fighting-cocks

If we only live like fighting-cocks, and go in perpetually for public amusements, we shall arrive in no time at the mens sana in corpore sano of the ancients.

Armadale 2003

He watched two of the frantic little fighting-cocks make from the scene with a girl between them; they immediately came to a disagreement over her and fell to fighting between themselves.

The Road Leads On 2003

That Geertz should also pair me off with Elie Kedourie, whom he describes as a right-wing Iraqi Jew, merely underlines the racist Orientalist habit of reducing the intellectual positions of wogs to their ethnic genealogy, then pairing them off like matched fighting-cocks.

Orientalism: An Exchange Grabar, Oleg 1982

Cases have been known of natives having fled from their burning huts, taking care to save their fighting-cocks, but leaving their wives and children to look after themselves.

The Philippine Islands John Foreman

Over 1,000 men, women, and children hastened across the low, swampy lands carrying their household goods and their fighting-cocks; it was indeed a curious spectacle.

The Philippine Islands John Foreman

The two meeting-houses which faced each other like a pair of fighting-cocks had not flapped their wings or crowed at each other for a considerable time.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 35, September, 1860 Various

We are now living like fighting-cocks, as the field canteen is open, with many delicacies, about half-a-mile to our rear.

With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) Journal of Active Service

Two meeting-houses stood on two eminences, facing each other, and looking like a couple of fighting-cocks with their necks straight up in the air, -- as if they would flap their roofs, the next thing, and crow out of their upstretched steeples, and peck at each other's glass eyes with their sharp-pointed weathercocks.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 29, March, 1860 Various

Princetown -- a race of sturdy beggars, according to his account, who live like fighting-cocks, do next to no work, get leave periodically to air their eloquence at pacifist meetings, and, worst of all, invade his constituency in their leisure hours.

Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 152, May 9, 1917 Various

Each watch into which they were divided had its especial story-teller, with whose merits it twitted the other, and on opportunity of a general _reunion_, they were pitted against one another like two fighting-cocks, or a couple of rival novelists in more polished literary society at home.

The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 of Literature, Science and Art. Various