skimble-skamble

• “For most of us ordinary folk, the authorship wars are irrelevant, "skimble-skamble stuff" (in Hotspur's phrase), and "Shakespeare" means interchangeably the man and his works.”

  The Wall Street Journal: Shakespeare, Center Stage

• “The author surely would not have us suppose that the wretched, skimble-skamble stuff which the latter is made to talk is any fair representative of the arguments by which the Church of Rome maintains its dogmas and vindicates its claims.”

  The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858

• “But in the passage before us -- in his assertion that "the converse must be heightened with all the arts and ornaments of poetry" -- it is hard to resist a vision of the dramatist first writing his dialogue in bald and skimble-skamble prose, and then wringing his brains to adorn it "with all the arts" of the dramatic”

  English literary criticism

• “In the first five lines of this skimble-skamble stuff I hear Shakespeare speaking in his cheapest way; with the oath, however, he tries to get into the character again, and succeeds indifferently.”

  The Man Shakespeare

• “All his skimble-skamble talk about psychology and hypnotism, and that other rambling discourse of pirate caves and buccaneering cruises, made me feel sometimes as if I were about to form a partnership with Aladdin, or the King of the Golden Mountain.”

  Aladdin & Co. A Romance of Yankee Magic

• “I can only remember that for the first twenty or thirty minutes Mr. Carlyle talked such a lot of skimble-skamble stuff and rubbish, which sounded like the very _debris_ and lees of his "Latter-Day Pamphlets," that I began to suspect that he was quizzing me, or that this was the manner in which he ladled out Carlyleism to visitors who came to be”

  Memoirs

• “-- Did you read his skimble-skamble about ** being at the head of his own _profession_, in the _eyes_ of _those_ who followed it?”

  Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 4 (of 6) With His Letters and Journals

• “One of the best examples of "skimble-skamble" used in context is also its first known use.”

  Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

• “Those and a hundred other skimble-skamble inquiries barbed the air until at last even Uncle Matthew had his fill and checked young Will’s chatter.”

  Simon & Schuster: The Secret of the Sealed Room

• “Writing this skimble-skamble stuff in her cottage, she had agreed to cut the play here; a slave to her audience, — to Mrs. Sands’ grumble — about tea; about dinner; — she had gashed the scene here.”

  Between the Acts

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