cheapjack
English
Alternative forms
Etymology
Noun
cheapjack (plural cheapjacks)
- A peddler, a travelling hawker.
- 1871, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter VI, in Middlemarch […], volume I, Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book I, page 93:
- "Why," rejoined Mrs Cadwallader, with a sharper note, "you don't mean to say that you would like him to turn public man in that way—making a sort of political Cheap Jack of himself?"
- 1974, GB Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, New York 2007, page 43:
- My mother and father was standing against the railings by the market, looking over at the fire-swallower and the cheap-jack and the Salvation Army down below; and the German Band was playing round the corner of the Commercial Arcade.
- 1999, Mike Mitchell, translating HJC von Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus, IV.8, Dedalus 2016, p. 303:
- I was much too timid and didn't have the cheap-jack’s boasting patter.
Adjective
cheapjack (comparative more cheapjack, superlative most cheapjack)
- shabby
- 1988, Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool Library, Penguin Books (1988), page 276
- It was a drab, cheapjack little area, unambiguously removed from the public, and yet I had come to love it in a way I never could the rest of the monstruous edifice.
- 1988, Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool Library, Penguin Books (1988), page 276