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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drawing a parallel between the literal fraying of material objects and the figurative decay of stale rhetoric or outdated customs ([7], [8], [9]).
  1. The patches of purple would be easily detected among his threadbare and tattered garments.
    — from Laws by Plato
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. [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
  5. It's an old story now—old and threadbare.
    — from Under Sail by Lincoln Colcord
  6. 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
  7. It is a distinct improvement upon the threadbare form of Indian legend.
    — from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain
  8. 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
  9. 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

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