an infinitude of volumes of religious biography and fiction which have been written since. Could such men attain this uniform elevation? Could such men have invented those extraordinary fictions,—the miracles and the parables? Could they, in spite ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers

... appreciable quantity of what strikes me as feeble sentimentalism, and also a lot of sheer dogma. But it is the least unsatisfactory manual of the brain that I have met with. And if the profane reader ignores all that is either Greek or twaddle to him, there will yet remain for his advantage a vast amount of very sound information and advice. All these three ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett

... her face, and she paused and looked up. There was a faint dash of color on Mr. Vernon's cheeks, and a tightening of the lips. It seemed to Nell, judging by his expression, that he had suddenly become impatient of the twaddle, and she instantly dropped the paper on her lap. But Mrs. Lorton was enjoying herself too much to permit ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice

... as if she had said something much cleverer than she could possibly realize. "That's a fact," admitted he. "It was simply supreme common-sense. What a world for twaddle it is when common-sense makes us sit up and stare.... But it's none the less true ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips

... never have been published, if they had not received the patronage of the Bombay Government. However interesting the Brahmanas may be to students of Indian literature, they are of small interest to the general reader. The greater portion of them is simply twaddle, and what is worse, theological twaddle. No person who is not acquainted beforehand with the place which the Brahmanas fill in the history of the Indian mind, could read more than ten pages without being disgusted. To the historian, however, and to the philosopher they are of infinite importance—to ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller

... down. With the exception, however, of this propensity to locomotion, Satan has not one Satanic quality. Mad Tom had told us that "the prince of darkness is a gentleman"; but we had yet to learn that he is a respectable and pious gentleman, whose principal fault is that he is something of a twaddle and far too liberal of his good advice. That happy change in his character which Origen anticipated, and of which Tillotson did not despair, seems to be rapidly taking place. Bad habits are not eradicated in a moment. It is not strange, therefore, that so old an offender ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... insane. I don't care to read any more such twaddle and I won't pay for the services of such a man out of the ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon

... "Twaddle," said Clayton Spencer, and put the book away. That was the sort of stuff men like Rodney lived on. In a ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... are yet felt only as blemishes in the admirable beauty and brilliance of the poem. The successive scenes are given with so firm and clear a touch—there is such a sense of form, the language is such a dexterous elevation of the ordinary social twaddle into the mock-heroic, that it is impossible not to recognize a consummate artistic power. The dazzling display of true wit and fancy blinds us for the time to the want of that real tenderness and humour, which ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... does the poor man work for? But I'm not going to argue that kindergarten twaddle of the college highbrows, Wayland. I'm out for all I can make; so is the Smelter; so are you; but the point is you've fought this timber thing; you have filed and filed and filed your recommendations for suit to be instituted; so have the ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... with a short laugh. "Well, I've heard that it would do great things, but I never took any stock in it; it seemed like so much twaddle to me. You are sure you're ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... childish theatres. There the Juliets and Isoldes, the Romeos and Tristans, might be our mothers and fathers. Not so the English actress. The heroine she impersonates is not allowed to discuss the elemental relations of men and women: all her romantic twaddle about novelet-made love, all her purely legal dilemmas as to whether she was married or "betrayed," quite miss our hearts and worry our minds. To console ourselves we must just look at her. We do so; and her beauty feeds our starving emotions. Sometimes we grumble ungallantly ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... loosen or tighten them at pleasure. I will be measured for a conscience after the newest fashion, one that will stretch handsomely as occasion may require. Am I to blame? It is the tailor's affair? I have heard a great deal of twaddle about the so-called ties of blood—enough to make a sober man beside himself. He is your brother, they say; which interpreted, means that he was manufactured in the same mould, and for that reason he must needs be sacred in ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... doubtful, judging from Branwell's letters and his verses, whether anything much better than his father's 'Cottage in the Wood' would have resulted from his following the advice of James Montgomery. Fluent ease, often on the verge of twaddle, with here and there a bright, felicitous touch, with here and there a smack of the conventional hymn-book and pulpit twang—such weak and characterless effusions are all that is left of the passion-ridden pseudo-genius of Haworth. Real genius is perhaps seldom of such ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson

... by the Peace Conference, as it is called, I think the merest twaddle—and I use the term with entire respect to the members—the merest twaddle that ever was presented to a thinking people. The proposition of the Senator from Kentucky has some sense in it. If he chooses to desert his own, I shall not complain of him; for I know that ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden

... and all that had dazed her. It does sometimes—lots of 'em; makes the most virtuous wife wish she could be a sinner and resume her normal goodness next day. But Kitty is different. And it was only that infernal twaddle caused it and made her write you that letter. A week hadn't passed before she wrote to me and told me how miserable she was. But I knew all through she didn't care a d———about me. And that's the ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke

... think.' 'Yes,' he said, 'on the whole, but they were a little too strong, too violent against the Bill,' because Harrowby had declared that he felt the same objection to the measure he had felt before. Sefton was outrageous, talked a vast deal of amusing nonsense, 'that he had never heard such twaddle,' 'but that the success was complete, and he looked on Harrowby and Wharncliffe as the two most enviable men in the kingdom.' I have no doubt that all the ultras will be deeply mortified at the moderation of ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville

... idea of the scope we try to cover at the other kind, but perhaps this will be more entertaining." She turned more directly to Frank. "A business meeting here always makes me think of the 'Antis,' and their twaddle about woman's sphere, which they would like to reduce to ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens

... laughed, treating the whole affair as a huge joke, "how romantic it sounds! Fancy meeting you again after all this time, and saving your life! I suppose the papers will be full of it if they get to know—gallant rescue, and all that kind of twaddle." ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux

... We are souls, and we shall be angels, with blue wings on our shoulder-blades. Do come to my assistance: is it not Tertullian who says that the blessed shall travel from star to star? Very well. We shall be the grasshoppers of the stars. And then, besides, we shall see God. Ta, ta, ta! What twaddle all these paradises are! God is a nonsensical monster. I would not say that in the Moniteur, egad! but I may whisper it among friends. Inter pocula. To sacrifice the world to paradise is to let slip the prey for the shadow. Be the dupe ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... knitting-needles, and her own little ailments and cossetings. Griffiths, luckily, was a woman of much the same tastes as her ladyship, only somewhat of a more active temperament; and they were most stedfast friends. It was such a comfort to Lady Cashel to have some one to whom she could twaddle! ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope

... at Hookham-cum-Snivey Church, by the Reverend Peter Twaddle, on the occasions, of building a dusthole for the national schools; of outfitting the missionaries who are exported annually to be eaten by the Catawampous Indians; on the death of Mr. Grubly, the retired cheesemonger, who endowed the weathercock; and in aid ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various

... lad? Who taught us that drawing-room twaddle? Call on your grandmother! Listen to the wind among the pines! ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster

... fire," over the burning words of some Brontean Pythoness, but when you open the last thrilling work of Maggie Marigold, and are immediately submerged "in a weak, washy, everlasting flood" of insipidity, twaddle, bosh, and heart-rending sorrow, you do not shut the book with a jerk. Why not? Because in the dismal distance you dimly descry two figures swimming, floating, struggling towards each other, and a languid soupon of curiosity detains you till you have ascertained, that, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... genuinely honest so very honest. Namby-pamby in these days is not thrown away if it be introduced in the proper quarters. Divine peeresses are no longer interesting, though possessed of every virtue; but a pattern peasant or an immaculate manufacturing hero may talk as much twaddle as one of Mrs Ratcliffe's heroines, and still be listened to. Perhaps, however, Mr Sentiment's great attraction is in his second-rate characters. If his heroes and heroines walk upon stilts, as heroes and heroines, ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope

... deeper, and more lasting consequences of our public acts and institutions in moulding the next generation. It will not, I think, be amiss to pass beyond policy for a space, and to insist—even with heaviness—that however convenient an institution may be, however much it may, in the twaddle of the time, be a "natural growth," and however much the "product of a long evolution," yet, if it does not mould men into fine and vigorous forms, it has to be destroyed. We "save the state" for the sake of our children, that, at least, is the New ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... the Flying Dutchman comes in, and the storm music rages once more. It is woven into Vanderdecken's magnificent scena (surely the greatest opera scena written up to the year 1842); and then disappears. In its place we get pages of (for Wagner) wearisome twaddle. The reason is obvious. For the purpose of explaining the subsequent movement of the drama there is a lot of conversation which Weber, in the Singspiel, would have left to be spoken, and Mozart would ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... obedience to my eye. I saw the likeness, and knew it depended on the features, and that, if I could copy the features exactly, the likeness would follow just as surely as the blood follows the knife. I found early that all the talk about catching the expression was mere twaddle; the expression would take care of itself if ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.

... the burden of her song, till at last I got very tired of it, and on the third evening I broke away from her, saying, "Law, granny how you do twaddle!" upon which she called me a good-for-nothing young blackguard, and felt positively sure that I should be hanged. The consequence was, that granny and I did not part good friends; and I sincerely ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat

... back in his cab and smoked his cigar he cursed vigorously. "Damn the cursed half-breed of a fellow! He's clever enough, and all that; but what the devil Helen can see in him to make me invite him down to Te Ariri I don't know. Curse her infernal twaddle about the rights of humanity and such fustian. Once you are my wife, my sweet, romantic cousin, I'll knock all that idiotic bosh on the head. It's bad enough to sit in the House and listen to this fellow frothing, without having to bring a quarter-bred savage into one's own family. However, ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke

... allotted can be filled with political gossip and personal items, with here and there some inspired twaddle about foreign personages, of whom no one has ever heard before or desires to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various

... again, surrounded by a circle of admirers—men and women—an oasis of intelligence, it seemed to him as he listened, in a desert of twaddle. She smiled at him with her eyes, as he looked at her through the press, and just as he had won to a place by her side, the tide was sent flooding into a large room where, it was announced, Professor Blatherwick and Madame le Claire ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick

... your penny. You set your prize subject. In the former case you hope for wax vestas, and you get butterscotch. In the latter, you hope for something at least readable, and you get the most complete, terrible, uninspired twaddle that was ever written on paper. The boy mind'—here the ash of his cigar fell off on to his waistcoat—'the merely boy mind is incapable ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse

... at all! Lord! how you twaddle and waddle and squall Like common-bred geese and ganders! What sad little bad little figures you make To the rich Miss K., whose plainest ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... with a strident laugh; "and where did you pick up your sense of right, madam, I should like to know? From what Methodist parson's hypocritical twaddle have you learnt to lay down the law to your poor old father about the sense of right? 'Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land,' miss, that's what your Bible teaches ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... she begins to fear we have been somewhat hasty, asks a little time for reconsideration of her precise sentiment toward me, and feels meanwhile in honour bound to release me from our engagement! Yet if upon mature deliberation—eh, oh, yes! twaddle! and commonplace! and dashed, of course, with a ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al

... evening before, after a bitter quarrel; and he had left her, vowing that he would not return till she sent for him. He had waited the whole day, in vain, for a sign. What was Dove with his pompous twaddle to him? Every slight sound on the stairs or in the passage meant more. He was listening, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... whom have we to take their place?" It is not until an age has receded into history, and all its mediocrity has dropped away from it, that we can see it as it is—as a group of men of genius. We forget the immense amount of twaddle that the great epochs produced. The total amount of fine literature created in a given period of time differs from epoch to epoch, but it does not differ much. And we may be perfectly sure that our own age will make a favourable impression upon that excellent judge, ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett

... like a capable woman. Now you're behaving and thinking like a fashionable doll. Isn't that true? I appeal to your intelligence, to your mind, to everything in you that lifts you out of the ordinary ruck. Your precious word compromised is only the twaddle of a countrified miss. ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux

... tell you, sir, that a country gentleman residing on his estate is as valuable a member of society as a man of fashion in London who lives by plundering those who have more money and less wit than himself;' when De Ros turned to Glengall and said, 'Richard, there appears to me to be a great deal of twaddle in this play; besides, you throw over ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... publish his Recollections, for there are few men who have had the opportunities of seeing so much of life and character as he has, and still fewer who at an advanced age could write an Autobiography in which we have opinions without twaddle, gossip without malice, and stories not marred in the ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... in all that silly love-making," he rejoined roughly, "it is good enough for the loutish peasants of the alfold (lowlands); they are sentimental and stupid: an educated man does not make use of a lot of twaddle when he woos ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... which work one can understand the hearty contempt and antipathy which such an athletic and boisterous genius as Fielding's must have entertained. He couldn't do otherwise than laugh at the puny Cockney bookseller, pouring out endless volumes of sentimental twaddle, and hold him up to scorn as a moll-coddle and a milksop. His genius had been nursed on sack-posset, and not on dishes of tea. His muse had sung the loudest in tavern choruses, had seen the daylight streaming in over thousands ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... disposal, a perfect composure, and a freedom from all effort, that were in their way the perfection of breeding. I have seen these often in the peasantry, in the poor. It is your middle classes, with their incessant flutter, and bluster, and twitter, and twaddle; with their perpetual strain after effect; with their deathless desire to get one rung of the ladder higher than they ever can get; with their preposterous affectations, their pedantic unrealities, their morbid dread of remark, their everlasting imitations, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... up such vulgar twaddle?" Kate demanded with her clear face. "How does such stuff, in this hole, get ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James

... awoke to the fact that he was beginning to give vent to a lot of twaddle, and speedily, pleading fatigue, she paid no further notice to him. This compelled Pao-y to at last be quiet and go to sleep. By the morrow, all recollection of the discussion ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... a dozen pages of similar twaddle, meant to show that the mayor of Amiens was a most tolerant prince, in that he had not ordered the destruction of every cross set ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... nor favor, denouncing bad work by the most illustrious hands and commending obscure merit. The "impudent literary cliques" who puffed each other's books; the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings who manufactured verses for the "Annuals;" and the twaddle of the "genial" incapables who praised them in flabby reviews—all these Poe exposed with ferocious honesty. Nor, though his writings are unmoral, can they be called in any sense immoral. His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... positively wrong in it, but there were a great many vulgar suggestions and unpleasant innuendoes. As a dramatic critic said in my hearing a day or two later, when discussing the popular entertainments of London, 'Most of these shows consist of vulgar, brainless twaddle.' Still, the audience laughed and cheered, and when the curtain finally fell, there was a good deal of applause. Certainly the entertainment would be a great contrast to the experiences which the lads who were home on leave had been ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking

... soles over bare solid rock, even if given the starting-point. No—he had got to die of thirst, starvation, and vultures, barring miracles of luck—and he had never had any good luck—for luck existed, undoubtedly, in spite of mealy-mouthed platitude-makers and twaddle about everything being pre-arranged and ordained with care and deliberation by ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren

... you?" continued the Marquis; "I want to hear a little more. How much were you paid for giving me this twaddle? Answer ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... Titiano!' she wrote, some years later; 'how that name recalls the happy, happy hours I passed with you at Eartham; when by the title 'Muse' you summoned me to the morning walk!' Amongst the drossy twaddle which passed current as poetry at Eartham, a sonnet in Romney's honour by a true poet—William Cowper—may be counted ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook

... with kings, and connived with the Czar; His Bulgarian twaddle once caused a great war, Where thousands were slain, but what did he heed, He still went to Church the lessons ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright

... indifferently bad, as you choose to look at it. In Bob's world there are good things and bad things, and the good is good and the bad is bad. Bob knows nothing of the cant which makes the robber monopolist only the sad victim of forces outside his control. Bob knows nothing of the sentimental twaddle about that interesting class of people who are more sinned against than sinning. Bob, like Nature, indulges in no fine distinctions. When he meets a bad Sultan he punches his head. When he meets a good Sultan, nothing is too good to believe ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky

... all this twaddle and get down to work," he said sharply. "We've wasted too much time squabbling over that miserable cripple. Let's brace up and make our plans. You are for destroying the ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett

... nostrils. Its liberty is the wildest license; its love the essence of the lowest lust! Priapus—worshipping obscenity. Rant and rubbish. Linguistic silliness. Inhumanly insolent. Apotheosis of Sweat. Mouthings of a mountebank. Venomously malignant. Pretentious twaddle. Degraded helot of literature. His work, like a maniac's robe, bedizened with fluttering tags of a thousand colors. Roaming, like a drunken satyr, with inflamed blood, through every field of lascivious ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler

... did the same in Italy. By the close of the fourteenth century, the love-lorn wailings of Petrarch's sonnets and others of the same kind were taken off by caricaturists; and the solemn air of this form of verse was parodied in lines of mystic twaddle. A constant invitation to parody was offered by the 'Divine Comedy,' and Lorenzo il Magnifico wrote the most admirable travesty in the style of the 'Inferno' (Simposio or I Beoni). Luigi Pulci obviously imitates the Improvisatori in his 'Morgante,' and both his ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... Reviewer—you censor morum, you who pique yourself (and justly and honorably in the main) upon your character of gentleman, as well as of writer, suppose, not that you yourself invent and indite absurd twaddle about gentlemen's private meetings and transactions, but pick this wretched garbage out of a New York street, and hold it up for your readers' amusement—don't you think, my friend, that you might have been better employed? Here, in my Saturday Review, and ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... even the protection of pleats and gathers; and insult good, sound, wholesome common sense with the sickening affectations they are pleased to call 'aesthetics.' Don't waste your time, and dilute your own mind by quoting the silly twaddle of a poor girl who was turned loose too early on society, who falls on her knees in ecstasies before a hideous broken-nose tea-pot from some filthy hovel in Japan; and who would not dare to admire the loveliest bit of Oiron pottery, or precious old ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... she had read—not connecting it however with her right-hand neighbour; and while I strained my ear for his reply I heard him, to my stupefaction, call back gaily, his mouth full of bread: "Oh, it's all right—the usual twaddle!" ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James

... thing won't happen, and therefore let there be an end of it. I hate the twaddle talk of love, whether it's about myself or about any one else. It makes me feel ashamed of my sex, when I find that I cannot talk of myself to another woman without being supposed to be either in love or thinking of love cither looking for it or avoiding it. When it comes, ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope

... you are"—he gave the dead man words—"what a colossal humbug. You and your nice Sunday go-to-meeting thoughts. It's so easy, isn't it? to dress up one's rottenness in pretty sentimental twaddle. But you don't deceive anybody. You don't even deceive yourself, not for three minutes at a stretch. You know that underneath all your humbugging pretenses the black sin is unchanged. You are no better and no worse than I was. You are exactly ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... you should think that because a woman looks like a school-girl she cannot write a clever book if gifted that way, is a condition of non-intelligence I fail to fathom! You speak of this author as a 'he.' Do you think only a male creature can produce a work of genius? Look at the twaddle men turn out every day in the form of novels alone! Many of them are worse than the worst weak fiction by women. I tell you I've lived long enough to know that a woman's brain can beat a man's if she cares to test it, so long ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli

... inartistic, and helplessly, childishly stupid as to any literary merits,—a mere mass of gossip and twaddle; but after all, when one remembers the taste of the thousands of circulating-library readers, it must not be considered the less likely to be widely read on that account. It is only once in a century that a writer ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... repeat the tragedy. I shall not strike you here and now, because the act might mean my arrest and detention on no one knows what sort of a trumped-up charge. You need not bother me with any silly twaddle about swords and pistols I shall pay no attention to it. Ordinarily Americans do not delay actual combat. We usually fight it out on the spot and the best man wins. I will, however, give you the chance to deliberate over ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon

... the testy interruption; "but the world is not so easily led in matters of religion. The message, as you say, is divine; but it may sound like meaningless twaddle to the world at large. If we are to heal mankind and dispel the heresy of disease and death, why can't Holiest Mother save herself? Mind you, I am looking at this thing with the ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... but such infamous creatures as Raeburn had no business to have daughters. No doubt she would stand it very well anything, you know, for a little notoriety. Such people lived for notoriety. Of course the papers had put in a lot of twaddle that he had said on his death bed 'always had tried to work entirely for the good of humanity,' and that sort of nonsense. This coffee ice is excellent. Let me get you another," after which the subject would be dropped, and the speakers would return to the ball room to improve upon Raeburn's ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... "Thunderer," and tersely put! Hammer this into BULL's big noddle, Until he just puts down his foot On temporising timid twaddle, And you will do a vast deal more To keep our drowsy British Lion In health, and strength and wakeful roar Than all the schemes Tryon may try on. Battle's not always to the strong; The race, though, must be to—the Fleet, With ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 13, 1890 • Various

... love and appreciation at your command, but let it be intelligent appreciation, not blind admiration or prejudiced disapproval. Do you recollect how you felt and dreamed and gushed when you were a girl, the pages of sentimental twaddle (as you now call it) which you confided to the diary which you burned in disgust at twenty-one? Do you remember how genuine your distresses then seemed? You can smile at the girl you once were, but still you find ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland

... of beer from which he had been drinking. "You talk sometimes that white-livered stuff about not hitting a man back if he wants to hit you, and you drag in your conscience, and prate about all men being brothers, and that sort of twaddle. A full-blooded Englishman don't like it, because we are all of us out to protect what we've got, any way and anyhow. But that doesn't alter the fact that there's something wrong in the world when we're driven to do this protecting ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... after a pause. "They are always repeating the same idiotic words: 'You can't create art out of science,' says one; 'Mechanical appliances kill poetry,' says another; and a pack of fools wail over the fate of the flowers, as though anybody wished the flowers any harm! I'm sick of all such twaddle; I should like to answer all that snivelling with some work of open defiance. I should take a pleasure in shocking those good people. Shall I tell you what was the finest thing I ever produced since I first ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... lowered, the Kearsarge fired no less than five shots into her. We believe that Captain Winslow does not deny the charge; but asserts that he was unaware of the act of surrender. In his letter to the Daily News, he declares the accusation that he had been guilty of this act to be "twaddle" (we quote ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes

... fair one—a cup of wine next. And after that shall Rome make Senators of her women and thou shalt be Brutus, for, by the gods, thou makest a ripe speech. Here's to thee, Claudia, my love. A Roman thou art though much taken with the twaddle of a Jew. And here is to the Jew. May he live long to oil his beard, haggle over fish in the market place, cry 'Unclean' at sight of a Gentile and pray in musty synagogues for the kingdom greater than that of Rome. Let us now to bed and see thou hast no dreams to disturb thy rest," ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock

... went on Dyce, "I meet my supporters. Lady Ogram gave me an account of them yesterday. Tell me what you think. May I be myself with these people? Or must I talk twaddle. I dislike twaddle, as you know, but I don't want to spoil my chances. You understand how I look at this business? My object in life is to gain influence, that I may spread my views. Parliament, I take it, is the best means. Considering the nature of the average elector, I don't think one need ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing

... misery crept over me, as I reflected that perchance I had left those most dear to return to them no more. But I forget; a description of private feelings is, to uninterested readers, only so much twaddle, besides being more egotistical than even an account of personal adventures could extenuate; so, with the exception of a few extracts from my "log," I shall jump at once from the English Channel to the more exciting ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey

... ended; to wish existence, too, had ceased; and so to sit down, an aching hollow, and take a part and sham an interest in twaddle to please others; such are woman's feats. How like nothing at ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade

... literary gift, but it was new to Miss Winchelsea to find herself deploring the want of gifts in a friend. That letter was even criticised aloud in the safe solitude of Miss Winchelsea's study, and her criticism, spoken with great bitterness, was "Twaddle!" It was full of just the things Miss Winchelsea's letter had been full of, particulars of the school. And of Mr. Snooks, only this much: "I have had a letter from Mr. Snooks, and he has been over to see me on two Saturday afternoons running. He talked about Rome and you; we both talked about ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... said Murray, fidgeting. "She has been very patient and kind of an evening in listening to me, though I am afraid I have often bored her terribly with my long-winded twaddle ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn

... day with her at Mr. Doggett's one of the liberal merchant princes of that city. The result of that day's cogitation was one of the most cutting speeches that the "Gentle Anna," as the Tribune called her, ever made. It was a severe, but just criticism of all the twaddle of the Western press after the Chicago Woman's Suffrage Convention. Liberty Hall was crowded with a most enthusiastic audience, and although the press was not very complimentary the next day, the people who listened were delighted. She was advertised ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... difficulties. To prevent or attempt to prevent the owner of a garden from shooting the bullfinches or blackbirds and so on that steal his fruit, or destroy his buds, is absurd. It is equally absurd to fine—what twaddle!—a lad for taking a bird's egg. The only point upon which I am fully clear is that the birdcatcher who takes birds on land not his own or in his occupation, on public property, as roads, wastes, commons, and so forth, ought ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies

... helper under a difficulty, as a monitor who is encouraging rather than severe. Mr. Cleves has the wonderful art of preaching sermons which the wheelwright and the blacksmith can understand; not because he talks condescending twaddle, but because he can call a spade a spade, and knows how to disencumber ideas of their wordy frippery. Look at him more attentively, and you will see that his face is a very interesting one —that there is a great deal of humour and feeling playing in his ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot

... soon saw I was wrong. It increased my respect for women in a way. To find, for instance, that you could do what you do single-handed and make light of it; that was rather an eye-opener. Whenever any pal of mine talks twaddle about what women can't do, I shall bring him ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts

... evening I spent there with musical performances. But here, too, the old leaven of Oxford burst forth sometimes. Of course, we generally performed the music of Handel and other classical authors; Mendelssohn's compositions were still considered as mere twaddle by some of the old school. At one of these evenings, the old organist of New College, with his wooden leg, after sitting through a rehearsal of Mendelssohn's Hymn of Praise, which I was conducting at the pianoforte, ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller

... Twaddle of this sort was being bandied about when Trimalchio came in; mopping his forehead and washing his hands in perfume, he said, after a short pause, "Pardon me, gentlemen, but my stomach's been on strike for the past few days and the doctors disagreed about the cause. But pomegranate rind ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... in your own house, so long as you do not attempt to interfere with my plans. Sit up, girl, if you choose, and talk. I am prepared to listen even though your twaddle bores me." ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... truly enough the evil and imperfection in the world. He notes the weakness and failures of the best intentioned, takes cognizance of the low motives that so often dominate, and bases his conclusions on them. He spurns the idealistic twaddle of those who, he says, are guided by their hopes rather than by ordinary good sense, and fancies himself a practical man. He ...
— Hidden from the Prudent - The 7th William Penn Lecture, May 8, 1921 • Paul Jones

... there, baffled and sombre, biting his pen and wondering what was meant by the "rewards" of literature, he generally ended by tossing away the composition deflowered by Mr. Locket and trying his hand at the sort of twaddle that Mrs. Ryves might be able to set to music. Success in these experiments wouldn't be a reward of literature, but it might very well become a labour of love. The experiments would be pleasant enough for him if they were pleasant for his inscrutable neighbour. That was the ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James

... attention to the innocent twaddle of poor old Katie, though at a less horrible moment it might have served to amuse her. She hurried as fast as her agitation would permit her from the scene of the dreadful tragedy, unconscious how closely this poor murdered ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... man; and there is nothing great in man but his soul." With this in view, how absurd to talk about "fixed laws" and "unchangeable order," in a way to keep man in his trouble from God. It is all the twaddle of the conceit of man setting himself up to judge and limit his maker. "To whom then will ye liken Me, or shall I be equal? saith the Holy One." The Creator is greater than his creation; the law giver is supreme over all law. He created the ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various

... seizes us in even the prose of such a book as Rousseau's Confessions. Macaulay thought the Prelude a poorer and more tiresome Excursion, with the old flimsy philosophy about the effect of scenery on the mind, the old crazy mystical metaphysics, and the endless wilderness of twaddle; still he admits that there are some fine descriptions and energetic declamations. All Macaulay's tastes and habits of mind made him a poor judge of such a poet as Wordsworth. He valued spirit, energy, pomp, stateliness of form ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley

... French and Germans, but who have never lived by sea-power, and peoples who, like the Russians and Chinese, have neither sea-power nor a sea-folk's blood, never use sea terms in their ordinary talk. They may dress up a landsman and put him on the stage to talk the same sort of twaddle that our own stage sailors talk—all about "shiver my timbers," "hitching his breeches," and "belaying the slack of your jaw." But they do not talk the real sea sense we have learnt from the handy man of whose strange life ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood

... for the marsupial martyr Is based upon an ancient nursery model; But he will find that he has caught a Tartar, Who hints that Punch is talking heartless twaddle. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various

... Ardent, The Illuminated, The Unconquered, The Intrepid, or The Dissonant, The Sterile, The Insipid, The Obtuse, The Astray, The Stunned, and they were all devoted to one purpose, namely, the production and the perpetuation of twaddle. It is prodigious to think of the incessant wash of slip-slop which they poured out in verse; of the grave disputations they held upon the most trivial questions; of the inane formalities of their sessions. At the meetings of a famous ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... that?" he said, then he settled back in his chair and looked hard at us. His eyes were as keen as frost; but they twinkled—just a little, as I have discovered they can and do twinkle if one isn't afraid to say right out what one means, without unnecessary fuss and twaddle. ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse

... as reasonable enough. At the time I thought it pretty vapid twaddle. Four quiet days I spent at my North Shore lodging, and then (by Mr. Foster's freely and most kindly given permission) back to the Chronicle office again, just as before, save for one detail—I no longer had a banking account. But was it really, 'just as before,' in any single sense? ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... keep your twaddle to yourselves!" he exclaimed impatiently, "or take my advice, and make for the nearest duck pond. You've both gone over your depth in the Governor's Madeira, and I advise you to keep quiet until you've had your heads in a basin of ice water. There, get ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow

... day forth, acquired an interest in Danyers's eyes. She was like a volume of unindexed and discursive memoirs, through which he patiently plodded in the hope of finding embedded amid layers of dusty twaddle some precious allusion to the subject of his thought. When, some months later, he brought out his first slim volume, in which the remodelled college essay on Rendle figured among a dozen, somewhat overstudied "appreciations," ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton

... couldn't drive that into an Oriental skull. This is what makes the study of precious stones so interesting. There is always some enchantment, some evil spell. To handle the drums is to invite a minor accident. Call it twaddle; probably is; and yet I have reason to believe that there's ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath

... Pennine Alps, stoopid! From their name they would seem a suitable residence for a person who scribbles twaddle in Magazines—ahem! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various

... (ASCII 1111110, ''). Also called 'squiggle', 'sqiggle' (sic — pronounced /skig'l/), and 'twaddle', but twiddle is the most common term. 2. A small and insignificant change to a program. Usually fixes one bug and generates several new ones (see also {shotgun debugging}). 3. /vt./ To change something in a small way. Bits, for example, are often twiddled. Twiddling a switch ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... will write an American book," said Bart, laughing. "But your question is a good answer to my solemn twaddle ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle

... thought it "a human book, written out of the heart of a live man, not merely out of the brain of an author, full of tenderness and pathos, without a scrap of sentimentality, of sense without dogmatism, of earnestness without twaddle—a book that makes one feel friends at once and for always with the man or woman who wrote it." She guessed the author was "a man of middle age, with a wife, from whom he has got those beautiful feminine touches in his book, a ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton

... is all right now," said Arthur, congratulating himself. "Graeme has too much sense to be put about by mamma's twaddle, and there is no fear as far as Fanny and she ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson

... watch'd the girls dance: N is the Nose she turned up at each glance: O is the Olga (just then in its prime): P is the Partner who wouldn't keep time: Q 's a Quadrille, put instead of the Lancers: R the Remonstrances made by the dancers: S is the Supper, where all went in pairs: T is the Twaddle they talked on the stairs: U is the Uncle who 'thought we'd be going': V is the Voice which his niece replied 'No' in: W is the Waiter, who sat up till eight: X is his Exit, not rigidly straight: Y is a Yawning fit caused by the Ball: Z ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.

... drunk the company braced themselves to the mental work of the afternoon, and although, as a matter of course, a good deal of twaddle was spoken, there was also much that threw light on the subject of ocean telegraphy. One of the leading merchants said, in his opening remarks: "Few of those present, I daresay, are really familiar with ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne

... of that, my reader, as a specimen of embittered eloquence and nervous pith? It is something to read massive and energetic sense, in days wherein mystical twaddle, and subtlety which hopelessly defies all logic, are sometimes thought extremely fine, if they are set out in a style which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... can I?... Very unpleasant, no doubt, but I rather fancy it will affect more important people than you. There is no use whining about it.... No, I couldn't possibly. You must take your chance.... That's enough, sir. Nonsense! I have something more important to do than to listen to such twaddle." ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle

... embodiment and representative of cat-hood in the abstract, which was a most important element in the economy of the universe. It was when Aunt Charlotte stigmatised these philosophical reflections as a pack of impertinent twaddle that Austin had had the audacity to say that she was ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour

... arabs, for the want of education, ambition, animation, and push, are indulging in practices that are fast working their own destruction and those they are brought into contact with, and a great deal of this may lay at the door of flattery, twaddle, petting, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith



Words linked to "Twaddle" :   hokum, palaver, vernacular, taradiddle, babble, verbalise, clack, piffle, drool, blither, bilgewater, twaddler, lingo, gabble, gibber, tosh, bosh, speak, humbug, talk, utter, blabber, boloney, prate, smatter, bunk, meaninglessness, tommyrot, tittle-tattle, tarradiddle, jargon, blather, cant, mouth, patois, maunder



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