Literary notes about Lumbering (AI summary)
The word “lumbering” is used to convey a sense of ponderous, heavy movement that is as much about physical mass as it is about deliberate sluggishness. Writers employ it to describe not only the creaking advance of vehicles and carts [1], [2], [3] but also the measured, sometimes awkward gait of characters and creatures [4], [5], [6]. It appears in contexts ranging from the industrial—evoking the weight and monotony of logging or large-scale operations [7], [8]—to the metaphorical, where even speech or reasoning is depicted as laboriously labored and lacking finesse [9], [10]. Across diverse settings, “lumbering” lends a vivid, kinetic quality to both animate and inanimate subjects, emphasizing their imposing bulk and unswerving pace.
- The lumbering vehicle started on its way, and the journey began afresh.
— from Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant - He heard the carts go lumbering by upon the neighbouring streets, but they were far off, and only buzzed upon his ear.
— from Sister Carrie: A Novel by Theodore Dreiser - There was a heavy lumbering of wheels within hearing.
— from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens - Adolph tripped gracefully forward, and Tom, with lumbering tread, went after.
— from Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe - The crowd surged back, no one offering to support him, and he fell lumbering to the ground and was dead.
— from The Mysterious Stranger, and Other Stories by Mark Twain - Jonas was almost six feet tall and correspondingly broad, and walked with a lumbering pace that added to the contrast between him and Johnny.
— from Right Half Hollins by Ralph Henry Barbour - The owners of farms were their own managers and overseers, and young men had to serve a practical apprenticeship to lumbering and agriculture.
— from The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America by Thomas Jefferson - It was the old man's duty to keep the booms of several great lumbering companies, and to watch the logs when the river-drivers were engaged elsewhere.
— from A Romany of the Snows, vol. 2 Being a Continuation of the Personal Histories of "Pierre and His People" and the Last Existing Records of Pretty Pierre by Gilbert Parker - "The war of the Peloponnesians and Athenians" is a somewhat lumbering way of saying "the Peloponnesian war."
— from The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 by Basil L. (Basil Lanneau) Gildersleeve - “Well,” went on Father Brown, with lumbering lucidity, “as you wouldn’t leave any tracks for the police, of course somebody had to.
— from The innocence of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton
