pelf /PELF/. noun. Spoils. Stolen goods. Ill-gained and corrupting wealth. From Anglo-French pelf, Old French pelfre (booty, spoils); see also: pilfer.
“When Luxury has lick’d up all thy pelf,
Curs’d by thy neighbours, thy trustees, thyself;
To friends, to fortune, to mankind a shame,
Think how posterity will treat thy name;”
(Alexander Pope)
“He still has the dangerous vision that guides his life—the vision of the Land of Pelf, the long green, the crisp bills falling gently from the money trees like dead leaves” (Harlan Ellison)
“Here enter not base pinching Usurers, Pelf-lickers, everlasting gatherers.” (Rabelais [translated by Thomas Urquhart])
“The Gulag Tour, so the purser tells me, never quite caught on…Moscow is impressive—grimly fantastic in its pelf. And Petersburg, too, no doubt, after its billion-dollar birthday: a tercentenary for the slave-built city ‘stolen from the sea.’ It’s everywhere else that is now below the waterline.” (Martin Amis)
“Machines is their cry, their chimera, their panacea. Laboursaving apparatuses, supplanters, bugbears, manufactured monsters for mutual murder, hideous hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted labour. The poor man starves while they are grassing their royal mountain stags or shooting peasants and phartridges in their purblind pomp of pelf and power.” (James Joyce)