"Plural" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on Gothic buildings, especially on castles. This at Coulyng is remarkable from being in English, at a time when Latin was employed in all charters; it contains that early form of the plural 'beth' instead of 'are.' The inscription measures thirty-two inches by fourteen, and the diameter of the seal is no less than seven and a quarter ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... 50 pounds in his pocket, setting out to turn it into 300 pounds by a book of travels. I have avoided mention of Margate, Ramsgate, Broadstairs, and all common watering-places; I have talked of physicians in the plural; in short, no one who reads that paragraph, but will suppose that you are a young man of rank and fortune, to whom money is no object, and who spends hundreds to cure that which might be effected by a little regularity, and ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... "flag-ships" plural in original. Chapter XII et seq.: "St. Martinsville" corrected to "St. Martinville" Chapter XXI: "Brownville", Texas, corrected to "Brownsville". Chapter XXXIV: the Grant in temporary command of Getty's division is Brigadier-General Lewis Grant, ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... of its organization, and the pith of all its problems of sex and age, leadership and training, aims and objectives. He should also know thoroughly the policies of denominational and interdenominational Sunday school bodies, and, where there are denominations in plural quantity, this may mean a task worth while. Sometimes it is a slow process. Surely, so! The Kingdom, with all the wisdom of Heaven, has been twenty centuries in the building, and it has been wrought out in the Church. ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... name of some fish, having been first interlined, was afterwards inserted at random in the text, and mis-spelt by a transcriber who did know its meaning," appears to me very improbable; and the very form of the words (sprote, saliu, supposing them substantives), which have not plural terminations, would, in my mind, render his supposition untenable. For, be it recollected, that throughout the answers of the Fiscere, the fish are always named in the plural; and it is not to be supposed that there would be an exception in favour of sprote, whether intended for sprat ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 18. Saturday, March 2, 1850 • Various
... laughter. Even Mrs. Shuster hadn't the "cheek" to try and attract the man's attention, and we returned to our own class thanking our conductor for "all the interesting things he had shown us." I wondered if he knew that while we spoke in plural ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... Modifications. [Footnote: Those grammarians that attempt to restrict number, case, mode, etc.—what we here call Modifications—to form, find themselves within bounds which they continually overleap. They define number, for instance, as a form, or inflection, and yet speak of nouns "plural in form but singular in sense," or "singular in form but plural in sense;" that is, if you construe them rigorously, plural or singular in form but singular or plural form in sense. They tell you that case is a form, and yet insist that nouns have three cases, though only two forms; and speak ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... God's executor, by Whose revelation he knew of their sin. With regard to Joseph it is probable that he warned his brethren, though Scripture does not say so. Or we may say that the sin was public with regard to his brethren, wherefore it is stated in the plural that he accused ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... a country town, conceiving that the word clause was in the plural number, would often talk of a claw in an act ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... Conygre (Vol. vii., pp. 182. 241. 368.).—There are many fields in the midland counties which bear the name of conigree. In some instances they are in the vicinity of manor-houses. The British name of a rabbit is cwningen, plural cwning. That of a rabbit warren is cwning-gaer, that is, literally, rabbits' camp. The term coneygar is so like this, that it may be supposed to have ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... agitated soul. My brain only works from synthesis to analysis, and formerly it was the contrary. Now, what presents itself to my eyes when I awaken is the planet; I have considerable trouble in finding again there the MOI which interested me formerly, and which I begin to' call YOU in the plural. It is charming, the planet, very interesting, very curious but rather backward, and as yet somewhat unpractical; I hope to pass into an oasis with better highways and possible to all. One needs so much money and ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... The plural of caste names and a few common Hindustani words is formed by adding s in the English manner according to ordinary usage, though this is not, of course, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... in solemn discourse, and you in common language. Ye (plural) is also used in serious addresses, and you in ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... and, forced as he was to slacken his speed, he had the satisfaction of seeing, on glancing back along the gloomy passage, that the bears were also compelled to slacken their pace and climb over intervening rocks as he had done. And it was plural, for the second one had joined the first, and they were coming steadily on, their light coats showing with terrible plainness in the ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... the coast of Hampshire, until the northernmost point of the Isle of Wight is reached, where its chief stream, the Medina, flows into the strait through an estuary about five hundred yards wide. Here is Cowes, divided by the river into the West Cow and the East Cow, the plural form of the name being modern. It is a popular bathing-place, but gets the most fame from being the headquarters of the Royal Yacht Club; their house is the old castle at the Medina entrance, built by Henry VIII., it is said, with ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... God in respect to His supremacy, as when we call Paul an apostle; the faculties of his power are set forth in an accompanying adjective, as El, great, awful, just, merciful, &c., or else all are understood at once by the use of El in the plural number, with a singular signification, an expression ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza
... all urthur boys en hit wuz a long thing lak a slip dat kum ter our knees. Our Mistress had a big fier place en w'en we would kum in cole she would say ain't you all cole. (You all was always used in the plural and not singular as some writers have it). W'ile we wuz warmin' she often played de organ fer ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Tennessee Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... word used to designate one supposed to have supernatural powers, and is applied alike to human beings and to the spirits invoked in the formulas. Some of the mythic heroes famous for their magic deeds are spoken of as ada[']w[)e]h[)i] (plural anida[']w[)e]h[)i] or anida[']we), but in its application to mortals the term is used only of the very greatest shamans. None of those now belonging to the band are considered worthy of being thus ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... i, 2. The word Vanity (remarks Hurwitz, the translator) occurs twice in the plural, which the Rabbi considered as equivalent to four, and three times in the singular, making ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... consistent with being understood. They inflect both their nouns and verbs regularly; and denote the cases of the former and the tenses of the latter, not like the English by auxiliary words, but like the Latins by change of termination. Their nouns, whether substantive or adjective, seem to admit of no plural. I have heard Mr. Dawes hint his belief of their using a dual number, similar to the Greeks, but I confess that I never could remark aught to confirm it. The method by which they answer a question that they cannot resolve is similar to what we sometimes use. Let for example the following question ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... bahadur! I ride away to visit my estates (he spoke of them always in the plural, as though he owned a county or two). You have under you the best eyes and the keenest blades along the border for I attended to it! Be ruthless! Use them, work them—sweat them to death! Keep away from messes and parades; seek no praise, for you will get none in any case! ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... the thien," or simply "the thien" taken as plural. But in Chinese the character called thien {.} denotes heaven, or Heaven, and is interchanged with Ti and Shang Ti, meaning God. With the Buddhists it denotes the devas or Brahmanic gods, or all the inhabitants of the ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... in addressing one another changed the homely singular pronoun to the more polite, if less grammatical, second person plural. The boy laughed, nodded his head, and said, 'You are a ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bee-line course to their landings, the officers might have been able to say at what hour we should reach our destination. As it was, they merely reiterated the characteristic "Ne znaem" (We don't know), which possesses plural powers of irritation when uttered in the conventional half-drawl. Perhaps they really did not know. Owing to a recent decree in the imperial navy, officers who have served a certain number of years without having accomplished a stipulated amount of sea service are retired. Since ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... common explanation of the name, and have stated that it was originally composed with the word tan['e] (seed, or grain), and the word hata (loom). Those who accept this etymology make the appellation, Tanabata-Sama, plural instead of singular, and render it as "the deities of grain and of the loom,"—that is to say, those presiding over agriculture and weaving. In old Japanese pictures the star-gods are represented according to this conception of their respective ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... that he never had had the audacity to tell the girl at the glove counter that he preferred bronze-green gloves, nor the boldness to show Maria Gerard his poems composed in her honor, in which he now always put the plural "amours," so as to make it rhyme with "toujours," which was an improvement. He never had dared to reply to the glance of the little maid on the second floor; and he was very wrong to be embarrassed, for one morning, as he ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... of the subjects of King Custom than the other two put together; his name is Fiddlefaddle, the toy-shop keeper; and the other two put him forward to do their worst work. In return, he often uses their names without authority. He took Etymology to witness that means to an end must be plural: and he would have any one method to be a mean. But Etymology proved him wrong, King Custom referred him to his Catechism, in which is "a means whereby we receive the same," and Analogy—a subordinate of {326} Etymology—asked whether he thought it a great new to hear that ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... superior to that of the animals, preceding or preparing the evolution of Self-consciousness proper, in the forms of "I" and "Thou" and the grammar of personal actions and relations. "They show that the plural and all other forms of number in grammar arise not by multiplication of an original 'I,' but by selection and gradual EXCLUSION from an original collective 'we.'" (3) According to this view the birth of self-consciousness in the human family, ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... number only, may be extended to several persons or things; and words importing the plural number only may be applied to one person, or thing; and words importing the masculine gender only may be ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... researches about the protoxide of azote: 'In less than half a minute the respiration being continued, diminished gradually and were succeeded by analogous to gentle pressure on all the muscles.' That the respiration was not 'diminished,' is not only clear by the subsequent context, but by the use of the plural, 'were.' The sentence, no doubt, was thus intended: 'In less than half a minute, the respiration [being continued, these feelings] diminished gradually, and were succeeded by [a sensation] analogous to gentle ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... plural, as plural as you can. They have every type under the sun. But," added the high military officer, "we use of course 'bullet rifles' (fusils a ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... verse of the ninth chapter of Deuteronomy, where the received version reads, "Thou art to pass over Jordan this day, to go in to possess nations greater and mightier than thyself," the corresponding passage of the fragments substitutes the plural for the singular, "Ye" for '"Thou," while for "g'dlm," the word translated "greater," it reads "rabbm." But a far more complete idea of the variations of text and signification may be obtained ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... admitted to a partnership with two corn-merchants at Liverpool, his contribution to the total capital of four thousand pounds being fifteen hundred, of which his father lent him five hundred, and a friend another five at five per cent. In 1787 he thought the plural ending of his name sounded awkwardly in the style of the firm, Corrie, Gladstones, and Bradshaw, so he dropped the s.[12] He visited London to enlarge his knowledge of the corn trade in Mark Lane, and here became acquainted with Sir Claude Scott, the banker (not yet, however, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... the forms of the imperative mood plural which occur so frequently throughout the poem in the Oriel copy. The forms ending in -eth are about 31 in number, of which 17 are of French, and 14 of A.S. origin. The words in which the ending -eth is dropped are 42, of ...
— Caxton's Book of Curtesye • Frederick J. Furnivall
... the plural, for Miss Wheeler, who found the skipper exceedingly bad company, had also risen, and was scrutinising the house with a gaze hardly less eager than his own. A suggestion of the mate that he should wave his handkerchief was promptly negatived by Miss Tyrell, on the ground that it would not be ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... noticeable feature is that the middle character, although passing from the singular to the plural number, suffers no change of ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... length; "I am a lonely woman, and my life has been broader for knowing you. I mean that you in the plural, for there have been a good many of you. Some have been successful, some have not; a few have become famous, just as you are doing. Some of them have been sent to me; some have come of their own accord. ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... great river by Orellana, a knight of Truxillo. The fabled women-warriors were said to have been seen in this notable voyage, and hence the name of the river Amazon, a name which in Spanish and Portuguese is in the plural. It was not until nearly one hundred years after Orellana was in his grave that a voyage of discovery ascended the river. In 1637 Pedro Teixeira started from Para with an expedition of nearly two thousand ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... laudable in each professor to magnify his department, and to seek to make it the first in the world if he can. But of course this tendency must be corrected by securing in the constitution of the college a power in the head (whether singular or plural) of coordinating all the parts. Else, important departments will be overlaid, as in Oxford and in Harvard, natural history was until now. Now, it looks as if natural history would obtain in time to come the like predominance as mathematics have here, or Greek at ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... plural of "cherub" (kerub), imaginary winged animal figures of a sacred character, referred to in the description of Solomon's temple (1 Kings vi. 23-35, vii. 29, viii. 6, 7), and also in that of the ark of the tabernacle (Ex. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... Christians in Constantine's army to be great. Why my opponent should ridicule my use of the phrase Christian regiments, I am too dull to understand. ("Who would not think," says he, "that it was one of Constantine's aide-de-camps that was speaking?") It may be that I am wrong in using the plural noun, and that there was only one such regiment,—that which carried the Labarum, or standard of the cross (Gibbon, ch. 20), to which so much efficacy was attributed in the war against Licinius. I have no time at present, nor any need for further inquiries on such matters. It is ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... forget, a bad start spoils all. No, be the garden a prince's or a cottager's, the climaxes to be got by superiority of stature, by darkness and breadth of foliage and by splendor of bloom belong at its far end. Even in the one-house garden I should like to see the climaxes plural to the extent of two; one immediately at the back of the house, the other at the extreme rear of the ground. At the far end of the lot I would have the final storm of passion and riot of disclosure, and then close about the rear of ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... Dictionary, quotes two amusing instances of ghost words in a communication to Notes and Queries (7th S., vii. 305). He says: "Possessors of Jamieson's Scottish Dictionary will do well to strike out the fictitious entry cietezour, cited from Bellenden's Chronicle in the plural cietezouris, which is merely a misreading of cietezanis (i.e. with Scottish z y), cieteyanis or citeyanis, Bellenden's regular word for citizens. One regrets to see this absurd mistake copied from ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... and the child would speak to no one,—indeed, she hardly would when she came to our camp. She was almost white, and this officer wished to adopt her, but the mother said, "I would do anything but that for oonah," this being a sort of Indian formation of the second-person-plural, such as they sometimes use. This same officer afterwards saw a reward offered for this family ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... same adventures of fancy and of soul.... My fairies must be thy fairies and my gods thy gods. Hand-in-hand we must thrill with a single rapture—'le coeur en fleur et l'ame en flamme.'" For myself I am well content (whether he addresses me in the second person singular or plural, or both—as here) to have vicariously achieved such heights in the person of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... under our system, but were not very general, and plural wives were usually sisters. The missionaries, and in some instances the Federal authorities, have required elderly men to abandon all but one wife, leading to difficult problems. Many of the younger ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... a question, we believe, not yet set at rest by the learned in these sort of matters, whether the word devil be singular or plural, that is to say, whether it be the name of a personage so called, standing by himself, or a noun of multitude. If it be singular, and used only personal as a proper name, it consequently implies one imperial devil, monarch or king of the whole clan ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... signifying I and he, and one signifying we, more than two, including the speaker and those present; and another including the speaker and persons absent. He will also find personal pronouns in the second and third person, perhaps with singular, dual, and plural forms. ...
— On the Evolution of Language • John Wesley Powell
... brought home to me by my experience of the nearest approximation to Proportional Representation which has ever been actually adopted in England. In 1870 Lord Frederick Cavendish induced the House of Commons to adopt 'plural voting' for School Board elections. I fought in three London School Board elections as a candidate and in two others as a political worker. In London the legal arrangement was that each voter in eleven large districts should be given about ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... anfractuosus, winding), twisting and turning, circuitousness; a word usually employed in the plural to denote winding channels such as occur in the depths of the sea, mountains, or the fissures (sulci) separating the convolutions of the brain, or, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... had been describing our Opera, not your own; we have just set out with one in what they call, the French manner, but about as like it, as my Lady Pomfret's hash of plural persons and singular verbs or infinitive moods was to Italian. They sing to jigs, and dance to church music -. Phaeton is run away with by horses that go a foot's-pace, like the Electress's(1338) coach, with such long traces, that the postilion was in one street and the coachman ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... provinces (changwat, singular and plural); Amnat Charoen, Ang Thong, Buriram, Chachoengsao, Chai Nat, Chaiyaphum, Chanthaburi, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Chon Buri, Chumphon, Kalasin, Kamphaeng Phet, Kanchanaburi, Khon Kaen, Krabi, Krung Thep Mahanakhon (Bangkok), Lampang, Lamphun, Loei, Lop Buri, Mae Hong Son, Maha Sarakham, Mukdahan, ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... although obliged to pay a proportion of the decimes,[Footnote: Decime, in the singular, was an extraordinary tax levied on ecclesiastical revenue for some object deemed important. Decimes, in the plural, was the tax paid annually by benefices. Dime, tithe (see Littre, Decime). It seems a question whether the proportion of the decimes paid by the parish priests was too large. See Revue des questions historiques, 1st July 1890, 102. Necker, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... of folly? For us also makes that mystical Psalmist, though I remembered it not in its right place, "Remember not the sins of my youth nor my ignorances." You see what two things he pretends, to wit, youth, whose companion I ever am, and ignorances, and that in the plural number, a number of multitude, whereby we are to understand that there was no small company ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... time of his departure is at hand," q.d., "gar cyrdd," from "cerdd" a walk. The adopted reading, however, is very strongly corroborated by passages in other poems, where "cyrdd" is unmistakeably used as the plural of "cerdd," ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... to think them practicable, he disgusts scholars and churchmen; and men of talent and women of superior sentiments cannot hide their contempt. Not the less does nature continue to fill the heart of youth with suggestions of this enthusiasm, and there are now men,—if indeed I can speak in the plural number,—more exactly, I will say, I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... I know not; all I know, The night was June's, the moon rode high and clear; "'Twas such a night as this," three years ago, Miss Kitty sang the song that two might hear. There is a walk where trees o'erarching grow, Too wide for one, not wide enough for three (A fact precluding any plural beau), Which quite explained Miss Kitty's company, But not why Grey that favored one ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... afternoons. Did you use to dote on horse-chestnuts? Queer boys should. But I rather like them myself, in a way,—out of the way! We have picked up a hundred and seventeen." Miss Salome dropped into the plural number innocently, and Elizabeth laughed over John's shoulder. Elizabeth did the reading between the lines. ...
— The Very Small Person • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... quotes the various aspects under which Life appeared to the wise and foolish teachers of humanity. First comes Hafiz, whose well-known lines are quoted beginning with Shab-i-tarik o bim-i-mauj, etc. Hur is the plural of Ahwar, in full Ahwar el-Ayn, a maid whose eyes are intensely white where they should be white, and black elsewhere: hence our silly "Houries." Follows Umar-i-Khayyam, who spiritualized Tasawwof, or Sooffeism, even as ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... English and a Latin ending, the former is usually given with the word and the other is added: e.g. aequilate -us, instead of aequilatus, there being no difference in the application. Usually the singular form of the word is first given, and the plural ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... editions read hema-punkha and silasita in the instrumental plural; the correct reading ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... CHAS. GOULD, B.A., to whose book Mythical Monsters (1886) I am very largely indebted for my account of this bird, and from which I have culled extracts from the Chinese, is not of this opinion. Certainly the fact that we read of Fung Hwangs in the plural, whilst tradition asserts that there is only one phoenix, seems to point to a ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... plural of "Inkoosi", is the salute given to Zulu wizards, because they are not one but many, since in them (as in the possessed demoniac in the Bible) dwell ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... "Dog" should be spelt, properly and precisely, "dog." When it is used in the sense to mean not "a dog" or "one dog" but two or more dogs—in other words what we grammarians are accustomed to call the plural—it is proper to add to it the diphthong, s, pronounced with a hiss like ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... what has been done by the Expedition, it should always be understood that Dr. Kirk, Mr. Charles Livingstone, Mr. R. Thornton, and others composed it. In using the plural number they are meant, and I wish to bear testimony to the untiring zeal, energy, courage, and perseverance with which my companions laboured; undaunted by difficulties, dangers, or hard fare. It is my firm belief that, ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... and to select the warmest railway rug she could find; for the teacher, though she was not a very learned nor judicious school-mistress, had a heart and affections of her own. She had once, it is true, taken the word legibus (dative plural of lex, a law) for an adjective of the third declension, legibus, legiba, legibum; and Margaret had criticised this grammatical subtlety with an unsparing philological acumen, as if she had been Professor ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... ring of New Orleans molasses; "those molasses," as the article was often called, with an admiring plural of majesty. ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... declined the noun very well," said I; "that is in the singular number; we will now go to the plural." ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... but there is not more rhyming than is usual in the poetry of the late empire. Not only in pronunciation, but in grammatical inflexion, the beginnings of Italian here and there appear. The case-forms of the different declensions are beginning to run into one another: the plural, for example, of insignis is no longer insignes, but, as in Italian, insigni; and the case-inflexions themselves are dwindling away before the free use of prepositions, which was already beginning to show itself in the ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... There still seemed to linger upon his palate the flavor of Aunt Eunice's pullets, from which he had been despoiled by his first enforced call upon her ward, and though he had regretfully heard Susanna say "chicken" without the plural "s," he knew that, being himself "company," he would get his full share of the fowl, which he trusted ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... such as the acephalous type, and those due to excess, such as the double monsters. Hippocrates, in his work on the "Nature of the Infant," tells us that twins are the result of a single coitus, and we are also informed that each infant has a chorion; so that both kinds of plural gestation (monochorionic and dichorionic) were known to the ancients. In this treatise it is further stated that the twins may be male or female, or both males or both females; the male is formed when the semen ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... proposed to give the vote to every woman of property if she chose to take the trouble to get it, and at the same time enfranchise only about one-tenth or one-fifteenth of the working women of the country. That was simply a roundabout way of doubling the plural voters and no democrat could possibly support it, so long as there remained a single alternative. The solution that most appeals to me is the one embodied in the Dickinson Bill, that is to say, a measure conferring the vote on women householders and on the wives of married electors; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... and interesting, we are? Frankly now is it possible to be MORE artistic, MORE strange and interesting, than this? You surely won't deny that we're remarkable." I was irritated by her use of the plural pronoun, for she had no right to pair herself with her brother; and moreover, of course, I couldn't see my way to—at all genially—include Mrs. Ambient. Yet there was no doubt they were, taken together, unprecedented enough, and, with all allowances, I had never been left, or condemned, ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... The plural of animate nouns is usually formed by adding the syllable "wog" to the singular; if the word ends in a vowel, only the letter "g" is added; and sometimes the syllables ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... geometrical cube, the die used in play, and the temple at Mecca, which is of the same figure. The Persic name for 'die' is 'dad,' and from this word is derived the name of the thing in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, namely, dado. In the old French it is det, in the plural dets; in modern French de and dez, whence our English name 'die,' and its plural 'dies,' ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... place below the earth where the dead go (gimokud, "spirit;" -an, plural ending); that is, [the place ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... reference occurs most frequently after collective nouns, such as mob, crowd, council, jury, assembly; after distributive pronouns, such as everyone, anybody, nobody; and after two or more singular and plural nouns, where the reporter forgets momentarily to which he is referring. In the following sentences note that each of the italicized pronouns violates one or more of these principles, thereby polluting the ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... or Lada, and sometimes in the plural Ladir, was the old capital of Drontheim, before Nidaros — the present Drontheim — was founded. Drontheim was originally the name of the country round the firth of the same name, and is not used in the old sagas for a town. (2) The country round the Christiania ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... of battle was "Spirito Santo Cavaliere", i.e. Cavalier in the singular number. The plural number has been employed in the text, as somewhat more animated, and therefore better adapted to the kind of poetry into the service of which ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the plural form, "Electricities," which frequently appears in the following pages, might seem a strange innovation. The Editor therefore states, by way of anticipation, that in certain important points the electrical science of Montalluyah differs from, if it ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... mad, don't it?" he inquired genially. "You are not accustomed to that sort of treatment. Most of 'em run the other way, don't they? I should, in their place! But you mustn't be hard on old George. When I said 'you,' I used the word as a plural, not as applying with any special significance to your charming self. It is womankind as a whole which he finds terrifying. Run a mile any day rather than meet a woman face to face! You must not imagine that ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... direct share in political life. Under pressure of public opinion, the demand for a revision of the Constitution was at last taken into consideration in 1891, and in 1893 a new law granted universal suffrage tempered by plural voting. In 1902 a new campaign was launched by the allied Liberal-Socialist opposition in favour of universal suffrage pure and simple, without obtaining any result, but when, in 1913, a general strike supported the demand, the Catholic ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... carefully this ardent confidence on the part of Catholic France; he recommended to his partisans attention to little pious and popular practices. "I send you some paternosters [meaning, in the plural, the beads of a chaplet, or the chaplet entire]," he wrote to his wife, Catherine of Cleves; "you will have strings made for them and string them together. I don't know whether you dare offer some of them to the queens and to my lady mother. Ask advice ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... which have been most widely advocated, at least in recent years, are four in number: (1) a fresh apportionment of seats in the Commons in accordance with the distribution of population; (2) the extension of the franchise to classes of men at present debarred; (3) the abolition of the plural vote; and (4) the ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... influence over its members, and of its attractiveness to its proselytes, viz., the peculiarity of the "Mormon" institution of marriage. The Latter-day Saints were long regarded as a polygamous people. That plural marriage has been practised by a limited proportion of the people, under sanction of Church ordinance, has never since the introduction of the system been denied. But that plural marriage is a vital tenet of the Church is ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage
... as to the elevation of the Emperor Maximin, and once as to his death[104]. Usener thinks that the 'Anecdoton Holderi' authorises us henceforward to assign these quotations without doubt to the younger, Christian Symmachus, not to his Pagan ancestor. To me the allusion to parentes (in the plural), whose industry as historians the Symmachus there spoken of imitated, seems to make it at least as probable that the earlier, not the later member of the family composed the history which is here quoted ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... BACTERIA (the plural of bacterium).—Exceedingly minute, spherical, oblong, or cylindrical cells which are concerned in putrefactive processes. ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... in Madras, of non-Brahmans, or, in the large cities, of Europeans and of Eurasians, besides still more specialised constituencies for the representation of land-holders, universities, commerce, and industries. There was no female suffrage, and no plural vote. No elector could vote both in a "general constituency" and in a "special" one. The qualifications laid down for the franchise were of a very modest character. Illiteracy was no bar, as to have made it so in a country where barely 10 per cent of the adult males attain to the ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... relieved," said David. "It's much easier to understand the plural of girl. Girl in the first ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... It is also, and perhaps chiefly, in this case, a pun on the meaning of the plural noun "cenci," "rags," or "old rags." The cry of this, frequent in Rome, was at first mistaken by Shelley for a voice urging him to go on with his play. Mr. Browning has used it to indicate the comparative unimportance of his contribution to the Cenci story. The quoted ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... and speaking; of a "jeering temper," and of a most grasping avarice. He was ridiculed on the stage in Middleton's play, The Game of Chess, as the "Fat Bishop." "He was well named De Dominis in the plural," says Crakanthorp, "for he could serve two masters, or twenty, if they ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... is the plural of "animalcule"? Ans. Animalcules or animalculae.—Write a sentence containing ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... he calls Intelligences the Scriptures call angels. Both are pure forms and incorporeal. Their rationality is indicated in the nineteenth Psalm, "The heavens declare the glory of God." That God rules the world through them is evident from a number of passages in Bible and Talmud. The plural number in "Let us make man in our image" (Gen. 1, 26), "Come, let us go down and confuse their speech" (ib. 11, 7) is explained by the Rabbis in the statement that "God never does anything without first looking at the celestial ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... the whole battery, wasn't it?" asked Gordon, "and two huts is plural. I said houses of the people. I couldn't say two houses of the people. Just you send this as you get it. You are not an American consul at the present moment. You are an under-paid agent of a cable company, and you send my ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... declined and actual building ceased, its technical secrets became ritual secrets, though they must always have had symbolical meanings. Further, while we have record of only one oath—which does not mean that there was only one—signs, tokens, and words are nearly always spoken of in the plural; and if the secrets of a Fellowcraft were purely technical—which some of us do not believe—they were at least accompanied and protected by certain signs, tokens, and passwords. From this it is clear that the advent of an Apprentice into the ranks ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... The plural has slipped from my pen, and perhaps it is right; for the house looked as if it had had many owners, and all ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... cherry comes from the old English cheri, chiri, and that probably from the French cerise, that from the Latin cerasus, and that from the Greek kerasos. "Cheri or chiri was a corruption of cheris or chiris, the final s being mistaken for the plural inflection; the same mistake occurs in several other words, notably in pea as shortened from ...
— The Book of Pears and Plums • Edward Bartrum
... newspaper where we had tea and cake at about four. From there to the house of the daughter of a leading statesman of the Manchus, she being a lady of small feet and ten children, who has offered a prize for the best essay on the ways to stop concubinage, which they call the whole system of plural marriage. They say it is quite unchanged among the rich. There we were given a tea of a rare sort, unknown in our experience. Two kinds of meat pies which are made in the form of little cakes and quite peculiar in taste, delicious; also cake. Then ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... need to say much of Peas, but it may be worth a note in passing that in old English we seldom meet with the word Pea. Peas or Pease (the Anglicised form of Pisum) is the singular, of which the plural is Peason. "Pisum is called in Englishe ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... word AUR, in the singular, signified light, but in the plural, AURIM, it denoted the revelation of the divine will; and the aurim and thummim, literally the lights and truths, constituted a part of the breastplate whence the high priest obtained oracular responses to ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... numbers: singular and plural; three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter, as in OHG. and NHG., from which the gender of nouns in MHG. does not materially differ; four cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative. Traces of an old locative occur in what is called the uninflected dative singular ...
— A Middle High German Primer - Third Edition • Joseph Wright
... writers mentioned in this book to whose lovers exactly the same kind of apology is desirable as it is in the case of Nodier. "Where," I hear reproaching voices crying, "is Jean Sbogar? Where is Laure Ruthwen ou les Vampires in novel-plural or Le Vampire in melodrama-singular? Where are a score or a hundred other books, pieces, pages, paragraphs, passages from five to fifty words long?" They are not here, and I could not find room for them here. "But you found more room ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... rallying power is gone: "the clouds return after the rain."—The keepers of the house shall tremble: Cheyne understands of the hands and arms, the trembling of which is a natural accompaniment of old age.—The strong men shall bow themselves: the stooping frame; the plural is merely by attraction to 'keepers.'—The grinders cease because they are few: obviously of the teeth.—Those that look out of the windows be darkened: the eyes becoming dim.—The doors shall ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... in any way disappointed the gentleman from San Juan, my closest observation of his smile and glance failed to detect it. He merely quivered his shoulders—a sort of plural shrug—rolled his cigarette tighter between his thumb and forefinger, remarked that the memoranda were entirely satisfactory, and folding the paper slid it carefully into his pocket; then with a series of salaams that reminded me ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... for foreigners to learn to pronounce, and the uncertainty of its accentuation; (2) its illogical and chaotic spelling, inevitably leading to confusions in pronunciation; (3) the grammatical irregularities in its verbs and plural nouns; and (4) the great number of widely different words which are almost or quite similar in pronunciation. A vast number of absurd pitfalls are thus prepared for the unwary user of English. He must remember that the plural of ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... the beauty of his plural pronoun as she had judged he might be with that of her own; but she knew now so well what she was about that she could almost play with him and with her new-born joy. "You say 'about the time you speak of.' But I don't think you speak of ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... is "Fordringsaegare." This indefinite form may be either singular or plural, but it is rarely used except as a plural. And the play itself makes it perfectly clear that the proper translation of its title is "Creditors," for under this aspect appear both the former and ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... of the paths (of our lives)," Ha[']-no-o-na wi-la-po-na. Not only these gods, but all supernatural beings, men, animals, plants, and many objects in nature, are regarded as personal existences, and are included in the one term a-ha-i, from a, the plural particle signifying "all," and ha-i, being or life,"Life," "the Beings." This again leads us to the important and interesting conclusion that all beings, whether deistic and supernatural, or animistic and mortal, are regarded as belonging to one system; and that they are likewise ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... cultivated—so much so, that it exports for the Ujiji and other distant markets. The Africans have no religion, unless Fetishism may be considered such. They use charms to keep off the evil eye, and believe in fortune-tellers. Their church is called Uganga, and the parson Mganga, the plural of which, priests, changes to Waganga. The prefixes, U, M, and Wa, are used uniformly throughout this land from Zanzibar, to denote respectively, U, country or place, M, an individual, and Wa for plurality, as in tribe or people: thus, Uganga, Mganga, Waganga; ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... was also a goddess called Fauna, or Bona Dea], the grandson of Saturn, was worshipped as the god of fields and shepherds, and also as a prophetic god. His name in the plural, Fauns, expressed a class of gamesome deities, like the ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... familiarly used of the birth of a man, as "Mizraim begat Pathrusim, and Casluhim out of whom came Philistim,"" Gen. x. 13, 14. This is a very awkward quotation on the part of Mr. Everett, as it says nothing in favour of his views, but directly favours mine: for Philistim is a word in the plural number, and is used in the Hebrew Bible, to express "the Philistines;" and the word translated "come"[fn33] is also in the plural number, see Simon's Hebrew Bible. The passage therefore in Genesis x. 13. 14. imports that the Philistines were derived or descended ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... consisted of a mud wall about three feet high, inclosing perhaps half an acre of bare clayey soil. Outside the wall was a moat, upward of a foot deep, and inside was a barrack. This barrack—I avoid using the plural purposely—was a wooden shanty that had been whitewashed once, but had practically recovered from it since; and its walls were pierced—for artillery-fire, no doubt—with two windows, to the frames of which a few fragments ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... established system? Should I not, in a moment so untoward, more than ever desire to merge my insignificant unit in the mysterious importance which the smallest Singular obtains when he makes himself a Plural, and speaks not as 'I,' but as 'We'? We are insensible to the charm of young ladies; We are not bribed by suppers; We, like the witches of 'Macbeth,' have no name on earth; We are the greatest wisdom of the greatest number; ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and Associators; myself grown quite indifferent upon the point; and the principal Tories, such as the Duke of Beaufort, &c., and those who would have been active, if they had been desired to be so half a year ago, never spoke to. Mr. Robinson,(144) in his letters to me, has always spoke in the plural number, our friend and I; so it is a scheme adopted by both, I am to suppose, and a hazardous one it is. But one Member they will have, I believe, and I wish they had fixed upon any one but ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... instance, is the memory of the Scaean Gate in the Great Tower of Ilium, and the constant use of the name Scaean Gate in the plural, because it had to be described as double, and in fact it has been proved to be a double gate. According to the lines of the Iliad, it now seems extremely probable that, at the time of Homer's visit, the King of Troy declared that his race was descended ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... proper to observe, that by the unavoidable idiom of our language the ideas of perception, of recollection, or of imagination, in the plural number signify the ideas belonging to perception, to recollection, or to imagination; whilst the idea of perception, of recollection, or of imagination, in the singular number is used for what is termed "a reflex idea of any of ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... mountains. God, like men in this region, has various names, as Chiuta, 'God in space and the rainbow sign across;' Mpambe, 'God Almighty' (or rather 'pre-excellent'); Mlezi, 'God the Sustainer,' and Mulungu, 'God who is spirit.' Mulungu God, 'not spirits or fetish.' 'You can't put the plural, as God is One,' say the natives. 'There are no idols called gods, and spirits are spirits of people who have died, not gods.' Idols are Zitunzi-zitunzi. 'Spirits are supposed to be with Mulungu.' God made the world and man. Our author says 'when ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... French disease, or Morbus Gallicus which attained the proportions of an epidemic in Europe about 1494. The expression "The Pox" in the older medical literature always refers to the Lues Venereal The word "pox" is the plural form of pock; the spelling "pox" is phonetic; "pocks" is the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... explained, wearily, "I do wish you wouldn't speak of your vital organs in the plural. Anyone would imagine you were a sort of freak, like the two-headed boy at the circus. ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... question,' he says, talking as he does sometimes in the historical plural of his philosophic chair,—'this question, rather than objection,'—[it was much to be preferred in that form certainly]—'whether we talk of perfecting NATURAL PHILOSOPHY alone, according to our method, or the other sciences such as—ETHICS, LOGIC, POLITICS.' ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... Canney and Principal Bennett tell me that the derivation of duda-im from dodim is improbable; and the former authority suggests that duda-im may be merely the plural of dud, a "pot".[383] Now I have already explained how a pot came to symbolize a woman or a goddess, not merely in Egypt, but also in Southern India, and in Mycenaean Greece, and, in fact, the Mediterranean generally.[384] Hence the use of the term dud for the mandrake ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... were assembled a great concourse of warriors. Inside I could see the heads of women and children peering over the top of the wall; and also, farther back, the long necks of lidi, topped by their tiny heads. Lidi, by the way, is both the singular and plural form of the noun that describes the huge beasts of burden of the Thurians. They are enormous quadrupeds, eighty or a hundred feet long, with very small heads perched at the top of very long, slender necks. Their heads are quite forty feet from the ground. Their gait ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to the Book of Foundations, Father Garcia de Toledo, her confessor at St. Joseph's Convent, is said to be responsible for the order to rewrite the "Life"; but in the Preface to the "Life" St. Teresa speaks of her "confessors" in the plural. Fathers Ibanez and Banez may be included in the number. See also ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila |
