What is "ditty"

Usage examples of "ditty".

Had not a momentary impulse tempted me to sing my favorite ditty to the harpsichord, to beguile the short interval, during which my hostess was conversing with her visitor in the next apartment, I should have speeded to New-York, have embarked for Europe, and been eternally severed from my friend, whom I believed to have died in phrenzy and beggary, but who was alive and affluent, and who sought me with a diligence, scarcely inferior to my own.

With impartiality he passed from strains of popular hymnody to the familiar ditties of the music hall, lavishing on each an excess of sentiment.

Serious folk, weird time sense, one of the few races to consider Wagner a composer of quick, hummable, stick-in-the-mind ditties.

Master Pory, arrived at the maudlin stage, alternately sang a slow and melancholy ditty and wiped the tears from his eyes with elaborate care.

When pinned, he preferred to disarm Proxenus by grinning spastically and singing faintly obscene ditties that would soon have his older cousin collapsed in paroxysms of laughter.

Grown men, as well as children, sometimes went round, and the ditties sung often contained verses of good-wishes for the household practically identical with those sung by wassailers at Christmas.

Fleta played a merry ditty on her horn, theme and countertheme on the panpipes, as if the two of them had not a care in the frame.

I stopped into a twenty-four-hour cybercafe called Digital Ditties, got online, and worked all night.

After having for a long time shone as the star of the supper parties of the Latin Quarter, at which she used to sing in a voice, still very fresh if not very true, a number of country ditties, which earned her the nickname under which she has since been immortalized by one of our neatest rhymsters, Mademoiselle Musette suddenly left the Rue de la Harpe to go and dwell upon the Cytherean heights of the Breda district.

Michael had now ended his ditty, and nothing was heard but the drowsy murmur of the breeze among the woods, and its light flutter, as it blew freshly into the carriage.

So the second act had the Essex rebellion, the Dark Lady shoved into a dark jail, the Bard collapsing with various kinds of distress as the Ghost in Hamlet, which and whom (Hamlet) he kept, in bereaved father's guilt, calling Hamnet and Hamnet, his going home to Stratford to be nagged to death by Anne, but not before conjuring the Dark Lady as Cleopatra and seeing, about his deathbed, visions of her wagging her divine farthingaled ass to that early mocking ditty about love.

Before the great man arrived the platform was occupied by a lascivious sergeant who was whittling away the time by leading us in a succession of bawdy ditties accompanied by gestures.

Answering the poet's unspoken inquiry whether he is not to die otherwise, or whether Jove will him stellify, the eagle says that he has been sent by Jupiter out of his "great ruth," "For that thou hast so truely So long served ententively* *with attentive zeal His blinde nephew* Cupido, *grandson And faire Venus also, Withoute guuerdon ever yet, And natheless hast set thy wit (Although that in thy head full lite* is) *little To make bookes, songs, and ditties, In rhyme or elles in cadence, As thou best canst, in reverence Of Love, and of his servants eke, That have his service sought, and seek, And pained thee to praise his art, Although thou haddest never part.

To the past--whatever it might have been--he said farewell, and went carolling some cheerful ditty, to look upon the face of his future.

Max hadn't anything zippy to brag about except the short-lived Plum Crunchies ditty.