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Seamy   /sˈimi/   Listen
Seamy

adjective
1.
Showing a seam.
2.
Morally degraded.  Synonyms: seedy, sleazy, sordid, squalid.  "The seamy side of life" , "Sleazy characters hanging around casinos" , "Sleazy storefronts with...dirt on the walls" , "The sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils" , "The squalid atmosphere of intrigue and betrayal"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Seamy" Quotes from Famous Books



... The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin A Second Home A Prince of Bohemia Letters of Two Brides The Muse of the Department The Imaginary Mistress The Middle Classes The Country Parson In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following: Another Study of Woman La ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... the close of 1825, he became one of the most active aides of Madame de la Chanterie and her charitable association. It was M. Alain who introduced Godefroid into the Brotherhood of the Consolation. [The Seamy ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe

... why it gathered dust as it went the rounds. From the average commercial manager's point of view there is a question about that seamy kind of thing getting over with the playgoer. He wants to be entertained, not harrowed. That's pretty raw stuff. Except for the little woman and the poor delinquent youngster, it is an out-and-out—what shall I say?—an out-and-out crook ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... plowman's paw, and, "Good-by, boy," he growled. There was nothing gallant about his appearance—his blue-flannel shirt dusty with white fuzz, his wrinkled brick-red neck, the oyster-like ear at which he kept fumbling with a seamy finger-nail of his left hand. But Carl's salute was a salute to ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... circumstances, without a trace of bitterness or fretfulness, amazed her. In old days she would have put it down to "good breeding—good manners," some superficial veneer of good society of which she thoroughly approved; but she had seen too much of the seamy side of "good society" now to be able to accept this explanation of his calmness. It was not want of sensitiveness, she was sure of that: he was by no means obtuse: it was simply that his large, strong nature rose ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... Pacific to build up its great system in the western states. Other things being at all equal, it was of course desirable that Canadian traffic should follow Canadian territory to Canadian ports; it was to this end that uncounted millions had been spent. Yet patriotism had a seamy reverse side of political buncombe. Every hint of outside competition in the preserves of railway or industrial corporations in Canada was denounced in interested quarters as dangerous and empire-smashing, while the counter-incursions into the territory of the United States ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton

... poor Grafigny, while sheltering at Cirey, Winter and Spring, 1738-1739; straitened there in various respects,—extremely ill off for fuel, among other things. Rugged practical Letters, shadowing out to us, unconsciously oftenest, and like a very mirror, the splendid and the sordid, the seamy side and the smooth, of Life at Cirey, in her experience of it. Published, fourscore years after, under the above title.] For the Ten Commandments are at a singular pass in cultivated France at this epoch. Such illicit-idyllic form ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle

... his eyes, as though to shut out something that the mind saw. He had had a rough life, he had become inured to the seamy side of things—there was a seamy side even in this clean, free, wide land; and he had no sentimentality; though something seemed to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... compound of agitated and inflamed senses. The life he had been leading appeared in a vicious development of his previously harmless conceit and egoism. All his characteristics had turned out, as it were, the seamy side; and Nancy with difficulty preserved her patience as he showed point after point of perverted disposition. The result of their talk was a careless promise from Horace that he would come to Grove Lane not seldomer than ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... 1918 or 1919 have numbered not less than 150,000; and banks, cooeperative societies, and race newspapers flourished. There were also abundant social problems awakened by the saloons and gambling dens, and by the seamy side of politics. Those who had been longest in the city, however, rallied to the needs of the newcomers, and in their homes, their churches, and their places of work endeavored to get them adjusted in their environment. The housing situation, in spite of all such effort, became more and more acute, ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... harness Dolly or Dobbin, and jog off his seven miles. Seven miles there, and seven miles back, morning and evening; that is twenty-eight miles in all, and ever the self-same bit of road in every weather. So that a farmer's life has its seamy side also. But then, to get back of a night! To find a good little wife like Annie waiting for you at the upper gate or by the house door. To eat your supper and smoke your pipe, with your feet on the mantel-piece if you pleased, and no possibility ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various

... the grand and peculiar feature of the scene. Nowhere could the lordly eminence be seen to the same advantage as from this point, and Nicholas contemplated it with feelings of rapture, which no familiarity could diminish. The sun shone brightly upon its rounded summit, and upon its seamy sides, revealing all its rifts and ridges; adding depth of tint to its dusky soil, laid bare in places by the winter torrents; lending new beauty to its purple heath, and making its grey sod glow as with fire. So exhilarating was the prospect, that ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... types of life issued from the womb of nature after so long and painful a travail? The annihilation of the unfit is the seamy side, though the most real side, of natural selection. We ignore it, or extenuate it, and turn rather to consider the advances in organisation by which the survivors were enabled to outlive the ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe

... would think it a shameful thing that any stranger not unknown to the gods should enter the dancing hall unsuitably clad; and therefore he led me to another room and took silken robes out of an old sea-chest of black and seamy oak with green copper hasps that were set with a few pale sapphires, and requested me to choose a suitable robe. And I chose a bright green robe, with an under-robe of light blue which was seen here and there, and ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany

... lost, but I may be lost also through him. That queer-looking darky, Chunk, is my best hope now unless it is Miss Lou. Droll, wasn't it, that I should take her for an angel? What queer thoughts a fellow has when within half an inch of the seamy side of life! Hanged if I deserve such an awakening as I thought was blessing my eyes on the other side. From the way I ache, the other side mayn't be far off yet. Like enough hours will pass before Chunk comes back, and I must try ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe

... London, it is generally alleged that the marriage was a hasty and unhappy one; but here again the evidence is entirely untrustworthy. In many Miracles as well as in later plays it was customary to depict the seamy side of domestic life for the amusement of the crowd; and Shakespeare may have followed the public taste in this as he did in other things. The references to love and home and quiet joys in Shakespeare's plays are enough, if we take such evidence, to establish firmly the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... the lot of a commanding officer a happy one! Oh, if they could only see the seamy side of it. (He returns to his table ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw

... smoke-drenched atmosphere. Harlan stood a moment, and looked at him with a sort of shamed pity. The plot seemed unworthy, in spite of its object. The sordid treachery of politics was turned up to him, all its seamy side displayed. ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day

... testiness which was due primarily to the bitterness of his struggle with the world, and, secondarily, to the complaints which that struggle engendered. One capital consequence, however, and one which specially concerns us, was that we get this unrivalled picture of the seamy side of foreign travel—a side rarely presented with anything like Smollett's skill to the student of the grand siecle of the Grand Tour. The rubs, the rods, the crosses of the road could, in fact, hardly be presented to us more graphically or magisterially than they are in some of these chapters. ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett

... appear in other stories of the Human Comedy. The Brotherhood of Consolation is also known by the title The Seamy Side of History and is referred to by ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac

... ounces of seamy, half an ounce of cinamon, and beat them in a mortar very fine with a little vinegar, and honey, make a perfect paste of it, and make it into little cakes or loaves, dry them in the sun or in an oven, and when you would use ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May

... immoral. That is merely the conventional misuse of a conventional word. The art of Yvette Guilbert is certainly the art of realism. She brings before you the real life-drama of the streets, of the pot-house; she shows you the seamy side of life behind the scenes; she calls things by their right names. But there is not a touch of sensuality about her, she is neither contaminated nor contaminating by what she sings; she is simply a great, impersonal, dramatic artist, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... looking at a portrait of Shakespeare which Dixon had found in Russia. Lord Lytton asked me if I thought it an original or true likeness. I observed that the face was full of many fine seamy lines, which infallibly indicate great nervous genius of the highest order—noting at the same time that Lord Lytton's countenance was very much marked in a like manner. The observation was new to him, and he seemed to be interested in it, as he always was in anything like chiromancy ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... mentioning the staff. She is to write a series of articles dealing with the seamy side of Grey Town life and her methods of reforming the riff-raff. Yes; it was she who brought Tim to me. 'Here you are!' she cried. 'Tis the wickedest boy in Grey Town. Make him something useful, and you will be doing a public service to me and to the town and district.' ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin

... that "all is not gold that glitters." The leaden casket is often the shrine of the priceless scroll. The glaring and the theatrical have often a ragged and seamy interior, and won't bear "looking into." A man may have much display and be very lonely; he may have piles of wealth and be destitute of joy. His libraries may cover an acre, and yet he may have no light. And a man may have only "a candle, and a table, and ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett

... worked was 12 to 18 ft., and the stone was crushed to 2-in. size. Owing to the seamy character of the rock it was broken by blasting into comparatively small pieces requiring very little sledging. The stone was loaded into one-horse dump carts, the driver taking one cart to the crusher while the other was being loaded. ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette

... left the boat I had a little experience of the seamy side of Southern travel; nothing to be angry about, perhaps, but annoying, nevertheless, on a hot day. I surrendered my check to the purser of the boat, and the deck hands put my trunk upon the landing at Blue ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey



Words linked to "Seamy" :   seam, seamed, squalid, disreputable



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