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Literary notes about Addle (AI summary)

Throughout literature, "addle" emerges as a multifaceted term that conveys both literal and figurative states of disorder. Authors often deploy derivatives like "addle-headed" or "addle-pated" to depict characters whose minds or actions are muddled and confused, as seen when satirists describe foolish individuals or ineffective efforts with playful disdain ([1], [2], [3]). At the same time, the word extends its reach to capture the idea of incompleteness or spoilage—comparing, for instance, a disrupted state to an egg that has gone bad ([4], [5], [6]). Even beyond psychological descriptions, "addle" finds its place in naming and spatial references, lending an inherent irony or character to locations and names ([7], [8]). In all these uses, the term enriches the text by evoking images of disarray and imperfection, consistently underlining humanity’s natural propensity toward error and the fleeting nature of order.
  1. What dullards, what fribbles, what addle-headed simple coxcombs!
    — from Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray
  2. "Art deaf, that thou didst not hear my command, or a mere addle-pate, to go alone into the midst of a host?"
    — from A Gentleman-at-Arms: Being Passages in the Life of Sir Christopher Rudd, Knight by Herbert Strang
  3. “You know he has nothing to recommend him but money and a ridiculous roll of addle-headed predecessors; now, don't you?”
    — from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  4. Adj. not completed &c. v.; incomplete &c. 53; uncompleted, unfinished, unaccomplished, unperformed, unexecuted; sketchy, addle.
    — from Roget's Thesaurus by Peter Mark Roget
  5. Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat, and yet thy head hath been beaten as addle as an egg for quarrelling.
    — from Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
  6. "The eggs always addle if you do, or the young birds refuse to hatch out; and of course in the case of turtle-doves it would be all the more so.
    — from In the High ValleyBeing the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series by Susan Coolidge
  7. "I'm ready for anything," said Addle thoughtfully.
    — from Berry and Co. by Dornford Yates
  8. Addle Street is an ungrateful corruption of Athelstan Street, so called from one of the most respectable of the Saxon kings, who had a palace in it.
    — from The Town: Its Memorable Characters and Events by Leigh Hunt

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