Noun

It now turns out that the Pitch Lake, like most other things, owes its appearance on the surface to no convulsion or vagary at all, but to a most slow, orderly, and respectable process of nature, by which buried vegetable matter, which would have become peat, and finally brown coal, in a temperate climate, becomes, under the hot tropic soil, asphalt and oil.

And then came the day when my socialism grew respectable,—still a vagary of youth, it was held, but romantically respectable.

Noun

The Manner of living among the Portugueze here is, with the utmost Frugality and Temperance. . . . The best of them (excepting the Governor now and then) neither pay nor receive any Visits of Escapade or Recreation.

[Nobody] stood more confounded than Oldbuck at this sudden escapade of his nephew. "Is the devil in him," was his first exclamation, "to go to disturb the brute?"

He is always doing something to make himself notorious. There was that breach-of-promise case, and that fight at the political meeting, and his escapades at Monte Carlo.

He seems on the verge of winning the New York Senate election when the New York Post runs a photo of David’s exposed butt in a mooning escapade from his college days.