"Syntax" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... truants of that busy day could have anticipated its application), walked down the Lawnmarket with Mr. Saddletree, each talking as he could get a word thrust in, the one on the laws of Scotland, the other on those of syntax, and neither listening to a word which his ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Instead, therefore, of giving an exact transcript of the original poems, he set himself to soften down their harshness, to clear away their obscurity, to amplify, transpose, and mutilate according to his own ideas of syntax, taste, and rhetoric. On the Dantesque ruggedness of Michael Angelo he engrafted the prettiness of the seventeenth Petrarchisti; and where he thought the morality of the poems was questionable, especially in the case of those addressed to Cavalieri, he ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... CONYERS knew as much about English syntax as she does about Irish, and were as certain in the handling of a story as she is in the conduct of a horse, Old Andy (METHUEN) might be taken at a single refreshing gallop. As it is, I advise the reader to tackle it piecemeal, a brisk run here and there, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various
... forces were encountered in the North Sea, her guns were in action." Very naturally he desired to do honour to this gallant light cruiser, and I admire prodigiously the modest way in which he has done it. "ETIENNE" is not a stylist; a professor of syntax might conceivably be distressed by his confusion of prepositions; but apart from this detail all is plain sailing—and fighting. I have read no more thrilling account of the Battle of Jutland than is to be found here. The author does it so well because ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... the woods, and experienced the usual privations and vicissitudes attendant on pioneer life. The new country and poverty of his parents prevented his receiving a common English education, and it was not until after he was of age that he mastered Murray's syntax and Daboll's arithmetic. ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... "Though the ordinary syntax of the possessive case is sufficiently plain and easy, there is, perhaps, among all the puzzling and disputable points of grammar, nothing more difficult of decision than are some questions that occur respecting the right management of this case. The observations that have been made ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... novelty of the sight), venting bitter imprecations against the lieutenant, and reproaching his scholars with treachery and rebellion; when the usher was admitted, whom my uncle accosted in this manner: "Harkee, Mr. Syntax, I believe you are an honest man, d'ye see—and I have a respect for you—but for all that, we must, for our own security, d'ye see, belay you for a short time." With these words, he pulled out some fathoms of cord, which the honest man no sooner saw than he protested with great earnestness ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... [Greek: he t' egemato], which Porson does not object to, and Elmsley adopts; or understand [Greek: egemato] in an ironical sense, in the spirit of Martial's Uxori nubere nolo meae: in the latter case [Greek: hei t' egemato] should be read (not [Greek: hen t']), as being the proper syntax. ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... foreign language may be made also a study of Comparative Philology. There are several points, such as the nature of irregular verbs, of indeclinable parts of speech, the influence of euphony, the decay or loss of inflections, the elements of syntax, which may be examined as well in the history of our own language as of any other. A few well-selected questions may lead the student at once into the heart of the mystery: such as, Why are the pronouns and the verb of existence generally more irregular ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... say:[367] "We should think the writer could not possibly read the manuscript after he has once written it, or overlook the press."[368] His habit of carrying two trains of thought on together was also responsible for slips in diction and syntax. An amanuensis working for him noticed this peculiarity, and Scott said in his Journal: "There must be two currents of ideas going on in my mind at the same time.... I always laugh when I hear people say, Do one thing ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... Testament, of which he had reported to Mr. Fuller:—"It has undergone one correction, but must undergo several more. I employ a pundit merely for this purpose, with whom I go through the whole in as exact a manner as I can. He judges of the style and syntax, and I of the faithfulness of the translation. I have, however, translated several chapters together, which have not required any alteration in the syntax whatever: yet I always submit this article entirely to his judgment. I can also, by hearing ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... learnt that the professor was Ikonin's guardian, and that Ikonin actually lived with him. I lost no time in answering the question in syntax which had been put to Ikonin, but the professor only pulled a long face ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... is a pseudo-antique strophe such as Klopstock often used; the substance a rhetorical denunciation of military ambition. The most awful curses are imprecated upon the head of the ruthless 'conqueror', whose badness is portrayed in lurid images and wild syntax that fairly rack the German language.[9] No wonder that editor Haug cautioned the young poet against ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... The syntax of the classic languages, which had been my weak point as a school-boy, now aroused the deepest interest, and I was grateful to Lepsius for having so earnestly insisted upon my pursuing philology. I soon felt ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... replace its artificiality by simplicity. But how infinitely more preferable is the novel of Lyly, with its artificial precision and lucidity, to the conscious artlessness of Sidney's Arcadia, with its interminable sentences and confused syntax. As a modern euphuist has taught us, of all poses the natural pose is the most irritating. In accordance with his desire for precision, Lyly made frequent use of the short sentence. In this we have another indication of his modernity: for the short sentence, which is so characteristic ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... of an inaccurate mind delights. He rejoices to profess all the classics, and to learn none of them. On the other hand, by "Grammar" is now more commonly meant, as Johnson defines it, "the art of using words properly," and it "comprises four parts—Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody." Grammar, in this sense, is the scientific analysis of language, and to be conversant with it, as regards a particular language, is to be able to understand the meaning and force of that language when ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... How to join them two in one; Till you got (these first steps past) To your fine text-hand at last. So though I at first commence With the humble accidence, And my study's course affords Little else as yet but words, I shall venture in a while At construction, grammar, style, Learn my syntax, and proceed Classic authors next to read, Such as wiser, better, make us, Sallust, Phaedrus, Ovid, Flaccus: All the poets (with their wit), All the grave historians writ, Who the lives and actions show Of men famous long ago; Ev'n their ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Ministers of the new era, and the one of them who excused his deficiencies of language with the class-monopoly of education was in the wrong, for any man of normal capacity might in ten years' practice of popular oratory have learned the elements of syntax. ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... ground away at her work, never giving it up. Some things she liked. Her subjects were English, Latin, French, mathematics and history. Once she knew how to read French and Latin, the syntax bored her. Most tedious was the close study of English literature. Why should one remember the things one read? Something in mathematics, their cold absoluteness, fascinated her, but the actual practice was tedious. Some people in history puzzled her and made her ponder, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... for a man to write, when he himself is the sole judge of what shall be written; but it is a terrible thing to have to draw up any document for the approval of others. One's choicest words are torn away, one's figures of speech are maltreated, one's stops are misunderstood, and one's very syntax is put to confusion; and then, at last, whole paragraphs are cashiered as unnecessary. First comes the torture and then the execution. "Come, Wilkins, you have the pen of a ready writer; prepare for us this document." In such words is the victim addressed by his colleagues. Unhappy ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... short abode there, and felt that the days would be well spent and full of happiness. But time forbade the indulgence, as time generally forbids all such luxuries to the workers in the world. Only those whose occupation in life is the pursuit of pleasure can, like Dr. Syntax, go off in search of the picturesque, and wander about at their own sweet desire like a will-o'-the-wisp. Such luxuries were not ours; and so it came to pass that, very soon after we had seen the sad procession winding down the hill, we were winding ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... the more salient features of the Khasi language, its grammar, and syntax, it seems to be of importance to show how intimately connected Khasi is with some of the languages of Further India. In the middle of the last century Logan pointed out affinity between Khasi and these languages, but it has been left to Professor Kuhn ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... Only half the work of the evolution of language is completed. There is, indeed, no tribe so undeveloped as to use the primitive forms of speech. The most savage of the races of mankind have made some progress in the art of combining words, gained some ideas of syntax and grammatical forms. Yet in certain instances the progress has been very slight, and in all we can see the living traces of the earlier method of ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... "to Tom, Dick or Harry:" the names like John Doe and Richard Roe are used indefinitely in Arab. Grammar and Syntax. I have noted that Amru is written and pronounced Amr: hence Amru, the Conqueror of Egypt, when told by an astrologer that Jerusalem would be taken only by a trium literarum homo, with three letters in his name sent for the Caliph Omar (Omr), to whom the so-called Holy City at once capitulated. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... to say that if I had been them, I should have burst out laughing and said what a couple of young asses we were!" The Hon. Percival was very colloquial, but syntax was not of the essence of ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... not always rightfully imputed to the bent for poetry: that is only one effect of the common cause.—Jack, says his father, is indeed no scholar; nor could all the drubbings from his master ever bring him one step forward in his accidence or syntax: but I intend him for a merchant.—Allow the same indulgence to Tom.—Tom reads Virgil and Horace when he should be casting accounts; and but t'other day he pawned his great-coat for an edition of Shakespeare.—But Tom would have been as ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... two I have mentioned, or any others of the fraternity, to be not only Astrologers, but Conjurers too, if I do not produce a hundred instances in all their Almanacks, to convince any reasonable man that they do not so much as understand Grammar and Syntax; that they are not able to spell any word out of the usual road, nor even, in their Prefaces, to write common sense, or ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... preserved by memory amongst the Gitanos, its grammatical peculiarities have disappeared, the entire language having been modified and subjected to the rules of Spanish grammar, with which it now coincides in syntax, in the conjugation of verbs, and in the declension of its nouns. Were it possible or necessary to collect all the relics of this speech, they would probably amount to four or five thousand words; but to effect such an achievement, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... my dear Mr. Uhlig, to thank you very cordially for this new proof of your obligingness and of your sympathy—in French, as this language becomes more and more familiar and easy to me, whereas I am obliged to make an effort to patch up more or less unskillfully my very halting German syntax. ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... Daddy Gilpin? Slowest of men, even of English men; yet delicious in his slowness, as is the light of a sleepy eye in woman. I always supposed "Dr. Syntax" was written to make fun of him. I have a whole set of his works, and am very proud of it, with its gray paper, and open type, and long ff, and orange-juice landscapes. The Pere Gilpin had the kind of science I like in the study of Nature,—a little less observation than ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Loti and the Goncourts, he writes for the eye. Fr. Paulhan calls writers of this type rich in the predominance des sensations visuelles. Disconnected by his constant abuse of the dash—he must have studied Poe not too wisely—infinitesimal strokes of colour supplying the place of a large-moulded syntax, this prose has not unity, precision, speed, euphony. Its rhythms are choppy, the dabs of paint, the shadings within shadings, the return upon itself of the theme, the reticent, inverted sentences, the absence of architectonic and the fatal lack of ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... is concerning the syntax and disposition of studies; that men may know in what order or pursuit ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... in either a maze of syntax, or of building-lots; I scarcely know which," remarked the ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... Comanche. I was not so sure of the correctness of my words— either of the pronunciation or the syntax—but I had the gratification to perceive that I was understood. Perhaps my gestures helped the savages to comprehend me—the meaning of these was not to ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... diction, the syntax, might all occur in prose. Yet when once the stamp of poetry has been put upon a cry that is as old as humanity, prose desists from rivalry, and is content to quote. Some of the greatest prose-writers have not disdained the help of these borrowed graces for the crown of their fabric. ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... processes and incidents which do not conduce directly to the furtherance of human life. So, for instance, in our time there is the knowledge of the dead languages and the occult sciences; of correct spelling; of syntax and prosody; of the various forms of domestic music and other household art; of the latest properties of dress, furniture, and equipage; of games, sports, and fancy-bred animals, such as dogs and race-horses. In all these branches of knowledge the initial motive from which their ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... shore and began to build his batteries. As soon as the British had made themselves secure Vaudreuil thought it time to turn them out. But he sent only 1,500 men; and so many of these were boys and youths at school and college that the French troops dubbed them 'The Royal Syntax.' These precious 1,500 went up the north shore, crossed over after dark, and started to march, in two separate columns, down the south shore towards Levis. Presently the first column heard a noise in the woods and ran back to join the second. But the second, seeing what it mistook for the enemy, ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... time, a Miss Barbara Something, they even ventured to make a logical joke on him, and say that he had been fascinated by Barbara's perfect figure. I know that many pupils of our public schools, in love with football more than syntax, often regretted that Bain ever composed his English Grammar. No book (unless perhaps Morell's Analysis) has ever been more cordially execrated, and no book ever more richly deserved it, for though, like Aberdeen granite, it is stately and impressive, it is also ruthless, ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... patterns, that you are bewildered if you attempt to make them out; but the earnestness of his manner, and a certain fitness of character, in his observations a kind of Shaksperian pithiness, redeem all this. Besides, his manifold blunders of syntax do not offend the taste of those audiences where he is ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... must probably have meant, not to turn from one language into another, but to explain the construction, or what is called by the Greek name syntax, much like what in regard to a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... One Class of Text-books.—In one class are those that aim chiefly to present a course of technical grammar in the order of Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody. These books give large space to grammatical Etymology, and demand much memorizing of definitions, rules, declensions, and conjugations, and much formal word parsing,—work of which a considerable portion is merely the invention of grammarians, and has little value in determining ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... of the brain must repeat themselves in secret hieroglyphics uttered by the flying footsteps. Even the inarticulate or brutal sounds of the globe must be all so many languages and ciphers that somewhere have their corresponding keys—have their own grammar and syntax; and thus the least things in the universe must be secret mirrors to the greatest. Palmistry has something of the same dark sublimity. All this, by rude efforts at explanation that mocked my feeble command of words, I communicated ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... in a real grip of the French language was miraculous; but the knowledge it gained in French grammar and syntax was deplorable. A certain mid-term examination—the paper being set by a neighbouring vicar—produced awful results. The phrase, "How do you do, dear?" which ought, by all the rules of Stratford-atte-Bowe, to be translated by Comment vous portez-vous, ma chere? was rendered by most ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... them by not using the same sign for different symbols and by not using in a superficially similar way signs that have different modes of signification: that is to say, a sign-language that is governed by logical grammar—by logical syntax. (The conceptual notation of Frege and Russell is such a language, though, it is true, it fails to ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... well-meaning young lady who wrote me the other day from America that her epistle was prompted "neither by love nor admiration." If I hint that popular lady novelists do not invariably produce masterpieces of style and syntax, I am accused of inflicting the "tarantulous bites of envious detractors." I am driven—most reluctantly—to a suspicion that has long been faintly glimmering in my bosom, a suspicion that ladies have no sense of humour. It is gravely pointed ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... even to Polish words a false Latin sound, by means of a Latin termination. French, German, and Italian forms of expression soon obtained the same right. But what was still worse, and what indeed affected the language most of all, was the fact, that even the natural structure and well established syntax of the Polish language had to give place to an injudicious imitation of foreign idioms. Thus the very circumstance of its great pliancy, one of its principal excellencies, became a source ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... random acuteness (shown particularly in bold attempts to excise interpolations from the Gospels), but as devoid of the higher critical wisdom as was Bentley, whom he congenially criticised. To a reader of to-day, his arguments from Shakspere's diction and syntax are ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... heroine. Her letters were full of repetition. She wrote rather doubtful grammar sometimes, and in her verses took all sorts of liberties with the metre. But oh, mesdames, if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and tetrameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... known to the student of literature. The fact that Rowley used constantly the possessive pronominal form itts, instead of his; or the other fact that he used the termination en in the singular of the verb, was alone enough to stamp the poems as spurious. Tyrwhitt also showed that the syntax, diction, idioms, and stanza forms were modern; that if modern words were substituted throughout for the antique, and the spelling modernized, the verse would read like eighteenth-century work. "If anyone," says Scott, in his review of the Southey ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... acuteness of perception, and a more than common accuracy of discrimination; and Mrs. Piozzi brought to the task, a jargon long since become proverbial for its vulgarity, an utter incapacity of defining a single term in the language, and just as much Latin from a child's syntax as sufficed to expose the ignorance she so anxiously labours to conceal." See Baviad ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... don't care a straw for Sruti-bhushan. Let the Pundit go hang. But, do you know what my trouble is now? Though I can't, for the life of me, understand your words, the music haunts me. Now, it's just the other way round with the Pundit. His words are clear enough, and they obey the rules of syntax quite correctly. But the tune!—No, it's no ...
— The Cycle of Spring • Rabindranath Tagore
... Whittier in fact had not arrived at the clear splendor of his later work without some earlier turbidity; he was still from time to time capable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn. As for the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' her syntax was such a snare to her that it sometimes needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the assistant editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction of solecisms, in transposition of phrases, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a nude woman standing on a table, you think you can copy nature; you fancy yourselves painters, and imagine that you have got at the secret of God's creations! Pr-r-r-r!—To be a great poet it is not enough to know the rules of syntax and write faultless grammar. Look at your saint, Porbus. At first sight she is admirable; but at the very next glance we perceive that she is glued to the canvas, and that we cannot walk round her. She is a silhouette with only one side, a semblance ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... fingers, All I've forgotten as well as what lingers In this old brain of mine that's but ill able To give you even this poor version Of the speech I spoil, as it were, with stammering! —More fault of those who had the hammering Or prosody into me and syntax, {700} And did it, not with hobnails but tintacks! But to return from this excursion,— Just, do you mark, when the song was sweetest, The peace most deep and the charm completest, There came, shall I say, a snap— And the charm vanished! ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... in an item interesting to our friends who revel in syntax and prosody. Any machine or apparatus for lifting has been called a "jack" since the days of Shakespeare. The jack was the bearer of bundles, a lifter, a puller, a worker. Any coarse bit of mechanism was called a jack, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... Who for a long time, ready at the coast, had looked out into the distance eagerly for the dear men. This changes the syntax of 'leofra manna.' ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... praise of Stevenson's style cannot be exhausted in a description of his use of individual words or his memory of individual phrases. His mastery of syntax, the orderly and emphatic arrangement of words in sentences, a branch of art so seldom mastered, was even greater. And here he could owe no great debt to his romantic predecessors in prose. Dumas, it is true, is a master of narrative, but he wrote in French, and ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... I have to acknowledge my great obligations to Noreen's Altisländische Grammatik, which is by far the best Icelandic grammar that has yet appeared—at least from that narrow point of view which ignores syntax, and concentrates ...
— An Icelandic Primer - With Grammar, Notes, and Glossary • Henry Sweet
... and fearful insinuations about my grammar and my erudition. Now, as regards grammar, I hold that, in prose at any rate, correctness should always be subordinate to artistic effect and musical cadence; and any peculiarities of syntax that may occur in Dorian Gray are deliberately intended, and are introduced to show the value of the artistic theory in question. Your writer gives no instance of any such peculiarity. This I regret, because I do not think that any ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... return mail they would jump into the East River—letters from people a thousand miles away, saying if they couldn't raise $1,500 to pay off a mortgage they would be sold out, and wouldn't I send it to them—letters of good advice, telling me how to preach, and the poorer the syntax and the etymology the more insistent the command. Many encouraging letters were a great help to me. Some letters of a spiritual beauty and power were magnificent tokens of a preacher's work. Most of these letters were lacking in one thing—Christian confidence. And yet, what noble examples ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... application of principles. Kellow's Practical Training in English .80 Helpful in its study of vocabulary, grammar, and structure. Spalding's Principles of Rhetoric 1.08 A supremely interesting presentation of the essentials. Strang's Exercises in English. Revised .56 Examples in syntax, accidence and style, for criticism ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... rhymes is not necessarily a poet. So, too, there are poets who do not express their inspirations according to the rules of metre and syntax. ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... Tom, and I notice that the flowers of the white man's syntax have left his tongue. He is the original proposition in bear's claws and copper color. 'Me bring,' says he, and he lays the kid in his mother's arms. 'Run fifteen mile,' says John Tom—'Ugh! Catch white ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... who but adds Betty Martin!' Thus cried the God with high imperial tone: In robe of stiffest state, that scoff'd at beauty, A pronoun-verb imperative he shone— Then substantive and plural-singular grown, He thus spake on:—'Behold in I alone (For Ethics boast a syntax of their own) Or if in ye, yet as I doth depute ye, In O! I, you, the vocative of duty! I of the world's whole Lexicon the root! Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight, The genitive and ablative to boot: The accusative ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... could read; frequently he had not read the Bible or studied the rudiments of grammar. The Gaon insisted that every one should first master the twenty-four books of the Bible, their etymology, prosody, and syntax, then the six divisions of the Mishnah with the important commentaries and the suggested emendations, and finally the Talmud in general, without wasting much time on pilpul, which brings no practical result. "These few lines," ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... forms thus resultant cannot, as may well be supposed, be exhibited or catalogued in the space at present permitted to us: but the reader, once master of the principle, will easily be able to investigate for himself the syntax of all examples that may occur to him, and I shall only here, as a kind of exercise, put before him a few of those which he will meet with most frequently in his Venetian inquiries, or which illustrate points, not hitherto touched upon, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... homogeneity may, with certain distinctions, be observed among all the various members composing it. The unity of language is threefold: it may be traced in the roots, in the inflections, and in the general features of the syntax. The roots are, as a rule, bilateral or trilateral, composed (that is) of two or three letters, all of which are consonants. The consonants determine the general sense of the words, and are alone expressed in the primitive writing; ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... skull articulating with the vertebral column by a single occipital condyle" and so on. I also work spasmodically at Hindustani. I rather fancy my handwriting in the Perso-Arabic script. Arabic proper I am discouraged from by the perverse economy of its grammar and syntax. It needs must have two plurals, one for under ten and one for over, twenty-three conjugations, and yet be without the distinction of past and future. Which is worse even than the Hindustani alphabet with no vowels and four z's—so ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... blundering distinctions, as the auditors perhaps may sometimes gape at, but seldom apprehend: and they take such a liberty in their speaking of Latin, that they scorn to stick at the exactness of syntax or concord; pretending it is below the majesty of a divine to talk like a pedagogue, and be tied to the slavish observance of ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... Beeston's grandfather, also William Beeston, to whom the satirical Elizabethan, Thomas Nash, dedicated in 1593, with good-humoured irony, one of his insolent libels on Gabriel Harvey, a scholar who had defamed the memory of a dead friend. Nash laughed at his patron's struggles with syntax in his efforts to write poetry, and at his indulgence in drink, which betrayed itself in his red nose. But, in spite of Nash's characteristic frankness, he greeted the first William Beeston as a boon ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... in the principles of English grammar." I doubt if the knowledge of, and facility in, English can be built up on such a basis; rather the laws should be deduced from examples. Philology, etymology, syntax are derivatives, not foundations. "Practice makes perfect" is a saying that needs to be followed by the old scholastic defensive "distinguo." Practice in reading, rather than practice in writing, makes good English composition possible. ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... of contemporary literature and language, most of the obscurities of the Old Testament melt away. Modern research in the fields of Semitic philology and syntax and the discovery of older texts and versions have put into the hands of translators new and valuable tools for making clear to all the thoughts in the minds of the original writers of the Old ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... it is easy to see what he meant. Not only does the treatment of the subject recall that of Paradise Lost, the council of the fallen gods bearing special resemblance to that of the fallen angels in Book II of Milton's epic, but in its style and syntax the influence of Milton is everywhere apparent. It is to be seen in the restraint and concentration of the language, which is in marked contrast to the wordiness of Keats's early work, as well as in the constant use of classical constructions,[247:1] ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... books De Lingua Latina, only v.-x. have been preserved, but the scope of the whole is known from Varro's own words. Book i. was introductory; ii.-vii. dealt with etymology; viii.-xiii. with inflexions; xiv.-xxv. with syntax. Varro's derivations are ridiculed by Quintilian i. 6, 37, 'Sed cui non post Varronem sit venia, qui agrum quia in eo agatur aliquid, et graculos quia gregatim volent dictos voluit persuadere Ciceroni?' From Book v. onwards the work was dedicated to ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... believe the wisest of us must be beguiled in this way sometimes, and must think both better and worse of people than they deserve. Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning. Long dark eyelashes, now—what can be more exquisite? I find it impossible not to expect some depth of soul behind a deep grey eye ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... therefore, we find Mrs. Piozzi using words or idioms rejected by modern taste or fastidiousness, we must not be too ready to accuse her of ignorance or vulgarity. I have commonly retained her original syntax, and her spelling, which frequently ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... [Unix techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the name derives from their initials). It is characterized by C-like syntax, a declaration-free approach to variable typing and declarations, associative arrays, and field-oriented text processing. See also {Perl}. 2. n. Editing term for an expression awkward to manipulate through normal {regexp} facilities (for example, ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... the Rev. Amos wrote preambulate, and instead of 'if haply', 'if happily', the contingency indicated being the reverse of happy. Mr. Barton had not the gift of perfect accuracy in English orthography and syntax, which was unfortunate, as he was known not to be a Hebrew scholar, and not in the least suspected of being an accomplished Grecian. These lapses, in a man who had gone through the Eleusinian mysteries of a university ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... observes, with some confusion of syntax, excusable in a person of his circumstances. Now, suppose they—or he—the man whose brains are out—goes about with his coffin under his arm, like my worthy uncle? and suppose he blandly, politely, relentlessly insists upon reading to you, out of that octavo sarcophagus, passages ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... grammatical quibble, has countenanced the General Government in a claim of universal power. For in the phrase, 'to lay taxes, to pay the debts and provide for the general welfare,' it is a mere question of syntax, whether the two last infinitives are governed by the first, or are distinct and co-ordinate powers; a question unequivocally decided by the exact definition of powers immediately following. It is fortunate ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... simpatio. Symphony simfonio. Symptom simptomo. Synagogue sinagogo. Syncope sveno. Syndicate sindikato. Synod sinodo. Synonym sinonimo, egalsenco. Synonymous sinonima, egalsenca. Synopsis resumo, sinopsiso. Syntax sintakso. Synthesis sintezo. Syphilis sifiliso. Syringe ensxprucigi. Syrup ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... some would say the finest, works of classical music by an American. It reflects the musical innovations of its creator, featuring revolutionary atmospheric effects, unprecedented atonal musical syntax, and surprising technical approaches to playing the piano, such as pressing down on over 10 notes simultaneously using a ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... Learners, and especially for Self-instruction. Containing the Elements of the SPANISH Language, and the Rules of Etymology and Syntax Exemplified; with NOTES and APPENDIX, consisting of Dialogues, ...
— The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition • Anonymous
... millennium to be brought about, it was open to his hearers to conceive the practical course. For the rest, the heresiarch had a mighty flow of vituperative speech. Aspirates troubled him, so that for the most part he cast them away, and the syntax of his periods was often anacoluthic; but these matters were ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... charges? In the first place, the negro race of America is not ignorant. In the year 1833 John C. Calhoun, senator from South Carolina, is reported to have said that if he could find a single negro who understood the Greek syntax, he would believe the negro was human and would treat him as such. At that time it was a very safe test. God accepted the challenge in behalf of the negro race, and inspired his white sons and daughters both in the North and South to teach their brothers in black; and a few years afterward ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton
... grouped on steps, chasing one another in twisting spirals over the lawns. Ahead, a massive brownstone chapel with pointed tower rose up, and to its right, in mathematical bulk, was the abode of Greek and Latin roots, syntax and dates, of blackboards, hard seats and the despotism of the Faculty. To the right, close at hand, was a large three-storied building with wonderful dormer windows tucked under the slanted slate roof, and below was a long stone esplanade, ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... almost a dialect of Persian; Latin growing up through English; Greek almost totally submerged under Latin, Slavonic, and Turkish, and now with a tendency to grow back into Greek; Celtic preserving in itself an older than Aryan syntax, and conveying that in its turn to the English spoken by Celts. Language is, to say the truth, a shifting kaleidoscopic thing: a momentary aspect of racial expression. In a thousand years it becomes unintelligible; we are modifying ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... by mysterious contact of Spirit; Thought kindling itself at the fire of living Thought? How shall he give kindling, in whose own inward man there is no live coal, but all is burnt-out to a dead grammatical cinder? The Hinterschlag Professors knew syntax enough; and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty called Memory, and could be acted-on through the muscular integument by ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... and last a prevailing impression that novel-writing must be tremendous fun; and this is so cheering that it is really impossible to be angry with her. Otherwise I might have some very sharp things to say about her light-hearted disregard of syntax and punctuation. Her pronouns, for example, are so elusive that not only am I frequently in doubt as to whom the heroine will marry in the end but as to which of the characters is speaking at any given moment. And not infrequently what can only be careless proofreading leaves sentences that contradict ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... laughter greeted this infraction of one of the most elementary rules of syntax, and ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... lingers In this old brain of mine that's but ill able To give you even this poor version Of the speech I spoil, as it were, with stammering —More fault of those who had the hammering Of prosody into me and syntax 700 And did it, not with hobnails ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... look for so wistfully in each other is the raw material of poetry. We can make the finished article for ourselves, given enough matter; and indeed the poetry which is imagined in contemplation is apt to be much finer than that which has passed through the claws of prosody and syntax. The fact, to be short with it, is that literature has an eye upon the consumer. Whether it is marketable or not, it is intended for the public. Now no man will undress in public with design. It may be a pity, but so it is. Undesignedly, I don't say. It would be possible, I think, ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... command, That you your birch do take in hand, Read concord and syntax on; The bays, your own, are only mine, Do you then still your nouns decline, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... to the parts of speech. At the end of three weeks nobody in the city had fired even a blank syllable in my direction except the waiter in the grub emporium where I fed. And as his outpourings of syntax wasn't nothing but plagiarisms from the bill of fare, he never satisfied my yearnings, which was to have somebody hit. If I stood next to a man at a bar he'd edge off and give a Baldwin-Ziegler look as if he suspected me of having the North Pole concealed on ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... and the parts of speech in a simple form in the third and fourth grades and in each succeeding year to review these topics, gradually enlarging and expanding the definitions, inflections, and constructions into a fuller etymology and syntax. In United States history we are beginning to adopt a similar plan of repetitions, and the frequent reviews in arithmetic are designed to make good the lack of thoroughness and mastery which should characterize each successive grade of work. The course of religious instruction ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... express in writing any thing but ideas of sense and wants of the first necessity. The nature of the verb, the relations of tenses, that of other words comprehended in the phrase, and which form the syntax of languages, were utterly unknown to them. And, indeed, how could they answer the most trifling question? Every thing in the construction of a period ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... manuscripts in all details. The syntax being comparatively simple, there is not much to be gained by modern punctuation, and that of the manuscripts has gained a fresh importance from theories which have been founded upon it. Where obvious mistakes have been ...
— Selections from early Middle English, 1130-1250 - Part I: Texts • Various
... fraternity, to be not only astrologers, but conjurers too, if I do not produce a hundred instances in all their almanacks, to convince any reasonable man, that they do not so much as understand common grammar and syntax; that they are not able to spell any word out of the usual road, nor even in their prefaces write common sense or intelligible English. Then for their observations and predictions, they are such as will equally ...
— The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers • Jonathan Swift
... likely to be greatly advanced by any efforts of his to invest the money in her intellectual development. It would not be hard to persuade the rather indolent and altogether confiding Katy that she was now old enough to cease bothering herself with the rules of syntax, and to devote herself to the happiness and comfort of Smith Westcott, who seemed, poor fellow, entirely unable to exist out of sight of her eyes, which he often complimented by singing, as he cut a double-shuffle on ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... pure "in grammatical forms, in syntax, and in vocabulary," could be kept thus clean without the aid of written texts, I am unable to imagine. If left merely to human memory and at the mercy of reciters and new poets, they would have become stained with "the defining ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... treatises, and text-books written at succeeding periods to replace it.[1] Such is the passion for versification, probably as an assistant to memory, that nearly every Singhalese work, ancient as well as modern, is composed in rhyme, and even the repulsive abstractions of Syntax have found an Alvarez and ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... as a most extraordinary change has taken place in the language of these islands during the latter half of the eighteenth century; insomuch that the language of the Indian inhabitants consists entirely of Spanish words, but all the inflexions, the syntax, and the idiomatic manner of expression are Chilese, that is to say exactly corresponding to the Moluchese dialect ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... of half a sugar-bowl (never mind syntax; you know I mean the sugar, not the glass), had enticed Moppet to betake himself out of sight and out of mind till somebody should signify a desire for his engaging presence; had steered clear of Nate ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... conciseness of Virgil, Dryden, Pope, Milton; Homer's repetitions; repetitions and "turns of words and thoughts" rare in Milton; double meanings of words; Milton's puns; extenuating circumstances; his mixed metaphors and violent syntax, due to compression; Milton's poetical style a dangerous model; the spontaneity and license ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... Rossetti, who painted poems and made poetry that is pictorial. Sculpture was the only art that had resisted this universal disintegration, this imbroglio of the arts. No sculptor before Rodin had dared to break the line, dared to shiver the syntax of stone. For sculpture is a static, not a dynamic art—is it not? Let us observe the rules, though we preserve the chill spirit of the cemetery. What Mallarme attempted to do with French poetry Rodin accomplished in clay. His marbles do not represent ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... double prosody, quantitative and alliterative, which secured it from the slightest chance of poetic poverty or hide-boundness; relieved from the cumbrousness of synthetic accidence to all but the smallest extent, and in case to elaborate a syntax equally suitable for verse and prose, for exposition and narrative, for oratory and for argument. Moreover it was, as I have at least endeavoured to show, probably England which provided the groundwork and ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Iliad, as a continuation of that series of cyclic poems, which have already been candidates for bestowing immortality upon, at the same time that they receive it from, his character and adventures. In this point of view I have violated no rule of syntax in beginning my composition with a conjunction; the full stop which closes the poem continued by me being, like the full stops at the end of the Iliad and Odyssey, a full stop of a ...
— Peter Bell the Third • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... admiration of Criticism and the praise of Fashion, until a more absurd novelty pushed them from their preferments and caused them to be as suddenly forgotten! The vulgar, tasteless jargon of "Dr. Syntax," with all the above-mentioned excellencies to excite public notice from the butterflies of fashion, soon found what it sought, though some of the plates or illustrations possess the disadvantageous merit of being good. Yet the letter-press doubly made up for all, ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... i. e. got out of his bounds"—Warburton—Bravo! old Hurlo-thumbo! got out of his depth, Warburton, you mean. Extra-vagant certainly may be construed out of bounds; we need no ghost with a mouthful of Syntax to tell us that; but Shakspeare had too much taste to adopt such an absurd Latinism. I have no doubt that the late king was a man of expensive habits, and is here compared to a prisoner within the rules of the king's bench, who must return to quod at a given moment or compliment ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... indeed, but they showed a keen mother-wit, a great command of the homely mother-tongue, an intimate knowledge of the English Bible, and a vast and dearly bought spiritual experience. They, therefore, when the corrector of the press had improved the syntax and the spelling, were well received by the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... power enters and takes possession of him. By this time his clothes are off, and he is snug in bed; not a wink can he sleep; that "fain" is domineering over him,—and he breaks out into what is as genuine passion and poetry, as anything from Sappho to Tennyson—abrupt, vivid, heedless of syntax. "Simmer's a pleasant time." Would any of our greatest geniuses, being limited to one word, have done better than take "pleasant?" and then the fine vagueness of "time!" "Flowers o' every color;" he gets a glimpse of "herself a fairer flower," and is off in pursuit. "The water ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... some things—rhapsodic prose-poems, weak in syntax but strong in the quality miscalled imagination. Her pen name was George Bishop: following the example of the three Georges so dear to the believer in sexless literature—George Sand, George Eliot and George Egerton. She ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... differences, though now and then called by new names. For names depend on custom, but the passions on Nature; and these being constant and those variable, this error has arisen. As, in the parts of a speech and the syntax of the words, some new sort of barbarism or solecism can suddenly arise; so the temperature of the body hath certain deviations and corruptions into which it may fall, those things which are against and hurtful to Nature being in some sort existent in Nature herself. ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... is nothing in Belhaven's oration which equals this in intensity, there is power and pathos, as well as Ciceronian syntax, in the period: "Hannibal, my lord, is at our gates; Hannibal is come within our gates; Hannibal is come the length of this table; he is at the foot of this throne; if we take not notice he'll seize upon these regalia, he'll take them as our spolia opima, and whip ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... subjects than came under the jurisdiction of his pedagogue's ferule. A benign Rosa Dartle might have been his godmother. He was for ever consulting encyclopaedias and books of reference. However badly he knew his Greek verbs or his Latin syntax he had a very shrewd and curious knowledge of the world when he left school at fifteen to enter the local branch of ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... Some of these letters will be found in the following pages. Even as manuscripts, I should insist that the letters of Patrick Henry are witnesses to the fact and quality of real intellectual cultivation: these are not the manuscripts of an uneducated person. In penmanship, punctuation, spelling, syntax, they are, upon the whole, rather better than the letters of most of the great actors in our Revolution. But, aside from the mere mechanics of written speech, there is in the diction of Patrick Henry's letters the nameless ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... English. Examples in Syntax, Accidence, and Style, for criticism and correction. New edition, revised and ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... and there never can be wanting some who distinguish desert, who will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since, while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding and some falling away; that a whole life can not be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he whose design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not understand; that a writer will sometimes be ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... dilute. This adjuvant strain is found in the enthusiasm of Slang. Slowly its rhetorical power has won foothold in the language. It has won many a verb and substantive, it has conquered idiom and diction, and now it is strong enough to assault the very syntax of our Anglo-Saxon tongue.[*] ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... I am very guilty; I should have written to you long ago; and now, though it must be done, I am so stupid that I can only boldly recapitulate. A phrase of three members is the outside of my syntax. ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... They never forget their syntax, children, when once they've been taught it. But I think some of them are, on the whole, worse than any of you. Not that it's amiable of you to look so radiant, all in ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... dressings', he grew tired of chemistry altogether, and presently of physical science in general. His evenings were given to poetry and history; he took up the classical schoolbooks again, and found a charm in Latin syntax hitherto unperceived. It was plain to him now how he had been wronged by the necessity of leaving school when his education had but ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Bowyer, who was at that time head master, a quick discerning man, but hasty and severe, sent for the master of the grammar school, and inquired about Coleridge; from him he learnt that he was a dull and inapt scholar, and that he could not be made to repeat a single rule of syntax, although he would give a rule in his ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... Pazi-el, Eli-asaph, point less to the Mosaic than to the Persian period, and have their analogies in the Chronicles. On the other hand, the prepositions and particles would have to be examined the use of the prepositions Beth and Lamed in the Priestly Code is very peculiar. That would lead further, to syntax; or better still, to rhetoric and style—a diffcult and little cultivated field of study, but one of great importance and lending itself readily to comparative treatment. This treatment yields the most far-reaching results in the case ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... the strictly miscellaneous part of the Miscellany. The greater part of the Uncertain Authors are less ambitious, but also less irregular than Wyatt, while they fall far short of Surrey in every respect. Sometimes, as in the famous "I loath that I did love," both syntax and prosody hardly show the reform at all; they recall the ruder snatches of an earlier time. But, on the whole, the characteristics of these poets, both in matter and form, are sufficiently uniform and sufficiently ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... only beauties, and beauties which even an ignorant listener—if he is naturally musical—will see without trouble. He did not understand the vast difference between the unlettered person who commits a solecism and Pascal, the inventor of a new syntax. ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... in our hearts that the French Academy is a foolish institution, designed and kept up for the encouragement of mediocrity, correct syntax, and the status quo, we still, also in our hearts, admire it and watch its mutations with the respect which we always give to foreign phenomena and usually withold from phenomena British. The last elected member is M. Francis ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... rusty handwriting of Miss Trewthen's betrothed conveyed little more matter than details of their future housekeeping, and his preparations for the same, with innumerable 'my dears' sprinkled in disconnectedly, to show the depth of his affection without the inconveniences of syntax. ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... a very "informal" approach to grammar and syntax; so apparently did his editor. I corrected several obvious errors in the book and listed them at the end of the text. Many more doubtful spellings and countless abbreviations remain as they ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... the language of the common people in the provinces did not differ materially from that spoken in Italy. It was the language of the Roman soldier, colonist, and trader, with common characteristics in the way of diction, form, phraseology, and syntax, dropping into some slight local peculiarities, but kept essentially a unit by the desire which each community felt to imitate its officials and ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... criticism, but of scientific fact—of geographical position, of atmospheric agency—which should be disposed of on its own merits, and which, like many others of the same sort, must ultimately transfer the whole inquiry to a much higher field than that of syllables and syntax. ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... diamond in the rough,—square, sturdy, uncompromising, generous and hospitable; his great pride and glory was his wife; his one great sorrow that their only child had died almost in infancy. His solecisms in syntax and society were many. He was given at times to profanity, and at others, when madame was away, to draw poker; but officers and men alike proclaimed him a man of mettle and never hesitated to go to him when in financial straits, sure of unusurious ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... could to poison the wells of mutual trust and mutual understanding among civilized men. Do they think that these things will make a good advertisement for the explosive guttural sounds and the huddled deformed syntax of the speech in which they express their arrogance and their hate? Which of the chief European languages will come first, after the War, with the little nations? Will Serbia be content to speak German? Will Norway and Denmark feel a new affection for the speech ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... you to say 'shut up,' but why the syntax didn't you save some of the stuff for our watch: that's what I want to know?" said the injured mariner, with an intoxicated air of Christian virtue. Jimmy's friend, anticipating trouble, came to the rescue by judiciously calling his attention from his grievance and ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... book, and at odd times set some type.... The penmanship of the copy furnished was good, but the grammar, spelling and punctuation were done by John H. Gilbert, who was chief compositor in the office. I have heard him swear many a time at the syntax and orthography of Cowdery, and declare that he would not set another line of the type. There were no paragraphs, no punctuation and no capitals. All that was done in the printing office, and what a time there used to be in straightening sentences out, too. During ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... ye pale professors, who drilled me in syntax and scansion, ye would deem me ungrateful indeed were I to give utterance to the contempt and indignation which I then felt for ye—then, when I looked back upon ten years of wasted existence spent under your tutelage—then, when, after believing ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... vicissitudes attendant on pioneer life. The new country and poverty of his parents prevented his receiving a common English education, and it was not until after he was of age that he mastered Murray's syntax ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... so to say, a grammar of their own, whose rules and syntax are more general than our own; if you attend carefully you will be surprised to find how exactly they follow certain analogies, very much mistaken if you like, but very regular; these forms are only objectionable because of their harshness or because they ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... unlearned. Since Filicaja's thrilling appeal to his enslaved country no poet had challenged the old Roman spirit which Petrarch had striven to rouse. While the literati were busy discussing Alfieri's blank verse, while the grammarians wrangled over his syntax and ridiculed his solecisms, the public, heedless of such niceties, was glowing with the new wine which he had poured into the old vessels of classic story. "Liberty" was the cry that rang on the lips of all his heroes, in accents so new and stirring that his audience never ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... arithmetic—fundamental rules, fractions, proportion, percentage and interest, reduction; (3) elements of accounts and bookkeeping; (4) geography, history, and government—general questions, principally such as relate to the United States; (5) elements of English grammar, chiefly orthography and syntax; (6) writing and briefing letters; ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson
... in the face of this invasion, and the written character soon became as corrupt as the language; words foreign to the Egyptian vocabulary, incorrect expressions, and barbarous errors in syntax were multiplied without stint. The taste for art decayed, and technical ability began to deteriorate, the moral and intellectual standard declined, and the mass of the people showed signs of relapsing into barbarism: the leaders of the aristocracy ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero |
