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Literary notes about stingy (AI summary)

The term "stingy" is deployed in literature to evoke a palpable sense of miserliness and a withholding nature, both materially and emotionally. Authors often use it to characterize individuals who are not only reluctant to spend money but also to extend generosity in relationships; such figures are portrayed as petty, mean, or even cruel ([1], [2], [3]). In some works, the word underscores a broader commentary on human nature and social interactions, highlighting a deficiency in warmth or even language, as when a character is described as "stingy with his breath" or words ([4], [5]). Meanwhile, its application in dialogue and narrative, as seen in critiques of behavior or in humorous allusions to frugality, serves to underline the contrast between true economy and an uncharitable, often morally questionable nature ([6], [7], [8]).
  1. He was a middle-aged, long, slim, bony, smooth-shaven, horse-faced, ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling, fault hunting, mote-magnifying tyrant.
    — from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain
  2. The old widower Samsonov, a man of large fortune, was stingy and merciless.
    — from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  3. He's growing stingy, too, and makes us live like beggars.
    — from The Deliverance: A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
  4. And to-day was his birthday and he had never celebrated it before, he used even to keep it secret from us, he was too stingy to keep it, he-he.
    — from Short Stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  5. She was as stingy with her language as if it had been hard liquor.
    — from Believe You Me! by Nina Wilcox Putnam
  6. “If you mean ECONOMICAL, it’s a VERY different thing from being stingy.
    — from Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery
  7. They both agreed in calling him an old screw; which means a very stingy, avaricious person.
    — from Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
  8. Anger surged up in his heart against her, and he thought malignantly: “She knows nothing about money, and so she is stingy.
    — from Project Gutenberg Compilation of Short Stories by Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

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