Look, driven one leg to death, and
spavined the other for life, and now wears out bone legs by the cord.
Here you're got to peg and peg and peg and there just ain't any let-up--and what you learn here, you've got to KNOW, dontchuknow --or else you'll have one of these
spavined, spectacles, ring-boned, knock-kneed old professors in your hair.
Luckily for them they had not to decide, for lumbering along the road, with one lamp lighted and two
spavined horses in the shafts, came a heavy coach, which after a moment's suspense they recognized as the Oxford coach, the redoubtable Pig and Whistle.
Area studies in today's universities--the languages, history, culture, and religion of a place--is a
spavined vestige of what the field was in the mid-20th century.
There, and there, and everywhere, the mountains of junk:
spavined bicycle frames, rusted fifty-five-gallon drums, refrigerators gone leprous with rust, snaggletoothed hay rakes, combine blades, baby carriages.
Like a couple,
spavined as old race horses, shuttering the windows on an
There are battle-weary,
spavined 944s that have somehow survived from the 1980s, a few big-buttocked 928s, welterweight Caymans and Boxsters and scores of 911s of every incarnation, including at least a dozen modified GT2s and GT3s, Porsche's howling mad race-cars-for-the-road.
Everywhere, there is much to talk and gripe about, as Italy is today one of the sick men of the Eurozone, its economy
spavined and growth forecasts gloomier than a Puccini opera, but you wouldn't know it to look around.
Even in graduate classes, however, I have occasionally asked students to read some piece of Dickens, say, or Browning, that shimmered with vitality, lithe, nimble, each word moving precisely in an elegant ballet of tones and meanings, only to find the ballet performed by a troupe, as it were, of knock-kneed, splay-footed,
spavined creatures stumbling precariously from one comma to the next.
My house is a decayed house, and the Jew squats an the window sill the owner,
Spavined in some estaminet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London ...