You sometimes dabble here and there with an encyclopedia in the library and then you forget everything you've read when you understand it at all," said the mosquito in a contumelious air.
"Corpus of a Siam Mosquito"
Steven Sills
Perhaps that was the reason that he drew so small a salary from Punch; at any rate, he always resented what he considered to be the contumelious and shabby treatment meted out to him by Mark Lemon.
"The History of "Punch""
M. H. Spielmann
Yuen Yan had conscientiously delivered at the door of his abode the last of his company and was turning his footsteps towards his own arch when he encountered the contumelious Ho, who was likewise returning at the close of a day's mendicancy-but with this distinction: that, whereas Ho was followed by two stalwart attendants carrying between them a sack full of money, Yan's share of his band's enterprise consisted solely of one base coin of a kind which the charitable set aside for bestowing upon the blind and quite useless for all ordinary purposes of exchange.
"Kai Lung's Golden Hours"
Ernest Bramah Commentator: Hilaire Belloc