Showy but shoddy

Usage examples of gaudy.

Nearly a month of unrelieved campaigning up through the inhospitable mountains had given them the look of ruffiansmostly unwashed, untrimmed and unshaven, showy with gaudy bits of looted Ahrmehnee finery, acrawl with vermin.

Dressed in gaudy tatters and besmudged with dirt, Alec watched gleefully as Seregil juggled, walked ropes, and mugged for the crowd.

Luke, Cleed, Princess Marxia, Baby Liz - all were portrayed in mammoth exaggeration upon the gaudy, painted sheets of canvas.

One was the chasseur Colonel of the Imperial Guard, gaudy in his scarlet pelisse, dark green overalls and colback, a round hat made of thick black fur.

Martian parrots hung limp and fashionless like gaudy rags, and in the courtyard ground the corn-rats came up from their tunnels in the scorching earth to die, squeaking in scores along under the walls.

They were round or oval, frames of wicker and shaped wood covered in hide and painted in gaudy shapes, the swastika-like fylfot, or animals.

Down its crowded corridors swarms a vast gaudy heterogeny of galactic creatures, natives of the worlds of Capella, Arcturus, Altair, Canopus, Polaris, Antares - beings both intelligent and articular, methane-breathing or nitrogen-breathing or argon-breathing, spiny-skinned or skinless, many-armed or many-headed or altogether incorporeal, each a product of a distant and distinctly unique and alien cultural heritage.

You should be in a ballroom with crystal chandeliers, drinking wine, and dancing to orchestra music, not in a gaudy honky tonk, drinking beer and listening to obscene shouts and the raucous music of a loud five-piece band.

Rufrius was right, they were very pretty in their Greek hoplite armor of linen corselets oversewn with silver metal scales, gaudy purple tunics, high brown boots, silver nose-pieced helmets bearing purple horsehair plumes.

They were both the same, with gaudy red and yellow pictured flames still visible on the singed surfaces, and the words GOLDEN BOMB in jazzy letters on the one under the harrow.

A small man, wearing a stylish but somewhat gaudy Ionian purple snakeskin jacket with illuminated kummerbund and curly-toed Brazilian pigbark slippers, Mini looked exactly what he was: a dealer in wholesale dried fruit.

Even here, no movement of life is visible, but one who has lived and known towns like these feels for the first time an emotion of warmth and life as he looks at the gaudy, blazing bill-beplastered silence of that front.

The gaudy earring no one would lay claim to, the matchbook from Le Mascarade she had found in her car, the necklace that had come in the plain white envelope.

He was attired in a gaudy purple dressing gown that gave him a mildish appearance.

A gaudy oleograph of a soldier on horseback--which little Peter had been fond of, and which had been hung up to amuse him during one of those childish illnesses--remained in its place.