What is "harridan"

Usage examples of "harridan".

Bryson lashed out with his left arm, like a cobra, directly toward the blade--a counterintuitive move, because it meant rising up and greeting the instrument of death, or the appendage that held it, rather than retreating from it--and as he seized the wrist of the hand holding the stiletto, the harridan was clearly taken by surprise.

Once, he was stopped by a trio of hairy and verminous keelboatmen who demanded his business-it took all the diplomacy of self-abasement he could muster to get out of the confrontation with no more than tobacco on his shirt-and as he passed the two-room plank shed owned and operated by a woman known as Kentucky Williams, that harridan and the ladies of her employ, sitting uncorseted in their shabby petticoats on the sills of their open French doors, rained him with orange-peels, cigar-butts, and some of the most scatalogical language he had ever heard in his life.

He thought that she was more like a child of Satan kept there by these two weird harridans for the love of the Devil.

She was a badgerer, a harridan, a snarling viper with a sure mouth for the wisecrack and a ready fang for the jugular.

From sweetskinned debutantes in rose gardens to toothless harridans who took all his money and kept telling him to hurry up.

The duty harridan from monitoring was waving bulletins at me like flags, a couple of janitors were yelling at me, the radio boy was clutching a bunch of signals, the phones were going, not just my own, but half a dozen of the direct lines on the fourth floor.

The harridan landladies of his past with their stewed cabbage, incontinent dogs and patched bedclothes inhabit a world far from London N.

So that's how Puddin' was born: I started writing first-person-female-adolescent stories—but not for that old harridan.

As soon as she had a ring on her finger, she dropped the sweetness and light and turned into a harridan and as interesting and deep as the paint jobs they did on pickups.

Nobody looked at me as I entered and it was quite clear that nobody even wanted to look at me, which was understandable, perhaps, in the circumstances, as the audience were almost splitting their pebble glasses in their eagerness to miss none of the aesthetic nuances or symbolic significances of the original and thought-compelling ballet performance taking place before their enraptured eyes, in which a shapely young harridan in a bubble-bath, to the accompaniment of the discordant thumpings and asthmatic wheezings of an excruciating band that would not otherwise have been tolerated in a boiler factory, endeavoured to stretch out for a bath-towel that had been craftily placed about a yard beyond her reach.