Carpet Tack

Manny a man I've knowed has so doped himsilf with books that he'd stumble over a carpet-tack. ❋ Finley Peter Dunne (1901)

That array of fluttering and tuning people on the southern slope began to look minute, like the myriad heads assembled in the infinitesimal photograph which you view through one of those little half-inch lorgnettes; and you had the satisfaction of knowing that to any lovely infinitesimality yonder you showed no bigger than a carpet-tack. ❋ William Dean Howells (1878)

A pretty good Christian will whistle when he steps on the "commercial end" of a carpet-tack; a savage will howl and claw the air, and that was just what happened that night about twelve o'clock, while I was asleep in the cabin, where the savages thought they "had me," sloop and all, but changed their minds when they stepped on deck, for then they thought that I or somebody else had them. ❋ Joshua Slocum (1877)

What with Buddy's shenanigans, what with the I & I's raison d"être, what with Boomer's dallying over there doing who knew what, it was getting harder and harder to carpet-tack the Middle East to the living room floor of her mind. ❋ Robbins, Tom (1990)

"There isn't so much as a carpet-tack left of the old regime. ❋ George Barr McCutcheon (1897)