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More "Vocabulary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... house kept better hours than its neighbours, for the simple reason that those who arrived after a certain time found themselves shut into the street for the night. They might hammer and appeal in the strongest language of their vocabulary, but Plon snored unmoved, and nothing short of a fire in the house would have turned him out of his bed. Gradually this became so well understood, that his lodgers accommodated themselves to it as to any other of the inexorable laws ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... did you get that word from? Whence comes it in the vocabulary of a youth—a youth? Oh, you ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... that he has done nothing of the kind, but that he has simply reaffirmed the individual's experiences in a more generalized vocabulary. And again, I can be excused from proving technically that the transcendentalist reasonings fail to make religion universal, for I can point to the plain fact that a majority of scholars, even religiously disposed ones, stubbornly refuse to treat them ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... be useless to talk to me about—loving." She took the word on her lips with a certain effect of adopting it for convenience' sake in her vocabulary. "All that was ended for me long ago,—ten years ago. And my whole life since then has been shaped to do without it. I will tell you my story if you like. Perhaps it's your due. I wish to be just. You may have a ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... observed, in his own particular kind of vocabulary, that the Major's intentions were absurd, since the young man would scarcely be such a peculiarly qualified kind of fool as to return. And Mrs. Partington agreed with him. (In fact, this had been her one comfort all day. For it seemed to her, with her frank and ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... earth's movement, have, however, plainly nothing to say to any real movements on the part of the stars themselves. The old idea was that the stars were absolutely fixed; hence arose the term "fixed stars"—a term which, though inaccurate, has not yet been entirely banished from the astronomical vocabulary. But careful observations extending over a number of years have shown slight changes of position among these bodies; and such alterations cannot be ascribed to the revolution of the earth in its orbit, for they appear to take place in every direction. ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... and abstract subjects. When compared with such philosophic writing as Hume's, Diderot's, Berkeley's, then Comte's manner is heavy, laboured, monotonous, without relief and without light. There is now and then an energetic phrase, but as a whole the vocabulary is jejune; the sentences are overloaded; the pitch is flat. A scrupulous insistence on making his meaning clear led to an iteration of certain adjectives and adverbs, which at length deaden the effect beyond the endurance ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... 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 ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... 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 ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... credit for exercising a large amount of common sense. In many ways they are more practical than we, and this is quite as noticeable in their language as in any other respect. They have one simple language for the whole globe and in its use they are all agreed. Their vocabulary is small because they have not yet branched out into the infinite varieties of ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... Early English Text Society the Troy Book, 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 from Mr. Donaldson, and, instead of assigning the Troy Book ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... other than a good Norman. He was endowed with the gift of oratory peculiar to the country; and his profanity was enriched with all the flavor of the provincial's elation in the committing of sin. From the earliest moment of our starting, the stream of his talk had been unending. His vocabulary was such as to have excited the envy and despair of a French realist, impassioned in the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... shade are lost. Thus a man will so insist upon the use of difficult words by George Elliot that a person unacquainted with her writings would think that the whole merit or demerit of that author lay in her vocabulary. A man will so exalt the pathos of Dickens or Thackeray that he will throw their wit and humour into the background. Some person's only remark on seeing Turner's Modern Italy will be that the colours are cracked, or, upon reading Sterne, ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... The Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, one of the wellsprings of hacker culture. The 1959 "Dictionary of the TMRC Language" compiled by Peter Samson included several terms that became basics of the hackish vocabulary (see esp. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... of "our glorious institootions, sir," always provokes the ridicule of an Englishman. The words have become ridiculous, and it would, I think, be well for the nation if the term "Institution" could be excluded from its vocabulary. But, in truth, they are glorious. The country in this respect boasts, but it has done that which justifies a boast. The arrangements for supplying New York with water are magnificent. The drainage of the new part of the city is excellent. ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... that slang has a distinct function in the language—in replenishing it, but Uncle Peter says about slang words, that 'many are called, and few are chosen,' and there is no need to try to accommodate them all in one's vocabulary. ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... Professor Chamberlain, "the Japanese language has no kindred, and its classification under any of the recognized linguistic families remains doubtful. In structure, though not to any appreciable extent in vocabulary, it closely resembles Korean, and both it and Korean may possibly be related to Mongol and to Manchu, and might therefore lay claim to be included in the so-called 'Altaic group' In any case, Japanese is what philologists call an agglutinative tongue; that is to ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... worse vicissitudes. Even the variety and richness of a master mariner's vocabulary was taxed to its utmost resources when he was coaxed into "trying on" a short jacket apparently intended for a toreador. Such minor troubles, however, were overcome in time. A razor and a hot bath were by no means ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... 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, unasked, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... the whole procedure and to the end of his days believed that the new drift into rivalry with European nations as a colonial power was fraught with genuine danger. "Our imperialistic friends," he said, "seem to have forgotten the use of the vocabulary of liberty. They talk about giving good government. 'We shall give them such a government as we think they are fitted for.' 'We shall give them a better government than they had before.' Why, Mr. President, that one phrase conveys to a free man and a free people the most stinging ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... Maud," observed Sir Roger. "Fine chance of improving your French vocabulary. Still, ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... Bantu border line, the traveller meets with numerous languages widely different and mutually incomprehensible whereas with a knowledge of one Bantu language it is not difficult to understand the structure and even the vocabulary of others. The importance of this language family in Africa is therefore obvious. The author defines clearly the special and peculiar characteristics of Bantu languages. There follows an interesting discussion of the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... this play into German, and it has also been admirably translated into English. The great excellence of Plautus was the masterly handling of language, and the adjusting the parts for dramatic effect. His humor, broad and fresh, produced irresistible comic effects. No one ever surpassed him in his vocabulary of nicknames and his happy jokes. Hence he maintained his popularity ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... scrutiny than ever before. What Taine found as inflexible and inert as a pudding-mold is now seen to be charged with life and movement, vibrant with light and shadow and color. More particularly, Wimsatt has shown how intimately connected is the vocabulary of The Rambler with Johnson's reading for the Dictionary, and how, having mastered the words of the experimental scientists of the previous century, Johnson proceeded to put them to original uses, generating with them new stylistic overtones in contexts now ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... admirably started by Mr. Edouard Sievers in a little book containing this portion of the text, and exhibiting in detail the peculiar intimacy of relation between it and the "Heliand," in regard to vocabulary, phraseology, and versification. This part of Mr. Sievers' work is complete. Probably no one who has gone through his proofs will be found to question his conclusion, that there is between the "Heliand" and the Saxon ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... remembered that when Mrs. Barlow asks Mrs. Veal any question the answering of which would seem to be inconsistent with her ghostly state, Defoe says, "However, she waived that;" and, waive not being at that time in the vocabulary of the young reader, she always imagined Mrs. Veal putting the question away from her, as it were, with a motion of her hand, and gazing the while in stony silence at Mrs. Barlow. This dramatic situation was calculated to have a certain effect upon the nerves, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... made considerable progress in the language, knew all the names of common objects, and could make themselves understood in simple matters. The language of savage people is always simple. Their range of ideas is narrow; their vocabulary very limited, and ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... robe of pure gold trembled visibly. She knew, it was plain, the import of the words. She spoke rapidly, beseechingly, in her own tongue. The words were liquid music in the air. Then, realizing their impotence, she resorted to her poor vocabulary of their ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... While General Joffre held the Germans behind the four hundred miles of trenches, France made itself over into a society organized for war—the new business kind of war which is waged in factory and railway terminal, not by gallant charges. "Organiser" has become in the Frenchman's vocabulary the next most popular word to "patrie." One implies, these days, ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... tribes or families now inhabiting Midian represent the ancient Midianites; and all speak the vulgar half-Fellah Arabic, without any difference of accent or vocabulary ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... as true a light as by any description in my power to give. The length of time that we remained at Otaheite, with the advantage of having been there before, gave me opportunities of making perhaps a more perfect vocabulary of the language than has yet appeared; but I have chosen to defer it for the present as there is a probability that I may hereafter be better qualified ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... English patriotism, English scholars could readily quit their native land to study at Paris, the French vernacular literature was the common property of the two peoples, and French words began to force their way into the stubborn vocabulary of the English language, which for two centuries had almost entirely rejected these alien elements. In dwelling, however briefly, on the new features which were transforming English civilisation during this memorable period, we shall constantly see how England gained by her ever-increasing intercourse ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... the vulgar tongue. I do this that I may be more clearly understood, regardless of the teeth of critics who rend the works of authors. Each day new wants arise, impossible to translate with the vocabulary left us by the venerable ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... thoughtful; Caleb's childlike faith and extensive vocabulary were alike puzzles to him. He did not understand that in homes—however simple—where the Bible is studied until it becomes as household words, the children are accustomed to a "well of English undefiled"; and so, unconsciously, mould their style upon and borrow their expressions ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... style distinguished, vigorous, and individual, but she was able to convey her extremest realism so subtly and yet so unambiguously that she could afford to disdain the latrinities of the "younger school." A marvellous feat. Most of them used the frank vocabulary of the humble home, as alone synonymous with Truth. Never before had such words invaded the sacrosanct pages of American letters. Little they recked, as Mr. Lee Clavering, who took the entire school as an obscene joke, pointed ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the same grace, the same lightness of elastic strength. Froude, like Newman, can pass from racy, colloquial vernacular, the talk of educated men who understand each other, to heights of genuine eloquence, where the resources of our grand old English tongue are drawn out to the full. His vocabulary was large and various. He was familiar with every device of rhetoric. He could play with every pipe in the language, and sound what stop he pleased. Oxford men used to talk very much in those days, and have talked more or less ever since, about the Oriel ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... returned, lazily. "I give it up." Then he contemplated his small daughter with much satisfaction. "I wonder none of you advanced women have ever turned your attention to baby-language," he observed presently; "we are studying the ape-vocabulary, you know. Dot has got quite a little language of her own. As far as I can make out each sentence is finished off with a 'gurgle-doe.' Something between the 'gobble, gobble' of a turkey and the coo of the ring-dove. I suppose ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... ever talk with an ambitious reporter unless you have a baseball mask over the face and a mosquito netting over the vocabulary; because if you only say to him, "How's the health?" you will find in the morning paper a column interview, in which you have decided to run for ...
— Get Next! • Hugh McHugh
... always spoke of things being "awfully jolly" and wondered why her vocabulary should be so limited in its ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... fortuitous and unguided excursions into books, and gleaned as industry should find, or chance should offer it, in the boundless chaos of a living speech. My search, however, has been either skilful or lucky; for I have much augmented the vocabulary. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... nature. He was of about the average height and, although quite advanced in years when I knew him, his hair had not changed color. His manner was exceeding gentle and, strange to say, with such a remarkable vocabulary at his command, in society he was exceedingly quiet. In his early life Irving was engaged to be married to one of his own ethereal kind, but she passed onward, and among his friends the subject was never broached as it seemed too sacred to dwell upon. Her name was Matilda Hoffman ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... before men were able to speak with any large vocabulary, they eked out their meaning by all kinds of motions and gestures. But the most highly cultivated men to- day, in their conversation, are the ones who get the least excited and have the least recourse to gestures, because they are capable of expressing the highest, finest, and most varied ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... comrade, yet, before the foremost succeeded in laying hands upon me, a newcomer, resplendent in glittering uniform, with an inflamed, almost purple face, leaped madly forth from the opposite side of the mast and began laying about him vigorously with an iron pin, making use meanwhile of a vocabulary of choice Spanish epithets such as ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... difference in rank. In fact, when a person can read intelligently and with appreciation such selections as appear in this volume he can read anything that is set before him. There may be some things that will require effort and perhaps explanation, but it is merely a question of vocabulary and parallel information. Besides the stories, there are selections in every department of literature except those that have been passed in the progress of the plan of grading. The legendary heroes, the myths and the stories of classic literature are no longer to ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... beginning to shine forth"; a late Latin word not found in the Ciceronian vocabulary, and therefore condemned by the Bishop; this word is, perhaps, what is meant by the "gaudy ware" in the second line of Gandolf's epitaph, referred to in ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... popular conception of the ignorant the Pleiade maintained that poetry was a high and difficult form of art; against the pedantry of humanism they maintained that the native tongue of France admitted of literary art worthy to take its place beside that of Greece or Rome. The French literary vocabulary, they declared, has excellences of its own, but it needs to be enriched by technical terms, by words of local dialects, by prudent adoptions from Greek and Latin, by judicious developments of the existing families of words, by the recovery of words ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... demand for breaking prairie. I reckon there must have been a dozen yoke of work-steers in our herd that year, and they were more trouble to me than all the balance of the cattle, for they were slothful and sinfully lazy. My vocabulary of profanity was worn to a frazzle before we were out a week, and those oxen didn't pay any more attention to a rope or myself than to the ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... area. The main force of Shere Singh was posted on the right bank of the river, but a strong brigade of four thousand men occupied the island, and erected batteries. These batteries commanded the only available ford, or "nullah," as it is called in the vocabulary of the country. The opposite town of Rumnugger was favourably situated for defence; it was flanked by a grove, and by the bend in the river. This position Shere Singh had skilfully fortified. On the 22nd, at two o'clock in ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... off poor Susan's questioning, and come forward, with the child still clinging, to incite the bird to display the rose colour under his crest, put up a grey claw to shake hands, and show off his vocabulary, laughing herself and acting merriment as she did so, in hopes ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... thief, the burglar, the low-class criminal everywhere, expresses all his emotions by oaths. Are they angry? They swear. Surprised? They swear. Delighted? They swear. Every conception of the mind, every impulse of the blood, is expressed in the narrow and base vocabulary of profanity. So that the first thing an oath indicates is that he who uses it has limited intellectual resources, otherwise he would not employ so commonplace ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... amusing. I didn't know there were so many kinds of people and so many sorts of provincialism in the world. The other night, at the British Minister's, a French attache, who complimented my awful French—I told him that I inherited all but the vocabulary and the accent—said that if specimens of the different kinds of women evolved in all out-of-the-way places who come to Washington could be exhibited, nobody would doubt any more that America is an interesting country. Wasn't it an impudent speech? I tried to tell him, in French, how ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... long vocabulary of compliments had been exhausted, Gomez Arias reverted to the adventure in the Zaguan, and with apparent anxiety demanded ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... the Vocabulary may seem inadequate. I assume that those persons who wish to make a critical study of the original text will provide themselves with the Nahuatl Dictionaries of Molina or Simeon, both of which are now easily obtainable, ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... neglecting the job I undertook, all the same," came the steady answer. "Never a batch of Boche prisoners is put behind the barbed-wire enclosure but what I find a chance to look 'em over and air my limited German vocabulary." ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach
... manifest in both forces; in one, for instance, of the Unlettered forces: The average farmer, or countryman, knows, in reality, a far better and wider range of diction than he permits himself to use. He restricts and abridges the vocabulary of his speech, fundamentally, for the reason that he fears offending his rural NEIGHBORS, to whom a choicer speech might suggest, on his part, an assumption—a spirit of conscious superiority, and therewith an implied reflection ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... va Vicente? Donde va la gente. See vocabulary. Note the two senses in which the adverb ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... from all the shores of all the Seven Seas either to tarry awhile and then to depart for ever, unwelcome sojourners only, or to settle down at last and found a family soon asserting equality with the oldest inhabitants of the vocabulary. Seafaring terms came to us from Scandinavia and from the Low Countries. Words of warfare on land crossed the channel, in exchange for words of warfare at sea which migrated from England to France. ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... was from Boston—no less; slim, pale, medium height, but with an alert look, and a high-bridged nose. But his clothes! Sam Price's vocabulary was insufficient here, they were cut in such a way, and Mr. Worthington was downright distinguished-looking under his gray beaver. Why had he come to Brampton? demanded Deacon Ira Perkins. Sam had saved this for the last. Young Mr. Worthington was threatened with consumption, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of Waldthurn, in 1690. Spencer's theory. Controversy and answer. Music of primeval man and early civilizations. The Vedas. Hebrew scriptures. Basis of scientific laws. Church ritual. Folk-music. Influence of crusades. Modern music architect of its own fortunes. Present musical vocabulary and literature. Counsel of Pythagoras. What Plato taught. Euripides on song. Auerbach. Martin Luther. Napoleon Bonaparte. Bain and Dr. Marx. Shakespeare, in Merchant of Venice. Wagner's ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... think the things she thought, and had no vocabulary or phrases or imagery whereby to express their own thinkings. God does not hurry such: have we enough of hope for them, or patience with them? I suspect their teachers must arise among themselves. They too must have an elect of their own kind, of like passions with themselves, to lift them ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... "Your vocabulary is a picturesque one, Reed," she told him, upon one occasion. "I ought to be shocked; but I've known you too long to be shocked at anything you do. Besides, in the end of all things, I imagine I should follow your own ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... 1781, he begins a new record, which he calls a Journal, and he expresses regret that he has not had time to keep one all the time. The subjects now considered are almost wholly military and the entries reveal a different man from that of 1775. The grammar is better, the vocabulary larger, the tone more elevated, the man himself is bigger and broader with ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... of 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 traffic by encircling their coasts with ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... to some of your readers. Having felt the need of such assistance in the course of my own reading, &c. &c.—I extracted them from an expensive work on the subject, and have only to lament that my vocabulary ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 404, December 12, 1829 • Various
... later phase of life, when a little girl's vocabulary was, somewhat at random, growing larger, belong a few brave phrases hazarded to express a meaning well realized—a personal matter. Questioned as to the eating of an uncertain number of buns just before lunch, the child averred, "I took them just to ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... of permanent value, culled from the folk-lore of the primitive races; the vocabulary, based upon that of the Hiawatha Primer, is increased gradually, and the new words and phrases will add to the child's power of expression. The naive explanations of the phenomena of nature given by the primitive races appeal ...
— The Book of Nature Myths • Florence Holbrook
... reader reached this singular conclusion, which came with an abruptness that indicated the decrepit imagination of the author and his overworked vocabulary, she looked up from the absurd vehicle of all this hectic style and incident and beheld in the eyes of her auditor a suggestion of the light that is indigenous ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... Parish, Louisiana, where they gain a livelihood as day laborers. Most of them speak English more than their native tongue; in fact, about two-thirds of the thirty-two survivors speak English only. The vocabulary obtained by him discloses the interesting fact that the Biloxi belong to the Siouan ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... I the utter futility of attempting to describe a modern battle so that the reader can really understand or visualize it. There are no words in any vocabulary that convey the emotions and thoughts of persons during the long days and nights of horror—of the continual crash of the shells, the melting away or total annihilation of parapets and dug-outs; being buried and ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... EVERY MAN WILL DO HIS DUTY. This is introduced into a naval vocabulary, not as wanting explanation, but that in recording the most remarkable signal ever made to a fleet, we may remind the tyro, that these words of Nelson are admirably adapted for all the varying changes of sea-life, whether in ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... stock association, in which, for a certain premium paid, an equivalent may be demanded. No Mason, or no lodge, is bound to give pecuniary or other aid to a Brother, unless he really needs. The word " benefit," as usually used in the modern friendly societies, has no place in the vocabulary of Freemasonry. If a wealthy Brother is afflicted with sorrow or sickness, we are to strive to comfort him with our sympathy, our kindness, and our attention, but we are to bestow our eleemosynary aid only on the ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... 1815. In 1820 Thomas Kendall went to England with some Maori chiefs, and while there helped Professor Lee, of Cambridge, to "fix" the Maori language—the outcome of their work being Lee and Kendall's 'Grammar and Vocabulary of the Language of New Zealand', published in the ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... may see a fight and be able to describe it truthfully, yet he may be unable to describe it dramatically. He must have the impressibility of the poetical nature to take in all its scenes, and the vocabulary of an artist to reproduce them. But, for some reason or other, poets are not very often found under fire, unless it be that of the critics. The temperament which makes men insensible to danger is rarely the gift of those who are so organized as to be sensitive ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... me admit to you—and I have already done so, I see—that, since I have been here, I have had daily lessons in English with a cultivated English woman; and in consequence I have been learning to enlarge a very meagre vocabulary, and have begun to appreciate possibilities in my own language of ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... (Arabia Deserta, i. 547) writes the word "Tahal" and translates it "ague-cake," i.e. the throbbing enlarged spleen, left after fevers, especially those of Al-Hijaz and Khaybar. [The form "Tayhal" with a plural "Tawahil" for the usual "Tihal" spleen is quoted by Dozy from the valuable Vocabulary published by Schiaparelli, 1871, after an old MS. of the end of the xiii. century. It has the same relation to the verb "tayhal" he suffered from the spleen, which "Tihal" bears the same verb "tuhil," used passively in the same sense. The name of the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... perhaps singular. The ancient language of Italy possessed a strong affinity with the modern. My knowledge of the former was my only means of gaining the latter. I had no grammar or vocabulary to explain how far the meanings and inflections of Tuscan words varied from the Roman dialect. I was to ponder on each sentence and phrase; to select among different conjectures the most plausible, and to ascertain the true by patient ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... the nest in the wide world, and her chick, chick, chick, uttered quickly, selects for them the dainty which she has found, or teaches them what is proper for their diet. A good listener will detect enough intonations in her voice to constitute a considerable vocabulary, which, if imitated ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... 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
... 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
... copying such ancient inscriptions, often defaced, originally ill-written, and complicated by the personal tastes of individual scribes for odd spellings, rare words, or stock phrases; besides the difficulties of a grammar and vocabulary only partly made out; the very nature of both contracts and letters implies special obscurities. But the peculiarities of these obscurities are such as to ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... Jane Shore. The finest exhibition of talent, and the most beautiful moral lessons, are interdicted, at the theatre. There is something in the word Playhouse, which seems so closely connected, in the minds of these people, with sin, and Satan,— that it stands in their vocabulary for every species of abomination. And yet why? Where is every feeling more roused in favour of virtue, than at a good play? Where is goodness so feelingly, so enthusiastically learnt? What so solemn as to see the excellent passions of the human heart called forth by a great actor, animated by ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... knocking about one may discover how limited a vocabulary has been their portion; and observation with a traveler means a widening of the horizon that ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... flying. By virtue of this characteristic and others no less important, she belongs to the order of Hymenoptera. (This order includes the Ichneumon-flies, of whom the Microgaster is one.—Translator's Note.) No matter: as our language possesses no more precise term outside the scientific vocabulary, let us use the expression Midge, which pretty well conveys the general idea. Our Midge, the Microgaster, is the size of an average Gnat. She measures 3 or 4 millimetres. (.117 to .156 inch.—Translator's Note.) The two sexes are equally numerous and wear the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... certain asthmatic persons, and dosed others with orvietan, the famous panacea of his time, of which he had brought with him a good supply. With respect to his missionary functions, he seems to have given himself little trouble, unless his attempt to make a Sioux vocabulary is to be regarded as preparatory to a future apostleship. "I could gain nothing over them," he says, "in the way of their salvation, by reason of their natural stupidity." Nevertheless, on one occasion he baptized ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... what I looked down on, for I can't. No, if I had a big book of synonyms to the words Grand and Glorious and used every one on 'em tryin' to describe that seen I couldn't begin to do justice to it, and so what is the use of tryin' with the Jonesville vocabulary. ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... emanating from the grisette, the lady, the pretentious woman in middle life, and the actress, among whom Adolphe has chosen his belle (according to the Fischtaminellian vocabulary). ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... their northward and, at the same time, quite distinct from the languages of their Brazilian neighbors to the eastward. The Aztecs of Mexico spoke a language differing radically in structure as well as in vocabulary from the Maya language of their Yucatan neighbors; yet there is unquestionably a relationship between the Aztecs and a number of very distant tribes, shown by resemblances of their languages, as in the case of the Shoshone Indians ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... the 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 ...
— The Boat Club - or, The Bunkers of Rippleton • Oliver Optic
... of the most remarkable characteristics of the Semitic family of speech is its conservatism and resistance to change. As compared with the other languages of the world, its grammar and vocabulary have alike undergone but little alteration in the course of the centuries during which we can trace its existence. The very words which were used by the Babylonians four or five thousand years ago, can still ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... poetess had been unknown. Many people had listened to this impassioned but despairing cry from some remote and charmed solitude, who had never read poetry before, who translated it into their own limited vocabulary and more limited experience, and were inexpressibly affected to find that they, too, understood it; it was caught up and echoed by the feverish, adventurous, and unsatisfied life that filled that day and time. ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... as means to the furtherance of the real interests. The first stage corresponds to the Infant or Kindergarten age: here the main object is to build up in the mind of the child systems of ideas about the things of his environment; to extend, by conversation and by reading to the child, the vocabulary of his own language; to give him practice in the combining and recombining of concrete groups of things, and to introduce him to a knowledge of the various language ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... altogether from the scientific vocabulary, and to substitute for the terms {29} cause and effect, antecedent and consequent, reducing causation to conjunction. But it was generally admitted that, where we have to deal with an invariable antecedent ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... If you realize Aunt Caroline at all, you will see that at least so much self-expression is necessary before anyone else can expect a chance. Time enough to pick up the thread again when the inevitable has happened and her exhausted vocabulary is ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... the camp. Young Pete, sniffing a customer, was immediately up and doing. Annersley inspected the horses and finally chose a horse which Young Pete roped with much swagger and unnecessary language, for the horse was gentle, and quite familiar with Young Pete's professional vocabulary. ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... explanations," 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
... they are, always find fitting expression. He does not grope for a term; it stands ready for his thought, and one feels that he had opportunity for choice. It is the exuberance of his fancy, already mentioned, coupled with this richness of vocabulary, that helped to make Burke a tiresome speaker. His mind was too comprehensive to allow any phase of his subject to pass without illumination. He followed where his subject led him, without any great attention to the patience of his audience. But he receives full credit when his speeches ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... moment to moment, subordinates the form of the language to the need of expressing the immediate sensation in its original vividness. He multiplies ellipses, anastrophes, words unexpectedly connected; he takes from every vocabulary its most expressive terms; he models himself upon the very appearance of things as they are; he knows no other rhythm than that of successive impressions. He is perpetually on the move. His agility occasionally seems a little feverish. ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... supposed interest of Scripture, to discredit the new learning. Even such a man as Dugald Stewart declared that the discovery of Sanskrit was altogether fraudulent, and endeavoured to prove that the Brahmans had made it up from the vocabulary and grammar of Greek and Latin. Others exercised their ingenuity in picking the new discovery to pieces, and still others attributed it all ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... neighborhood and I visited him often. To get to his cabinets, it was necessary to go through his garden where thorn-apples and cacti grew abundantly, and where they kept a gray parrot, brought from Gaboon, whose vocabulary consisted of words learnt from ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... in the 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; ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... charitable disposition that we make the acquaintance of two weird sisters, who live not far from us in Calle Falier, and whom we know to this day merely as the Creatures— creatura being in the vocabulary of Venetian pity the term for a fellow-being somewhat more pitiable than a poveretta. Our Creatures are both well stricken in years, and one of them has some incurable disorder which frequently confines her to the wretched cellar in which they live with the invalid's husband,—a mild, pleasant-faced ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... 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 argot of fairyland. He watched ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... gave to the individual subsistence of a rational nature the name [Greek: hupostasis] while we through want of appropriate words have kept a borrowed term, calling that persona which they call [Greek: hupostasis]; but Greece with its richer vocabulary gives the name [Greek: hupostasis] to the individual subsistence. And, if I may use Greek in dealing with matters which were first mooted by Greeks before they came to be interpreted in Latin: [Greek: hai ousiai en men tois katholou einai dunantai. ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... knife becomes itself a pigment, as on the hone. Modern science has much enlarged the colour list. There is thus the greater temptation offered to make endless varieties. It has been remarked in language, that the best writers have the most brief vocabulary—so it may be, that the best colourists will have the fewest colours. The rule has been verified in the old masters of the best time. Cennino Cennini, who always begins from the beginning, recommends ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... uttered the only expression of supreme disgust in his vocabulary a long-drawn, hissing sound which he used only in those moments when his command of English was entirely ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... that time in Paris, but who is not referred to by Irving, who for some unexplained reason failed to meet the genial Scotsman at breakfast. Perhaps it is to his failure to do so that he owes the semi-respectful reference to himself in Carlyle's "Reminiscences." Lacking the stimulus to his vocabulary of personal acquaintance, Carlyle simply wrote: "Washington Irving was said to be in Paris, a kind of lion at that time, whose books I somewhat esteemed. One day the Emerson-Tennant people bragged that they had engaged him to breakfast with ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... become almost one of those conventionalities of amorous expression which belong to the vocabulary of self-abandonment. Every woman who utters it, when torn by the almost terrible extravagance of a great love, believes that no one before her has ever said it, and that in her own ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... we had dropped the word 'culture' out of our vocabulary because of Germany, the Archdeacon of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... child I could speak French as easily as English, and even after eight years of French lessons at school, my French was still tucked away in some corner of my head; but I had, of course, only a child's vocabulary, sufficient for a child's simple wants. Under Madame Ducros' skilful tuition I soon began to acquire an adult vocabulary, and it became no effort ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... men of genius, but he was never conscious of the antithesis and so knew nothing of intellectual suffering. His intellect, unexhausted by speculation or casuistry, was wholly at the service of hand and eye, and whatever he pleased he did with an unheard of ease and simplicity, and if style and vocabulary were at times monotonous, he could not have made them otherwise without ceasing to be himself. Instead of the language of Chaucer and Shakespeare, its warp fresh from field and market, if the woof were learned, his age offered him a speech, exhausted ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... [77] A complete vocabulary of Italian billingsgate might be selected from Biagioli. Or see the concluding pages of Nannucci's excellent tract "Intorno alle voci usate da Dante," Corfu, 1840. Even Foscolo could not always refrain. Dante should have taught them to shun such ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... willing to renounce the fashions of her younger days, but still wore the flowered gown, the yellow kerchief, and turban-like head-gear of the classic fish-wife, besides retaining the latter's loud voice and rapidity of gesture as she stood with her hands on her hips, shouting out the whole abusive vocabulary of her calling. ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... Mountstuart diverged from her inquiry, "he will swell the letters of my vocabulary to gigantic proportions if I see much ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Instead of simply 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 ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Of all the kings, Ashurnasirbal seems to have been especially devoted to the service of Nin-ib. The annals of this king, instead of beginning, as is customary, with an invocation of all or many of the gods, starts out with an address to Nin-ib, in which the king fairly exhausts the vocabulary of the language in his desire to secure the favor of this powerful deity. Almost all the attributes he assigns to him have reference to the god's powers in war. Dwelling in the capital Calah, he is 'the strong, the mighty, the supreme one,' the perfect ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... he exclaimed shrugging his shoulders lightly ... "These words, my young friend, are terms that nowadays belong exclusively to the vocabulary of the uneducated masses; we,—and by WE, I mean scientists, and men of the highest culture,—have long ago rejected them as unmeaning and therefore unnecessary. Phenomenon is a particularly vile expression, serving merely to designate anything wonderful and uncommon,—whereas ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... constraint in their presence. The presence of the ecclesiastical sex imposes severe restrictions upon our conversation. The Lieutenant-Governor of the South-Eastern Provinces once complained to me that the presence of a clergyman rendered nine-tenths of his vocabulary contraband, and choked up his fountains of anecdote. It also restricts us in the selection of our friends. But with an Archdeacon all this is changed. He is both of Heaven and Earth. When we see him in the pulpit we are pleased to think that ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... of this Island; and Dr. King, a name well-known among scientific men, gave it as his opinion, founded on historical evidence, going so far back as the period of Sebastian Cabot, that they were really an Esquimaux tribe. Others are of opinion, founded on some real or presumed affinity between the vocabulary of the one people with that of the other, that the Indian tribes of North America and the original inhabitants of Newfoundland, called by themselves "Boeothicks," and by Europeans "Red Indians," are of the ...
— Lecture On The Aborigines Of Newfoundland • Joseph Noad
... this method a spelling lesson of ten words is given each day from the spoken vocabulary of the pupil. Of these ten words two are selected for intensive study, and in the spelling book are made prominent in both position and type at the head of each day's lessons, these two words being followed by ...
— Health Lessons - Book 1 • Alvin Davison
... Andrew Marvell made his mark upon Hull. Mr. Grosart, who lacked nothing but the curb upon a too exuberant vocabulary, a little less enthusiasm and a great deal more discretion, to be a model editor, tells us in his invaluable edition of The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Andrew Marvell, M.P.,[8:1] that he had read a number of the elder Marvell's manuscripts, consisting ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... exist, or have existed, with whose records I am not in some degree acquainted, from Herodotus down to Gibbon. Of the classics, I know about as much as most schoolboys after a discipline of thirteen years; of the law of the land as much as enables me to keep 'within the statute'—to use the poacher's vocabulary. I did study the 'Spirit of Laws' and the Law of Nations; but when I saw the latter violated every month, I gave up my attempts at so useless an accomplishment;—of geography, I have seen more land on maps than I should wish to traverse on foot;—of mathematics, enough to give me the headache ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... suppose, from you," said Charles Osmond. "I wish you could have seen her delight over it. Words absolutely failed her. I don't think any one else noticed it, but, her own vocabulary coming to an end, she turned to ours, it was 'What HEAVENLY person can have sent ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... ever after the Governor General was called in the West. Jim's phonetic mouthful gave the West a roar of laughter and a new word to the language. On another occasion Jim gave the West a new phrase to its vocabulary which remains to this day. Having to take the wife of a high personage of the neighbouring Republic over the line in the private car, he had astounded his master by presenting a bill for finger-bowls before the journey began. Ingolby said to him, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that. He was surprised in Thorpe, in more ways than one. His voice was low, and filled with a certain companionable quality that gave one confidence in him immediately. He was apparently a man of education and of some little culture, in spite of his vocation, which usually possesses a vocabulary of its own as hard as rock. But Philip's greatest surprise came when he regarded Thorpe's personal appearance. He judged that he was past forty, perhaps forty-five, and the thought made him shudder inwardly. He was twice—almost three times—as old ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... administration, and higher education), Arabic (widely spoken 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 ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... variants added to each recipe by the translator are printed in upper and lower case and in the same type as the other contributions by the translator, the Apiciana, the Critical Review and the Vocabulary and Index. ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... coffee-shops and, supposedly, in some degree the gin-palaces, which however, mostly existed in the picturesque vocabulary of ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... not weary 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
... it need not be premised that I mean infinitely more than Cassocks and Surplices; and do not at all mean the mere haberdasher Sunday Clothes that men go to Church in. Far from it! Church-Clothes are, in our vocabulary, the Forms, the Vestures, under which men have at various periods embodied and represented for themselves the Religious Principle; that is to say, invested The Divine Idea of the World with a sensible and practically active ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Sigmund with comical irritability. "Summoning my whole vocabulary, I said all sorts of pretty things to her, but while talking excitedly, with burning cheeks, she took up the little dog our friend Tannemann gave her, and calmly began to hunt for fleas in his curly hair. This made me so furious that I started up and ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... about," "Hard a-lee," and "All right," comprised Tehei's English vocabulary and led me to suspect that at some time he had been one of a Kanaka crew under an American captain. Between the puffs I made signs to him and repeatedly and interrogatively uttered the word SAILOR. Then I tried it in atrocious French. MARIN ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... voice of spring when it breathes on the sleeping earth; he knew each note in Love's music, every word in the great thing that is Love's vocabulary. Love loved, and Psyche listened, and soon she knew that her lover was ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... responsive to the pleasure of finding a familiar word concealed under a variation of shape; but this should be conveyed orally. What is really requisite is that boys should be taught how to read a book intelligently. In dealing with classical books, vocabulary must be always a difficulty, and I myself very much doubt the advisability in the case of average boys of attempting to teach more than one foreign language at a time, especially when in dealing, say, with three kindred languages, ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... imp of Satan; and he calls the Pope the scarlet mother of abominations, Antichrist, Babylon. That age is prodigal in offensive epithets; kings and prelates and doctors alike use hard words. They are like angry children and women and pugilists; their vocabulary of abuse is amusing and inexhaustible. See how prodigal Shakspeare and Ben Jonson are in the language of vituperation. But they were all defiant and fierce, for the age was rough and earnest. The Pope, in wrath, hurls the old weapons ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... phenomena was not simply blind force, but that some intelligence directed it, or at least was associated with it. The noises, whereof I have spoken, were repeated a determinate number of times. They became either strong or feeble, at my request, and came from different places. By a vocabulary of signals previously agreed upon, the power answered questions, and gave messages ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... condition of the roadways, the vocabulary of blame had been exhausted long before I arrived. Two things, however, struck me in New York which I had not heard of by report: the greasiness of the streets, transforming every automobile into a skidding death-trap at the ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... and sycophantic. In history our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common day's work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred and Scanderbeg and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... foreigner who must necessarily lose something of their point and the tang of their local expressions. It was the habi the satirist, who at least loved the people's quaintness and originality—and perhaps this is as much democracy as we ought to demand of a poet—it was Giusti's habit to replenish his vocabulary from the fountains of the popular speech. By this means he gave his satires a racy local flavor; and though he cannot be said to have written dialect, since Tuscan is the Italian language, he gained by these words and phrases the ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... that you own this craft, Dory Dornwood!" said Thad when the party had exhausted their vocabulary of fine words ...
— All Adrift - or The Goldwing Club • Oliver Optic
... any longer own or recognise her. Afterwards he exhibited the most contradictory emotions, and first cursed Maria Monk; then reviled the Priests, applying to them all the loathsome epithets in the Canadian vocabulary. Subsequently, he went to make inquiries at the Seminary; and after his return to Mr. Johnson's house he declared, that the persons there had informed him, that Maria Monk had lived in the Nunnery, ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... my entire vocabulary is at your service in an affair of the heart." The Judge beamed on Delaven and bowed to Madame Caron as though including her in the circle where Love's ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... be hardened, to give them strong constitutions. Am I and my brother the worse for it?" said Sylvie. "You'll make Pierrette a peakling"; this was a word in the Rogron vocabulary which meant a puny and ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... breakfast at General Soult's, he observed the countenances of his soldiers rather inclined to laughter than to wrath; and he heard some jests, significant enough in the vocabulary of encampments, and which informed him that contempt was not the sentiment with which your navy had inspired his troops. The occurrences of these two days hastened his departure from the coast for Aix-la-Chapelle, where the ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... there may be found exemplified his characteristically vivacious and memorable style, his delicate appreciations brilliantly and precisely expressed, his concrete and persuasive argument. Perhaps no single critical document of our time has contributed so many phrases to the current literary vocabulary, or has stimulated so many readers to the use of lofty ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... butterfly bursts the chrysalis. Her life till then had been mere grub existence; now she could fly and had seen the sun drawing the scent from flowers. Great ideas filled her soul; new emotions awoke; she was like a baby trying to utter the thing he has no word for; her vocabulary broke down under the strain, and as she walked she gave thanks to Nature in a mere wordless song, like the lark, because she could not put her acknowledgment into language. But the great Mother, to whom Life is all in all, the living individual nothing, looked on at a world wakening from sleep and ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... not only a whole vocabulary of his own, both in conversation, from twittering to oratory, and in calls from assembly cries and notes of warning to screams of derision and defiance, but he is an imitator in certain lines. He will ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... all possible, he could reach the author. The journey to Oxford was made, and Bok was introduced to the don, who turned out to be no less a person than the original possessor of the highly colored vocabulary of the "White Rabbit" of ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... a speaking and understanding knowledge of any other in this region. It is important to note that these dialects belong to the Philippine group, and there seems to be very little evidence of Chinese influence [27] either in structure or vocabulary. [28] ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... are, sir, what is called nowadays, a beautiful soul. What is 'a beautiful soul?' I know nothing of the species." While thus speaking he seemed to be looking by turns for a fly on the ceiling and a pin on the floor. "I have old-fashioned ideas of everything, and I do not understand the vocabulary of my age. I know a beautiful horse very well or a beautiful woman;—but A BEAUTIFUL SOUL! Do you know how to explain to me, sir, what 'this ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... managed that the effect of distance, light, and shade are lost. Thus a man will so insist upon the use of difficult words by George Elliot that a person unacquainted with her writings would think that the whole merit or demerit of that author lay in her vocabulary. A man will so exalt the pathos of Dickens or Thackeray that he will throw their wit and humour into the background. Some person's only remark on seeing Turner's Modern Italy will be that the colours are cracked, or, upon ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... their own languages that democratic nations attempt to perpetrate innovations. From time to time they resume forgotten expressions in their vocabulary, which they restore to use; or they borrow from some particular class of the community a term peculiar to it, which they introduce with a figurative meaning into the language of daily life. Many expressions which originally belonged to the technical ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Islands," writes Professor Chamberlain, "the Japanese language has no kindred, and its classification under any of the recognized linguistic families remains doubtful. In structure, though not to any appreciable extent in vocabulary, it closely resembles Korean, and both it and Korean may possibly be related to Mongol and to Manchu, and might therefore lay claim to be included in the so-called 'Altaic group' In any case, Japanese is what philologists call an agglutinative tongue; that is to say, it builds ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... is, 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
... many dog names familiar to him, and Hal added a few. But, although the animal wagged his tail with evident pleasure at thus being talked to, he gave no evidence of owning any of the names in the boys' vocabulary. ...
— The Boy Allies On the Firing Line - Or, Twelve Days Battle Along the Marne • Clair W. Hayes
... his attention facts lying within the experience of all, and to cause him to classify these so as to refer any given mental process to the class or classes where it belongs. This calls for definition, the making of distinctions, the analysis of complex facts, the use of a technical vocabulary, and in general for much more precision of statement than the student has been used to employ in speaking of such matters. Some laws of mental action, verifiable within ordinary experience, are also brought to ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... effort he had scarcely an equal. His command of language was extraordinary, tho he had little imagination and his vocabulary was limited; but he possest the faculty of expressing himself in a racy, virile manner, within the apprehension of every reader. As he treated every topic in a practical rather than a philosophical spirit, and with strong feeling ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... arrange a proper speech, and they had, what was still better, the remembrance of a certain patent-medicine vender's discourse at the Milltown Fair. His method, when once observed, could never be forgotten; nor his manner, nor his vocabulary. Emma Jane practiced it on Rebecca, ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... communicate with an object implies such an acquaintance with it, as renders it capable of being discriminately reflected on; the distinct knowledge of an uneducated rustic would furnish a very scanty vocabulary. The few things and modes of action requisite for his bodily conveniences would alone be individualized; while all the rest of nature would be expressed by a small number of confused general terms. Secondly, I deny that the words and combinations of words derived from the objects, with which ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... born in London, April 5, 1837. He was educated partly in France, at Eton, and at Balliol College, Oxford. He left the University without a degree to spend several years in travel. He is a master of English, using a wider vocabulary than any of his contemporaries, and the musical effects of his many varied meters have won for him a unique position in poetry. He has been called "the greatest metrical inventor in English literature." ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... all the Seven Seas either to tarry awhile and then to depart for ever, unwelcome sojourners only, or to settle down at last and found a family soon asserting equality with the oldest inhabitants of the vocabulary. Seafaring terms came to us from Scandinavia and from the Low Countries. Words of warfare on land crossed the channel, in exchange for words of warfare at sea which migrated from England to France. Dead tongues, Greek and Latin, have been revived to replenish our verbal population with the terms ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... a riddle?" he returned, lazily. "I give it up." Then he contemplated his small daughter with much satisfaction. "I wonder none of you advanced women have ever turned your attention to baby-language," he observed presently; "we are studying the ape-vocabulary, you know. Dot has got quite a little language of her own. As far as I can make out each sentence is finished off with a 'gurgle-doe.' Something between the 'gobble, gobble' of a turkey and the coo of the ring-dove. I ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... long delay on the railway or an interminable "wait" at the theatre as a direct visitation of Providence, against which it would be useless folly to direct cat-calls, grumbles, or letters to the Times. Americans invented the slang word "kicker," but so far as I could see their vocabulary is here miles ahead of their practice; they dream noble deeds, but do not do them; Englishmen "kick" much better, without having a name for it. The right of the individual to do as he will is respected to such an extent that an entire company will put up with inconvenience rather than infringe ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Annie's vocabulary was emphatic, rather than choice. Entirely without education, she made no pretense at being what she was not and therein perhaps lay her chief charm. As Howard stooped to kiss her, ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... distinguished at fifty paces, and upon which glittered a gold chain and a bunch of trinkets, was under the yoke of this Catherine II. of commerce. Short and fat, harnessed with spectacles and a shirt-collar worn above his ears, he was chiefly distinguished for his bass voice and the richness of his vocabulary. He never said Corneille, but "the sublime Corneille"; Racine was "the gentle Racine"; Voltaire, "Oh! Voltaire, second in everything, with more wit than genius, but nevertheless a man of genius"; Rousseau, "a gloomy mind, a man full of pride, who hanged himself." He related in his prosy way vulgar ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... that the State (which, according to established metaphor, is a vessel par excellence) should admit Jack upon quarterdeck, yet, what with talking against lords and aristocracy, jobs and abuses, and searching through no very refined vocabulary for the strongest epithets to apply to those irritating nouns-substantive, his bile had got the better of his understanding, and he became fuddled, as it were, by his own eloquence. Thus, though as innocent of Jacobinical designs as he was incapable of setting the Thames on fire, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... generations of wholesalers and strong probabilities about the respectability of still another generation, was her ideal of a Christian gentleman. She wore a full white muslin gown with a blue sash, her hair primly parted in the middle, her right hand laid flat over her left in her lap. Her vocabulary was choice. For a second, when she referred to winter sports at Lake Placid, she forgot herself and tucked one smooth, silk-clad, un-mid-Victorian leg under her, but instantly she recovered her poise ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... considerable deviations exist in their vocabularies, if not in the 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 a better designation than any yet given to them ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... ownership. Quite naturally, therefore, he thinks because he possesses a farm, he owns a farm. Possession and ownership mean exactly the same thing to a man who begins by ignoring God. When you hear this man talk you find that the only pronouns he has in his vocabulary are "I," "My" and "Mine." He knows only the grammar of atheism. He is acquainted only with the vocabulary of the fool. "His" and "Ours" and "Yours" are not found in ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... philosopher. This description is industriously and carefully elaborated, and, like the whole book, is overballasted with, not always unavoidable, philosophical expressions, which is all the more annoying in that the writer does not hold to the vocabulary of one and the same school nor even of Feuerbach himself, but mixes up expressions of very different schools, and especially of the present epidemic of ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... Tone did not feel constrained to explain the finesse which prompted him to abandon the vocabulary which he had derived from a year's ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... regarded him in speechless amaze, then realising a vocabulary to which Miss Wheeler had acted as a safety-valve all the evening, he turned up a side street and stamped his way back to the ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... of Rentgen's vocabulary, by his want of logic, Alixe asked herself many times whether she was wrong and her husband right. She wished to be loyal. His devotion to his work, his inspiration springing as it did from poetic sources, counted for something. Why not? All composers should read the ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... arraignment, except by the exploded cry of "the bloody shirt," or claimed that a single thing stated by me as fact was not true. I referred to the "tenderfoot" who would not hurt anyone's feelings, who would banish the word "rebel" from our vocabulary, who would not denounce crimes against our fellow-citizens when they occurred, who thought that, like Cromwell's Roundheads, we must surrender our captured flags to the rebels who bore them, and our Grand Army boys, bent and gray, must march under the new flag, under the flag of Grover ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... dupe. Monsieur de Rochefide, like all 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
... of life, when a little girl's vocabulary was, somewhat at random, growing larger, belong a few brave phrases hazarded to express a meaning well realized—a personal matter. Questioned as to the eating of an uncertain number of buns just before ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... patience he spent in giving her a swell private education. There never was a bird that could swear so copiously as that bird of Bob's. He taught her every thing she knew. He worked day and night to provide her with an up-to-date vocabulary. He used to lie awake nights thinking up new words for old Polly to conquer. Now he says the blamed old rip was deceiving him all the time. She began springing expletives on him that he'd never heard of before in all his forty years before the mast. She first began using them a couple ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... vocabulary of my own; I "pass away time," when it is ill and uneasy, but when 'tis good I do not pass it away: "I taste it over again and adhere to it"; one must run over the ill and settle upon the good. This ordinary phrase of pastime, and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... made of prefixes and suffixes, every one of which has a clear, fixed meaning. Great economy of vocabulary is thus effected, one root-word in Esperanto sufficing, when modified by suitable affixes, to translate many English words. Many of the affixes are often met with as single words. In such cases the English ...
— Esperanto Self-Taught with Phonetic Pronunciation • William W. Mann
... only the most direct and the simplest thought, and are purely colloquial and wanting in the modifications always necessary for communication by writing. The sense is largely eked out by manner and action. Mincopie is the first word in Colebrooke's vocabulary for "Andaman Island, or native country,'' and the term—though probably a mishearing on Colebrooke's part for Mongebe ("I am an Onge,'' i.e. a member of the Onge tribe)—has thus become a persistent book-name for the people. Attempts to civilize the Andamanese have met with little success either ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... blast her fair soul—rob her of all dignity—destroy her virtue, and annihilate in her person all the graces that adorn the character of virtuous womanhood? I ask, how would you regard me, if such were my conduct? Oh! the vocabulary of the damned would not afford a word sufficiently infernal to express your idea of my God-provoking wickedness. Yet, sir, your treatment of my beloved sisters is in all essential points precisely like the case I have now supposed. Damning as would be such a deed on my part, ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... wonders which I surveyed, an American gentleman, to my great amusement, tapped me on the shoulder, and "guessed" that it was "pretty droll!" It was difficult to avoid laughing in his face; yet I could not help envying him his vocabulary, which had so eloquently released ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... most gifted orators of natural compass, white or black, in the United States. He has a voice that reminds men of Henry Grady, and controls an almost inexhaustible vocabulary." ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... for the support of all loyal Englishmen to increase their numbers and strengthen their hands. Orangeism, which had at first only been known in Ireland, began to spread widely throughout Great Britain. Orange Lodges were everywhere formed; Orange Grand Masters were appointed; a whole vocabulary of Orange titles, passwords, and phrases was invented; a complete hierarchy of Orange officialism was created, and an invisible network of Orangeism held the members of the organization together. The Orange conspiracy, if {276} we may call ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... influence of the Arabic on European literature in general, there can be no reasonable doubt that it has been considerable on the Provencal and the Castilian. In the latter especially, so far from being confined to the vocabulary, or to external forms of composition, it seems to have penetrated deep into its spirit, and is plainly discernible in that affectation of stateliness and Oriental hyberbole, which characterizes Spanish writers even ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... Having exhausted her vocabulary, both English and Hindustani, Tessa broke at last into tears and wept stormily for many minutes. Monck sat through the storm without ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... speak to him again; and he paid the L600 a year out of his own pocket as long as Curran lived. As a 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 very ...
— 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
... ashamed of the term 'shell-shock.' It was a bad word, and should be wiped out of the vocabulary of every scientific man. It was really molecular abnormality of the nervous system, characterised by abnormal reactions to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... unknown reason, this epithet was the most scathing in the girls' vocabulary, and either was ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... 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
... him ten dollars in as many seconds had not helped his self-confidence though he kept wondering if there was a sliding scale of penalties for improper language applied to the police of St. Louis and just what would have happened if he had called the large blue policeman anything out of his A.E.F. vocabulary. Also the desk, when he called there for his key, reminded him twingingly of the dock, and the clerk behind it looked at him so knowingly as he made the request that Oliver began to construct a hasty ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... with exemplary patience, only snatching the very earliest opportunity to take to his heels. Where a sharp tongue will not serve the purpose, they trust to the sharpness of their finger-nails, or incarnate a whole vocabulary of vituperative words in a resounding slap, or the downright blow of a doubled fist. All English people, I imagine, are influenced in a far greater degree than ourselves by this simple and honest ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... give Monsieur Correlli an opportunity to say one word, until she had exhausted her seemingly endless vocabulary; but he was as colorless as a piece of his own statuary, and a lurid, desperate light burned in his eyes—a gleam, which, if she had been less intent upon venting her own passion, would have warned her that she was doing her cause, whatever it might ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... authority, that a finding and sentence of court-martial rendered in time of war should be regarded as res adjudicata, produced in my mind the painful impression that a very great man did not find the word "justice" anywhere in his vocabulary; and I watched for many years the conversation and writings and public speeches of that man without finding that he ever made use of that word, or ever gave as a reason for doing or not doing anything that it would be just or unjust. In his mind, whatever ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... on street corners arrayed like the lilies of the conservatory and busy with nail files and penknives. Thus displayed as a guarantee of good faith, they carried on an innocuous conversation in a 200-word vocabulary, to the casual observer as innocent and immaterial as that heard in clubs seven ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... inflections have largely disappeared. Some of the early Jesuit missionaries, men of great natural ability who steeped themselves in Oriental learning, have left very different opinions on record. Chinese appeared to them as admirable for the superabundant richness of its vocabulary as for the conciseness of its literary style. And among modern scholars there is a decided tendency to accept this view as embodying a great deal ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... the beating of the wings of victory. Nothing could undermine that, since it was victory simply to be acted. It would be victory even to be acted badly; a reflection that didn't prevent him, however, from banishing, in his politic optimism, the word "bad" from his vocabulary. It had no application, in the compromise of practice; it didn't apply even to his play, which he was conscious he had already outlived and as to which he foresaw that, in the coming weeks, frequent alarm would alternate, in his spirit, with frequent esteem. When he went down to the dusky ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James
... 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 of success by sometimes making opportunities, and always ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... geology. We had had revolutionary orators, reformers, martyrs; it was but a few years since Abner Kneeland had been sent to jail for expressing an opinion about the great First Cause; but we had had nothing like this man, with his seraphic voice and countenance, his choice vocabulary, his refined utterance, his gentle courage, which, with a different manner, might have been called audacity, his temperate statement of opinions which threatened to shake the existing order of thought ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... to perform tasks that have no value when once provision has been made for perpetuating the species. Finally the mode by which the colony grows and amplifies is in all respects like the embryonic development of an egg into a Hydra, so that we may add the phrase "social embryology" to our vocabulary. The original female is an undifferentiated master of all trades; the small tribe she first establishes is little better off than a horde of savages; but during its seasonal existence the community increases ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... may not stumble in pronouncing any unfamiliar names to be met with in the stories, the editor has prepared and included in the volume a Pronouncing Vocabulary of Difficult Names. To which is added a collection of Shakespearean Quotations, classified in alphabetical order, illustrative of the wisdom and genius of the world's ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... sick man's fancy. Still he strove to analyse the sound. Sonorous as thunder was it, mellow as a golden bell, thin and sweet as a thrummed taut cord of silver—no; it was none of these, nor a blend of these. There were no words nor semblances in his vocabulary and experience with which to describe the totality of ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... another entirely in genius and capacity of expression. Greek is probably the best of all languages in melody, richness, elasticity, and simplicity; so much so, that in spite of its complex inflections, when once a vocabulary is acquired, it is more easy and natural for a modern than his ancestral Latin itself. Latin is the stiffer tongue; it is by nature at once laconic and grandiloquent, and the exceptional condensation and transposition ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... word in the vocabulary of the photoplaywright. To be able to see in fancy his thoughts transformed into action is to have gained one goal for which every photoplay ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... was a Canadian who spoke villanous French and worse English; his vocabulary being largely interspersed with "enfant de garce," "sacre," "sacre enfant," and "damn" until it was a difficult matter to tell what ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... "breakfast" (which had temporarily slipped from his vocabulary) the famished professor wheeled so quickly that his knee twisted. Miss Farr smiled, her cool and ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... I have consulted on the subject, and I do not fear to say that the laudable efforts she is making are greatly handicapped by statements of this kind, nor to urge her as a friend and well-wisher to banish from her vocabulary all such allusions as a source of weakness to the cause ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... they have withdrawn themselves from the church; many of them 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 a ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... Gipsy. "We have met," says one writer, "in London with a poor Mohammedan Hindu of Calcutta. This man had in his youth lived with these wanderers, and been, in fact, one of them. He had also, as is common with intelligent Mohammedans, written his autobiography, embodying in it a vocabulary of the Indian Gipsy language. This MS. had unfortunately been burned by his English wife, who informed the writer that she had done so 'because she was tired of seeing a book lying about which she could ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... 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 of ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... Breton voice could be heard asserting itself. Though every man spoke in French, for the purposes of the common parliament, each man swore in his own tongue; and they all swore briskly and crisply, with a seemingly inexhaustible vocabulary of blasphemy and obscenity, so that the foul air of that inn parlor was rendered fouler still by the volley of oaths—German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Biscayan, and Breton—that were fired into its steaming, stinking atmosphere. ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... intelligently and with appreciation such selections as appear in this volume he can read anything that is set before him. There may be some things that will require effort and perhaps explanation, but it is merely a question of vocabulary and parallel information. Besides the stories, there are selections in every department of literature except those that have been passed in the progress of the plan of grading. The legendary heroes, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... drooped. In a shamed whisper she confessed that Miss Hillary's wonderful vocabulary had tempted her. She dared not look up and did not see that ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... the Calvinistic theology in which his youth was trammelled, but it had secured him against the conscious ethicism of the prevailing Unitarian doctrine which supremely worshipped Conduct; and it had colored his vocabulary to such strange effects that he spoke of moral men with abhorrence; as more hopelessly lost than sinners. Any one whose sphere tempted him to recognition of the foibles of others, he called the Devil; ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the Hebrew writers often used a vivid form of warning and invective is not a reason why we should keep on doing it. The Hebrew writer was a primitive speaking to primitives. Meaning what we mean, he required a stronger, fiercer vocabulary than we ever need. In saying this I am not dodging the issue; I am stating a fact which rules in all historical interpretation. To make the phraseology of two thousand years before Christ the literal expression of the thought of two thousand years ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... store-house for the problems of mind. But the work has been much overestimated. It is the product of a confused though laborious mind. It contains contradictions not merely incidental, such as any great novel work must retain (since no man can at once remodel his whole vocabulary and opinions) but contradictions absolutely fundamental and inexcusable, like that between the transcendental function of intellect and its limited authority, or that between the efficacy of things-in-themselves ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the condition of the roadways, the vocabulary of blame had been exhausted long before I arrived. Two things, however, struck me in New York which I had not heard of by report: the greasiness of the streets, transforming every automobile into a skidding death-trap at the least sign of moisture, and the leisureliness ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... friendship was, however, very brief. Before many weeks had passed there was no vituperative epithet that Leicester was not in the daily habit of bestowing upon Paul. The Earl's vocabulary of abuse was not a limited one, but he exhausted it on the head of the Advocate. He lacked at last words and breath to utter what was like him. He pronounced his former friend "a very dangerous man, altogether hated of the people and the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... only one language spoken in Quaker Hill. Indeed only one or two persons have any other than English as their native tongue.[35] And very few have acquired any other as a matter of culture. The vocabulary used is limited. An intelligent observer says: "The vocabulary of the native community is the meagerest I have ever known, except that of the immigrant." There are, however, very few illiterates; none, indeed, in the literal meaning of ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... struck with the good qualities of your new Premier. I am sure his great wish will be to make the best possible Minister of the Crown. His task will be very difficult. "Bread, cheap bread," "the poor oppressed by the aristocratie," etc.—a whole vocabulary of exciting words of that kind will be put forward to inflame the popular mind; and of all the Sovereigns, the Sovereign "People" is certainly one of the most fanciful and fickle. Our neighbour in France shows this more than ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... wherein more definitely critical questions can be discussed. There are a few Irish words which have been retained in the translation and which require a word of explanation: The Old Irish geis (later, also geas[12]; plural geasa) has as much right to a place in the English vocabulary as the Polynesian word tabu, by which it is often translated. It is sometimes Englished "injunction," "condition," "prohibition," "bond," "ban," "charm," "magical decree," or translated by the Scots-Gaelic ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... dinner with the man, however, and Jack added further to his vocabulary in finding that the drivers of the ox teams were called "bullwhackers," and those of the ...
— The Voyage of the Rattletrap • Hayden Carruth
... The homeliness of his vocabulary amused Barstein. Evidently the dictionary was his fount of inspiration. Without it Niagara was reduced to a trickle. He seemed indeed quite shy of speech, preferring to gaze ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... imaginings in regard to the Spirits of the Bells—something of the grace and goblinry of which, Maclise's pencil shadowed forth in the lovely frontispiece to the little volume in the form in which it was first of all published—has exhausted the vocabulary of wonder in his elvish delineation of the Goblin Sight beheld in the old church-tower on New Year's ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... up!" said the man, his hands in his pockets—James Wentworth's vocabulary had grown twenty years younger in ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... to him that he had not noticed it at first, the almost Hanoverian purity of her speech and the freedom with which she spoke. The average peasant is diffident, with a vocabulary of few words, ignorant of art or music or where the ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... grisette, the lady, the pretentious woman in middle life, and the actress, among whom Adolphe has chosen his belle (according to the Fischtaminellian vocabulary). ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... religious, for I don't look down on folks like you at all," said Janetta, calmly adopting Mrs. Brand's vocabulary. ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... protection of 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 traffic by encircling their coasts with an impenetrable ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... in only two years, and succeeded her first child, which was brought from Sacramento at considerable expense by a Mr. William Dodd, also a teamster, on her seventh birthday. This, by one of those rare inventions known only to a child's vocabulary, she at once called "Misery"—probably a combination of "Missy," as she herself was formerly termed by strangers, and "Missouri," her native State. It was an excessively large doll at first—Mr. Dodd wishing to get the worth of his money—but time, and perhaps an excess of maternal ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... peculiar to the country; and his profanity was enriched with all the flavor of the provincial's elation in the committing of sin. From the earliest moment of our starting, the stream of his talk had been unending. His vocabulary was such as to have excited the envy and despair of a French realist, impassioned in ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... the 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 ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... you, Helen, that you can take it so. Personally, I believe in nothing which I cannot fully explain and understand. 'Faith,' in your sense of the word, has no place in my vocabulary. I was a very small boy when my faith took to itself wings and flew away; and, curiously enough, it was while I was singing lustily, in the village church at Dinglevale: 'As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... you possess about the beautiful! Now, if there were question of a new railroad-bridge, the vocabulary ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... I'd heard it alleviated dermal irritations. Lathering my face, I glanced over the list culled from the dictionary and stuck in the mirror the night before, for I have never been too tired to improve my mind. By this easy method of increasing my vocabulary I had progressed, at the time, down ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... motor-bicycle. Owing to the lack of proper accommodation in my nursery my literary labours are carried on under the greatest difficulties and hampered by constant interruptions from my nurse, a vulgar woman with a limited vocabulary and no aspirates. I say nothing, though I might say much, of the jealousy of adult authors, the pusillanimity of unenterprising publishers, the senile indifference of Parliament. But I warn them that, unless the just claims of youth to economic and intellectual ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... flowers of every hue, affording abundance of interest as we proceeded. Marian was delighted, and was continually crying out, "Oh, what a lovely flower!—what a graceful tree!—see that magnificent bird!—oh, what a gorgeous butterfly!" till she had exhausted her vocabulary of suitable epithets. ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... much On the Spot with Mrs. Eyton-Eyton. Nursery governess was a comprehensive word in the Eyton-Eyton vocabulary; covered every duty that in a nursery must be performed. One must do the nursery fire, sweep the nursery floor, bring up and carry down the nursery meals—servants, you see, object to waiting upon one whom, as Mrs. Eyton-Eyton ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... 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. ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... or rather he never took time, preferring invariably quantity to quality. What work of his has survived till to-day is read, not for its style, but in spite of its style. His syntax is loose and unscholarly; his vocabulary is copious, but often inaccurate; many of his sentences ramble on interminably, lacking unity, precision, and balance. Figures of speech he seldom abuses because he seldom uses; his imagination, as noticed before, being extremely limited in range. That Defoe, in spite of these ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... and to which touchy people who have no genius attach so much importance. No leader who had not been tampered with by the psychopathic monomaniacs could ever put any construction but the obvious and innocent one on these passages. But the general vocabulary of the sonnets to Pembroke (or whoever "Mr W. H." really was) is so overcharged according to modern ideas that a reply on the general ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... women on remote farms are tragic beyond belief. They appear natural and commonplace only because the victims are trained in endurance, not in the vocabulary of expression. There are thousands of farmers' wives in every rural community who endure hardships undreamed of in the sweatshops of commerce. There are no laws to protect them from long hours, nor any to protect their children. They average sixteen hours a day, while ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... and dignity, &c. &c. &c.: We are not masters of the whole vocabulary. See any novel by ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... self-sacrificing men by the hand; while, aside from their special claims to honor, it will be so pleasant to meet cultivated human beings once more! They are Germans, but their head-quarters are at London; they will speak English; and if their vocabulary prove scanty, we will try to eke it out with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... feelings, Petrea got into such excessively high spirits, that she infected therewith her companions in misfortune; or, according to her vocabulary, good fortune. But now, however, came on a horrible tempest, with hail, whose great stones made themselves thou to such a degree with Petrea's nose as astonished and almost offended her. The Assessor looked out for shelter; and Petrea, quite charmed that she was nearly blown away, followed ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... has 'chucked' it into the next yard, and the janitor will have to climb the fence,—at his age! Oh, if I could eliminate the irregular verb 'to chuck' from the vocabulary of this school, I could 'make out of the broken sounds of life a song, and out of life itself a melody,'" and she flew down-stairs like a breeze, to find the patient Mr. Bowker. Mr. Bowker was a nice little man, who had not all ...
— The Story of Patsy • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... steak, pork, and potatoes, biscuits, light bread, coffee, and 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 ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... as the word ought to be rendered, not 'full of glory' but 'glorified.' Unspeakable. Still waters run deep. It is poor wealth that can be counted; it is shallow emotion that can be crammed into the narrow limits of any human vocabulary. Fathers and mothers, parents and children, husbands and wives, know that. And the depths of the joy that a believing soul has in Jesus Christ are not to be spoken. Perhaps it is better that it should not ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... Magog, who travelled in 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... historian of Greece, who had learned this lesson from the Peloponnesian war, and who took sides with the Southern States, to the great dismay of his fellow-radicals, who could not see, as George Grote saw, the real point at issue in the controversy. Submission is slavery, and the bitterest taunt in the vocabulary of those who advocated secession was "submissionist." But where does submission begin? Who is to mark the point of encroachment? That is a matter which must be decided by the sovereign; and on the theory that the States are sovereign, each State must be the judge. The extreme Southern ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... through Giovanna's charitable disposition that we make the acquaintance of two weird sisters, who live not far from us in Calle Falier, and whom we know to this day merely as the Creatures— creatura being in the vocabulary of Venetian pity the term for a fellow-being somewhat more pitiable than a poveretta. Our Creatures are both well stricken in years, and one of them has some incurable disorder which frequently confines her to the wretched cellar in which they live with ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... the interior tumult by the artifice of filling his mouth with sweets and comfits. When GOLDONI found his sleep disturbed by the obtrusive ideas still floating from the studies of the day, he contrived to lull himself to rest by conning in his mind a vocabulary of the Venetian dialect, translating some word into Tuscan and French; which being a very uninteresting occupation, at the third or fourth version this recipe never failed. This was an art of withdrawing attention from the greater ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... heels and pulling methodically but slowly at the weeds, digging with their pangas, carrying loads: to and fro, or solemnly pushing a lawn mower, blankets wrapped shamelessly about their necks. They were harried about by a red-faced beefy English gardener with a marvellous vocabulary of several native languages and a short hippo-hide whip. He talked himself absolutely purple in the face without, as far as my observation went, penetrating an inch below the surface. The Kikuyus went right on doing what they were already doing in exactly the same manner. Probably the purple ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... got your vocabulary all warmed up," observed Little Joe, so-called because of two hundred pounds of iron-hard sinew and muscle. Slim was wandering towards the door to execute his mission, but he kept his head cocked towards his prostrated ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... gain and rage for improvement which keep our people continually on the move, and our country towns incessantly in a state of transition. There the magic phrases, "town lots," "water privileges," "railroads," and other comprehensive and soul-stirring words from the speculator's vocabulary, are never heard. The residents dwell in the houses built by their forefathers, without thinking of enlarging or modernizing them, or pulling them down and turning them into granite stores. The trees, under which they have been born and have played in infancy, flourish undisturbed; ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... indifferent politicians! Nay, and the orator treads in a beaten round; the matters he discusses have been discussed a thousand times before; language is ready-shaped to his purpose; he speaks out of a cut-and-dry vocabulary. But you—may it not be that your defence reposes on some subtlety of feeling, not so much as touched upon in Shakespeare, to express which, like a pioneer, you must venture forth into zones of thought still unsurveyed, and become yourself a literary innovator? ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hand, he hadn't made a fortune or bought a car or given her any reason for feeling compensated for the lack of marital excitement. His friends called him a nice fellow—in some ways as damning a thing as one could say about anybody—and let it go at that. However, Helen Starratt's vocabulary was just as limited when it came to characterizing her conventional aims and ambitions. If, occasionally, her speculations stirred the muddy reaches of certain furtive desires, she took care that they ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... distinguished from that of knowledge, is vibratory or oscillating, as distinguished from fixed. That is the nearest literal representation of the fact; but it is only literal to the intellect, not to the intuition. For this part of man's consciousness a different vocabulary is needed. The idea of "fixed" might perhaps be transposed into that of "at home." In sensation no permanent home can be found, because change is the law of this vibratory existence. That fact is the first one which must be learned by the disciple. It is useless ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... lesson. On the screen appeared objects which Urg would name, to have his sibilant uttering repeated by Garin. As the American later learned, the ray treatment he had undergone had quickened his mental powers, and in an incredibly short time he had a working vocabulary. ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
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