This was still the era — it would end later in that famous decade — when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.
But Dick had made up his mind: stockings of any shade were unnecessary, an encumbrance, a useless expense ("I've already invested enough money in this operation"), and, after all, anyone they encountered would not live to bear witness.
With such a mood prevailing, Europe is perceived by many to be more of an encumbrance, a dictation, a cost factor … rather than a model case.
And I thought I sensed in Swiss the urge to say what all of us would like to say — that traditions are not just encumbrances, that a novel is not news, that an essay is a different thing from an Internet rant, that techniques are the probity and ethic of magic, the real work.
Even the most compact laptop would be an encumbrance on a walk through the Lake District.
Alec was five when Evelyn was born, but he later recalled that he felt like an only child throughout his youth; Evelyn was "no more than an encumbrance in a corner".
He never abandoned his crusade for the poor ― his speaking tours for A Christmas Carol raised money for charity ― but family joys and responsibilities became an encumbrance to a man consumed by his own greatness.
In 1836, the Public Ledger, a Philadelphia newspaper, proposed the issuance of both a gold dollar and a twenty-dollar piece; they wrote of the latter, "Twenty [silver dollars] are an encumbrance in a pocket ... if we are to have larger coins, let them be of gold.
It is skimming the most committed families from the public school population, they say, and operating without the encumbrances of a system that receives government funds.
