Literary notes about threadbare (AI summary)
The word "threadbare" in literature often conveys a dual sense of physical and metaphorical deterioration. On one level, it paints vivid images of worn-out clothing, furniture, or even entire settings—invoking scenes where fabric is so overused and tattered that it epitomizes poverty or neglect ([1], [2], [3]). On another level, it is employed to characterize ideas, discourses, or narratives that have been exhausted by repetition, suggesting both the loss of originality and the erosion of vigor in thought ([4], [5], [6]). This layered application allows writers to enrich their descriptions, drawing a parallel between the literal fraying of material objects and the figurative decay of stale rhetoric or outdated customs ([7], [8], [9]).
- The patches of purple would be easily detected among his threadbare and tattered garments.
— from Laws by Plato - His clothes, of a nondescript brown mixture, were threadbare and marked with stains, dusty in the folds, with ragged button-holes.
— from The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale by Joseph Conrad - The furniture was shabby, the carpet was getting threadbare, and some of the glass in the partition that cut off the clerks' office was cracked.
— from Lister's Great Adventure by Harold Bindloss - [212] Jackson was undoubtedly right; but the pretext which he denounced in advance was employed so constantly afterwards as to become threadbare.
— from Charles Sumner: his complete works, volume 07 (of 20) by Charles Sumner - It's an old story now—old and threadbare.
— from Under Sail by Lincoln Colcord - None of the ideas were original, the illustrations were commonplace, and what passed for argument was rather threadbare.
— from Kafir Stories: Seven Short Stories by W. C. (William Charles) Scully - It is a distinct improvement upon the threadbare form of Indian legend.
— from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain - The pastoral form had doubtless been used in earlier hands to embody true poetic feeling; but in Pope's time it had become hopelessly threadbare.
— from Alexander Pope by Leslie Stephen - This age thinks better of a gilded fool Than of a threadbare saint in wisdom's school.
— from Familiar QuotationsA Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced toTheir Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature