From The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop, by Gladys Mitchell:
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Rupert Sethleigh was five feet seven and a quarter in his socks, the wrong height for such impetuous behavior.
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"It seems that James has told Various Lies"--the bishop's smile broke bounds at the sound of the capital letters in her voice--"and that Rupert never had any intention of going to America."
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[A surprising image in the mouth of a character who has probably never left the British Isles:]
"You'd sooner stop up the great cave of Kentucky with little apples than you would be filling the bishop's stomach when there's scones to his tea!"
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"Good old gaiters!" remarked the young man, with a glance at his own bare legs.
[In case it's not clear without more context, "Good old gaiters!" is strictly an expletive here.]
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[And speaking of expletives...]
"Hoots toots!" cried Mrs. Bradley, who professed an enormous admiration for the Scots people and occasionally expressed herself in what she fondly believed to be their native tongue.
***
[Cousin to the walking encyclopedia?]
"He looks such a worm in his clothes. But take them away, and, damn it, the chap's a pocket Hercules."
***
"She goes off cackling to herself as though she'd made a joke or laid an egg or something!"
***
[Cocoa??]
"Wright--an artist. That is, in the popular conception, a man without morals, personal decency, or legal obligations. A pariah, an outcast, an unscrupulous dodger of debts. A promiscuous sitter on other people's unmade beds, a habitant of yet other people's made ones. A sipper of absinthe and imbiber of cocoa. A creature long-haired, filthy, depraved, and mentally unbalanced. A cocaine fiend, a dram drinker, an apostle of obscenity, lust, and freedom."
[And a teen listener responds:]
"Thanks," said Aubrey gratefully. "I've got all that down in shorthand. Stafford Major called me a bug-hunting stinker last term!"
[And now the payoff, in our favorite plural form:]
"How do you mean?" asked Aubrey, who had finished transcribing Mrs. Bradley's remarks about artists into longhand and now felt that he possessed sufficient verbal ammunition to account for three or four Staffords Major at the beginning of the next school term.
