"Vernacular" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... terms in the gaucho vernacular synonymous with "ostrich, be hanged!" adding, as he continues to gaze hopelessly around, "I wish I'd let the long-legged brute go its way. Like as not, it'll hinder me going mine, till too late. And if so, there'll ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... translations of the Scriptures, the Church Services, and other books, and the preachers in the vernacular for the infant Russian nation? The books had been translated about one hundred and twenty-five years previously, for the benefit of a small Slavonic tribe, the Moravians. This tribe had been baptized by German ecclesiastics, whose books and speech, in the Latin tongue, were wholly incomprehensible ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... of this in the life of Prince Henry; at present there is only space to notice the general fact. The other lines of John's home government—his reform of criminal procedure, his sanction of the vernacular in legal and official business in place of Latin, his attempt to publish the first collection of Portuguese laws, his settlement of the Court in the true national capital of Lisbon—are only to be linked with the life ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... then why have there been so few good translators? why is it that there has been such great difficulty in combining the two necessary qualities, fidelity to the original and purity in the adopted vernacular? why is it that the authorized versions of the Church are often so inferior to the original as compositions, except that the Church is bound above all things to see that the version is doctrinally correct, and in a difficult problem is obliged to put up with defects in what is of secondary importance, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... we should read "24 piccoli each" for this was about the equivalent of a grosso. This is the first time Polo mentions cowries, which he calls porcellani. This might have been rendered by the corresponding vernacular name "Pig-shells," applied to certain shells of that genus (Cypraea) in some parts of England. It is worthy of note that as the name porcellana has been transferred from these shells to China-ware, so the word pig has been in Scotland applied to ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... from Mr. Caird that indigo grows in cakes (the ale is imported); to his description of the process of manufacture I can only add that the juice is generally expressed in the vernacular. You give a cake of the raw material to a coloured servant, you stand over him to see that he doesn't eat it, and your assistant canes him slowly as he squeezes the juice into a blue bottle. Blue ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... less general—for instance, neither Sir Robert nor Mr. Champers-Haswell laughed. This merriment seemed to excite Jeekie. At any rate it caused him to cease his stilted talk and relapse into the strange vernacular that is common to all negroes, tinctured with a racy slang that was all ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... form, and returns au galop. Sometimes he's an ugly little cacophonous brown sparrow; sometimes he's a splendid florid money-lender, or an aproned and obsequious greengrocer, or a trusted friend, hearty and familiar. But he 's always there; and he's always—if you don't mind the vernacular—'on the snatch.'" ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... which these stories are presented is the language in which they were collected and written down,—English. Perhaps no apology is required for not printing the vernacular herewith; nevertheless an explanation might be made. In the first place, the object in recording these tales has been a literary one, not a linguistic one. In the second place, the number of distinctly different languages represented by the originals might be baffling even to the reader ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... what Europeans imply in the etymological construction of the Latin root of this term. In their creed there is no such thing as a "binding" in the Christian sense—a submission to or merging of self in a Divine Being. Agama is their vernacular word to express their relation to Buddhism and the BUDDHA. It is pure Samskrt, and means "approach, or coming"; and as "Buddha" is enlightenment, the compound word by which they indicate Buddhism—Buddhagama—would be properly rendered as "an approach ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... like the race. Anyway, it makes an interesting mixture. We have had to put them all together, and they get on capitally, exchanging stories and gossip and sympathy like men of the same company. One of them, a Boer,—" she hesitated for the right word; then she adopted the vernacular of the service—"went out, the other day; and, among his mourners, the sincerest ones were the two London Tommies in the two next beds. War isn't all hatred, by any means. Turn nurse for a month ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... if a horse were within hail; who rode to dances with a shawl thrown over her skirt; who wore her hair cropped and curling all over her head; who answered indifferently to the name of William or Bill; whose speech was heavy with the flowers of the vernacular; who could act in amateur theatricals, play on the banjo, rule eight servants and two horses, their accounts and their diseases, and look men slowly and deliberately between the eyes—yea, after they had proposed to her and ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... knowledge, such generous devotion, such patriotic fervor. And lastly, he is a man of distinguished literary ability, wielding the language of his adopted country with an ease and grace which hardly leave a suspicion that he was not writing his vernacular tongue. A namesake of his—whether a relation or not, we are not informed—has written "in very choice Italian" a history of the American Revolution; and the work before us, relating in such excellent English the leading events of a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... necessarily intervened between Homer and the "Father of History," a generation sufficed between Dante and Boccaccio, for Italian literature had only to throw off the leaden garb of Latin form to find its new dress in the vernacular. Dante certainly wrote Italian prose, but he was more at ease in verse; and while the latter provoked in him an abundance of those happy phrases which seem to have been born with the thought they express, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... a little better acquainted with Mrs. Sewell, she dropped the genteel elongation of her final syllables, and used such vernacular forms of speech as came first to her. The name of 'Manda Grier seemed to come in at every fourth word with her, and she tired Mrs. Sewell with visits which she appeared unable to bring ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... even the true personality of madame. In point of fact, he was a quiet, inoffensive, amiable man, who gave his mind to Sanskrit for work and to entomology for play, and did not trouble himself about his own portrait as drawn in the local vernacular. Nevertheless, for all his reserved habits and quiet ways, he had learnt the whole history of the place and people before he had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... stiffly frozen snow, shouting, dancing, yelling, and whooping, and others acting precisely the peculiar traits of a Negro, an Arab, a Chinese, an Italian, or even the polite gayety of a Frenchman. And, what is still more astounding, speaking the vernacular dialects of each race. Their confabulation, aided by inspired interpreters, was truly amusing and interesting. On one occasion I saw a sister, inspired by a squaw, her head mounted with an old hat of felt, cocked, jammed, and indented in no geometrical form, rush to a pan containing a collection ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... deny that there was a measure of truth in his brief remark. She did want to "show 'em." Bill's vernacular expressed it exactly. She had compassed success in a manner that Granville—and especially that portion of Granville which she knew and which knew her—could appreciate and understand and envy according ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the preservation of government on the basis of a free constitution. Wherever it exists there will be foolish and violent paragraphs in the newspapers, as there are, I am sorry to say, foolish and violent speeches in both houses of Congress. In truth, Sir, I must say that, in my opinion, the vernacular tongue of the country has become greatly vitiated, depraved, and corrupted by the style of our Congressional debates. And if it were possible for those debates to vitiate the principles of the people as much as they have depraved their tastes, I should ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... artificiality of style, which is far more marked in his earliest work, and from which at times he quite escapes, Irving's personality shines clearly. He has so employed a conventional medium as to make it serve his original purposes. He possessed, to be sure, a faculty of strong vernacular speech, which is little suggested in his to-be-published writing, or even in his private letters. The Oregon embroilment had led certain British journals into gross speech about America. Irving was much disturbed. What he wrote was, ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... on; perge, puer, as a body may say," interrupted the major, who seemed resolved to show what command of language he had, for he uniformly began his speeches in his vernacular, and translated them, though with an effort, into English, or any other tongue he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... the oldest of the vernacular literatures of modern Europe; and it is a consequence of this that its relations with Latin literature have been the closest. All the vernacular literatures have been influenced by the Latin, but of Anglo-Saxon literature alone can it ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... real! This was regular! One wiser than the rest—one who thought himself schooled in the vernacular, because he had once witnessed a Frontier Week celebration at Cheyenne—seized upon this opportunity ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... said the mate, in the peculiar drawling vernacular of the poor whites of the south, extending a hand as cold ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... styled the Padma Purana, because it treats of the "epoch when the world was a golden Lotus"; and the sacred incantation which goes murmuring through Thibet is "Om mani padme houm." It would be singular, if upon these delicate floating leaves a fragment of our earliest vernacular has been borne down to us, so that here the schoolboy is more learned ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... of this kind: out-births at once of rapture and of charity. Written in the popular Hindi, not in the literary tongue, they were deliberately addressed—like the vernacular poetry of Jacopone da Tod and Richard Rolle—to the people rather than to the professionally religious class; and all must be struck by the constant employment in them of imagery drawn from the common life, the universal experience. It is by the simplest metaphors, by constant ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... size; and a fourth, Sheemus Ruah, or red James, from the color of his hair. These epithets, to be sure, still occur in Ireland, but far less frequently now than in the times of which we write, when Irish was almost the vernacular language of the country. It was for a reason similar to those just alleged, that John O'Rorke was known as Lamh Laudher O'Rorke; he, as well as his forefathers for two or three generations, having been remarkable for prodigious bodily ...
— The Dead Boxer - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... said mildly, as he opened the hall door, "I am going around to the Supreme Court rooms. In five minutes you may step into the inner office, and inform the lady who is waiting there that"— here Lawyer Gooch made use of the vernacular—"that there's nothing doing." ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... keenly insighted so as to divine he would prove superior in fate to Stephen Douglas, also courting her. Although unsuited by nature and his means to shine in the ballroom, Lincoln followed his flame thither. Using the vernacular, he asked for her hand, ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... not have heard of the poor men of Lyons whose peculiar tenets at this time were arousing very general attention. It is not improbable that he may have fallen in with one of those translations of the New Testament into the vernacular executed by Stephen de Emsa at the expense of Peter Waldo, and through his means widely circulated among all classes. [Footnote: See "Facts and Documents Illustrative of the History, Doctrine, and ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... the names of authors are given in their vernacular form. In English and French surnames beginning with a prefix (except the French de and d') the name is recorded under the prefix. In other languages and in French names beginning with de and d', the name is recorded under the word following the prefix. Compound surnames are entered under the first ...
— A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library [Dewey Decimal Classification] • Melvil Dewey
... safety, successfully planned the escape of Hugh's master and his whole party. The story is given on uninterrupted tradition in the country of the Mackenzies; and a full and independent version in the vernacular of the hero's humane conduct on Leathad Leacachan will be found in the Celtic Magazine, vol. ii., pp. 468-9, to which ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... circular beds of scarlet tulips and yellow daffodils. Detached from the Penniman house, but still in the same yard, was a smaller, one-storied house, also white, with green blinds, tenanted by Dave Cowan and his twins, who—in Newbern vernacular—mealed with Mrs. Penniman. It had been the Cowan home when Dave married the Penniman cousin who had borne the twins. There was a path worn in the grass between ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... affair, this! A total lack of tall trunks, frills, and curling-kids. Driven by the oestrum of a Yo-Semite pilgrimage, the San-Francisco belle forsakes (the Western vernacular is "goes back on") her back-hair, abandons her capillary "waterfalls" for those of the Sierra, and, like John Phoenix's old lady who had her whole osseous system removed by the patent tooth-puller, departs, leaving her "skeleton" behind her. The bachelor who ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... was a bit sick," continued Sheen, relapsing once more into the vernacular, "and I wanted to do something to put things right again, and I met—anyhow, I took up boxing. I wanted to box for the house, if I was good enough. I practised every day, and stuck to it, and after a bit ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... brought by a butcher from West Bungtown. It was, in the vernacular, a buck-skin. Hide-bound, with ribs so prominent they suggested a wash-board. The two fore legs were well bent out at the knees; both hind legs were swelled near the hoofs. His ears nearly as large as a donkey's; one eye covered with a cataract, the other ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... through into clear sunlight as a purpose no longer to be confused with the gratification of personal fancies, the impossible realization of boys' and girls' dreams of bliss, or the need of older people for companionship or money. The plain-spoken marriage services of the vernacular Churches will no longer be abbreviated and half suppressed as indelicate. The sober decency, earnestness and authority of their declaration of the real purpose of marriage will be honored and accepted, whilst their romantic vowings and pledgings and until-death-do-us-partings ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... enormous responsibility they undertake for the books which they sanction by their official examinations for degrees, the name of Paley is their great opprobrium. But, on the other hand, for style, Paley is a master. Homely, racy, vernacular English, the rustic vigor of a style which intentionally foregoes the graces of polish on the one hand, and of scholastic precision on the other—that quality of merit has never been attained in a degree so eminent. This first interchange of thought ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... knell of popery, and in writing to Peder Galle he inveighed against it. "We marvel much," he wrote, "that the archbishop should enter this labyrinth without consulting the prelates and chapters of the Church. Every one knows that translations into the vernacular have already given rise to frequent heresy.... It is said the Bible is capable of four different interpretations. Therefore it would imperil many souls were a mere literal translation made. Moreover, laymen cannot read the Bible even if it be ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... is Latin for Constitution, will not make you a particle the wiser; I will, therefore, explain it in the vernacular tongue.—Constitution then, in its primary, abstract, and true signification, is a concatenation or coacervation of simple, distinct parts, of various qualities or properties, united, compounded, or constituted ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... fully and clearly; and, consequently, in a manner which will defy the ingenuity of man to give our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express. To be able to speak and write our vernacular tongue with accuracy and elegance, is, certainly, a consideration ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... in the discussions of the Council, may be specially instanced his action in the matter of the cotton duties (in which he defended native Indian manufactures as against hostile Manchester interests); the Vernacular Press Act, the necessity for which he fully recognised; and the retention of Kandahar, for which he recorded his vote in a strong minute. In all these three cases, which are typical of many others, his opinion was overruled, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... cares of a troublesome kingship, could find time to devote to this work, and realised the importance of vernacular literature, is one of the chief signs of his greatness. What he did had a lasting influence upon our literature. He tapped the wellspring of English prose. Mainly owing to his initiative, from his day till the Conquest all the literature of importance was in the vernacular, and the impulse so ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... the law!" impatiently exclaimed the Reverend Doctor, in his most strident vernacular, when the question of Barnabas Bidwell's expulsion from the Assembly was under discussion in his hearing—"Never mind the law; toorn ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... interested not to act, but to pause and consider; it does not want to use the present as a point of departure. It wants to bask in the present perfection of color, word, or sound. The practical man is interested in a present situation for what can be done with it; he wants to know, in the vernacular, "What comes next?" "Where do we go from here?" The appreciator wishes to remain in the lovely interlude of perfection which he experiences in music, poetry, ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... without a distinctly ascertained connotation, and with no more precise notion of their meaning than can be loosely collected from observing what objects they are used to denote. It is in this manner that we all acquire, and inevitably so, our first knowledge of our vernacular language. A child learns the meaning of the words man, or white, by hearing them applied to a variety of individual objects, and finding out, by a process of generalization and analysis which he could not himself describe, what those different objects have in common. ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... for he was the pattern of the ideal german scholar, as daringly original in his thought as he was homely in his life, a modest, genial, laborious slave to truth and learning, and withal the owner of an admirable literary style of the vernacular sort. The materialistic generation, that in the fifties and sixties called his speculations fantastic, had been replaced by one with greater liberty of imagination, and a Preyer, a Wundt, a Paulsen, and a Lasswitz could now speak of Fechner as ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... these grounds fair claims to the public favour and attention; he was an illiterate old steward, whose partiality to THE FAMILY, in which he was bred and born, must be obvious to the reader. He tells the history of the Rackrent family in his vernacular idiom, and in the full confidence that Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, Sir Kit, and Sir Condy Rackrent's affairs will be as interesting to all the world as they were to himself. Those who were acquainted with the manners of ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... ye're after?" Maggie was apt in any state of excitement to revert in her speech to the vernacular. "'Deed an' ye'll look till the end of yer days an' risk dyin' a downright old maid, if it's parfection ye're after marryin' in a man! An' I don't need a gell as has niver been married to tell me my Jim ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... Five Forks in some open ground along the crest of a gentle ridge. Custer got Capehart into place just in time to lend a hand to Smith, who, severely pressed, came back on us here from his retreat along Chamberlain's "bed"—the vernacular for a woody swamp such as that through which Smith retired. A little later the brigades of Gregg and Gibbs, falling to the rear slowly and steadily, took up in the woods a line which covered the Boydton Road some distance to the right ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 5 • P. H. Sheridan
... malady which had been so prevalent on the passage to Bear Island. Mr. Cooke had never felt better, and looked every inch a sea-captain in his natty yachting-suit. He had acquired a tan on the island; and, as is eminently proper on a boat, he affected nautical manners and nautical ways. But his vernacular savored so hopelessly of the track and stall that he had been able to acquire no mastery over the art of marine invective. And he possessed not so much as one maritime oath. As soon as we had swung clear of the cove he made for the weather stays, where ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... at Fort Mackinac with Archie; Archie was my nephew, a young lieutenant. In the short, bright summer came the visitors from below; all the world outside is 'below' in island vernacular. In the long winter the little white fort looked out over unbroken ice-fields, and watched for the moving black dot of the dog-train bringing the mails from the main land. One January day I had been out walking on the snow-crust, breathing ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... inviting, rather than desiring to exclude, other attempts of the same kind, calling the attention of the Church to the many and anxious questions involved in rendering the Holy Scriptures into the vernacular language, and offering some help towards the settlement ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott
... the babu's explanation had been made in fluent, vernacular Urdu, Amber's surprise at the girl's evident familiarity with that tongue was hardly to be concealed. "You understand Urdu?" ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... own intention to run as a candidate for office at the next election, Jim expressed his interest in the vernacular of the hour, "What do you know about that?" Further discussion of politics ending in Jim's pledging his support to his boyhood's friend, Thor shook hands with an encouraging sense of being embarked on a public career, and went forward to visit ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... off side, tackled, then tried a forward pass," replied Dick, lightly speaking the football vernacular so familiar to Thorne. ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... would you, you treacherous Jane!" The old vernacular returned unbidden to Willa's lips. "You'd play both ways from the ace and take in the look-out? If I had you down in Mexico I'd shoot you full of holes! You heard me! If I find you at the house when I get back, look out ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... succession, than to sport in that manner with one only, then may blank verse be more easily fabricated than rhyme. And if to these labors we add others equally requisite, a style in general more elaborate than rhyme requires, farther removed from the vernacular idiom both in the language itself and in the arrangement of it, we shall not long doubt which of these two very different species of verse threatens the composer with most expense of study and contrivance. I feel it unpleasant to appeal to my own experience, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... Speech in any vernacular—and Wee Willie Winkie had a colloquial acquaintance with three—was easy to the boy who could not yet manage his "r's" and ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... universal Bantu vernacular, French (official), English (official), Kiswahili (Swahili) ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... interesting of Aelfric's writings is his Colloquium, designed to teach Latin in the monastery at Winchester. The pupils were required to learn the Latin translation of his dialogues in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular. Some of these dialogues are today valuable illustrations of the social and industrial life of the time. The following is part of the conversation between the Teacher and ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... independent thought, of individual ratiocination. When "Les Miserables" first appeared some literary Columbus made the remarkable discovery that it was a French book, that it was shot full of "slang," the expressive patois of the race, that it was liberally spiced with argot, the vernacular of vagabonds. Hugo's immortal masterpiece has not yet recovered from this discovery—the thousandth ewe lamb is still blithely saltating over the blackthorn. It is as useless to contend against the purist fad as against the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... came to St. Andrews, a city once archiepiscopal; where that university still subsists in which philosophy was formerly taught by Buchanan, whose name has as fair a claim to immortality as can be conferred by modern latinity, and perhaps a fairer than the instability of vernacular languages admits. ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... year later he had so far relented as to give reluctant consent for Jane and the child to come, provided her condemned husband did not accompany them. "If that low-lived Portygee sets foot on my premises, so help me God, I'll kill him!" declared the captain. In his vernacular all foreigners were "Portygees." ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... satirical poems abound in wit and in happy phrase; his two tragedies, Baptistes and Jephthes, have enjoyed from the first an undiminished European reputation for academic excellence. In addition to the works already named, Buchanan wrote in prose Chamaeleon, a satire in the vernacular against Maitland of Lethington, first printed in 1711; a Latin translation of Linacre's Grammar (Paris, 1533); Libettus de Prosodia (Edinburgh, 1640); and Vita ab ipso scripta biennio ante mortem (1608), edited by R. Sibbald (1702). His other poems are Fratres Fraterrimi, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... had fully convinced me that the Russian language is one of those things which can only be acquired by practice, and that even a person of antediluvian longevity might spend all his life in that city without learning to express himself fluently in the vernacular—especially if he has the misfortune of being able to speak English, French, and German. With his friends and associates he speaks French or English. German serves as a medium of communication with waiters, shop keepers, and other people of that class. It is only with isvoshtchiki—the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... which exists between such of the vernacular languages of India as are offshoots of the Sanscrit, as the Hindostanee, Mahratta, Guzeratee, &c., and the Greek, Latin, German, and English languages, is now well known to European scholars, more especially since the publication of the researches of Vans ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 56, November 23, 1850 • Various
... multitudes of others, Christine and Dennis at last received an army biscuit (hardtack in the soldier's vernacular) and a tin-cup of what resembled coffee. To him it was very touching to see how eagerly she received this coarse fare, proving that she was indeed almost famished. Too weak to stand, they sat down near the door on the sidewalk. A kind lady presently came and ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... were rear guard and, passing through a fat land, abounding with oranges, tangerines, citrons, lemons, tobacco and good water, not to forget porkers, fowls, ducks, and the like, "did ourselves proud," to resort to the vernacular. That night we had a huge veldt fire, and the whole camp had to turn out with blankets to fight it. Fortunately a well-beaten track separated the blazing veldt from us, and the wind blew it beyond, or we could ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... this signification would be in entire agreement with the Syriac translation. (5) This Syriac translation (if it be a translation, which is very doubtful, for we know neither the time of its appearance, nor the translators and Syriac was the vernacular of the Apostles) renders the text before us in a way well explained by Tremellius as ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza
... itinerary, as in all the ancient voyages and travels, the names of persons, places, and things, are generally given in an extremely vicious orthography, often almost utterly unintelligible, as taken down orally, according to the vernacular modes of the respective writers, without any intimate knowledge of the native language, or the employment of any fixed general standard. To avoid the multiplication of notes, we have endeavoured to supply this defect, by subjoining those names which are now ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... to go elsewhere, and thus brought them fame and fortune." Whatever foundation there may be for these jibes, they are in themselves a sufficient evidence that Chicago is alive to her opportunities and responsibilities. She is, in her own vernacular, "making, culture hum." Mr. Fuller, I understand, reproached her with her stockyards—an injustice which even Mr. Bernard Shaw would scarcely have committed. Is it the fault of Chicago that the world is carnivorous? Was not "Nature red in tooth ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... the burly Buggins, than whom no Goose had a more fluent use of his vernacular. He was not polished as Robinson, nor had he ever possessed the exquisite keenness of Crowdy. But in speaking he always hit the nail on the head, and carried his hearers with him by the energy and perspicuity ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... within hearing, he would never have let his mother forget this speech. For had not she, the immaculate, the reprover, fallen herself into the slough of the vernacular? The fact is, it is easier to speak the truth in a patois, for it lies nearer to the simple realities ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... Colloquia written in the racy Dutch of the sixteenth century! What could he not have produced if, instead of gleaning and commenting upon classic Adagia, he had, for his themes, availed himself of the proverbs of the vernacular? To us such a proverb is perhaps even more sapid than the sometimes slightly finical turns praised ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... agile natures to follow the tracks of light and emulate the choice examples set before them, with swifter movements and with richer results than they could ever have attained, if not thus encouraged. Proverbial axioms flourish copiously in the idiomatic ground and vernacular climate of unlearned, undisciplined, unreflective minds, as thistles on the highway where every ass may gather them. But precious maxims, those "short sentences drawn from a long experience," as Cervantes calls them, are found mostly in the writings ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... funny gink that hurried by a little while ago?" queried Dora, in the vernacular of her calling. "He gave me the double O as though he had something ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... It has been already observed that Naples was a Greek colony, and consequently Greek appears to have continued the vernacular tongue.] ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... those within its own pale, these eccentric politicians aver that under a Roman Catholic Parliament, elected by the clergy alone, the isolated Protestants of Catholic Ireland, known in the Papist vernacular as Black-faces, Black-mouths, Heretics, Soupers, and Jumpers, would be treated with perfect consideration, would enjoy the fullest freedom, the most indulgent toleration, would, in short, be placed in a position of equality with the predestined inhabitants of ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... voice that went home to the heart of the people,—the voice of James Russell Lowell in the "Biglow Papers." In the homely Yankee vernacular he spoke for the highest conscience of New England. The righteous wrath was winged with stinging wit and lightened with broad humor. He spoke for that sentiment of the new and nobler America which ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... militiae suae principi nutriendum tradidit, ut, ibi lingua eruditus Danica, suis exterisque hominibus sciret aperte dare responsa, (Wilhelm. Gemeticensis de Ducibus Normannis, l. iii. c. 8, p. 623, edit. Camden.) Of the vernacular and favorite idiom of William the Conqueror, (A.D. 1035,) Selden (Opera, tom. ii. p. 1640-1656) has given a specimen, obsolete and obscure ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... elegant Moralities was composed by Louise L'Abe; the Aspasia of Lyons in 1550, adored by her contemporaries. With no extraordinary beauty, she however displayed the fascination of classical learning, and a vein of vernacular poetry refined and fanciful. To accomplishments so various she added the singular one of distinguishing herself by a military spirit, and was nicknamed Captain Louise. She was a fine rider and a fine lutanist. She presided in the assemblies of persons of literature and distinction. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... like the rest of yore wolf tribe. You come out here because the country got too hot to hold you after what you did to 'Lindy Clanton. I might 'a' knowed I'd find you with the 'Paches. You allus was low-mixed Injun." The boy had fallen into the hill vernacular to which he had been born. He was once more a tribal ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... use limited to literate minority), Mende (principal vernacular in the south), Temne (principal vernacular in the north), Krio (the language of the re-settled ex-slave population of the Freetown area and ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... a playlet depends upon showing not the conventional stage, as it is commonly seen, but the real stage as it is, unset with scenery; therefore sometimes the entire stage is used as the playing stage, and then in the vernacular it is called ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... this peroration accorded so ill with his prattling exordium that I was left with nothing but a gaze. This I gave him liberally; but he went on, lashing himself into fury, to use every vernacular oath he could lay tongue to. He swore in Venetian, in Piedmontese, in Tuscan. He swore Corsican, Ligurian, Calabrian, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabian and Portuguese. He shook his fists in my face, dangerously near my astonished eyes; he leaped at me, gnashing his teeth like a fiend; he bellowed ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... is "Pagliacci," not "I Pagliacci" as it frequently appears in books and newspapers. When the opera was brought out in the vernacular, Mr. Frederick E. Weatherly, who made the English adaptation, called the play and the character assumed by Canio in the comedy "Punchinello." This evoked an interesting comment from Mr. Hale: "'Pagliacci' is the plural of Pagliaccio, ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... slipped away from their place at their husbands' side, and left them unhelped in their public life. But even now they wield great influence over husband and son. Culture has never forsaken them, but the English education of their husbands and sons, with the neglect of Sanskrit and the Vernacular, have made a barrier between the culture of the husband and that of the wife, and has shut the woman out from her old sympathy with the larger life of men. While the interests of the husband have widened, those of the wife have narrowed. The materialising of the husband tended also, by ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... Muse can hardly raise her wing from the ground, nor spread her hidden glories to the sun. He has "no figures nor no fantasies, which busy passion draws in the brains of men:" neither the gorgeous machinery of mythologic lore, nor the splendid colours of poetic diction. His style is vernacular: he delivers household truths. He sees nothing loftier than human hopes; nothing deeper than the human heart. This he probes, this he tampers with, this he poises, with all its incalculable weight of thought and feeling, in his ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Edfrid, executed a wonderful copy of the Gospels, which was illuminated by his successor, Ethelwald. Another bishop enclosed it in a cover of gold and silver, adorning it with jewels; and, later, a priest of Lindisfarne, Aldred, wrote between the lines a translation into the vernacular, and added marginal notes. This precious manuscript, a wonderful example of the beautiful work done in monastic houses in the north so many centuries ago, is now in the British Museum, where it is known as the ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... Rev. Catholic bishop is respectfully informed that there is a negro woman lying dangerously ill at Mr. Goldrich's, who, being a Catholic, desires the last rites of that church. Being a native of St. Domingo, the French is her vernacular tongue; for which cause it will be desirable, if possible, to send, a clergyman who can speak ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... robes, passed within the altar-rails, opened his Tahitian Bible, and began to preach from notes. I understood one word—the name of God; but the preacher managed his voice with taste, used rare and expressive gestures, and made a strong impression of sincerity. The plain service, the vernacular Bible, the hymn-tunes mostly on an English pattern—"God save the Queen," I was informed, a special favourite,—all, save some paper flowers upon the altar, seemed not merely but austerely Protestant. It is thus the Catholics ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... times. During Lord William Bentinck's term of office education in India was reformed. Macaulay, afterwards Lord Macaulay, was an Indian official at the time, and he penned a notable report on education in India, in which he belittled vernacular learning and asserted that the Government of India would do well to discountenance it altogether, and to introduce western learning and the study of English literature into all schools under Government control, ...
— The Story of Madras • Glyn Barlow
... highest intellectual training in the philosophy and theology of the Scriptures and of the Fathers. It is known that, by the introduction of the Latin and Greek tongues into their schools in addition to the vernacular, the Bible in Latin and Greek, and the writings of many Fathers in both languages, as also the most celebrated works of Roman and Greek classical writers, became most interesting subjects of study. They reproduced those works for their own use in the scriptoria ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... his kingdom shall hear the word of God freely and without hinderance in the language which it understands. At present, throughout our entire diocese, on feast-days, and especially on Sunday, both the epistle and gospel are read to the people in the vernacular tongue, and the parish priest adds a word of exhortation to the epistle or gospel, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... 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 and caprices. The "Constitution," also, a word constantly profaned by his lips, is not so much, as he uses it, the Constitution of the United States as the moral and mental constitution of Andrew Johnson, which, in his view, is the one primary fact to which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... having been somewhat lamely and laboriously translated into the vernacular by Squanto, Winslow wiped his brow and wished that it consisted with his dignity to throw off his armor and stretch himself upon the pine needles at his feet, but it evidently did not; and in a moment or two Squanto delivered to him the king's ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... all hope of a return to Florence, though he retained the longing for it, dwelt in Ravenna for a number of years, under the protection of its gracious lord. And here by his teachings he trained many scholars in poetry, especially in the vernacular, which vernacular to my thinking he first exalted and brought into repute amongst us Italians no otherwise than did Homer his amongst the Greeks or Virgil his amongst the Latins. Before him, though it is supposed that it had already been practised some ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... common sense means his good judgment, his freedom from excentricity, his GUMPTION, to use the vernacular word. In philosophy it means something entirely different, it means his use of certain intellectual forms or categories of thought. Were we lobsters, or bees, it might be that our organization would have led to our using quite ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... cultivated in modern India. Bengali is a true daughter of the Sanskrit; it has Italian sweetness and German capacity for expressing abstract ideas. No degree of proficiency in an alien tongue can compensate for the neglect of the vernacular. Moreover, the curriculum introduced in the "thirties" was purely academic. It came to India directly from English universities, which had stuck fast in the ruts of the Renaissance. Undue weight was given to literary training, while science and technical skill were despised. ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... jurisdiction, that no place of Scripture justifies it. This is what was meant when the assertion that the Papacy is of divine right was denied. This becomes quite clear when Henry VIII instead of the previous prohibitions against distributing the Bible in the vernacular gave his licence for it. As he once declared with great animation, the advancement of God's word and of his own authority were one and the same thing.[125] The engraved title-page of the translation which appeared with his privilegium puts into his mouth the expression 'Thy word ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... magus to them.[1095] In Irish ecclesiastical literature, drui is used as the translation of magus, e.g. in the case of the Egyptian magicians, while magi is used in Latin lives of saints as the equivalent of the vernacular druides.[1096] In the sagas and in popular tales Druidecht, "Druidism," stands for "magic," and slat an draoichta, "rod of Druidism," is a magic wand.[1097] The Tuatha De Danann were said to have learned "Druidism" from ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... Malcolm taught you,' and Esclairmonde took the girl's hand. 'You know how much I owe to Father Malcolm,' she softly added, as she led the maiden to a carved rood at the end of the cloister, and, before it, repeated the vernacular version of the Lord's Prayer till Eleanor knew it perfectly, and promised to follow up ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... purpose, as would appear by his marking the words, to illustrate the alliterative principle. The following are variations which I have heard:—"As proud as the cobbler's dog, that took [or as took—the most general vernacular form, for the sake of euphony] the wall of a dung-cart, and got crushed for his pains." "As queer as Dick's hatband as went nine times ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 33, June 15, 1850 • Various
... In his crude vernacular, which I have endeavoured to reproduce faithfully, the aged rustic had said Hatcher's Lake was better than three miles distant. I am convinced what he meant was not better ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... have that at a venture, if I were the sick one," said Mr. Linden. "But the specific most prized by that class of the population who have 'fever nagur', is called in their vernacular 'Queen Anne'—anglice, quinine. Faith, you have no idea how those buttercups ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... myself," responded Berrie. "The only thing that feels natural is my hand. They cinched me so tight I can't eat a thing, and my shoes hurt." She laughed as she said this, for her use of the vernacular was conscious. "I'm a fraud. Your father will spot my brand first shot. Look at my face—red as ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... former Wars are transmitted to us in our Vernacular Idiom, to use the Phrase of a great Modern Critick. [4] I do not find in any of our Chronicles, that Edward the Third ever reconnoitred the Enemy, tho' he often discovered the Posture of the French, and ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... one to continue in its ruins, and suffered the other to be got through anyhow, or not at all - just as it happened. Clergymen were engaged to perform the service (there was but one each day) at the lowest price of the clerical market. Occasionally it was announced, in the vernacular of the district, that there would be no church, "because the priest had gone for the sea-bathing," or because the waters were out, and the ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... edition of the book, when of course it is the son who inserts it. We may say then, that, in all probability, the military technical term was introduced in the third quarter of the sixteenth century. This, I suspect, is too late to allow us to suppose that the vernacular force which Shakspeare takes it to have, could have been gained for it by the time ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various
... of them of high excellence. Frederick II. of Germany and Richard I. of England were both good poets, and were as proud of their verses as they were of their military exploits. Frederick II. may be said to have founded the vernacular in which Dante wrote; and Longfellow rendered into English a poem of Richard's which he composed during his cruel imprisonment in Austria. A knight who could not compose a song and sing it to the guitar was as rare as a modern gentleman of fashion ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... Nan was saying, archly. She had switched back to her favorite baseball vernacular. "You pitched a swell game last Saturday in Rochester, didn't you? Not! You had no steam, no control, and you couldn't have ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... of costume and appearance supply the vintage with its pleasant characteristics. The clatter of tongues is incessant. A fire of jokes and jeers, of saucy questions and more saucy retorts—of what, in fact, in the humble and unpoetic, but expressive vernacular, is called "chaff"—is kept up with a vigour which seldom flags, except now and then, when the but-end of a song, or the twanging close of a chorus, strikes the general fancy, and procures for the morceau a lusty encore. Meantime, the master wine-grower ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... 30%, Mende 30%, other 39%), Creole, European, Lebanese, and Asian 1% Religions: Muslim 30%, indigenous beliefs 30%, Christian 10%, other or none 30% Languages: English (official; regular use limited to literate minority), Mende principal vernacular in the south, Temne principal vernacular in the north, Krio the language of the re-settled ex-slave population of the Freetown area and is lingua franca Literacy: age 15 and over can read and write English, Merde, Temne, or Arabic (1990) total population: 21% male: 31% ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... yacht &c. and on her being grown up she became more prudent than other children of the same age, she paid every affectionate attention to her affectionate and esteemed father in every thing where her ability allowed; she was well educated in the vernacular Siamese literature which she commenced to study when she was 3 years old, and in last year she commenced to study in the English School where the schoolmistress, Lady L—— has observed that she was more skillful than the other royal Children, she pronounced & spoke ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... Walter Besant. But he will insist upon treating his ghosts—he has published half a workshopful of them—with levity. He makes his ghost-seers talk familiarly, and, in some cases, flirt outrageously, with the phantoms. You may treat anything, from a Viceroy to a Vernacular Paper, with levity; but you must behave reverently toward a ghost, and particularly ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... why they interested her. And now—he had almost seen her do it—she had shifted her position, come over to Connie Edward's side, and was gazing over her shoulder, with her own brown head tilted a little on one ear, and was saying in Connie's vernacular: ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... yet nearly always he had talked in the language of the uneducated Westerner, in the jargon of yeggmen, and the vernacular of the professional tramps with whom he had hoboed over the West—a "gay cat," as he was pleased to call himself, when boasting of the "toughness" of his life. He had affected uncleanliness, uncouthness; but in spite of his efforts the glimmer of the "something good" of which he was the ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... of their interview. Both of these men were members of the Confraternita de' Neri, who assumed the duty of comforting condemned prisoners with spiritual counsel, prayer, and exhortation. The narrative, dictated in the choicest vernacular Tuscan, by an artist whose charity and beauty of soul transpire in every line in contrast with the fiercer fortitude of Boscoli, is one of the most valuable original documents for this period which we possess.[4] What is most ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... steep cliff, where the churchyard hangs over the laneway to the East Pier so steeply that some of the flat tombstones, thruffsteans or through-stones, as they call them in Whitby vernacular, actually project over where the sustaining cliff has fallen away, it disappeared in the darkness, which seemed intensified just beyond the focus of ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... the witchery of our ballad-Enniuses, whose beauties, had Virgil lived with Addison, he would have inlaid into his mosaic. The bigotry of classical taste, which is not always accompanied by a natural one, and rests securely on prescribed opinions and traditional excellence, long contemned our vernacular genius, spurning at the minstrelsy of the nation; Johnson's ridicule of "Percy's Reliques" had its hour, but the more poetical mind of Scott has brought us back to home feelings, to ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... . The lands of Madariaga were indeed greater than many principalities. This put the old plainsman in rare good humor and he exclaimed in the cowboy vernacular which had become second nature to him—"Then it wouldn't be absurd to proclaim myself king some day? Just imagine it, Frenchy;—Don Madariaga, the First. . . . The worst of it all is that I would ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Pitlochry, whence he wrote that he was engaged in the composition of "crawlers." The first and best of these, "Thrawn Janet," was (with his "Tod Lapraik" in "Kidnapped") the only pendant to Scott's "Wandering Willie's Tale," in the northern vernacular. The tale has a limited circle; no Southern can appreciate all its merits, the thing is so absolutely and essentially Scots; especially the atmosphere. He said that it was "true for a hill parish in Scotland in old days, not true for mankind ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... more hot water, and on the way heard voices which made him call Mr. Graham, who knew more of the vernacular German patois than himself, to understand it. He thought he had caught something about English, and a doctor at Kandersteg. It was true. A guide belonging to the other side of the pass, who had been weather-bound at Kandersteg, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hardly repress a smile at this torrent of eloquence gushing from such a bit of a fellow, which sounded specially out of place here, where the ryots are given to stating their profoundly vital wants in plain and direct vernacular, of which even the more unusual words get sadly twisted out of shape. The clerks and ryots, however, seemed duly impressed, and likewise envious, as though deploring their parents' omission to endow them with so splendid a means of ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... gifts of Aphrodite. For a woman can never be truly beautiful who does not possess intelligence. It is a matter of the utmost indifference to me what studies my ideal has pursued. She may be a panglot or she may scarcely know her vernacular. If she speak French and German and read Latin and Greek, it is well. If she know conics and curves it is well; if she be able to integrate the vanishing function of a quivering infinitesimal, it is well; if from a disintegrating track which hardening cosmic mud has fixed and fastened ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... vernacular of the times, so familiar to the world in which she moved, Miss Van Ashton's appearance was decidedly fetching, and strongly suggestive of the things of which poets, in their madness, are continually harping—flower gardens flooded ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... his right hand. Naturally slow of thought when confronted by blank paper, the mechanical limitations put him far behind in his reports and correspondence. Naturally awkward of phrase when deprived of his picturesque vernacular, he stumbled among phrases. The monthly reports were a nightmare to him. When at last they were finished, he breathed a deep sigh, and went out into his sugar pines ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... cheeks and in concentric circles on the chest (done with loving care and a knife, in his infancy, by his papa) said only "Ptwack" as he chewed a mouthful of coffee-beans and hide. It may have been a pious ejaculation or a whole speech in his own peculiar vernacular. It was a tremendous smacking of tremendous lips, and the expression which overspread his speaking countenance was of gusto, appreciative, and such ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... may admit a French word which has no English equivalent), that is to say, the stock phrases which Heaven knows who first minted and which will pass till they are worn out of all knowledge. It has two great poets—one in the vernacular, one in the literary language—who are rich enough to keep a bank for their inferiors almost to the end of time. The depreciation of it by "glaikit Englishers" (I am a glaikit Englisher who does not depreciate), simply because it ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... but naturally more difficult for the use of beginners. To obviate the matter Lamarck conceived and proposed the dichotomic method for the easy determination of species. No new species were described, and the work, written in the vernacular, was simply a guide to the indigenous plants of France, beginning with the cryptogams and ending with the flowering plants. A second edition appeared in 1780, and a third, edited and remodelled by A. P. De Candolle, and forming six volumes, ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... shrieks. Altogether it was an extraordinary sound, a sound never to be forgotten by any one who heard it. It was almost as unforgettable as the sight which caused it; the word "sight" being here used in its vernacular sense, for Penrod, standing unmantled and revealed in all the medieval and artistic glory of the janitor's blue overalls, ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... strikes and preventing riots, the largest part of the work for which detectives are employed is not in the detection of crime and criminals, but in simply watching people, following them, and reporting as accurately as possible their movements. These functions are known in the vernacular as spotting, locating, and trailing. It requires patience, some powers of observation, and occasionally a little ingenuity. The real detective under such circumstances is the man to whom they hand in their reports. ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... Murren was not in, he left the item on his table. Then he wandered into the local editor's room. The newspaper boys all liked Hammerly, and many a good item they got from him. They never gave him away, and he saw that they never got left, as the vernacular is. ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... language of Plato or even of Aristotle is but slightly removed from that of common life, and was introduced naturally by a series of thinkers: the language of the scholastic logic has become technical to us, but in the Middle Ages was the vernacular Latin of priests and students. The higher spirit of philosophy, the spirit of Plato and Socrates, rebels against the Hegelian use of language as mechanical ...
— Sophist • Plato
... to the horse as he touched him with the whip. The horse responded nobly and they bowled along right merrily. Bob tried to think what "Allons, Gi-may" meant. He got the first word all right. That meant "Giddap or Go-along" in the vernacular but what that "Gi-may" meant he could not think. He did not want to ask Mr. Waterman so soon for information. Taking the bull by the horns, Bob began a conversation with the driver. To be sure it was very limited, for Bob had his troubles, but after a little while ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... maidens in the palace were having a good time, and were gaily engaged in sowing the whirlwind, with a sublime disregard for the storm, which it would be theirs to reap, when the King returned to punish. As the vernacular proverb has it, the cat and the roast, the tinder and the spark, and a boy and a girl are ill to keep asunder; and consequently my friends about the palace were often in trouble, by reason of their love affairs, even when the King was at hand; and on his return, after ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... lies in a sedate, rather commonplace realism. One of the most national of authors, he loses much in translation.[1] His style is racy, smacking of the street or the counting-house; he is one of the greatest masters of the Russian vernacular. To translate his Moscow slang into the equivalent dialect of New York would be merely to transfer Broadway associations to the Ilyinka. A translator can only strive to be colloquial and familiar, giving up ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... into bluffness, and was never consistent with the delicacy of refined taste, but which unmistakably evinced a sound and benevolent disposition. When her sharp temper was stirred—and her daughters gave it abundant exercise—she expressed herself in a racy and vigorous vernacular which there was no opposing; never coarse, never, in the large sense, unwomanly, she made her predominance felt with an emphasis which would fain have been rivalled by many of the mothers of Dunfield. Lavishly indulgent to her girls, she yet kept them thoroughly ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... area covered by the nomenclature of plants, as seen in the gradual evolution and descent of vernacular names, may be gathered even from a cursory survey of those most widely known in our own and other countries. Apart, too, from their etymological associations, it is interesting to trace the variety of sources from whence plant names have sprung, a few ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... kind. They are never whipped, and eat as much pastry as they think proper; whereby they grow up dyspeptic and rational beyond their years. Parents don't appear to exercise any particular functions, masters (we again beg Demus's pardon for the poverty of the vernacular) have nothing magisterial about them, and servants won't stomach even the name, at least if they wear white skins, and know it. After the first burst of admiration at the philosophy of the thing, it grows tiresome to live amongst people who are all so much alike. Now in England the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... low and sepulchral, but either the ghostly apparition that uttered the command had slipped up on its vernacular, or it was the spirit of a bandit. Some demand of the kind was, however, urgently necessary, for George did not, as formerly, show a desire to flee; his belligerent attitude suggested fight and he was a husky specimen with a handy club. Even though he might have suffered a qualm at again beholding ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... at such a distance from us all, I should not be surprised to hear that he had constituted himself the lord and master of some blue-eyed fraeulein with whom he could not exchange a dozen words in her own vernacular, and had become a dis-respectable pater familias at nineteen. In the midst of all the worry and anxiety which these considerations occasion, we are living here a most unsettled, flurried life of divided work and pleasure. We have gone out to Heaton every morning ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... without heavy capitalization, could have sustained a policy of political reform, when, in the picturesque vernacular of the time and place, "the bottom had dropped out of the town." A rival newspaper, the LEDGER, in order to retrench, began a war on the Printers' Union, to break wages. Lane repudiated the effort made ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... and fell away in laughing horror. When her humour, or her feelings generally, were a little excited, she spoke her vernacular as her sisters did, but immediately subsided into ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sadness, there were yet jests and loud laughter. However keenly I felt these things, I had learned that modesty amounted to little in the army; so I pushed my nag steadily forward and scattered the camp vernacular, in the shape ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... on the counter and dangling from clips over the edge, to say nothing of his conceiving of there being other periodicals in circulation which he never even hears about. But any one knowing the commuter well enough to call him "dearie" might tell him in slightly worn vernacular that he doesn't know the half ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... destined one day to arouse the admiration of the peoples across the Channel and exercise an important influence upon other literatures. In the Middle Ages, however, French, not English, was the most important of the vernacular languages of western Europe. In France a vast literature was produced in the language of the people during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which profoundly affected the books written in Italy, ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... tale I am also indebted to my friend the Rev. Owen Jones. The story appears in a Welsh MS. in his possession, which he kindly lent me. I will, first of all, give the tale in the vernacular, and then I will, for the benefit of my English readers, ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... regard with affectionate veneration the life-work of the Reformers, and the theology of the Reformation. Of a later date, and in our own vernacular, we have inherited from the Puritans an indigenous theology, great in quantity and precious in kind,—a legacy that has enriched our age more, perhaps, than the age is altogether willing to acknowledge. At various ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... himself with poetical composition, and was the intimate friend of some of the most eminent bards of his time. But he was above all devoted to the study of philosophy and history. He made a version of Aristotle's Ethics into the vernacular, which was first printed nearly fifty years after his death, at Saragossa, in 1509. He compiled also a Chronicle of Navarre from the earliest period to his own times, which, although suffered to ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... spontaneous utterance of an aesthetic instinct, but the outcome of material needs and of patriotic pride," and hence only an incomplete expression of Roman civilization. "To them, in brief, art was not vernacular: their purest taste, their brightest gifts of mind, ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... you about but I don't know where to begin. I want to say one thing that I think, which is that I think it is very difficult to judge practically when a too analytical definition of a condition or state is substituted for the ordinary and worldly vernacular. I think one must often fall into error from too great an attempt of metaphysical accuracy (precision), for whatever the thing in essence, the reaction thereof upon the multitude is made more forcible and more lucid to the mind by the term ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... Force, they were compelled to take a long chance. A Mounted Policeman can't use his gun except in self-defense. He isn't supposed to smoke up a fugitive unless the fugitive begins to throw lead his way—which method of procedure gives a man who is, in the vernacular, "on the dodge" all the best of a situation like that; for it gives an outlaw a chance to take the initiative, and the first shot often settles an argument of that kind. The dominating idea, as I understood it, was that the majesty of the law should prove a sufficiently ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... to an old Blue Mountain house a guest comes whom it is wished to do honour, the Lady, as in the vernacular the mistress of the house is called, comes herself to meet the guest at the door—or, rather, outside the door—so that she can herself conduct him within. It is a pretty ceremony, and it is said that of old in kingly days the monarch ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... We're very busy in here, and you disturb us. We're revising the moral laws." The shock of this intelligence electrified them, and while they stared at each other helplessly, not knowing what to do, she armed herself with the vulgar vernacular, which was the best weapon, she understood, to level at cant. "Lord," she said to herself, "how Diavolo would enjoy this! I wish he was here!" She found the work of the Sphere very heavy, and she tried to remember the name of some saint, but for the life of her she ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... wreck the lives of others in order to secure her own peace of mind would make her both ridiculous and contemptible in her own eyes, and she had yet to despise herself. She would "stick it out," "see it through," to quote the vernacular of these curious American novels she had been reading; trusting that she had merely been suffering from a flurry of the senses . . . not so remarkable ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... that my jaw dropped open,—that, to use his own vernacular, I was 'all of a heap.' ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... "Zeno Imperator Tu Vincas", would be, as we know from other similar instances, the most frequently uttered acclamation. It is a curious instance of "survival" that this was always shouted in Latin, though Greek was the vernacular tongue of the vast majority of the ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin |
