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Scum   /skəm/   Listen
Scum

noun
1.
Worthless people.  Synonym: trash.
2.
A film of impurities or vegetation that can form on the surface of a liquid.



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"Scum" Quotes from Famous Books



... lb. Infuse together for four days; then boil for half an hour, strain through a linen cloth, and place the liquid again over the fire. Having dissolved 1/4 lb. of alum in a pint of white wine vinegar, mix both liquids together and stir them well. Take the scum that arises on the surface, gradually dry and powder it, and it ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young

... dead and bound together in the doorway; at a four-went way a man and woman hung from an ash-tree; of a farmstead the four walls stood, with a fire yet burning in the rick-yard; in the duck-pond before the house the bodies of the owners were floating amid the scum of green weed. That night he slept by a roadside shrine, and next morning betimes took the lonely track again. Considering all this as he rode, he reached a sign-post which told him that here the ways of Wanmeeting and Waisford parted company. ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett

... numbers and position, Aremberg was disposed only to skirmish. He knew better than did his soldiers the treacherous nature of the ground in front of the enemy. He saw that it was one of those districts where peat had been taken out in large squares for fuel, and where a fallacious and verdant scum upon the surface of deep pools simulated the turf that had been removed. He saw that the battle-ground presented to him by his sagacious enemy was one great sweep of traps and pitfalls. Before he could carry the position, many men must necessarily ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... Cobblers are always philosophers. Not pretty men, but thinkers. In their little, dingy shops they sit all day with their eyes down, isolated from the "hum and scum" about them, to the tune of their "tap, tap, tap," their minds are detached to think and ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey

... conqueror's scorn; The national gods o'erthrown—treasure and blood, Once boundless as the flood, That 'neath his fixed and unforgiving eye Crept onward silently; Scattered and squandered wantonly, by bands, Leaguered in shame, the scum of foreign lands, Sent forth to lengthen out their infamy, With the wild ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various

... kept away from the great fields of active thought and love by the gewgaws she hangs on her bonnet! How light must be that thing which will float on the sea of passion—a bubble, a feather, a puff-ball! And yet multitudes of women float there, live there, and call it life. Poor things! Scum on the surface! But there is a truth, young women; woman was made for a higher purpose, a nobler use, a grander destiny. Her powers are rich and strong; her genius bold and daring. She may walk the fields of thought, achieve the victories of mind, spread around her the testimonials ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver

... silvery bubbles spring! Good! the mass is melting now! Let the salts we duly bring Purge the flood, and speed the flow. From the dross and the scum, Pure, the fusion must come; For perfect and pure we the metal must keep, That its voice may be perfect, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various

... things flourished. There was not room for anything to grow and if there had been the soot from the towering chimneys would soon have settled upon any venturesome leaf or flower and quickly shrivelled it beneath a cloak of cinders. Even the river was coated with a scum of oil and refuse that poured from the waste pipes of the factories into the stream and washed up along the shores which might otherwise ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett

... gun of the magazine, and inquires: 'What of the the Confederacy—the Present and the Future?' It is of course full of hope, bluster, and self-praise. 'Our armies,' says Delony, 'are not like the miserable hirelings of Lincoln—the scum of infamy and degradation—hunted up from the dens, sewers, and filthy prisons of the North, with the low vandalism of foreign importations, picked up wherever they can be found. Yet such are the creatures our brave soldiers ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... had so recently passed through, I was compelled to confess to myself that they were by no means a prepossessing lot; they, one and all, O'Gorman and Price not excepted, wore that sullen, hang-dog, ruffianly expression of countenance that marks the very lowest class of British seamen, the scum and refuse of the vocation. Still, we had not far to go, and I consoled myself with the reflection that they would probably prove good ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood

... latter way Broke but the bond of love which Nature makes. Whence in the second circle have their nest Dissimulation, witchcraft, flatteries, Theft, falsehood, simony, all who seduce To lust, or set their honesty at pawn, With such vile scum as these. The other way Forgets both Nature's general love, and that Which thereto added afterwards gives birth To special faith. Whence in the lesser circle, Point of the universe, dread seat of Dis, The ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... Don nodded sadly in his chair. He was dishonouring the name of the Riegos, Carlos would exclaim feebly, turning his head towards his uncle. His uncle's own province, the name of his own town, stood for a refuge of the scum of the Antilles. It wras a shameful sanctuary. Every ruffian, rascal, murderer, and thief of the West Indies had come to think of this ancient and honourable town ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... posture, not by one while he is going along.' And Utanka having agreed to this, sat down with his face towards the east, and washed his face, hands, and feet thoroughly. And he then, without a noise, sipped thrice of water free from scum and froth, and not warm, and just sufficient to reach his stomach and wiped his face twice. And he then touched with water the apertures of his organs (eyes, ears, etc.). And having done all this, he once more entered the apartments of the women. And ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)

... proud swelling of a man who can boast that precious endowment himself, "you can't keep it down. There's no use talking to me about this equality between men at the hour of birth; it's all a poetic fiction. It would take forty generations of this European scum such as is beginning to drift across to us and taint our national atmosphere to produce one Joe Newbolt! And he's got blood on only one ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... seemed as if he, Othman, and all would be ripped away from the boat by the tremendous suction. Great eddies boiled and swirled in every direction, and a thick scum of oil and coal dust rose and covered the surface ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges

... on his way, while Tom was not quite so sure of the two chips on which he was to carry Eloise out if she tried to boss him. He'd wait and see. That city chap from Crompton Place had certainly been very friendly, and had not treated him as if he was scum; and after taking his seat and telling Ruby Ann, with quite an air when she asked why he was so late, that he had been detained by Mr. Harcourt, who wanted to talk with him, he took from his desk his slate and rubbed out the caricature he had drawn the day before of a young girl on crutches ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes

... spoke. "I too have something to tell you. There is an outcry about Madame Diane's Italian—the first time an outcry has been made about any such scum. This morning there was a scene at the petit couvert. I was there. The short of it is that the King, my gossip, sided with his mistress as against Vendome. Words ran so high that the Duke was ordered to leave Paris, ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats

... all I know. Gipsy scum! rob an old man, would he? I'll gipsy him if I find hair or hoof of him. Lord, master, how liquor do make a man thirsty. You must ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond

... and those who are here today are gone to-morrow, and their places in society filled up by others who ten years back had no prospect of ever being admitted. All is transition, the waves follow one another to the far west, the froth and scum, boiling in the advance. ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... well-known here. With nothing special, perhaps, to record, I would give a word or two to his memory. He seem'd to me not an inappropriate specimen in character and elements, of that bulk of the average good American race that ebbs and flows perennially beneath this scum of eructations on the surface. Always very quiet in manner, neat in person and dress, good temper'd—punctual and industrious at his work, till he could work no longer—he just lived his steady, square, unobtrusive life, in its own humble sphere, doubtless unconscious ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... fellow!" cried one of the servants. "You scum of the earth! This comes of hobnobbing with such rascals. Go hence quickly, with your fellows, or we will break ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick

... or a broiled lobster, or a subway. But I was interested and curious about all of them. And Lasker said, 'A man who can humanize a rock, or a tree, or a chipmunk ought to be able to make even those things seem human. You've got what they call the fresh viewpoint. New York's full of people with a scum over their eyes, but a lot of them came to New York from Winnebago, or towns just like it, and you'd be surprised at the number of them who still get their home town paper. One day, when I came into Lee Kohl's office, with stars, and leading men, and all that waiting outside ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber

... usual city crowd gathered about the fighting men and a second later the slum saloon in front of which they were battling, emptied its filthy scum into the street, all anxious to enjoy the combat. Some of the plingers amongst this riff-raff must have recognized their mate, and thinking that the trouble was merely a case of a street beggar insulting a citizen, and noting that this one ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)

... monarch. Your heart is up, I warrant, because you have the King's pardon; and are replaced on the bench, forsooth, to persecute the poor Papist. There was never turmoil in the state, but knaves had their vantage by it—never pot boiled, but the scum was ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... to Jim's cheek. "So," he said, facing her quickly, "for the sake of a lot of riff-raff and scum that's drifted here around us—jest for the sake of cuttin' a swell before them—you'll go out among the hounds ez allowed your mother was a Spanish nigger or a kanaka, ez called your father a pirate and landgrabber, ez ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... nearly as she looks, to live as nearly as she lives, to resemble her and yet to place that resemblance on a legal and, consequently, secure foundation, is becoming more and more the life-work of that feminine "scum" which the war stirred up and peace has caused to overflow. Beneath it all I know there is a strata of the Magnificent, but the surface-ground is weedier than ever. I am not a prude (I think!), but the eternally amusement-seeking and irresponsible lives led by many of the rich, and the ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King

... scum. Now I am going, stop me if you dare. Walls have ears, so I'll whisper. If you wish to send a constable after me, you'll find me at the house of the Jew Lazarus. ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat

... called him. He read the reports of the discussions of the Corps Legislatif, and laughed with glee over the slightest words that fell from Morny's lips. Ah, Morny was the man to sit upon your rascally republicans! And he would assert that only the scum detested the Emperor, for his Majesty desired that all respectable people should have a ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... following the course of the Brook Kedron down the Wady en-Nar (Valley of Fire). In half an hour more we reached two large tanks, hewn out under the base of a limestone cliff, and nearly filled with rain. The surface was covered with a greenish vegetable scum, and three wild and dirty Arabs of the hills were washing themselves in the principal one. Our Bedouins immediately dismounted and followed their example, and after we had taken some refreshment, we had the satisfaction of ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... and the old Red Church, by the riverside above Carrollton, are several miles apart. People know this as well as they know that the latanier is the palmetto palm of the Southern wood, with its comb-like, many-toothed leaves, and that the Old Basin is a great pool of scum-covered, murky water, lying in a thickly-settled part of the French town, where numbers of small sailboats, coming in through the bayou with their cargoes of lumber from the coast of the Sound, lie against one another as they ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart

... why shouldn't I be allowed to let you in also for a share of that good fortune? You think there's a difference, but I tell you it's imaginary—pure moonshine. Why, the very people whose opinion you're afraid of—what did they do themselves when the South African craze was on? I'm told that the scum of the earth had only to own some Chartered shares, and pretend to be 'in the know' about them—and they could dine with as many duchesses as they liked. I knew one or two of the men who were in that deal—I wouldn't have them in my house—but ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic

... boils the scum rises to the surface, and the first result of these disloyal murmurings and agitations was to bring into prominence the two brothers, Francisco and Diego de Porras, who, it will be remembered, owed their presence with the expedition ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... the series of clarifiers on the second floor. They are heated by a chain of steam pipes running along the bottom, and being filled, the juice slowly simmers Much of the foreign substance rises in a scum to the surface and is skimmed off by the sugar maker. It is further purified by the addition of Thomaston or what is called sugar lime. At one half a peck is considered sufficient for seven hundred and fifty gallons of juice, but much depends upon the quantity of saccharine ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various

... salt.—Saturate a quart of water and strain it; pour some in a saucer and sprinkle guano upon the surface. Good guano sinks immediately, leaving only a slight scum. If it has been adulterated by any light or flocculent matters, they will be seen upon the surface ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson

... bookbindery girl conversed absorbedly, with their elbows on the table. Their glasses of beer were pushed to one side, scarcely touched, with the foam on them sunken to a thin white scum. Since the stroke of one the stale pleasures of Rooney's had become renovated and spiced; not by any addition to the list of distractions, but because from that moment the sweets became stolen ones. The flattest glass of beer acquired the tang ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry

... pellet, gimcrack, gewgaw, bauble, trinket, bagatelle, Rickshaw, knickknack, whim-wham, trifle, "trifles light as air"; yankee notions [U. S.]. trumpery, trash, rubbish, stuff, fatras[obs3], frippery; "leather or prunello"; chaff, drug, froth bubble smoke, cobweb; weed; refuse &c. (inutility) 645; scum &c. (dirt) 653. joke, jest, snap of the fingers; fudge &c. (unmeaning) 517; fiddlestick[obs3], fiddlestick end[obs3]; pack of nonsense, mere farce. straw, pin, fig, button, rush; bulrush, feather, halfpenny, farthing, brass farthing, doit[obs3], peppercorn, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... nearly full of sai-gee and stirred frequently for four days more, during which it ferments and throws up a copper-coloured scum. It is then allowed to remain at rest for one day, and on the tenth day from the commencement of the process the cloth is put into it. No mordant whatever is used; the cloth is simply wetted with cold water, and wrung hard ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park

... latitude was 59 deg. 34', the wind northeast, and we sailed east, for we were almost in the latitude of the south point of Shetland. We saw, several times, quantities of spermaceti drifting, a yellowish fat, which lies in the water, all together, but solid like the green scum which floats in ditches. We also saw rockweed floating; and a small land bird came on board the ship, from which we concluded we were approaching land. The wind was more free, and after running out and in it remained north-northeast. ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts

... insulting and humiliating the nobleman who owned the parish in which he lived? To Lord Trowbridge the very fact that the parson of the parish which he regarded as his own was opposed to him, proved sufficiently that that parson was,—scum, dregs, riff-raff, a low radical, and everything that a parson ought not to be. The Vicar had been wrong there. The Marquis did ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope

... association, had Ballinghall given him to understand that he regarded him otherwise than as a mere Tommy without any pretensions to gentility. There had been times when Ballinghall had cursed him—perhaps justifiably and perhaps lovingly—as though he had been the scum of the earth. Doggie would no more have dared address him in terms of familiarity than he would have dared slap the Brigadier-General on the back. And now the honest warrior sought Doggie's patronage. Of the original crowd in England who had transformed Doggie's military existence by making ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke

... and the floating scum-like substances on fresh water; they deserve to be more studied, for some, as dulse, laver, badderlocks, &c., are eatable, and others are useful ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... pints of water, and, having warmed it, add half a teacupful of wine. Put into this mixture a quantity of red-hot iron; allow it to stand for five or six days, when there will be a scum on the top of the mixture, which should then be poured into a small teacup and placed near a fire. When it is warm, powdered gallnuts and iron filings should be added to it, and the whole should be warmed again. The ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford

... dear zany, And swears for heroics he writes best of any; 'Don Carlos' his pockets so amply had filled, That his mange was quite cured, and his lice were all killed. But Apollo had seen his face on the stage, And prudently did not think fit to engage The scum of a playhouse for ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott

... anchors, hailing from the ships and quays, boats sculling rapidly to and fro. It was almost dusk, although only half-past six o'clock. The sea was of the color and looked as solid and smooth as a sheet of lead, and covered with an oily scum. Gusts of wind swept over without ruffling it, and big drops of rain fell on its surface, rebounding, as if they could not penetrate it. There was a commotion in the air, made up of many threatening sounds, coming ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... Imperial Government only troubled itself about the corps d'elite; that the object in the line regiments was to get substitutes as cheaply as possible; consequently, they are filled with men physically and morally the scum of the nation. Semaphore telegraphs have been put up on all the high public buildings. There are also semaphores on the forts. I see that one opposite me is exchanging signals. The crowd watch them as though by looking they would discover what they mean. "A first success," ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere

... hunting-ground. We quenched our thirst with water from the pool, which I was rather surprised to find quite pure. These pools are, of course, sometimes fouled for a time by the movements of alligators and other tenants in the fine mud which settles at the bottom, but I never observed a scum of confervae or traces of oil revealing animal decomposition on the surface of these waters, nor was there ever any foul smell perceptible. The whole of this level land, instead of being covered with ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... one God, and Mohammed is the prophet of God!" he roared. "Am I to prostrate myself before an infidel dog—the chief dog of a pack of dogs? This for the scum!" And he spat full ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford

... I shall never forget. In Kansas, before the war, I once had a walk of several miles under a burning sun, in a region where not a drop of water could be found. When I finally reached it, the only water to be found was in a small, stagnant pool, covered with a green scum nearly an inch in thickness. Warm, brackish, and fever-laden as that water was, I had never before tasted any thing half so sweet. Again, while crossing the Great Plains in 1860, I underwent a severe and prolonged thirst, only quenching it with the ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox

... precious set of people, ain't you?' said Uriah, in the same low voice, and breaking out into a clammy heat, which he wiped from his forehead, with his long lean hand, 'to buy over my clerk, who is the very scum of society,—as you yourself were, Copperfield, you know it, before anyone had charity on you,—to defame me with his lies? Miss Trotwood, you had better stop this; or I'll stop your husband shorter than will be pleasant ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... growing and growing, and therewith the jeering grew; And now that the time was come for an ugly brawl I knew, When I saw how midst of the workmen some well-dressed men there came, Of the scum of the well-to-do, brutes void of pity or shame; The thief is a saint beside them. These raised a jeering noise, And our speaker quailed before it, and the hubbub drowned his voice. Then Richard put him aside ...
— The Pilgrims of Hope • William Morris

... believe that you—yes, that you" she pointed a scornful finger at him "killed this poor man who was bringing the mummy to the Professor. If you were in my own country, I should have you lashed like the dog you are. Pig of a Yankee, vile scum ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume

... educated or more wealthy from serving in such distant regions, and none went south who could avoid it. The army which the Khedives maintained in the Delta was, judged by European standards, only a rabble. It was badly trained, rarely paid, and very cowardly; and the scum of the army of the Delta was the cream of the army of the Soudan. The officers remained for long periods, many all their lives, in the obscurity of the remote provinces. Some had been sent there in disgrace, others in disfavour. Some had been forced ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill

... boils, after the meat is in it, the scum should be carefully removed from time to time, while it is cooking. If the scum be allowed to boil down, it will settle on the joint and discolour it. It is best, however, as a precaution, to wrap the meat in a very clean cloth; this will effectually ...
— The Skilful Cook - A Practical Manual of Modern Experience • Mary Harrison

... fell over the sea so thickly that within three miles of the island you could walk on them, and even five hundred miles away, the ashes formed a scum on the surface of the sea. The finer dust and the icy particles from the condensed vapor reached extreme heights in the air. These dust particles spread all round the world, completing the circuit in ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler

... sad place of execution: Thine hour is come, and the tormentor stands Ready to pierce Thy tender feet and hands. Long before this, the base, the dull, the rude, Th' inconstant and unpurged multitude Yawn for Thy coming; some ere this time cry, How He defers, how loath He is to die! Amongst this scum, the soldier with his spear And that sour fellow with his vinegar, His sponge, and stick, do ask why Thou dost stay; So do the scurf and bran too. Go Thy way, Thy way, Thou guiltless man, and satisfy By Thine approach each their beholding eye. Not as a thief ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick

... Jove, yes! Never didn't pay a shilling I lost in my life! It's deuced hard, when a fellow is on the square like that, to make two ends meet when he comes across defaulters. Those fellows should be hung. They're the very scum of the earth. Talk of welchers! They're worse than any welcher. Welcher is a thing you needn't have to do with if you're careful. But when a fellow turns round upon you as a defaulter at cards, there is no getting rid of him. Where ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope

... The proletariat rose up and destroyed it. To mobs anything beautiful is offensive. Palaces looted, banks, museums, houses. The ignorant toying with hand grenades, thinking them sceptres. All the scum in the world boiling to the top. After the Red Day ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath

... 'Fiends and scum of all the wicked, set free on this instant the captive princess whom you hold imprisoned in that coach, or else prepare for death, which is the just punishment ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various

... Mucor-stems, l. 283. Mucor or mould in its early state is properly a microscopic vegetable, and is spontaneously produced on the scum of all decomposing organic matter. The Monas is a moving speck, the Vibrio an undulating wire, the Proteus perpetually changes its shape, and the Vorticella has wheels about its mouth, with which it makes an eddy, and ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin

... before I was married—was wid twelve av the scum av the earth—the pickin's av the gutter—mane men that wud neither laugh nor talk nor yet get dhrunk as a man shud. They thried some av their dog's thricks on me, but I dhrew a line round my cot, an' the man that thransgressed ut wint into hospital ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... critics of American life has said: "Corruption does not so much rot the masses; it poisons Congress. Credit mobilier and money rings are not housed under thatched roofs; they flaunt at the capital." The real scum is the so-called better class. If anybody is to be deprived of a vote, it should be the railroad king, the mill owner, the indifferent trader, and the Europeanized Yankee who spends abroad what his father earned at home, and mistakes Paris ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various

... listen, sir," he continued, turning abruptly upon Hassen. "You would know whence sprang that evil weed of a Republic! I will tell you. It was the work of foreign spies working with foreign gold amongst the outcasts and scum of Theos. It was not the choice of the people. It was the word of sedition, of cunning bribery, the vile underhand efforts of foreign politicians seeking to weaken by treachery a country they dared not, small though it ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim

... color, replete with a finesse of rare loveliness, as gratifying a performance, to my notion, as has been seen on our stage for many years. Perhaps if the author, recalling vain pasts, could realize the scum of saccharinity in which the play is utterly submerged, and that it struggles with great difficulty to survive the nesselrodelike sweetness with which it is surfeited, he would recognize the real distinction that Barrymore lends ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... over the tomatoes, in order to remove the skin; after which, weigh, and place in a stone jar, with as much sugar as tomatoes, and let them stand two days; then pour off the sirup, and boil and skim it till no scum rises; pour it over the tomatoes, and let them stand two days as before; then boil, and skim again. After the third time, they are fit to dry, if the weather is good; if not, let them stand in the sirup until drying weather. Then place them on large earthen ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr

... supply of powder and of pamphlets. The one explosive material enabled them to make a more effective defence of their citadel against the Dutch fleet; the other revealed to the Portuguese and their Mussulman allies that "the Netherlanders could not exist without English protection, that they were the scum of nations, and that if they should get possession of this clove monopoly, their insolence would become intolerable." Samples of polite literature such as these, printed but not published, flew about in volleys. It was an age ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... sugar in the water, and add the well-beaten white of an egg (this must be done before the mixture is heated). Then put on the fire in a strong saucepan. Remove all scum as it rises, and when the syrup begins to look clear, take off the fire and strain through muslin. Put the syrup back into the saucepan and let it boil quickly until you find by testing it that it is done. Then add the juice ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... scattered empire, with many islands, a long frontier line in every continent, and a very tempting bit of plunder at the centre, by mere volunteer recruits, who mostly come from the worst class of the people—whom the Great Duke called the "scum of the earth"—who come in uncertain numbers year by year—who by some political accident may not come in adequate numbers, or at all, in the year we need them most. Our War Office attempts what foreign War Offices (perhaps rightly) would ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot

... will you please get Hanna a saucer of milk?" said Cousin Emelene now, seeing the maid's round eyes glaring startled from the dining-room door. "And just warm it a little bit, don't scald it. She won't touch it if there's the least bit of a scum on it. Just take that ice-box chill off. Here, I'll go with you this time. Since we're going to live here now, you'll have to do it a good many times, and I'd better show you just how to do ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.

... name you already know. And upon the word of yon scum, you have judged. By the glint o' hate, as you looked into my eyes, I know—for one does not so welcome a stranger beyond the outposts. But, since you have asked, I will tell you; my name is MacNair—Robert MacNair, by ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... through twenty miles of glorious forest, filled with fallow deer and wild bulls. The house itself, dating from the time of the Plantagenets, was surrounded by a moat covered with broad lilies and floating green scum. Magnificent peacocks sunned themselves on the terraces, while from the surrounding shrubberies there rose the soft murmur of doves, ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock

... sleep in importance was the fortnightly bath. Sometimes we cleansed ourselves, as best we could, in muddy little duck ponds, populous with frogs and green with scum; but oh, the joy when our march ended at a military bathhouse! The Government had provided these whenever possible, and for several weeks we were within marching distance of one. There we received a fresh change of underclothing, and our uniforms were fumigated while ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall

... you kin smell money; and I swear they's kind of a scum comes over your eyes when you see it. How do you know he's ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart

... flogging would have made it work more "splendidly." Mr. Hugh Fraser Leslie, who the February before had, in his place in the Assembly, denominated the anti-slavery delegates assembled in London, as "a set of crawling wretches;" "the scum and refuse of society." "The washings and scrapings of the manufacturing districts," &c. &c. now delivered himself of ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... Who knows this so well as I do? for I too have been hungered—not like you, bastard scum, but as any honest man may be, by the turn of Fate and the will ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling

... hundred people passed him in a block, the populace of the Bowery awakening into fullest life at midnight, men, women and children—the dregs of the city's scum—the aristocracy of upper Fifth Avenue, of Riverside Drive, aping Bohemianism, seeking the lure of the Turkey Trot, transported from the Barbary Coast of San Francisco. Rich and poor, squalor and affluence, vice and near-vice surged by him, voicing ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard

... compare my rude singing with that divine voice? Scum of the earth! Toads! And I never divined that they were doing to him here what was done to me ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand

... passage in the history of the barnacle, which traced the lineage of the bird to one of the pedunculated cirripedes, and the lineage of the cirripede to a log of wood. The puffin feeds its young, say the islanders, on an oily scum of the sea, which renders it such an unwieldy mass of fat, that about the time when it should be beginning to fly, it becomes unable to get out of its hole. The parent bird, not in the least puzzled, however, treats the case ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... of a {tourist}. Often used as a pejorative, as in 'losing touristic scum'. Often spelled 'turistic' or 'turistik', so that phrase might be more properly ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10

... for soup are one pound of meat and bone to one and a half quarts of cold water; the meat and bones to be well chopped and broken up, and put over the fire in cold water, being brought slowly to a boil, and carefully skimmed as often as any scum rises; and being maintained at a steady boiling point from two to six hours, as time permits; one hour before the stock is done, add to it one carrot and one turnip pared, one onion stuck with three cloves, and a ...
— The Cooking Manual of Practical Directions for Economical Every-Day Cookery • Juliet Corson

... brook until it was no longer passable. Huge bowlders lay jammed and crowded in clefts of the mountain before them. Penn remembered the spot. He had been there in spring, when down over the rocks, now covered with lichens and dry scum, ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge

... verdurous visions come, Save yon exiguous pool's conferva-scum, - No concave vast repeats the tender hue That laves my ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... long-forgotten word. 'Forty years ago that might have been said, and not without truth. Ay. thirty years ago. But it is the fault of this gadding up and down Hind that a king's widow must jostle all the scum of the land, and be made ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling

... what a blessing it is for us to have, as we may have, a source of joy, frozen by no winter, dried up by no summer, muddied and corrupted by no iridescent scum of putrefaction which ever mantles over the stagnant ponds of earthly joys! Like some citadel that has an unfailing well in its courtyard, we may have a fountain of gladness within ourselves which nothing that touches the outside can cut off. We have but to lap a hasty ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... beaten, the coolies remove the froth and scum from the surface of the water, and then leave the contents to settle. The fecula or dye, or mall, as it is technically called, now settles at the bottom of the vat in a soft pulpy sediment, and the waste liquor left on the top is let off ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... tiny balls of blossom, but in many places among their foliage where, only a week before, they had still been breaking in waves of fragrant foam, these were now spent and shrivelled and discoloured, a hollow scum, dry and scentless. My grandfather pointed out to my father in what respects the appearance of the place was still the same, and how far it had altered since the walk that he had taken with old M. Swann, on the day of his wife's death; and he seized the opportunity to tell us, once again, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... came to a climax last night. I don't like to talk about it—think about it—but you're bound to hear. I consented to go out with him. He dragged me through the dance-halls and the saloons—made me drink with him, publicly, and with the scum of the town." Noting the expression on her hearer's face, the Countess laughed shortly, mirthlessly. "Shocking, wasn't it? Low, indecent, wretched? That's what everybody is saying. Dawson is humming with it. God! How he humiliated me! ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach

... boil the sugar before you add the fruit to it, it will be improved in clearness by passing it through a flannel bag. Skim off the brown scum, all the ...
— Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry Cakes, and Sweetmeats • Miss Leslie

... next book, the Ebb-Tide (in collaboration with Osbourne) to little better than a mud-bath, for we find ourselves, as it were, unrelieved by dredging among the scum and dregs of humanity, the 'white trash' of the Pacific. Here we have Stevenson's masterly but utterly revolting incarnation of the lowest, vilest, vulgarest villainy in the cockney, Huish. Stevenson's other villains shock us by their cruel and wicked ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... looked at her, I marvelled that she had found it possible to forsake all that was fair and lovely in life, to dare ignore caste, to deliberately face ridicule and insult and the scornful anger of her own kind, for the sake of the filthy scum festering in the sinkholes of ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

... at full length on the shelly strand, his boat secured by a clove-hitch round his right leg, which rode calmly in the little inlet; his bald head, with the few dry gray hairs on his temples, resting on Miguel's sennit hat, and the thin scum of frosty eyelids drawn over his frozen eyes—cracking their covering at times—until at last the pirate, aided by ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise

... nowadays," he continued, apostrophising the dingy walls of his office, as he took his walking-stick and prepared to leave the premises—"thanks to the donkey-journalism of the period which brays down everything that is not like itself—mere froth and scum. And unlike our great classic teachers who held that old age was honourable and deserved the highest place in the senate, the present generation affects to consider a man well on the way to dotage after forty. God bless me!—what fools there are in this twentieth century!—what blatant ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli

... their whole flock steep in running streams, While, plunged beneath the flood, with drenched fell, The ram, launched free, goes drifting down the tide. Else, having shorn, they smear their bodies o'er With acrid oil-lees, and mix silver-scum And native sulphur and Idaean pitch, Wax mollified with ointment, and therewith Sea-leek, strong hellebores, bitumen black. Yet ne'er doth kindlier fortune crown his toil, Than if with blade of iron a man dare ...
— The Georgics • Virgil

... get into any trouble, you know where I am; and though I don't want you, you will be welcome to our mess—and a nice mess we are in, eh, Archie?—Come, look sharp, you British soldiers, and clear away all this scum." ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn

... Francesco Cei, "that is a well-tanned San Giovanni! some sturdy Romagnole beggar-man, I'll warrant. Our Signoria plays the host to all the Jewish and Christian scum that every other city shuts its gates against, and lets them fatten on us like Saint ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... For years she had figured on the beach as one in the riot of vendors merely. How she had longed to rise to the class of owners, still to haggle, of course, but to dictate terms, from a vantage point, to that dirty turbulent crowd of lower scum! And now her dream of glory was being realized! She stood sniffing at the air through that disdainful nose of hers, straightening up full height behind her array of baskets; while Tonet—educated in the Royal Navy, if you please—was tending ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... mouching round the bazaars and wharves. Being for so long weak in the head—and also of another country—allowances are made, and I'm looked on as an oddity, and yet well respected, for I'm clever with cures and language. Well, I used to poke about among a lot of scum that has no respect for any cloth whatever—no, nor for life itself; and all the time I felt in me bones I'd surely find what I wanted among a crew that's just ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker

... konsciencdubo. Scrupulous konscienca. Scrutinize esplori, sercxadi. Scrutiny sercxado. Scuffle interpusxo. Scull (oar) remilo. Scullery lavejo, potlavejo. Sculptor skulptisto. Sculpture (art) skulptarto. Sculpture (statuary) skulptajxo. Sculpture (to carve) skulpti. Scum sxauxmo. Scurf favo. Scurrilous maldeca, maldelikata. Scurvy skorbuto. Scuttle, coal karbujo—eto. Scythe falcxilo. Sea maro. Seafaring mara. Sea-gull mevo. Sea-horse (walrus) rosmaro. Seal sigeli. Seal sigelo—ilo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... permanent; that any song or story could live to give delight in future ages. But literature is like a river in flood, which gradually purifies itself in two ways,—the mud settles to the bottom, and the scum rises to the top. When we examine the writings that by common consent constitute our literature, the clear stream purified of its dross, we find at least two more qualities, which we call the tests of literature, and which determine ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... Europe is a peninsula at the end of Asia? that France, Germany, Italy, are the fringe of Russia? Have you ever really realised that the English-speaking race lives mostly in America? that the country is vastly more populous than London? that our class is the froth and the scum of society? Think these things out, and try to measure them on the globe. And when you speak of Abroad, do please specify what ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... the hotel office with a desperate glance, trying to select a face to which she might appeal. There wasn't one. Estabrook was filling with its usual week-end scum; crafty faces, hard faces, faces shallowly good-natured, and therefore doubly treacherous. Even the pimply clerk at the desk, discerning her unescorted state, had changed ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans

... shuddering. "Will I ever forgit it? John and me had got married just a month before Evy died in October, and gone to live up the hollow a small piece from maw, and even then she were complaining of a leetle scum over her eyes. Losing Evy, and rebelling like she done atterward, and Uncle Joshuay's talk, holp it along fast, and it were plain to all before winter were over that he had prophesied right, and her sight were a-going. I would come down ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman

... extreme,—King August, for one item, sailing to it, with sound of trumpet and hautbois, in silken flotillas gayer than Cleopatra's, down the Elbe,—there was a rush towards Berlin of what we will not call the scum, but must call the foam of mankind, rush of the idle moneyed populations from all countries; and such a crowd there, for the three weeks, as was seldom seen. Foam everywhere is stirred up, and encouraged to ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... and sighed. He was a heavy man, and he had not known sentiment for years; he was a big man, and it took much to move him, literally and figuratively; he was a man in whom the dreams of God that haunt the soul in youth, though overlaid by the scum that gathers in the fight for money, had not, as with the majority, utterly died ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... on three quarts of water, cover the pot close, and keep it gently and steadily boiling five hours, which will leave about three pints of clear soup; do not let the pot boil over, but take off the scum carefully, as it rises. When it has boiled four hours, put in a small bundle of thyme and parsley, and a pint of celery cut small, or a tea-spoonful of celery seed pounded. These latter ingredients would lose their delicate flavour if boiled too much. Just before you take ...
— The Virginia Housewife • Mary Randolph

... the grotesque absurdity with which it has been managed. One can imagine how Swift might have introduced the subject in Grildrig's conversations with the King of Brobdingnag. "The King asked me more about our 'dots' of houses, as his Majesty was pleased to call them; and how we removed the scum and filth from those little 'ant-heaps' which we called great towns. I answered that our custom was to have a long brick tube, which we called a sewer, in the middle of our streets, where we kept a sufficient supply ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps

... utter abominations. We care nothing for mere names, though a good deed is none the worse for coming from a good hand; but the small fry of literature—the lackadaisical geniuses—Heaven bless the mark—who, scum-like, float upon the surface, soiling what they touch and disturbing by their presence what, but for them, might be free from offence—we ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth

... him! The pond be close at hand. Let's give him a taste of his deservings! What do he the scum, turn himself up at West Lynne for, bearding Mr. Carlyle? What have he done with Lady Isabel? Him put up for others at West Lynne! West Lynne's respectable, it don't want him; it have got a better man; it won't have a ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood

... fields. They take the jobs of honest men, who are Americans, and I see by the papers that there are two hundred and fifty thousand men out of work and hunting jobs in New York this spring," mused Bob. "It appears to me as if we might look after Americans first for a while, instead of letting in more scum. Cheap labor is all right; but when honest men have to pay higher taxes to take care of the peasants of Europe who don't want to work, and who do crowd our hospitals and streets, and fill our schools with their children, and our jails and hospitals with ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball

... freeing the bath of melted pig-iron from excess of carbon by adding broken lumps of pure hematite or magnetite iron ore. This causes a violent boiling, which is kept up until the metal becomes soft enough, when it is allowed to stand to let the metal clear from the slag which floats in scum upon the top. The separation of the slag and iron is facilitated by throwing in some lime from time to time. Spiegel, or specular iron, is then added; about 1 per cent. more than in the scrap process. From 20 to 24 cwt. ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro

... has grown out of all knowledge since I first made its acquaintance in 1877. It was then a cluster of evil-looking shanties, the abode of the scum of the Levant, who waxed fat by the profits of the gambling hells and the sale of pornographic photographs. It has now donned the outwardly respectable look of middle age; it has laid itself out in streets; the gambling dens have disappeared, and the robbers have betaken themselves to the ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne

... a bad business," Captain Martin agreed; "a very bad business, comrade. And although these things were done by a mere handful of the scum of the town the respectable citizens raised no hand to stop it, although they can turn out the town guard readily enough to put a stop to a quarrel between the members of two of the guilds. There were plenty of men who have banded themselves together ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty

... declivity of the mountain towards the west, they met with another well, but the water was a very strong mineral, had a thick green scum on the top, and stunk intolerably. Necessity, however, obliged some to drink of it; but it soon made them so sick, that they threw it up the same way that it ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook

... cabbage greens; broth. "Kail through the reek," to give one a severe reproof. Kail-brose, pottage of meal made with the scum of broth. Kale-yard, a vegetable garden. Ken, to know. Kend, knew. Kenna, kensna, know ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... enjoyed using his skill and adroitness; he loved to present the smouldering and flashing of passions, the thrill and sting of which he had never known. Saved as he was by his temperament alike from deep suffering and tense emotion, and from any vital mingling either with the scum and foam or with the stagnancy and mire of life, the books remain as a brilliant illusion, with much of the shifting hues and changing glimmer of his own ardent and restless mind rippling over the surface of a depth ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson

... you are alive, and I don't think of Hawes now one way or other—with such scum as that out of sight is out of mind. When did you begin to get better, sir? and are you better? and shall I see your blessed face in my cell every day as I used?" And the water stood ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... and purposeless, the unmeaning creations of an unconscious cause," born only to perish, which a relentless reviewer has imposed upon his theory—rightly enough upon the atheistic alternative—the theistic view rids him at once of this "scum of creation." For, as species do not now vary at all times and places and in all directions, nor produce crude, vague, imperfect, and useless forms, there is no reason for supposing that they ever did. Good-for-nothing monstrosities, failures ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... some of the tricks of fence taught me by Captain Galsworthy. The only work which all the prisoners had to perform in turn was the drawing of water from a well in the keep. The water of the moat, as I had seen when we crossed it on entering, was covered with a green scum, the rivulet which fed it not being of sufficient volume to keep ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang

... of the tyrannous government of the Bourbons; but the fact remains that, whatever its origin, the Mafia to-day is a criminal organization, having, like the Camorra, for its ultimate object blackmail and extortion. Its lower ranks are recruited from the scum of Palermo, who, combining extraordinary physical courage with the lowest type of viciousness, generally live by the same means that supports the East Side "cadet" in New York City, and who end either in prison or on the dissecting-table, or gradually ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train

... gentian violet three to five minutes. Filter as much aniline water on to the cover-slip as it will hold; then add the smallest quantity of alcoholic solution of gentian violet which suffices to saturate the aniline water and form a "bronze scum" upon its surface—if too much of the alcoholic gentian violet is added the ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre

... the church are often, like Diotrephes, eager for the pre-eminence, while the best are modest and retiring. It is not always the cream that comes to the top, either in civil or religious society; it is sometimes the scum. And my readers must take these things into account while reading my story. The early Methodist churches were blessed organizations, bitterly as Wesley and Fletcher lamented their shortcomings and backslidings. With all their faults they were the lights of the world, and the salt of the earth. They ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker

... both coagulable by heat; if, therefore, we raise the liquor to the boiling point prior to applying the lime, taking care to remove the scum as soon as it shows signs of breaking, and continuing the boiling until the scum thrown to the surface becomes inconsiderable, we shall find that the albumen and gluten, in coagulating and rising, have carried with them the small particles of woody fibre, the wax, and a large proportion of ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... had collected, and against them stood, perhaps, four hundred men in all, so that the odds were great. Still, they had no horsemen or archers, and our position was very good, also we were Northmen and they were Grecian scum. ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard

... them!" he muttered. "At last! The tocsin has sounded, and the rats have come out of their holes! Half a million and more of scum eating their way into the entrails of this great city of ours. For years we have tried to make the government see the danger of it. It is our cursed British arrogance which has shut the ears and closed the eyes of the men who govern our destinies. Supposing your invasion should ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... had it?' said Percy, ironically. 'So you approve her marrying an old rogue and miser, who had heaped up his hoards by extortion of wretched Indians and Spaniards, the very scum of Mammon, coming to the top ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... stirred it round and round and round, And he sniffed at the foaming froth; When I ups with his heels, and smothers his squeals In the scum of ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert

... interest and beauty, and Job Hesketh's soul was in his work. The molten iron from the blast furnaces flows along its channel into huge "ladles" or cauldrons, and from there it is conveyed into a still larger reservoir or "mixer," where the greater part of the slag—which floats as a scum on the surface—is drawn off. Then the purified metal passes into other cauldrons, which are borne along by hydraulic machinery and their contents gently tipped into the crucibles, which lower their gaping mouths to receive the daffodil stream of molten iron. ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman

... light winds and the coast was but indistinctly seen. The sea was covered with a brown scum which Captain Cook's sailors called sea saw-dust, from its resemblance to that substance.* Very few fish were noticed, but they were generally more numerous nearer ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King

... Shall your fears Or your cares Cast you down? Hang your wealth And your health, Get renown. We are all undone for ever, Now the King and the crown Are tumbling down, And the realm doth groan with disasters; And the scum of the land Are the men that command, And our slaves are become ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay

... yourself, there is, after all, something solemn and impressive in all this; but when a greasy apostle in an alapaca duster, takes his place behind the elevated desk, and with bad grammar and slangy sentences, asks God in a businesslike way to bless this buzzing mass of unclean, low-browed, barbarous scum of all foreign countries, and the white trash and criminals of our own, you find no reverence, and no ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... head of every one of them. The people of God cooeperate with atheists; the most skilful accumulators of property ally themselves with communists; the peculiar and chosen race touch the hand of all the scum and low castes of Europe! And all this because they wish to destroy that ungrateful Christendom which owes to them even its name, and whose tyranny they ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli

... stocks and lucky speculations, in the world, than was formerly the case. Society is decidedly less graceful, more care-worn, and of a worse tone to-day, than it was previously to the revolution of 1830. I presume the elements are unchanged, but the ebullition of the times is throwing the scum to the surface; a natural but temporary consequence of ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper

... it had, indeed, the dazzle and flash of the ruby; but out from the mass of the molten red, broke coruscations of all prismal hues, shooting, shifting, in a play that made the wavelets themselves seem living things, sensible of their joy. No longer was there scum or film upon the surface; only ever and anon a light, rosy vapor floating up, and quick lost in the haggard, heavy, sulphurous air, hot with the conflagration rushing toward us from behind. And these coruscations formed, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... The subterranean barracks and railway have ended forever the rise of the scum, the reign of the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... with the Indians? All they ask is to be let alone! Ever see a single piaster of profit made out of a dead Indian unless you could sell his hair? Of course not. The Indians don't want war. What they want is trade. I've lived among 'em. I know. It's Dunmore and the border scum who want war. They want to steal ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter

... him inside the house, pulled the door closed, and walked away down the street. I was very angry and disturbed, but I felt also the need to treat Barber with contempt so as to keep myself alive to the fact that he was really a mere nothing, a little scum on the surface of London, of no more importance than a piece of paper on the pavement. For—shall I confess it?—I was even yet so much under the emotion of the scene back there in the concert hall that I could not help regarding him ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... word is kai, or the green scum that floats on stagnant water. "Bihzad Khan, dispersed the enemy as kai is dispersed when a stone is thrown into the water," is nearly ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli

... cities, he tells us that he found sights and scenes that would shame Sodom and Gomorrah, and bemoans the fact that in this young, fresh land things should be as bad as in London and Paris, whither the scum and wrecks ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... Scum Goodman, a knave more abandoned, if possible, than Porter, was in the plot. Goodman had been on the stage, had been kept, like some much greater men, by the Duchess of Cleveland, had been taken into her house, had been loaded by her with gifts, and had requited her by bribing an Italian ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... fain to get their bread with tongue and pen, by retailing to 'silly women,' 'ever learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth,' second-hand German eclecticisms, now exploded even in the country where they arose, and the very froth and scum of the Medea's caldron, in which the disjecta membra of old ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley

... to decide it. Reference to Turgenev and Tolstoy—who avoided the "muck heap"—does not throw light on the question. Their fastidiousness does not prove anything; why, before them there was a generation of writers who regarded as dirty not only accounts of "the dregs and scum," but even descriptions of peasants and of officials below the rank of titular councillor. Besides, one period, however brilliant, does not entitle us to draw conclusions in favour of this or that literary tendency. Reference to the demoralizing effects of the literary tendency we are ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... chimney, and the shutters of the window were closed, from which we gathered that the folk who owned it had fled away from their perilous position. On either side the marsh extended, reedy and shallow at the edge, but deeper at a distance, with a bright green scum which covered its treacherous surface. We knocked at the weather-blotched door, but receiving, as we expected, no reply, I presently put my shoulder against it and forced the staple from ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle

... of these were the offspring of white overseers—and it is a notorious fact that a majority of our professional "nigger-drivers" were from the North. This is no reflection on the character of the Northern people—these fellows were simply the feculent scum, the excrementitious offscourings of civilization. And now I remember that a second-cousin of mine in Kentucky has an overseer from Ohio named Otis. A very thrifty and choleric man was my cousin, and considering ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... to knock at the door of No. 19. But even as he did so Bauer groaned. Dead perhaps he ought to have been, but it seems to me that fate is always ready to take the cream and leave the scum. His leap aside had served him well, after all: he had nearly escaped scot free. As it was, the bullet, almost missing his head altogether, had just glanced on his temple as it passed; its impact had ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope

... into your three or four gallon pot, three parts filled with cold water, and set it on the fire to boil; remove all the scum that rises to the surface, and then let it boil gently on the hob; when the meat has boiled an hour and is about half done, add the parsnips in a net, and at the end of another half hour put in the cabbages, also in a net. A piece of beef weighing five or six pounds ...
— A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes • Charles Elme Francatelli

... a wet towel round his head, writing a leader upon the event. This production, which was very sonorous and effective, was peppered all over with such phrases as "protection of property," "outraged majesty of the law," and "scum of civilization"— expressions which had been used so continuously by Mr. O'Flaherty, that he had come to think that he had a copyright in them, and loudly accused the London papers of plagiarism if he happened to ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... people—the scum of the rabble, sir, banded together by the myrmidons of Sir Barnes Newcome, attacked us at the King's Arms, and smashed ninety-six pounds' worth of glass at one volley, besides knocking off the gold unicorn head and the tail of the British lion; it was fine, sir," F. B. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... an excellent citizen indeed, such as has not been seen for a long time. 'Tis truly a man of the lowest scum! As for you, Paphlagonian, who pretend to love me, you only feed me on garlic. Return me my ring, for you cease ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... it, that this plat is not mended, that poor travellers might go thither with more security?" And he said unto me, "This miry slough is such a place as cannot be mended: it is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run, and therefore it is called the Slough of Despond; for still as the sinner is awakened about his lost condition, there arise in his soul many fears and doubts, and discouraging ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells

... bells were ringing for evensong, and a squad of Salvation Army lassies came singing down Waterloo Road. On the bridge a number of loafers were watching a curious brown scum that came drifting down the stream in patches. The sun was just setting, and the Clock Tower and the Houses of Parliament rose against one of the most peaceful skies it is possible to imagine, a sky of gold, barred with long transverse stripes ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... feeble attempt at description will show. This immense caldron, two and three quarter miles in circumference, is filled to within twenty feet of its brim with red molten lava, over which lies a thin scum resembling the slag on a smelting furnace. The whole surface was in fearful agitation. Great rollers followed each other to the side, and, breaking, disclosed deep edges of crimson. These were the canals of fire we had noticed the night before diverging from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... again in what Captain Fairfax called the 'centrifugal curve,' and just went round and round the canyon like ez when yer washin' the dirt out o' a prospectin' pan—every now and then washin' some one of the boys that was in it, like scum, up ag'in the banks. ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte



Words linked to "Scum" :   rabble, riffraff, remove, film, scum bag, dross, ragtag, slag, ragtag and bobtail, get rid of, scoria



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