Use jumble in a sentence

In Macedonia, for instance, there is a jumble of Albanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek and Rumanian villages always jostling one another and maintaining an intense irritation between the kindred nations close at hand.

Her dealings with men had been confined to members of that sex who went about their purpose in an indirect and roundabout way, speaking in generalities, attentive to insignificant detail, possessing that smaller sense of proportion which is a feminine failing and which must always make a tangled jumble of those public affairs in which women and priests may play a part.

Immigrants in time changed the character of the population as well as its dress, and for a while there seems to have been something of a jumble of elements, new laws conflicting with old habits, hungry politicians preying upon a simple people, who only desired to be let alone, and who, when they discovered some gross imposition, were philosophical enough to call it, jokingly, being "greased and swallowed."

She got together all sorts of interesting people in or about the public service, she mixed the obscurely efficient with the ill-instructed famous and the rudderless rich, got together in one room more of the factors in our strange jumble of a public life than had ever met easily before.

In like manner, if two or more atoms be joined together into the same mass, every one of those atoms will be the same, by the foregoing rule: and whilst they exist united together, the mass, consisting of the same atoms, must be the same mass, or the same body, let the parts be ever so differently jumbled.

Whether it be probable that a promiscuous jumble of printing letters should often fall into a method and order, which should stamp on paper a coherent discourse; or that a blind fortuitous concourse of atoms, not guided by an understanding agent, should frequently constitute the bodies of any species of animals: in these and the like cases, I think, nobody that considers them can be one jot at a stand which side to take, nor at all waver in his assent.

The so-called spontaneous utterances that seem so full of life and are apparently the product of flashed thought are either the welling up of some subconscious ideas quickly reconstructed to fit the situation, or they are a haphazard jumble either meaningless or conveying an unintended impression.

Sheridan once electrified the country gentlemen in the House of Commons, by concluding an animated appeal to their patriotism, with a quotation from Herodotus, which they cheered most vociferously; when, in fact, he merely strung together a jumble of words, a jargon uttered on the instant, which sounded very much like Greek.

The "it" and the "that" which were reported, and which the despatch related in another three or four lines, concerned the position of a forward line of battle, but have really nothing to do with this account, which aims only at relating something of the method by which "it was reported" and the men whose particular work was concerned only with the report as a report, a string of words, a jumble of letters, a huddle of Morse dots and dashes.

I wonder if my boys, when they are grown and begin to realize woman, will care to look into this book of mine, and read in and between the lines of its jumble of scraps and letters what their mother thought of them, and how things appeared to her in the days of their babyhood.

For myself I must declare, that at the end of the play I found my soul uniform, and all of a piece; but at the end of the epilogue, it was so jumbled together and divided between jest and earnest, that, if you will forgive me an extravagant fancy, I will here set it down.

In letters to members of the family or to intimate friends we must include many very minor things, because we know that our correspondent will be interested in them, but a rambling, disjointed jumble of poorly selected and ill-arranged details becomes tedious.

He jumped ditches and gullies, plunged into bad jumbles or rock, tried to hurdle logs too high for him, carried me under low branches and through dense thickets, and in general showed he was exceedingly willing to chase after the pack, but ignorant of rough forest travel.

We climbed out of the parks, up onto the rocky ridges where the spruce grew scarce, and then farther to the jumble of stones that had weathered from the great peaks above, and beyond that up the slope where all the vegetation was dwarfed, deformed, and weird, strange manifestation of its struggle for life.

In the one glance which Marcus then obtained of the interior of the room, he saw the pale mechanic hastily rise from a jumble of cog wheels before him, and put up a screen to shelter his work from observation, after which he stepped forward, or rather sprang, to meet his child.

It was also realized that as soon as any considerable number of stations were established about the world, and began sending messages to and fro, there would be a perfect jumble of waves flying about in all directions through the ether, so that no messages could be sent or received.

He turned the handles of the little organ fitfully, so that now the strains of sorrow arose at such long intervals as hardly to be connected with one another, and now all huddled and jumbled like notes in a barbaric quickstep, and as he played he addressed his instrument in a quiet, cruel voice.

We who have just got in crowd to the windows and try to look outside, towards the level crossing where, perhaps, the people in whom we live are still watching for us; but the eye can no longer pick up anything but a vague stirring, shaded with crayon and jumbled with nature.

As for Hugh himself he found it hard to believe his senses, for the absolute quiet and dead calm brooding all day long over that retired spot in the wilderness had been rudely shattered by a most astonishing noise as of many hoarse voices, making a jumble and roar of sound unlike anything save the confusion of battle.

Can the insulting jumble of ignorance and effrontery, of scientific phrase and French paraphrase, of slang and inspired adjective, which he puts forward with the pretence that it represents thought, be regarded, from any possible point of view, as a philosophy, or a system, or a belief?

I had heard and read of battlefields, seen pictures of battlefields, of horses and men, of cannon and wagons, all jumbled together, while the ground was strewn with dead and dying and wounded, but I must confess that I never realized the "pomp and circumstance" of the thing called glorious war until I saw this.

I suppose that the first is the instrument he uses to cut off coupons with, and the next is his salmon rod, which I would like to break into little pieces, for it has been the cause of turning our long bowsprit towards this horrid jumble of rock and sea.

The captain, with his blind eye and lame leg, would, it is true, bring his strange dream to mind, and perplex him sadly for a few moments; but, of late, his life had been made up so much of dreams and realities, his nights and days had been so jumbled together, that he seemed to be moving continually in a delusion.

The opposition that has in modern times been set up between science on the one hand and a jumble of studies labelled either literary or "humanistic" studies on the other is to my mind wholly unfounded in the nature of things, and destructive of any liberal view of education.

One cannot with any patience reflect on the unaccountable jumble of persons and things in this town and nation, which occasions very frequently, that a brave man falls by a hand below that of the common hangman, and yet his executioner escapes the clutches of the hangman for doing it.

We are further informed that the Sibyl generally wrote her oracles on separate oak leaves, which were set in due order in her cave, but which the wind, as soon as the doors opened, scattered or jumbled together, so that most of her predictions proved unintelligible to those who visited her shrine.

If this rule is disregarded every piece of furniture unrelated to the whole becomes a spot, it has no real connection with the room, and the room itself, instead of a harmonious and delightful influence, akin to that of a sun-flushed dawn or a sunset sky, is like a picture where there is no composition, or a book where incident is jumbled together without relation to the story.

"I do this," he said, "because it seems pleasant to be able to look back upon our past lives and note the gradual change in our sentiments and views of life; and because my life has been, and bids fair to be, such a jumble of strange incidents that, should I become anybody or anything, this will be useful as a means of showing how much suffering and temptation a man may undergo and still keep clear of despair and vice."

He does not deny that a public testimonial may be an honor, and that there may be proper occasion for such things; but, real discernment of merit being rare, and those who give and those who seek testimonials being but a jumble of the good and the bad together, the abuses of the system bring it into discredit.

She jumbled all her letters up together and seemed quite unable to learn them, and when the tutor tried to draw her attention to their different shapes, and to help her by showing her that this was like a little horn, or that like a bird's bill, she would suddenly exclaim in a joyful voice, "That is a goat!"

The first has at least a consistency, that makes a man, however erroneously, uniform at least; but the latter way of proceeding is such an inconsistent chimera and jumble of philosophy and vulgar prejudice, that hardly anything more ridiculous can be conceived.

Self-righteous pedants who had turned religion into a jumble of petty precepts, and very superior persons who keenly appreciated the good things of this world, and were too enlightened to have much belief in anything, and too comfortable to be enthusiasts, were not hopeful material.

Having cleared a way across the tobacco-laden atmosphere, through which can be spied ladies, young and old, inhaling and exhaling with more vigor than grace, they had ensconced themselves in the seat for two which lies isolated from the jumble of chairs and couches.

"I run it through in its sheath," Leonie had replied, pulling the sheathed dagger out as she spoke, so that her hair had fallen in a jumbled scented mantle all over her, causing the men to put their hands in their pockets, or behind their backs, and the women to mechanically pat their heads; just as you fidget unconsciously with your veil, or the curls above your ear, when someone of your own sex, and far better turned-out, happens upon your horizon.

The Consul kept going and looking at the barometer, and tapping it to see if the quicksilver was rising or falling: but, to tell the truth, it did not seem to make much matter which it did; for the sky, the clouds, the rain, and the storm had all got into such a jumble, that the weather continued equally abominable, week after week, during the whole winter.

I cry out against it, because it jumbles all ideas, causes the means to be taken for the end, the obstacle for the cause, the alpha for the omega; because its presence in the world, though in itself beneficial, has, nevertheless, introduced a fatal notion, a perversion of principles, a contradictory theory, which, in a multitude of forms, has impoverished mankind and deluged the earth with blood.

And she began running away, and she ran and ran till she found herself reckoning up an account she had puzzled over in the morning, and she did it backwards and forwards, upwards and downwards, starting here, starting there, and the figures got mixed up with other things, and she had to begin over again, and everything jumbled up, and her head whirled, till finally, with a start, she woke.

And this, I say, is the natural difference between the rhetorician and the sophist, but by reason of their near connection, they are apt to be jumbled up together; neither do they know what to make of themselves, nor do other men know what to make of them.

He grinned, said maybe he would, folded the sheet of paper filled with what looked like a meaningless jumble of letters and figures, bought a plat of that township and begged some government pamphlets, and went out humming a little tune just above a whisper.

In looking at Hogarth, you are ready to burst your sides with laughing at the unaccountable jumble of odd things which are brought together; you look at Wilkie's pictures with a mingled feeling of curiosity and admiration at the accuracy of the representation.

Jumbled up as the garden is, the spring twilight veils all deficiencies and releases persuasive odors from every corner, while the knoll, with its gnarled trees outlined against the sky, appealed to me as never before, a thing desirable and to be restored and preserved even at a cost rather than obliterated.

It is also dangerous for the inexperienced to plunge into easy arrangements of unknown music, taking perhaps wrong views of the time, and sometimes making the more experienced listener smile, if nothing worse, at the curious rendering of some well-known air, jumbled up with its obbligato accompaniment, the existence of which was entirely unknown to the poor player.

His brain was somewhat confused, and scraps of old songs and verses he had known in boyhood, were jumbled together without cause or sequence, varying in their turn with the events of his business, his financial "deals" and the general results of his life's work.

Look at our literature, our architecture, our science, our political and moral theories, our social arrangements generally, and especially our hideous, almost diabolical arrangements or lack of arrangements for the care of the poor and the unfortunate, and what a confused jumble they present!

Later, when I tried to piece together the fragments of that journey, I remembered that my coat, which had been folded and placed beyond my restless tossing, had been rescued in the morning from a heterogeneous jumble of blankets, evening papers and cravat, had been shaken out with profanity and donned with wrath.

Baby Sue's little, clear jumble of words in perfect tune was so bewitchingly sweet that Harriet again engulfed her, while the outraged mother, not so easily beguiled, sailed down the steps and around through the garden toward the chapel, driving the two older offenders before her to the scene of the crime.

If you are so fortunate to approach the white-eyed vireo before he suspects your presence, you may hear him amusing himself by jumbling together snatches of the songs of the other birds in a sort of potpourri; or perhaps he will be scolding or arguing with an imaginary foe, then dropping his voice and talking confidentially to himself.

These particulars are given merely to show how little reliance is to be placed upon the statements of perfectly truthful persons who do not observe closely, whose memory plays them tricks, who are not especially interested in the matter under discussion, or whose recollections naturally become jumbled after several years have elapsed.

When Pauline had gone over all these things several times, in that extraordinary jumbling yet keenly distinct way with which such reminiscences will troop to the memory, she felt positively fatigued, and a sense of oppression lay like a burden at her heart.

In the window were jars of candy, red and white, gingerbread horses, shoestrings, oranges, lemons, and dolls strung along in a line, the largest in the middle and the smallest at each end; besides these there were tops, whistles, writing paper, pencils, scrap pictures, and a variety of other things, all jumbled up together.

The gaping rent, the jumbled rocks, the thick spurt of steam issuing from the buried drill, it was all tumultuous, primeval; and that grimy workman, heaving aside the dirt and scrambling to the air, was suggestive of Milton's earth-born "tawny lion, pawing to get free."

Then as they read the unintelligible jumble of words, he repeated the meaning of them as though they formed the most ordinary message, instead of a dispatch that might, as they well knew, shake Europe to its social and political foundations within the next week or so.

It and other works of the same author may be described as queer and interesting jumbles of astronomical and other information, thrown into an interesting form; and, in the case of the present work, spread through a finely illustrated quarto volume of nearly five hundred pages. "The War Department got ahead of us in the matter of furniture," said an officer of the Navy Department to me long afterwards, when the furniture for the new department building was being obtained.

Had he wished to terrify her by a hostile reception, he could not have succeeded more completely, though, to be just, he meant nothing of the sort; his wits being jumbled into chaos by the apparition of the last person then alive whom he expected or desired to see on board the Andromeda.

Will you tell us that the fifty-seven primary elements danced about till the air, and sea, and earth, somehow jumbled themselves together into the present shape of this glorious and beautiful world, with all its regularity of day and night, and summer and winter, with all its beautiful flowers and lofty trees, with all its variety of birds, and beasts, and fishes?

We first came to the place at midnight; in the morning when we got up we found outside our door, in the midst of a jumble of broken pump handles and biscuit tins, fragments of chairs, holy pictures, crucifixes and barbed wire entanglements, a dead dog dwindling to dust, the hair falling from its skin and the white bones showing.

In these "arguments" the term venerable is used instead of moldy, and hallowed instead of devilish; whereas there is nothing properly venerable or antique about a language which is not yet four hundred years old, and about a jumble of imbecile spellings which were grotesque in the beginning, and which grow more and more grotesque with the flight of the years.

It is not unusual at hotel dinners, or on board steamers, to see a man, I cannot call him a gentleman, sitting next a female, totally neglect her, and heap his plate with fish, with flesh, with pie, with pudding, with potato, with cranberry jam, with pickles, with salad, with all and every thing then within his reach, swallow in a trice all this jumble of edibles, jump up and vanish.

Gabriel brushed in a large, bright picture of her progress through the time and round the world, round it and round it again, from continent to continent and clime to clime; with populations and deputations, reporters and photographers, placards and interviews and banquets, steamers, railways, dollars, diamonds, speeches and artistic ruin all jumbled into her train.

And all that evening he was scribbling away upon a pad of paper he had brought along, drawing all manner of remarkable figures, which he jumbled up in such a way that he actually forgot the key to the combinations; and had to get Allan's help in solving some of them, which the others considered a rich joke.

Again, the writer's mind may contain several jumbled ideas, each one good in itself but totally independent of the others; and if he attempts to express any particular one before it has had time to disentangle itself, it is bound to bring with it portions of other and distinct ideas.

Without being an odd jumble, it could not possibly reflect American life and manners at the present time with any degree of fidelity; for the foundations of the old in society have been broken up as effectually, within the past two years, as were those of the great deep at the time of Noah's flood, and the disruption has not taken place long enough ago for the new to have assumed any appearance of stability.

Long before reaching the Moro school for boys, which we next visited, we could hear the voices of the pupils in a treble uproar, for they all and individually studied aloud, rocking back and forth in their seats, so that at first the sound was an unintelligible jumble, which finally resolved itself into bits of the multiplication table, detached letters of the alphabet, and pages from geography or history.

I put this question also, and the confusion appeared to become worse confounded; some half-a-dozen replies coming back to us all jumbled up together, English and French words being so hopelessly intermixed, that it was utterly impossible to make head or tail of what they were saying.

Here and there when the tide was low lay patches of blackish sand, but the foot of the cliffs nearly all the way was one jumble of great rocks, beginning with lumps, say as big as a chest of drawers, and running up to rugged masses as large as cottages.

How the above was extracted from the eight characters which represented the year, month, day, and hour of our birth, is made perfectly clear by a sum showing every step in the working of the problem, though we must confess it appeared to us a humbugging jumble, the most prominent part of which was the answer.

After travelling three hours and a half we passed over and amongst a range of low hills, a volcanic jumble with earths of all colors, seams of gypsum stuck up sideways, and many other things. I used once to sigh and groan over not having brought a geologist with us, but I was wiser by that time.

The constant rush and roar of traffic, the crowds of people jostling each other on the pavements, the happiness and the misery, the riches and the poverty, all mixed up together in one jumble, like good and bad fruit in a basket, fairly took my breath away; and when I went down, that first afternoon, and saw the Park in all its summer glory, my amazement may be better imagined than described.

Jennings's prophecies, though rather jumbled together, were chiefly fulfilled; for she was able to visit Edward and his wife in their Parsonage by Michaelmas, and she found in Elinor and her husband, as she really believed, one of the happiest couples in the world.

The village is an odd one, for it is over a mile long, but hardly any houses stand away from the main street, which is made up of cob-walled, thatched cottages, quite large shops, little slate-roofed houses, and villas in their own garden, all jumbled together as if they had been thrown down accidentally.

In point of style it is a curious jumble of American sense and Southern highfaluting.

They were all pretty far gone in a state of intoxication, and were singing a jumble of at least a dozen forecastle ditties in tones of maudlin sentiment, or laughing and jeering at nothing in particular as they reeled and staggered about the deck.

There were no more blank plates, but there were some double ones which had been twice exposed, and showed such a kaleidoscopic jumble of heads and legs as was as good as any professional puzzle; but, besides these, there were a number of groups where the likenesses were quite recognizable, though scarcely flattering enough to be pleasant to the originals.

The strata seem, on the contrary, to have been shoved up and crumpled in all directions by some powerful shrinkage of the earth's crust, due perhaps to cooling; and the result is such a jumble of contorted rock masses, that it looks as if some great castle had been blown up by dynamite and its walls hurled in all directions.

It receives the impressions of the senses, combines them, feels them, comprehends and designates or names them after any characteristic, and when man has found words, then the adding and subtracting begin, but unfortunately also the jumbling and chattering, till we finally establish that philosophy and religion, which have aroused in so great degree your anger, and even your blood thirstiness.

This jumble of doctrinal and family commands bears internal evidence of the truth of Clayton's account of its offhand dictation with a view to its immediate submission to the prophet's wife, who was already in a state of rebellion because of his infidelities.

This silence lasted a quarter of an hour, when at last one of them rose up, took off his hat, and, after making a variety of wry faces and groaning in a most lamentable manner, he, partly from his nose and partly from his mouth, threw out a strange, confused jumble of words (borrowed, as he imagined, from the Gospel) which neither himself nor any of his hearers understood.

They are simple things, but mostly made expressly for him, of oxidized silver, with his initials in plain block letters; and each object has a neat sole leather case of its own, so that they can be thrown pell-mell into a bag and jumbled up together without being scratched.

The room was plethoric with artistic objects, some good, some bad, some atrocious, but all recalling the singer's past triumphs, and all jumbled together, on tables, easels, pedestals, brackets and shelves with much less taste than an average dealer in antiquities would have shown in arranging his wares.

Most of them were but as blurs, swimming, yet he was aware (he thought) of a formidable and horrible impassive scrutiny of himself, a glare seeming to pierce through him to the back of the belt round his waist, so that he began to have fearful doubts about that belt, about every fastening and adjustment of his garments, about the expression of his countenance, and about many other things jumbling together in his consciousness.

Peking is not a Chinese city at all, although generally supposed to be so, but a Tartar city, which, instead of the jumble of narrow, paved streets habitually found in all Chinese towns, was originally designed and laid out on a plan probably excelling in grandeur that of any other city in the world.

There were great cakes and little cakes, cakes with raisins in them, cakes with currants, and cakes without either; there were brown cakes and yellow cakes, frosted cakes, glazed cakes, hearts and rounds, and jumbles, which playful youth slip over the forefinger before spoiling their annular outline.

By the flickering light of one poor candle, which could hardly be kept burning for the pouring rain, the Dutch captain read the terms he had brought, while the rest stood round him, gathering what sense they could from the confused jumbling of bad French, and worse English he was pleased to call a translation.

And he found himself fastened to the wheel, jumbled with that credulous and childish humanity, but lacking the consolation of their fond delusion; and his traveling companions insulted him, spat upon him, beat him in their indignation when they learned of his absurd denial of their movement, believing him insane for holding in doubt something which was visible to all.

They all wander together through the gray streets where the centuries-old buildings tower overhead: all blending together, a formless jumble of the Past, and yet very much alive: and it does not seem to matter in the least that you look down upon them from a rattling motor-'bus that leaves pools of oil where perchance lay the puddle over which Raleigh flung his cloak lest his queen's slipper should be soiled.

The great and the little, the wise and the foolish, the rash and the prudent, the cowardly and the brave, were all engaged and jumbled up pell-mell on both sides; and the mixture was so strange, so heterogeneous, and so incomprehensible, that a sentiment of the ridiculous was irresistibly paramount, and the war began amongst fits of laughter on all sides.

If there is here or there in the book an essay or a poem the product of thought and effort and offered in all seriousness, how little chance it has of being appreciated, except by a few, even if it is remarked at all in the jumble of miscellaneous contributions.

And as he lay there, gasping his life away, the follies of boyhood and the graver offenses of more recent days seemed to be in some way jumbled up hopelessly in his disordered mind with a confused idea of the urgent necessity for speedy repentance of both.

For many years after the war a jumble of English sovereigns and shillings, of Spanish dollars, French crowns, and American silver, made up the currency in use, circulating sometimes by weight and sometimes by tale, at rates that were constantly shifting.

Their walls are higher than those of ordinary houses, their wooden columns of greater diameter, their roofs are immense, and a greater variety of painting and gilding may be bestowed on the different parts; but none of them exceeds one story in height, and they are jumbled and surrounded with mean and insignificant hovels.

Logs sometimes jamming the whole fairway with an indescribable jumble, logs collected into river bays with a neatness that made the surface of the water appear one great raft, and by these "log booms" there was, usually, the piles of squared timber, and the collection of rough wooden houses that formed the mill.

Beneath the conveyors are great ragged mounds of short logs cut into sections for the paper pulp trade, and jumbled heaps of shorter sections that are to serve as the winter firing for whole districts; these have the contours of coal dumps, while fed from chutes are hillocks of golden sawdust as big and as conspicuous as the ash and slag mounds of the mining areas.

Thenceforth, for nearly ten years, stroke followed upon stroke, each still further jumbling the threads of her intelligence, but by degrees so gradual and with such partiality of loss and of survival, that her precise state was always and to the end a matter of dispute.

He knew that the nearer uncertainty approaches a certainty the more fatal will be the result of its upsetting; that, whereas a scheme jumbled in its infancy may recover, the slightest maladjustment on the threshold of success often spells irrevocable ruin.

There was the letter which she had left behind her setting him free, as the lawless creature intended; there was the marriage certificate and some little jumble of mementos which somehow, without any will of his, had got associated with the more important papers.

It was only a passionate jumble of boyish words they had listened to, but behind it, vibrating in his tense voice, was something bigger than he could frame words to express, something that commanded silence; pain forcing its way into speech, long repression broken at last.

The tale went round, and would have been credited, perhaps, till now, had not the drunkard, sitting one day in the very alehouse the milkman had stopped at, on hearing the story repeated, with a hearty laugh acknowledged himself to be the ghost, and that he had much enjoyed the jumbling of the man's pails, as he ran away, and the loss which it occasioned him.

Anything more appalling than this jumbled mass of the remains of a departed race I cannot imagine, and what made it even more dreadful was that in this dry air a considerable number of the bodies had simply become desiccated with the skin still on them, and now, fixed in every conceivable position, stared at us out of the mountain of white bones, grotesquely horrible caricatures of humanity.

And while the captain paced the floor of his quarters at the barracks and dreamed dreams, an honest, courageous, and loyal Mexican was fighting against death in a little hovel on the mountain side; and a Pueblo Indian, stimulated by a queer and jumbled mixture of rage, gratitude, revenge, and pity, was making his slow way, with infinite caution, through the cover north of town.

If even then we sing nothing that is really sensible, there is not much in us, and that we can feelingly read in the delicate smile which plays on Clara's lips, when we presume to tinkle something before her, which is to pass for a song, although it is only a confused jumble of tones.