This, I suppose, is the virgin who abideth still in the house with you. She is not given, I hope, to gadding overmuch, nor to vain and foolish decorations of her person with ear-rings and finger-rings, and crisping-pins: for such are unprofitable, yea, abominable.
But there is no telling the sacrament, seldom if in any case revealed to the gadding world, wherever under circumstances at all akin to those here attempted to be set forth, two of great Nature's nobler order embrace.
(RQ:Wodehouse Offing)
puhekieltä A greedy and/or stupid person.
Jamieson, John (1825)
He's a perfect gad for silver.
Gordon, George (1913)
Ye greedy ged, ye have taken the very breath out o' me.
Twain finds his voice after a short search for it and when he impels it forward it is a good, strong, steady voice in harness until the driver becomes absent-minded, when it stops to rest, and then the gad must be used to drive it on again.
they sette uppon hym and drew oute their swerdys to have slayne hym – but there wolde no swerde byghte on hym more than uppon a gadde of steele, for the Hyghe Lorde which he served, He hym preserved.
Moxon
Flemish steel (..) some in bars and some in gads.
A pointed metal tool for breaking or chiselling rock, especially in mining.
Shakespeare
I will go get a leaf of brass, / And with a gad of steel will write these words.
2006, Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, Vintage 2007, p. 327:
Frank was able to keep his eyes open long enough to check his bed with a miner's gad and douse the electric lamp
puhekieltä An indeterminate measure of metal produced by a furnace, perhaps equivalent to the bloom, perhaps weighing around 100 pounds.
1957, H.R. Schubert, History of the British Iron and Steel Industry, p. 146.
Twice a day a gad' of iron, i.e., a bloom weighing 1 cwt. was produced, which took from six to seven hours.