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More "Slang" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... can't tell, It's plain to understand; An sure aw am it saands as weel, Tho' happen net soa grand. Tell fowk they're courtin, they're enraged, They call that vulgar slang; But if aw tell 'em they're engaged, That's net ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... insects swarm out of their childish mouths; frightful nicknames, thieves' slang, sailors' oaths, that they perhaps had learnt down on the wharf; and they are both so engaged that they do not notice my landlady, who rushes out to ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... these procuresses will write to men of means of their acquaintance, informing them in some cipher or slang phrase that they have a new importation in their house awaiting eligible disposition. Large sums are often paid under such circumstances, and the fresh importation is usually sold in this way five or six times. In other words, she is represented as a maid and imposed upon men as a ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... this is the difficult part of the subject to make clear, the most vulgar slang like that quoted above, is scarcely worse than the attempted elegance which those unused to good society imagine to be ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... that I find the introduction of the Masque in the fourth act extraordinarily interesting. Ben Jonson had written classic masques for this and that occasion; masques which were very successful, we are told; they had "caught on," in fact, to use our modern slang. Shakespeare will now show us that he, too, can write a masque with classic deities in it, and better Jonson's example. It is pitiful, and goes to prove, I think, that Shakespeare was but little ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... with low filchers' slang; but the reply was forthcoming; other questions, too, were answered tentatively; sometimes at length, with repulsive fullness of detail. The speaker hesitated over words, shot sharp, short looks at ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... among your friends I would be out of place and uncomfortable, and should always have to be bowing and scraping and exchanging compliments, and besides they would soon find out that my Spanish was doubtful. I talk a sailor's slang, but I doubt if I should understand pure Spanish. Altogether, I should be very uncomfortable, and should make you uncomfortable, and I would very much rather take my place among the men that work for you until I can get on ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... long howl on Oonalaska's shore' is not in it with that of mine," said George Henry—for since his coat had become threadbare his language had deteriorated, and he too frequently used slang—"but I'm thankful that I alone hear my own. How different the case from what it is when one's dog barks o' nights! Then the owner is the only one who sleeps within a radius of blocks. The beasts are ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... considerable body of aristocratic feeling that lurks beneath this republican simplicity. I have on several occasions been made the confidant of these romantic but delusive vagaries, of which the stronghold appears to be the Empire City,—a slang name for New York. I was assured in many quarters that that locality, at least, is ripe for a monarchy, and if one of the Queen's sons would come and talk it over, he would meet with the highest encouragement. This ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... elements? Dividing lines parting the population into two camps more or less hostile may be drawn variously; for example, one may be run between the law-abiding and the criminal class. But the elements to which reference is here made are those immemorable and implacable foes which the slang of modern economics roughly and loosely distinguishes as "Capital" and "Labor." A more accurate classification—as accurate a one as it is possible to make—would designate them as those who do muscular labor and those who do not. The distinction between rich and poor does not serve: to the ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... of office boy to that of secretary for the Corrugated Iron Company. The story is full of humor and infectious American slang. ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... to orgasm. Thus, Forel mentions, a sensuous woman by the pressure of her garments in dancing can produce ejaculation in her partner. Most usually the process is that voluptuous contact and revery which, in English slang, is called "spooning." From first to last there need not be any explicit explanations, proposals, or declarations on either side, and neither party is committed to any relationship with the other beyond the period devoted to flirtage. In one form, however, flirtage consists entirely ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... was yours till you threw him off. No, don't be angry: I am only talking in that careless slang we all use when we mean nothing, just as people employ counters instead of money at cards; but I like him: he has that easy flippancy in talk that asks for no effort to follow, and he says his little nothings nicely, and he is not ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... ignorant class I have described. Professors, teachers, musicians, all drift at times down the river; and one is often startled at finding in the apparently rough crew men who seem worthy of a better fate. To these the river experiences are generally new, and the ribald jokes and low river slang, with the ever-accompanying cheap corn-whiskey and the nightly riots over cutthroat euchre, must be at first a revelation. Hundreds of these low fellows will swear to you that the world owes them a living, and that they ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... exaggeration in conversation. It is a just complaint among refined and cultivated people that many, even of the well-educated young women of the present day, talk too loudly and vehemently; are given to exaggeration of statement and slang expressions. The greatest blemish of the conversation and manners of the young people of to-day is obtrusiveness and exaggeration. By obtrusiveness I mean a style of speech and manners that attracts attention and remark; by exaggeration ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... the skipper standing on the same spot where he had left him, apparently in the same attitude, and with the same grave, sleepless expression on his cast-iron features. The boy, Robin Tips, was at the helm, looking very sleepy. He was an English boy, smart, active, and wide-awake—in the slang sense—in which sense also we may add ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... drawing himself into the smallest space possible. "No, Redhead! The devil dragged the man who did that down to the lower regions long ago, on account of my tongue. It's his son. The younger, the sharper. This stripling made Casper Rubling,—[Dice, in gambler's slang]—poor wretch, pay for his loaded ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... is not slang. It is a veritable expression and anybody who thinks that the favourite of the boarding house table cannot produce a fermented article that is tres fort in the way of a throat burner, is greatly mistaken. In France the fermented juice of the prune is called "water of life," but it carries a "dead ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... the use of good English. It precludes the use of all slang words, vulgar phrases, obsolete terms, foreign idioms, ambiguous expressions or any ungrammatical language whatsoever. Neither does it sanction the use of any newly coined word until such word is adopted by the best writers ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... humourists by trade On waistcoat had the shoe displayed, Lampoon's sour spirit might be laid, And cease its spiteful railing. Whether the humour chanced to be Joke, pun, quaint ballad, repartee, Slang, or bad spelling, we should see Good ...
— The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil • Edward G. Flight
... my feet, mentally at least. I don't suppose any one could set me permanently on my physical, corporeal pins. Beg pardon for the slang, Conny, I don't forget how you and Sybil used to lecture me for that, and my other vices. Poor sis, she had given up the drink talks latterly, given me over as hopeless, and so I am. Con., I have made ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... with the honesty of this confession, and in the same way I sympathize with those Officers of the Salvation Army who, in racing slang, cannot 'stay ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... demonstrative spirit characteristic of his age and class. He could have entered into this circle of strangers—strangers for the most part, in all probability, to one another—and in ten minutes' time been one of them. Their screams, their twang, their slang, their gossip, their jolly banter, and their gay ineptitude would have been to him like a welcome home. But he was Norrie Ford, known by name and misfortune to every one of them. The boys and girls on the pier, the elderly ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... sort of criminal, she thought, with his humour and ready address, his sudden shifts from slang of the street to phrases chosen with a discriminating taste in English, his cool indifference to her threatening attitude, and his paradoxical pose of warm—it seemed—personal interest in and consideration for a complete and, to say the least, ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... is styled 'plew' on board, in the slang of the training-ship; possibly, through some association with the 'sky blue' known in the ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... conviviality of the inn at Ballymahon, and the company which used to assemble there, it is surmised that he took some hints in after life for his picturing of Tony Lumpkin and his associates: "Dick Muggins, the exciseman; Jack Slang, the horse doctor; little Aminidab, that grinds the music-box, and Tom Twist, that spins the pewter platter." Nay, it is thought that Tony's drinking song at the Three Jolly Pigeons was but a revival of one of the ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... in your family know of it—if you could get them to tell you. My two sons studied at a State university, and they would bring me home what they heard—the gossip, the slang, the horrible obscenity. Fourteen fellows in one dormitory using the same bathroom—and on the wall you saw a row of fourteen syringes! And they told that on themselves, it was the joke of the campus. They call the disease a 'dose'; ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... grandeur and responsibility of the paternal relation. But really, in the only other example (which immediately occurs) of Papa's attempt to bias the filial intellect, we recognise nothing but what is mystical; and involuntarily we think of him in the modern slang character of 'governor,' rather than as a 'guide, philosopher, and friend.' It seems that one Saturday, about the time when the Rev. Walker in Furness must have been sitting down to his exegesis ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... cackling protest and panic from the hastily departing fowl. Calmness under misfortune is not an attribute of either hen-folk or womenkind, and while Mrs. Saunders declaimed over her onion bed such portions of the slang dictionary as are permitted by the Nonconformist conscience to be said or sung, the Vasco da Gama fowl was waking the echoes of Toad-Water with crescendo bursts of throat music which compelled attention to her griefs. Mrs. Crick had a long ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... their roots in water-soaked mud or the beds of running streams, while leaves and flowers rise far above into the light. Other pools should become "beds" for the water-flowers that float upon the surface. In the slang of the rock garden the plants living and flourishing on upright rocks are called "verticals." If we must have a slang for the flora of the brook garden we will term them "horizontals"— the plants that lie flat on the water ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... viciousness of our social hierarchy lies in the fact that it is based solely upon material success. We have no titles of nobility; but we have Coal Barons, Merchant Princes and Kings of Finance. The very catchwords of our slang tell the story. The achievement of which we boast as the foundation of our aristocracy is indeed ignoble; but, since there is no other, we and our sons, and their sons after them, will doubtless continue ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... reproductions of their desert homes. Representing other native races, there are the Samoan Village, the Maori Village, and the Tehuantepec Village. All these people are genuine and live in primitive style on the Zone, though, to tell the truth, they are quite likely to use college slang and know which fork to use first. Not on the Zone, but proper to be mentioned here, are the Blackfoot Indians brought to the Exposition from Glacier Park by the Great Northern Railroad. Eagle Calf is a real chief of the old days, and his ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... frequently stretched through a watch, and kept all hands awake. They were always amusing from their improbability, and, indeed, he never expected to be believed, but spun them merely for amusement; and as he had some humor and a good supply of man-of-war slang and sailor's salt phrases, he always made fun. Next to him in age and experience, and, of course, in standing in the watch, was an Englishman, named Harris, of whom I shall have more to say hereafter. Then, came two or three Americans, who had been the common run of European and South American ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... before, I learn languages with incredible difficulty, a fact which I cannot reconcile with the extreme interest which I take in philology and linguistics, and the discoveries which I have made; as, for instance, that of Shelta in England, or my labours in jargons, such as Pidgin-English, Slang, and Romany. But, as the reader has probably perceived, I was a boy with an inherited good constitution only from the paternal side, and a not very robust one from my mother, while my mind, weakened by long illness, had ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... knew. Tremendous fop—ladies loved him—cheeks like roses—tongue like sulphuric acid. Beautiful to look at. Clothes like a fashion-plate—got any fashion-plates in Chaudiere? 'who's your tailor?'" he added, in the slang of the hour, with a loud laugh, then stopped suddenly and took off his hat. "I forgot," he added, with upturned eyes and a dramatic seriousness, "your tailor saved my life to-day-henceforth I am the friend of all tailors. Well, to continue. My friend that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... is assumed, and both Von Engel and Von Furzmann are determined that my silence shall voice itself. I have no doubt that they would like to have me write it, so that they could boast of it afterward to their fellow officers. Now, as Jimmie would say in his frightful slang, 'I'm going to give them a run for their money.' Von Engel will probably beseech you to arrange to keep Jimmie at your side, so that he can have a few words with Mrs. Jimmie. Von Furzmann will plead with you to permit him a word with me. I need hardly tell you that your role to-night is to make ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... honour, Are the freedom and gifts Of which I am the donor."[Footnote: Of the cant words used in this inauguratory oration, some are obvious in their meaning, others, as Harman Beck (constable), and the like, derive their source from that ancient piece of lexicography, the Slang Dictionary] ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... lecturers in the colleges—lies sleeping, aside, unrecking itself, in some western idiom, or native Michigan or Tennessee repartee, or stumpspeech—or in Kentucky or Georgia, or the Carolinas—or in some slang or local song or allusion of the Manhattan, Boston, Philadelphia or Baltimore mechanic—or up in the Maine woods—or off in the hut of the California miner, or crossing the Rocky mountains, or along the Pacific railroad—or on the breasts of the young farmers of the northwest, or ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... those horrible words. Where do you learn them? Not from me, certainly not from me," said Miss Leech, distressed. She had a profound horror of slang, and was bewildered by the way in which these weeds of rhetoric sprang up on ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... weather. Their proper establishments are known by a great variety of appellations, the old word bordel being now considered gross. More commonly they are designated discreetly as Tolerances or Gros Numeros; in the popular slang they are claques or boxons. Many of them have special designations, as the celebrated Botte de paille mentioned by Edmond de Goncourt in his Fille Elisa; one of the noisiest was known as the Perroquet ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... whole thing was but spoofing of a silly sort that lads of this age will indulge in, for I had seen the younger one take his seat at the luncheon table. But now they spoke of a raid on the settlement to procure "grub," as the American slang for food has it. Bidding me stop on there and to utter the cry of the great horned owl if danger threatened, they stealthily crept toward the buildings of the camp. Presently came a scream, followed by a hoarse shout of rage. A second later the two dashed by me into the dense woods, Hawk Eye bearing ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... and in some cases tragic. A crew that had aged only six weeks would return to find that Earth had grown nine years older. Customs had changed; new slang words made language unintelligible. ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... keep your eye on. Of course Anneke couldn't be "electrified"—but you may find many less evident blunders than that would be. She might be shocked, but couldn't "receive a shock." We need free colloquial slang and common expressions; but while "get out" seems all right from Stuyvesant to Bogardus, for Barry to say "Skedadle" would put him in the 87th New York Vols., 1861-64. Yet I doubt whether we have any more classic and revered ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... answered, "I can't make it all out—" she smiled at him—"but I think you are right in saying that it is all O.K." He laughed, and stretched out his long legs comfortably. "You've got the idea. That's the way to get the good of traveling and seeing other kinds of folks. You learn my queer slang words, ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... patience on his bed. The trouble is that we are not willing to call it "all right" unless it is the same,—the same in this case meaning whatever may be identical with our own personal ideas of what is "all right." That expressive little bit of slang is full of humor and ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... and messages from the other world. Geographically the most favoured stations for wireless heavenly connections seem to be Brooklyn, New York, and Los Angeles, California. The adherents of this underworld philosophy have a slang of their own, and the result is that their letters, while they spring from the deepest emotions, sound as if they were copied from the same sample book. The better style begins about like this: "Knowing that you are intensely interested in things psychological, ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... trades, all callings, become picturesque by the water's side, or on the water. The soil, the slovenliness, is washed out of every calling by its touch. All river-crafts, sea-crafts, are picturesque, are poetical. Their very slang is poetry. ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... he's suffering from a swollen head," remarked the curate, who used slang as a proof ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... who has more of that kind of business on hand than he can perform for himself, naturally brings about him a train of satellites, who make it their business to minister to his importunate cravings. With them the phraseology of the initiated degenerates into a hard business sort of slang. Whatever slight remnant of respect towards literature as a vehicle of knowledge may linger in the conversation of their employers, has never belonged to theirs. They are dealers who have just two things to look to—the price of their merchandise, and the peculiar propensities of ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... don't know what kind," snapped the lady. "A common or garden ox, to use the slang expression. It is the garden part of it that I object to. My garden has just been put straight for the winter, and an ox roaming about in it won't improve matters. Besides, there are the ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... always like to think Of GEORGEADE as a Summer Drink, Sparkling and cool, with just a Tang Of Pleasant Effervescent Slang; A Wholesome Tonic, without question, And Cure for Moral Indigestion. In Summer-time, beneath the shade, We find Refreshment in GEORGEADE. And 'mid the Scorching City's roar We drink him up and call for more. I often wonder ...
— Confessions of a Caricaturist • Oliver Herford
... exchanging a few words with each other, one of them spoke to him in a jargon which he seemed to understand, though we could not. He replied with hesitation. For some time they continued asking him questions, and then talking to each other in a slang which was as incomprehensible to us as was the language they spoke to ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... objectionable everywhere, but the slang and twang of the conventicle—as bad in its way as that of the House of Commons, and nothing worse can be said of it—should be studiously avoided under such circumstances as I describe. The avoidance was not complete on this occasion. Nor was it quite agreeable ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... public spirit were highly spoken of by those who knew him best. That a journal does not always reflect the editor is as much the fault of society as of the man. So long as the public will pay for gross personalities, obscenity, and slang, decent journals will be outbidden in the market. The fact that the La Crosse Democrat found a ready sale in all parts of the country showed that Mr. Pomeroy fairly reflected the popular taste. While multitudes turned up the whites ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Peter; and the tone touched John, though he detested slang. "And what's croquet, after all, to a fellow that's used to exercise? I suppose I shall be all right again hunting, when I've got my nerve back a bit. At present it's rotten. A fellow feels so beastly helpless and one-sided. However, that'll wear ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... memory or imagination, just as readily as you would were you observing their occurrence in the mind of a friend. You will find them all stored away in some parts of your mental make-up, and you may (to use a modern American slang phrase) "make them trot before you, and show their paces." Don't you see that they are not "You"—that they are merely something that you carry around with you in a mental bag. You can imagine yourself as living without them, and still being ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... language of the "fence's" parlour, and that of the literary salon; on being able to appear as much at home in one as in the other. Delighted at our prowess, we often whispered, "The princess, I swear, would not believe her eyes if she saw us now;" and then in terrible slang we shouted a benediction on some "crib" that was going to be broken into that evening. And we thought there was something very thrilling in leaving the Rue de la Gaieté, returning home to dress, and presenting our spotless selves to the élite. And we succeeded very well, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... picked up his knowledge of English at Alexandria, and his conversation abounded with slang phrases which he used ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... her memory, though unknown to any now upon the farm except her brother, when the Mains of Glashruach was the talk of Daurside because of certain inexplicable nightly disorders that fell out there; the slang rows, or the Scotch remishs (a form of the English romage), would perhaps come nearest to a designation of them, consisting as they did of confused noises, rumblings, ejaculations; and the fact ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... nondescripts made up our unique company to Dawson. Some had been over the route before when mules and horses had been the only means of transportation over the Passes, and stories of the trials and dangers of former trips were heard upon deck each day, with accompaniments of oaths and slang phrases, and punctuated by ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... London. In so doing they have performed a philological operation not only curious but instructive. By copying such expressions as due soldi, tre soldi, as equivalent to 'twopence,' 'threepence,' the word saltee became a recognized slang term for 'penny'; and pence are reckoned ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... to any one who had not lost his sense of appreciation of the noblest of all the works of Nature. Both men fulfilled that requisite of the powerful athlete that they should look larger without their clothes than with them. In ring slang, they buffed well. And each showed up the other's points on account of the extreme contrast between them: the long, loose-limbed, deer- footed youngster, and the square-set, rugged veteran with his trunk like the stump of an oak. ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and then he turned to the chauffeur, who was fumbling with the tyre—it was something complicated, not only just the bursting—and in a minute or two he was down in the mud giving such practical advice. And you never heard such slang! But I believe men like that sort of thing, as the chauffeur was not a bit offended at ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... is awfully nice. He did not forget my birthday, but he says that at that time he was stoney, in student's slang that means that he hadn't any money, and then he could not find anything suitable, but that he will repair the omission as soon as we get back to Vienna. But I don't know what I should like. Oswald is going to stay until we all go back to Vienna, and we are making ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... however, by the bookmaker, who, having no views, but seeing an opportunity for fun, brought up reinforcements of chaff and slang, easily construable into profanity, and impregnated with terse humour. Many of the ladies had spoken of the bookmaker as one of the best-mannered men on board. So he was to all appearance. None dressed with better ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... snows in the mountain and wasted capital in fruitless schemes on the river, there was little room for the indulgence of that lazy and original humor which belonged to their lost youth and prosperity. Blazing Star truly, in the grim figure of their slang, was "played out." Not dug out, worked out, or washed out, but dissipated in a year of ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... rough feed in the Mia-mia Paddock, and there the tribes congregated to hold their protracted Feast of Tabernacles, their vast camp-meeting, which they by no means conducted on religious lines. For the easy profanity, unconscious obscenity, and august slang of the back country scented the air like myall; whilst the aggregate repertory of bon fide anecdote and reminiscence was something worth while. No young fellow in that great rendezvous dared to embellish his narrative in the slightest degree, on pain of being ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Fisher paused in her thoughts, arrested by the strange expression. Where had it come from? How was it possible for it to come at all? It might have been one of Mrs. Wilkins's, in its levity, its almost slang. Perhaps it was one of hers, and she had heard her say it and unconsciously caught it ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... goin' to swear," decided Anson; and after that Bert took the education of the little waif in hand, for he was a man of good education; his use of dialect and slang sprang mainly ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... you use slang at all, be its master instead of its slave. You have many times been told that the overuse of slang disfigures one's speech and hampers his standing with cultivated people. You have also been told that slang constantly changes, so that one's accumulations of it today will be a profitless clutter ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... This was a slang which Hal had never heard, but the meaning was inescapable; he "stuck 'em up." At the same moment his first assailant rushed at him, and dealt him a blow over the eye which sent him sprawling backward ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... time to catch the Post! Pheugh! But the Pats would have "had me on toast" (As 'ARRY would say in his odious slang), If I had been but a little bit later. Out o' breath as it is. Ah, hang This hurrying business! My mouth's like a crater, Dreadfully dry, and doosedly hot. Rather a downer, this is, for SCOTT's lot! Feared Mrs. Manchester might just say (In the popular patter of my young day) "It is ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 17, 1891 • Various
... asked Bess, "who ever started that lumberman's slang of 'sawney' for 'greenhorn' up in this hall of ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... beneath the yellow ripples, as each new point of the forest-clad banks opened out, Nilssen gave him courses and cross bearings, dazing enough to the unprofessional ear, but easily stored in a trained seaman's brain. He discoursed in easy slang of the cut-offs, the currents, the sludge-shallows, the floods, and the other vagaries of the great river's course, and punctuated his discourse with draughts of Rabeira's wine, and comments on the tangled mass of black humanity under ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... is a nautical slang term. In the British navy there were formerly two days in each week on which meat formed no part of the men's rations. These were called banyan days, in allusion to the vegetarian diet of the Hindu merchants. Banyan hospital also became a slang term for a hospital for animals, in reference ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... you've had enough." Martha reddened and patted his arm, looking pleased. Neither of them had talked that way, even in the old days, but the out-dated slang brought back memories—school parties, dances at the Rocketport Club, the early years of the war when Donegal had jockeyed an R-43 fighter in the close-space assaults against the Soviet satellite project. ...
— Death of a Spaceman • Walter M. Miller
... Skelton "a virulent pamphleteer, who jumbles together French, English, Latin phrases, with slang and fashionable words, invented words, intermingled with short rhymes. Style, metre, rhyme, language, art of every kind, at an end; beneath the vain parade of official style there is only a heap of ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... that Frank used slang, but just then he was in want of a better expression by means of which to give vent to ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... a Psychologist I am anxious to establish once and for all, both by plano-inductive and precoordinate systems of logic, the Status of Slang. ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin
... 105 Toping and Napping. 'To top' and 'to nap' are slang terms signifying to cheat, especially with dice. cf. R. Head, Canting Academy (1673), 'What chance of the dye is soonest thrown in topping, shoring, palming, napping.' Both words occur very frequently, and are amply explained in ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... as discreetly as possible, frightened by the very words he spoke, the horrors he had to relate in that sphere of superlative luxury and enjoyment, before those happy ones who possessed all the gifts of this world; for—to use a slang expression—he fully realised that he sang out of tune, and in most uncourteous fashion. What a strange idea of his to have called at the hour when one has just finished dejeuner, when the aroma of hot coffee flatters happy digestion. Nevertheless he went on, and even ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... dancing chit Slang and suggestiveness serve her for wit, And impudence for beauty. Yet frigid 'Form' melts at her cockney spell, 'Form,' which votes valsing with the reigning ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... Birmingham. I thought that in these days of slang everyone knew that. In old times at Brum, which had a lot of small metal industries, the gold- and silver-smiths used to buy metal from almost anyone who came along. And as metal in small quantities could generally be had cheap when they didn't ask where it came from, ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... "They are prose poems, carefully meditated, and exquisitely touched in by a teacher ready to sympathize with every joy and sorrow." The five stories are told in simple and clear language, and without slang, to which she heartily objects. For one so rich in imagination as Miss Ingelow, her prose is singularly free from obscurity and ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... have taken place at Cannes, when both the combatants perished after drinking an extraordinary quantity, may be strictly denominated a duel with deadly weapons. In the south of France, it is said, one person sometimes invites another to partake of absinthe by the slang phrase, "Take a shovelful of earth;" as if an American bar-room lounger, recognizing with grim humor the deadly quality of his liquor, should say, "Come and get measured for your coffin." The French expression has certainly, in view ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... youths of aspect most terrestrial, And clad in uniform, were loitering near A villa's casement, where a gentle vestal Took their impatience somewhat patiently, Knowing the youths were somewhat green and "bestial"— (A certain slang of the Academy, I beg the reader ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... here," she continued. "Helen daren't slang the rich, being rich herself, but she would like to. There's an odd notion, that I haven't yet got hold of, running about at the back of her brain, that poverty is somehow 'real.' She dislikes all organization, and probably confuses wealth with the technique of wealth. Sovereigns ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... I guess I oughtn't to use slang before you." said the foreman. "When I say 'grub' I mean something to eat And here comes Sing Foo with ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Great West • Laura Lee Hope
... beginning Realism, before she had put on her capital letter, had divined this near-at-hand truth along with the rest. Lowell, almost the greatest and finest realist who ever wrought in verse, showed us that Elizabeth was still Queen where he heard Yankee farmers talk. One need not invite slang into the company of its betters, though perhaps slang has been dropping its "s" and becoming language ever since the world began, and is certainly sometimes delightful and forcible beyond the reach of the dictionary. I would not have any one go about for new words, but if ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... anywhere else," said Leonhard, looking up and smiling. "Excuse the slang. If you are where she is, you may feel very certain about ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... "is Army slang. Your 'striker' is a private soldier, whom you hire at so many a dollars a month to do the rougher work in your quarters. You make whatever bargain you choose with the soldier. At this post the bachelor officers usually pay a ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... entered college she set herself the task of learning ten new words a day; but Miss Martin says that she sometimes had to unlearn several of them, owing to the fondness of her fellow students for slang. However, she was persevering, and in time learned to use the language easily. One of the teachers, who had returned a plate to her with an orange on it, still treasures a half sheet of paper which appeared on a returned plate of hers, on ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton
... slang, Mother! At least it may be; but I want to know, because, really, you know, ma'am, when it comes ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... novel, A Stumble on the Threshold, to Cambridge men or Camford men (for in this story the names are synonymous), will be the small-beer chronicle of small College life in their University some thirty years ago. The slang phrases of that remote period are perhaps somewhat confused with those of a more modern time, just as an old Dutch Master will introduce his own native town and the costume of his fellow-countrymen into a picture representing some great Scriptural subject, thus ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 17, 1892 • Various
... this time slang is unknown to him; and re-reads it. That girl has come! There can't be any doubt of it. He had almost forgotten her existence during these past tranquil months, when no word or hint about her reached him, but now, here she is at last, descending ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... founded in 1473 by Robert Woodlark, Chancellor of the University, and dedicated to "the glorious Virgin Martyr, St. Catherine of Alexandria." Undergraduate slang, alas! reduces all this to "Cat's." It was originally called St. Catherine's Hall, and is one of the smallest of the colleges. Although not claiming the strong ecclesiastical flavour of Corpus, it has educated quite a formidable array of bishops. ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... fulfilment of the highest social duties, are poorly performed, and, indeed, little understood. Not many of those who think at all think beyond the line of established custom and routine. They may take pains in their letters to obey the ordinary rules of grammar, to avoid the use of slang phrases and vulgar expressions, to write a clear sentence; but how few seek for the not less imperative rules which are prescribed by politeness and good sense! Of those who should know them, no small proportion habitually, from thoughtlessness or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... remarkable that while the French mind is agog to apprehend every fact and detail it can about the British, to make the wisest and fullest use of our binding necessities, that strange English "incuria"—to use the new slang—attains to its most monumental in ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... determined to undertake the journey to the Front in the true spirit of the French Poilu, and, no matter what happened, "de ne pas s'en faire." This famous "motto" of the French Army is probably derived from one of two slang sentences, de ne pas se faire des cheveux ("to keep one's hair on,") or de ne pas se faire de la bile, or, in other words, not to upset one's digestion by unnecessary worrying. The phrase is typical of the mentality of the Poilu, who accepts ...
— The White Road to Verdun • Kathleen Burke
... a golden popularity, he cannot refrain from sneering at genuine artists. Thus, to the interviewer, he referred to Stephane Mallarme as a "fumiste." No English word will render exactly this French slang; it may be roughly translated a practical joker with a trace of fraud. There may be, and there are, two opinions as to the permanent value of Mallarme's work, but there cannot be two informed and honest opinions ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... long, Beckey received not only "the best" foreigners (as the phrase is in our noble and admirable society slang), but some of ...
— "Stops" - Or How to Punctuate. A Practical Handbook for Writers and Students • Paul Allardyce
... from home, he said. At first he found that a wholly new place and new people took him out of himself ("surprised me," he said, "so that I could not live everything beforehand"). Thus he fled. The slang he used, "chased himself all over the country," seemed peculiarly expressive. He had been in foreign countries; he had herded sheep in Australia (so he said), and certainly from his knowledge of the country he had ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... me, inwardly of course, and I agree with you. Ladies should not use slang, nor should they promenade alone in Swiss valleys by moonlight. My excuse is that I did not feel sleepy, and the moon tempted me. ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... adapts his language to the persons who use it, and thus we pass from the pompous grandiloquence of king and herald to the common English and coarse conceits of clown and nurse and grave-digger; from the bombastic speech of Glendower and the rhapsodies of Hotspur to the slang ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Mary. I'm going to say it over again. Tomorrow morning, to see Rebecca Mary!" setting apart the syllables with the pointing finger. "You can play in my back yard," said Aunt Olivia, sublimely unconscious of slang. ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... Finance" either did not hear it or supposed it was some art-slang common to such ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Antony and Caesar. Thus we saw traffic policemen with their Stop and Go signals in the middle of the Sahara; telephones, check books, motorcycles and automobiles in use, and so on. In addition, the leaders were filled with modern business and other slang; and the spectacle of a huge negro wrapping Cleopatsy in a modern Axminster rug and carrying her in to show her to Antony (instead of, as according to history, Caesar) kept the spectators in a roar of laughter. For an originally-worked-out ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... struck by the old man's mode of expressing himself—so different to the slang language used in general by the rough trappers and traders of the ...
— The Frontier Fort - Stirring Times in the N-West Territory of British America • W. H. G. Kingston
... of kings Agamemnon holds himself, from the day that I was seized with dread of being seen during sleep by any other eyes than those of Providence. In the same way, too, from the day I heard my old nurse snorting in her sleep "like a whale," to use a slang expression, I have added a petition to the special litany which I address to Saint-Honore, my patron saint, to the effect that he would save me from indulging in this ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... somewhat intimidated by her well-bred manners and cultured conversation. He made no secret of his preference for the homelier virtues of the elder sister, whose irrepressible propensity for picturesque, up-to-date slang and free-and-easy style put them on a more equal social footing. So began an acquaintance which resulted in the young man becoming a frequent and intimate ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... you mean?" asked Margaret, who could not abide slang of any kind. "No, indeed, Basil. Your Uncle John is the head of the house, in every possible way. I hope you are all going to be very good and obedient. He is the kindest, best man in the ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards
... agreed weakly. It was audible in his voice, the effort to talk sanely of sane things, and in the slang of every day. "Addington's on. Let's can it! Here we are and here we're likely to stay for a few days. In the meantime we've got to live. How are we going ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... had no misgivings about themselves, and they passed judgment on others with entire assurance. In their slang all with whom they came into contact were either "hearses" or "live Mollies." There was nothing racial, local, or social in this division. A family might be divided, one member being a live Molly, and all the rest the most dismal of hearses. Occasionally a stranger might be brought along. He ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... Ibrahim had picked up his knowledge of English at Alexandria, and his conversation abounded with slang phrases which ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... like other professions, is in some sort to be considered as a distinct nation, possessing manners, customs, a code, and, above all, a language of its own. This, by the outside world, is designated "slang;" just as in one country the tongue of another is vulgarly described as gibberish. Now and then, however, a word escapes from the peculiar vocabulary of the players, and secures the recognition and acceptance of the ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... commercial operations that produce the drug for medical use. Qat (kat, khat) is a stimulant from the buds or leaves of Catha edulis that is chewed or drunk as tea. Quaaludes is the North American slang term for methaqualone, a pharmaceutical depressant. Stimulants are drugs that relieve mild depression, increase energy and activity, and include cocaine (coke, snow, crack), amphetamines (Desoxyn, Dexedrine), ephedrine, ecstasy (clarity, essence, doctor, Adam), phenmetrazine (Preludin), methylphenidate ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... New York in the spring I meant going on farther whether I could or not. Australia and home again was in my mind, and in New York slang I swore there should be "blood on the face of the moon" if I did not get through inside of four months. Now this is not record time by any means, and it is not difficult to do it in much less, provided one spends enough money; but I was at that time in ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... it vex'd his soul to see So grand a cause, so proud a realm, With Goose and Goody at the helm; Who long ago had fall'n asunder 65 But for their rivals' baser blunder, The coward whine and Frenchified Slaver and slang of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... explained it. Mr. Blackwood has a pair of tailor's-shears, and three apprentices who stand by him for orders. One hands him the "Times," another the "Examiner" and a third a "Culley's New Compendium of Slang-Whang." Mr. B. merely cuts out and intersperses. It is soon done—nothing but "Examiner," "Slang-Whang," and "Times"—then "Times," "Slang-Whang," and "Examiner"—and then ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... in. For the sake of the uninitiated, I must explain that, in digger's slang, a "canary" ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... off more quietly than the procession on Monday. There were about 25,000 men, mostly well dressed, no noise or tumult, a vast crowd. It was a failure altogether; Melbourne's answer was good. They say 250,000 men are enrolled in the Unions, and the slang name for those who won't belong to them is 'dungs;' the intimidation used is great. There was quite as great a crowd assembled yesterday to see old Lady Hertford's funeral go by. The King sent all the royal ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... demi-savans (I don't mean Napoleon's in Egypt, but the provinvial editors—in some cases it amounts to the same thing) having proved the word to be Greek, I suppose it is slang no longer), the Tenth Illinois regiment (Dick Wolcott, you know) camped a few miles to the northward, near the woods; and hasty but shady structures were soon reared in front of the officers' tents; but one morning there arose a great wind, and the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... pronunciation or spelling, or the introduction of some words borrowed from a foreign language to express ideas of which no native term precisely conveyed the import. He may also remember hearing for the first time some cant terms or slang phrases, which have since forced their way into common use, in spite of the efforts of the purist. But he may still contend that "within the range of his experience," his language has continued unchanged, and he may believe in its immutability ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... River. Her old school companions called her a darling. Tom Whyte said "he never seed nothink like her nowhere." The clerks spoke of her in terms too glowing to remember; and the last arrival among them, the youngest, with the slang of the "old country" fresh on his lips, called her a stunner! Even Mrs. Grant got up one of her half-expressed remarks about her, which everybody would have supposed to be quizzical in its nature, were it not for the frequent occurrence of the terms "good girl," "innocent creature," ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... circumspect and very ceremonious affair must that lovers' row have been. No swearing, no slang or loud talking, but everything deliberate and in the best of form. Lady Betty telling Morelove to go about his business, and that quickly, but doing so with a stately elegance worthy of the great Mrs. Barry; the suitor bowing ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... to these beggars pretending that they were patients discharged from the Abraham ward at Bedlam. The genuine Bedlamite was allowed to roam the country on his discharge, soliciting alms, provided he wore a badge. This humane privilege was grossly abused, and thus gave rise to the slang phrase ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Kathleen, in her easy slang, "is that he never pulls any knighthood-in-flower stuff, yet you somehow feel it's there. Know what I mean? There's a scrapper behind that ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... stooped, exceedingly neat, black-haired, and of medium height. He was like Beth only in a "family" manner. His nose was a trifle large for his face, but something in his modest, good-natured way, coupled to his earnest delivery of slang in all his conversation, lent him a certain charm ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... and the dean of the group. He was in a business house that imported linens, and lived in a "glorious room with two outside windows, and ample seating capacity," so the friends often met there and learned something of Gothic architecture and of the abominations of slang, in spite of themselves. With Burns, and of his firm, was Brydon Lamb, "also of Scotch descent, but born in America, a delightful combination of strength, sweetness and light. The simple grace of his manner, his unhurried speech, his urbanity, captivated us all. We loved him for what ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... in water-soaked mud or the beds of running streams, while leaves and flowers rise far above into the light. Other pools should become "beds" for the water-flowers that float upon the surface. In the slang of the rock garden the plants living and flourishing on upright rocks are called "verticals." If we must have a slang for the flora of the brook garden we will term them "horizontals"— the plants that lie flat on the water surface, and only use their stems as cables to ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... at the dinner said that the Americans by the introduction of slang were ruining the English language. Mr. James Russell Lowell had come evidently prepared for this controversy. He said that American slang was the common language of that part of England from which the Pilgrims sailed, and that it had ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... vagabonds who wandered over the country dressed in grotesque fashion, pretending to be mad and working upon the fears or the charity of people for alms. They were common in the time of Shakespeare, and were found even as late as the Restoration. The slang phrase "to sham Abraham," is a survival of the practice. There was a ward in Bethlehem (or Bedlam) Hospital, called the Abraham Ward, and hence probably arose the name of these beggars. Harmless lunatics who had been discharged were often to be seen roaming about the ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... possessor a fine thing, for it cannot put up with indifferent fare and lodging: it can only prove its existence by the manner in which it annexes all that is richest, most beautiful, and, to use a byegone slang word, most Precious. For it is reserved the luxurious Chesterfield or Divan, heaped with rainbow-like cushions, and placed in the most becoming light, until the quick, unhappy day dawns when another "artistic ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... society, manners, types, characters, possibilities and prodigies and mysteries of fifty sorts; and all in the light of being splendidly "on my own," as I supposed it, though we hadn't then that perfection of slang, and of (in especial) going and coming along that interminable and incomparable Seine-side front of the Palace against which young sensibility felt itself almost rub, for endearment and consecration, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... vocabulary available and in common use, and we possess slang not only of the different nations constituting the United Kingdom, but also slang from the United States, and from our Colonies, whilst we have a lawlessness in the use of our language not permitted to the French. There are disadvantages as well as advantages ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... "go on" a good deal about our slang. They used to be fond of quoting in superior derision in their papers our, to them, utterly unintelligible baseball news. Mr. Crosland, to drag him in again, to illustrate our abuse of "the language," ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... right. That's one time Prudence was away off." She smiled as she recognized a bit of Carol's slang upon her lips. "Don't worry about her. You needn't keep an eye on her any more. She's ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... episode in his martial career, which, as it happened, had taken place in full view of his retainers, among whom it remained the greatest of jokes. Indeed, he wanted to kill a man, the wag of the party, who gave him a slang name which, being ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... the Duffer. "Only you mustn't slang Harrow. And you'd better get it into your silly head that it's the best school in this or any other ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... the chambers—at Lind's table, in fact. He was a man of about twenty-eight or thirty, slim and dark, with a perfectly pallid face, a small black mustache carefully waxed, and an affectedly courteous smile. He wore a pince-nez; was fond of slang, to show his familiarity with English; and aimed at an English manner, too. He seemed bored. He regarded this man whom Brand introduced to him ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... the poor. His charity, business honor, and public spirit were highly spoken of by those who knew him best. That a journal does not always reflect the editor is as much the fault of society as of the man. So long as the public will pay for gross personalities, obscenity, and slang, decent journals will be outbidden in the market. The fact that the La Crosse Democrat found a ready sale in all parts of the country showed that Mr. Pomeroy fairly reflected the popular taste. While multitudes turned up the whites of their eyes and ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... was a bit of slang, and I like to use bits of English slang when I can; they'll be so useful to know by-and-by when I am scolding ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... Cannes, when both the combatants perished after drinking an extraordinary quantity, may be strictly denominated a duel with deadly weapons. In the south of France, it is said, one person sometimes invites another to partake of absinthe by the slang phrase, "Take a shovelful of earth;" as if an American bar-room lounger, recognizing with grim humor the deadly quality of his liquor, should say, "Come and get measured for your coffin." The French expression has certainly, in view of Dr. Magnan's disclosures, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... heads were moved by one muscle, all the faces were turned toward him with wide, derisive grins. He seemed to hear some one make a humorous remark in a low tone. At it the others all crowed and cackled. He was a slang phrase. ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... retorted, frowning severely at the culprit, "that this low-brow means to intimate that I am a Spanish athlete. I should be deeply pained to know that any one who has been under the refining influence of Rally Hall should indulge in the practice of slang. What would our dear Doctor Rally say if he heard one of ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... most effectual and sudden words in spite of usage and fashionable taste; and that, therefore, when he can get a brighter tint, a more expressive form, by means of some strange—we must call it—Carlylism; English, Scotch, German, Greek, Latin, French, Technical, Slang, American, or Lunar, or altogether superlunar, transcendental, and drawn from the eternal nowhere—he uses it with a courage which might blast an academy of lexicographers into a Hades, void ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Rascal, his pony, pulled up the lariat pin which held him out upon the prairie and scampered for home, and Billy and Davie Dunn, his chum, were forced to "hoof it," as the western slang goes, home. ...
— Beadle's Boy's Library of Sport, Story and Adventure, Vol. I, No. 1. - Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood to Manhood • Prentiss Ingraham
... he listened to Davy's enthusiasm and slang. He drummed his fingers on the table as he considered his proposals. "I hadn't thought of involving any of our home-folks in my troubles," said he thoughtfully, "but maybe your assistance and plan will be the thing that's needed. I want information. People ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... not familiar with the slang of the Rue de Jerusalem, and as it is fifteen years since we applied this word for the first time to this thing, allow us to explain to them what ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the boards of dictionaries and in speech dole out the worn bronze coinage of our vocabulary. We are the misers of philological history. And when we can save our pennies and pass the counterfeit coin of slang, we are as happy as if we heard a blind beggar thank us for putting a pewter sixpence ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... find out where to go to with letters, and they are such illiterate men too! But what can one expect in a world of inconsistencies, where things are all topsy-turvy, so to speak, though I don't like slang, and never use it except when there is a want of a proper what-d'ye-call-it to express one's thingumy-jigs. Don't you think ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... "Granny" (the fifteen-inch howitzer) in orders "mother" is the name given to the twelve-inch howitzer. The trench language is changing so quickly that I think the staff in the rear are unable to keep up to date, because they have recently issued an order to the effect that slang must not be used in official correspondence. Now instead of reporting that a "dud Minnie" arrived over back of "mud lane," it is necessary to put, "I have the honor to report that a projectile from a German Minnenwerfer landed in rear of Trench F ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... a young, and as Fong had said, "awful smart boy." Smuggled into the country in his childhood, he spoke excellent English, interspersed with slang. He repeated his story with a Chinaman's unimaginative exactness, not a detail changed, omitted or overemphasized. The young men were impressed by him, intelligent, imperturbable and self-reliant, a man admirably fitted to put in execution the move they had decided on. ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... so perhaps they won't try it on too hard," said Sam, and there the students' slang came to an end for the ...
— The Rover Boys In The Mountains • Arthur M. Winfield
... back I'll talk nothing but Greek and Latin. I'm getting French now from Ford, and Hindoo from Frank Harley. Then I know English and slang and Long Islandish. Think of one ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... Salisbury, your memory is admirable. Yes, I was hard up. But the curious thing is that soon after you saw me I became harder up. My financial state was described by a friend as 'stone broke.' I don't approve of slang, mind you, but such was my condition. But suppose we go in; there might be other people who would like to dine—it's a ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... scrutiny, but a face that was becoming a kind of hold on life, even a kind of refuge, an ally. It was a face that might have come out of a rather flashy book; or such as is revered on the stage. 'A rotten bad face,' he whispered at it in his own familiar slang, after some such abrupt encounter; a fearless, packed, daring, fascinating face, with even—what?—a spice of genius in it. Whose the devil's face was it? What on earth was the matter?... 'Brazen it out,' ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... Billina; and you're talking slang, which is very undig'n'fied," said Dorothy, reprovingly. "Come here, Billina, and I'll let you out; for Ozma of Oz is here, and ...
— Ozma of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... lookin' consid'ble like rain, lately, hereabouts," continued the captain, coolly, in a kind of amphibious slang, characteristic of the man, "but in these yer latitudes no man kin set up to be ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... which the words were uttered was so venomous, that Bob realized the speaker meant mischief, though he was ignorant of the fact that in the slang of tramps who beat their way on railroads, "con" betokened conductor, and "blind baggage" the platform of the coach in a passenger train nearest ...
— Bob Chester's Grit - From Ranch to Riches • Frank V. Webster
... the many private academies, or the Realschule, where thorough instruction is given, but with less special, though no slight attention to Latin and Greek, and more to mathematics and practical branches, even then he must acquire from one of the gymnasia the exemption-and-maturity-right. In the slang of student-life, the gymnasiast is styled a Frog, the school itself a Pond; between the time of his declaration of maturity and his reception as student, he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... determined that my silence shall voice itself. I have no doubt that they would like to have me write it, so that they could boast of it afterward to their fellow officers. Now, as Jimmie would say in his frightful slang, 'I'm going to give them a run for their money.' Von Engel will probably beseech you to arrange to keep Jimmie at your side, so that he can have a few words with Mrs. Jimmie. Von Furzmann will plead with you to permit him a word with me. I need hardly tell you that your role to-night ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... affair turned out. She had put him in the way of something absolutely special—an old house untouched, untouchable, indescribable, an old corner such as one didn't believe existed, and the holy calm of which made the chatter of studios, the smell of paint, the slang of critics, the whole sense and sound of Paris, come back as so many signs of a huge monkey-cage. He moved about, restless, while he wrote; he lighted cigarettes and, nervous and suddenly scrupulous, put them out again; the night was mild and one of the windows of ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... characteristic of his talking and his writing than that tragic poem in which, with his heart crying for the child he had adored and lost, he could compare himself to 'an old black rotter of a boat' past service, and could see, when criticised for it, nothing discordant in that slang rotter dropped into such verse!" A good deal of Henley is in both answers. This curious blend must have especially struck everybody who saw him and listened to him in his own home. I can recall summer Sunday afternoons at Addiscombe, with Henley ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... from the other world. Geographically the most favoured stations for wireless heavenly connections seem to be Brooklyn, New York, and Los Angeles, California. The adherents of this underworld philosophy have a slang of their own, and the result is that their letters, while they spring from the deepest emotions, sound as if they were copied from the same sample book. The better style begins about like this: "Knowing that you are intensely interested in things psychological, I ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... really, in the only other example (which immediately occurs) of Papa's attempt to bias the filial intellect, we recognise nothing but what is mystical; and involuntarily we think of him in the modern slang character of 'governor,' rather than as a 'guide, philosopher, and friend.' It seems that one Saturday, about the time when the Rev. Walker in Furness must have been sitting down to his exegesis of hard sayings in the ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... associated in his great work. The one possessed the reverse qualities of the other: BUFFON, whose style in his composition is elaborate and declamatory, was in conversation coarse and careless. Pleading that conversation with him was only a relaxation, he rather sought than avoided the idiom and slang of the mob, when these seemed expressive and facetious; while MONTBELLIARD threw every charm of animation over his delightful talk: but when he took his seat at the rival desk of Buffon, an immense interval separated them; he whose tongue dropped the honey and the music of the ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... off, but ere they had gone two April knew the painter as well as if they had been twin sisters. Clive Connal hadn't a secret or a shilling she would not share with the whole world. She used the vocabulary of a horse-dealer and the slang of a schoolboy, but her mind was as fragrant as a field that the Lord hath blessed, and her heart was the heart of a child. It was shameful to deceive such a creature, and April's nature revolted from the act. Before they reached the farm ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... section of the country from which he came was against him. The bishop was not without his prejudices, and was disposed to father all the materialistic spirit of the age upon his guest, whether or no. He had noted that lapse into slang, and his attitude had become like that of the loiterers in the hall of Caiaphas, the high priest. Had his thought become vocal, it would have run like a garbled version of their triumphant charge against St. Peter: "Thou art a Westerner, and thy ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... what the Abbaye de Cinq-Pierres is, or rather what it was? Mind, not Saint-Pierre, but Cinq-Pierres (Five Stones). Gavroche,[55] who loves puns and is very fond of slang, gave this nickname to a set of huge stones which stood before the prison of La Roquette, and on which the guillotine used to be erected on the mornings when a capital punishment was to take place. The executioner was the Abbe de Cinq-Pierres, ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... with pleasure, madame," replied Patty, dimpling with fun as she heard the old lady's unsuccessful attempts in American slang. "My name is Patty Fairfield; and though I seldom use the slang of my country, I'm more or less familiar with its terms, and can enlighten you concerning them, at least to a degree. To me your language is difficult; ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... nice. You'll find a bunch of clippings in my second drawer there. Be sure and show them to your father, and don't fail to keep him in touch with your work: he can help you once he's aroused to what you can do. By the way, you must boil the slang out of your system. It's charming, but it won't do. First thing you know it will be slipping in to your ink-pot and corrupting your manuscripts. You know better; I don't! As you go on Nan Bartlett can probably save you a good ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... may be led astray by some fascinating "divorcee"; that he may be caught in her "selfish snare" and left with a smashed heart and lost youthful ideals, while the fair lady laughs and leaves; but if you will pardon a bit of slang, I should say that the Western youth is a "pretty wise guy," and that mother need not worry because he can look out for himself! However, "mother's advice" may not always have held good after a mint julep, or a stroll in the moonlight..... Hence ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... trifle better than such roughness of the heart as that passage with the Chinese waiter. This new attitude was loose in the back, tight across the shoulders, short in the seams—it was not made to fit Bertram Chester. When he launched out into rudimentary art criticism, stringing together the stock slang which he had picked up in the studios, when he tried to impress her with his refined acquaintance, his progress toward "society" of the conventional kind, her amusement took another turn in the circle ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... then had Coxeter—to use a phrase which he himself would not have used, for he avoided the use of slang—"given himself away." Over his lantern-shaped face, across his thin, determined mouth, there had still lingered a trace of the supercilious smile with which he had been looking round him. And, as he had ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... or thoughtlessness, or from yielding to the bad bit in them, join in silly school talk, silly mysteries, giggling, criticizing other people, boasting about home, loud, rough ways of talking, slang, cliques and exclusive friendships (every one of which is underbred, as well as silly or unkind), and are yet, three-quarters of them, fit for something better,—at home they would be better, and at ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... in The Manchester Guardian.—'Bell's talk is full of salt and vivacity, a brilliant stream in which city slang reinforces rustic idiom, and both are re-manipulated by inexhaustible native wit. She is the most remarkable creation in a gallery where not a single figure is indistinct or conventional.... Mr. Gibson's essay—for there is confessedly something experimental ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... the Castle exhausted their adulation, and had received their last reward for upholding the appointment. The Tory press, hungry for the spoil which it maddened the others to lose, paid back the compliments by intense vituperation. The slang of party warfare was bandied in the usual fashion, without thought or a care beyond the interest of party. The Register, to everybody's astonishment, took up the one cause not represented, namely, that of the country. Davis denounced the appointment as an insult to that country, and with ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... button hole"—a slang term for the mouth, has been well "threshed out"—as it is called. Of "My Prooshian Blue," as his son affectedly styled his parent, Mr. Lang correctly suggests the solution, that the term came of George IV's intention of changing ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... to go out to Belgium and get some good 'stuff.' [Stuff, let me say, is the technical or slang term for film pictures.] How would you like ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... Miss Cristel. Excitement, Mr. Roylake. For more than a year past, I have not luxuriated in the pleasures of society. I feel the social glow; I love the human family; I never, never, never was such a good man as I am now. Let vile slang express my emotions: ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... provocative angle, and she knew just when to let Bud catch a slow, sidelong glance—of the kind that is supposed to set a man's heart to syncopatic behavior. She did not do it too often. She did not powder too much, and she had the latest slang at her pink tongue's tip and was yet moderate in her ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... no chances of gettin' 'made,' see?" Murphy answered. "Made," John remembered, was the slang of detectives for identification. When a person was ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... more often than you write. Your habits of speech are likely to become permanent and your errors of speech will creep into your written work. It is important therefore that you watch your spoken language. Occasions will arise when the slang expressions that you so freely use will seem inappropriate, and it will be unfortunate indeed if you find that you have used the slang so long that you have no other words to take their place. An abbreviated form of gymnasium or of mathematics may not attract ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... things as discreetly as possible, frightened by the very words he spoke, the horrors he had to relate in that sphere of superlative luxury and enjoyment, before those happy ones who possessed all the gifts of this world; for—to use a slang expression—he fully realised that he sang out of tune, and in most uncourteous fashion. What a strange idea of his to have called at the hour when one has just finished dejeuner, when the aroma of hot ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... good looks, the kind that led you to expect the person enjoying them would dispose of disputations, speculations, aspirations, in a few very neatly and brightly uttered words, so simplified in sense, however, that they sounded, even when guiltless, like rather aggravated slang. It wasn't that Kate hadn't pretended too that she should like to go to America; it was only that with this young woman Milly had constantly proceeded, and more than ever of late, on the theory of intimate confessions, private ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... knowledge how and when to make a compromise, and when to hold fast to a principle. The tendency of the thoughtless is to denounce all compromise as wicked, and to stick to a form of words without bothering about the real meaning. Belief in "fads"—I cannot avoid the bit of slang—and singular malleability of real convictions are sometimes generated just by want of serious thought; and, at any rate, both phenomena ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... solitudes held no enemies for him. He felt that the world belonged to him at night. The moon was his lantern and the stars were his friends. Circumstance and environment had wrought for him a coat of cheerful effrontery which passed for hardihood; a coat patched with slang and gaping with inconsistencies, which he put on or off at will. Out on the starlit mesas he had metaphorically shed his coat. He was at home. Here there were no men to joke about his awkwardness and his ungainly height. A wanderer ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... furnished the Carthaginians with the most expert slingers in the world, who did them great service in battles and sieges.(582) They slang large stones of above a pound weight; and sometimes threw leaden bullets,(583) with so much violence, that they would pierce even the strongest helmets, shields, and cuirasses; and were so dexterous in their aim, that they scarce ever ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... there were others not so good-natured as Lizzie, who, though often vastly entertained by Becky, were quite ready to believe that the spirit of mimicry she possessed had something lawless about it, especially when she broke forth into the slang of the street,—"gutter-slang," the other parcel-girls called it,—the lawlessness seemed to gather a sort of proof. And so it was that, in spite of the entertainment she afforded, and a certain kind of respect ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... stoutly defensive. G.J. grew self-conscious. Moreover, her slang disturbed him. It was the first slang he had heard her use, and in using it her voice had roughened. But he remembered that Concepcion also ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... at him coldly. She was not accustomed to this style of expression. Her friends perhaps occasionally used a slang word or term, but it was done in a spirit of gaiety or as a jest, whereas this man used his expressions ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... the detection of the swaggering boatswain; and all that the Baronet had for it was to sneak off, saying, "D—n the old quiz, who the devil thought to have heard so much slang ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... class. His father, John Chaucer, was a London wine merchant. The family very likely came at first from France, and the name may mean shoemaker, from an old Norman word chaucier or chaussier, a shoemaker. And although the French word for shoemaker is different now, there is still a slang word ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... not—to use a little modern slang—going to "give myself away" on canoeing, or talk of startling adventure. But, for the possible advantage of some future canoeist, I will briefly relate what happened to me on a certain windy morning one summer. It was on one of the larger lakes—no matter which—between ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... faults of his kind, not inveterately, for he spoke good English to women; but as he indulged in his dear island slang to men, he felt bound to use it to himself. "This poor little woman is thorough game," he said to himself. "I can see that she is as tender as a little bird, yet she has shown as much pluck as a six-foot grenadier? She has not flinched at all. I can ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... of wool, however, did in those days bring with it much profit, so that our ancient friend, when dying, was declared, in whatever slang then prevailed, to cut up exceeding well. For sons and daughters there was ample sustenance with assistance of due industry; for friends and relatives some relief for grief at this great loss; for aged dependents comfort in declining years. This was much for one old man to get done in that ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... own fault," replied Lester, as he followed his companion to another part of the stand where they could give free vent to their mirth. "You can't blame her for not understanding baseball slang. I'll bet after this that ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... for crime; his vessels were usually secreted in the land-locked bay of Barataria, to the westward of the mouth of the river. They were, however, soon extirpated by the American government. The language of the adjacent States is still adulterated with the slang of those scoundrels, proving how short a period it is since they disappeared, and how they must have mixed up with the reckless population, whose head-quarters were then at ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... typical of Sophie that she had selected from among all the dashing wooers; at her heels, Walter Trumwell, simple and sedate, who was horrified by her pranks and shocked by her use of slang, but who adored her with the devotion of a frightened puppy. Their engagement had been long announced. It was only in its high-handed abruptness that ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... In the slang of the newspaper shop a "story" means non-fiction. It may be an interview. It may be an account of a fire. It may be a page of descriptive writing for the Sunday magazine section. It may be merely ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... current slang for shrewd. To smoke a plot or a trick was to detect it; in modern ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... saddle. Then, in a flash and thunder of flying horses, we swept like tawny lightning down the Pincian. The last words I heard from the club window, through the heliotrope-scented air, were "Thirty to one on Atys, half only if declared." They were wagering on our lives; the slang of the paddock was ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... cricket matches, at both of which more attention is paid to fashion than to the field, follow one another in a dizzy succession. She has naturally no time for thought, but in order to avoid the least suspicion of it, she learns to chatter the slang of the youthful Guardsmen and others who are her companions. A certain flashing style of beauty ensures to her the devotion of numerous admirers, to whom she babbles of "chappies" and "Johnnies," and "real jam" and "stony broke," and "two to one bar one," as if her life depended ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... snake-charmer and the boneless wonder. David was profoundly polite, almost old- fashioned in his acknowledgment of the introduction. The women were suddenly conscious of a new-found glory in themselves. The "boneless wonder" talked of his elegance for weeks, and always without resorting to slang. ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... atrocious slang! Won't eat his oatmeal! And he's such a queer child—queer! So pale, never laughs, doesn't like any one. Why should you take up for him? He doesn't even like you. Hates ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... the young ruffian, now using that half-whining, half-sneering form of discourse peculiar alike to the vicious chevalier of Paris and his confrere of the provincial centres. Accent and slang alone distinguish between them; the argot, however, is practically ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... my finish," said Launcelot, moved to slang, by the intensity of his feelings. "I thought it was bad enough to be cut out of going to college, but if you and Anne go away, I ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... In the days when link-boys and sedan chairs helped home a jag they had the time to speak good English. But now! Good Lord! With typewriters cutting your phrases into angular fragments, with the very soil at your heels saturated with slang, what hope in an age of hurry has a fellow to think of the cadence? I honestly believe Stevenson was having fun when he wrote that essay of his on the technical elements of style. It's a puzzle picture and no more to be deciphered ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... a good deal of slang from the nature of his associates, and she set to work to improve his language, ...
— Adrift in New York - Tom and Florence Braving the World • Horatio Alger
... Tucca. "His peculiarity" has been well described by Ward as "a buoyant blackguardism which recovers itself instantaneously from the most complete exposure, and a picturesqueness of speech like that of a walking dictionary of slang." ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... Yarrow. "I was only a boy. You remember that I was only a boy,—just out of the shop. The more uneducated a man was in our church-pulpit then, the better. I knew nothing, John," appealingly. "When I preached about foreordination and hell-fire, it was in coarse slang: I knew that. I used to think there might be a different God and books and another life farther out in the world, if I could only get at it. I never was strong, and they had forced me into it; and when you came to me to help you with your plan, I wanted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... Revolution: they trusted reason and have had their reward; no such leap forward has ever been made as France made in that one decade, and the effects are still potent. In the last hundred years the language of Moliere has grown fourfold; the slang of the studios and the gutter and the laboratory, of the engineering school and the dissecting table, has been ransacked for special terms to enrich and strengthen the language in order that it may deal ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... a river, is now, by the unusual droughts of the summer, shrunken to a mere rill, but even now, and at all seasons, it must be worth the drive to see it. Worth the drive! a drive any where in these hills 'pays'—to borrow the slang of this bank-note world—for itself. It is a pure enjoyment. On our return we repeatedly saw young partridges in our path, nearly as tame as the chickens of the Casse-cour. The whir-r-ing of their wings struck a spark even from our sportsman's eye, and—a ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the novel of "Paul Clifford" (and hence the introduction of a semi-burlesque or travesty in the earlier chapters) was to show that there is nothing essentially different between vulgar vice and fashionable vice, and that the slang of the one circle is but an easy paraphrase of the cant ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... respect to me. And then, 'who can say?' as the Portuguese says when he hasn't anything else to say. They'll keep a strict watch over you, my friend, because you've played the lion too much. Just before I left the States, as you call them, a new slang phrase was going the rounds;—'it is better to play the fox some of the time than to roar all of the time.' Ergo, be foxy. Take it cool. So long as you haven't got that mint packed about your person, the ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... amusement. Many are the ministers to this taste in our time. There is almost a mania for frivolity and excitement, which exhibits itself in many forms in our popular literature. To meet the public taste, our books and periodicals must now be highly spiced, amusing, and comic, not disdaining slang, and illustrative of breaches of all laws, human and divine. Douglas Jerrold once observed of this tendency, "I am convinced the world will get tired (at least I hope so) of this eternal guffaw about all things. After all, life has ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... I presume that means. The Consolidated Pacific is wise to the situation. 'Wise' is slang, isn't it? It used ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Spain, even in Suchet's corps, which was one of the best disciplined: and the Italians, anxious not to be outdone in any respect by their allies, were the most accomplished of depredators. They had come in fact to hold theft meritorious, and designated it by the elegant name of poetry. This slang term had become so general, that it was used even by the officers; and the adjutant of Pepe's regiment, in reporting a marauder to him, calls the man a poet. The prosaic application of a couple of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... and Caesar. Thus we saw traffic policemen with their Stop and Go signals in the middle of the Sahara; telephones, check books, motorcycles and automobiles in use, and so on. In addition, the leaders were filled with modern business and other slang; and the spectacle of a huge negro wrapping Cleopatsy in a modern Axminster rug and carrying her in to show her to Antony (instead of, as according to history, Caesar) kept the spectators in a roar of laughter. For an originally-worked-out idea such ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... at this, and then proceeded to explain the meaning of the slang phraseology he had used. "Green, you must know, ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... was visible and clear; At least two youths of aspect most terrestrial, And clad in uniform, were loitering near A villa's casement, where a gentle vestal Took their impatience somewhat patiently, Knowing the youths were somewhat green and "bestial"— (A certain slang of the Academy, I beg the reader ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... doesn't know where Bella picks up her slang words. I think it is Mr. Ned who teaches her, for when he comes home in the summer he often says, with a sly twinkle in his eye, "Come out into the garden, Bella," and he lies in a hammock under the trees, and Bella perches on a branch near him, and he talks to her by the ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... the facts to Uncle John; and then he turned to the chauffeur, who was fumbling with the tyre—it was something complicated, not only just the bursting—and in a minute or two he was down in the mud giving such practical advice. And you never heard such slang! But I believe men like that sort of thing, as the chauffeur was not a bit ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... having been expended upon persons of infinitely small merit, what was to be done when those of real superiority entered upon the scene? It was impossible to apply to them the forms of laudation adapted to their inferiors. Well, then, a species of slang was invented, by which it was thought practicable to make the genuine great men conceive they had passed into the condition of demigods. A language was devised that was to express the fervor of the adorers who were suddenly allowed to penetrate ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... Skirmish bataleto. Skirt jupo. Skittles kegloj. Skulk kasxigxi. [Error in book: kasigxi] Skull kranio. Sky cxielo. Skylight fenestreto. Slack malstrecxa. Slacken (speed) malakceli. Slacken (loose) malstrecxi. Slag metala sxauxmo. Slake sensoifigi. Slander kalumnii. Slang vulgaresprimo. Slanting oblikva. Slap in the face survango. Slash trancxadi, trancxegi. Slate ardezo. Slater tegmentisto. Slates (roofing) tegmentajxo. Slaughter (animals) bucxadi. Slaughter mortigi. Slaughter-house ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... clever about Lucretia Borgia, and Mary Manning, and Mary Newell! One would think English mothers were all going to boil their children. This is just what has happened about everything else. In certain English circles slang is talked: therefore women have become coarse and vulgar. The Divorce Court has been a busy one of late; and scandals have been 'going round' as the American ladies in this hotel say; therefore there are to be no more virtuous mothers and sisters presently. Upon my word, the audacity of this makes ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... The boys in your family know of it—if you could get them to tell you. My two sons studied at a State university, and they would bring me home what they heard—the gossip, the slang, the horrible obscenity. Fourteen fellows in one dormitory using the same bathroom—and on the wall you saw a row of fourteen syringes! And they told that on themselves, it was the joke of the campus. They call the disease a 'dose'; and a man's not supposed to ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... and myself were left alone, neither the first nor the second nor'-wester of brandy-and-water could arouse him from his sullen mood. He told me frankly, and in his own sea-slang, that he could not disintegrate the idea of a lawyer from that of the devil, and that he was assured that neither I nor my cause would prosper if I permitted the interference of a land-shark. I was even obliged ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... my brother, do not fear it; I'm no disembodied spirit— I am Lampton, the Slang Poet, with a price upon my head. I am watching by this portal for some late lamented mortal To arise in his disquietude and leave his ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... date" (as the slang goes) of Our Village, may interest the supporters of the Statesman Mr. ACLAND, without annoying the admirers of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... linguistic chaos and decomposition few writers have the necessary knowledge of Russian, the taste and the sense of measure, to write anything like his pure and flexible Russian. In the hands of others it degenerates into slang, or into some personal jargon closely related to ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... supposed foreign tongues were nothing more than the ordinary dialects of the country modified by an affected accentuation, by the introduction of a few cabalistic terms, and by the use of descriptive circumlocutions and figurative words in place of ordinary expressions, a slang, in short, such as rascals and pedants invariably coin ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... beside her, drawing himself into the smallest space possible. "No, Redhead! The devil dragged the man who did that down to the lower regions long ago, on account of my tongue. It's his son. The younger, the sharper. This stripling made Casper Rubling,—[Dice, in gambler's slang]—poor wretch, pay for his loaded dice with ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... (4) Hirta. Late Latin slang for hirsuta, and always used of nasty places or nasty people; it shall not stay. The species shall be our Viola Seclusa,—Monk's violet—meaning the kind of monk who leads a rough life like Elijah's, or the Baptist's, or Esau's—in another kind. This violet ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... believe it's a regular language they talk," he said to himself. "Only a lot of slang words they've made up. What do they call it? Rum—Rum—Romany, that is it. Well, it doesn't sound ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... of criminal, she thought, with his humour and ready address, his sudden shifts from slang of the street to phrases chosen with a discriminating taste in English, his cool indifference to her threatening attitude, and his paradoxical pose of warm—it seemed—personal interest in and consideration for a complete and, to say ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... to an oracle; treasure up his cant phrases; echo his opinions about horses and other topics of jockey lore; and, above all, endeavour to imitate his air and carriage. Every ragamuffin that has a coat to his back thrusts his hands in the pockets, rolls in his gait, talks slang, and is ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... fleets, to win your Camperdowns and Trafalgars? and when they came ashore again, were no longer the simple, slouching Simons of the village; but jolly tars, with rolling gait, quid in mouth, glazed hats, with crowns of one inch high, and brims of five wide, and with as much glib slang, and glib money to treat the girls with, as any ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... the terror and disgust peculiar to a woman who had risen successfully above it. That very afternoon she had read in the Figaro an account of the proceedings at a public meeting which had verged on the comic. Owing to the slang words that had been used and to the piggish behavior of a drunken man who had got himself chucked, she was laughing at ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... old line of stuff!" She had never before employed Felicity's brand of slang. It came unpleasantly from her tongue. "The wages of sin and all ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... upon Scott's own work, as for example by Professor Masson, who spoke of "the shrewdness and sagacity of some of his critical prefaces to his novels, where he discusses principles of literature without seeming to call them such."[491] Scott was quick to notice "cant and slang"[492] in the professional language of men in all arts; and he valued most highly the remarks of those whose intelligence had not been overlaid by a ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... with a cheery smile. He had made mistakes, of course—who didn't? But he intended to come out on top, you bet your life! Western slang flowed freely from his lips. The blazing sun, which already had cracked the unpainted shingles on his roof, had bleached the crude blue of his jumper and overalls. His sombrero might have belonged to a veteran cowboy. Jim wore it with a rakish list to port, ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... almost see the quotation marks around what Dr. O'Connor considered slang dropping into ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... I think enjoys the comic page more than the present writer,—yet it spreads a demoralizing virus amongst children. Of what use is it to teach children good English when the newspaper deliberately teaches them the cheapest slang? Of what use is it to teach them manners and kindliness when the newspaper constantly spreads boorishness and "rough house" conduct? Of what use is it to raise taste when this is injured at the very outset of life by giving ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... the profession living in the village, had no competitor save when the sitting of the court brought in one or more from neighboring settlements, and, being thus circumstanced, without opposition, and the only representative of his craft, he was literally, to employ the slang phrase in that quarter, the "cock of the walk." He was, however, not so much regarded by the villagers a worthy as a clever man. It required not erudition to win the credit of profundity, and the lawyer knew ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... oc, to enter; applied to garments "that which is entered," or put on. Compare our slang expression, "to ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... Mangonel, whilst the machine which he describes is a Trebuchet with moveable counterpoise. The history of the word appears to be the following. The Greek word [Greek: magganon], "a piece of witchcraft," came to signify a juggler's trick, an unexpected contrivance (in modern slang "a jim"), and so specially a military engine. It seems to have reached this specific meaning by the time of Hero the Younger, who is believed to have written in the first half of the 7th century. From the form ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... girls American slang. It doesn't amount to much, teaching French girls slang, because they never have any chance to get it off on the men. ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... I've heard persons say I was the whole show. Of course, I'm joking now, but the women all take up for me and applaud everything I say, whether it has a point to it or not. 'Whole show!' I oughtn't to have said that. When I try to keep from using bookish expressions I drop plumb into slang; there is ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... Sammy Brown was shone upon by the far-flung rays of the renaissance. Sammy, with his ultra clothes, his horseshoe pin, his plump face, his trite slang, his uncomprehending admiration of Ravenel—the broker's clerk made an excellent foil to the new, bright unseen visitor to ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... bear upon Zululand. The immorality, infanticide, superstition, &c., seem to be as great in a Melanesian island as in any part of the heathen world. And with our many languages, it is not possible for us to-know the "slang" ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... him no response to his expressed surprise and he laughed and said, "D'you know, Rosalie, I don't believe I've ever before heard you use slang." ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... drawing-room was not tedious, nor indeed very secret, for anyone acquainted with the diplomatic slang in which such affairs were conducted might have learned in the lobby, or indeed in the hall, so mighty was the voice of the stranger, that there was no chance of any settlement without a meeting which was fixed to take place ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Swift, when he came into favour, helped to form the Brothers' Club, which was especially intended to direct patronage towards promising writers of the Tory persuasion. The institution, in modern slang, differentiated as time went on. The more aristocratic clubs became exclusive societies, occupying their own houses, more devoted to gambling than to literature; while the older type, represented by Jonson's famous club, were composed ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... as I launched out on my speech. Not that I was tryin' to chuck any flowers of oratory. What I aimed to do was to tell 'em about Rowley's schemes as simple and straight away as I could, usin' one-syllable words for the most part, cannin' the slang, and soundin' as many final G's as my tongue would let me. Before I turned in too, I had it almost pat; but I hardly dared to go to sleep for fear it would get away ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... know so little about them that his description of them would never induce a jeweller to purchase them, but on the contrary make him regard the man as a fool, deceived with bits of coloured glass for rubies and sapphires. Major Marvel was not of such. He knew nothing of the slang of the Pharisees, knew little of the language of either the saints or the prophets, had, like most Christians, many worldly ways of looking at things, and yet I think our Lord would have said there was no guile ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... consciously with a deliberate attempt upon them, in just that partial, selecting, creative way in which an artist looks at things for the purpose of painting a picture. In order to arrive at their effects, they shrink from no sacrifice, from no excess; slang, neologism, forced construction, archaism, barbarous epithet, nothing comes amiss to them, so long as it tends to render a sensation. Their unique care is that the phrase should live, should palpitate, should be alert, exactly expressive, super-subtle in ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... in the chambers—at Lind's table, in fact. He was a man of about twenty-eight or thirty, slim and dark, with a perfectly pallid face, a small black mustache carefully waxed, and an affectedly courteous smile. He wore a pince-nez; was fond of slang, to show his familiarity with English; and aimed at an English manner, too. He seemed bored. He regarded this man whom Brand introduced to him without surprise, ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... private academies, or the Realschule, where thorough instruction is given, but with less special, though no slight attention to Latin and Greek, and more to mathematics and practical branches, even then he must acquire from one of the gymnasia the exemption-and-maturity-right. In the slang of student-life, the gymnasiast is styled a Frog, the school itself a Pond; between the time of his declaration of maturity and his reception as student, he is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... seldom that Frank used slang, but just then he was in want of a better expression by means of which to give vent ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... propagated by the Sabbatians, and on the other hand the mystical Chassidim were beginning to perform their witches' dance. The language commonly used was the Judendeutsch (the Jewish German jargon) which, stripped of its former literary dignity, was not much better than thieves' slang. Of such pitiful elements the life of the Jews was made up during the first half of ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... special interest, which had stamped him unduly. In addition, the section of the country from which he came was against him. The bishop was not without his prejudices, and was disposed to father all the materialistic spirit of the age upon his guest, whether or no. He had noted that lapse into slang, and his attitude had become like that of the loiterers in the hall of Caiaphas, the high priest. Had his thought become vocal, it would have run like a garbled version of their triumphant charge against St. Peter: "Thou art a Westerner, and thy ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... poilu slang word "Pinard" came from, but everyone knows what it means. It's half way between water and red wine, with the kick mostly in the taste. It is served as an army ration. The poilu's canteen is always ...
— "I was there" - with the Yanks in France. • C. LeRoy Baldridge
... lewd women in audacity, extravagance, and effrontery, who fleece their husbands as cleverly as courtesans fleece their lovers? Noble ladies! who drink, and smoke, and carouse, who attend masked balls, and talk slang! Noble ladies! the idiots who long for the applause of the crowd, and consider notoriety to be desirable and flattering. A woman is only noble by her virtues—and the chief of all virtues, modesty, is entirely wanting in ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... "American slang," he explained penitently. "I am sorry. I meant that it was very pleasant to be here alone with you for ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... receptions, dinners and theatres, race meetings and cricket matches, at both of which more attention is paid to fashion than to the field, follow one another in a dizzy succession. She has naturally no time for thought, but in order to avoid the least suspicion of it, she learns to chatter the slang of the youthful Guardsmen and others who are her companions. A certain flashing style of beauty ensures to her the devotion of numerous admirers, to whom she babbles of "chappies" and "Johnnies," and "real jam" and "stony ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... me," said Kathleen, in her easy slang, "is that he never pulls any knighthood-in-flower stuff, yet you somehow feel it's there. Know what I mean? There's a scrapper behind ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Dividing lines parting the population into two camps more or less hostile may be drawn variously; for example, one may be run between the law-abiding and the criminal class. But the elements to which reference is here made are those immemorable and implacable foes which the slang of modern economics roughly and loosely distinguishes as "Capital" and "Labor." A more accurate classification—as accurate a one as it is possible to make—would designate them as those who do muscular labor and those who ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... waiters were one's good friends, and Madame the proprietress addressed her Bohemians as "mes enfants." Having dined, one joined one's brother workers who waged the battle of Art with jaws and gestures. Bawling out the slang of the studios, they grimaced, sneered, shrugged, praised, demolished. Nothing was sacred to these young savages but the joy of the present. They had no past, and the future hadn't arrived. They lived in the moment, ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... black-and-white hat mashed down upon her soft, loose hair, and, slung about her shoulders, a woolly coat of clearest lemon yellow. Vivian gave the impression of a soft little watchful cat, unfriendly, alert, selfish. Her manner was studiedly rowdyish, her speech marred by slang; she loved only a few persons in the world besides herself. One of these few persons, however, was Clarence Breckenridge's daughter, Carol, affectionately known to all these persons as "Billy," and it was in Miss Breckenridge's defence that Vivian was speaking now. A general yet ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... heard at that meal. I remember mumbling something about the pleasure in store for me, and while my tongue pronounced this statement, my conscience denounced me as a liar. It would be no pleasure. An upstart of a boarding-school girl, with her airy ways, her college slang and her ear-piercing laughter, tearing around the house like a young cyclone, having girl friends and boy friends hanging around continually,—the thought was not encouraging, and I groaned in spirit, and puffed away, setting misty shallops ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... traveling from Sulphite to Sulphite, like the spark of a pyrotechnic set-piece, till the thinking world has been over-violently illuminated, has obscured its genesis and diverted attention from the simplicity and force of its fundamental principles.[1] In this, its progress has been like that of slang, which, gaining in popularity, must inevitably decrease ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... he could scarcely speak. This was a new experience. At first it attracted him, but the hopeless vulgarity of the girl at his side, her tawdry clothes, her sordid, petty talk, her slang, her miserable profanity, soon began to revolt him. He felt that he could not keep his self-respect while such a girl hung upon ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... how can you use slang in the presence of ladies?" and she assumed the characteristic "tough" walk, which had always been one of ...
— The Motor Girls on a Tour • Margaret Penrose
... good? You go about Warwickshire, and fancy that from merely being born and wandering in those sweet sunny plains and fresh woodlands Shakspeare must have drunk in a portion of that frank artless sense of beauty which lies about his works like a bloom or dew; but a Coventry ribbon-maker, or a slang Leamington squire, are looking on those very same landscapes too, and what do they profit? You theorise about the influence which the climate and appearance of Attica must have had in ennobling those who were born there: yonder dirty, swindling, ragged blackguards, lolling over ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... admit—in chemistry as in biology—but they seem to me to be different in very essence from the 'mysteries' of spiritualism and all allied 'psychic phenomena,' which appear to me essentially absurd, ignoble—'ratty,' to use a slang phrase—a faith founded upon things done in the ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... those about her, Kitty tried to enact the fashionable young lady, and, like most novices, she overdid the part. Quite forgetting her cousin, she tossed her head, twirled her fan, gave affected little shrieks at college jokes, and talked college slang in a way that convulsed Fletcher, who enjoyed the ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... all the ex-pugs become statesmen and all the ex-cons become literateurs; California, the home of the movie, the Spanish mission, the golden poppy, the militant labor leader, the turkey-trot, the grizzly-bear, the bunny-hug, progressive politics and most American slang; California, which can at a moment's notice produce an earthquake, a volcano, a geyser; California, where the spring comes in the fall and the fall comes in the summer and the summer comes in the winter and the winter never comes at ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... he desired of all things to "strangle a parrokeet." This was some absurd slang for saying he ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Algebra, &c.), with three or four others, and in the latter half by a man to whom Saunderson had some resemblance in spring and elasticity of understanding, viz. by Edmund Burke. Since his day I know of no writers who have avoided the slang and unmeaning use of the word, excepting Messrs. Coleridge and Wordsworth; both of whom (but especially the last) have been remarkably attentive to the scholar-like [1] use of words, and to the history of their ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... before and behind the foot-lights, artists and their models, literary men of Bohemian tendencies, these are the people whom Billy Burgundy has selected for characterization. True, they speak their lines in slang, but it is the slang of the educated, and is ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... of it yourselves," said Allie doubtfully. "I don't half like it; and if Howard won't help meet him, he ought to keep clear out of the way. But there's one thing about it, boys, you must, you really must, stop talking so much slang. It's bad enough with us girls, and I'm getting to use it as much as you do; but you'll scare Charlie to pieces if you talk so ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... door, and held out his hand with a dramatically significant gesture when the little Scotchman entered. "Put her there!" he exclaimed heartily, with an exuberant reversion to the slang of remote transatlantic bonhomie. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... prose used for serious writing. But the conversation of many of the characters is in the plebeius sermo, the actual speech of the lower orders, of which so little survives in literature. It is full of solecisms and popular slang; and where the scene lies, as it mostly does in the extant fragments, in the semi-Greek seaports of Southern Italy, it passes into what was almost a dialect of its own, the lingua franca of the Mediterranean under the Empire, a dialect of mixed Latin and Greek. The longest ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... Agnes," she declared, though without entire sincerity; "I can't quite keep up with your thieves' argot—your slang, you know. Just what did this brother of ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... have got on a swagger dress this time!' cried Mr. Tom, who, though he had never been to Oxford, was a genuine free-trader in slang, and was ready to import it ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... being ruined by his vanity is very good: but I wish you would not let him plunge into a "vortex of dissipation." I do not object to the thing, but I cannot bear the expression: it is such thorough novel slang; and so old that I dare say Adam met with it in the ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... carping critic will find little to cavil at in her productions. If fault should be found with any of them it would probably be with such a narrative as "Wolverine." It "bites," like all her Indian pieces, and conveys a definite meaning. But, written in the conventional slang of the frontier, it jars with her other work, and seems out of form, if ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... things. Mrs. Fisher paused in her thoughts, arrested by the strange expression. Where had it come from? How was it possible for it to come at all? It might have been one of Mrs. Wilkins's, in its levity, its almost slang. Perhaps it was one of hers, and she had heard her say it and unconsciously caught ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... general style of the paper is fluent and pleasing, we believe that "Bruno" might gain much force of expression through the exercise of a little more care and dignity in his prose. For instance, many colloquial contractions like "don't", "won't", or "can't" might be eliminated, while such slang phrases as "neck of the woods", "make good", "somewhat off", or "bunch ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... "Endymion" for fourpence a copy! The first edition of "Endymion" is now rare and valued. In trying to mend the binding of an old "Odyssey" lately, I extracted from the vellum covers parts of two copies of a very scarce and curious French dictionary of slang, "Le Jargon, ou Langage de l'Argot Reforme." This treatise may have been valueless, almost, when it appeared, but now it is serviceable to the philologist, and to all who care to try to interpret the slang ballades of the ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... error, too, is held to be inexcusable, and Punch is pointed at with scorn for a misquotation from Horace; or an incorrect rendering in one of his drawings of an antiquarian inscription; or a slip in a Shakespearean line; or an inaccuracy in slang or dialect. Scottish, Irish, Suffolk, or Yorkshire must all be perfectly rendered, or the natives will know the reason why. In August, 1894, Mr. Hodgson sent from the Yorkshire moors a story of a keeper who, dissatisfied ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... "No slang, please," mocked Dave. "How can a fellow who's going to work hard beat his way, I'd like ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... stagnant, the greater the immorality. It is the one blot upon the character of the agricultural poor. They are not thieves, they are not drunkards; if they do drink they are harmless, and it evaporates in shouting and slang. They are not riotous; but the immorality cannot be gainsaid. No specific cure for this state of things can be devised: it must slowly work itself out under the gradual pressure of an advancing social state. It will be slow; for, up to the present, ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... from his forehead, and his new cutaway on, and his wrists covered up with clean cuffs, blessed if he didn't look distinguished—at least, that's the only word I can think of that fills the bill. And he talked beautiful language, not like the slang he hove at Brown and ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... a good deal about our slang. They used to be fond of quoting in superior derision in their papers our, to them, utterly unintelligible baseball news. Mr. Crosland, to drag him in again, to illustrate our abuse of "the language," quotes from some tenth-rate American ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... prefatory remarks of "conviction," &c. Mr. Bowles proceeds to Mr. Gilchrist; whom he charges with "slang" and "slander," besides a small subsidiary indictment of "abuse, ignorance, malice," and so forth. Mr. Gilchrist has, indeed, shown some anger; but it is an honest indignation, which rises up in defence of the illustrious dead. It is a generous rage which interposes between ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Crug ... piggins. Crug is still current slang. In the school museum one of these ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... familiar conversation, French artists, playwrights, and novelists invariably call their productions by the slang ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... advise you to avoid slang, my dear cousin,—professional slang especially; and to remember that in London there are no professions after ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... competent judges; but, quite the contrary—a sensible, well-informed, gentlemanly personage. But, then, he had no great friends, no patrician weaknesses; he knew nothing about racing, or betting, or opera-dancers, or slang in general. In short, he seemed flat and insipid to Bab, who had been compared to the beautiful Lady Mary Manvers by the soft and persuasive tongue of Lady Mary Manvers's dear friend. Yet, in her secret heart of hearts, Bab drew comparisons by no means disadvantageous ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... used to wonder, sometimes, why Eleanor was so "up stage"? (that was her latest slang); but it did not trouble her much, for she was too generous to put two and two together. "Eleanor has nervous prostration," she used to tell herself, with good-natured excuse for some especial coldness; and she even tried, ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... There is a slang expression current among the irreverent youth of the present day, when referring to a man wise in his own conceit, to the effect that "what that fellow does not know is torn out." So I, quoting my juniors, begin my talk with the sentence—for the raciness of which ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... synonym. As we went, she danced and sang, and laughed out joyously at everything and at nothing, and talked the most fascinating nonsense—all in the role of "Cousin Burwell." She could imitate him to perfection; her strut and swagger and slang threw me into paroxysms of delight. We picked huckleberries, and dived into the woods to feast upon wild plums that had ten drops of syrupy juice between tough skins and flinty stones encased in the pulp of bitterness, and gathered handfuls of wild flowers because their ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... most widely read of the author's works. Many of the readers of Don Juan have, it must be confessed, been found among those least likely to admire in it what is most admirable—who have been attracted by the very excesses of buffoonery, violations of good taste, and occasionally almost vulgar slang, which disfigure its pages. Their patronage is, at the best, of no more value than that of a mob gathered by a showy Shakespearian revival, and it has laid the volume open to the charge of being adapted "laudari ab illaudatis." But the welcome ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... and a clever workman, you will meet next Sunday in the Louvre discoursing energetically on the comparative merits of the French and Italian schools of painting; yet this same Theophile shall be the Titi of the gallery of the Porte St. Martin in the evening, who yells slang at his friend on the opposite side; and the Pierrot or Debardeur of the next ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... Martyrdom of King Charles I on the Poor Man's Contentment on the Wretched Condition of Ireland on Sleeping in Church Servants, Irish, fraud of Service, mutual Sharp, Dr. John, Archbishop of York Shaster, the Sheridan, Dr. T. Shrewsbury, Duke of Sin, original, doctrine of Slang Sleep, often a poor man's privilege Sleeping in church, sermon on Smallridge, Dr. Smoking, habit bad among the youth Society for propagating Free-thinking Socinus, Leelius his teachings on worship the greatest of the heathen philosophers Diogenes' opinion of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... West End, and rapidly dying out there, and the "dishonourable" trade of the show-shops and slop-shops—the plate-glass palaces, where gents—and, alas! those who would be indignant at that name—buy their cheap-and-nasty clothes. The two names are the tailors' own slang; slang is true and expressive enough, though, now and then. The honourable shops in the West End number only sixty; the dishonourable, four hundred and more; while at the East End the dishonourable trade has it all its own ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... was for decades notoriously feebleminded, and was yet permitted to continue in his responsible office. A trait, after the manner of the find in the Lido, forces itself upon me here. It was to this man that some youthful colleagues in the hospital adapted the then popular slang of that day: "No Goethe has written that," "No ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... cried Robert, aping, as was his fancy, the Norse rovers' slang. "Will you come with me ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... in about equal parts, of classical allusion, quotation from the stable, simper from the scullery, cant from the clubs, and the technical slang of heraldry. We boasted much of ancestry, and admired the whiteness of our hands whenever the skin was visible through a fault in the grease and tar. Next to love, the vegetable kingdom, murder, arson, adultery and ritual, we talked most of art. The wooden figure-head of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... birth," jantu, "child, being, stock," jata, "son." Kind, therefore, while not the same word as our child, has the same primitive meaning, "the produced one," and finds further cognates in kid and colt, names applied to the young of certain animals, and the first of which, in the slang of to-day, is applied to children also. In some parts of Germany and Switzerland Kind has the sense of boy; in Thuringia, for example, people speak of zwei Kinder und ein Madchen, "two boys and a girl." From the ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... hurt them to lie out in the open air," responded the Colonel; "that was proved in the South African War. The wounds often heal if you leave them alone in the open air. But you people come along and stir up and joggle them. In army slang, we call you the ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... whole winged flock of ballades of amazing dexterity. This unknown balladist was Mr. Henley; perhaps he was the first Englishman who ever burst into a double ballade, and his translations of two of Villon's ballades into modern thieves' slang were marvels of dexterity. Mr. Swinburne wrote a serious ballade, but the form, I venture to think, is not 'wholly serious,' of its nature, in modern days; and he did not persevere. Nor did the taste for these trifles long endure. A good ballade is almost as rare as a good sonnet, but a middling ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... talon or fang this imp of the alleys is worse: His speech is a poisonous slang—his phrases ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... I reminded him that he had just joined the church. "Yes, Linda," said he. "It was proper for me to do so. I am getting in years, and my position in society requires it, and it puts an end to all the damned slang. You would do well to join the church, ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... water, with fruit either fresh or stewed; for dinner, soup with the soup-meat, a side-dish and dessert; for supper, a joint with salad or dessert. With the last two was served a mild mixture of wine and water, known in school slang as "abundance." The outfit of clothing comprised underwear for two changes a week, a uniform consisting of a blue cloth coat, faced and trimmed with red, a waistcoat of the same with white revers, and serge breeches either blue or black. The overcoat was of the same material as the uniform, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... always loved her quaint terms of endearment, slang, and epithets, but as she grew into a beautiful and refined and dignified girl, it was still more piquant to be addressed in the highly unladylike (or un-Smelliean) terms that ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... surprised at his moderation. The conviction that the duke's government would only cease with the termination of his public career was so general, that the moment he was installed in office, the whigs smiled on him; political conciliation became the slang of the day, and the fusion of parties the babble of clubs and the tattle ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... the faults of his kind, not inveterately, for he spoke good English to women; but as he indulged in his dear island slang to men, he felt bound to use it to himself. "This poor little woman is thorough game," he said to himself. "I can see that she is as tender as a little bird, yet she has shown as much pluck as a ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... a good hand at whist. While he lived, though it was a mystery how he lived, he kept Mrs. Ryfe "very comfortable," to use Bargrave's expression. When he died he left her nothing but the boy Tom, a precocious urchin, inheriting some of his father's sporting propensities, with a certain slang smartness of tone and manner, acquired in those circles where horseflesh is affected as an ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... double-quick, with occasional rests. The road lay along Deer Creek, passing several plantations; and occasionally, at the bends, it crossed the swamp, where the water came above my hips. The smaller drummer-boys had to carry their drums on their heads, and most of the men slang their cartridge-boxes around their necks. The soldiers generally were glad to have their general and field officers afoot, but we gave them a fair specimen of marching, accomplishing about twenty-one miles by noon. Of course, our speed was accelerated by ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... magnificent physique, carries round with him something that says to David, "Don't trust him!" What makes personality? I declare I cannot put my finger on the thing that makes me sure that Randall is yellow; but David has seen it, and has drawn back from it. Ninety-nine Yale men may slang Harvard, and the Harvard man will take it in good part—and vice-versa; but Randall is the hundredth, and he said a few things that made David tremble, not with anger but with disgust. "Have a cigarette?" asked Randall at the end. "No, thanks," answered ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... several steps on the staircase, Fougeres rubbed up his hair, buttoned his jacket of bottle-green velveteen, and was not a little amazed to see, entering his doorway, a simpleton face vulgarly called in studio slang a "melon." This fruit surmounted a pumpkin, clothed in blue cloth adorned with a bunch of tintinnabulating baubles. The melon puffed like a walrus; the pumpkin advanced on turnips, improperly called legs. A true painter would have turned the little bottle-vendor off at once, assuring him that ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... slice of that bacon and then run, for we shall have to get off this boat in double quick time if we expect to save our bacon," said Billy, thinking the slang ...
— Billy Whiskers' Adventures • Frances Trego Montgomery
... chaste herself, and yet cause a great deal of unchasteness in other people. Here is this Mrs. Harrison, smoking cigarettes—and cigars, too, sometimes, in the open air; drinking grog at night, and sometimes in the morning; letting Tom Edwards and the foolish boys who imitate him talk slang to her without putting them down; always ready for a walk or drive with the last handsome young man who has arrived; and utterly ignoring her husband, except when she makes some slighting mention of him for not sending her money enough: what is the effect of all this ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... besides, of the thousand and one Hechts visible in the sketches, there were several that appear rarely, if at all, in his novels: The whimsical Hecht, sailing jocosely on the surface of life; the witty Hecht, flinging out novel word-combinations, slang and snappy endings; Hecht the child-lover and animal-lover, with a special tenderness for dogs; Hecht the sympathetic, betraying his pity for the aged, the forgotten, the forlorn. In the novels he is one of his selves, in the ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... who have spoken on this subject—the Rev. Mr. Collyer, a gentleman standing as high as anybody, and I have nothing to say against him—because I denounced God who upheld murder, and slavery and polygamy, he said that what I said was slang. I would like to have it compared with any sermon that ever issued from the lips of that gentleman. And before he gets through he admits that the Old Testament is a rotten tree that will soon fall into the earth and act as ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... I whispered, "this is just what I do want to hear. These slang types are among your city's most distinguishing features. Is this the Bowery variety? I really ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... stammered poor Cissy rather abashed, blushing furiously, while Conny took advantage of the opportunity to point out to her the evil effects of using slang words; but the little lecture of the elder sister was soon joked away by the doctor, and they arrived at the station ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... with an air which would have befitted a grand duchess, leaving her astonished auditors to look at each other a moment in silence, and then to express themselves fully and freely and unreservedly with regard to American effrontery, American manners, and American slang, ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... type of the travelling canvasser for a manufacturing house—a class which at that time was first being dubbed by the slang of the day "drummers." He came within the meaning of a still newer term, which had sprung into general use among Americans in 1880, and which concisely expressed the thought of one whose dress or manners are calculated to elicit the admiration ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... apparently in the same attitude, and with the same grave, sleepless expression on his cast-iron features. The boy, Robin Tips, was at the helm, looking very sleepy. He was an English boy, smart, active, and wide-awake—in the slang sense—in which sense also we may add ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... "mother" is the name given to the twelve-inch howitzer. The trench language is changing so quickly that I think the staff in the rear are unable to keep up to date, because they have recently issued an order to the effect that slang must not be used in official correspondence. Now instead of reporting that a "dud Minnie" arrived over back of "mud lane," it is necessary to put, "I have the honor to report that a projectile from a German Minnenwerfer ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... made himself agreeable at dinner, appreciated his host's wine, and told good stories that pleased the business man as showing that he knew "what was what." He accorded him his more particular approval, speaking to his wife, on the ground that he was a man of the world, with none of the army slang about him. Mr. Dempster was not aware that he had himself more business peculiarities than any officer in her majesty's service had ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... aw can't tell, It's plain to understand; An sure aw am it saands as weel, Tho' happen net soa grand. Tell fowk they're courtin, they're enraged, They call that vulgar slang; But if aw tell 'em they're engaged, That's net ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... far from discouraged, showed her something else—many somethings. Concerning each he was enthusiastic, slangy, and familiar. Mary-'Gusta paid little attention to slang or enthusiasm; the familiarity she ignored utterly. She selected several of the novelties, a rather extensive line of Christmas cards, and in the matters of price and cash discounts was keen and businesslike. ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple blossoms: 'Flowers and fruits, and other winged things.' These fairies try to be funny, and fail; or they try to preach, and succeed. Real fairies never preach or talk slang. At the end, the little boy or girl wakes up and finds ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... Rome, such as slaves talked so long, that their masters ultimately adopted it—a language of which Plautus gives us glimpses and which the graffiti may perhaps help to restore. When Varius was emperor, this phrase of the kitchen was as rife as when Plautus wrote—a proof that occasionally slang has ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... day, named it "Welsh Rabbit," and thought it one of the best things to eat. In fact, there are many people, who do not easily see a joke, who misunderstand the fun, or who suppose the name to be either slang, or vulgar, or a mistake, and who call it "rarebit." It is like "Cape Cod turkey" (codfish), or "Bombay ducks" (dried fish), or "Irish plums" (potatoes) and such funny cookery ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... know, is styled 'plew' on board, in the slang of the training-ship; possibly, through some association with the 'sky blue' known in the boarding-schools of ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... consideration. Suffice it to say, that for my own part, diligence hath not been wanting in the research. Johnson's Dictionary and old Bailey, have been ransacked; but neither the learned Johnson, nor the recondite Bailey, throw much light upon this matter. The Slang Dictionary, to which I should in the first place have directed my attention, was unfortunately not within my reach. The result of all my inquiries amounts to this—that bore, boor, and boar, are all three spelt indifferently, and consequently are derived from ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... their affair turned out. She had put him in the way of something absolutely special—an old house untouched, untouchable, indescribable, an old corner such as one didn't believe existed, and the holy calm of which made the chatter of studios, the smell of paint, the slang of critics, the whole sense and sound of Paris, come back as so many signs of a huge monkey-cage. He moved about, restless, while he wrote; he lighted cigarettes and, nervous and suddenly scrupulous, put them out again; the ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... the European girl wants to know. The American girl! She comes over here, and, as a British matron, reduced to slang by force of indignation, once exclaimed to me: "You'd think the whole blessed show belonged to her." The European girl is hampered by her relatives. She has to account for her father: to explain away, if possible, her grandfather. The American ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... she is going to land her fish, if you will pardon the slang phrase," said the young man, confidently. "My father has successfully resisted the allurements of the gentler sex for too many years to succumb at this late day; so you and I need give ourselves no uneasiness upon that score. Does he know ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... obtaining a tomb in Westminster Abbey. From the captain, after a time, the term descended to all the little gallant band. In no part of our community will you find such {527} meaning expressions (often very slang ones) used as in the army. A lady, without hearing anything to shock "ears polite," might listen to the talk of a mess table, and be unable to understand clearly in what the conversation consisted. "He is gone to the bad"—meaning, he is ruined. "A wigging from ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 213, November 26, 1853 • Various
... her arm, and her sunbonnet hanging down her back, after the fashion in which I usually wore mine. In reply to my look of inquiry she said her father had concluded to let her go to the district school, though he didn't expect her to learn anything but "slang terms ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... the "sparring" of the cabman who wanted to fight Mr. Pickwick. "Friend in the green jemmy" refers to Mr. Winkle, who, we are told in Chapter I., "wore a new green shooting-coat," &c. "Pig's whisper" is slang for a very brief space of time. Bartlett says the Americans have "pig's whistle" ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... of the chief, and under it they had sprinkled swan's-down, and they all were dressed up to their limit. And though they could have been killed any minute, these two white men had that lot of Indians feeding from the hand, as the slang goes, Uncle Dick!" ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... performed, and, indeed, little understood. Not many of those who think at all think beyond the line of established custom and routine. They may take pains in their letters to obey the ordinary rules of grammar, to avoid the use of slang phrases and vulgar expressions, to write a clear sentence; but how few seek for the not less imperative rules which are prescribed by politeness and good sense! Of those who should know them, no small proportion habitually, from thoughtlessness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... fit your word to your thought, and your thought to the fact. Being accurate does not mean being dull. Effective speech has much need for imagination, but very little for common slang. You understand ...
— Manners And Conduct In School And Out • Anonymous
... returns and messages from the other world. Geographically the most favoured stations for wireless heavenly connections seem to be Brooklyn, New York, and Los Angeles, California. The adherents of this underworld philosophy have a slang of their own, and the result is that their letters, while they spring from the deepest emotions, sound as if they were copied from the same sample book. The better style begins about like this: "Knowing that you are intensely interested ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... other terms in common use too plain to need explanation, and there are a good many slang phrases to be found in newspaper descriptions of runs, which are both vulgar and unnecessary. One of the finest descriptions of a fox-hunt ever written is to be found in the account of Jorrocks' day with the "Old Customer," disfigured, unfortunately, by ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... ridicule for the diversion of himself and of chance comers-in. "The Elf—da," says he, "was too exquisitely pretty; I could make no fun out of that."' Piozzi's Anec. p. 37. I doubt whether Johnson used the word fun, which he describes in his Dictionary as 'a low cant [slang] word.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... course, he swung in along-side the dark- eyed one and walked with her. There was no awkwardness on his part, no numb tongue. He was at home here, and he held his own royally in the badinage, bristling with slang and sharpness, that was always the preliminary to getting acquainted in these swift-moving affairs. At the corner where the main stream of people flowed onward, he started to edge out into the cross street. But the girl with the ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... you at your Berlin wools. Pardon me - but whenever I see a lady busy with her needle and a bit of canvass, I always think she is hard up for something to think of. Pardon again, Daisy. I know you have no mercy upon slang." ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... one of these houses, not far from Drury Lane, he found some strapping fellows engaged in conversation, interlarded with much flash and low slang; but decently dressed, he mingled in a sort of general dialogue with them on the state of the weather, politics, &c. After sitting some time in their company, and particularly noticing their ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... words were uttered was so venomous, that Bob realized the speaker meant mischief, though he was ignorant of the fact that in the slang of tramps who beat their way on railroads, "con" betokened conductor, and "blind baggage" the platform of the coach in a passenger train nearest ...
— Bob Chester's Grit - From Ranch to Riches • Frank V. Webster
... Lillian, graceful, sceptical, and shallow, to the young girl beside him, so frankly modern in her appreciation of life. This, then, was love as seen by the eyes of the world—the world that accepts, judges, and condemns in a slang phrase or two! Very slowly the ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... not a particularly evil rascal, and women found him charming. Possessed of a merry face, a horsey manner and a vocabulary which would have delighted a maker of slang dictionaries, he pushed his my everywhere, not hoping for something to turn up, but determined that his own cleverness should contrive that desirable arrival. When he met Anna Gessner at Ascot a year ago, the propitious moment ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... quite a love affair - for me; and Mr. Wiltshire (the narrator) is a huge lark, though I say it. But there is always the exotic question, and everything, the life, the place, the dialects - trader's talk, which is a strange conglomerate of literary expressions and English and American slang, and Beach de Mar, or native English, - the very trades and hopes and fears of the characters, are all novel, and may be found unwelcome to that great, hulking, ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "odds" is not an English word; he classifies it as belonging to a language known by the term "slang," of which he declares his utter disuse. And he thinks that when used at all, the word is but an ellipsis for "odd chances." This was not the opinion of the great English lexicographer, who ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 39. Saturday, July 27, 1850 • Various
... ragged serfs, from whom, poverty stricken as they are, he contrives to wring a splendid privy purse, throw back with contumely, the "tribute" of his own countrymen from this land of "miscreants." These people may exhaust their slang, and make blackguards of themselves, but they cannot defile us. And as for the suggestion to exclude slaveholders from your London clubs, we scout it. Many of us, indeed, do go to London, and we have seen your breed of gawky lords, both there and here, but it never entered ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... take up his wanderings and his discoveries. Some day, I will tell you how he broke his promise to help a friend. That was long since, and he has, by this time, been nearly spoilt for what he would call shikar. He is forgetting the slang, and the beggar's cant, and the marks, and the signs, and the drift of the undercurrents, which, if a man would master, he must always continue ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... sudden words in spite of usage and fashionable taste; and that, therefore, when he can get a brighter tint, a more expressive form, by means of some strange—we must call it—Carlylism; English, Scotch, German, Greek, Latin, French, Technical, Slang, American, or Lunar, or altogether superlunar, transcendental, and drawn from the eternal nowhere—he uses it with a courage which might blast an academy of lexicographers into a Hades, void ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... and told the facts to Uncle John; and then he turned to the chauffeur, who was fumbling with the tyre—it was something complicated, not only just the bursting—and in a minute or two he was down in the mud giving such practical advice. And you never heard such slang! But I believe men like that sort of thing, as the chauffeur was not a bit ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... men. Frequenters of the now fashionable prize-ring—thanks to two brutes who have brought that degraded pastime into prominent notice—will hear a great deal about a man 'fancying himself.' It is common slang and heeds little explanation. Hook 'fancied himself' from an early period, and continued to 'fancy himself,' in spite of repeated disgraces, till a very mature age. At Harrow, he was the contemporary, but scarcely the friend, of Lord Byron. No two characters could have ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... "Slang!" said Massachusetts, looking up again. "One cent for the missionary fund. You will clothe the heathen at this rate, Maine. That is ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... was done with a view to sending up the shares two hundred francs during the first six months by the payment of a sham dividend. Twenty per cent, on ten millions! Du Tillet's interest in the concern amounted to five hundred thousand francs. In the stock-exchange slang of the day, this share of the spoils was a 'sop in the pan.' Nucingen, with his millions made by the aid of a lithographer's stone and a handful of pink paper, proposed to himself to operate certain nice little shares carefully hoarded in his private office till the time came for putting ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... piled up anguish and apprehension, the peon cries exultantly 'Wah wah! khodawund, lug, gea,' that bullet has told; oh your highness! and while the boat rocks violently to and fro, I abuse the boatmen, slang the syce, and rush to grasp a pole, while the peon seizes another; for we are drifting rapidly down stream, and may at any moment strike on a bank and topple over. We can hear by the growling and commotion on the bank, that my ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... union. It is a thing that must be. But it is remarkable that while the French mind is agog to apprehend every fact and detail it can about the British, to make the wisest and fullest use of our binding necessities, that strange English "incuria"—to use the new slang—attains to its most monumental in ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... chiffon that swept about her neck and heaving shoulders fluttered against his face. Her high-heeled boots trod on his. He seemed one with her. Then she had vanished, and instantly he was in the arms of a huge racing-man, who wore gigantic pink pearls in his shirt front, and bellowed the latest slang to a thin and dissipated companion. It seemed to Julian that he was kicked like a football from one life to another, and that from each life he drew away something as he bounded from it, the fragment of a thought, ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... fewer physical signs of excessive debauchery. Here, the number of broken-down young men, and blear-eyed, hoary sinners, is astonishing. I have never been in any place where licentiousness was so open and avowed—and yet, where the slang of a sham morality was so prevalent. There are no houses of prostitution in Stockholm, and the city would be scandalised at the idea of allowing such a thing. A few years ago two were established and the fact was no sooner known than a virtuous ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... you tell Aunt Ann. And now," said Portia, "the first time he does a real nice jolly piece of mischief you come down on him like—like a thousand of bricks." Her slang was reserved for the Squire, as ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... are drawn alike from Paris and Westminster; and the public vehicles partake of the fashions of Lisbon and Long Acre. You hear "Place aux dames" on one side of the street, and "g'lang" on the other; and the United States have contributed their hotel system and their slang. ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... young gentleman from Chicago in surprise, and then in pity. He could not understand how any one, and more especially a boy, could be so ignorant of the meaning of one of the most common words of slang. At first he looked as if he was about to reprove such ignorance; but he evidently thought better of it, for ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... months he was thumbing page ten of the grammar, but he had seized upon a good many slang phrases, supercharged ejaculations. Though the undercurrent of his discouragement about his progress was considerable, it interfered little with his acquainting him proficiently with the restaurant world of Dresden. He saw and heard what ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... can; and when it comes to painting them, aerial perspective and anatomical detail must come right. This is the first and the great endowment. And the second is like unto it in—Shall I use the fashionable artistic slang and say preciousness? It is the gift of a dexterous hand, winged with lightness and steady as steel, sensitive as a blind man's finger-tips, yet unerring in its stroke as the piston of a steamship. This is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... cradle since I left you! 'That is no fellow tramp of mine,' you will say, 'That woman being victimized by children in knee-high dresses! Theodosia Baxter nothing!'"—for Cornelia Dunlap in moments of surprise resorted sometimes to slang, which she claimed was a sturdy vehicle of speech. "You will set down your teacup hard," wrote on Miss Theodosia,—"I know you are drinking tea!—when I tell you the little story of the Whitewashing of Theodosia Baxter. But shall I ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... himself, from the day that I was seized with dread of being seen during sleep by any other eyes than those of Providence. In the same way, too, from the day I heard my old nurse snorting in her sleep "like a whale," to use a slang expression, I have added a petition to the special litany which I address to Saint-Honore, my patron saint, to the effect that he would save me from indulging in ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... we must drop the old slang since we've given up the old business. These good folks are making a gentleman of you, and I wont be the one to spoil their work. Hold on, my dears, and I'll show you how they say good-morning in California," he added, beckoning ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various
... her mother was going to be what in the family slang was called "grand." The grandeur consisted in a polite inattention; it went with a soft voice and immobile expression. In this mood Adelaide answered you about three seconds later than you expected, and though she answered you accurately, it was as if she had ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... a confession of jealous fear that I had been, in slang phrasing, "put wise." And sooth to say, I saw ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... into tears. "You've recently," she observed, "got into a new way. Whatever slang you happen to hear outside you come and tell me. And whenever you read any improper book, you poke your fun at me. What! have I ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... unfavorable winds having risen, blowing off at a sad rate the smoke of that abstruse Institution.—"JARNI-BLEU!" snuffles the Feldzeugmeister to himself. But "SI DEUS EST NOBISCUM," as Grumkow exclaims once to his beautiful Reichenbach, or NOSTI as he calls him in their slang or cipher language, "If God is with us, who can prevail against us?" For the Grumkow can quote Scripture; nay solaces himself with it, which is a feat beyond what the Devil ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... man should say in their company, that Chaucer was a great poet, one will immediately enquire, "how much?" while another wishes to know if Chaucer is entered for the "Derby?" "How much?" is the invariable slang, whenever a man gets the bit out of his mouth, or, in other words, talks of any ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... personages in Jonson's comedy is Captain Tucca. "His peculiarity" has been well described by Ward as "a buoyant blackguardism which recovers itself instantaneously from the most complete exposure, and a picturesqueness of speech like that of a walking dictionary of slang." ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... see Rebecca Mary. I'm going to say it over again. Tomorrow morning, to see Rebecca Mary!" setting apart the syllables with the pointing finger. "You can play in my back yard," said Aunt Olivia, sublimely unconscious of slang. ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... stereotyped in modern slang, and yet the idea could not but have existed under other words in the days of those flush individuals, Midas and Croesus. The first of these moneyed gentlemen found gold too plenty for comfort, while the latter, by his unfortunate ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... no means a purist; his pages bristle with neologisms and foreign—or, rather, outlandish—words; nor has he any hesitancy in adapting and Russianizing such words. He coins words; he is, at times, actually Borrowesque, and not only does he resort to colloquialisms and slang, but to dialect, cant, and even actual argot. Therein is his glory—and, perhaps, his weakness. Therefore, an attempt has been made, wherever corruptions, slang, and so forth, appear in the original, to render them through the nearest English equivalents. While ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... time. There is almost a mania for frivolity and excitement, which exhibits itself in many forms in our popular literature. To meet the public taste, our books and periodicals must now be highly spiced, amusing, and comic, not disdaining slang, and illustrative of breaches of all laws, human and divine. Douglas Jerrold once observed of this tendency, "I am convinced the world will get tired (at least I hope so) of this eternal guffaw about all things. ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... more reason to fear Aristophanes than any fool living. Oh, that he could but hear you trying to imitate the slang of Straton (See Aristophanes; Equites, 1375.) and the lisp of Alcibiades! (See Aristophanes; Vespae, 44.) You would be an inexhaustible subject. You would console him ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of thing you need not squander fifteen cents on your favorite magazine. The modest sum of one cent will make you the possessor of a Pink 'Un. There you will find the season's games handled in masterly fashion by a six-best-seller artist, an expert mathematician, and an original-slang humorist. No mere short story dub may hope ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... is just what I do want to hear. These slang types are among your city's most distinguishing features. Is this the Bowery variety? I really ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... of milk teeth, like white shells. The blue eyes and the baby smile went up, confidingly, to the young ragamuffin's face. There had been kindness here. The boy had taken to Jo, it seemed; and was benevolently evincing it, in the best way he could, by teaching her good-natured slang. ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... ball-room talk will not fail to notice what may be called the exclusive slang of society. He will find people "in society" habitually using a few pet words which they love, not because they are a bit better than the synonyms used by other people, but just because other people don't use them, whereby they serve as a sort of passwords or Masonic ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... know," answered Grace doubtfully. "She is an enigma. She speaks the most precise English, with absolutely no trace of slang. But she looks as though the whole world were her natural enemy. Elfreda named her the Anarchist. I am rather ashamed to say we call her that ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... with dogged indifference to what any one else was doing. Miss Rutherford sat in the stern of the Tortoise and shouted encouraging remarks from time to time. She had, apparently, boated on the Thames at some time in her life, for she was mistress of a good deal of rowing slang which she used with vigour and effect. It cheered Frank greatly to hear the more or less familiar words, for he realised almost at once that neither Priscilla nor Jimmy Kinsella understood them. He felt a warm affection for Miss Rutherford rise in his heart when she told Jimmy, ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... perfect sincerity. There are plenty of men, especially among those who desire the office of a pedagogue, whose field of vision is constricted to a slit. If they were painters their work would be in the slang of the day, "tight." One small group of facts they see hard and sharp, without atmosphere or value. Their own knowledge having no capacity for extension, no width or relationship to the world at large, they cannot imagine that breadth in itself may be a merit. Adepts in a petty erudition ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... them is sharply drawn. We all live in similar dug-outs, but we bring a new atmosphere into them. In one, full of the odour of Turkish cigarettes, the spoken English is above suspicion; in another, stinking of regimental shag, slang plays skittles with our language. Only in No. 3 is there two worlds blent in one; our platoon officer says that we are a most remarkable section, consisting of literary men ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... twice he actually asked me to dine with him at his club, and I actually did; and actually he with me, at mine! And we spoke French all through dinner, and I taught him a lot of French school-boy slang, with which he was delighted. Then he came to see me in Barge Yard, and I even introduced him to my mother and sister, who couldn't help being charmed with him. He was fond of the best music only (he had no ear whatever, and didn't know a note), and only cared for ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... "propaganda" paper. It had a manner all its own—it was full of ginger and spice, of Western slang and hustle: It collected news of the doings of the "plutes," and served it up for the benefit of the "American working-mule." It would have columns of the deadly parallel—the million dollars' worth of diamonds, or the fancy pet-poodle establishment of a society dame, beside the fate of Mrs. ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... cold, as of a charged force: it was like a real person standing motionless in the middle of a picture. (Mr. Parham-Carter did not, of course, use such beautiful similes as these; he employed the kind of language customary to men who have received a public school and university education, half slang and half childishness; but he waved his hands at me and distorted his features, and conveyed, on the whole, the kind of impression I have just ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... Warwickshire, and fancy that from merely being born and wandering in those sweet sunny plains and fresh woodlands Shakspeare must have drunk in a portion of that frank artless sense of beauty which lies about his works like a bloom or dew; but a Coventry ribbon-maker, or a slang Leamington squire, are looking on those very same landscapes too, and what do they profit? You theorise about the influence which the climate and appearance of Attica must have had in ennobling those who were born there: yonder dirty, ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a liberal man: liberal in the true classical sense, not in the slang sense of modern politicians and education-mongers. Being so, I am sure that you will sympathize with my case. I am an ill-used man, Dr. North—particularly ill used; and, with your permission, I will briefly explain how. ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... language, and when employed impart to it much dignity and beauty; but there is no standard of orthography, nor any grammar, and but few rules of universal application. Every Siamese writer spells to please himself, and the purism of one is the slang or ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... speech over the years, with some checking in the dictionaries. Not all of these are peculiar to Australian slang, but are important in Lawson's ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... parting the population into two camps more or less hostile may be drawn variously; for example, one may be run between the law-abiding and the criminal class. But the elements to which reference is here made are those immemorable and implacable foes which the slang of modern economics roughly and loosely distinguishes as "Capital" and "Labor." A more accurate classification—as accurate a one as it is possible to make—would designate them as those who do muscular labor and those who do ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... expressive slang, so fresh and in such variety. So different from your heavy British slang, in which everything approaching the superlative must be one of three things, 'ripping,' with very distinct articulation on the double p, or 'top hole,' or 'awfully jolly.' More recently, I ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... version "up to date" (as the slang goes) of Our Village, may interest the supporters of the Statesman Mr. ACLAND, without annoying the admirers of the poet ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... fossilized, was for decades notoriously feebleminded, and was yet permitted to continue in his responsible office. A trait, after the manner of the find in the Lido, forces itself upon me here. It was to this man that some youthful colleagues in the hospital adapted the then popular slang of that day: "No Goethe has written that," "No Schiller composed ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... twig"—— This was his sheet-anchor; and, as this also came home, of course the poor man was totally wrecked. It turned out that the dictionary he had used (Arnold's, we think,)—a work of a hundred years back, and, from mere ignorance, giving slang translations from Tom Brown, L'Estrange, and other jocular writers—had put down the verb sterben (to die) with the following worshipful series of equivalents—1. To kick the bucket; 2. To cut one's stick; 3. To go to kingdom come; 4. To ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... and the goose hangs high!" cried the Captain, who on grand occasions was not above a little slang. ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... had not been so good. The old Earl called me to him when he had finished, and talked so beautifully to me; he paid me some such grand old-fashioned compliments, and his voice sounds as if he had learnt elocution in his youth. There is not a word of slang or anything modern; one quite understands how he was able to wake up the House of Lords before his legs gave way. It seems sad that such a ninny as Charlie should succeed him. I feel proud of being related to him, ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... cosmopolitan in that ancient world which he so vividly portrays; he was a barbarian by birth, a Greek by education, and wrote his book in the Romans' language. In his use of luminous slang for literary purposes he was Rudyard ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... had ever met with the phrase—which is doubtful—had certainly never heard it addressed to himself; conceivably he might have once come across it in turning over the pages of a slang dictionary. A tragic expression traversed his bewildered features—and then he ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... on a swagger dress this time!' cried Mr. Tom, who, though he had never been to Oxford, was a genuine free-trader in slang, and was ready to import ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... BUCKETSHOP, a slang financial term for the office or business of an inferior class of stockbroker, who is not a member of an official exchange and conducts speculative operations for his clients, who deposit a margin or cover. The operations consist, as a rule, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Calhoun spoke frequently, and with greater effect. Wisely he never spoke. In his best efforts we see that something which we know not what to name, unless we call it Southernism. If it were allowable to use a slang expression, we should style the passages to which we refer effective bosh. The most telling passage in the most telling speech which he delivered at this session may serve to illustrate our meaning. Imagine these short, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... forget it with your melodious Klaxon working overtime?" queried Tom. "Great Fishes isn't slang, ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson
... His hearty, humorous greeting seemed to do the sick man good. Herman approached the bed. "Know where you are?" Wallace slowly put out a hand, and Herman took it. "You're coming on all right. Want some breakfast? Make it bucks?" he said, in Chicago restaurant slang. ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... to bring along. Of these, O. Henry was the most popular. The little shilling editions were read until they fell to pieces, and in this he held the same position as in the British army. I had been puzzled at this popularity among the English, for much of his slang must have been worse than Greek to them. I also had Charles O'Malley and Harry Lorrequer, Dumas' Dame de Monsereau and Monte Cristo, Flaubert's Education Sentimentale, Gibbon's Rise and Fall, and Borrow's Zincali. ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... smiled, and glanced at her husband's indorsement—"All right. Wade in." "It's nothing but Jim's slang," she said, with a laugh and a slightly heightened color. "He ought not to have sent you by that short cut; it's a bother, and even dangerous for a stranger. If you had come directly to US by the road, without making your first call at the mill," she added, with a touch of coquetry, ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... answer with delight at his sympathy in my narration of the sport. I liked very well the American slang that my father's friends were always glad to teach to me, and that gave to him both amusement and delight when I used ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... of the animal under consideration. Suffice it to say, that for my own part, diligence hath not been wanting in the research. Johnson's Dictionary and old Bailey, have been ransacked; but neither the learned Johnson, nor the recondite Bailey, throw much light upon this matter. The Slang Dictionary, to which I should in the first place have directed my attention, was unfortunately not within my reach. The result of all my inquiries amounts to this—that bore, boor, and boar, are all three spelt indifferently, and consequently are ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... meaning, in the slang of the day, "good-for-nothing." "You would take my house by storm! Do you think it is a Boche dugout you charge when ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... for the Sunday-school. I don't want any one to think I am laying claim to the record of having always been a good little boy; nor that everything I did was wise. No; I confess I did my share of deviltry, that some of my deeds were foolish, and (to use the slang of that time) I often got it in the neck. Once I bantered a big fat boy to a fight. He chased me and I ran and crawled into a place so narrow that I knew he couldn't follow me. I crawled under the floor of a shed that was only about six inches above the ground. Fatty was at least ten ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... inventing an arbitrary private vocabulary of words and phrases for the purpose of disguising references to functions and parts of the body regarded as immodest and indecent, first began to become common. Such private slang, growing up independently in families, and especially among women, as well as between lovers, is now almost universal. It is not confined to any European country, and has been studied in Italy by Niceforo (Il Gergo, 1897, cap. 1 and 2), who regards it as a weapon of social defence ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... I get you; but that's only slang. You have been here long enough, I should guess from your talk, to get on to our American guff. Well, we're glad to know ...
— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple
... rattled off slang as if thoroughly familiar with it. But this dampened Thornton's ardor for no ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... always so attractive. The cherubs' wings with which imagination has endowed them drop off, and they subside into cheeky, and sometimes scrubby, little boys, with a tendency towards peppermints, and a strong bias in favour of slang and tricks. The choir-boys of Chenecote, however, had been well-trained under Mr. Smith's ascetic eye; and though he had not drained the humanity entirely out of them, he had persuaded them to perfect cleanliness, if not to perfect godliness. They ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... is deservedly renowned for courage and for crime; his vessels were usually secreted in the land-locked bay of Barataria, to the westward of the mouth of the river. They were, however, soon extirpated by the American government. The language of the adjacent States is still adulterated with the slang of those scoundrels, proving how short a period it is since they disappeared, and how they must have mixed up with the reckless population, whose head-quarters were then at the mouth of ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... hour we took turns listening at the detectaphone. We gathered a choice collection of slang and epithets, but very little real news. However, it was evident that they had a wholesome respect for both the Chief and the Boss. It seemed that the real head of the gang, if it was a gang, had disappeared, as one of the men ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... Murray laughed. "I know that you wanted to use that particular expressive bit of our particularly expressive slang. What I mean is this: People study religion nowadays—that is, English-speaking people—with the Catholic Church left out. Yet she claims the allegiance of over three hundred million people. Without her, Christianity would be merely pitiful. She alone stands firm on her foundation. She alone has ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach
... for drawing a long bow. His yarns frequently stretched through a watch, and kept all hands awake. They were always amusing from their improbability, and, indeed, he never expected to be believed, but spun them merely for amusement; and as he had some humor and a good supply of man-of-war slang and sailor's salt phrases, he always made fun. Next to him in age and experience, and, of course, in standing in the watch, was an Englishman, named Harris, of whom I shall have more to say hereafter. Then, came two or three Americans, who had been the common run of European and South American ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... for the natural and semisynthetic narcotics. Poppy straw concentrate is the alkaloid derived from the mature, dried opium poppy. Qat (kat, khat) is a stimulant from the buds or leaves of Catha edulis that is chewed or drunk as tea. Quaaludes is the North American slang term for methaqualone, a pharmaceutical depressant. Stimulants are drugs that relieve mild depression, increase energy and activity, and include cocaine (coke, snow, crack), amphetamines (Desoxyn, ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... piano and is considered intellectual and artistic. She spent a year at the Conservatoire in Brussels, and often uses French words in conversation. Effie, the youngest, is an adept at games, and rather alarms her mother by her habit of using slang expressions and the ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... C. H. Herford in The Manchester Guardian.—'Bell's talk is full of salt and vivacity, a brilliant stream in which city slang reinforces rustic idiom, and both are re-manipulated by inexhaustible native wit. She is the most remarkable creation in a gallery where not a single figure is indistinct or conventional.... Mr. Gibson's essay—for there is confessedly ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... yourself, Scotch!" advised Jenks, dropping into the slang he had overheard some boy use. "This ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... absolutely special—an old house untouched, untouchable, indescribable, an old corner such as one didn't believe existed, and the holy calm of which made the chatter of studios, the smell of paint, the slang of critics, the whole sense and sound of Paris, come back as so many signs of a huge monkey-cage. He moved about, restless, while he wrote; he lighted cigarettes and, nervous and suddenly scrupulous, put them out again; the night was mild and one of the windows ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... innocence or when intended for uncontaminated ears attains a blank intensity of virtue that our own literature cannot hope to rival. The French "juvenile" still guards that beauteous ignorance of slang or of other small vice which the American schoolboy regards as poverty of resource or incapacity, and which he has put off with his frocks and his Parent's Assistant and his Sanford and Merton. But Marie Derville, when its accent of Berquin is allowed for, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... or Johnson. Language has undergone such changes, even within the last sixty or seventy years, that many words, at that time considered pure, are now obsolete; while others—of which the word "mob" is a specimen—formerly slang, are now used by our best writers, and received, like pardoned outlaws, into the body of respectable citizens.' The standard, accordingly, to which the author refers in the work before us, is the sense in which a word ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... having taken part in their expeditions. Perhaps he told the truth, but his antecedents were accepted in lieu of proof, and he was sent for three years to Poissy. There he made coarse playthings for children, was tattooed on the chest, learned thieves' slang and the penal-code. A new liberation, and a new plunge into the sink of Paris; but very short this time, for at the end of six months at the most he was again compromised in a night robbery, aggravated by climbing and breaking—a serious affair, in which he played ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... when they discovered that the "gentlewoman who had never appear'd on any stage before" could more than hold her own in repartee and give the fops of fashion as good as or better than they gave. How could they tell that the sprightly young budding actress had graduated in the wit and slang of the streets? ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... with them. Quite naturally, as a matter of course, he swung in along-side the dark- eyed one and walked with her. There was no awkwardness on his part, no numb tongue. He was at home here, and he held his own royally in the badinage, bristling with slang and sharpness, that was always the preliminary to getting acquainted in these swift-moving affairs. At the corner where the main stream of people flowed onward, he started to edge out into the cross street. But the girl with the black eyes caught his arm, following him and dragging ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... street slang during his visits to Cottonton, and considered its acquisition a benefit and its use ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... There was the lost and hardened female, uttering the wild screams of intoxication, or pouring forth from her dark, filthy place of confinement torrents of polluted mirth; the juvenile pickpocket, ripe in all the ribald wit and traditional slang of his profession; the ruffian burglar, with strong animal frame, dark eyebrows, low forehead, and face full of coarseness and brutality; the open robber, reckless and jocular, indifferent to consequences, and holding his life only in trust for the hangman, or ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... call it fair to persecute, in this way, at the instigation of a proud aristocrat (he had already learned this slang sophistry), a young man, who is ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... use it as if it were the poorest. We hoard up our infinite wealth of words between the boards of dictionaries and in speech dole out the worn bronze coinage of our vocabulary. We are the misers of philological history. And when we can save our pennies and pass the counterfeit coin of slang, we are as happy as if we heard a blind beggar thank us for putting a pewter ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... activity, rose high. Everywhere was violent advertisement, until his brain swam at the tumult of light and colour. And Babble Machines of a peculiarly rancid tone were abundant and filled the air with strenuous squealing and an idiotic slang. "Skin your eyes and slide," "Gewhoop, Bonanza," ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... ideas they express. Many words become so hackneyed as to be no longer impressive. As late as in 1820, Keats could say, in stanza 6 of his poem of Isabella, that "His heart beat awfully against his side"; but at the present day the word awfully is suggestive of schoolboys' slang. It is here that we may well have the benefit of the principle of "dialectic regeneration." We shall often do well to borrow from our dialects many terms that are still fresh and racy, and instinct with a full significance. ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... ruined by his vanity is very good: but I wish you would not let him plunge into a "vortex of dissipation." I do not object to the thing, but I cannot bear the expression: it is such thorough novel slang; and so old that I dare say Adam met with it in the ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple blossoms: 'Flowers and fruits, and other winged things.' These fairies try to be funny, and fail; or they try to preach, and succeed. Real fairies never preach or talk slang. At the end, the little boy or girl wakes up and finds ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... 22d of February, the President greatly damaged his cause by denouncing a Senator and a Representative, and using the slang of the stump against the Secretary of the Senate in the midst of an uproarious Washington mob. The people were mortified that the Executive of the nation should have committed ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... might have thought she was impertinent, for "garn" on cockney lips means "go on, now," in the slang of the United States, and "beller" is not elegant, but Anna knew that she did not intend ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... red, like a bashful woman's. He thought Blecker had divined his secret, would haul it out roughly in another moment. If this slang-talking Yankee should take little Lizzy's name into his mouth! But the Doctor was silent, even looked away until the heat on the poor old bachelor's face had died out. He knew McKinstry's thought of that little girl well enough, but he held the child-hearted man's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... persons of infinitely small merit, what was to be done when those of real superiority entered upon the scene? It was impossible to apply to them the forms of laudation adapted to their inferiors. Well, then, a species of slang was invented, by which it was thought practicable to make the genuine great men conceive they had passed into the condition of demigods. A language was devised that was to express the fervor of the adorers who were suddenly allowed to penetrate into Olympus, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... inane misunderstanding, and sprang from my unfamiliarity with the language. For although two nations use the same words and read the same books, intercourse is not conducted by the dictionary. The business of life is not carried on by words, but in set phrases, each with a special and almost a slang signification. Some international obscurity prevailed between me and the coloured gentleman at Council Bluffs; so that what I was asking, which seemed very natural to me, appeared to him a monstrous exigency. He refused, and that ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... accursed portrait began to intermit its visits under its influence. What of that? Was this singular apparition—as full of character as of terror—therefore the creature of my fancy, or the invention of my poor stomach? Was it, in short, subjective (to borrow the technical slang of the day) and not the palpable aggression and intrusion of an external agent? That, good friend, as we will both admit, by no means follows. The evil spirit, who enthralled my senses in the shape of ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... her? What kind of language do you call that, Margaret Pratt Stillman?" reproved Marjorie, with her best grandmother air. "If you are not careful, the habit of using slang will ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... The slang of art-talk has reached the 'young men' in the furniture warehouses. A friend of mine was recommended a sideboard the other day as not being a Chippendale, but as 'having a Chippendale feeling ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... Bailey. "And you'll come near beating, too. We shall have to work harder than ever, but I'll beat Jack Allingham—or bust! Excuse the slang, Gertie, but I've got to relieve ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... conversation. When an occasion arose which seemed to demand a special effort, the talk around the "chuck-wagon" was so riddled with slang from all corners of the earth, so full of startling imagery, that a stranger might stare, bewildered, unable to extract a particle of meaning. And through it blazed such a continual shower of oaths, that were themselves sparks of satanic poetry, that, in the phrase ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... Tom would, but that is a boy's word, and it is slang besides. Miss Pomeroy says a lady doesn't use slang. I will use 'great'. No, that isn't much better. ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... have the goodness to tell me why I was a jolly fool, and so green, as you call it. Pity people can't teach you foreigners something better than slang. Now then—answer." ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... Her eyes were sparkling, for Wallie's tone implied that the expression was slang ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... was nineteen when I went on the New England rural circuit—to give it a better name. Oh, I've been through all the steps! As soon as I felt a little secure about mother, I ventured to New York in answer to advertisements in The Reflector, and went out 'on the road' at 'fifteen per.'" These slang phrases seemed humorous as they came from her smiling lips, but Douglass knew some little part of the toil ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... now accompany the student through a day's history. Morning chapel begins at seven; and the gyp calls him at half-past six. In chapel, he commences picking up some knowledge of the powers that be, or the dons, as they are styled in the slang of the university. In general terms, they are the master ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... author, his most eminent acts are written in the pages of the universally read historian above quoted. But he was in reality more of a Tory than it suited Macaulay to represent him, though he gloried in the name of Trimmer, and certainly showed what is called in modern political slang a 'crossbench mind' not only during the madness of the Popish plot, during the greater madness of James's assaults on the Church, the Constitution, and private rights, but also (after the Revolution) towards William of Orange. Born about 1630 he died in April 1695, leaving the ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... fellow called John spoke up sharply and said, it was "rum" to hear me "pitchin' into fellers" for "goin' it in the slang line," when I used all the flash words myself ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... social regime which is every day more strongly asserting itself. All the gradations are fast disappearing; the palisades of good manners, dignity, and respect, are vanishing with the hedges; the country is positively inundated with slang and vulgarity—all from the ill-breeding, presumption, and ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... reading of Latin. When, for instance, the slave in a play of Plautus says: "Do you catch on" (tenes?), "I'll touch the old man for a loan" (tangam senem, etc.), or "I put it over him" (ei os sublevi) we recognize specimens of Latin slang, because all of the metaphors involved are in current use to-day. When one of the freedmen in Petronius remarks: "You ought not to do a good turn to nobody" (neminem nihil boni facere oportet) ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... many miles. The California mining system a gambling or lottery transaction. Miner who works his own claim the more successful. Dr. C. a loser in his mining ventures. Another sleep-killer. Bowling-alleys. Bizarre cant phrases and slang used by the miners. "Honest Indian?" "Talk enough when horses fight". "Talk enough between gentlemen". "I've got the dead-wood on him". "I'm going nary cent" (on person mistrusted). All carry the freshness of originality to the ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... literature as found its way into Briar Farm filled her with amazement, repulsion and disgust. There was nothing in any modern magazine that at all resembled the delicate, pointed and picturesque phraseology of the Sieur Amadis! Strange, coarse slang-words were used,—and the news of the day was slung together in loose ungrammatical sentences and chopped-up paragraphs of clumsy construction, lacking all pith and eloquence. So, repelled by the horror of twentieth-century "style," she had hidden her manuscripts deeper than ever in the old bureau, ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... time of its compilation, that our young men of fashion would at no very distant period be as distinguished for the vulgarity of their jargon as the inhabitants of Newgate; and he therefore conceived it superfluous to incorporate with his work the few examples of fashionable slang that ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... said Louise. She liked to use a bit of slang when it was perfectly safe—as in very good company, or among those she loved; at other ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... do not themselves use slang understand and even appreciate it. The American brand is generally pithy, compact, and expressive, and not always vulgar. Slang is at its worst in contemptuous epithets, and of those the one that is lowest and most offensive seems likely to become a permanent, recognized ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... the guests at the dinner said that the Americans by the introduction of slang were ruining the English language. Mr. James Russell Lowell had come evidently prepared for this controversy. He said that American slang was the common language of that part of England from which the Pilgrims sailed, and that it had been preserved ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... go away? There is no such thing as society now. Assemblies of well-dressed mobs meet at each other's houses, tear each other's clothes, tread on each other's toes. If you are particularly lucky, you sit on the staircase, you get a tepid ice, and you hear vapid talk in slang phrases all round you. There is modern society. If we had a good opera, it would be something to stay in London for. Look at the programme for the season on that table—promising as much as possible on paper, and performing as little as possible on the stage. ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... pipe all hands etcetera is in that comic opera I'm illustrating and doing the costumes for, and I've got it on the brain. Have you noticed," he went on, "that Carville seems to have no professional slang?" ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... for the purpose of preying upon the patriots, and then retreating behind the shelter of the royal fortifications, were composed of the vilest miscreants that could be gathered from the dregs of any community, and were generally known by the slang ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... crusading hero of the song, and put the slang for "sergeant" in his stead, Jacqueline leaned back on the gunwale quite contented. She fell to gazing on the transparent emerald of the inshore, and plunged in her hand. The soft, plump wrist turned baby pink under the ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... parted in the middle, and his moustache bristled with a martial ardour. He had lately bought a fine set of artificial teeth, which, with pardonable pride, he constantly exhibited to the admiration of all and sundry. Major Forsyth's consuming desire was to appear juvenile; he affected slang, and carried himself with a youthful jauntiness. He vowed he felt a mere boy, and flattered himself that on his good days, with the light behind him, he might ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... her out in the snow to cool her hot blood. What right has she to attract Ware and make him neglect that dear angel over there? See, yonder is Daisy. There's a face, there's charm, there's hair!" finished Mrs. Parry, quite unconscious that she was using the latest London slang. "I ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... supporting them, stood for the new politics instead of the old,—the replacement of the war issues and their sequels by the matters of clean administration, sound currency, and interests common alike to the whole nation. But the Republican leaders found their best campaign material in what the slang of the time called "waving the bloody shirt,"—reviving the cry of abuse of the freedmen, suppression of the negro vote, and the need of national protection for the nation's wards. It was out of keeping with Hayes's record, and with his ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... recount things as discreetly as possible, frightened by the very words he spoke, the horrors he had to relate in that sphere of superlative luxury and enjoyment, before those happy ones who possessed all the gifts of this world; for—to use a slang expression—he fully realised that he sang out of tune, and in most uncourteous fashion. What a strange idea of his to have called at the hour when one has just finished dejeuner, when the aroma of hot coffee flatters happy digestion. Nevertheless he went on, and even ended by ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... he exclaimed, a weak smile on his lips. "I'm no boob!" Obviously, he meant this lapse into the slang of the Tenderloin to convey his intimate knowledge of police methods. "You can't soft-soap me! You don't want explanations! You want me to get myself in bad. But you won't get anything out of me. ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... from Alabama,—but we desist; a full catalogue would fill pages. We will only add, that a few months since, in the city of London, Governor Hamilton, of South Carolina, went armed with pistols, to the lodgings of Daniel O'Connell, 'to stop his wind' in the bullying slang of his own published boast. During the last session of Congress Messrs. Dromgoole and Wise[41] of Virginia, W. Cost Johnson and Jenifer of Maryland, Pickens and Campbell of South Carolina, and we know not how many more slaveholding members of Congress have ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... ones, and to be zealous in keeping order and enforcing rules. She held a surprise inspection of the juniors' desks and drawers, and pounced upon illicit packets of chocolate; she examined their books, and confiscated any which she considered unsuitable; she put a ban upon slang, and wrote out a new set of dormitory regulations. Her efforts were hardly so much appreciated as they deserved. The girls grumbled at this unanticipated tightening ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... a number of English slang words with which he interlarded his conversation. He meant to be kind, and indeed liked Miles greatly. In proof of his recovered temper, he offered the young man a pinch of snuff. Jennings hated ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... that is awful slang. But what can you expect of a 'freshie'? I've got to make the most of my time, too, you know, for when I get to be a junior I'll have to begin the 'prune and prism' act," retorted the girl with a roguish wink. "Then"— ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... Hicks. "I'm a blackguard; I know it; and I don't think I was worth fishing up. But you've done it, and I mustn't go back on you, I suppose." He lifted his poor, weak, bad little face, and looked Staniford in the eyes with a pathos that belied the slang of his speech. The latter released his hand from Captain Jenness and gave it to Hicks, who wrung it, as he kept looking him in the eyes, while his lips twitched pitifully, like a child's. The captain gave a quick snort either of disgust or of sympathy, and turned abruptly ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... Lord Lisle was about as unpleasant a matter as one could well experience. His language was coarse; his ideas coarser still. There was very little to redeem it. He mistook slang for wit, told stories that made his wife shudder, and misbehaved himself as only ...
— The Coquette's Victim • Charlotte M. Braeme
... American writers, and was very severe upon them; some of them were friends of mine, and it was not pleasant. But I was especially hurt by a remark which he made afterwards. Americans are noted in England for their use of slang. The English suppose that the language of Sam Slick or of Nasby is the language used in cultivated society. They do not seem to understand it, and I have no doubt to-day that Lowell's comic poems are taken seriously. ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... said Billy briefly, "and I'm blowed if I'll ask my dear old dad to come to the rescue. He's had to cough up (shame on your slang, Billy) far too much already. I tell you, Gordon, I'm so fixed that I can't explain these things unless I'm actually brought to trial. It's—it's—well—you have no secret societies at the Point as we do at college, so you can't fathom it. I'm no more afraid of standing trial than I ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... miserable remnant of us were leaving Andersonville months afterward, I saw him, sleek, rotund, and well-clothed, lounging leisurely in the door of a tent. He regarded us a moment contemptuously, and then went on conversing with a fellow N'Yaarker, in the foul slang that none but such as he were low ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... some old fellow who wrote the rules of arithmetic, I believe; it's only a bit of slang. But, I repeat, you have a right to be sad, and it's taking an unfair advantage of your relations to look as pleasant ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... Their proper establishments are known by a great variety of appellations, the old word bordel being now considered gross. More commonly they are designated discreetly as Tolerances or Gros Numeros; in the popular slang they are claques or boxons. Many of them have special designations, as the celebrated Botte de paille mentioned by Edmond de Goncourt in his Fille Elisa; one of the noisiest was known as the Perroquet gris; and another, from its specialty, Au Telescope. ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... made her nervous all the time. She felt as if she were sailing under false colors. If your every-day language is not fit for a letter or for print, it is not fit for talk. And if, by any series of joking or fun, at school or at home, you have got into the habit of using slang in talk, which is not fit for print, why, the sooner you get out of it the better. Remember that the very highest compliment paid to anything printed is paid when a person, hearing it read aloud, thinks it is the remark of the reader made in conversation. ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... adventures that have become immortal in the pages of Lavengro. Dr. Knapp has encouraged the idea that Joseph Sell was a real book, ignoring the fact that the very title suggests doubts, and was probably meant to suggest them. In Norfolk, as elsewhere, a 'sell' is a word in current slang used for an imposture or a cheat, and doubtless Borrow meant to make merry with the credulous. There was, we may be perfectly sure, no Joseph Sell, and it is more reasonable to suppose that it was the sale of his translation of ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... if I held an official position in the brigade. I make great progress in knowledge of military affairs—am quite familiar, as you may perceive, with the details of the last campaign, and begin to understand both the technical language and the slang of our comrades; who give me plenty of their company, and right merry companions they are. But, perhaps," said she, looking at him doubtingly, "you may be able to understand me, and excuse my weakness, when I confess ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... the endeavor to present the actual life of the University, it has seemed quite inadvisable to edit the conversation of the characters from the standpoint of the English purist. Since, however, those readers who boggle over slang could hardly be much interested in the Undergraduate, it is sufficient merely to call attention ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... remember mumbling something about the pleasure in store for me, and while my tongue pronounced this statement, my conscience denounced me as a liar. It would be no pleasure. An upstart of a boarding-school girl, with her airy ways, her college slang and her ear-piercing laughter, tearing around the house like a young cyclone, having girl friends and boy friends hanging around continually,—the thought was not encouraging, and I groaned in spirit, and puffed away, setting misty shallops afloat upon the sea of moonlight. ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... and conscience, Billy, if you aren't the—the limit!" Which, indeed, she must have been, to have brought circumspect Aunt Hannah to the point of actually using slang. ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... use of vulgar slang upbraid, But, when I'm speaking by the card, I call a spade a spade; And I, who have been touched of that same mania, myself, Am well aware that, when it comes to parting with his pelf, The curio collector is so blindly ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... almost borders on the romantic, is beautifully chosen, and fit, without change of a syllable, for the most critical eye. What girl now studies the words with which she shall address her lover, or seeks to charm him with grace of diction? She dearly likes a little slang, and revels in the luxury of entire familiarity with a new and strange being. There is something in that, too, pleasant to our thoughts, but I fear that this phase of life does not conduce to a taste for poetry among our girls. Though my mother was a writer of prose, and revelled ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... spite of a magnificent physique, carries round with him something that says to David, "Don't trust him!" What makes personality? I declare I cannot put my finger on the thing that makes me sure that Randall is yellow; but David has seen it, and has drawn back from it. Ninety-nine Yale men may slang Harvard, and the Harvard man will take it in good part—and vice-versa; but Randall is the hundredth, and he said a few things that made David tremble, not with anger but with disgust. "Have a cigarette?" asked Randall at the end. "No, ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... of the charabang Employ the most outrageous slang And talk with an appalling twang. Their manners ape the wild orang; They do not care a single hang For sober folk on foot who gang, But as they roll, with jolt and clang, For parasang on parasang, They cause a vulgar Sturm und Drang. They ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... laugh, using a bit of American slang she had heard the day before. "Search me! Wouldn't it be ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... is coming home!" said Beatrice. "How you will learn to talk sea slang! And how happy grandmamma will be, especially if he comes in time for her great affair. Do you hear, Alex? you must practise your steps, for grandmamma is going to give a grand party, Careys and Evanses, and all, on purpose to gratify ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... smugglers and owlers who had used the Woolpack as their headquarters long ago, riding by moonlight to the cross-roads, with their mouths full of slang—cant talk of "mackerel" and "fencing" and "hornies" and ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... community where neighbors are quarreling, hating and lawing with each other. In home life there are angry words and bitter feelings and estrangements. There are lewd revelries and wanton pleasures. There are stealings and lyings, cheatings, fightings, swearings, drinking, chewing and smoking, slang phrases, etc. Such is a reproach, and thus we learn how righteousness exalts a nation and sin becomes a ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... and they were received by Mrs. Morrison and the teachers, and responded with an elaborate politeness that was the cult of the College. For the space of three hours an extremely high-toned atmosphere prevailed, not a word of slang offended the ear, and everybody behaved with the dignity and courtesy demanded by such a stately ceremony. Mrs. Morrison, in black silk and old lace, her white hair dressed high, was an imposing figure, and set a standard ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... expression, used to express incredulity. It has somewhat the same meaning as the slang phrase heard in the United ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... It is characteristic of Miss Royden that she should fasten on the real cause of this violence. "I don't like jargon," she said, "particularly the jargon of Christian Science and Theosophy. I love English literature too much for that; and I don't like slang, particularly slang of a brutal order; but I feel a deep sympathy with anybody who is trying, as Mr. Studdert-Kennedy is trying, to put life and power into institutionalism. It wants it so badly—oh, so very badly—life, ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... standing motionless in the middle of a picture. (Mr. Parham-Carter did not, of course, use such beautiful similes as these; he employed the kind of language customary to men who have received a public school and university education, half slang and half childishness; but he waved his hands at me and distorted his features, and conveyed, on the whole, the kind of impression I have just attempted ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... "Asker jarrar" lit. "drawing": so in Egyptian slang "Nas jarrar"folk who wish to draw your money out of your ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... wring or dry each article in turn. The other gentleman on top received them all rather grimly, and had not perhaps been amused by the situation but for the exploit of his hat. It was of the sort called in Italian as in English slang a stove-pipe (canna), and having been made in Italy, it was of course too large for its wearer. It had never been any thing but a horror and reproach to him, and he was now inexpressibly delighted to see it steal out of the diligence in company with ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... merely being born and wandering in those sweet sunny plains and fresh woodlands Shakspeare must have drunk in a portion of that frank artless sense of beauty which lies about his works like a bloom or dew; but a Coventry ribbon-maker, or a slang Leamington squire, are looking on those very same landscapes too, and what do they profit? You theorise about the influence which the climate and appearance of Attica must have had in ennobling those who were born there: yonder dirty, swindling, ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... patronizing and talked a jargon of fashionable slang which Halcyone hardly understood. Some transient gleam of her beloved mother kept suggesting itself to her when Mabel smiled. The memory was not distinct enough for her to know what it was, but it hurt her. The big, bouncing, overdeveloped ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... there is a small stream of that name in Kentucky, the passage of which is made difficult and laborious, as well by its tortuous course as by numerous shallows and bars. The real application of the phrase is to the unhappy wight who propels the boat, but politically, in slang usage, it means the man ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... said the Superintendent, and there was a sound of tears in her usually steady voice, "my dear, I'm about all in! Yes, I know it's slang, but I can't help it—I feel slangy! Come up to my sitting-room for a few minutes and we'll have a cup of ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... portraits—this also is "high art." Likewise gowns lumped upon the shoulders, with all the folds drawn across, instead of hanging draperies. The term is never used when we speak of the great arts—painting, sculpture, and architecture. It is, in fact, only the slang of the cabinet-maker, the upholsterer, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... could now be of great service. He does not know me, and if I were to darken my face, and put on a proper dress, I think I should have no difficulty in passing myself off as one of the tribe, knowing their slang, and having been ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... I've chucked some things, An' learned a whole lot more to fill the space. I've slung all slang; crook words 'ave taken wings, An' I 'ave learned to entertain with grace. But when ole Missus Flood comes round our place I don't object to 'er, for all 'er sighs; Becos I likes 'er ways, I likes 'er face, An', most uv all, she 'as ...
— Digger Smith • C. J. Dennis
... to get looking at that for?" she asked Anna-Felicitas, when she had edged through the crowd staring at the Vaterland, and got to where Anna-Felicitas stood listening abstractedly to the fireworks of American slang the young man was treating her to,—that terse, surprising, swift hitting-of-the-nail-on-the-head form of speech which she was hearing in such abundance for ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... held to be inexcusable, and Punch is pointed at with scorn for a misquotation from Horace; or an incorrect rendering in one of his drawings of an antiquarian inscription; or a slip in a Shakespearean line; or an inaccuracy in slang or dialect. Scottish, Irish, Suffolk, or Yorkshire must all be perfectly rendered, or the natives will know the reason why. In August, 1894, Mr. Hodgson sent from the Yorkshire moors a story of a keeper who, dissatisfied with the calendar, replies ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... gladly sprung in. For the sake of the uninitiated, I must explain that, in digger's slang, a "canary" and half-a-sovereign ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... says," said Mr. Polteed, unlocking a bureau drawer and taking out a file of papers; "she sums it up somewhere confidentially. Yes, here it is! '17 very attractive—conclude 47, longer in the tooth' (slang for age, you know)—'distinctly gone—waiting his time—17 perhaps holding off for terms, impossible to say without knowing more. But inclined to think on the whole—doesn't know her mind—likely to act on impulse some day. Both ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... wrote the Princess of Lichtenstein a letter such as during the Carnival itself one would not dare to write even to public women. How can I express what must have been Madame Lichtenstein's horror on reading this production,—an incomprehensible collection of all the low expressions that army slang could furnish! The evidence of a third person was necessary to convince her that the signature, M——, Surgeon-major of the Imperial French Guard, was not the forgery of some miserable drunkard. In her profound indignation ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... shall swallow and fill his mighty maw, What time he maketh an end of the Priests, the Police, and the Law, And then, ah, who shall purchase the poems of old that I sang, Who shall pay twelve-and-six for an epic in Saga slang? But perchance even "Hermes the Flitter" could scarcely expound what I mean, And I trow that another were fitter to sing you a song for ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... when link-boys and sedan chairs helped home a jag they had the time to speak good English. But now! Good Lord! With typewriters cutting your phrases into angular fragments, with the very soil at your heels saturated with slang, what hope in an age of hurry has a fellow to think of the cadence? I honestly believe Stevenson was having fun when he wrote that essay of his on the technical elements of style. It's a puzzle picture and no more to be ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... up and take notice, I suppose," put in Jack quickly. "Pardon the slang, ladies, but sometimes slang seems to fit ...
— The Motor Girls • Margaret Penrose
... know if you can hear me, but I'll chance it. I want to tell you that it's not my fault about Tishy, and the wedding not coming off. She bolted with Ned Cloherty last night—" he checked himself, and felt he ought to apologise for talking slang, and then thought that if it were the Doctor, himself, he wouldn't mind. "Tishy liked Cloherty best," he hurried on, "and she was probably quite right, but I want you to know that I would have played up all right." Then he said, hesitating, that Barty had told him a thing that he didn't quite ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... old English "whenas" (for when, vol. ii. 130), the common ballad-terms "a plump of spearmen" (ii. 190) and a "red cent" (i. 321), the only literal rendering of "Fals ahmar" which serves to show the ancient and noble pedigree of a slang term supposed to be modern and American. Moreover this Satan even condemns fiercely the sin of supplying him with "useful knowledge." The important note (ii. 45) upon the normal English mispronunciation ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Wretched Condition of Ireland on Sleeping in Church Servants, Irish, fraud of Service, mutual Sharp, Dr. John, Archbishop of York Shaster, the Sheridan, Dr. T. Shrewsbury, Duke of Sin, original, doctrine of Slang Sleep, often a poor man's privilege Sleeping in church, sermon on Smallridge, Dr. Smoking, habit bad among the youth Society for propagating Free-thinking Socinus, Leelius his teachings on worship the greatest of the heathen philosophers Diogenes' opinion of Solemn league and covenant Solomon, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... posts, or fetter-free And running amuck against old party creeds, On-howl their packs and glory in the fight. See mangy curs, whose editorial ears Prick to all winds to catch the popular breeze, Slang-whanging yelp, and froth and snap and snarl, And sniff the gutters for their daily food. And these—are they our prophets and our priests? Hurra!—Hurra!—Hurra!—for "Liberty!" Flaunt the red flag and flutter the petticoat; Ran-tan ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... of slang imprecation. If she had said "Oh, pull up your socks!" I should have been less surprised. And then suddenly the words took a dreadful meaning in my mind, and I rushed to the cellar. The cask was tilted forward ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... by accidentally dropping a large handful, warm, on top of Celeste's head, aggravating the offense by telling her to "go quick and soak her head;" which, although it was what she eventually did, was too much like a certain slang phrase much in vogue, for human nature to endure; and giving him an angry look, the only one on record ever given by her to a man, she rushed from the room, and was seen no ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... compromise, and when to hold fast to a principle. The tendency of the thoughtless is to denounce all compromise as wicked, and to stick to a form of words without bothering about the real meaning. Belief in "fads"—I cannot avoid the bit of slang—and singular malleability of real convictions are sometimes generated just by want of serious thought; and, at any rate, both phenomena are very ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... to enthusiasm as she called the school roll. "Kid McCoy uses too much slang. We'll teach her manners. Rosalie doesn't like to study. We'll pour her full of algebra and Latin. Harriet Gladden's a jelly fish, Mary Deskam's an awful little liar, Evalina Smith's a silly ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... came back in their ridiculous English slang. Now an American would have said some little old moon that! We certainly have our ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... about the characteristics of the pleasure he receives from literature, should not have noticed in this period the fact—beside and outside of the other fact of a provision of delectable novelists—of a great splitting up and (as scientific slang would put it) fissiparous generation of the the classes of novel. It is, indeed, open to the advocates or generic or specific criticism—though I think they cannot possibly maintain their position as to poetry—to urge that a great deal of harm was ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... old girl," said Dorothy Kip abruptly. "Oh, excuse me, Mrs. Hollister, but sometimes I just love to use slang. You go ahead and wish hard for what you want and you'll get it. I always do. Say, don't you know that you can influence others to think exactly as you do? By wishing with all your might you can will it ...
— How Ethel Hollister Became a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... Army slang. Your 'striker' is a private soldier, whom you hire at so many a dollars a month to do the rougher work in your quarters. You make whatever bargain you choose with the soldier. At this post the bachelor officers usually pay a striker eight ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... "You've recently," she observed, "got into a new way. Whatever slang you happen to hear outside you come and tell me. And whenever you read any improper book, you poke your fun at me. What! have I become ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... me to aid you with any information on slang," admonished her friend. "I don't suppose he is really king of anything except of a ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... gentleman from Chicago in surprise, and then in pity. He could not understand how any one, and more especially a boy, could be so ignorant of the meaning of one of the most common words of slang. At first he looked as if he was about to reprove such ignorance; but he evidently thought better of it, for ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... the words into approximate meaning in English, saying it was as difficult to translate these intimate and slang phrases as it would be to put "Yankee Doodle" into French or German. His translation, as he wrote it on a ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... a man to go out to Belgium and get some good 'stuff.' [Stuff, let me say, is the technical or slang term for film pictures.] How would you ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... wants his fun at once. If you begin with a long history of who's who and all that, why he won't read three pages; but if you touch him up with a startling incident or two at the first go off, then give him a chapter of horrors, then another of fun, then a little love or a little slang, or something of that sort, why, you know, about the end of the first volume, you may describe as much as you like, and tell everything about everybody's father and mother for just as many pages as you want to fill. At least that's ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... they must be simplified, and treated much as a painter treats them, drawing them in squarely, seizing the more important features, and neglecting all that does not assert itself as too essential to be passed over—hence the slang and cant words of every profession, and indeed all language; for language at best is but a kind of "patter," the only way, it is true, in many cases, of expressing our ideas to one another, but still a very ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... Olivia; she was pretty and merry and kind; and, above all, she had mastered to perfection the rare art of letting children alone. If we kept ourselves tolerably clean, and refrained from quarrelling or talking slang, Aunt Olivia did not worry us. Aunt Janet, on the contrary, gave us so much good advice and was so constantly telling us to do this or not to do the other thing, that we could not remember half her instructions, ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... interpreted as a confession of jealous fear that I had been, in slang phrasing, "put wise." And sooth to say, I ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... extent that you use slang at all, be its master instead of its slave. You have many times been told that the overuse of slang disfigures one's speech and hampers his standing with cultivated people. You have also been told that slang constantly ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Frank consoled her, "Alice and Dick will revel in these vulgar westernisms. See if they don't. Why Mother, it's by slang that a language is enriched, ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... that you will never use a foreign word when you can give its meaning in English. And also determine now, definitely, that no matter how popular slang becomes in the less refined circles of society, you will never use it because you know that it is the badge of vulgarity. There is nothing quite as beautiful as good, simple English, when ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... very consciously with a deliberate attempt upon them, in just that partial, selecting, creative way in which an artist looks at things for the purpose of painting a picture. In order to arrive at their effects, they shrink from no sacrifice, from no excess; slang, neologism, forced construction, archaism, barbarous epithet, nothing comes amiss to them, so long as it tends to render a sensation. Their unique care is that the phrase should live, should palpitate, should be alert, exactly expressive, super-subtle ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... "Now that wasn't slang nor sarcasm what I was usin'," sez I, smoothin' it over. "That gigantic maid you mentioned is part o' the tale ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... letters to several congressmen from his uncle and from Mr. Duff Brown, each of whom had an extensive acquaintance in both houses where they were well known as men engaged in large private operations for the public good and men, besides, who, in the slang of the day, understood the virtues of "addition, ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... after her ride, and with quite a new expression on her face. It seemed that she had punctured her bicycle (whatever that means) and could not get on: and then an "awfully nice man" (she will use the modern slang; in my days we should merely have said "a gentleman") came up with his tools and things, and put it right for her: and ended by claiming acquaintance and proposing to call, "Because, Mammy dear," said Tabitha, "isn't it funny, ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... of love," the young nobleman went on, kindling as he spoke, and forgetting the slang and colloquialisms with which we garnish all our conversation—"this fine picture of Jenny and Jessamy falling in love at first sight, billing and cooing in an arbour, and retiring to a cottage afterwards to go on cooing and billing—Psha! what folly is this! It is good for romances, and for misses ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... on" a good deal about our slang. They used to be fond of quoting in superior derision in their papers our, to them, utterly unintelligible baseball news. Mr. Crosland, to drag him in again, to illustrate our abuse of "the language," quotes from some tenth-rate American author—which ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... congruity, or for striking a key of expression and keeping it, but becomes simply the most spontaneous and unstudied of human beings. He has at his command the whole vocabularies of the English and Scottish languages, classical and slang, with good stores of the French, and tosses and tumbles them about irresponsibly to convey the impression or affection, the mood or freak of the moment; pouring himself out in all manner of rhapsodical confessions and speculations, grave or gay, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had been above whilst I was in the cabin with the others, approached and stared at me, but not insolently—merely with curiosity. They seemed a vile lot, one and all. With some of them every other word was an oath; their talk was almost gibberish to my ears with thieves' slang. I wondered to find not one of them dressed in felon's garb; but on reflection I concluded that they had plundered the crew and the people who had had charge of them and of the Cyprus, and had forced all those they ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... the "man" still speaks his "plain Anglo-Saxon," and the "gentleman" still speaks his refined Latinized speech. In every language, it is true, there are social distinctions in speech, and every language has its slang. But in English these distinctions are perpetuated in the very structure of the language. Elsewhere the working-class speak—with a little difference in the quality—a language needing no substantial transformation to become the language of society, which differs from ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... what's more, she's on!" The Irishman reverted to trooper slang in his ardor, and got a sharp nudge from the doctor ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... infinitely small merit, what was to be done when those of real superiority entered upon the scene? It was impossible to apply to them the forms of laudation adapted to their inferiors. Well, then, a species of slang was invented, by which it was thought practicable to make the genuine great men conceive they had passed into the condition of demigods. A language was devised that was to express the fervor of the adorers who were suddenly allowed to penetrate into Olympus, and the strange, misapplied ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... into the smallest space possible. "No, Redhead! The devil dragged the man who did that down to the lower regions long ago, on account of my tongue. It's his son. The younger, the sharper. This stripling made Casper Rubling,—[Dice, in gambler's slang]—poor wretch, pay for his loaded ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... read historian above quoted. But he was in reality more of a Tory than it suited Macaulay to represent him, though he gloried in the name of Trimmer, and certainly showed what is called in modern political slang a 'crossbench mind' not only during the madness of the Popish plot, during the greater madness of James's assaults on the Church, the Constitution, and private rights, but also (after the Revolution) towards William of Orange. Born about ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... but I like to see what is going on; and" (with an heroic attempt at sea-slang) "I like ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... temperance has been nobly raised; people don't talk now as formerly of a man's being somewhat elevated or tipsy, or merely overtaken, when he is drunk, for they have learned to call things by their right names, and not practise imposture by slang phrases. Public resolutions have been passed against giving spirituous liquor at wakes or funerals, churns, ploughing-matches, or evening parties; men and women can go to market and fair, buy and sell, and yet never think of treating or being treated with spirits; and what still ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... the use of slang terms. There are surely words enough in the English language to express all the thoughts and ideas of the mind, and it is a sign of pure vulgarity to employ synonyms, the only remarkable part of ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... was alone, he despised Concha's frankness. It was just as people believed; she was very attractive, very pretty, but absolutely lacking in scruples. As for himself, he heaped insults on himself in the slang of his Bohemian days, comparing himself with all the horned animals he could ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... temperament is for its possessor a fine thing, for it cannot put up with indifferent fare and lodging: it can only prove its existence by the manner in which it annexes all that is richest, most beautiful, and, to use a byegone slang word, most Precious. For it is reserved the luxurious Chesterfield or Divan, heaped with rainbow-like cushions, and placed in the most becoming light, until the quick, unhappy day dawns when another "artistic temperament" comes to the fore, and the first ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... but partly it is due to the general ignorance of English prevailing throughout the world. It is atrociously taught, and taught by ignorant men. It is atrociously and meanly written. So far as this second cause of sheer ignorance goes, the gaps in knowledge are continually resulting in slang and the addition of needless neologisms to the language. People come upon ideas that they know no English to express, and strike out the new phrase in a fine burst of ignorant discovery. There are Americans in particular who are amazingly ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... of that—of that—persuasion still remain an anarchist when alone, quite alone and going to bed, for instance? Does he lay his head on the pillow, pull his bedclothes over him, and go to sleep with the necessity of the chambardement general, as the French slang has it, of the general blow-up, always present to his mind? And if so how can he? I am sure that if such a faith (or such a fanaticism) once mastered my thoughts I would never be able to compose myself sufficiently to sleep or eat or perform any of the routine acts of daily life. I would ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... himself a man—that is, every man who has been an English boy, and, as such, been compelled to the use of his fists—knows what a "mill" is. But I sing not only "pueris," but "virginibus." Ladies, "a mill,"—using with reluctance and contempt for myself that slang in which ladywriters indulge, and Girls of the Period know much better than they do their Murray,—"a mill,"—speaking not to ladywriters, not to Girls of the Period, but to innocent damsels, and in explanation to those ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... elements supporting them, stood for the new politics instead of the old,—the replacement of the war issues and their sequels by the matters of clean administration, sound currency, and interests common alike to the whole nation. But the Republican leaders found their best campaign material in what the slang of the time called "waving the bloody shirt,"—reviving the cry of abuse of the freedmen, suppression of the negro vote, and the need of national protection for the nation's wards. It was out of keeping with Hayes's record, and with his later performances,—but he let the campaign take its way, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... sight to any one who had not lost his sense of appreciation of the noblest of all the works of Nature. Both men fulfilled that requisite of the powerful athlete that they should look larger without their clothes than with them. In ring slang, they buffed well. And each showed up the other's points on account of the extreme contrast between them: the long, loose-limbed, deer- footed youngster, and the square-set, rugged veteran with his trunk like ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... land and joined their friends in the debris heaps. The protection of the debris heaps was not quite so good as that afforded by the mines, and the music of the cannon the troglodytes had always with them. But there was more liberty and comfort in the caves, which were dry as dust and—no slang intended—not ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... curate's, who had come to spend a few days with him in the country. The friend was a harsh-featured, swarthy young man, belonging to what may be called the muscular variety of high Ritualism; much given to a sort of aggressive slang—he had been known to refer to the bishop of his diocese as "the sporting old jester that bosses our show"—and representing militant sacerdotalism in its most blusterous and rampant form. He was also in the habit of informing people that he was "nuts" on the Athanasian Creed, and ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... in his Slang Dictionary, and defines it "a concerted scheme to defraud a person by gaming." "This phrase," says Bartlett, in his Dictionary of Americanisms, "seems to be taken from the lifeless attitude of a pointer in ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... continued, shoving a 'possum-colored lock back from his brow, "as I suffers through one of them calamities miscalled cel'brations, endoorin' the slang-whangin' of the orators an' bracin' myse'f ag'inst the slam-bangin' of the guns, to say nothin' of the firecrackers an' kindred Chinese contraptions, I a'preeciates the feelin's of that Horace Walpole person Colonel Sterett quotes ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... nefarious projects of the desperate characters who frequent such dens. Each member should report daily, and if he is not familiar with the 'flash' dialect in which thieves converse (which is very improbable, if chosen as suggested), should take care to provide himself with a copy of GROSE'S Slang Dictionary or Vocabulary of Gross Language, which will the better enable ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various
... Elsie, to whom the slang term was new, looked at the speaker with a slightly puzzled expression; but Edward, who fully understood it, drew himself ...
— Grandmother Elsie • Martha Finley
... Old maids Jews Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Niggers (not Russians, or other foreigners of any denomination) Fatness Thinness Long hair (worn by a man) Baldness Sea-sickness Stuttering Bad cheese 'Shooting the moon' (slang expression for leaving a ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... enjoys the comic page more than the present writer,—yet it spreads a demoralizing virus amongst children. Of what use is it to teach children good English when the newspaper deliberately teaches them the cheapest slang? Of what use is it to teach them manners and kindliness when the newspaper constantly spreads boorishness and "rough house" conduct? Of what use is it to raise taste when this is injured at the very outset of life by giving bad taste a ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... and showed little rows of milk teeth, like white shells. The blue eyes and the baby smile went up, confidingly, to the young ragamuffin's face. There had been kindness here. The boy had taken to Jo, it seemed; and was benevolently evincing it, in the best way he could, by teaching her good-natured slang. ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... teach the girls American slang. It doesn't amount to much, teaching French girls slang, because they never have any chance to get it off on the men. But they ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... of the realm, and their entertaining this high opinion of themselves can scarcely be wondered at; they were low fellows, but masters of driving; driving was in fashion, and sprigs of nobility used to dress as coachmen and imitate the slang and behaviour of coachmen, from whom occasionally they would take lessons in driving as they sat beside them on the box, which post of honour any sprig of nobility who happened to take a place on a coach claimed as his unquestionable right; and then these sprigs would smoke ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... back and take up his wanderings and his discoveries. Some day, I will tell you how he broke his promise to help a friend. That was long since, and he has, by this time, been nearly spoilt for what he would call shikar. He is forgetting the slang, and the beggar's cant, and the marks, and the signs, and the drift of the undercurrents, which, if a man would master, he must ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... than you can rebury." That warning, in the slang current when they had left Terra, was reassuring simply because it was of the earth he knew. Raf grinned. But he did not head toward the roof opening and the ramp inside the building. Instead he set a ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... some, misapplications that weaken and disfigure the style of him who adopts them; and some, downright vulgarisms—that is, phrases that come from below, and are thrust into clean company with the odors of slang about them. These last are often a device for giving piquancy to style. Against such abuses we should be the more heedful, because, from the convenience of some of them, they get so incorporated into daily speech as not to be readily distinguishable from their healthy neighbors, clinging ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... The road lay along Deer Creek, passing several plantations; and occasionally, at the bends, it crossed the swamp, where the water came above my hips. The smaller drummer-boys had to carry their drums on their heads, and most of the men slang their cartridge-boxes around their necks. The soldiers generally were glad to have their general and field officers afoot, but we gave them a fair specimen of marching, accomplishing about twenty-one miles by noon. Of course, our speed was accelerated by the sounds ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... not yet having ceased to think of themselves as Englishmen, used to distinguish themselves as "Continentals," while the king's troops were known as the "British." The quaint term "Continental" long ago fell into disuse, except in the slang phrase "not worth a Continental" which referred to the debased condition of our currency at the close of the Revolutionary War; but "American" and "British" might still serve the purpose sufficiently whenever it is necessary to distinguish between the two great English nationalities. The term "English," ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... glow departed and the darkness gathered, if there was one lonely boy in the world, languidly despairing, it was I. Many times I found myself uttering aloud such slang expressions as: "Oh, my hat! If only I had told the beastly truth for the third time! Dash it, why didn't I? Why the deuce didn't I?" I addressed myself as: "You blithering, blithering fool!" And my temples began to ache and now and then to hammer. For, always in these my early ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... of a language is much like seeing the said language in its intellectual shirt-sleeves, off duty and taking its ease: one feels sure of detecting some essential characteristics of the people who speak it, and one turns over the pages of a slang dictionary expecting to recognize through its corruption and perversions the real nature of the people who have created it. French slang is no exception to this, theory: the two hundred and thirty double-columned ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... using with equal facility the language of the "fence's" parlour, and that of the literary salon; on being able to appear as much at home in one as in the other. Delighted at our prowess, we often whispered, "The princess, I swear, would not believe her eyes if she saw us now;" and then in terrible slang we shouted a benediction on some "crib" that was going to be broken into that evening. And we thought there was something very thrilling in leaving the Rue de la Gaieté, returning home to dress, and presenting our spotless selves ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... admire in women precisely those qualities in which they feel themselves to be chiefly deficient. Their reverence and affection are bestowed upon her whose voice is ever soft, gentle and low, and whose mild influence is shed like a balm upon the labours and troubles of life. Of slang, and of slaps upon the back, of strength, whether of language or of body, they get enough and to spare amongst themselves, and they are scarcely to be blamed if at certain moments they should prefer refinement to roughness, and gentleness to gentlemen. However, these obvious considerations ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... which justifies such a tone as you have assumed, and that underhand interference in my affairs which, I have reason to suppose, you have been practising. I tell you plainly, gentlemen, that little as I care for the opinion of the world (as the slang goes), I don't choose to submit quietly to slander and malice. Whether you suffer yourselves to be imposed upon too easily, or wilfully make yourselves parties to it, the result to me is the same. In either case, you can't expect from a plain ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... gently. "I'm sorry if I hit too hard. But I feel rather strongly on that subject. I've no wish to slang you. I only want to set you on your feet, and keep you there. So we may as well ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... details of his new craft. As each sandbar showed up beneath the yellow ripples, as each new point of the forest-clad banks opened out, Nilssen gave him courses and cross bearings, dazing enough to the unprofessional ear, but easily stored in a trained seaman's brain. He discoursed in easy slang of the cut-offs, the currents, the sludge-shallows, the floods, and the other vagaries of the great river's course, and punctuated his discourse with draughts of Rabeira's wine, and comments on the tangled mass of black humanity ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... society that compels competition for livelihood, and holds out to the workers as a stimulus to exertion the hope of their rising into a monopolist class of non-producers, it is yet possible to "moralize" capital (to use a slang phrase of the Positivists): that is to say, that a sentiment imported from a religion which looks upon another world as the true sphere of action for mankind, will override the necessities of our daily life in this ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... illustrating—to let you know what especial things in language I hope you will keep your eye on. Of course Anneke couldn't be "electrified"—but you may find many less evident blunders than that would be. She might be shocked, but couldn't "receive a shock." We need free colloquial slang and common expressions; but while "get out" seems all right from Stuyvesant to Bogardus, for Barry to say "Skedadle" would put him in the 87th New York Vols., 1861-64. Yet I doubt whether we have any more classic and revered ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... how far I should be from laughing. "In your case," he continued, "the pathognomonic, if you will excuse medical slang, was every now and then broken by the intrusion ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... away with a precise movement. He looked at the Masked Lady with a smug smile. "That word snitch," he said. "It's entirely out of place, you know—after you've once introduced Aladdin and Hansel and Grettel in your story. And a giant. It's slang, and it came into use long after the race of giants ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... unquestionable evidences. There was the lost and hardened female, uttering the wild screams of intoxication, or pouring forth from her dark, filthy place of confinement torrents of polluted mirth; the juvenile pickpocket, ripe in all the ribald wit and traditional slang of his profession; the ruffian burglar, with strong animal frame, dark eyebrows, low forehead, and face full of coarseness and brutality; the open robber, reckless and jocular, indifferent to consequences, and holding his life only ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... For certain slang expressions used by cadets I am indebted to a member of the corps. From this admiral-to-be I learn that a "bird" or "wazzo" is a man or boy; that a "pap sheet" is a report covering delinquencies, and that to "hit the pap" is to be reported for delinquency; ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... college was founded in 1473 by Robert Woodlark, Chancellor of the University, and dedicated to "the glorious Virgin Martyr, St. Catherine of Alexandria." Undergraduate slang, alas! reduces all this to "Cat's." It was originally called St. Catherine's Hall, and is one of the smallest of the colleges. Although not claiming the strong ecclesiastical flavour of Corpus, it has educated quite a ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... playing off innocence or when intended for uncontaminated ears attains a blank intensity of virtue that our own literature cannot hope to rival. The French "juvenile" still guards that beauteous ignorance of slang or of other small vice which the American schoolboy regards as poverty of resource or incapacity, and which he has put off with his frocks and his Parent's Assistant and his Sanford and Merton. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... scribe! whose vivid genius strays 'Mid Drury's stews to incubate her lays, And in St. Giles's slang conveys her tropes, Wreathing the poet's lines with hangmen's ropes; You who conceive 'tis poetry to teach The sad bravado of a dying speech; Or, when possessed with a sublimer mood, Show "Jack o'Dandies" dancing upon blood! Crush ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... once more master of the jurisdiction, as it is said in tauromachian slang, settled himself firmly on his heels, and manoeuvred with the muleta to make the bull ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... with the West. There is the home of the younger sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to the sea for their inheritance. It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of to-day. ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... inimitably droll, which I think rather nice. You'll find a bunch of clippings in my second drawer there. Be sure and show them to your father, and don't fail to keep him in touch with your work: he can help you once he's aroused to what you can do. By the way, you must boil the slang out of your system. It's charming, but it won't do. First thing you know it will be slipping in to your ink-pot and corrupting your manuscripts. You know better; I don't! As you go on Nan Bartlett can probably save you a good many bumps: she's a clever woman. I read her book twice, and ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... healed. Then, just before the last big fight—the one you say you were in—the sergeant was held a prisoner in the hut where you found him. He was in a bad way and I suppose the Germans thought he'd die when they left him—which they did when our boys knocked the spots off 'em, if you'll excuse my slang." ...
— The Khaki Boys Over the Top - Doing and Daring for Uncle Sam • Gordon Bates
... know how grandly their affair turned out. She had put him in the way of something absolutely special—an old house untouched, untouchable, indescribable, an old corner such as one didn't believe existed, and the holy calm of which made the chatter of studios, the smell of paint, the slang of critics, the whole sense and sound of Paris, come back as so many signs of a huge monkey-cage. He moved about, restless, while he wrote; he lighted cigarettes and, nervous and suddenly scrupulous, put them out again; the night was mild and one of the windows ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... "Reglarly up a tree, by jingo!" exclaimed the modest boy, who could not face the gentlest of her sex—not even Briggs—when she began to talk to him; whereas, put him at Iffley Lock, and he could out-slang the boldest bargeman. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... He had struck a bell, and the office seemed suddenly filled with clerks. Van Teyl's words were incoherent—a string of strange directions, punctuated by slang which was, so far as Lutchester was concerned, unintelligible. The whole place seemed to wake into a clamour of telephone bells, shouts, the clanging and opening of the lift gates, and the hurried ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... complication had occurred. In their return the spirit of Fritz von Hartmann had entered into the body of Alexis von Baumgarten, and that of Alexis von Baumgarten had taken up its abode in the frame of Fritz von Hartmann. Hence the slang and scurrility which issued from the lips of the serious Professor, and hence also the weighty words and grave statements which fell from the careless student. It was an unprecedented event, yet no one knew of it, least of all ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... which our ancestors amused themselves, from the novels of Swift's coadjutrix, Mrs. Manley, the delectable author of the New Atlantis, to the facetious productions of Tom Durfey, and Tom Brown, and Ned Ward, writer of the London Spy and several other volumes of ribaldry. The slang of the taverns and ordinaries, the wit of the bagnios, form the strongest part of the farrago of which these libels are composed. In the excellent newspaper collection at the British Museum, you may ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... as the querist supposes, a military cant term, and a sufficiently vulgar one too. It originated at the great slang-manufactory for the army, the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. You may depend upon the following account of it, which I had many years ago from the late Thomas Leybourne, F.R.S., Senior Professor of Mathematics in ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.04.06 • Various
... word, the viciousness of our social hierarchy lies in the fact that it is based solely upon material success. We have no titles of nobility; but we have Coal Barons, Merchant Princes and Kings of Finance. The very catchwords of our slang tell the story. The achievement of which we boast as the foundation of our aristocracy is indeed ignoble; but, since there is no other, we and our sons, and their sons after them, will doubtless continue to struggle—and ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... a holy life. You should use the very choicest words. Words that are wholly free from vulgarity, slang, and the spirit of the world. Untidiness, uncleanness, carelessness, and shabbiness are not at all beautiful ornaments in a holy life. But quietness, modesty, and reticence are gems which sparkle in a holy life like diamond sets in a band of gold. ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr
... be a young, and as Fong had said, "awful smart boy." Smuggled into the country in his childhood, he spoke excellent English, interspersed with slang. He repeated his story with a Chinaman's unimaginative exactness, not a detail changed, omitted or overemphasized. The young men were impressed by him, intelligent, imperturbable and self-reliant, a man admirably fitted to put in execution the move they had decided on. This turned on his ability ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... Turn her out in the snow to cool her hot blood. What right has she to attract Ware and make him neglect that dear angel over there? See, yonder is Daisy. There's a face, there's charm, there's hair!" finished Mrs. Parry, quite unconscious that she was using the latest London slang. "I call her ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... but my mother's way is never to let a child in her care use slang, or slam doors, or leave things lying about in wrong places, or speak unkindly of the absent. Half a cent had to be paid every time I did any of these things, and I kept my own account of them, and punished myself. I always knew when I had violated one of mother's golden rules by her grieved ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... kind that led you to expect the person enjoying them would dispose of disputations, speculations, aspirations, in a few very neatly and brightly uttered words, so simplified in sense, however, that they sounded, even when guiltless, like rather aggravated slang. It wasn't that Kate hadn't pretended too that she should like to go to America; it was only that with this young woman Milly had constantly proceeded, and more than ever of late, on the theory of intimate confessions, private frank ironies that made up for their public grimaces and ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... quaint terms of endearment, slang, and epithets, but as she grew into a beautiful and refined and dignified girl, it was still more piquant to be addressed in the highly unladylike (or un-Smelliean) terms that ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... worked and toiled, cheerful and contented; and him he sought to save from all to which he subjected himself. He could not bear that that soft and delicate child should ever be exposed to the low and menial associations that now made up his own life—to the obscene slang of grooms and ostlers—to their coarse manners and rough contact. He kept him, therefore, apart and aloof in their little lodging, and hoped in time to lay by, so that Sidney might ultimately be restored, if not to his bright original sphere, at least to a higher ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... professor says slang has its place, and he might have added that the place seems to ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... there is a more remarkable instance. If any two classes can be singled out in the community as the largest habitual consumers of tobacco, it must be the college students and the city "roughs" or "rowdies," or whatever the latest slang name is,—for these roysterers, like oysters, incline to names with an r in. Now the "rough," when brought to a physical climax, becomes the prize-fighter; and the college student is seen in his highest condition as the prize-oarsman; and both these representative men, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... sinkings. They argued that the naming of British, Canadian and Australian aces would direct the attacks of German aviators against the most useful men in the British forces. They also felt that publicity would tend toward the swagger which in English slang was "swank" and toward ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... and mental degradation, follow in the train of this class of writers. In what consists the merit of Uncle Tom's Cabin? It is hard to tell. Look at its dark design—its injustice—its falsehoods! Its vulgarisms, negroisms, localisms, and common place slang! Its tendency to pervert public taste, and corrupt public morals. How remarkable that a work of its character, should have been so much read and admired! We may boast of our intelligence and virtue to our hearts content, the reception of this work ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... That's one time Prudence was away off." She smiled as she recognized a bit of Carol's slang upon her lips. "Don't worry about her. You needn't keep an eye on her any more. She's ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... "up to date" (as the slang goes) of Our Village, may interest the supporters of the Statesman Mr. ACLAND, without annoying the admirers of the poet ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... entertained. He was all English now. It was not in the least difficult to make acquaintances. Almost everybody spoke to everybody without the slightest feeling of restraint. He learned the meaning of the latest American slang but found difficulty in applying it, rejoiced in the syncopation of the jazz, America's original contribution to the musical art, and by the end of a ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... should suppose that I am indulging in the vulgar English slang against French governesses, I will add, that our own was the very worst, in every respect, I ever saw, in or out of France; and that I have met with ladies in this situation every way qualified, by principles, attainments, manners, and antecedents, to ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... that about me or any of my doin's. I hate sentimental bosh as much as you hate slang, and should have been a bachelor to this day if I hadn't seen Kitty jest as I did. You see, I'd been too busy larkin' round to get time for marryin', till a couple of years ago, when I did up the job double-quick, as I'd like to do this thunderin' slow one, ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... naturally, as a matter of course, he swung in along-side the dark- eyed one and walked with her. There was no awkwardness on his part, no numb tongue. He was at home here, and he held his own royally in the badinage, bristling with slang and sharpness, that was always the preliminary to getting acquainted in these swift-moving affairs. At the corner where the main stream of people flowed onward, he started to edge out into the cross street. But the girl with the black eyes caught his arm, following ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... said Kathleen, in her easy slang, "is that he never pulls any knighthood-in-flower stuff, yet you somehow feel it's there. Know what I mean? There's a scrapper behind that ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... virago of the first order, very able with her fist, and still more formidable with her tongue. From one end of Dublin to the other she was notorious for her powers of abuse, and even in the provinces Mrs. Moriarty's language had passed into currency. The dictionary of Dublin slang had been considerably enlarged by her, and her voluble impudence had almost become proverbial. Some of O'Connell's friends, however, thought that he could beat her at the use of her own weapons. Of this, however, he had some doubts himself, ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... wandered back to the man, and the mystery surrounding his appearance and disappearance. What did the woman mean by "halibi"? She supposed it must be a slang word, so it would be no use looking in a dictionary; perhaps ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... For, like most of his class in Minnesota at that day, the Superior Being had enriched his vocabulary of slang with divers Indian words. Then, after a pause, he said: "What does he call it? I believe it's 'Charlton,' or suthin' ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... The following year, Studies for Stories was published, of which the Athenaeum said, "They are prose poems, carefully meditated, and exquisitely touched in by a teacher ready to sympathize with every joy and sorrow." The five stories are told in simple and clear language, and without slang, to which she heartily objects. For one so rich in imagination as Miss Ingelow, her prose is singularly free ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... completely guided by quotations from Shakspeare or Milton, or even from Addison or Johnson. Language has undergone such changes, even within the last sixty or seventy years, that many words, at that time considered pure, are now obsolete; while others—of which the word "mob" is a specimen—formerly slang, are now used by our best writers, and received, like pardoned outlaws, into the body of respectable citizens.' The standard, accordingly, to which the author refers in the work before us, is the sense in which a word ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... whose great eyes almost popped from his head at the continuous display of tropical marvels, and whose exclamations of astonishment and surprise, enriched from his inexhaustible store of American slang and miner's parlance, burst from his gaping mouth at every turn of the sinuous trail. From the outset, he had constituted himself Carmen's special protector, although much to Rosendo's consternation, for the lank, awkward fellow, whose lean shoulders ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... said something about 'jumping a claim.' She was accustomed to use slang of the kind. I have no idea what ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... palm of the hand), means to take all the tricks in a game of ombre; so that le voleur, the robber, is the capitalist who takes all, who gets the lion's share. Probably this verb voler had its origin in the professional slang of thieves, whence it has passed into common use, and, consequently into the ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... well enough. Few educated foreign gentlemen could have spoken it better, although there was the tendency to use slang that well-bred natives insist on picking up from British officers; and as he went on, here and there the native idiom crept through, translated. King said nothing, but listened and watched, puzzled more than he would have cared to admit by the look ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... complete language must be, with its long and arbitrary vocabulary, its intricate system of sounds; the many forms that single words may take, especially if they are verbs; the rules of grammar, the sentence structure, the idioms, slang and inflections. Heavens, what a genius for tongues these simians have![1] Where another race, after the most frightful discord and pains, might have slowly constructed one language before this earth grew cold, this race will create literally hundreds, each complete in itself, and many of them ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... goodness to tell me why I was a jolly fool, and so green, as you call it. Pity people can't teach you foreigners something better than slang. ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... go about Warwickshire, and fancy that from merely being born and wandering in those sweet sunny plains and fresh woodlands Shakspeare must have drunk in a portion of that frank artless sense of beauty which lies about his works like a bloom or dew; but a Coventry ribbon-maker, or a slang Leamington squire, are looking on those very same landscapes too, and what do they profit? You theorise about the influence which the climate and appearance of Attica must have had in ennobling those who were born there: yonder dirty, swindling, ragged blackguards, lolling ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... (the demi-savans (I don't mean Napoleon's in Egypt, but the provinvial editors—in some cases it amounts to the same thing) having proved the word to be Greek, I suppose it is slang no longer), the Tenth Illinois regiment (Dick Wolcott, you know) camped a few miles to the northward, near the woods; and hasty but shady structures were soon reared in front of the officers' tents; but one morning there arose a great wind, and the 'arboresque' screens became rapidly as non ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... have an innings," said Isaacson, smiling at the slang which suited him so little and suited Nigel ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... if it were the poorest. We hoard up our infinite wealth of words between the boards of dictionaries and in speech dole out the worn bronze coinage of our vocabulary. We are the misers of philological history. And when we can save our pennies and pass the counterfeit coin of slang, we are as happy as if we heard a blind beggar thank us for putting a pewter ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... "Only you mustn't slang Harrow. And you'd better get it into your silly head that it's the best school in this or any ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... let them float away over the garden and the orchard like fairy balloons. They had glorious afternoon teas under the beech tree. They made ice cream themselves. Jims even slid down the bannisters when he wanted to. And he could try out a slang word or two occasionally without anybody dying of horror. Miss Avery did not seem to mind ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Dale's rooms during that week. No Soph wanted to miss a sight of a captive bowl-man. Ken felt so callow and fresh in their presence that he scarcely responded to their jokes. Worry Arthur's nickname of "Kid" vied with another the coach conferred on Ken, and that was "Peg." It was significant slang expressing the little baseball man's baseball ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... a bit of slang, and I like to use bits of English slang when I can; they'll be so useful to know by-and-by when I am scolding my people. ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... of the property in my little room with brown whiskers, and I says "Blessings on you sir where is the Darling!" and he says "In Kennington Station House." I was dropping at his feet Stone at the image of that Innocence in cells with murderers when he adds "He followed the Monkey." I says deeming it slang language "O sir explain for a loving grandmother what Monkey!" He says "Him in the spangled cap with the strap under the chin, as won't keep on—him as sweeps the crossings on a round table and don't want to draw his sabre more than he can help." Then I understood ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings • Charles Dickens
... have I told you not to use slang? "Awful" isn't a pretty word, but it could be a convenience, now you mention it, if ...
— Just So Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... again. Even Sammy Brown was shone upon by the far-flung rays of the renaissance. Sammy, with his ultra clothes, his horseshoe pin, his plump face, his trite slang, his uncomprehending admiration of Ravenel—the broker's clerk made an excellent foil to the new, bright unseen visitor to ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... the whole thing was but spoofing of a silly sort that lads of this age will indulge in, for I had seen the younger one take his seat at the luncheon table. But now they spoke of a raid on the settlement to procure "grub," as the American slang for food has it. Bidding me stop on there and to utter the cry of the great horned owl if danger threatened, they stealthily crept toward the buildings of the camp. Presently came a scream, followed by a hoarse shout of rage. A second later the two dashed by me into the dense ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... consid'ble like rain, lately, hereabouts," continued the captain, coolly, in a kind of amphibious slang, characteristic of the man, "but in these yer latitudes no man kin set up to be ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... Anti-corn-law League," and so forth; and, (making every allowance for the exigencies occasioned by the dearth of topics while Parliament is not sitting,) we are exceedingly surprised, that the great London newspapers should inflict upon their readers so much of the slang and drivel of the gentry in question. In the due prosecution of our subject, we cannot avoid the topic of the new corn-law, even were we so disposed; and we shall at once proceed to our task, with two objects ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... turned to the chauffeur, who was fumbling with the tyre—it was something complicated, not only just the bursting—and in a minute or two he was down in the mud giving such practical advice. And you never heard such slang! But I believe men like that sort of thing, as the chauffeur was not a bit ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... [3] The slang of art-talk has reached the 'young men' in the furniture warehouses. A friend of mine was recommended a sideboard the other day as not being a Chippendale, but as 'having ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... table. Amid the uproar his silence was for some time unheeded; but at length Harry Whitaker, his old college chum, now lieutenant in his Majesty's navy, and with a considerable portion of broad sailor's humour and slang, observed it, and slapping him roundly on the back, cried, "Hilloa, Frank! what are you dodging about?—quizzing the rig of your convoy, because they have too much light duck set to walk steadily through ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... envied them! Then the whole superficies of his mind became filled with a desire to conceal this difference. He recalled the various characteristics of those who worked along with him. One knew all topical songs, slang and phrases; another affected a smartness in dress; a third discussed theatres with semi-professional knowledge. Harvey, however, could never have entered the world, or lived in it, if he had first to pass through the portals of such ideas! He delivered his letter; he was wearied out, ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... or form. I doubt if he ever gave us any assistance in devising a political cartoon. What his politics were I am unable to say, and I do not think he troubled himself about the matter. In 'the old days' he delighted in chaffing Horace Mayhew, with whom he exchanged 'slang' in French. With the jovial proprietor, William Bradbury, he was always on the best of terms of friendly nonsense, being invariably his left-hand neighbour at 'The Table.' He was a genuine Bohemian of the artistic fraternity (as given in his Trilby) with the true polish of an English gentleman, ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... her capital letter, had divined this near-at-hand truth along with the rest. Lowell, almost the greatest and finest realist who ever wrought in verse, showed us that Elizabeth was still Queen where he heard Yankee farmers talk. One need not invite slang into the company of its betters, though perhaps slang has been dropping its "s" and becoming language ever since the world began, and is certainly sometimes delightful and forcible beyond the reach of the dictionary. I ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... was selected as the place of confinement. The name by which she was spoken or written of was Corpach, an ominous distinction, corresponding to what is called subject in the lecture-room of an anatomist, or shot in the slang of the Westport murderers' [Burke and Hare]. Sir Walter adds that 'it was said of M'Neil of Barra, that when he dined, his bagpipes blew a particular strain, intimating that all the world might go to dinner.' Croker's Boswell, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... lovely and the goose hangs high!" cried the Captain, who on grand occasions was not above a little slang. ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... novels, the theories enunciated in his magazine articles, adulating the intrusion of positivism upon art. But in the works of his best pupil, Rosny, the only talented novelist who is really imbued with the ideas of the master, naturalism has become a sickening jargon of chemist's slang serving to display a layman's erudition, which is about as profound as the scientific knowledge of a shop foreman. No, there is no getting around it. Everything this whole poverty-stricken school has produced ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... want you all, the whole kit o' you, to come to my house tomorrow morning to see Rebecca Mary. I'm going to say it over again. Tomorrow morning, to see Rebecca Mary!" setting apart the syllables with the pointing finger. "You can play in my back yard," said Aunt Olivia, sublimely unconscious of slang. ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has | | been preserved. | | | | For the interest of the reader, 'the morning hate' is | | WWI slang for the "Stand To Arms". | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... low-looking half-breeds in gaudy shirts, and wearing their black hair long and unkempt, were filling in the time waiting for breakfast, shooting "crap dice." The only words spoken between them were the filthy epithets and slang they addressed to the dice as they threw them, and the deep-throated curses as money passed ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... girl rattled off slang as if thoroughly familiar with it. But this dampened Thornton's ardor for no more ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... still, perhaps wholly vulgar obscenities. Were he in his boyhood given a present in the pictorial line, it would be of an Opera-dancer or a race-course, or an abomination of London low life. What "slang" is to the ear, so would it be to the eye; and such is in nine cases out of ten the first education of those aspirants in art, who, ere they have unlearned any thing, set up for themselves—and abuse the old masters. Generally ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... said Henderson, "your eternal friend's delicate insinuation that you are a donkey. Here, come with me and I'll take you to be patted on." Henderson's exuberant spirits prevented his ever speaking without giving vent to slang, bad ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... her of the smugglers and owlers who had used the Woolpack as their headquarters long ago, riding by moonlight to the cross-roads, with their mouths full of slang—cant talk of "mackerel" and "fencing" and "hornies" and ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... and well-built, with handsome, strongly-marked features, he gave at first sight an impression of strength—which faded somewhat when he began to talk. It was not so much the manner of his speech—with its rapid slang, and its way of turning everything to a jest—as the feeling it produced, that the brain behind it took naturally the path of least resistance. He was in fact one of those personalities who are often enough prominent in politics and social life, by reason of their appearance, position, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... suspicion. After exchanging a few words with each other, one of them spoke to him in a jargon which he seemed to understand, though we could not. He replied with hesitation. For some time they continued asking him questions, and then talking to each other in a slang which was as incomprehensible to us as was the language they ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... "I don't believe in slang," he added, as if to fortify himself against a conviction. "You needn't go, deary. Stay ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... The old feudal distinctions are still perpetuated; the "man" still speaks his "plain Anglo-Saxon," and the "gentleman" still speaks his refined Latinized speech. In every language, it is true, there are social distinctions in speech, and every language has its slang. But in English these distinctions are perpetuated in the very structure of the language. Elsewhere the working-class speak—with a little difference in the quality—a language needing no substantial transformation to become the language of society, which differs ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... competition for livelihood, and holds out to the workers as a stimulus to exertion the hope of their rising into a monopolist class of non-producers, it is yet possible to "moralize" capital (to use a slang phrase of the Positivists): that is to say, that a sentiment imported from a religion which looks upon another world as the true sphere of action for mankind, will override the necessities of our ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... the term in its slang sense, and mean to insinuate that we are a couple of unfortunate beggars, I ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... with a blush, "don't you know me? Have I changed much? I should have known you anywhere; and I am glad to see you, awfully glad (excuse the slang, but it is such a relief to be able to say 'awful' without being pulled up by Aunt Chambers). Just think, it is three years since we met. Do you remember Grumps? How do I look? Do you think you will like me as much ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... difficult to find words to describe Nieuport as it is to talk of metaphysics in slang. The words don't seem invented that will convey that haunting sense of desolation, that supreme quiet under the shock of continually firing guns. Hardly anything is left now of the little homely bits that, when I saw the place last autumn, reminded one that this was once a city of living human ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... thumbing page ten of the grammar, but he had seized upon a good many slang phrases, supercharged ejaculations. Though the undercurrent of his discouragement about his progress was considerable, it interfered little with his acquainting him proficiently with the restaurant ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... in the big dark eyes fixed on Laura's face. Nobody laughed, nobody even chuckled, and yet it was a jolly letter that they read first, full of spirit and life and fun. High-hearted adventure rollicked through it, and the humor that makes light of hardship, and the latest slang of the front adorned its pages with grotesquely picturesque phrases. The Cameron boys were obviously getting a good time out of the war. Bob had got something else, too. The letter had been delayed ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... propriety, accidental disorder of the dress, grotesque postures, vulgar gestures of derision or defiance, blows, painful accidents and mishaps,—if not too serious,—deformations of the body (humpbacks), epithets and nicknames, slang and other abuses of language (like mispronunciation by foreigners), vituperation, caricature and burlesque of respectable types like the pedant, dandy, Puritan, imbecile, or the rich and great, always raise a laugh in the crowd and are relished by the crowd. They are constant elements of farce ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... their practical union. It is a thing that must be. But it is remarkable that while the French mind is agog to apprehend every fact and detail it can about the British, to make the wisest and fullest use of our binding necessities, that strange English "incuria"—to use the new slang—attains to its ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... floor of the room, a man in a broad-skirted green coat, with corduroy knee-smalls and gray cotton stockings, was performing the most popular steps of a hornpipe, with a slang and burlesque caricature of grace and lightness, which, combined with the very appropriate character of his costume, was inexpressibly absurd. Another man, evidently very drunk, who had probably been tumbled into bed by his companions, was sitting up between the sheets, warbling as ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... Jane Carson, facing round from her coffee cup on the washstand. "I'm sorry to criticize, but if you could just talk a little slang or something. Folks'll never think you belong to me. 'Intrude!' Now, that sounds stuck up! You oughtta say 'be in the way,' or something ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... and when it comes to painting them, aerial perspective and anatomical detail must come right. This is the first and the great endowment. And the second is like unto it in—Shall I use the fashionable artistic slang and say preciousness? It is the gift of a dexterous hand, winged with lightness and steady as steel, sensitive as a blind man's finger-tips, yet unerring in its stroke as the piston of a steamship. This is a gift as well as the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... qualities in which they feel themselves to be chiefly deficient. Their reverence and affection are bestowed upon her whose voice is ever soft, gentle and low, and whose mild influence is shed like a balm upon the labours and troubles of life. Of slang, and of slaps upon the back, of strength, whether of language or of body, they get enough and to spare amongst themselves, and they are scarcely to be blamed if at certain moments they should prefer refinement to roughness, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... miles off, but ere they had gone two April knew the painter as well as if they had been twin sisters. Clive Connal hadn't a secret or a shilling she would not share with the whole world. She used the vocabulary of a horse-dealer and the slang of a schoolboy, but her mind was as fragrant as a field that the Lord hath blessed, and her heart was the heart of a child. It was shameful to deceive such a creature, and April's nature revolted from the ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... such slang from the educated tongue of a college boy?" she exclaimed with a gesture of astonishment ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... doesn't carry me anywhere except into trouble. When I think of all the pains I've taken to learn how to talk like the dictionary! Why, nobody talks like the dictionary any longer! They all talk slang, every one of them—only they don't talk the kind that Julius Gershom and all these politicians do. If you could have seen Mrs. Berkeley's face when I told her I'd had a 'grand' time to-night—she looked exactly like a frozen fish—though just the moment before ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... distressing thought of all was that I saw my children predestined to the same fate. I saw them growing up in complete destitution of those country sights and sounds which had made my own youth delightful; acquiring the superficial sharpness of the city child and his slang; suffering at times by the anaemia and listlessness bred of vitiated air; high-strung and sensitive as those must needs be whose nerves are in perpetual agitation; and when, in chance excursions to the country, I compared my children with the children ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... Father Murray laughed. "I know that you wanted to use that particular expressive bit of our particularly expressive slang. What I mean is this: People study religion nowadays—that is, English-speaking people—with the Catholic Church left out. Yet she claims the allegiance of over three hundred million people. Without her, Christianity would be merely ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach
... it is one of the many true, natural, and, nowadays, conventional means of expression. It is an idiom, perhaps a "set or series of colloquialisms," similar to those that have added through centuries and through natural means, some beauty to all languages. Every language is but the evolution of slang, and possibly the broad "A" in Harvard may have come down from the "butcher of Southwark." To examine ragtime rhythms and the syncopations of Schumann or of Brahms seems to the writer to show how much alike they are not. Ragtime, as we hear it, is, of course, more (but not ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... "do not let me hear a repetition of such language from you. If you wish to join our game, you may do so, if you will play in a gentlemanly manner. But I will not permit the use of slang about this house. Now, Rollo, that was better; much better. But you must aim more accurately and pitch less violently. You will never learn anything until you acquire it, unless you pay attention while giving your mind to it. Now, play ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... poppy straw in commercial operations that produce the drug for medical use. Qat (kat, khat) is a stimulant from the buds or leaves of Catha edulis that is chewed or drunk as tea. Quaaludes is the North American slang term for methaqualone, a pharmaceutical depressant. Stimulants are drugs that relieve mild depression, increase energy and activity, and include cocaine (coke, snow, crack), amphetamines (Desoxyn, Dexedrine), ephedrine, ecstasy (clarity, ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... own work, as for example by Professor Masson, who spoke of "the shrewdness and sagacity of some of his critical prefaces to his novels, where he discusses principles of literature without seeming to call them such."[491] Scott was quick to notice "cant and slang"[492] in the professional language of men in all arts; and he valued most highly the remarks of those whose intelligence had not been overlaid by ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... same time free of the nursery, where, it appeared, that 'Phoebe was the jolliest little fellow in the world,' and Lieschen was the only 'good-natured body going,' and knew no end of Mahrchen. The boy spoke a very odd mixture of Lieschen's German and of English, pervaded by stable slang, and was altogether a curious study of the effects of absentee parents; nevertheless Honora and Lucilla both took a considerable fancy to him, the latter patronizing him to such a degree that she hardly allowed him to eat the much-needed breakfast, which recalled colour ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Edmund,' returned Mrs Sparkler, 'is the slang term for indisposition, he has. If it is not, I am unable to give an opinion on the barbarous language you address to Edward's sister. That he contracted Malaria Fever somewhere, either by travelling day and night to Rome, where, after all, he arrived too late to see poor dear papa before ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... Dozia answered witheringly. "I can't see that the adventure 'got us anywhere' as brother Tom would say. I haven't any brother, you know, Jane dear, but it always sounds better to blame one's slang on him, don't ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... rising to enthusiasm as she called the school roll. "Kid McCoy uses too much slang. We'll teach her manners. Rosalie doesn't like to study. We'll pour her full of algebra and Latin. Harriet Gladden's a jelly fish, Mary Deskam's an awful little liar, Evalina Smith's a silly goose, ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... a sailor, and his knowledge of sea-life, of seamen, and of sea-slang, is generally attributed to the instructions of his brother, the master of a ship. This brother was subsequently lost at sea, and Dibdin is said to have written Poor Tom Bowling as his elegy. Dibdin's sea-lore was, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... Anak—with that air which, never vaunting strength, always made you aware of its repression. I could fancy hearing Mrs. Montresor say, "That air of his! it always fetches women!" for she loved a little slang, by some antipodal attraction of her refinement, and I instinctively stiffened myself, determined it should never fetch me. And here he was calling his allies, the spirits and powers of the dark ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... being able to appear as much at home in one as in the other. Delighted at our prowess, we often whispered, "The princess, I swear, would not believe her eyes if she saw us now;" and then in terrible slang we shouted a benediction on some "crib" that was going to be broken into that evening. And we thought there was something very thrilling in leaving the Rue de la Gaieté, returning home to dress, and presenting our spotless selves to the élite. And ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... snicker when I confess the fondness I had for the Sunday-school. I don't want any one to think I am laying claim to the record of having always been a good little boy; nor that everything I did was wise. No; I confess I did my share of deviltry, that some of my deeds were foolish, and (to use the slang of that time) I often got it in the neck. Once I bantered a big fat boy to a fight. He chased me and I ran and crawled into a place so narrow that I knew he couldn't follow me. I crawled under ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... their faces towards their work, and a pencil or a pinch of clay held thoughtfully between their fingers, appealed to him as if he had remained young and prosperous, and they had gone forward to age and hard work. They were very quaint at times. They talked the American slang of the war days and of the days before the war; without a mastery of Italian, they often used the idioms of that tongue in their English speech. They were dim and vague about the country, with whose affairs they had kept up through the newspapers. ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... not even the same courtesy shown to the weaker sex either. I have heard young men and young women—young ladies, I suppose I ought to say—who address each other in a 'hail-fellow-well-met' sort of manner, but what can you expect," in a disgusted tone, "when the girls talk slang, and ape their young brothers? I think the 'sweet madame' of our great-grandmothers' times preferable to these slipshod manners. I would rather see our girls live and die in single blessedness than marry ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... fact. Eiren, melleiren, sideunes, and the like—words, titles, which indicate an unflinching elaboration of the attitudes of youthful subordination and command with responsibility—remain as a part of what we might [222] call their "public-school slang." They ate together "in their divisions" (agelai) on much the same fare every day at a sort of messes; not reclined, like Ionians or Asiatics, but like heroes, the princely males, in Homer, sitting upright on their wooden benches; were "inspected" ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... consequences, now ran the "forlorn hope" either of ending his days or obtaining a tomb in Westminster Abbey. From the captain, after a time, the term descended to all the little gallant band. In no part of our community will you find such {527} meaning expressions (often very slang ones) used as in the army. A lady, without hearing anything to shock "ears polite," might listen to the talk of a mess table, and be unable to understand clearly in what the conversation consisted. "He is gone to the bad"—meaning, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 213, November 26, 1853 • Various
... German slang expression with the general significance of the English "gone to smash," but also a hundred other and wider meanings, impossible to render ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... wished me to drink with him, but I would none of his drinks. He grew pathetically tender in his professions; but I walked beside him in silence or answered him in stately courtesies; and when we got to the landing-place, passed the word in English slang ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... solely to the English language, I think I might fairly take exception to a string of instances with which A.E.B. endeavours to refute me from a vocabulary of a language very expressive, no doubt, yet commonly called "slang". The words in question are not English: I never use them myself, nor do I recognise the right or necessity for any one else to do so; and I might, indeed, deem this a sufficient answer. But the fact is that the language in some degree ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 36. Saturday, July 6, 1850 • Various
... free my mind with neatness and despatch. I simply wish to go over the whole affair, from Alfred to Omaha; and you've got to let me talk as much slang and nonsense as I want. And then I'll skip all the details I can. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... said before, I learn languages with incredible difficulty, a fact which I cannot reconcile with the extreme interest which I take in philology and linguistics, and the discoveries which I have made; as, for instance, that of Shelta in England, or my labours in jargons, such as Pidgin-English, Slang, and Romany. But, as the reader has probably perceived, I was a boy with an inherited good constitution only from the paternal side, and a not very robust one from my mother, while my mind, weakened by long illness, ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... whose vivid genius strays 'Mid Drury's stews to incubate her lays, And in St. Giles's slang conveys her tropes, Wreathing the poet's lines with hangmen's ropes; You who conceive 'tis poetry to teach The sad bravado of a dying speech; Or, when possessed with a sublimer mood, Show "Jack o'Dandies" ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... not lift a corner of the mask That makes these solemn days so much more solemn? A very little ray is all I ask To light the utter darkness—say a column Of "stories" which your slang describes as "snappy;" With ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various
... stunningly, carnageously—as Johnny, just gifted with his commission, and thereby with much slang, described her; and in truth she carried her bunting well, as Captain Stubbard told his wife, and Captain Tugwell confirmed it. But the eyes of everybody with half an eye followed the two forms in silver-grey. That ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... chiefly obvious to the sober spectator. As the sober spectator, he sang of violent delights which have violent ends. He may best be left to illustrate student life for himself. The 'waster' of whom he chants is the slang name borne by the local ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... loose an earful that time," spoke Bud, in picturesque, western slang. "We'll have to let the bottle-breaker wait for a spell, until we size up this rustler question. We may have to get up a sheriff's posse and clean out ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... Heaven's sake!" said Tom, "or we shall have you blue next, my good fellow. I'd go myself, but they'd not hear me, for certain; I am no Christian, I suppose: at least, I can't talk their slang:—but I know who can! ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... "It's worse than slang in the Army," laughed Hal. "The army 'goat' is the very new officer who has a lot of extra duties thrust upon him that the older officers don't want. Those duties of the 'goat' are generally both very trifling ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Lieutenants - or, Serving Old Glory as Line Officers • H. Irving Hancock
... She spends so much of her life under the all-pervading eye of authority, she is so drilled, and lectured, and ruled and regulated, that, when the eye of authority is off her, she seems naturally to degenerate into licence. No speech so interwoven with slang as the speech of a schoolgirl—except that ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... about his enemy, the then Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Lancaster of Queen's—'Dr. Lancaster, when Bachelor of Arts, was plucked for his declamation.' But it is most unlikely that so good a Tory as Hearne would have used a slang phrase, unless it had become well established by long usage. 'Pluck', in the sense of causing to fail, is not unfrequently found in English eighteenth century literature, without any relation to a university; the metaphor from 'plucking' a bird is an obvious one, and may be compared to ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... queered ourselves," said she, struck by the phrase that fell from his lips. It was not Anne's habit to use slang, but somehow George's way of putting the situation into words was so aggravatingly complete that she almost resented his prior use of an expression that she had never used before in her life. It did sum up the business, neatly ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... to her, a citizen of Edinburgh, a comically unhistoric air about the place. The gaily-coloured rows of neat dwellings that debouched on the esplanade, and the line of hotels and boarding-houses that faced the sea, were as new as the pantomime songs of last Christmas or this year's slang. One might conceive them being designed by architects who knew as little of the past as children know of death, and painted by fresh-faced people to match themselves, and there was a romping arbitrariness about the design and decoration of the place which ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... lines, my favourite measure, such as Cowper Hill and Solitude. In some of your story telling Ballads the provincial phrases sometimes startle me. I think you are too profuse with them. In poetry slang [underlined] of every kind is to be avoided. There is a rustick Cockneyism as little pleasing as ours of London. Transplant Arcadia to Helpstone. The true rustic style, the Arcadian English, I think is ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... at the double-quick, with occasional rests. The road lay along Deer Creek, passing several plantations; and occasionally, at the bends, it crossed the swamp, where the water came above my hips. The smaller drummer-boys had to carry their drums on their heads, and most of the men slang their cartridge-boxes around their necks. The soldiers generally were glad to have their general and field officers afoot, but we gave them a fair specimen of marching, accomplishing about twenty-one ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... the bush," said I, desperately clothing my sentiments in slang, after the manner of my age; "the fellow who gets you for a wife, Maria, must be uncommonly fortunate, and I hope that with a good husband, who made your wishes his first consideration, you would not be ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... cheese. When the miserable remnant of us were leaving Andersonville months afterward, I saw him, sleek, rotund, and well-clothed, lounging leisurely in the door of a tent. He regarded us a moment contemptuously, and then went on conversing with a fellow N'Yaarker, in the foul slang that none but such as he ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... innuendoes of the cabaret and the witticisms of the messroom! Pornography is admitted, but science is not! I tell you, sir, that is the thing which must be changed! We must elevate the soul of the young man by taking these facts out of the realm of mystery and of slang. We must awaken in him a pride in that creative power with which each one of us is endowed. We must make him understand that he is a sort of temple in which is prepared the future of the race, and we must teach him that he must transmit, intact, the ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... fleet was moored." "Handled his fives well" of course refers to the "sparring" of the cabman who wanted to fight Mr. Pickwick. "Friend in the green jemmy" refers to Mr. Winkle, who, we are told in Chapter I., "wore a new green shooting-coat," &c. "Pig's whisper" is slang for a very brief space of time. Bartlett says the Americans have "pig's whistle" ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... and Italian, and talking poetry to him. "Reglarly up a tree, by jingo!" exclaimed the modest boy, who could not face the gentlest of her sex—not even Briggs—when she began to talk to him; whereas, put him at Iffley Lock, and he could out-slang the ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of any suit of cards, or of dice. It is also a term used in tennis when both sides have each scored three points in a game, or five games in a set; to win the game or set two points or games must then be won consecutively. The earliest instances in English of the use of the slang expression "the deuce," in exclamations and the like, date from the middle of the 17th century. The meaning was similar to that of "plague" or "mischief" in such phrases as "plague on you," "mischief take you" and the like. The use of the word as an euphemism for "the devil" is later. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... to continue in his responsible office. A trait, after the manner of the find in the Lido, forces itself upon me here. It was to this man that some youthful colleagues in the hospital adapted the then popular slang of that day: "No Goethe has written that," "No Schiller composed ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... Napping. 'To top' and 'to nap' are slang terms signifying to cheat, especially with dice. cf. R. Head, Canting Academy (1673), 'What chance of the dye is soonest thrown in topping, shoring, palming, napping.' Both words occur very frequently, and are amply explained in ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... Elf—da," says he, "was too exquisitely pretty; I could make no fun out of that."' Piozzi's Anec. p. 37. I doubt whether Johnson used the word fun, which he describes in his Dictionary as 'a low cant [slang] word.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... you would outgrow your slang, Zen," she remonstrated gently. "Men like Mr. Transley are likely to judge ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... a man of that—of that—persuasion still remain an anarchist when alone, quite alone and going to bed, for instance? Does he lay his head on the pillow, pull his bedclothes over him, and go to sleep with the necessity of the chambardement general, as the French slang has it, of the general blow-up, always present to his mind? And if so how can he? I am sure that if such a faith (or such a fanaticism) once mastered my thoughts I would never be able to compose myself sufficiently to sleep or ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... standard of public sentiment in regard to temperance has been nobly raised; people don't talk now as formerly of a man's being somewhat elevated or tipsy, or merely overtaken, when he is drunk, for they have learned to call things by their right names, and not practise imposture by slang phrases. Public resolutions have been passed against giving spirituous liquor at wakes or funerals, churns, ploughing-matches, or evening parties; men and women can go to market and fair, buy and sell, and yet never think of ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... "No, Redhead! The devil dragged the man who did that down to the lower regions long ago, on account of my tongue. It's his son. The younger, the sharper. This stripling made Casper Rubling,—[Dice, in gambler's slang]—poor wretch, pay for his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Jimmie's indifference is assumed, and both Von Engel and Von Furzmann are determined that my silence shall voice itself. I have no doubt that they would like to have me write it, so that they could boast of it afterward to their fellow officers. Now, as Jimmie would say in his frightful slang, 'I'm going to give them a run for their money.' Von Engel will probably beseech you to arrange to keep Jimmie at your side, so that he can have a few words with Mrs. Jimmie. Von Furzmann will plead with you to permit him a word with me. I need hardly tell you that ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... native land and joined their friends in the debris heaps. The protection of the debris heaps was not quite so good as that afforded by the mines, and the music of the cannon the troglodytes had always with them. But there was more liberty and comfort in the caves, which were dry as dust and—no slang intended—not too dusty. ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... Oh dear me! I desired to shape a Democratic Budget! But I fear 'twill be a fizzle, howsoe'er I fake and fudge it! Second E. M. Don't talk like that, my H-RC-T, for such cynic slang is shocking! But—the Revenue Returns, no doubt, our dearest hopes are mocking. First E. M. Oh, I know you ape the casuist, and love the pleonastic, But how tackle our taxation in a manner really drastic With a Revenue declining! From the task my courage blenches, But—what will be the consequence ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... temperament and his pursuits were also analogous; he was a great pugilist, knew the merits of every man in the ring, and the precise date and circumstances attending every battle which had been fought for the previous thirty years. His conversation was at all times interlarded with the slang terms appropriated to the science, to which he was so devoted. In other points he was a brave and trust-worthy officer, although he valued the practical above the theoretical branches of his profession, and was better pleased when superintending the mousing ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Language itself in its very origination would seem to be traceable to individuals. Their peculiarities have given it its character. We are often able in fact to trace particular phrases or idioms to individuals; we know the history of their rise. Slang surely, as it is called, comes of, and breathes of the personal. The connection between the force of words in particular languages and the habits and sentiments of the nations speaking them has often been pointed out. ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... which are the fulfilment of the highest social duties, are poorly performed, and, indeed, little understood. Not many of those who think at all think beyond the line of established custom and routine. They may take pains in their letters to obey the ordinary rules of grammar, to avoid the use of slang phrases and vulgar expressions, to write a clear sentence; but how few seek for the not less imperative rules which are prescribed by politeness and good sense! Of those who should know them, no small proportion habitually, from thoughtlessness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... everybody. This absence of reserve was especially characteristic of her, and was another reason why all relied on her. She had long ago taken up Fru Kaas—entertained her first and foremost. Angelika Nagel used in conversation modern Christiania slang which is the latest development of the language. In the choice of expressions, words such as hideous were applied to what was the very opposite of hideous, such as "hideously amusing," "hideously handsome." "Snapping" to anything that was liquid, as "snapping good punch." One ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... call slang or flash songs. He tells us that there were poets who composed songs in the dialect of the mob; and who succeeded in this kind of poetry, adapted to their various characters. The French call such songs Chansons a la ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... but the reply to this question was clear. "It is his day to go,—the garrison can't live without provision,—if he don't go to-day, we must skulk another twenty-four hours,—we must not venture with him, there will be murder!" then followed several sentences in such broad slang, as Tamar could not comprehend, though she thought she understood the tendency of these words, which were mixed with oaths and terms so brutal, that her blood ran cold in thinking of them; "Caught in his own snare,—he will sink in his own dyke,—we have him now, pelf ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... him. He had struck a bell, and the office seemed suddenly filled with clerks. Van Teyl's words were incoherent—a string of strange directions, punctuated by slang which was, so far as Lutchester was concerned, unintelligible. The whole place seemed to wake into a clamour of telephone bells, shouts, the clanging and opening of the lift gates, and the hurried tramp of footsteps in the corridors outside. Lutchester ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... you be so good as to spare us your slang speeches," continued Mademoiselle de Corandeuil, who seemed to become more crabbed as the young girl's confusion increased. "What a fine education for a young lady! and one who has just come from the 'Sacred Heart'! One that has taken five prizes not fifteen days ago! I really ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... blonde, and the other an equally pronounced brunette, and he suffered a great deal because of the uncertainty as to which of the two pursuers he desired the most to avoid. It seemed to him that at last he was cornered, and the fiendish young ladies began literally, as the slang phrase is, to mop the deck with him. He felt himself being slowly pushed back and forward across the deck, and he wondered how long he would last if this treatment were kept up. By and by he found himself lying still in his ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... of "conviction," &c. Mr. Bowles proceeds to Mr. Gilchrist; whom he charges with "slang" and "slander," besides a small subsidiary indictment of "abuse, ignorance, malice," and so forth. Mr. Gilchrist has, indeed, shown some anger; but it is an honest indignation, which rises up in defence ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... feel as if I held an official position in the brigade. I make great progress in knowledge of military affairs—am quite familiar, as you may perceive, with the details of the last campaign, and begin to understand both the technical language and the slang of our comrades; who give me plenty of their company, and right merry companions they are. But, perhaps," said she, looking at him doubtingly, "you may be able to understand me, and excuse my weakness, when I confess that there is still so much of the ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... and take up his wanderings and his discoveries. Some day, I will tell you how he broke his promise to help a friend. That was long since, and he has, by this time, been nearly spoilt for what he would call shikar. He is forgetting the slang, and the beggar's cant, and the marks, and the signs, and the drift of the undercurrents, which, if a man would master, he must ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... encouraged the idea that Joseph Sell was a real book, ignoring the fact that the very title suggests doubts, and was probably meant to suggest them. In Norfolk, as elsewhere, a 'sell' is a word in current slang used for an imposture or a cheat, and doubtless Borrow meant to make merry with the credulous. There was, we may be perfectly sure, no Joseph Sell, and it is more reasonable to suppose that it was the sale of his translation of Klinger's ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... Democrat. He is, as his official expositor, the late Mr. Alfred Hodder, says, "a typical American of the new time." No old-fashioned Democrat would have smoked cigarettes, tossed dice in public for drinks, and "handed out" slang to his constituents; and his unconventionally in these respects is merely an occasional expression of a novel, individual, and refreshing point of view. Mr. Jerome alone among American politicians has made a specialty of plain speaking. He has revolted ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... elbow, process, apophysis[obs3], condyle, bulb, node, nodule, nodosity[obs3], tongue, dorsum, bump, clump; sugar loaf &c. (sharpness) 253; bow; mamelon[obs3]; molar; belly, corporation|!, pot belly, gut[coll]; withers, back, shoulder, lip, flange. [convexities on skin] pimple, zit [slang]; wen, wheel, papula[Med], pustule, pock, proud flesh, growth, sarcoma, caruncle[obs3], corn, wart, pappiloma, furuncle, polypus[obs3], fungus, fungosity[obs3], exostosis[obs3], bleb, blister, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... a corner of the mask That makes these solemn days so much more solemn? A very little ray is all I ask To light the utter darkness—say a column Of "stories" which your slang describes as "snappy;" With these I could ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various
... the words were uttered was so venomous, that Bob realized the speaker meant mischief, though he was ignorant of the fact that in the slang of tramps who beat their way on railroads, "con" betokened conductor, and "blind baggage" the platform of the coach in a passenger train nearest ...
— Bob Chester's Grit - From Ranch to Riches • Frank V. Webster
... called John spoke up sharply and said, it was "rum" to hear me "pitchin' into fellers" for "goin' it in the slang line," when I used all the flash words myself ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Professor Masson, who spoke of "the shrewdness and sagacity of some of his critical prefaces to his novels, where he discusses principles of literature without seeming to call them such."[491] Scott was quick to notice "cant and slang"[492] in the professional language of men in all arts; and he valued most highly the remarks of those whose intelligence had not been ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... dear lady—utterly impossible. Can the Foss River help freezing in winter? Can Jacky help talking prairie slang? Can Lablache help grubbing for money? Can you help caring for all of our worthless selves who belong to the Foss River Settlement? Nothing can alter these things. John would play poker on the lid of his own coffin, while the undertakers were winding his shroud about him—if they'd lend him ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... the note of vehement vitality, of uncontrollable, hasty activity, rose high. Everywhere was violent advertisement, until his brain swam at the tumult of light and colour. And Babble Machines of a peculiarly rancid tone were abundant and filled the air with strenuous squealing and an idiotic slang. "Skin your eyes and slide," "Gewhoop, Bonanza," ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... crystallised carbon, or a nugget of virgin ore, strolls to the "saloon" and shouts for champagne. The mild Hindoo imbibes it quietly, but approvingly, as he watches the evolutions of the Nautch girls, and his partiality for it has already enriched the Anglo-Bengalee vocabulary and London slang with the word "simkin." It is transported on camel-backs across the deserts of Central Asia, and in frail canoes up the mighty Amazon. The two-sworded Daimio calls for it in the tea-gardens of Yokohama, and the New Yorker, when not rinsing ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... wasn't slang nor sarcasm what I was usin'," sez I, smoothin' it over. "That gigantic maid you mentioned is part o' the tale ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... the most beautiful Christmas present you can imagine, Adam?" she said. "If you are not suited with this it must be because, in the old slang, ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... Coxeter—to use a phrase which he himself would not have used, for he avoided the use of slang—"given himself away." Over his lantern-shaped face, across his thin, determined mouth, there had still lingered a trace of the supercilious smile with which he had been looking round him. And, as he had helped Mrs. Archdale ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... words into approximate meaning in English, saying it was as difficult to translate these intimate and slang phrases as it would be to put "Yankee Doodle" into French or German. His translation, as he wrote it on a scrap of ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... schoolgirl off duty. She spends so much of her life under the all-pervading eye of authority, she is so drilled, and lectured, and ruled and regulated, that, when the eye of authority is off her, she seems naturally to degenerate into licence. No speech so interwoven with slang as the speech of a schoolgirl—except ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... several gentlemen who have spoken on this subject—the Rev. Mr. Collyer, a gentleman standing as high as anybody, and I have nothing to say against him—because I denounced God who upheld murder, and slavery and polygamy, he said that what I said was slang. I would like to have it compared with any sermon that ever issued from the lips of that gentleman. And before he gets through he admits that the Old Testament is a rotten tree that will soon fall into the earth and act as ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... drop the old slang since we've given up the old business. These good folks are making a gentleman of you, and I won't be the one to spoil their work. Hold on, my dears, and I'll show you how they say good-morning in California," he added, beckoning to the little girls, ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... claim for property, would ever think of urging any other; nor would any legislator who had sound and sufficient reasons for his measures—reasons that could properly justify him before God and man for his laws—have recourse to slang to sustain him. If these anti-renters were right, they would have no need of secret combinations, of disguises, blood-and-thunder names, and special agents in the legislature of the land. The right ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... almost the truth. Belle's loyalty, affection, good nature, and willingness were beyond price, but Belle's noisiness, her slang, and her utter lack of training were a sore trial. When November came, with rains that kept the little household at Rising Water prisoners indoors, Mrs. Tressady began to think she could not ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... carding of wool, however, did in those days bring with it much profit, so that our ancient friend, when dying, was declared, in whatever slang then prevailed, to cut up exceeding well. For sons and daughters there was ample sustenance with assistance of due industry; for friends and relatives some relief for grief at this great loss; for aged dependents comfort in declining years. This was much for one old man to get done in that dark ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... in upon you, but I saw you from afar, and you looked awfully good to me." Her clear enunciation made the slang phrase sound like the purest English. "I have just been with your principal in her office. She told me to come here and look over the list of subjects. Do you think me unpardonably rude?" She looked appealingly at the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... perch-fisher. He had a new white hat, stuck on one side of his head, a new green overcoat, new gray trousers, and new boots. In his hand was a whalebone stick, with a silver handle. Nothing could be more vagrant, devil-me-Garish, and, to use a slang word, tigerish, than his whole air. Yet, vulgar as was his costume, he did not himself seem vulgar, but rather eccentric, lawless,—something out of the pale of convention. His face looked more pale and more puffed than before, the tip of his nose redder; ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Moreover, the child exhibited an ingenuous amazement and admiration in presence of his wealth, which flattered his parvenu pride; and sometimes, when he teased her, she would break out with the droll phrases of a Paris gamine, slang redolent of the faubourgs, seasoned by her pretty, piquant face, inclined to pallor, which not even superficiality could deprive of its distinction. So he never had ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... are hundreds and thousands of good, honest girls, I'm thankful to say, but they are so terribly outspoken and up to date. Of course, I am only an old-fashioned frump and sadly behind the times, but though slang may not be sinful and a little outward roughness is only the husk, and there is plenty of sweet, sound kernel inside, yet I must own, Livy, I like gentleness ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... afterwards. But all the same he could never bear any allusion to this tree-climbing episode in his martial career, which, as it happened, had taken place in full view of his retainers, among whom it remained the greatest of jokes. Indeed, he wanted to kill a man, the wag of the party, who gave him a slang name which, being translated, ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... picture passed, sold it as a curiosity, not an original portrait, for L5. The buyer, being a person of ingenuity, and fonder of money than curiosities, fabricated a series of letters to and from Sir Kenelm Digby, and, passing over to France, planted—the slang term used among the less honest of the curiosity-dealing fraternity—the picture and the letters in an old chateau near Paris. Of course a confederate managed to discover the plant, in the presence of witnesses, and great was the excitement ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... spiritualistic one, which expresses itself in spirit returns and messages from the other world. Geographically the most favoured stations for wireless heavenly connections seem to be Brooklyn, New York, and Los Angeles, California. The adherents of this underworld philosophy have a slang of their own, and the result is that their letters, while they spring from the deepest emotions, sound as if they were copied from the same sample book. The better style begins about like this: "Knowing ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... let my eyes twinkle, or my face do that weird thing, "break into a smile"; but Jack Morrison told me that Miss MacDonald had "set her cap at the great Somerled," and torn it off and stamped on it in rage because—this is Jack's slang—Sir S. "wasn't ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the trial, which appeared after its termination, in the Kennebec Journal, published at Augusta, the Hon. James G. Blaine, the writer, declared epigrammatically that, in the defence of Judge Chase, "Paine furnished the logic, Choate the rhetoric, and Smith the slang." ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... sake!" said Tom, "or we shall have you blue next, my good fellow. I'd go myself, but they'd not hear me, for certain; I am no Christian, I suppose: at least, I can't talk their slang:—but I know who can! ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... of words at command, Scotch, English and slang in promiscuous alliance. He at length against Syntax has taken his stand, And sets all the Nine Parts of ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... play by letting them talk to each other. Many of our playwrights are endowed with a sense of situation; several of them have a gift for characterisation, or at least for caricature; and most of them can write easy and natural dialogue, especially in slang. But very few of them start out with something to say, as Mr. Moody started out in The Great Divide and Mr. Thomas ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... FIFEE assumes that, when the aged knight said they had gone "four miles in the hour" on the level, he meant that four miles was the distance gone, not merely the rate. This would have been—if FIFEE will excuse the slang expression—a "sell," ill-suited to the dignity of ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... the Boston divines "a stinking carrion and a human invention," was fined L10, while Thomas Makepeace, another Weymouth malcontent, was informed by those in power that "they were weary of him," or, in modern slang, that "he made them tired." Parson Lenthal himself, being sent for by the convention, weakened at once in a way his church followers must have bitterly despised; he was "quickly convinced of his error and evil." His conviction was followed with his confession, and in open court ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... things useful. I can split a bullet on a penknife; I know the secret tierce of Coulon, the fencing-master; I can speak two languages (besides English) like a native, even to their slang; I know every game in the cards; I can act comedy, tragedy, farce; I can drink down Bacchus himself; I can make any woman I please in love with me,—that is, any woman good for nothing. Can I earn a handsome livelihood out of ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... should be found with any of them it would probably be with such a narrative as "Wolverine." It "bites," like all her Indian pieces, and conveys a definite meaning. But, written in the conventional slang of the frontier, it jars with her other work, and seems out of form, if not ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... live each in a separate world, and the line of demarcation between them is sharply drawn. We all live in similar dug-outs, but we bring a new atmosphere into them. In one, full of the odour of Turkish cigarettes, the spoken English is above suspicion; in another, stinking of regimental shag, slang plays skittles with our language. Only in No. 3 is there two worlds blent in one; our platoon officer says that we are a most remarkable section, consisting of literary ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... have thought she was impertinent, for "garn" on cockney lips means "go on, now," in the slang of the United States, and "beller" is not elegant, but Anna knew that she did ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... letter itself, as well as in the remarks of the audience on it, there was a great deal of slang, and a great many cant phrases which I could not make out. But, on the whole, I obtained a pretty correct knowledge of the import ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... regarded that petition as a formula vaguely pleasing to the Deity, but we no more expected His kingdom to come than we expected Him to give us each day our daily bread; we knew that if we wanted something to eat we should have to hustle for it, and get there first; I use the slang of that far-off time, which, I confess, ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... comedy is Captain Tucca. "His peculiarity" has been well described by Ward as "a buoyant blackguardism which recovers itself instantaneously from the most complete exposure, and a picturesqueness of speech like that of a walking dictionary of slang." ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... hear, but spare the scoffer! Spare the wretch Who sneers at the anointed man of truth! When we reached that, I and my followers Would rend you limb from limb. There!—ha! ha! ha! [Laughing.] Have I not caught the slang these fellows preach; A grand, original idea, to back it; And all the stock in trade of ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... Burgundy, and get all the young fellows drunk, as we generally do; and yet people will call our parties 'bourgeois' and yours 'recherche', if you give them nothing but tea and biscuit. Now, there's my Dick: he respects your husband; you can see he does. In his odious slang way, he says he's 'some,' and 'a brick;' and he's a little anxious to please him, though he professes not to care for anybody. Now, Dick has pretty sharp sense, after all, or he'd never have been ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... choosing it of the most beautiful kind; on the contrary, it shall be a piece reaching as low down as he ever allows Scotch to go—it is perhaps the only unfair patriotism in him, that if ever he wants a word or two of really villainous slang, he gives it in ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Italy Cathari becomes Gazzari; for that matter, each country had its special appellatives; one of the most general in the north was that of the Bulgari, which marks the oriental origin of the sect, whence the slang term Boulgres and its derivatives (vide Matthew Paris, ann. 1238). Cf. Schmit, Histoire des Cathares, 8vo, ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... know which is worse," Ruth Fielding said with a sigh, as Helen slowed down for a railroad crossing at which stood a flagman. "Heavy's French or her slang." ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... savage criticism in the years 1855 and 1856 limited to this side of the Atlantic. The London Critic, in a caustic review, found this the mildest comment that Whitman's verse warranted: "Walt Whitman gives us slang in the place of melody, and rowdyism in the place of regularity. * * * Walt Whitman libels the highest type of humanity, and calls his free speech the true utterance of a man; we who may have been misdirected by civilization, call it the expression ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... to celebrities in rooms sumptuously furnished by the house decorator. Showy by nature, with a taste for doing things handsomely, he affected an easy-going air, and seemed so much the less formidable because he had kept the slang of "the road" (to use his own expression), with a few green-room phrases superadded. Now, artists in the theatrical profession are wont to express themselves with some vigor; Gaudissart borrowed sufficient racy green-room ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... spiritualist gossips of the nineteenth? How does it happen that the mediaeval saint, the Indian medicine-man, the Siberian shaman (a suggestive term), have nearly identical wonders attributed to them? If people wanted merely to tell "a good square lie," as the American slang has it, invention does not seem to have such pitifully narrow boundaries. It appears to follow that there are contagious nervous illusions, about which science has not said the last word. We believe that the life of children, with its innocent mixture of dreams and waking, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... head—accidentally, of course—by the bottle which is in use on these occasions. "Very YARDLEY treated," observed Sir DRURIOLANUS, in his happiest vein. Not the first literary gent who, according to the ancient slang of the Tom-and-Jerry period, has been "cut" by ill-use of the bottle. But the unfortunate author's sorrows did not end with this sad blow, as, very soon afterwards, his dear friends the Critics, with profuse apologies for being compelled ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... charities to the poor. His charity, business honor, and public spirit were highly spoken of by those who knew him best. That a journal does not always reflect the editor is as much the fault of society as of the man. So long as the public will pay for gross personalities, obscenity, and slang, decent journals will be outbidden in the market. The fact that the La Crosse Democrat found a ready sale in all parts of the country showed that Mr. Pomeroy fairly reflected the popular taste. While multitudes turned up the whites of ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... "I can't make it all out—" she smiled at him—"but I think you are right in saying that it is all O.K." He laughed, and stretched out his long legs comfortably. "You've got the idea. That's the way to get the good of traveling and seeing other kinds of folks. You learn my queer slang words, and I'll ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... under consideration. Suffice it to say, that for my own part, diligence hath not been wanting in the research. Johnson's Dictionary and old Bailey, have been ransacked; but neither the learned Johnson, nor the recondite Bailey, throw much light upon this matter. The Slang Dictionary, to which I should in the first place have directed my attention, was unfortunately not within my reach. The result of all my inquiries amounts to this—that bore, boor, and boar, are all three ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... came to pass, when the Philistine arose, and came and drew nigh to meet David, that David hasted, and ran toward the army to meet the Philistine. And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it, and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead; and he fell upon his ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... people's bad temper with fire and slaughter; but now that the fire is so long of range and the slaughter so large, they do other things, and few among their people guess how much they owe in mere life and money to what the slang of the minute calls ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... profession living in the village, had no competitor save when the sitting of the court brought in one or more from neighboring settlements, and, being thus circumstanced, without opposition, and the only representative of his craft, he was literally, to employ the slang phrase in that quarter, the "cock of the walk." He was, however, not so much regarded by the villagers a worthy as a clever man. It required not erudition to win the credit of profundity, and the lawyer knew ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... Truly there is no hope for those who enter here. Both sides are squeezed by the gate-keeper —a very lucrative post in all yamens—before they are allowed to present their petitions. It then becomes necessary for plaintiff and defendant alike to go through the process of (in Peking slang) "making a slit," i.e., making a present of money to the magistrate and his subordinates proportionate to the interests involved. In many yamens there is a regular scale of charges, answering to our Table of Fees, but ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... strictly agricultural, and therefore stagnant, the greater the immorality. It is the one blot upon the character of the agricultural poor. They are not thieves, they are not drunkards; if they do drink they are harmless, and it evaporates in shouting and slang. They are not riotous; but the immorality cannot be gainsaid. No specific cure for this state of things can be devised: it must slowly work itself out under the gradual pressure of an advancing social state. It will be slow; for, up to the present, the ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... with Bob that he was to answer in the event of the said "old Steve" hailing us as we went alongside, and directed him what to say, as Bob's phraseology was habitually seasoned far more highly with nautical slang than was my own, and he would, therefore, be less likely to be suspected in the carrying on of ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... his superior officers. He scolded and carped and criticised and caviled, told half truths and solid lies, and the august and astute Committee listened with open ears, and the phonographer dotted down every word. So the meanest gossip and slang of the camp was raked into a heap and preserved in ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... not themselves use slang understand and even appreciate it. The American brand is generally pithy, compact, and expressive, and not always vulgar. Slang is at its worst in contemptuous epithets, and of those the one that is lowest and most offensive seems likely to become a permanent, ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... a new field for me and I delved into the matter with success. Counterfeit money, in slang, is called "queer," and those who pass it on the public are called "shovers." Its manufacturer never "shoves" it, but sells it in quantities to small shop keepers, car conductors, and others, at a certain percentage of its face value—50 per cent. quite ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith
... unfamiliarity with the language. For although two nations use the same words and read the same books, intercourse is not conducted by the dictionary. The business of life is not carried on by words, but in set phrases, each with a special and almost a slang signification. Some international obscurity prevailed between me and the coloured gentleman at Council Bluffs; so that what I was asking, which seemed very natural to me, appeared to him a monstrous exigency. He refused, and that with the plainness of the West. This American ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... North, "is Army slang. Your 'striker' is a private soldier, whom you hire at so many a dollars a month to do the rougher work in your quarters. You make whatever bargain you choose with the soldier. At this post the bachelor officers usually pay a ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... the projection of powerful thought-forms from the mind of the magician or other wonder-worker, of whom India has a plentiful supply. Even the ignorant fakirs (I use the word in its true sense, not in the sense given it by American slang)—even these itinerant showmen of psychic phenomena, are able to produce phenomena of this kind which seems miraculous to those witnessing them. As for the trained occultists of India, I may say that their feats (when they deign to produce ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... rather commonplace realism. One of the most national of authors, he loses much in translation.[1] His style is racy, smacking of the street or the counting-house; he is one of the greatest masters of the Russian vernacular. To translate his Moscow slang into the equivalent dialect of New York would be merely to transfer Broadway associations to the Ilyinka. A translator can only strive to be colloquial and familiar, giving up the effort to render the varying atmosphere ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... manly appeal to the justice and good sense of the jury, in vindication of his claims; which, on every legal as well as equitable principle, was out of all question such as every civilized community should have maintained. But the great and most powerful foe of justice, in cases of this sort, is SLANG; and SLANG in this instance came very near being too much for law. The jury were divided, ten going for the 'people,' and two for the right; one of the last being Bigelow, who was a fearless, independent ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... description of being natus rebus agendis—sent into this world not for talking, but for doing; not for counsel, but for execution. On that field he was a portentous man, a monster; and, viewing him as such, I am disposed to concede a few words to what modern slang denominates his "antecedents." ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the characters are often animals, endowed with all the attributes of men. It early lost favor because of its bald didacticism, and for the last century has been practiced only occasionally. To-day it is used chiefly for the purpose of burlesque and satire, as in George Ade's "Fables in Slang." AEsop is of course the immortal example ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... a glint of dark youthful passion in Lorna's face. Lane felt rise in him a desire to bid her sharply to omit slang and profanity from the conversation. But the desire faded before his bewilderment. All had suffered change. What had he come home to? There was no clear answer. But whatever it was, he felt it to be enormous and staggering. And he meant to find out. Weary as was ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... learnt enough French slang from Morgan to know that to filer meant to cut sticks. "Ah my dear fellow, ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... played, Hock would sit quietly looking out of the window, vowing to himself he would give up slang, and go to Sunday-school regularly, and not shoot craps any more behind the barn with boys his father had expressed a wish not to have around the place. In after years Hock knew what made him have these good impulses ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... had been to look for Griff in vain more than once, and they had only really met at a Castleford dinner-party. In fact, Clarence's youthful spirits, and the tastes which would have made him companionable to Griff, had been crushed out of him; and he was what more recent slang calls 'such a muff,' that he had perforce drifted out of our elder brother's daily life, as much as if he had been a grave senior of fifty. It was, as he owned, a heavy penalty of his youthful fall that he could not help ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Her to come out and see him talking there with them. Quite naturally, as a matter of course, he swung in along-side the dark- eyed one and walked with her. There was no awkwardness on his part, no numb tongue. He was at home here, and he held his own royally in the badinage, bristling with slang and sharpness, that was always the preliminary to getting acquainted in these swift-moving affairs. At the corner where the main stream of people flowed onward, he started to edge out into the cross street. But the girl with the black eyes caught his arm, following him and ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... An' what's more, she's on!" The Irishman reverted to trooper slang in his ardor, and got a sharp nudge ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... Geology Gothic Architecture Gerard's Douw's "Schoolmaster" and Titian's "Venus" Sir J. Scarlett Mandeville's Fable of the Bees Bestial Theory Character of Bertram Beaumont and Fletcher's Dramas Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides Milton Style Cavalier Slang Junius Prose and Verse Imitation and Copy Dr. Johnson Boswell Burke Newton Milton Painting Music Poetry Public Schools Scott and Coleridge Nervous Weakness Hooker and Bull Faith Quakers Philanthropists Jews Sallust Thucydides Herodotus Gibbon Key to the Decline of ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... severely, "do not let me hear a repetition of such language from you. If you wish to join our game, you may do so, if you will play in a gentlemanly manner. But I will not permit the use of slang about this house. Now, Rollo, that was better; much better. But you must aim more accurately and pitch less violently. You will never learn anything until you acquire it, unless you pay attention while giving your mind to it. Now, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... sailors' language," said Flora, "and I am sure he did not learn that of Mr. Ernescliffe. You never hear slang from him." ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... out even at Oxford. Archdeacon Denison wrote in his "Memories"—"When I went up to Oxford, 1823-24, there were two things unknown in Christ Church, and I believe very generally in Oxford—smoking and slang"; but one cannot help fancying that the archdeacon's memory was not quite trustworthy. It is difficult to imagine that there was ever a time when the slang of the day was not current on the lips of young Oxford, or that so long as tobacco was procurable ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... up his knowledge of English at Alexandria, and his conversation abounded with slang phrases which he used in ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... You go about Warwickshire, and fancy that from merely being born and wandering in those sweet sunny plains and fresh woodlands Shakspeare must have drunk in a portion of that frank artless sense of beauty which lies about his works like a bloom or dew; but a Coventry ribbon-maker, or a slang Leamington squire, are looking on those very same landscapes too, and what do they profit? You theorise about the influence which the climate and appearance of Attica must have had in ennobling those who were born there: yonder dirty, swindling, ragged blackguards, ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... gentlemen," exclaimed Fred, "if you desire the continuance of my friendship, and if you wish to respect the dignity of morality and the English language, you must refrain from using such insinuating balderdash and bar-room-slang." ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... all its own. The idioms of the game should be learned, as all books on the game are written in tennis parlance. The technical terms and their counterpart in slang need to be understood to thoroughly grasp the idea in ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... high point of pedestrianism that a cynical person might have been reminded of loud calls for wine at some hostelry in the land of opera bouffe. He was speaking fluently, though with a detestable accent, in a rough-and-ready, pick-up dialect of Parisian slang, evidently under the pleasant delusion that he employed the French language, while Pere Baudry contributed his share of the conversation in a slow patois. As both men spoke at the same time and neither understood ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... guess I oughtn't to use slang before you." said the foreman. "When I say 'grub' I mean something to eat And here comes ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Great West • Laura Lee Hope
... than the women, and even in Paris one sees fewer physical signs of excessive debauchery. Here, the number of broken-down young men, and blear-eyed, hoary sinners, is astonishing. I have never been in any place where licentiousness was so open and avowed—and yet, where the slang of a sham morality was so prevalent. There are no houses of prostitution in Stockholm, and the city would be scandalised at the idea of allowing such a thing. A few years ago two were established and the ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... repetitions. She was always "a worm" when asked after her health, and everything that pleased her was "pucka." She knew no language but her own, and that she spoke indifferently, her command of it being limited for the most part to slang expressions, which are the scum of language; and a few stock phrases of polite quality for special occasions. But she used the latter awkwardly, as workmen ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... speak as I like! We have to be so proper at school. You can't say a word of slang while the govs. are about, and ordinary language is so tame. You can't make a really good effect with ordinary words. Suppose I said to Rowena: 'Your conduct, my dear, is inconsistent, with your sentiments as expressed in conversation,' she wouldn't mind a bit, but when ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the Condemned Cell. A second and a lighter object in the novel of "Paul Clifford" (and hence the introduction of a semi-burlesque or travesty in the earlier chapters) was to show that there is nothing essentially different between vulgar vice and fashionable vice, and that the slang of the one circle is but an easy paraphrase of the ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in common use too plain to need explanation, and there are a good many slang phrases to be found in newspaper descriptions of runs, which are both vulgar and unnecessary. One of the finest descriptions of a fox-hunt ever written is to be found in the account of Jorrocks' day with the "Old Customer," disfigured, unfortunately, by an overload of impossible ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... She could blush like the pink tea-rose of an old-fashioned English garden. She could blanch to the whiteness of alabaster. Her eyes were forget-me-nots after rain. Her mouth was made for pretty slang and kisses. Neither her features nor her most often photographed expression showed the tiniest scrap of what the austere of her sex used to call character. When the world smiled on her she laughed: when it frowned, she ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... which makes it difficult or impossible to put themselves at ease among those with whom they would like to associate. They are painfully aware of their own surplus ego; they are constrained and awkward; they feel that in some way they are outsiders, that, as the slang phrase puts it, they do not belong. It is probable that more social failures are due to this trait than ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... Moral: The people across the brine Are exceedingly strong on Auld Lang Syne, But they're lost in the push when they strike a gang That is strong on American new line slang! ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... Elizabethan London the eclat of the inns was at its brightest, and during the reigns of Elizabeth's two nearest successors London submitted to the Inns-of-Court men as arbiters of all matters pertaining to taste—copying their dress, slang, amusements, and vices. The same may be said, with less emphasis, of Charles II.'s London. Under the 'Merry Monarch' theatrical managers were especially anxious to please the inns, for they knew that no play would succeed which the lawyers had ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... had his face upon his hand, and once more he was the miserable man who had begun brokenly to unfold the history of his shame. The unconscious animation produced by the mere unloading of his heart, the natural boyish slang with which his tale had been freely garnished, had faded from his face, had died upon his lips. Once more he was a soul in torments of despair and degradation; and yet once more did the absence of the abject in man and manner redeem him from the depths of either. In these moments ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... trifle with even the most imminent doom. On being presented to the Gaul, I always hastened to say that I spoke his or her language only 'un tout petit peu'—knowing well that this poor spark of slang would kindle within the breast of M. Tel or the bosom of Mme. Chose hopes that must so quickly be quenched in the puddle of my incompetence. I offer no excuse for so foolish a proceeding. I do but ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... condition); for him he now worked and toiled, cheerful and contented; and him he sought to save from all to which he subjected himself. He could not bear that that soft and delicate child should ever be exposed to the low and menial associations that now made up his own life—to the obscene slang of grooms and ostlers—to their coarse manners and rough contact. He kept him, therefore, apart and aloof in their little lodging, and hoped in time to lay by, so that Sidney might ultimately be restored, if not to his ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... made him feel happier. He'd have hated reporting the old man. Something in the outdated slang made him feel—almost patriotic. The old man was a part of America, a respected ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... mustn't keep saying 'jolly'; he says 'nice' would be better in a book. He is looking it over for me, you see. I think 'nice' is a girl's word, but Clem says you shouldn't write slang in a book, so I try not to; though of course I don't really expect this story ever to be made ...
— Peterkin • Mary Louisa Molesworth
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