wiredrawn

Here was no pindling fowl that had taken the veil and lived the cloistered life; here was no wiredrawn and trained-down cross-country turkey, but a lusty giant of a bird that would have been a cassowary, probably, or an emu, if he had lived, his bosom a white mountain of lusciousness, his interior a Golconda and not a Golgotha.

Cobb's Bill-of-Fare Peter Newell 1910

The other letter consists of the usual wiredrawn argument for fatalism.

Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays 1905

The thought is wiredrawn to inanity, but the words make it perfectly clear that the poet was the only one of the lady's lovers -- to the definite exclusion of all others -- whose name justified the quibbling pretence of identity with the 'will' which controls her being.

A Life of William Shakespeare with portraits and facsimiles Sidney Lee 1892

One scribe will probably make something like an inverted cornucopia, or wiredrawn extinguisher; and one will cross it with a dash, and another with a loop; while another will make

Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 Various 1841

Small substance in that Figaro: thin wiredrawn intrigues, thin wiredrawn sentiments and sarcasms; a thing lean, barren; yet which winds and whisks itself, as through a wholly mad universe, adroitly, with a high-sniffing air: wherein each, as was hinted, which is the grand secret, may see some image of himself, and of his own state and ways.

The French Revolution Thomas Carlyle 1838

By which last wiredrawn similitude does Teufelsdröckh mean no more than that young men find obstacles in what we call 'getting under way'?

Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History Thomas Carlyle 1838

As, I assure you, were I to fill the remainder, all I should say would be terribly wiredrawn, do excuse me: you shall hear an ample detail of the first Admiral Vernon that springs out of our

The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford — Volume 2 Horace Walpole 1757

Here was no pindling fowl that had taken the veil and lived a cloistered life; here was no wiredrawn and trained-down cross-country turkey, but a lusty giant of a bird that would have been a cassowary, probably, or an emu, if he had lived, his bosom a white mountain of lusciousness, his interior a Golconda and not a Golgotha.

The Old Foodie 2009

This, I supposed, would have engaged her into a subject from which I could have wiredrawn something: — for Hickman is one of her favourites — why, I can’t divine, except for the sake of opposition of character to that of thy honest friend.

Clarissa Harlowe 2006