Rereading your book has made me regretfully aware of our increasing age. How freshly and passionately, with what bold anticipations, and without learned and systematic, scholarly doubts, is the thing still dealt with here! And the very illusion that the result will leap into the daylight of history tomorrow or the day after gives the whole thing a warmth and vivacious humour—compared with which the later “gray in gray” makes a damned unpleasant contrast.

—Karl Marx, in an 1863 letter to Friedrich Engels
about The Condition of the Working Class in England

At sea, the sailors … manufacture a clumsy sort of twine, called spun-yarn… . For material, they use odds and ends of old rigging called “junk,” the yarn of which are picked to pieces, and then twisted into new combinations, something as most books are manufactured.

—Herman Melville,
Redburn: His First Voyage (1849)