"Vocabulary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nobility and the citizens had influenced taste in writing and in eloquence, and how our more popular government not only admitted allusions to the occupations of the lower classes, but required them. Our orators at elections, and in parliament, must speak so as to come home to the feelings and vocabulary of constituents. Examples from Burke and others, the chief justice said, might be brought in support of ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... last, and their disappearance was a disaster. Party, as the term is used in the constitutional vocabulary, was not yet developed; and no organisation possessed the alternate power of presenting ministers to the Crown. The main lines that divided opinion came to light in the debates of September, and the Assembly fell ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... in Zanzibar), many local languages note: Kiswahili (Swahili) is the mother tongue of the Bantu people living in Zanzibar and nearby coastal Tanzania; although Kiswahili is Bantu in structure and origin, its vocabulary draws on a variety of sources, including Arabic and English, and it has become the lingua franca of central and eastern Africa; the first language of most people is one ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... I admitted impartially, "although we each think there is but one. I will agree that yours is more entertaining. Jannie was jealous again. The Roman orgies, the young person from the grands boulevards, were more than she could accept; and she tried, in the vocabulary lately so prevalent, a reprisal. But I must acknowledge that I am surprised at the persistent masculine flexibility ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... was a word not found in Ralph Buckner's vocabulary. We were married and began our life at his ranch, which, as I say, was near enough to my father so that we could be in frequent communication. He had been much concerned about me, having discovered more of my homesickness for the East than I had realized, so to see me well settled and apparently ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... concierge, fearing he had said too much, approached the grand marshal, begging him to excuse him to his Majesty; but he never had an idea of punishing him for the liberty he had taken, and the expression which had escaped his lips one would hardly expect to find in the imperial vocabulary. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... laid this new thought to heart or not, certain it is that he kept zealously to lessons and Mr. Fane, took kindly to Inna, and called her "a little brick," and all the many flattering names found in a boy's vocabulary. But his wound would not heal, for which the weather was blamed, and the constant friction he gave it, until his two doctors advised he should not race about so much; and so it came about that November ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... who, cursing in his excitement, was straining every muscle and a comprehensive vocabulary in an effort to ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... Jackum drew his attention with a touch, and began making hideous grimaces at the creature, while the others began to shout and were apparently calling it every opprobrious name that their limited vocabulary supplied. ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... refusal to be her modest sense of incompetence in matters social and polite, he would say that she was wonderfully well-informed and versatile—which was certainly true, her natural quickness and her admiration for him having led her to pick up his vocabulary, his accent, and fragments of his knowledge, to a surprising extent. After these tender contests and her victory she would go away by herself under the remotest cow, if at milking-time, or into the sedge or into her room, if at a leisure interval, ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... waters! Alas for the knot that breaks, and for the iron that bends; for the lost landing-net, and the gillie with the gaff that scrapes the fish! Izaak believed that fish could hear; if they can, their vocabulary must be full of strange oaths, for all anglers are not patient men. A malison on the trout that 'bulge' and 'tail,' on the salmon that 'jiggers,' or sulks, or lightly gambols over and under the line. These things, and many ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... always in the high and lasting fitness of things. There are words that belong to hours or even moments, words that win their meaning from the newly created situation. But faith is not such a word. It stands for something inclusive and imperial. It is one of the few timeless words in earth's vocabulary. For the deep roots of it and the wide range of it there is nothing like unto it in the whole sweep of things spiritual. So the 'all times' trust is not for one moment to be regarded as some supreme degree of faith unto which one here and there may attain ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... to the waiting secretary. He groped in the chambers of his imagery for some superlative adjective to express his emotion before this colossal display of wealth. But his ample vocabulary had faded quite. He could only shake his head and give vent to the inept ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... but they wrote so miserably and slowly, that this consumed a great portion of valuable time. Observing that they were ignorant of the signification of a great number of French words, of constant use and recurrence, I made a selection from the vocabulary, and I set them to write down in little copy-books,[14] words which were in most frequent use; but the explanations contained in the dictionary were not enough, and I was obliged to rack my brain for new and brief definitions which they could understand, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... perhaps therein lay a sufficient reason why the man of science in him was fascinated. True, those discoveries which he made were new only to him; yet one might say the same of America and Columbus. For one thing, it dawned on him that here was a new and excellent technical vocabulary; he stored away in his brain strange words as a squirrel sticks nuts and acorns into a hole. Hondo, tapaderos, bad hombre, tecolote, bronco, maverick, side-winder—rapaciously he seized upon them as bits of ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... good instance of this is found in Brihan N[a]rad[i]ya Pur[a]na, X., where the churik[a] and drugha[n.]a (24) appear in an imitative scene of this sort; one of these being later, the other earlier, than the epic vocabulary.] ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... upon the ocean; sometimes they would gather shells, when the day's work was over, and string them in fantastic chaplets, which "Dummy" was very expert in contriving. He could converse with Kattern without difficulty. He had taught her his vocabulary of signs, and the maiden liked to observe his strange remarks ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... if it struck the flat basket on which were placed his wares, then he would swear never to come again, as he poured out upon them all the imprecations and anathemas imaginable. Then the boys would redouble their efforts to make him rage the more, and when at last his vocabulary was exhausted and they were satiated with his fearful mixtures, they paid him religiously, and sent him away happy, winking, chuckling to himself, and receiving as caresses the light blows from their canes that the students gave him as ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... have come into use in the other literature before the exile, if they were in existence. They cannot be counted technical terms: QRBN used in Hebrew for sacrifice and offering is simply as if an English writer should say priere instead of worship. In such comparisons of the vocabulary we have, however, to consider first the working up and revision which has been at work in every part of the books of the Bible, and secondly the caprice of the writers in apparent trifles, such as )NKY and )NY, especially outside the Pentateuch. These two agencies have so dislocated ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... year or two more I think to give to the public what I then shall have acquired. I have lately seen a report of Mr. Volney's to the Celtic Academy, on a work of Mr. Pallas, entitled Vocabulaires Compares des Langues de toute la Terre; with a list of one hundred and thirty words, to which the vocabulary is limited. I find that seventy-three of these words are common to that and to my vocabulary, and therefore will enable us, by a comparison of language, to make the inquiry so long desired, as to the probability ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the difficulty in unravelling the tangled skein of the religious and philosophical teachings prevalent in the early centuries of Christianity is the lack of precision in the language of the writers, the loss of the key to the special vocabulary they used, and the veils which writers who possessed some degree of initiation, deliberately threw over teachings which could only be given to the masses in ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... communing with my own thoughts; sometimes in the stable, attending to, and not unfrequently conversing with, my horse; and at meal- time—for I seldom saw him at any other—discoursing with the old gentleman, sometimes on the Chinese vocabulary, sometimes on Chinese syntax, and once or twice on English horseflesh; though on this latter subject, notwithstanding his descent from a race of horse-traders, he did not enter into with much alacrity. As a small requital for his kindness, I gave him one day, after dinner, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... very good work with Mom on those ideographs," Meillard said. "Keep it up till you've taught her the Lingua Terra Basic vocabulary, and with her help we can train a few more. They can be our interpreters; we can write what we want them to say to the others. It'll be clumsy, but it will work, and it's about the only thing I can ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... together, with my hand in his, with my head on his shoulder, little by little we fell insensibly into silence. Had we already exhausted the narrow yet eloquent vocabulary of love? Or had we determined by unexpressed consent, after enjoying the luxury of passion that speaks, to try the deeper and finer rapture of passion that thinks? I can hardly determine; I only know that a time came when, under some strange ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... to her family, capable of any sacrifice for those she loved; and when she came to have losses of money, Fortune straightway compensated her by many kindnesses which no income can supply. The good old lady admired the word gentlewoman of all others in the English vocabulary, and made all around her feel that such was her rank. Her mother's father was a naval captain; her father had taken pupils, got a living, sent his son to college, dined with the squire, published his volume of sermons, was liked in his parish, where Miss Honeyman kept house for him, was respected ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... cars, occupying first one territory with their flocks, but not cultivating the land, then leaving it to nature and taking up another resting-place. It is certain that the Russians have many Asiatic words in their vocabulary, which must necessarily have occurred from their being for more than two centuries sometimes under Tatar, and sometimes under Mongol domination; and the origin of this word tsar or car may leave to be sought on the plateaus of North-east Asia. In the Shemitic tongues (Arabic, Hebrew, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... drily. "And don't run away with the idea that I'm joking about this—that goes. I don't expect to make a silver-tongued orator out of you, Flopper, and perhaps not even a purist—but I hope to eradicate a few minor touches of Bad Land vernacular from your vocabulary." ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... to be quite frank, were very far from gratifying to me; when at length they left me to myself, my reflections took this course:—So the only attraction in my work is that it is unusual, and does not follow the beaten track; good vocabulary, orthodox composition, insight, subtlety, Attic grace, general constructive skill—these may for aught I know be completely wanting; else indeed they would hardly have left them unnoticed, and approved my method only as new and startling. Fool that I was, I did indeed guess, when they ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... only muttered, "The contemptible creature!" But such words were far enough beyond Miaki's vocabulary, so he looked on ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... at the ropes, but a da—a Dutchman for company. 'Twixt he and the bog-trotters we shipped at Cork Harbour 't was the dev—'t was the scuttiest lot I ever took aboard ship." The rum was getting into the captain's tongue, and making his usual vocabulary difficult to keep under. ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... said, good-naturedly; "but next time yer shove people, Mr. Gordon, just quit shovin' yer friends. My shoulder feels like—" perhaps it's just as well not to say what his shoulder felt like. The Western vocabulary is expressive, but at times not quite fit ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... proverb may be used invidiously; and folly in the vocabulary of envy or baseness may signify courage and magnanimity. Hardihood and foolhardiness are indeed as different as green and yellow, yet will appear the same to the jaundiced eye. Courage multiplies the chances ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... Maurice was inclined to declaim in that vigorous vocabulary which is taboo. He had been tricked. He was no longer needed at the Red Chateau. Four millions in a gun barrel; hoax was written all over the face of it, and yet he had been as unsuspicious as a Highland gillie. Madame had tricked ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... clear, and the words of the master sufficed to bring the entire machine into perfect order. The great officers of state were not slow in their response—from the police, from the university, from the courts came protestation after protestation of loyalty; the vocabulary of the French language was ransacked for terms to express the most fulsome adulation. Napoleon's firm front was in itself an inspiration, and such unanimity of devotion in high quarters confirmed the people in their changed tendency. Soon not ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... high rank he has won among lyric poets, deserves attention also as proving him to possess that faculty of epic narration which is rarer than all others in the nineteenth century. In our love of stimulants, and our numbness of taste, which craves the red pepper of a biting vocabulary, we of the present generation are apt to overlook this almost obsolete and unobtrusive quality; but we doubt if, since Chaucer, we have had an example of more purely objective narrative than in "The Courtship of Miles Standish." Apart from its intrinsic beauty, ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... owing loyalty to their Prince, in common poetic terms befitting the men of Beowulf or Byrhtnoth. As in the French poems on Alexander the Great, Alexander may become a feudal king, and take over completely all that belongs to such a rank. There may be no consciousness of any need for a new vocabulary or a new mode of expression to fit the foreign themes. In France, it is true, there is a general distinction of form between the Chansons de Geste and the romances; though to this there are exceptions, themes not French, ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... to the director of the jury of the department the duty of discovering, indicting, and prosecuting the persons guilty of the delinquency committed at Gondreville. Remark, by the way, that the Convention had eliminated from its judicial vocabulary the word "crime"; delinquencies and misdemeanors were alone admitted; and these were punished with fines, imprisonment, and penalties "afflictive or infamous." Death was an afflictive punishment. But the penalty of death was to be done away with after the restoration of peace, and ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... iced teas, but only such light goods as canned tomatoes, green corn, beans, salmon, and fresh fish, I will tell them how to make "cush." You will not find this word in the dictionaries of the day, but it was in the soldier's vocabulary, now obsolete. Chip up bacon in fine particles, place in an oven and fry to a crisp. Fill the oven one-third or one-half full of branch water, then take the stale corn bread, the more moldy the better, rub into fine crumbs, mix and bring the whole to a boil, gently stirring with a forked stick. ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... adroitness to carry through; yesterday she had brought her victory to its concluding stage by wrenching her husband away from Town and its group of satellite watering-places and "settling him down," in the vocabulary of her kind, in this remote wood-girt manor farm which was his ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... is delightful to every reader, and invaluable as a study to every person who wishes to obtain a wide command over the English language. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people. There is not an expression, if we except a few technical terms of theology, which would puzzle the rudest peasant. We have observed several pages which do not contain ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... first understand them, and yet as we became the more acquainted with them, we found their language was nearly the same spoken at Otaheite and the Society Isles. The difference not being greater than what we find betwixt the most northern and western parts of England, as will more fully appear by the vocabulary. ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... followed. But the reader is wrong. The word "dandies" [7] which was what the villain meant, had not then been born, so that he could not have called us by that name, unless through the spirit of prophecy. Buck was the nearest word at hand in his Manchester vocabulary: he gave all he could, and let us dream the rest. But in the next moment he discovered our boots, and he consummated his crime by saluting us as "Boots! boots!" My brother made a dead stop, surveyed him with ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... New Guinea, which are equally necessary for the support of life, would certainly have been transplanted to New Holland, where no traces of them are to be found. The author of the "Histoire des Navigationes aux Terres Australes," in his account of La Maire's voyage, has given a vocabulary of the language that is spoken in an island near New Britain, and we find, by comparing that vocabulary with the words which we learnt in New Holland, that the languages are not the same. If therefore it should appear that ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?—Do let me sell you something!"—varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... of administration, the upsetting of a stage, or the death of a cart-horse; they are all equally crisises, in the American vocabulary." ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... speech, and that certain words (for instance) were tapu on the quarter-deck of a man-of-war; and he begged in consequence that we should watch and correct him on the point. We were able to assure him that he was beyond correction. His vocabulary is apt and ample to an extraordinary degree. God knows where he collected it, but by some instinct or some accident he has avoided all profane or gross expressions. "Obliged," "stabbed," "gnaw," "lodge," "power," "company," "slender," "smooth," and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which had dropped out of the British vocabulary suddenly came back. It was dramatised in every possible way and it became part of a new gospel that vied with the war ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... against her purpose with counter-balancing velocity and mass. A hired man would have left her long ago under such tongue-lashing, but old Dewey could not leave, because to leave is an act. There were no verbs in his vocabulary comprehending possibilities of usefulness within range of the present tense. What an irony in names! ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... of these varieties, by restraining the different sounds, and always representing the same simple ones by the same character; and this is no less necessary in the English than any other language, as this variety of powers is very frequent, and without being taken notice of in the following Vocabulary, might render it entirely unintelligible. As the vowels are the regulations of all sounds, it is these only that need be noticed, and the powers allotted to each of these ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... little minds, was terribly afraid of being carotte. The noun has become a verb. From the very start of his passion for Madame Schontz, Arthur was on his guard, and he was, therefore, very rat, to use another word of the same vocabulary. The word rat, when applied to a young girl, means the guest or the one entertained, but applied to a man it signifies the giver of the ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... ascertained, and the grammar are Indo-European, but a large number of words have been borrowed from the Latin or Italian and Greek, and it is not always easy to decide Whether the mutilated and curtailed forms now in use represent adopted words or belong to the original vocabulary. There is also a considerable admixture of Turkish and Slavonic words. Notwithstanding certain points of resemblance in structure and phonetics, Albanian is entirely distinct from the neighbouring languages; in its relation ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... The ablest Wall Street man is only like the burglar who, after working for weeks to loot a second story, is astounded to find, while lugging his swag by the police station, that the bag he thought full of dead sealskins contains a live parrot with a lusty vocabulary, "Police! Robbers!" ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... of the original introduction of this word into our vocabulary in either of the senses in which it is equivocally used by Falstaff in 1 Henry IV., Act. V. Sc. 3.? In the sense of fire-arms, pistols seem to have been unknown by that name as late as the year 1541; for the stat. 33 Hen. VIII. c. 6., after reciting the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... caused several juxtaposed words to be combined and contracted, so that they are partially fused with one another—a process called polysyntheticism; odei, "cloud," and ots, "noise," form odots, "thunder"; belar, "forehead," and oin, "foot," give belaun, "knee," front of the foot. The vocabulary is poor; general and synthetic words are often wanting; but particular terms abound. There is no proper term for "sister," but arreba, a man's sister, is distinguished from ahizpa, a woman's sister. We find no original words for abstract ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... down to tea, but then he seldom did so. Indeed, none of the men-folk except myself had taken to the habit, and I (as I say) chiefly for the sake of the talk, which sharpened my wits and refreshed my working vocabulary. But as I passed back to my writing-den I could hear my brother-in-law moving restlessly about his room, and talking to himself, which was a recently-acquired habit of his. However, I took this as a good sign. Anything in the way of occupation was better than his former ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... made a collection of linguistic material among the Catawba Indians of South Carolina, and was struck with the resemblance of many of the vocables to Siouan terms of like meaning, and began the preparation of a comparative Catawba-Dakota vocabulary. To this the Tutelo, cegiha, {LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED T}{LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN O}iwere, and Hotcangara (Winnebago) were added by Dorsey, who made a critical examination of all Catawba material extant and compared it with several Dakota dialects, with which he was specially conversant. ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... this appeal into borrowing the latest expletive from the vocabulary of my eldest son, at which Josephine bridled for an instant, thinking that she had detected blasphemy. When it dawned upon her that the phrase in question was only one of those hybrid, meaningless objurgations, the use of which will ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... coat. The pockets were filled with various articles known in the vocabulary of a schoolboy. Mr. Headley thrust his hand in, and Tony confidently waited the result. Several things were taken out and returned. It was not ...
— The Boat Club - or, The Bunkers of Rippleton • Oliver Optic
... I tell you about my vacation, or are you only interested in my education as such? I hope you appreciate the delicate shade of meaning in 'as such'. It is the latest addition to my vocabulary. ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... said the Lamb cheerfully - 'me grow big boy, have guns an' mouses - an' - an' ...' Imagination or vocabulary gave out here. But anyway it was the longest speech the Lamb had ever made, and it charmed everyone, even Cyril, who tumbled the Lamb over and rolled him in the moss to ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... to the ludicrous final scene in which, after a device borrowed from the "Lexiphanes" of Lucian, the offending poetaster, Marston-Crispinus, is made to throw up the difficult words with which he had overburdened his stomach as well as overlarded his vocabulary. In the end Crispinus with his fellow, Dekker-Demetrius, is bound over to keep the peace and never thenceforward "malign, traduce, or detract the person or writings of Quintus Horatius Flaccus [Jonson] or any other eminent man transcending you in merit." One of the most diverting personages in Jonson's ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... it, I mean," he enumerated quickly, in a praise-worthy attempt to bring his vocabulary to the ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... their day, Prince Louis Napoleon thought he might renew the imperial quackery, why should he not? It has recollections with it that must always be dear to a gallant nation; it has certain claptraps in its vocabulary that can never fail to inflame a ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... than has any other word in the vocabulary of life. It is the scourge of America; and is both a cause and a result of our high-pressure civilization. Hurry adroitly assumes so many masquerades of disguise that its identity ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... as if his vocabulary was so inadequate to voice his emotions that the one expletive would do as well as any to cover his meaning; and sat down heavily ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... Note.—The word immortality—Unsterblichkeit—does not occur in the original; nor would it, in its usual application, find a place in Schopenhauer's vocabulary. The word he uses is Unzerstoerbarkeit—indestructibility. But I have preferred immortality, because that word is commonly associated with the subject touched upon in this little debate. If any critic doubts the wisdom of this preference, let me ask him to try his hand at a short, concise, ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the language of the Bible is sufficient for every purpose. It sustained the genius of Bunyan, but the mightier genius of Shakespeare had to draw from other sources to support its flight. Our English Bible contains six thousand words; Shakespeare's vocabulary ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... changed. But nothing can shake the truth of the statement that the Indo-Germanic languages constitute in themselves a family sprung from the same source, marked by the same characteristics, and differentiated from all other languages by formation, by vocabulary, and by syntax. The historical method was applied to language long before it reached biology. Nearly a quarter of a century before Charles Darwin was born, Sir William Jones had made the first suggestion of a ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... Hall. I was placed on the top of the coach, to the delight of the outside passengers; where I soon made an acquaintance with the customary oratory of guards and coachmen, which produced much laughter. I rapidly added to my vocabulary many curious phrases, among which the most distinct were—"Aisy, now, aisy," "Get along out of that," "All's right," &c. &c. &c. with nearly a verse of "The night before Larry was stretched," tune and all, and the air of "Polly put the kettle on," which the guard was practising on his bugle, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... Cavaliers confessed to "the vices of men,—love of wine and women"; but they charged upon their opponents "the vices of devils,—hypocrisy and spiritual pride." Accordingly, the two verdicts have been recorded in the most delicate of all registers,—language. For the Cavaliers added to the English vocabulary the word plunder, and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... marked contrast with the strength and somberness of Anglo-Saxon poetry. During the three centuries following Hastings, Normans and Saxons gradually united. The Anglo-Saxon speech simplified itself by dropping most of its Teutonic inflections, absorbed eventually a large part of the French vocabulary, and became our English language. English literature is also a combination of French and Saxon elements. The three chief effects of the conquest were (1) the bringing of Roman civilization to England; (2) the growth of nationality, i.e. a strong centralized government, instead of the loose ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... have become its mordant critics; the more extreme of them have disowned religion as well as its organized form, and the violently radical would dethrone any conception of the Divine and take the word God out of our vocabulary. This extreme group has not for the most part associated itself with the new religious movement, but here at least has been ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... death of Henry Johnson. It contained a long interview with Edward J. Hannigan, in which the latter described in full the performance of Johnson at the fire. There was also an editorial built from all the best words in the vocabulary of the staff. The town halted in its accustomed road of thought, and turned a reverent attention to the memory of this hostler. In the breasts of many people was the regret that they had not known enough to give him a hand and a lift when he was alive, and they judged themselves ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... of a certain kind of work as sentimental, which simply means possessing the admirable and essential quality of sentiment. Such phrases are all parts of one peddling and cowardly philosophy, and remind us of the days when 'enthusiast' was a term of reproach. But of all this vocabulary of unconscious eulogies nothing is more ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... change of plan made it clear that he would not remain long at Westmore, and it was one of the miseries of Amherst's situation that he could not give the reasons for his defection, but must bear to figure in Duplain's terse vocabulary as a "quitter." The difficulty of finding a new manager expert enough to satisfy the directors, yet in sympathy with his own social theories, made Amherst fear that Duplain's withdrawal would open the way for Truscomb's reinstatement, an outcome on which he suspected Halford Gaines had always ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... remember that, if Berlioz's poverty of harmonic effect is sometimes annoying, he never falls into the humdrum ruts of those who have had a stereotyped academic training. His genius was unhampered by any conventional harmonic vocabulary, and hence it could always express itself freely. That he was a real genius ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... the Japanese use synonyms instead of the words themselves. That's why their English is so queer," remarked Mary, better trained in English than any of the others and with a remarkably good vocabulary when she could be persuaded to talk. "Now a synonym of 'to warn' is 'to summon.' Maybe Onoye wanted to tell you that some one wished ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... one word in the extended vocabulary of barrack-room abuse that cannot pass without comment. You may call a man a thief and risk nothing. You may even call him a coward without finding more than a boot whiz past your ear, but you must not call a man a bastard unless you are prepared ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... the word "ideals" had grown out-of-date and priggish—we had substituted for it the more robust word "ambitions." Today ideals have come back to their place in our vocabulary. We have forgotten that we ever had ambitions, but at this moment men are drowning for ideals in the mud ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... habit,—I said to our company a day or two afterwards,—worse than that of punning. It is the gradual substitution of cant or flash terms for words which truly characterize their objects. I have known several very genteel idiots whose whole vocabulary had deliquesced into some half dozen expressions. All things fell into one of two great categories,—fast or slow. Man's chief end was to be a brick. When the great calamities of life overtook their friends, these last were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... incompleteness, emotion suggestiveness: that quality or effect which we all feel to be present in romantic and absent from classic work, but which we find it hard to describe by any single term. It is open to any analyst of our critical vocabulary to draw out the fullest meanings that he can, from such pairs of related words as classic and romantic, fancy and imagination, wit and humor, reason and understanding, passion and sentiment. Let us, for instance, develop briefly this proposition that ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... agree that Villeneuve-Loubet was superb? Perhaps we were artists? So many artists came here to paint and sketch the old houses. What was our impression of her country? We knew that she meant by "country" not France but Villeneuve-Loubet, and mustered our best vocabulary to admire the town, the solid foundations, the houses, the protecting castle, and above all, ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... any dictionary of ancient Egyptian within my means, so that I might purchase and compare? I should not grudge two or three pounds for it. Professor Vater has written on it, but I do not know what dictionary he consulted. One Tattam has written a Coptic grammar; perhaps that has a vocabulary, and might serve my purpose. I see Tattam advertised by John Russell Smith, 4 Old Compton Street, Soho, London,—'Tattam (H.), Lexicon Egyptiaco-Latinum e veteribus linguae Egyptiacae monumentis; ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... a lazy, good-for-nothing rascal; you're neither man, boy, soger, nor sailor! you're no more than a thing aboard a vessel! you don't earn your salt! you're worse than a Mahon soger!'' and other still more choice extracts from the sailor's vocabulary. After the poor fellow had taken this harangue, he was sent into his state-room, and the captain stood the rest ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... employ either of these terminations, nor were they known to the Anglo-Saxons, who, however, had adjectives of direction in -AN or -EN, -ern and -weard, the last always meaning the point TOWARDS which motion in supposed, the others that FROM which it proceeds. The vocabulary of science has no specific name for one of the most important phenomena in meteorology—I mean for watery vapor condensed and rendered visible by cold. The Latins expressed this condition of water by the word vapor. For INVISIBLE vapor they ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... the track. Any religious work that reaches them now has almost to begin all over again. It has to undo their thinking about prayer and faith and God's love and human conduct and nearly every other Christian idea. They have a Christian vocabulary, but it means very little. They think they can buy religion, if they want it—any kind they want. And if they can't afford it, or don't want it, they don't quite think they'll be sent to hell for that, in spite of what the priest says. They think enough to be afraid, but not enough to be sure ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... our readers with any further attempt at unraveling the opinions, illustrations, and rhetoric of Mr. John Harrington, Democrat and orator. The possession of an abundant vocabulary without any especial use for it in the shape of an idea will not revolutionize modern government, whatever may be the opinion of the individual so richly gifted; nor will any accomplished Democrat find a true key to success ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... the ascetic idea inherent in Christianity, [576] are not ashamed of the sensual appetite, but rather the reverse." [577] Nafzawi, indeed, praises Allah for amorous pleasures just as other writers have exhausted the vocabulary in gratitude for a loaded fruit tree or an iridescent sunset. His mind runs on the houris promised to the faithful after death, and he says that these pleasures are "part of the delights of paradise awarded by Allah as a foretaste of what is waiting for us, namely delights a thousand ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... library waited a long time for his return. Wilton, elbows on the table, stared straight in front of him, giving no sign of knowledge of the other's presence. Sloane fidgeted with the smelling-salts, emitting now and then long-drawn, tremulous sighs that were his own special vocabulary ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... NOTE.—This vocabulary is supplementary to that of THE HIAWATHA PRIMER. Nouns and verbs which are inflected regularly are entered under but ...
— The Book of Nature Myths • Florence Holbrook
... reading away at interesting and beautiful books, and trying, to cover some ground, a great quantity of pedantic grammar was taught; time was wasted in trying to make the boys compose in both Latin and Greek, when they had no vocabulary, and no knowledge of the languages. It was like setting children of six and seven to write English in the style of Milton ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... indeed, put in possession of the facts, in anticipation of the province of the interpreter, who merely steps in, with his more perfect key, to confirm our preconceived interpretation. It may be contended by some gainsayer, that the Indian vocabulary, being so much less full and rich than our own, gesture and action serve but to cover up dearth of words, and are, in truth, well-nigh the sum of the Indian's oratory; a judgment which, while, perhaps, conceding to the Indian honour as ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... hear it too, Maud," observed Sir Roger. "Fine chance of improving your French vocabulary. ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... I will exercise my patience.' Indeed so perfectly calm was this young man under his dreadful calamity, that in a very few days after condemnation his brother says, 'While I write this, Peter is sitting by me making an Otaheitan vocabulary, and so happy and intent upon it, that I have scarcely an opportunity of saying a word to him; he is in excellent spirits, and I am convinced they are ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... closed, parted again—she seemed to taste something unspeakably bitter. She groped for words to fit her state of mind, but words failed her. When she did speak, however, the weakness of her vocabulary was offset by the shrill tone of her surprise. "My DEAR! Why, my DEAR! He hasn't a CENT. Of course you're quite confused now—you've been through a lot, and you think he's the only man in the world—but it's impossible. ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... and drew its breath sharply, as one man; and the silence now and then was startling as the young officer told his story; although he had few gifts of rhetoric, except a certain vivid vocabulary. He himself was a lad of eighteen or so, with a pleasant reckless face, now flushed with drink and excitement, and sparkling eyes; he was seated in a chair upon the further end of the table, so that all could hear his story; and he had a cup of huff-cup in his left ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... was more than gracious to him. "It's a wonder to me, Peter, you never thought of writing. You have such a beautiful vocabulary." But even that did not daunt him, for he knew as soon as he had looked on her again, that loving Eunice Goodward was enough of ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... compelled to muster his limited vocabulary and pick out enough German to make himself understood. In that language, then, ...
— Army Boys on German Soil • Homer Randall
... which a scholar approaches the task of translating the Agamemnon depends directly on its greatness as poetry. It is in part a matter of diction. The language of Aeschylus is an extraordinary thing, the syntax stiff and simple, the vocabulary obscure, unexpected, and steeped in splendour. Its peculiarities cannot be disregarded, or the translation will be false in character. Yet not Milton himself could produce in English the same great music, ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... shall be ere long as greasy as an Alsatian bully,' comes third; and Mrs. Behn's reference to Alsatia in this play, which is often ignored, claims fourth place. We then have Shadwell's famous comedy, The Squire of Alsatia (1688), with its well-known vocabulary of Alsatian jargon and slang, its scenes in Whitefriars, the locus classicus, a veritable mine of information. The particular portions of Whitefriars forming Alsatia were Ram-Alley, Mitre Court, and a lane called in the local cant Lombard Street. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... Ask him what questions I might, the resources of his vocabulary remained invariably the same. Still this youthful Oracle answered always ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... she looked toward the memorial, "and I can't tell you how good it is of you to explain it all to me. I envy you the power you have of making—wonderful things." The adjective crowded out every other in her vocabulary. "But I really came to ask you to do something for me, Miss Roscoe," she smiled at the sphinxlike figure. "I've been getting up a sort of fair, and it's going to be a great success—everybody in the village has promised to help, and my New York friends from ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... philosophy, anyway? With Ross it seemed a matter of speaking the vocabulary of philosophers. It was so, he knew, with many men. And yet, as to the thing itself, it was not a mere learning a system of thought, acquiring the easy use of a peculiar kind of words. It was not ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... unique in Danish letters, should have been forgotten for three hundred years, and have survived only in an epitome and in exceedingly few manuscripts. The history of the book is worth recording. Doubtless its very merits, its "marvellous vocabulary, thickly-studded maxims, and excellent variety of images," which Erasmus admired long afterwards, sealed it to the vulgar. A man needed some Latin to appreciate it, and Erasmus' natural wonder "how a Dane at that day could ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... a complete language must be, with its long and arbitrary vocabulary, its intricate system of sounds; the many forms that single words may take, especially if they are verbs; the rules of grammar, the sentence structure, the idioms, slang and inflections. Heavens, what a genius for tongues these simians have![2] Where another ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... may be lacking, is discipline. The sheer difficulty of Latin and Greek, the highly organized structure of these languages, the need of scrupulous search to find the nearest equivalents for words that differ widely in their scope of meaning from their derivatives in any modern vocabulary, the effort of lifting one's self out of the familiar rut of ideas into so foreign a world, all these things act as a tonic exercise to the brain. And it is a demonstrable fact that students of the classics do actually surpass their ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... he spoke, his unwonted buoyancy softened into a quietness of manner more befitting that word "happiness." Strange word! hardly in my vocabulary. Yet, when he uttered it, I seemed to understand ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... that same light, unconscious, and nonchalant cleverness, and easy way of life. It is little more than a year since I began to teach her, and already she can speak English with a quite considerable vocabulary, and perfect correctness (except that she does not pronounce the letter 'r'); she has also read, or rather devoured, a good many books; and can write, draw, and play the harp. And all she does without effort: rather with the flighty naturalness ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... met me in Sicily and quite frightened me about you. Is it the air of the Apennines that has worked these marvels? for, really, you appear to me exactly the same as when we learnt the French vocabulary together ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... import, the language was poor to desperation. Egede's instruction began when he caught the word "kine"—what is it? And from that time on he learned every day; but the pronunciation was as varied as the workaday vocabulary, and it was an ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... grammatical construction. For instance, take two words that one hears oftener than any others: On the Alaska coast they say "na-koo-ruk," a word meaning "good," "all right," etc.; on the Siberian coast "mah-zink-ah," while a vocabulary collected during Lieutenant Schwatka's expedition gives the word "mah-muk'-poo" for "good." The first two of these words are so characteristic of the tribes on the respective shores above the straits that ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... vivema. Vital necesega. Vitality vivemo. Vitiate difekti. Vitreous vitreca. Vitrify vitrigi. Vitriol vitriolo. Vivacity viveco. Vivid (color) hela. Vivifying viviga. Vixen vulpino. Viz nome, tio estas, t.e. Vizier veziro. Vocabulary vortareto. Vocal vocxa. Vocalist kantisto. Vocation profesio, inklino, emo. Voice vocxo. Voice (vote) vocxdono. Void (empty) malplena. Void (null) nuliga. Void (emptiness) malplenajxo. Volatile (fickle) flirtema. Volatilise vaporigi. Vol-au-vent pastecxo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... the restraining rules and the humanizing usages of civilized warfare? [Cheers.] We think we cannot. [Cheers.] The enemy, borrowing what I may, perhaps, for this purpose call a neutral flag from the vocabulary of diplomacy, describe these newly adopted measures by a grotesque and puerile perversion of language as a "blockade." [Laughter.] What is a blockade? A blockade consists in sealing up the war ports of a belligerent against sea-borne ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... upon the landing. Then from her and the child arose a most terrific uproar of commination; both together yelled such foulness and blasphemy as can only be conceived by those who have made a special study of this vocabulary, and the vituperation of the child was, if anything, richer in quality than the mother's. The former, moreover, did not confine herself to words, but all at once sent her clenched fist through every pain of glass in the ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... ward off the power to hold and draw her that lay behind the mere prettiness. "Besides, he isn't pretty," she thought, as she placed the glass before him, received the silver dime in payment, and for the third time looked into his eyes. Her vocabulary was limited, and she knew little of the worth of words; but the strong masculinity of his boy's face told her that ...
— The Game • Jack London
... of Composition and Rhetoric. Revised 1.20 An inductive course with abundant application of principles. Kellow's Practical Training in English .80 Helpful in its study of vocabulary, grammar, and structure. Spalding's Principles of Rhetoric 1.08 A supremely interesting presentation of the essentials. Strang's Exercises in English. Revised .56 Examples in syntax, accidence and style, for ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... to do?" said he, mingling with his alarmed protests many law maxims and Latin quotations, an instinct of chattering jays, who pour forth all their vocabulary when they are frightened. "What do you want me to do? Who am I? What can I do? I am nothing. No one is any longer anything. Ubi nihil, nihil. Might is there. Where there is Might the people lose ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... No vocabulary of the Servants' Hall could have encompassed the fine phrase grand seigneur, but, when Mrs. Blayne and the rest talked of him in their least resentful and more amiable moods, they unconsciously made efforts to express the quality in him which these two words ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was not one of those men who mean something else than what they say. His whole vocabulary was either "Yes" or "No," just as the circumstances were. When Clary arrived at the harbor at seven o'clock, she found a troop of giants awaiting her, who stood in line like Prussian grenadiers. Wharton moved his hat, ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... neighbourhood, paying him for his trouble in victuals, or whisky, of which he was very fond. He seldom spoke; and the sentences he could utter were few; yet the tone, and even the words of his limited vocabulary, were sufficient to express gratitude and some measure of love towards those who were kind to him, and hatred of those who teased and insulted him. He lived a life without aim, and apparently to no purpose; in this resembling ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... This continues until the adjectives beginning with the letter "A" have been exhausted. Then the letter "B" is used and the game continues. It is well to change the subject after every fourth or fifth letter. This is a good game for adding to the vocabulary of the pupil. A little fun can be had by using, instead of an historical subject, one of the pupils of the room ...
— School, Church, and Home Games • George O. Draper
... and himself. That his conversancy with French extended from Froissart downwards, through Rabelais' succulent jargon as well as Moliere's racy idiom, is patent in nearly all he wrote; and that he was capable of using this vocabulary aptly is sufficiently shown in the best and simplest of his works. But it is not so clear that he added anything to the original stock. Such words as he coined under the impetus of his exuberance are mostly found in his letters and have not been ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... probable that the working machinery of an average man's brain sets a practical limit to his convenient workable vocabulary; that is to say, a man who can easily command the spontaneous use of a certain number of words cannot much increase it without effort. If that is so, then, as he learns new words, there will be a tendency, if not a necessity, for him to lose hold ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... when he declined further controversy. Paradoxists of the ignorant sort (for it must be remembered that not all are ignorant) are, indeed, well practised in abuse, and have long learned to call mathematicians and astronomers cheats and charlatans. They freely used their vocabulary for the benefit of De Morgan, whom they denounced as a scurrilous scribbler, a defamatory, dishonest, abusive, ungentlemanly, and ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... they could lie on their backs and smoke Canteen-plug and swear at the punkah-coolies. They enjoyed a fine, full flesh meal in the middle of the day, and then threw themselves down on their cots and sweated and slept till it was cool enough to go out with their "towny," whose vocabulary contained less than six hundred words, and the Adjective, and whose views on every conceivable question they ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... incidentally, the abandonment of the traditional Italian terms of expression and the substitution of English words and phrases, which are used freely and with adroitness to indicate every shade of the composer's meaning. In place of the stereotyped terms of the music-maker's familiarly limited vocabulary, we have such a system of direct and elastic expression as Schumann adopted. Thus one finds, in the "Prologue," such unmistakable and illuminating directions as: "with sturdy good humour," "pleadingly," "mockingly"; in the "Soubrette"—"poutingly"; ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... popular, though he worked in living stuff and put the whole savour of his countryside into his tragic and passionate stories. A peasant, who writes about peasants and poor people, with a curiosity of style which not only packs his vocabulary with difficult words, old or local, and with unheard of rhythms, chosen to give voice to some never yet articulated emotion, but which drives him into oddities of printing, of punctuation, of the very shape of his accents! A page of Cladel has a certain visible uncouthness, and at first ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... cascades, and other water- works are doubtless all very well; but on the whole, considering our seven months of frost, are not cotton shirts and woollen coats still better? As for the spirits of the river, the Merrimac Naiads, or whatever may be their name in Indian vocabulary, they have no good reason for complaint; inasmuch as Nature, in marking and scooping out the channel of their stream, seems to have had an eye to the useful rather than the picturesque. After a few preliminary antics and youthful vagaries up among the White Hills, the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... "Impossible! The word is not in the vocabulary of the American politician. The Director is all right, a fine clean fellow. But he can't help himself. It's either Jim or the Project to be smirched. They won't be satisfied, the politicians, till they get the Service attached to the Spoils system. What do they care for scientific ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... the outskirts of the betting ring, searching a limited vocabulary for language with which to garnish his emotions, felt a nudge at his elbow. ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... of these, its Latin name being too long for the simple vocabulary of The Garden, You, and I. It first shows itself in a brown spot that seems to have worked out from the inner part of the leaf. Sometimes it can be conquered by snipping the infected leaves, but if it seizes an entire bed, the necessary evil of spraying with Bordeaux mixture must be ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... Polynesian idea of divine blessing. Of Kualii the chanter boasts that he "lived to be carried to battle in a net." The word is kaikoko, "to carry on the back in a net," as in the case of old and feeble persons. Polynesian dialects contain a full vocabulary of age terms ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... specialties as would make it a puzzle for the larger part of its public; still, one is not bound to respect the lazy obtuseness or snobbish ignorance of people who do not care to know more of their native tongue than the vocabulary of the drawing-room ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... translated from Guido di Colonna, puts forward a plea for Huchowne as its author, to whom he would also assign the Morte Arthure (ed. Perry) and the Pistel of Sweet Susan.[8] But Mr. Donaldson seems to have been misled by the similarity of vocabulary, which is not at all a safe criterion in judging of works written in a Northumbrian, West or East Midland speech. The dialect, I venture to think, is a far safer test. A careful examination of the Troy Book compels me to differ in toto ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... generis; for international law in any true sense. What really exists is the exclusive state—der geschlossene Staat—and in another sense than that of Fichte. This state is rigorously national: it excludes all foreign words from its vocabulary, and it would fain exclude all foreign articles from its shores in order to found a real 'national' economy such as List preached. Further, in the teaching of Treitschke this exclusive state is, 'as Machiavelli first clearly ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... for college; working on their farms; hearing the children say their catechism; fasting and praying long, weary hours in their own study,—truly they were "pious and painful preachers," as Colonel Higginson saw recorded on a gravestone in Watertown. Though I suspect "painful" in the Puritan vocabulary meant "painstaking," did it not? Cotton Mather called John Fiske, of Chelmsford, a "plaine but able painful and useful preacher," while President Dunster, of Harvard College, was described by a contemporary divine as "pious painful and fit to teach." Other curious epithets and descriptions were ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... intricate. It has seven cases and three genders; and as the latter are dependent upon no definite principle whatever, but are purely arbitrary, it is almost impossible for a foreigner to learn them so as to give nouns and adjectives their proper terminations. Its vocabulary is very copious; and its idioms have a peculiarly racy individuality which can hardly be appreciated without a thorough acquaintance with the colloquial talk of ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... empty hope, your Honour, but the full Assurance that to-day, as yesterday, Savonarola will let loose his thunder Against the vices of the idle rich And from the brimming cornucopia Of his immense vocabulary pour Scorn on the lamentable heresies Of the New Learning and on all the art ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... I've been afloat," was the graceful parenthetical apology which a distinguished naval officer used to make, when by mistake he let drop one of "those big words which lie at the bottom of the best man's vocabulary," in conversation with sensitive persons whose ears he feared it might offend. I ought possibly, at the end of the following anecdote, to make some such excuse to the scrupulous reader, whose notions of propriety it will perhaps slightly infringe: "I beg your ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... specimen of Curran's wit, one day when Lord Moira had been making a speech in his usual style full of sounding phrases and long words, Curran said, 'Upon my word his lordship has been airing his vocabulary in a ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... appeared upon his countenance. I am discovering that in Sweetapple Cove one must limit one's vocabulary. The old man would probably not appreciate ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... began the latter, with at least six ornate oaths which out-tarred the vocabulary of any jolly, profane tar who ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... refusing, approving, disapproving, liking, disliking, embracing, rejecting, determining, directing, commanding, forbidding, inclining or being averse, being pleased or displeased with—all may be reduced to this of choosing."(104) Thus, in the vocabulary and according to the psychology of this great author, the phenomena of the sensibility and those of the will are identified, as well as the faculties themselves. Pleasing and willing, liking and acting, are all one with him. ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... important beyond the giving of formal tests. We found her to be a fluent and remarkably logical and coherent conversationalist. Her choice of words was unusually good. Questioned about this she said she had always made it a point to cultivate a vocabulary and was particularly fond of the use of correct English. (This was all the more interesting because we later knew that she had been living recently with somewhat illiterate people and that her original home offered her very little ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... characteristics of the Authorized Version, the beauty of its rhythm, the vigor of its native Saxon vocabulary, there is little to prepare one in the comment of its translators or their predecessors. Apparently the faithful effort to render the original truly resulted in a perfection of style of which the translator himself was largely unconscious. The declaration in the ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... But not all of it. Some of it is based on downright wilfulness. I have seen him do without things he really wanted, rather than unbend and say the necessary "Ta-ta" which stands for both "please" and "thanks" in his still limited vocabulary. The little Hun will also fall on his picture-books, at times, and do his best to tear the linen pages apart, flailing them about in the air with genuine Berserker madness. But along with this, as I've already said, he has his equally ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... country, I induced the oxen to move with alacrity, and the wagon and contents were speedily carried to the summit. The whole trouble was at once revealed: the oxen had been broken and trained by a man who, when they were in a pinch, had encouraged them by his frontier vocabulary, and they could not realize what was expected of them under extraordinary conditions until they heard familiar and possibly profanely urgent phrases. I took the wagon to its destination, but as it was not brought back, even in all the time I was stationed ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... a middle-aged solicitor turn plovers' egg colour and drop his jaw when reminded of so innocent and festal a matter as that no death had ever occurred in a house that he had sold? If I knew my English vocabulary at all, the tone in which he said the youngest sister "fell ill" meant that she had gone out of her mind. That might explain his change of countenance, and it was just possible that her demented influence still hung about Holmescroft; but the ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... critical pause came, he patiently waited for the missing word, and rarely failed to find a phrase which was expressive if not technically correct. He often said afterward that his sole preparation for these lectures consisted in shutting himself up for hours and marshaling his vocabulary, passing in review, that is, all the English words he could recall. As the Lyells had prophesied, his foreign accent rather added a charm to his address, and the pauses in which he seemed to ask the forbearance of the audience, ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz |
