What is "whittling"

Usage examples of "whittling".

The slender cleric sat on a fallen log whittling the finishing touches into the butt of a staff.

The Spanish-Mexican family, a father, mother and five children and sister-in-law, sat rigid on the edges of the hired chairs, silent, constrained, their eyes lowered, their elbows in at their sides, glancing furtively from under their eyebrows at the decorations or watching with intense absorption young Vacca, son of one of the division superintendents, who wore a checked coat and white thread gloves and who paced up and down the length of the barn, frowning, very important, whittling a wax candle over the floor to make it slippery for dancing.

Duffy took the block of wood from his pocket and, unsheathing his dagger, recommenced his whittling.

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.

Also they were slyly whittling down the power of the Corleone Family, muscling into their gambling areas, testing the Corleones’ reactions and, finding them weak, establishing their own bookmakers.

Right now, this very moment, there is a bowmaker whittling a piece of wood to shape it properly.

I myself possess a barlow knife which is good for whittling and Omally has an air pistol.

Speaking and reading become complex conditioned responses, as does typing or whittling or any of a myriad other mechanical skills.

Here she found an American cowboy busily engaged in whittling a stick as he sat upon an upturned cracker box and shot accurate streams of tobacco juice at a couple of industrious tumble bugs that had had the great impudence to roll their little ball of provender within the whittler's range.

Without incentives, most of Manitou's sailors would choose whittling and games over providing exertive services free of charge.

They're whittling us away and we're taking heavy fire from Fairview Beach since we can't bring the broadside to bear.

On a bench before the village inn an old man sat whittling long yellow-white curls from a length of green alder.

After the double blow of the birth and his public embarrassment, he was not yet up to professional engagements and sat whittling praying beads out of oak, scoring and inscribing them with emblems of the Namelessness of God.

A few seamen observed idly from the quarterdeck stairs, whittling sticks of soft wood into lacy, finely curled sculptures of sea animals.

Dawn-to-dusk, fourteen-hour-a-day workers, unshirking and unstinting, stylish in their own New England right, whose plainest, homeliest task became a kind of ritualistic act: the quartering of an apple, the whittling of a stick, the laying of a brick.