Meaning of doddard | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A frail old man.
2. A moribund or decayed tree.
   rare

Examples

“You are too old and too exacting to be satisfied with a blank page. You would certainly prefer one upon which life has written something. It is more interesting. Young girls are only for youths and for certain brainless doddards.”

“President Roosevelt and the former King Edward collect stamps, along with thousands of others, ranging from six-year-olds to ninety-seven year old^([sic]) doddards.”

“Nelly. There are some people who enjoy Sunday. / Renny. Yes . . . the old doddards who listen to military bands in the public park.”

“Comments John Garth, critic of the San Francisco Argonaut: “When the young student leaves art school and starts his career as a producing artist, his utter contempt for those moss-backed old doddards, the Old Masters, is complete and vocal. After ten years of the heat of the struggle, he stands silent before the Old Masters and removes his hat.””

“Secondly, the members of the Oporto Junta were no better than inept doddards, none of whom possessed any personal prestige.”

“The doctor is interested only in getting the three old doddards out of their ruts, and that is accomplished not by Freud but by cops and robbers, romance, and sentimental complications out of Scribe and Pinero.”

“Pound challenged one poet to a duel because he was “stupid,” as he attacked the “elderly muttonheads” and the Victorian “doddards” much in the manner of Mencken, his friend, at home.”

“Publishers, he has been told, are literary brigands, lying in wait for talented but defenseless authors, ready to rob them of their ideas. Those who aren’t brigands are doddards who have no real taste or appreciation and don’t know a good thing then they see it and unless you know someone who knows someone who knows the publisher it is impossible even to get a reading of your manuscript.”

“So it is not surprising that her joint was raided while she was revealed in an attitude most indicative of her general attitude (“action fotos” were taken by the go-getter chief of local police, who organized the raid), as she was, like a real trouper, trying indefatigably to ascertain the precise wishes of a party of old roués and impotent old doddards . . . then she was caught and she swore like a real trooper.”

“Flaccid adrenals urged near-moribund hearts to beat faster. They flayed their ponies with the shafts of their spears. Drool flecked the lips of doddards and ponies alike. Their backbrains smelled blood and fire in the air.”

“Furthermore, reaction and tension between adults and the younger folk is nothing new. In Faust, a student rants, / While half the world beneath our yoke is brought. What have you doddards done? Nothing thought, dreamed, and considered drafting plan on plan!”

“Wood’s comment, when he first learned of the March plan, is interesting. “We have a lot of doddards toddling into the military situation now. The General Staff which is such only in name is quoted in last night’s paper as being opposed to universal service and training and recommending a standing army of 500,000 men. These are on a par with the group of microcephaloids, who twice sent me when I was Chief of Staff, a unanimous recommendation from the War College in favor of a bounty system as against universal service.” Wood to Theodore Roosevelt, December 12, 1918, Wood MSS.”

““I’ll tell you the trouble. Our army is commanded by doddards left over from the Revolution, and the spirit of ’76 is not only dead but decayed. Military tactics change like everything else, and old men lose their vigor and perception and incentive. Worse still, their courage.””

“He would have no choice, it seemed, but to saunter around the house or join the other doddards who with the aid of walking-sticks tottered along the length of Cheyne Walk.”

“The statement that influenza rages in England does not imply that the disease is not rampant elsewhere. The Mercure de France for March 16 brings evidence that Paris is as much plagued by doddards as we are.”

“Penny whist, the game of shabby genteel dowagers and doddards.”

“There are men of all ages and all types, from wild-eyed adolescents to crinkled doddards.”

“Too, they were men like him, younger and more vigorous than the doddards who served on Heraclius’ staff.”

“He was starting to lose patience with the old doddards at the Foreign Office, too, and beginning to think he was wasting his time on them.”

““That’s for the Directory. All sound and no presence. Those doddards couldn’t muster an Imperial Host if Hypat itself had barbarians climbing the First Walls.””

“All over Western Europe, wherever the School’s influence was felt, men and women nonetheless continued to turn into puckered, rheumy old doddards, just as they’d always done, sinking at an alarmingly early age into smelly decrepitude before toppling gnarled and half-blind into their graves, often with a hefty push from the younger members of their families.”

“The creative faculty may, and often does, outlast the critical. On the whole, about all an old critic can do, if he is to stay in the ring, is to use himself and his position as a megaphone for some younger man’s ideas, a course where his conceit usually prevents and forestals him. A few doddards should, of course, be preserved, to run wode when the wind blows; to act as a sort of barometer for the energy of new work.”

“What I’m trying to say is that she could be delightful when she wanted to be. Here, she had no reason to extend herself for what she called ‘a bunch of old doddards.’”

“Male characters showing up as young heroes-in-the-making or sage old doddards, and female characters being maidens, matrons or crones?”

“I shall replenish it with Roman blood. / Who here has sworn, and then failed to keep his oath? Simeon of Corinth. Who has cringed unto the dust and let fall the sword from his hand? You, brethren. And at this moment, in the city, nothing more is needed for Caesar and the city’s gods to perish than the resurrection of the saints. Ha! Leave the old doddards among the graves! With me, now!”

“These are not imperial soldiers. These are ship guards, trained in directing doddards to the latrines and dealing with drunk noblemen, not killing.”

“[…] / Another ſhakes the Bed; diſſolving there, / Till knots upon his Gouty Joints appear, / And Chalk is in his crippled Fingers found; / Rots like a Doddard Oke, and piecemeal falls to the ground.”

“Trees when lopped were dodded and became doddards.”

“All the old pollards on the site should be maintained and any old, ill-formed or inaccessible individuals left to over-maturity. At present there is a dearth of older dying and decaying material. In areas being restocked, planting up close to these old doddards and pollards should be avoided.”

“A famous survey of 1608 revealed 123,927 trees (197,405 loads) fit for the Navy and another 118,072 loads of ‘doddards’ (ancient decayed trees). The high proportion of ‘doddards’ shows the lack of replacement, caused by the grazing. From the outbreak of the Civil War many of these trees were being rapidly felled, whole woods being stripped of their oak. Even doddards were cut wholesale to provide ‘knees’ and ‘crooks’ used in ship frames.”

“From 1612, oak was felled in the forest for the navy yards at Deptford and Woolwich and from 1632 also for Portsmouth and other local yards. Felling for the navy continued for the remainder of the century and, periodically, during the 18th and into the 19th century. Besides oak, small amounts of beech and large numbers of ‘doddards’ (probably moribund oak, that provided big limbs, crooks and knees) were also taken.”

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