"Pronoun" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him nothing to respect. He is cursed with that form of moral disease which sometimes renders a man ridiculous, sometimes infamous, but which never renders him respectable,—namely, vanity of will. Other men may be vain of their talents and accomplishments, but he is vain of the personal pronoun itself, utterly regardless of what it covers and includes. Reason, conscience, understanding, have no impersonality to him. When he uses the words, he uses them as synonymes of his determinations, or as decorative terms into which it pleases him to translate the rough vernacular of his wilfulness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... nickname were apparent after two minutes' conversation with him. Buzz Werner was called Buzz not only because he talked too much, but because he was a braggart. His conversation bristled with the perpendicular pronoun, and his pet phrase ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... true person springs to what belongs to—their life!" said Kenneth, using that wrong little pronoun that we shall never be able to ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... a scanning line. Setting up correctness, that humble merit of prose, as the central literary excellence, he is really a less correct writer than he may seem, still with an imperfect mastery of the relative pronoun. It might have been foreseen that, in the rotations of mind, the province of poetry in prose would find its assertor; and, a century after Dryden, amid very different intellectual needs, and with the ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... is our Shepherd. It is the work of the shepherd to care for the sheep, to feed them and protect them. "I am the Good Shepherd;" "My sheep hear My voice." "I lay down My life for the sheep." In that wonderful tenth chapter of John, Christ uses the personal pronoun no less than twenty-eight times, in declaring what He is and what He will do. In verse 28 He says, "They shall never perish; neither shall any [man] pluck them out of My hand." But notice the word "man" is in italics. See ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... reviewers were ignorant of the authorship of "The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy" (1753) and "The Invisible Spy" (1755). Twenty years later, in fact, a writer in the "Critical Review" used the masculine pronoun to refer to the author of "Betsy Thoughtless." It is quite certain that Mrs. Haywood spent the closing years of her life in great obscurity, for no notice of her death appeared in any one of the usual magazines. She continued ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord" (1 Thess. iv. 15-17). It was the frequent use of the pronoun "we" that had confused them—we who remain, we who are alive. The Thessalonians had inferred from this that the second coming of Christ would take place in their day. Hence, to correct this impression ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... had been so accustomed to regard Jack Frost as a member of the male sex that they could not get out of the habit. So they continually used the masculine pronoun, although the result was ludicrous. Visitors used to be quite electrified when Rilla referred casually to "Jack and his kitten," or told Goldie sternly, "Go to your mother and get ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... vulgar extortioner, most decidedly!" she returned, without repudiating the possessive pronoun. "It doesn't follow that I think anything of him—apart from what you did between you ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... returned carelessly, accenting the pronoun as though the whole corps were concerned. "A lot of his men ran back to him and put him on my horse. I simply ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... Account of the Revolution. In the first three editions, I told this story incorrectly. The fault was chiefly my own but partly Burnet's, by whose careless use of the pronoun he, I was ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... perforce close this record of personal experiences, written perhaps more to amuse and satisfy myself than for the perusal of others; more especially as this being a personal Diary I have been obliged by force of circumstances to use the pronoun "I" more than I would otherwise wish. The war seems played out so far as one can judge. It appears to be becoming now a guerilla warfare of small actions and runaway fights at long ranges; these furnish ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... word for metrical reasons, and sometimes, in the interests of clearness, ademonstrative or personal pronoun, or even a proper name (cf. l.500 ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... the duel, Clinton (using the name, "Clinton," instead of the pronoun "I") said: "The affair of the duel ought not to be brought up. It was a silly affair. Clinton ought to have declined the challenge of the bully, and have challenged the principal, who was Burr. There were five shots, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... wouldn't," said Billy Manners, with an emphasis on the pronoun, "but decent fellows can see it. Would you have gone over ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... for an artist to have a certain part of his property invested in unsolved difficulties. When this is not the case, the question with regard to his future simplifies itself somewhat portentously. "What will he do with it?" we ask, meaning by the pronoun the sharp, completely forged weapon. It becomes more purely a question of responsibility, and we hold him altogether to a higher account. This is the case with Mr. Sargent; he knows so much about ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... the woodward and his wife. He served in my Lord of Essex's army, but he has never seen you. Moreover, he was to be at the squire's to-day helping to stack his corn. Ben, do you tell Patience that he"—again taking refuge in a pronoun—"is a gentleman in danger, and she must see to his safety for an hour or two till I ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mighty quick with that chapter—about five days of the toughest kind of work. God forbid I should ever have such another pirn to wind! When I invent a language, there shall be a direct and an indirect pronoun differently declined—then writing would be ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "thou shalt be;" i.e., shalt whether or no. R forms the conditional, avra, and ren the conditional past, avrena, "I should have been." The need for a passive voice is avoided by the simple method of putting the pronoun in the accusative; thus, daca signifies "I strike," dacal (me strike) "I am struck." The infinitive is avi; avyta, "being;" avnyta, "having been;" avmyta, "about to be." These are declined like nouns, of which latter ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... do children agree, and that is the rejection of most of the conventions of the authors who have reported them. They do not, for example, say "me is"; their natural reply to "are you?" is "I are." One child, pronouncing sweetly and neatly, will have nothing but the nominative pronoun. "Lift I up and let I see it raining," she bids; and told that it does not rain resumes, "Lift I up and let ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... chiefly with the taking of a showy house and the use of a showy conveyance; he or she will become part of one of the greatest of all the public services in the coming time, the service of public health. Either he—I use this pronoun and imply its feminine—will be on the staff of one of the main hospitals (which will not be charities, but amply endowed public institutions), or he will be a part of a district staff, working in conjunction with a nursing organization, a cottage hospital, an isolation hospital and ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... interpretation, e.g., the bitterness of the imprecatory psalms, or the far-reaching consequences attached in other psalms (cf. xxii., xl.) to the deliverance of the singer. Till the exile, the religious unit was the nation, and the collective use of the singular pronoun is one of the commonest phenomena in Hebrew literature. The Decalogue is addressed to Israel in the 2nd pers. sing., in Deuteronomy the 2nd pers. sing, alternates with the pl., in the priestly blessing (Num. vi. 24ff.) Israel is blessed in the singular. ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... the key-note of his purpose. But the truth of it would have been infinitely more sure had the pronoun been singular. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... apology is needed for the constant recurrence of the personal pronoun in these pages, let it be said that the recital of personal incidents, without circumlocution, ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... the sacred name of God was Hu[132]—a name which, although it is supposed, by Bryant, to have been intended by them for Noah, will be recognized as one of the modifications of the Hebrew tetragrammaton. It is, in fact, the masculine pronoun in Hebrew, and may be considered as the symbolization of the male or generative principle in nature—a sort of modification of the system of ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... The pronoun thrilled Bob with pleasure. It meant the sweeping aside of the last film of distrust and the restoration of the old man's former confidence and friendship. For days Willie had slowly been reaching the conviction that if fraud had been practised Tiny's nephew ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... fiction, Conrad may claim the same honour; his edifice, in its contrapuntal presentation of character and chapter suspensions, is new, tantalisingly, bewilderingly, refreshingly, new. The colour is toned down, is more sober than the prose of the Eastern stories. Sometimes he employs the personal pronoun, and with what piquancy as well as poignancy may be noted in the volume Youth. This contains three tales, the first, which gives the title-key, has been called the finest short story in English, although it is difficult to discriminate. What ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... 18th NOVEMBER, 1759). "To your Royal Majesty, send [no pronoun "I" allowed] herewith a Corporal, who has deserted from the Austrians. He says, Sincere with the Reserve did march with the Reichs Army; but a league behind it, and turned towards Dippoldiswalde. General Brentano [Wehla's old comrade, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the end of the meal—the ice was being served—the elderly baronial councillor once more arose to his feet to propose in a second speech that from now on they should all address each other by the familiar pronoun "Du." Thereupon he embraced Innstetten and gave him a kiss on the left cheek. But this was not the end of the matter for him. On the contrary, he went on to recommend, in addition to the "Du," a set of more intimate ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... accustomed to daily conversation with its natives, the English words and fashion of periods that occurred to Volktman were rather those used in books than in colloquy; and a certain solemnity and slowness of tone accompanied with the frequent, almost constant use of the pronoun singular—the thou and the thee, gave a strangeness and unfamiliar majesty to his dialect that suited well with the subjects on which he so loved to dwell. He himself was lean, gaunt, and wan; his cheeks were drawn and hollow; and thin locks, ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which the author desires to offer is for the constant repetition of the personal pronoun. This has been all along a matter of sincere regret to the author, but he saw no way of obviating it. It is a difficult matter to tell a story, when you are your own hero and villain, and keep down to a ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... elisions and contractions, but never quite disappears. Mr. Grout says: "So strong is the influence of this inclination to concord produced by the repetition of initials, that it controls the distinction of number, and quite subordinates that of gender, and tends to mould the pronoun after the likeness of the initial element of the noun to which it refers; as, Izintombi zake zi ya hamba, 'The daughters of him they do walk.'" These characteristics appear in the formation of the Creole French, in connection with another ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... by so doing, you have no right to make any one else say words he did not say. If you leave out part of the passage, show the omission by dots; and in such a case, if you have to supply words of your own, as for example a noun in place of a pronoun, use square brackets, thus []. On the following page are examples of a ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... several inflections of the verb in the past and future tneses, for immediate, proximate, and more or less remote times of the performance of the action,[8] it is often found convenient, especially when speaking in the dual or plural, to prefix a complete pronoun from the table of pronouns. Thus, instead of saying, Bumulbenli, a native frequently expresses it, Ngulli bumulben. Again, instead of saying, Bumulgiriniguna, he would use, Ngeaniguna bumulgiri. This leaves the termination of the verb freer ...
— The Wiradyuri and Other Languages of New South Wales • Robert Hamilton Mathews
... it, of course," said she calmly. I made note of the pronoun. "They've been searching for it for two centuries without success. My—that is, Mr. Pless has spent days down there. He is very hard-up, you know. It would come ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... of precision and distinction can be reached in certain cases. Take Ruth, i. VV. 8 to 13, and imagine how those pronouns come in; it is exquisitely elegant, and makes the mouth of the LITTERATEUR to water. I am going to exercitate my pupil over those verses to-day for pronoun practice. ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as myself, yourselves; and sometimes to personal pronouns, as himself, itself, themselves. It then, like own, expresses emphasis and opposition, as I did this myself, that is, not another; or it forms a reciprocal pronoun, as We hurt ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... quite the funniest thing I ever heard. It was at a Thanksgiving service when some of our troops returned from South Africa. The proceedings concluded by the singing of the National Anthem right through. You recollect how recently we had had to make the change of pronoun, and how difficult it was to ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... pronoun "she" was not uttered in the house. Zina was spoken of impersonally: "this has come," "Gone away," and so on. . . . The mother recognised her daughter's handwriting, and her face grew ugly and unpleasant, and her grey hair ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... pronoun "I" used in this communication? What position did Mr. Felix Adams hold toward this young girl qualifying him to make use of such language after her marriage ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... no, not my name, I feel sure.' He accentuated the possessive pronoun strongly, and then proceeded to explain the accentuation, smiling more and more amiably as he did so. 'No, not my name; my ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... she echoed; and the inflection of the pronoun might have flattered him had he not reflected that it was impossible she could have understood his allusion. And now she bethought her that she had not thanked him—and the debt was a heavy one. He had come to her aid in an hour when hope seemed dead. He had come single-handed—save for his man ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... appears to apply the "you" to those only who were out of bed and in Covent Garden market on the night of conflagration, instead of the audience or the discerning public at large, all of whom are intended to be comprised in that comprehensive and, I hope, comprehensible pronoun. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... was trembling. The solemnity of his mien and the feminine pronoun he had let slip revealed to Trenholme the direction his ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... over England. As early as the beginning of the thirteenth century, this dialect had thrown off most of the old inflexions, and had become almost as flexionless as the English of the present day. Let us note a few of the more prominent changes. —The first personal pronoun Ic or Ich loses the guttural, and becomes I. —The pronouns him, them, and whom, which are true datives, are used either as datives or as objectives. —The imperative plural ends in eth. "Riseth up," Chaucer makes one of his characters say, "and ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... one of the company, who instantly rendered the lines in English, contending with reason that the indefinite article in English, together with the pronoun "his," &c. should be considered as one word with the noun following, and more than counterbalanced by the greater number of syllables in the Greek words, the terminations of which are in truth only little words glued on to them. The ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... rendered the "Great-Tree People,"—literally, "those of the great log." It is derived from karonta, a fallen tree or piece of timber, with the suffix kowa or kona, great, added, and the verb-forming pronoun prefixed. In the singular number it becomes Niharontakowa, which would be understood to mean "He is an Oneida." The name, it is said, was given to the nation because when Dekanawidah and Hiawatha first went to meet its chief, they crossed the Oneida creek on a bridge composed ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... of the nearest male heir, Don Carlos de Bourbon, thus giving rise to the Carlist movement. Some writers state that severe measures had to be adopted to compel many of the friars in the Philippines to use the feminine pronoun in their prayers for the sovereign, just whom the reverend gentlemen expected to deceive not ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... to belch up you"; and Mr. White says in his note, "The tautological repetition of the pronoun was a habit, almost a custom, with the Elizabethan dramatists." This may be true, (though we think the assertion rash,) but certainly never as in this case. We think the Folio right, except in its punctuation. The repetition of the "you" ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... ciappa is to assume insolent familiarity or unbounded good fellowship with the person addressed. A Venetian says Cio a thousand times in a day, and hails every one but his superior in that way. I think it is hardly the Italian pronoun, but rather a contraction of Veccio (vecchio), Old fellow! It is common with all classes of the people: parents use it in speaking to their children, and brothers and sisters call one mother Cio. It is a salutation between friends, who cry out, Cio! as ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... hold her principles," said Tom, indicating Lois rather awkwardly by the pronoun rather than in any more definite way. "You ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... gender is marked by the pronoun, and not by the form of the noun. But the fact that in English the distinction of gender is confined to difference of sex makes ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... de sel font-il monoie"—"They make money of salt," becomes (p. 168) "ma fannole da loro," sel being taken for a pronoun, whilst in another place sel is ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... here of the Nigritian tongues. A New Testament, translated into this language, would or could be read by a third of the tribes of Central Africa. Asking my negro master what I was, he replied, "Kerdee," which means kafer ("infidel") in Bornou, the negro mistaking my individual self for the pronoun I, which is oomah. I laughed heartily ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... laziness—that I have given you the work I ought to have done myself. My reply would be that it was not my work. If a man happens to be born to a job he is not in the least fitted for, that's the affair of Providence. Providence bungled it when he, she, or it—take which pronoun you like—[Greek: tyche], as you and I know, is feminine—made me a landowner. My proper job was to dig up and decipher what is left of the Greeks. And if any one says that the two jobs are not tanti, and the landowning job is more important than the other, I disagree ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... every one thinks, that I'm a greedy, soulless woman, and that I even married you"—she laid a fierce emphasis on the pronoun—"out of the wretched, pettifogging ambition some day to be Lady Harwich. You did think it, Nigel. ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... in an intemperate haste, and like many another rebel to the English tongue, she found a proper pronoun would not serve her ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... superfluous hair—it shall henceforth be considered as having the same status as an untaught child or a barbarian, insofar as social conventions are concerned, and shall be entitled to the use of the human pronoun, he. ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... previous conversations many a point without which the above conversation would remain obscure. The Vedantins and the followers of Shankaracharya's philosophy, in talking of themselves, often avoid using the pronoun I, and say, "this body went," "this hand took," and so on, in everything concerning the automatic actions of man. The personal pronouns are only used concerning mental and moral processes, such as, "I thought," "he desired." The body in their eyes is not the man, but ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... my life—and in the use, of the possessive pronoun here and elsewhere, let it signify also the life of my life-partner—is beyond the range of ordinary experience, since it is immune from the ferments which seethe and muddle the lives of the many, I am ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... found that many supposed Messianic claims become general statements of Jesus' conception of the high prerogatives of man, while in other places the name stands simply as an emphatic substitute for the personal pronoun. Thus, for instance, Jesus is found to assert that authority on earth to forgive sins belongs to man (Mark ii. 10), and, toward the end of his course, to have taught simply that he himself must meet with suffering (Mark viii. 31), and will come on the clouds ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... sweeping of the streets, the drilling, the standing guard, picket and videt, and who drew (or were to draw) eleven dollars per month and rations, and also drew the ramrod and tore the cartridge. Pardon me should I use the personal pronoun "I" too frequently, as I do not wish to be called egotistical, for I only write of what I saw as an humble private in the rear rank in an infantry regiment, commonly called "webfoot." Neither do I propose to make this a connected journal, for I write entirely from ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... these are easily associated with the objects themselves, and there is little danger of mistake or confusion. We will not enter into the grammatical dispute concerning the right of precedency, amongst pronoun substantives and verbs; we do not know which came first into the mind of man; perhaps, in different minds, and in different circumstances, the precedency must have varied; but this seems to be of little consequence; children ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... when speaking of those we hate, quite as much as when speaking of those we love, we use the pronoun alone. Mr. Amherst is "he" always ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... movement as He "kneeled down" and "fell on His face to the ground" They were near enough to hear the passionate cry of love and agony, "O, My Father." This is the only time we know of His using this personal pronoun in prayer to His Father. He thus showed the intensity of His feeling, and longing for that sympathy and help which the Father alone ...
— A Life of St. John for the Young • George Ludington Weed
... it grew, as it were, without attributes. The sun is called the Self of all that moves and rests (Rv. I. 115, 1), and still more frequently self becomes a mere pronoun. But Atman remained always free from mythe and worship, differing in this from the Brahman (neuter), who has his temples in India even now, and is worshipped as Brahman (masculine), together with Vishnu and Siva, and other popular gods. The idea ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... proceeded to Secocoeni's town, accompanied by a fresh set of interpreters, and had a long interview with Secocoeni. The chief's Prime Minister or "mouth," Makurupiji, speaking in his presence, and on his behalf and making use of the pronoun "I" before all the assembled headmen of the tribe, gave an account of the interview between Commandant Ferreira in the presence of that gentleman, who accompanied the commission and Secocoeni, in almost the same words as had been used by the interpreters at Middelburg. ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... revision to "I hurry amain," with the present tense of the following verbs. The pronoun "his" ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... the greatest-born of woman, yet he knew that his bosom was not broad enough, nor his heart tender enough, to justify him in bidding all weary and heavy-laden ones to come to him for rest; he could not say that he and God were one, and include himself with the Deity, in the majestic pronoun, we; he never dared to ask men to believe in himself as they believed in the Father: but there came after him One who dared to say all these things; and this is the inevitable conclusion, that either Jesus was inferior to John in all that goes to make a strong ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... that say, He did it with uttering five solemn chosen words: and some, with rehearsing the same words afterward again. Some will have it, that, when Christ did speak those five words, the material wheaten bread was pointed by this demonstrative pronoun hoc: some had rather have, that a certain vagum individuum, as they term it, was meant thereby. Again, others there be that say dogs and mice may truly and in very deed eat the body of Christ; ...
— The Apology of the Church of England • John Jewel
... calculated to annoy, eh? Also, by the way, in its careless rapture it twice misrelates the relative pronoun; and Froude was a master of style. Or what do you ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... God embraces every good quality of masculine and feminine character, as also the impersonal life Principle. It is therefore proper to use the masculine, feminine or neuter pronoun when referring to Deity. As different phases of the one Love, we see manifested, the strong, all-protecting, intelligent father-love, the tender, restful, patient mother-love, the innocent, confiding, trustful child-love, each complete in the whole, which can be ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... the wind from me Oh Lord, I fear it will hurt me' (wind means love, which is like the Simoom) 'Alas! it has struck me and I am sick. Why do ye bring the physician? Oh physician put back thy medicine in the canister, for only he who has hurt can cure me.' The masculine pronoun is always used instead of she in poetry out ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... my! my!" exclaimed Mrs. Talbot, her possessive pronoun stumbling and fainting away without reaching its object. "Must we have that bear in the ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... like a shadow, is necessarily a very personal thing. Without the person with which it is associated it could not exist. Therefore, I feel that it is appropriate to present throughout this paper a liberal use of the pronoun in the first person. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... black, and she addressed him in the third person. "If Mr. Spinrobin will please to come down," she said, "Mr. Skale is waiting. Mr. Skale is always quite punctual." She always spoke thus, in the third person; she never used the personal pronoun if it could be avoided. She preferred the name direct, it seemed. And as Spinrobin passed her on the way out, she observed further, looking straight into his eyes as she said it: "and should Mr. Spinrobin have need of anything, that," ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... "she," in delicacy and jealousy of making public the beauty or conditions of the "veiled sex." Even public singers would hesitate to use a feminine pronoun. As will be seen however, the rule is not invariably kept and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... a dilemma. My modesty (?) is at variance with my love of verity. Oh, the inconvenience of that little pronoun, I! Would that I had in the first instance imitated the wily conduct of the bald-pated invader of Britain. How complacently might I not then have vaunted in the beginning, have caracoled through the middle, and glorified myself at the conclusion of this my autobiography! What a monstrous ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... etymology—thus hirundo (swallow) from aer (air). One had to know the meaning of the word before one searched for it! The grammars were written in a barbarous Latin of inconceivably difficult style. Can any man now readily understand the following definition of "pronoun," taken from a book intended {664} for beginners, published in 1499? "Pronomen . . . significat substantiam seu entitatem sub modo conceptus intrinseco permanentis seu habitus et ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Fortunately she was induced at this time to jot down some impressions of her work, and these, which were never published, give the best idea of the remarkable change which had been wrought in the life and habits of Okoyong. It will be noticed that she does not use the pronoun "I." Whenever she gave a statement of her work she always wrote "we," as if she were a ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... the MSS. except the substitution of capital letters for small ones, where capitals would now be used. In this matter Lauder's practice is capricious, and it may safely be said that it was governed by no rule, conscious or unconscious. He spells the pronoun I with a capital, and usually begins a sentence with one. But names of persons and places are very often spelt with small letters. The use of capitals was not yet fixed, as it is now, and the usage of different languages, ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... he said, "I am afraid I am obliged to tell you that I cannot listen to anything you may have to say. I can guess, of course, why you have come here, and I am sorry for you," he said, leaning on the pronoun. "But I can do nothing," and he spoke slowly and inexorably, "I can do nothing for either you or your husband." But Rachel had now lost all fear, ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... conjunctive (sentence), also coition; Al-Mausl the conjoined, a grammatical term for relative pronoun or particle. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... grammatically correct. These people are clinging to the dialect of their fathers who were Anglo-Saxons. The use of "hit" for "it" is not confined to the mountains, but the Old English grammars give "hit" as the neuter of the pronoun "he." ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... (brimhana)—this being the meaning of the root brimh (from which 'Brahman' is derived). Of this Brahman, thus already known (on the basis of etymology), the origination, sustentation, and reabsorption of the world are collateral marks. Moreover, in the Taitt. text under discussion, the relative pronoun—which appears in three forms, (that) 'from whence,' (that) 'by which,' (that) 'into which'—refers to something which is already known as the cause of the origin, and so on, of the world. This previous knowledge rests on the Ch. passage, 'Being only this was in the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... however analogously applied to God, must contain something of what we mean when we call ourselves "persons," else "we are landed in the unmeaning." When Christ spoke of Himself as "I," the selfness implied by the pronoun must have had some kind of resemblance to our own; just as when He called God His Father He intended to convey something of what fatherhood meant for His then hearers. That He intended to convey what it might come to mean in other conditions and ages ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... your sister said; she isn't over fond of him, is she?" Nellie inquired, with a light laugh and a mischievous glance at the averted face on the pillow in the berth, as she emphasized the pronoun. "Come," she added, presently, "let us lay out the things we are likely to need during the voyage, and put our state-room in order, for there is no knowing how soon we may be attacked by the dread enemy ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... and definite, and I could not help feeling that it would be a cruel and terrible thing if that pronoun "Thee" embodied no living and loving personality. The light in their faces, like that of a planet beaming on me through the open window, appeared but the inevitable reflection of a fuller, richer spiritual light that now shone full ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... Intentionally Nona used the pronoun "they," including Lieutenant Orlaff with herself in their interest in Sonya. Yet except for his first muttered exclamation the Russian officer had ...
— The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army • Margaret Vandercook
... sing-song voice, and with an air of anxious simplicity, Doddle began, 'Article, noun, adjective, pronoun, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, interjection, outerjection, beginning with ies in the plural—as, baby, babies; lady, ladies; hady, hadies. Please, sir, isn't that last one ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... a rather compromising way, Mr. Wrandall. The pronoun 'we' is somewhat general, if you will permit me to say so. Do you expect me to discuss my findings in the presence of ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... The pronoun referred to Le Maitre. The remark was perhaps prompted by natural pity, but it was so instantly agreed to by all on the vessel that the chorus had the air of propitiating the ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... [Footnote: "It" seems preferable to "itself" here. The same Hebrew word stands for both, but if the "fruit-tree" be taken as the antecedent, which it must be if we translate "itself," there seems no meaning in the statement. If we read "it," the pronoun will refer to the fruit—"the tree whose seed is in its fruit"—which gives an intelligible sense.] upon the ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... such a confounded jackass!" said Mr Sidsby, without giving a local habitation or a name to the personal pronoun he. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... child of five years old, her first lesson in English grammar; but no alarming book of grammar was produced upon the occasion, nor did the father put on an unpropitious gravity of countenance. He explained to the smiling child the nature of a verb, a pronoun, and a substantive. ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... out the "ordo verborum" are according to the subjoined interpretation of Mons. COLLESSON, who prepared this Delphine edition. The same figures have been placed where the adjective agrees with the substantive or pronoun; and for this clew to the consecutive arrangement of these disbanded and dispersed members of the sentence, some young gentlemen at school, and many who have finished their education, will ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... that an early phenomenon of child mental development is the emphasis laid on "meum" and "tuum," mine and yours. The child is a thoroughgoing individualist in feelings, conceptions, and language. The first personal pronoun is ever on his lips and in his thought. Only as culture arises and he is trained to see how disagreeable in others is excessive emphasis on the first person, does he learn to moderate his own excessive egoistic tendency. Is it not a fact that ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... distant passage can have the power of divorcing from its natural object and transferring to another object the direct statement about light implied in the word 'light,' may be answered without difficulty. The passage under discussion runs[125], 'which above this heaven, the light.' The relative pronoun with which this clause begins intimates, according to its grammatical force[126], the same Brahman which was mentioned in the previous passage, and which is here recognised (as being the same which was mentioned before) through its connexion ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... ask your father what we ought to do." . . . She stopped in painful awareness of the possessive pronoun. Mark was unresponsive, until there came the news from Africa, which made him throw his arms about his mother's neck while she was still alive. Mrs. Lidderdale, whatever bitterness she may once have felt for the ruin of her married life, ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... that the African, like the Scotch Highlander, will interpose the personal or demonstrative pronoun between noun and verb: "sun he go down," means "the sun sets" and, as genders do not exist, you must be careful to say, "This woman he cry ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... much pleased to learn that the pronoun leur is used for persons, but also for things, while ou and en are used for things ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... you." Austin slightly stressed the pronoun. He had taken a reasonless liking for the young man, who from the first had smiled into his frowning face, and treated him as he treated others. Or perhaps Austin liked him because, although the Boy did a good deal of "gassin' with the gang," he ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... by the pronoun, was a woman; though why one should tempt Providence by traveling on this route at this juncture, I found it hard to guess. Standing with her back to me, enveloped in a coat of sealskin with a broad collar of darker fur, well gloved, smartly shod, crowned by a fur hat with a gold cockade, she ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal look, demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression. His present aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the scene, explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment. One could feel that a saner religion had never prevailed under the sky. The luminary was a golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... stiff obstinate-looking curls, and at the top into what he was pleased to call a feather, though it was much more like a tile. His conversation had in it something peculiar; generally it assumed a quick, short, abrupt turn, that, retrenching all superfluities of pronoun and conjunction, and marching at once upon the meaning of the sentence, had in it a military and Spartan significance, which betrayed how difficult it often is for a man to forget that he has been a corporal. Occasionally indeed, for where but in farces is the phraseology of the humorist ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "Deserted Village," a mysterious patch of light appeared dancing about on the wall and ceiling, attracting the attention of the whole class, and causing the boy just told to "go on" to describe "man" as a personal pronoun, and to put a direct object after the verb ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... positive affinity." It was now discovered that the peculiar terminations or inflections by which persons are expressed throughout the verbs of nearly the whole of these languages, have their foundations in pronouns; the pronoun was simply placed at the end, and thus became an inflexion. "By an analysis of the Sanskrit pronouns, the elements of those existing in all the other languages were cleared of their anomalies; the verb substantive, which in Latin is composed ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... line, of the pronoun Tu—Thou—is here to be noticed. It is characteristic of this middle Stanza that each of the three phases of the Saviour's existence is expressed by two thoughts which are included in one line. The pronoun Tu introduces ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... it might concern that all was lost. In the telegram in which he reported his defeat to Lord Lansdowne and of which the frankness, the candour, and the copious yet not egotistical use of the first personal pronoun were in curious contrast to the formal and sterilized paragraphs of an official account, he confessed that with the force at his disposal he had little hope of relieving Ladysmith and he proposed that he should let it go. He ordered the staff to select a defensive line ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... suppose, a personal narrative is the most wearying to the writer, if not to the reader; egotistical talk may be pleasant enough, but, commit it to paper, the fault carries its own punishment. The recurrence of that everlasting first pronoun becomes a real stumbling-block to one at last. Yet there is no evading it, unless you cast your story into a curt, succinct diary; to carry this off effectively, requires a succession of incidents, more varied ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... The coming up of 'suicide' is marked by this passage in Phillips' New World of Words, 1671, 3rd ed.: "Nor less to be exploded is the word 'suicide', which may as well seem to participate of sus a sow, as of the pronoun sui". In the Index to Jackson's Works, published two years later, it is still 'suicidium'—"the horrid suicidium of the Jews at York". 'Suicide' is apparently of much later introduction into French. Genin (Recreations Philol. vol. ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... employ the word either as a singular or plural, but not in the same sentence to do both: here, however, he was tied {121} to the singular, for, wanting a rhyme to contents, the nominative to presents must be singular, and that nominative was the pronoun of contents. Since, therefore, the plural die and the singular it could not both be referable to the same noun contents, by silently substituting die for dies, MR. COLLIER has blinded his reader and wronged ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... has no pronoun of the third person, and is often takes the place of one; it is then to be translated 'he,' 'she,' 'it,' ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... "There is no such thing as privacy in this country. The newspapers are making us," with a slight accent on the pronoun, "as common ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... The pronoun which Bubble used nowadays was always "we." He belonged to the doctor body and soul, but it was no servile giving. The doctor also belonged to him, and it was with this privilege of ownership that he now found fault with his idol. Had any one else objected to ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... shrug. The shrug requires special attention. The shrug is a gesture used by the Latin race for expressing a multitude of things, both objectively and subjectively. It is a language of itself. It is, as circumstances require, a noun, adverb, pronoun, verb, adjective, preposition, interjection, conjunction. Yet it does not supersede the spoken language. It comes in rather when spoken words are useless, to convey intensity of meaning or delicacy. It is not taught, but ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... tenets of his sect, "thou-ing" and "thee-ing" all those whom he addressed; but he had assented to an omission in this matter on the part of his daughter, recognizing the fact that there could be no falsehood in using a mode of language common to all the world. "If a plural pronoun of ignoble sound," so he said, "were used commonly for the singular because the singular was too grand and authoritative for ordinary use, it was no doubt a pity that the language should be so injured; but there could be no untruth ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... not know why he said "Pooh!" It merely notes, apropos of Miss Dickenson's last words, that the first person plural pronoun, used as a dual by a lady to a gentleman, sometimes makes hay of the thirdness of their respective persons singular. But if it had done so, this time, "Pooh!" was a weak ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... P. Flower's certificate appointing her a member of the Board of Managers of the State Industrial School at Rochester, N. Y. She took considerable satisfaction in pointing out that it referred to her as "him," because she had always contended that, if the masculine pronoun in an official document is sufficient to send a woman to the jail or the gallows, it is sufficient to enable her ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... two children had in addressing one another changed the homely singular pronoun to the more polite, if less grammatical, second person plural. The boy laughed, nodded his head, and said, 'You ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... such dreadful possibilities of stumbling on 'conditional moods,' 'imperfect tenses,' 'singular numbers,'—I should have been too glad to put up with the safe spot for the sole of my foot though no larger than afforded by such a word as 'Conjunction,' 'possessive pronoun—,' secure so far from poor Tippet's catastrophe. Well, I ventured, and what did I find? This—which I copy from the book now—'If we love in the other world as we do in this, I shall love thee to eternity'—from 'Promiscuous Exercises,' ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... use of the indefinite pronoun "one" as giving a refined and elegant touch to literary efforts, Rebecca painstakingly rewrote her composition on solitude, giving it all the benefit of Miss Dearborn's suggestion. It then appeared in the following form, which hardly ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... second person nominative), "you;" pudung, "shut;" -nu (pronominal suffix), "your;" yan (demonstrative pronoun), "that," ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... [Cherissime],—I send you [FOOTNOTE: In addressing Franchomme Chopin makes use of the pronoun of the second person singular.] the letter from Schlesinger and another for him. Read them. He wishes to delay the publication, and I cannot do so. If he says NO, give my manuscripts to Maho [FOOTNOTE: See next letter.] so that he may get M. Meissonnier [FOOTNOTE: A Paris ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... so far as I know," said the father, with a backward nod to indicate the antecedent of the pronoun. Following which, he said what lay uppermost in his mind. "I been allowin' maybe you'd come back this time with your head sot on lettin' ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... (or Definite) declension, is thus generally given by Mr Guest for Chaucer. "When the adjective follows the definite article, or the definite pronoun, this, that, or any one of the possessive pronouns—his, her, &c.—it takes what is called its definite form."—(Vol. i. p. 32.) From the Anglo-Saxon definite declension (running through three genders, five cases, and two numbers,) ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... room twirl under his feet. How one little pronoun can destroy a man! In his agony he saw Mrs. Kent and Kathleen sit down on the big couch, and painfully found ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley |
