Fourscore

"Fourscore and seven years ago, our forefathers owned a bunch of scrubs." "Harkinian, that's not right and you know it." "Quiet! I'm enjoying my tale, so let me tell my story."

This Inspector, when I first knew him, was a man of fourscore years, or thereabouts, and certainly one of the most wonderful specimens of winter-green that you would be likely to discover in a lifetime’s search. With his florid cheek, his compact figure, smartly arrayed in a bright-buttoned blue coat, his brisk and vigorous step, and his hale and hearty aspect, altogether he seemed—not young, indeed—but a kind of new contrivance of Mother Nature in the shape of man, whom age and infirmity had no business to touch. His voice and laugh, which perpetually re-echoed through the Custom-House, had nothing of the tremulous quaver and cackle of an old man’s utterance; they came strutting out of his lungs, like the crow of a cock, or the blast of a clarion.

Thou ſtick'ſt a dagger in me, I ſhall neuer ſee my gold againe, foureſcore ducats at aſitting, foureſcore ducats.

Euen thoſe that were numbꝛed of them, were eight thouſand, and fiue hundꝛed, and foureſcoꝛe.

“I could be sorry for these men,” he said, “ay, and for that poor Queen, but what avail earthly sorrows to a man of fourscore?—and it is a rare dropping morning for the early colewort.”

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Old Martha was standing at a table trussing a pair of chickens for the market stall as she had trussed them for nearly fourscore years.

[…] I know every life is equally sacred, but that is a thought, another thought, I mean, all these valuable people who aren’t going to have their normal fourscore as it is now, these people aren’t going to be replaced, and it’s such a loss to the culture.

W. J. Davis, a retired missionary, a veteran in the fourscores of his years.