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Cobblers   /kˈɑblərz/   Listen
Cobblers

noun
1.
Nonsense.
2.
A man's testicles (from Cockney rhyming slang: cobbler's awl rhymes with ball).






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Cobblers" Quotes from Famous Books



... which circled the base of the hill had been partially cleared of fallen rock and stonework, and the car could pick its way between the crazy shop-fronts, where notices of vanished cobblers, manicurists, butchers, flapped before caverns hollowed by fire, upon fingers of ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold

... Here the sons of adversity meet the children of calamity, and here the children of calamity meet the offspring of sin. Bankrupt brokers, boot-blacks, blacklegs, and blacksmiths here assemble together; and cast-away tinkers, watch-makers, quill-drivers, cobblers, doctors, farmers, and lawyers compare past experiences and talk of old times. Wrecked on a desert shore, a man-of-war's crew could quickly found an Alexandria by themselves, and fill it with all the things which go to make ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville

... on leaving England, had renounced their more leisurely occupations and professions to practise trades in Leyden,—Brewster and Winslow as printers, Allerton as tailor, Dr. Samuel Fuller as say-weaver and others as carpenters, wool-combers, masons, cobblers, pewterers and in other crafts. A few owned residences near the famous University of Leyden, where Robinson and Brewster taught. Some educational influences would thus fall upon their families. [Footnote: The England and Holland of the Pilgrims, Henry M. Dexter and Morton Dexter, ...
— The Women Who Came in the Mayflower • Annie Russell Marble

... masterpiece (for a masterpiece it is in its own undisciplined way) of the Witch of Edmonton, where the obvious signs of a play hastily cobbled up to meet a popular demand do not obscure the talents of the cobblers. It must be confessed that there is much less of Ford than of Rowley and Dekker in the piece, except perhaps its comparative regularity and the quite unreasonable and unintelligible bloodiness of the murder of Susan. In The Sun's Darling, due to Ford and Dekker, the numerous and ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... Cobblers-Awl, n. bird-name. The word is a provincial English name for the Avocet. In Tasmania, the name is applied to a Spine-Bill (q.v.) from the shape of ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... said Grenfell, looking at him solemnly. "If you weren't, I should regard that observation as an impertinence. I said the club, which is sufficient. They used to make you really excellent sherry cobblers there." ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... and bites his mistress's legs, who kicks and whips him. However, the players have struck these buffooneries (which indeed were calculated merely for the dregs of the people) out of Otway's tragedy; but they have still left in Shakspeare's Julius Caesar the jokes of the Roman shoemakers and cobblers, who are introduced in the same scene with Brutus and Cassius. You will undoubtedly complain, that those who have hitherto discoursed with you on the English stage, and especially on the celebrated Shakspeare, have taken notice only of his errors; and that no one ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire

... (as was admirably pointed out by my old friend and enemy Mr. Blatchford in a Clarion review) is very largely due to our mixing with only one social class, whose conventions are very strict, and to whose affectations we are accustomed. In cabmen, in cobblers, in charwomen, individuality is often pushed to the edge of insanity. But as long as the Thackerayan platform of gentility stood firm all this was, comparatively speaking, concealed. For the English, of all nations, have the most uniform upper class ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton

... Cobblers set afloat their establishments, calling attention to the fact by the creaking sign of a boot; and here on the rushing river a man can have his heel tapped ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop

... merchant was allowed to go at large. The animal used to walk about the streets in as quiet and familiar a manner as any of the people, and took great pleasure in visiting the shops, especially those which sold herbs and fruit, where he was well received, except by a couple of brutal cobblers, who, without any cause, took offense at the generous creature, and once or twice tried to wound his trunk with their awls. The noble animal, who knew it was beneath him to crush them, did not hesitate to punish them by other means. ...
— Anecdotes of Animals • Unknown

... ever seen apples—so thick that there was no picking of steps among them, and in some places it was impossible to set down the foot without treading upon and crushing them. Now the pulpy outer part, when thus crushed, is almost as gummy and sticky as cobblers' wax, and the consequence was, that walking over the nuts was no easy matter—in short it was both difficult and disagreeable. Sometimes a whole cluster of them would adhere to the soles of our shoes, or, ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid

... Pasquin and the Register, as to one who could condone public corruption. And as for the accusation of tampering with "Liberty" the like charge was brought, we may remember, by the "Happy Cobler of Portugal Street" against Fielding's Inquiry into the Encrease of Robbers. The literary cobblers who pursued Amelia with the abuse of their poor pens may very well be consigned to the oblivion of their political brother. The comment of one hostile pen cannot however be dismissed as coming from ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden

... tenth of the number of good officers which was required. Commissions were scattered profusely among idle cosherers who claimed to be descended from good Irish families. Yet even thus the supply of captains and lieutenants fell short of the demand; and many companies were commanded by cobblers, tailors and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... Chitrakar, Chitevari, Musabir.—The occupational caste of saddlers and cobblers. In 1911 about 4000 Mochis and 2000 Jingars were returned from the Central Provinces and Berar, the former residing principally in the Hindustani and the latter in the Marathi-speaking Districts. The name is derived from the Sanskrit mochika and the Hindustani ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... others—fishermen, gardeners, hunters, weavers, brickmakers, lime-burners, carpenters, and iron-workers—who live outside the silk market, and without the city, upon the shores of the sea and river. Within the silk market are many tailors, cobblers, bakers, carpenters, candle-makers, confectioners, apothecaries, painters, silversmiths, and those engaged in ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair

... Annie? And sweet potatoes. Jock loves 'em. And corn au gratin and some head lettuce." She glanced toward Jock in the hallway, then lowered her voice. "Annie," she teased, "just give us one of your peach cobblers, will you? You see he—he's going to be awfully—tired when he ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber

... great truth that from the same wood are formed the statues of idols and the rafters of gallows, kings' thrones and cobblers' stalls; and another strange thing is that from the same rags are made the paper on which the wisdom of sages is recorded, and the crown which is placed on the head of a fool. The same, too, may be said of children: one daughter is good and another ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile

... nimble with mace or cue; at the billiard-table, it is hinted, he can distinguish a kiss from a carom; at the sideboard (and here, if I were Mr. Charles Reade, I would whisper, in small type) he confounds not cocktails with cobblers; when, being in trade, he would sell you saltpetre, he tries you with flax-seed; when he would buy indigo, he offers you indigo at a sacrifice. Yet, in Asirvadam, if any quality is more noticeable than the sleek respectability of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... slippers were perfect curiosities—the soles were studded with great nails, while the upper leathers consisted of as many different pieces as the celebrated ship Argos. He had worn them during ten years, and the art of the ablest cobblers in Baghdad had been exhausted in preventing a total separation of the parts; in short, by frequent accessions of nails and patches they had become so heavy that they passed into a proverb, and anything ponderous was compared ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston

... makers). Glovers. Hosiers. Hatmakers. Capmakers. Cordwainers (cobblers). Saddlers. Girdlers and nailers. Spuriers and lorimers (makers of spurs, bits ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson

... activity of brain, is too unimportant to enter into the calculations of the great King Laissez-faire. Well, my dear Society, it is you that suffer for the mistake, after all, more than we. If you do tether your cleverest artisans on tailors' shopboards and cobblers' benches, and they—as sedentary folk will—fall a thinking, and come to strange conclusions thereby, they really ought to be much more thankful to you than you are to them. If Thomas Cooper had passed his first five-and-twenty ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... of guests won't do. Why, much learning is spoiling you. You remind me of the radical cobblers in the silly old novels, who, according to the authors, were prepared to trample down all good manners in the pursuit of utilitarian knowledge. The fact is, I begin to think that you have so muddled your ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris

... my dear sir, get into a passion?—Take things coolly. As the poet has observed, "Those only is gentlemen who behave as sich;" with such, then, consort, be they cobblers or dukes. Don't give us, cries the patriotic reader, any abuse of our fellow-countrymen (anybody else can do that), but rather continue in that good-humored, facetious, descriptive style with which your letter has commenced.—Your remark, sir, is perfectly just, and does honor ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... fowling pieces, and here and there a sword was brandished; but more of them were armed with clubs, and most of them trailed the mammoth pikes fashioned out of scythes, as formidable to the eye as they were clumsy to the hand. There were weavers, brewers, carpenters, smiths, masons, bricklayers, cobblers, and representatives of every other of the trades of peace among these improvised men of war. Bridgewater, like Taunton, had yielded so generously of its manhood to the service of the bastard Duke that for any to abstain whose age and strength admitted of his bearing ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... may occasionally have effectually sheltered card-playing; but when a young snob went so far as to light a cigar there, he had the pleasure of finishing it in the country, for he was rusticated. It was on a cognate occasion in Jesus College, in which cobblers' wax played a prominent part, that Dr. Corrie dismissed the culprit, after a severe lecture, with these admirable words: 'Your conduct, sir, is what a Christian would call profane, and a ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson

... pathetic dignity Kamienszka handed to the worthy patriot the proclamation of Numa Pompilius, in which that worthy confided to the tailors, cobblers, and bakers of the city the honourable task of making, stitching, and baking some thousands of boots, hose, and rolls for headquarters ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai

... below were seen craftsmen of all sorts, occupied in their respective callings. Carpenters hard at work with plane and saw; blacksmiths with bellows and anvil; tailors and cobblers, barbers and washerwomen, painters and armourers, rope-makers and butchers, and several others, besides the seamen engaged in the multifarious duties in which officers know well how to employ them. ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston

... judgment should be busily seeking the opinion of local courts upon transitory newspaper opinions of him-self and his writings. It is as if Dickens, when the whole English-reading world—judges on the bench and bishops in their studies, cobblers in their stalls and grooms in the stables—were all laughing over Pickwick, should have sued the Eatanswill Gazette for calling him a clown. Thackeray pronounces Cooper's Long Tom Coffin one of the prizemen of fiction. That is a final ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis

... sugar which she took up only in ounces. In short, the itch spread; the refuse of the vilest teas were run into this country from Holland, sold and bought at the prices I have mentioned; and at present there are very few cobblers in any of the burghs of this country who do not sit down gravely with their wives and families to tea.'[Footnote: Culloden Papers, 191.] What a frightful picture! We may laugh at it, but it really was frightful to one who sincerely believed that the money ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers

... desire to be tried by any one," said Joy; "but, sith I am to be put on my deliverance, I think that I shall stand a better chance in the hands of honorable gentlemen, some of whom have been soldiers, than in the dirty paws of tinkers, and cobblers, and ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams

... aska me "why not?" I say them Japanee man no want go talkee to lamp-post, shakee hands with pump, and try for makee light him cigar with door-key. So it make American man do. Drinkee no good for Japanee mans. Japanee TOMMY too much fond—what you call—cobblers. TOMMY bad boy. Got drunks. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various

... passed through every technical stage; from the tinted profile system of Polygnotus to the proper pictorial system of natural scenes, composed with natural backgrounds; and Peiraiikos is named as an artist of genre—a painter of barbers and cobblers, booths, asses, eatables, and such-like ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... happen to have families. Many of them are content to live unmarried. Some mend their broken fortunes by prudent alliances, and some leave a numerous progeny to pass into the obscurity from which their ancestors emerged; so that you may see on handcarts and cobblers' stalls names which, a few generations back, were upon parchments with broad seals, and tombstones with ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... lawyers of the town. Others studied the mystery of medicine, and bought a small stock of the nauseous drugs of the times, which they retailed with accompanying advice to their parishioners. Some were coopers, some carpenters, rope-makers, millers, or cobblers. One cobbler clergyman in Andover, Vermont, worked at his shoe-mending all the week with his Bible open on his bench before him, and he marked the page containing any text which bore on the subject of his coming sermon, ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle

... you mean!" exclaimed Des Meloises. "Well, Poulariez, all I have to say is that if this Colony is to be kept up for the sake of a lot of shopkeepers, wood-choppers, cobblers, and farmers, the sooner the King hands it over to the devil or the English ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... belonging to these various official bodies are obliged; through the privileges they enjoy, to follow the court "on its journeys that it may be provided on the spot with apothecaries, armorers, gunsmiths, sellers of silken and woollen hosiery, butchers, bakers, embroiderers, publicans, cobblers, belt-makers, candle-makers, hatters, pork-dealers, surgeons, shoemakers, curriers, cooks, pinkers, gilders and engravers, spur-makers, sweetmeat-dealers, furbishers, old-clothes brokers, glove-perfumers, watchmakers, booksellers, linen-drapers, wholesale and retail ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... more refined than our art; nothing more remunerative; we deal with the blessing of God, for we prepare the daily bread. The Lord's Prayer includes the baker, 'Give us this day our daily bread.' Is there any mention anywhere of butchers, of tailors or of cobblers? Well, does anyone pray for meat, for coats, or for books? Let me hear about him. But they do pray for their daily bread, don't they? And does the prayer-book say anything concerning councillors? What? Who knows anything ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai

... castle of Nothelert in Flintshire. The Earl sent for succor to the Constable of Chester, Roger Lacy, surnamed "Hell," on account of his fierceness. It was then fair-time at Chester, and the constable collected a miscellaneous rabble of fiddlers, players, cobblers, tailors, and all manner of debauched people, and led them to the relief of the Earl. At sight of this strange army the Welshmen fled; and forever after the Earl assigned to the constable of Chester power over all fiddlers, shoemakers, etc., within the bounds of Cheshire. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Cross, life does not stop. To most of the people gathered there, what takes place is no more than a common execution. Many of them are attending to it as to a tedious duty. Others work away at some menial task more or less connected with the Crucifixion, as unconcerned as cobblers humming over their last. Most of the people in the huge canvas are represented, as no doubt they were in life, without much personal feeling about Christ. His own friends are painted with all their grief and despair, but the others are allowed to feel as they please. The painter ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson

... two days I expect to be chronicled in ditty, and sung in woful ballad, to the tune of the Superannuated Maiden's Comfort, or the Bachelor's Fall; and upon the third, I shall be hanged in effigy, pasted up for the exemplary ornament of necessary houses and cobblers' stalls. Death, I can't think on't—I'll run into the danger ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve

... penetrated among them without their knowing it. They joined reason to faith, and claimed that religion had been divested of the superstitious practices that dishonoured it, just as in later days the booths that the cobblers, hucksters, and dealers in old clothes had built against the walls of the cathedrals were cleared away. The word, legend, which at first indicated what the faithful ought to read, soon suggested the idea of pious ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... long-continued oppression, many of the towns of the Middle Ages had admitted women to citizenship on an equal footing with men. In 1160 Louis le Jeune, of France, granted to Theci, wife of Yves, and to her heirs, the grand-mastership of the five trades of cobblers, belt-makers, sweaters, leather-dressers, and purse-makers. In Frankfort and the Silesian towns there were female furriers; along the middle Rhine many female bakers were at work. Cologne and Strasburg had female saddlers and embroiderers of coats-of-arms. Frankfort had female tailors, Nuremburg ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell

... shrimps their patience tax When put down people's backs - Surprising, too, what one can do with fifty fat black beedles - And treacle on a chair Will make a Quaker swear! Then sharp tin tacks And pocket squirts - And cobblers' wax For ladies' skirts - And slimy slugs On bedroom floors - And water jugs On open doors - Prepared with these cheap properties, amusing tricks to play, Upon a friend a man may ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert

... right-hand side of the Street of the Three Pebbles. Charlie's bar was on the left-hand side of the street, always crowded after six o'clock by officers of every regiment, drinking egg-nogs, Martinis, Bronxes, sherry cobblers, and other liquids, which helped men marvelously to forget the beastliness of war, and gave them the gift of laughter, and made them careless of the battles which would have to be fought. Young staff-officers were there, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... a party which, indeed, if any one had known it, was the most important of all; the only one which, in a true, high sense, was of importance at all; and for the sake of which, little as it then appeared to be so, the whole work was to be done—composed at that time merely of poor men, poor cobblers, weavers, carpenters, trade apprentices, and humble artisans, men of low birth and low estate, who might be seen at night stealing along the lanes and alleys of London, carrying with them some precious load of books which it was death to possess; ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... that thou sew up the rent." Accordingly the Envoy looked about him and, seeing there another stone, said to Pharaoh, "O my lord, here am I a stranger man nor have I with me aught of darning-gear; but I would have thee bid thy confidants amongst the cobblers to provide me out of this other stone with shoemaker's awls and needles and scissors wherewith I may sew up for thee the breach in yon millstone." Hereat Pharaoh the King fell a-laughing, he and his Grandees, and cried, "Blessed be Allah, who hath vouchsafed to thee all this penetration ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... poor Pike no peaceful thought, no calm absorption of high mind into the world of flies, no placid period of cobblers' wax, floss-silk, turned hackles, and dubbing. For in making of flies John Pike had his special moments of inspiration, times of clearer insight into the everlasting verities, times of brighter conception ...
— Crocker's Hole - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore



Words linked to "Cobblers" :   ballock, nonsensicality, Britain, ball, United Kingdom, testis, nonsense, Great Britain, egg, hokum, bunk, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, U.K., meaninglessness, UK, bollock, testicle, nut, orchis



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