subs. (colloquial).—1. Old material—cloth, rags, &c.—ground up or shredded, and rewoven with a new warp. Hence (2) anything of poor quality or pretentious reputation: spec. (in derision) a workman in a woollen factory. Also as adj. = sham. Also derivatives such as SHODDYITE, SHODDYISE, &c.
1851–61. H. MAYHEW, London Labour and the London Poor, ii. 34. The fabric thus snatched, as it were, from the ruins of cloth, is known as SHODDY.
1864. The Spectator, 26 March, 355. The mixture of good wool and rotten SHODDY we call broad-cloth.
1869. FROUDE, Inaugural Address at St. Andrews, 19 March. We have false weights, false measures, cheating and SHODDY everywhere.
1871. J. R. LOWELL, My Study Windows, 56. A horrible consciousness of SHODDY running through politics, manners, art, literature, nay, religion itself?
1872. Evening Standard. 11 Dec. ‘Ag. Lab. Movement.’ There were things that Parliament could do. It could abolish the truck system, whether in SHODDY or in cider, and could provide that money should be paid in the coin of the realm.
1880. OUIDA, Moths, vii. In New York she and hers were deemed ‘SHODDY’—the very SHODDIEST of SHODDY—and were looked coldly on, and were left unvisited.
1881. D. M. WALLACE, Russia, xii. The Russian merchant’s love of ostention is … entirely different from English SNOBBERY. He never affects to be other than he really is.
1883. Belfast Weekly Northern Whig, 3 Feb., 1, 9. Cloaks lined with ostrich feathers are now in style, but the worst of this fashion is that if a woman leaves it unbuttoned, she is accounted a SHODDYITE, more anxious for vulgar display than comfort, while if she keeps it buttoned it might just as well be lined with red flannel for no one can see it.
1889. A. W. BENN, Review of St. George Mivart’s Of Truth, in The Academy, 11 May, 325, 2. Philosophic SHODDY.
