Her ever smiling lips and laughing eyes had caused him to crave her body, and when he had accomplished that and found it was all she had to offer, and had turned from her constant demands, she had proffered her favors elsewhere, not discreetly, which he might have borne, if not forgiven, but openly, until her name became a byword. I am positive when I say that if need were I could produce a cloud of witnesses to the excellence of her noble exercitations which, so far from being a byword, should be a glorious incentive in the human breast.

The watershed was a j umble of ridges and swales and some of the streams wandered out to the little Muskrat River in the wilderness eastward, a nightmare region of thickets and 136 huge boulders, a byword amongst the older lumbermen. The byword in Mos Eisley, which looks like a cluster of populated sand dunes, is camouflage.Īnd that eternal honour which should live Sunlike, above the reek of mortal fame, Changed to a mockery and a byword? The haggard, distressed countenances of these miserable, complaining, dejected, living skeletons, crying for medical aid and food, and cursing their Government for its refusal to exchange prisoners, and the ghastly corpses, with their glazed eye balls staring up into vacant space, with the flies swarming down their open and grinning mouths, and over their ragged clothes, infested with numerous lice, as they lay amongst the sick and dying, formed a picture of helpless, hopeless misery which it would be impossible to portray bywords or by the brush. It had finally been swept aside by the forces of an increasingly nervous secular state empowered by a sickened populace, but its name lingered as a byword for terror, sadism and savagery, and all that is foul in human nature. His fidelity to his wife was as pure as a poet could imagine, and his courage a byword in the army. His explanation made it sound possible, even somewhat simple, as if they were looking for the boy in a section of New York and not in the wilderness and ruined towns in the thousands of square clicks of O-Zone, which was itself a byword for everything unknown and unfathomable and empty and strange. I should tamely submit to be a derided, outcast husband, that I should take no vengeance upon, that villainous Pope for having made me a thing of scorn, a byword throughout Italy?Īs a result, he was naturally a hissing and a byword to all decent people, as he would have known, if he had ever associated with decent people which, of course, he did not, only with other lost souls like himself.

Definition of byword