Stephens called it “dry operose quackery ... mere chaff not studied from nature, and therefore worthless, never felt, and therefore useless”.

It seems to me a circuitous and operose way of relieving myself to put upon your community the emancipation which I ought to take on myself.

Nor is the ascription of existence to universality, particularity, and co-inhesion dependent on any sui generis existence of their own; for such an hypothesis is operose, requiring too many sui generis existences.

The common Scots saying, on the sight of anything operose and finical, “he must have had little to do that made that!” might be put as epigraph on all the song-books of old France.

The more curious and operose Manufactures are, the more Hands they employ; and that with the Variety of them, the Number of Workmen must still encrease, wants no Proof.