Bores
person who inspires boredom or is boorish in demeanor
Bores are people who inspire boredom, usually through a lack of social skills and an inability to understand that their topics of conversation are of no interest to their listeners.
The bore is usually considered a harmless creature, or of that class of irrational bipeds who hurt only themselves.
- Maria Edgeworth (1833)
- Maria Edgeworth (1833)
Quotes
edit- BORE, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
- Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911).
- Society is now one polished horde,
Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.- Lord Byron, Don Juan (1818-24), Canto XIII, Stanza 95.
- The bore is usually considered a harmless creature, or of that class of irrational bipeds who hurt only themselves.
- Maria Edgeworth, Thoughts on Bores (1833).
- …had that worst bump developed that can adorn the head of a bore—viz., long-story-tellativeness.
- Letitia Elizabeth Landon, A Friend in Need is a Friend Indeed, The New Monthly Magazine (1836)
- Got the ill name of augurs, because they were bores.
- James Russell Lowell, A Fable for Critics (1848), line 55.
- L'ennui naquit un jour de l'uniformité.
- One day ennui was born from uniformity.
- Antoine Houdar de la Motte, Les Amis trop d'accord, Fables (1719); quotes and translation reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 81.
- That old hereditary bore,
The steward.- Samuel Rogers Italy (1822), A Character, line 13.
- Again I hear that creaking step!—
He's rapping at the door!
Too well I know the boding sound
That ushers in a bore.- John Godfrey Saxe, My Familiar (1849).
- He says a thousand pleasant things,—
But never says "Adieu."- John Godfrey Saxe My Familiar (1849).
- O, he's as tedious
As is a tir'd horse, a railing wife;
Worse than a smoky house; I had rather live
With cheese and garlic in a windmill, far,
Than feed on cates, and have him talk to me,
In any summer-house in Christendom.- William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I (c. 1597), Act III, scene I, line 159.
