Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 2, 2025
Geoffrey Barrington was accustomed to country houses in England, with their broad acres and their lavish luxuriance of scent and blossom. This niggling landscape art of the Japanese seemed to him mean and insignificant. He much preferred the garden at Count Saito's home. Count Saito, the late Ambassador at the Court of St.
"Well well, he'll have tears in his eyes before I go after him!" And with that there was the rasp of a third "niggling" match, faintly-heard, far in, a momentary reflection, a tiny glance-coal, in the fissure's leering mouth! And and, following that, a shriek! A shriek, headlong, sinking and pitching dying like a falling star, as if some clutch were stifling it. "Hea-vens!"
His friends have seen him destroy a finished picture because, in his eyes, it looked too smooth. "It is overdone," he would say; "it is niggling work." With his eccentric, yet lofty nature, with a nervous organization and all that it entails of torment and delight, the craving for perfection becomes morbid. Intellectually he is akin to Sterne, though he is not a literary worker.
"Tenez, madame this is what Paris does for our young. My neighbor yonder," and she pointed, as only Frenchwomen point, sticking her thumb into the air to designate a point back of her bench, "my neighbor had a son like Paul. He too was always niggling at something. He niggled so well a rich cousin sent him up to Paris.
But in the afternoon he gave himself to all the delightful bye-tasks: the works of supererogation, the excursions into side paths, the niggling with proofs, the toying with style, the potterings and polishings, the ruminations, and rewritings and refinements which make the joy of the man of letters.
"Ah," he said, "what a blessed thing to be in the open air again to be quit of all their niggling and naggling, to be quit of that pompous old fool the Rector, and of that hypocrite Joliffe, and of that pedant of a doctor! Why does he want to waste money on cementing the vaults? It's only digging up pestilences; and they won't spend a farthing on the organ.
The full power of our men must be thrown into military effort. And, then, if as a nation we have brains to pool, we will not stand niggling, but will throw women doctors in to render their service, grant to the nurse corps what it needs to ensure efficiency, throw open the technical schools to girls as well as to boys, modify the college course to meet the facts of life.
And much as the women of our race may resent that their rôle in matrimony is the one of petty detail while the man enjoys the "broader interests," I think few of us would exchange our lot for one of constant niggling interference. It induces a certain pleasure to reflect that so many Frenchwomen have reformed.
NIGGLING, which means idling, wasting time, doing anything slowly, may be derived from some other Indo-European source, but in English Gipsy it means to go slowly, "to potter along," and in fact it is the same as the English word.
Moreover, instead of sinking his facade modestly a little, eighteen inches would have been enough he has carried the face of his niggling little buttresses flush with the massive walls of the great towers. I wished I could have had M. Viollet-le-Duc there by both his ears and knocked his head against the abomination he has created. He had a splendid opportunity, and through incapacity he lost it.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking