What is "gewgaw"

Usage examples of "gewgaw".

There are thousands of such gewgaws and toys which people have in their chambers, or which they keep upon their shelves, believing that they are precious things, when they are the mere passing follies of the passing time and of no more value than papers gathered up from some dunghill or raked by chance out of the kennel.

And that house of hers, that incredible hotchpotch of stone and baked-earth bricks and flattened petrol drums, and inside a cross between a Bedouin tent and an English cottage, with great heaps of things in the process of being classified and sketched and a silver tea service and a paraffin heater and block-and-board shelving sagging with books and gewgaws.

Her motives in buying it may have been as instinctive and uncomplex as those by which any young girl chooses a dress or gewgaw of a particular hue and shape.

Gewgaws and rickrack ornamented the facade, which included complicated turrets and window embrasures.

As Master of a Lodge it is your duty to instruct your Brethren that they are all so many constant lessons, teaching the lofty qualifications which are required of those who claim them, and not merely idle gewgaws worn in ridiculous imitation of the times when the Nobles and Priests were masters and the people slaves: and that, in all true Masonry, the Knight, the Pontiff, the Prince, and the Sovereign are but the first among their equals: and the cordon, the clothing, and the jewel but symbols and emblems of the virtues required of all good Masons.

He eschewed the traditional trappings of shamans: the spiral-carved stick, the circle of stones, the pyramids of crystals, and other gewgaws.

With a contempt of the vulgar gewgaws of wealth and rank he combined a humble but intense and growing conviction of his capacity for leadership, of a spiritual superiority to those whom he desired to benefit.

I saw a pool-table, a polythene-wrapped three-piece suite, various devotional ornaments and gewgaws with their special pale glow.

She was wearing a pink dress with a lot of crinolines and petticoats and doodads and gewgaws, and she was enough to make strong men chew carpets.

Surth threw the gewgaw in his hand, and Bezrar hastily buried his face in the moss and leaves.

It was all girlish gewgaws: pandas and arcade Kewpie dolls, pinups of matinee idols and college pennants on the walls.

Pekins, damasks, lampas, painted moires, robes of shot gros de Tours, India kerchiefs embroidered in gold that could be washed, dauphines without a right or wrong side, in the piece, Genoa and Alencon point lace, parures in antique goldsmith's work, ivory bon-bon boxes ornamented with microscopic battles, gewgaws and ribbons -- he lavished everything on Cosette.

To put it in plain language, her father's mother had been a greedy old bitch, and it seemed as if every gilded gewgaw, every piece of overcarved furniture, every garishly painted chest she had been able to collect was crammed into the room.