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Examples
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But change or not (in substantial terms) they know it is definitely time to clean out the augean stables.
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Of course, I remember growing up in NYC in the days when tickets were balanced - one Jew, one Italian, one Irishman - by evil old Tammany Hall, which understood, and served, human nature so much better, infinitely better than the reformers, oh the holy holy reformers, who cleaned out the augean stables and ruined everything for everybody forever.
"The Audacity of Oprah." Ann Althouse 2007
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A work of installation art in a gallery at Harvard attends to the augean task of "[engaging] the ever-present conflicted relationships between the body and the mind, between the personal and the public, and between time and the timeless."
Bad Publicity 2007
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As in the appellate court faces the augean task of cleaning up the mess the district court made of this litigation.
The Volokh Conspiracy » Classical or Biblical Allusions: 2007
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As the winter wore itself away, Mr Cheesacre, happy as he was amidst the sports of Norfolk, and prosperous as he might be with the augean spoils of Oileymead, fretted himself with an intense anxiety to bring to a close that affair which he had on his hands with the widow Greenow.
Can You Forgive Her? 1993
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No use to take medicines for your _poor blood, bad complexion and horrid feelings_, as they will not cleanse the augean stable so long neglected.
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The receptacles of the inner man reek with augean filth, and we cleanse them not.
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As the winter wore itself away, Mr Cheesacre, happy as he was amidst the sports of Norfolk, and prosperous as he might be with the augean spoils of Oileymead, fretted himself with an intense anxiety to bring to a close that affair which he had on his hands with the widow Greenow.
Can you forgive her? 1864
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As the winter wore itself away, Mr Cheesacre, happy as he was amidst the sports of Norfolk, and prosperous as he might be with the augean spoils of Oileymead, fretted himself with an intense anxiety to bring to a close that affair which he had on his hands with the widow
Can You Forgive Her? Anthony Trollope 1848
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Cleaning out these augean stables, Henry II wisely abandoned Fordlandia.
Books news, reviews and author interviews | guardian.co.uk 2010
carolinacc commented on the word augean
Abominably filthy; i.e. resembling the stable of Augeas, a fabulous king of Elis, which contained 3,000 oxen, and had been uncleansed for 30 years, when Hercules, by turning the river Alpheus through it, purified it in a single day.
oed
April 8, 2009
hernesheir commented on the word augean
Railroad telegraph shorthand for the question "What will you authorize?" --US Railway Association, Standard Cipher Code, 1906.
January 20, 2013