Cinquefoil, with small yellow blossom, and ranunculus, with glossy yellow cup, edged the sunny roads ... Janet Lewis, The Trial of Sören Qvist, 1947
This was my curious labor all summer,--to make this portion of the earth's surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
... for ever sith the lord Clisson turned French, he never loved him. Jean Froissart (1333?– c.1400), The Chronicles of Froissart, translated by John Bourchier, 1523–25
"Of course you see now, Sir Thomas, how ill a match Master John Feversham should have been for Blanche." "Wherefore?" was the short answer. "Sith he is no longer the heir." Emily Sarah Holt, Clare Avery, 1876
O quick and forgetive power! Dante Alighieri (written c. 1308–21), The Vision: or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, of Dante Alighieri, translated by Henry Francis Cary, 1814
A good sherris-sack hath a two-fold operation in it. It ... makes it apprehensive quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery and delectable shapes ... William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2, 1623
"I believe you are misinformed, sir," said Jekyl dryly, and then resumed as deftly as he could, his proper character of a pococurante. Sir Walter Scott, St. Ronan's Well, 1823
Calling a careless person a "pococurante" or other fancy name will not, by the precision of the term, suddenly make the careless careful. Jeff VanderMeer, The Third Bear, 2010
The world would be a kinder and gentler place if we all exchanged tussie-mussies instead of badmouthing people behind their backs or unfriending them on Facebook. Claire Cook, The Wildwater Walking Club: Back on Track, 2017
When those were finished, they turned to the tussie-mussies--handheld herbal nosegays in which each plant has a special significance--for the women guests. Susan Wittig Albert, Lavender Lies, 1999
I need to tell you about my shamefully Machiavellian motive for sending her packing and the subdolous way in which her death facilitated my crowning achievement. Clanash Farjeon, A Handbook for Attendants on the Insane: The Autobiography of 'Jack the Ripper' as Revealed to Clanash Farjeon, 2003
The doctor's mind pursued its own schemes with Machiavellian subtlety. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, 1904
Using the GPS collars that updated an animal’s location regularly and other data, the project found that vagility—the ability of an organism to move—declines in areas with human footprints by as much as half to two-thirds the distance than in places where there is little or no human activity. Jim Robbins, "Animals Are Losing Their Vagility, or Ability to Roam Freely," New York Times, February 19, 2018
With this combination of low vagility and narrow habitat requirements, the mayfly faunas of islands around New Zealand provide a unique opportunity to investigate the effects of isolation, dispersal ability and the response of communities to reduced diversity. D. R. Towns, "The mayflies (Ephemeroptera) of Great Barrier Island, New Zealand: macro- and micro-distributional comparisons," Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Volume 17, 1987