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More "Syntax" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the fraternity, to be not only astrologers, but conjurers too, if I do not produce a hundred instances in all their almanacks to convince any reasonable man that they do not so much as understand common grammar and syntax; that they are not able to spell any word out of the usual road, nor even in their prefaces write common sense or intelligible English. Then for their observations and predictions, they are such as will equally suit any ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... not been for what happened at night. Sometimes Hugh started out of bed, and began to dress, when the elder boys went up with their light, only an hour after the younger ones. Sometimes he would begin saying his syntax in the middle of the night, fancying he was standing before Mr Carnaby; and once he walked in his sleep as far as the head of the stairs, and then suddenly woke, and could not make out where he was. Phil should have told Mr Tooke of ...
— The Crofton Boys • Harriet Martineau
... l'Isle-Adam. Finally, it is in Stephane Mallarme that he finds the incarnation of 'the decadence of a literature, irreparably affected in its organism, weakened in its ideas by age, exhausted by the excesses of syntax, sensitive only to the curiosity which fevers sick people, and yet hastening to say everything, now at the end, torn by the wish to atone for all its omissions of enjoyment, to bequeath its subtlest memories ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... exhibits a fine and bold peculiarity—a double declension of its Adjectives, depending on a condition of syntax. The Anglo-Saxon adjective, in its ordinary (or, as grammarians have called it, Indefinite) declension, makes the nominative plural for all the genders in E; and this remains as the regular plural termination of the adjective to Chaucer. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... prevail, and there never can be wanting some who distinguish desert; who will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since, while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he, whose design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not understand; that a writer will sometimes be hurried by eagerness to the end, and sometimes faint with weariness under a task which ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... of the finest in our language, and more in Milton's style than has been reached by any other poet, is occasionally obscure from imitation of the condensed Latin syntax. The meaning of st. 5 is "rivalry or hostility are the same to a lofty spirit, and limitation more hateful than opposition." The allusion in st. 11 is to the old physical doctrines of the non-existence ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... the brave Subaltern dreads Awkward breaches of syntax a hundred times more; And tho' often condemned to see breaking of heads, He had ne'er seen such ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... every syllable With those clever clerkly fingers, All I've forgotten as well as what lingers 695 In this old brain of mine that's but ill able To give you even this poor version Of the speech I spoil, as it were, with stammering —More fault of those who had the hammering Of prosody into me and syntax, 700 And did it, not with hobnails but tin-tacks! But to return from this excursion— Just, do you mark, when the song was sweetest, The peace most deep and the charm completest, There came, shall I say, a ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... entire business it was to weed out from Congressmen's speeches the sins against Anglo-Saxon; but the work was too much for him, and he died of delirium tremens, from having drank too much of the wine of syntax, in his ravings imagining that 'interrogations' were crawling over him like snakes, and that 'interjections' were thrusting him through with daggers and 'periods' struck him like bullets, and his body seemed torn apart by disjunctive conjunctions. No, Mr. Givemfits, you are too ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... Marischal College, Aberdeen—a post which he held for eleven years. To this new labour he gave himself with all his heart, and was eminently successful. The Aberdeen students were remarkable for their accurate knowledge of the grammatical forms and syntax of Latin, acquired under the careful training of Dr Melvin; but their reading, both classical and general, was restricted, and they were wanting in literary impulses. Professor Blackie strove to supply both deficiencies. He took his students over ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... and Latin. After my discovery of Christian Science most of the knowledge I gleaned from school books vanished like a dream. Learning was so illumined that grammar was eclipsed. Etymology was divine history, voicing the idea of God in man's origin and signification. Syntax was spiritual order and unity. Prosody the song of angels and no ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... to work hard, Bart. You'll have to take your book into the field as I did. After every row of corn I learned a rule of syntax or arithmetic or a fact in geography while I rested, and my thought and memory took hold of it as I plied the hoe. I don't want you to stop the reading, but from now on you must spend half of ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... when the old gender system decayed, and the form its gradually came into use, until, by the end of the seventeenth century, it was in general use. Milton, however, scarcely recognised it, its place in his involved syntax being taken by the relative pronouns and other connectives, or by ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... French of yards of cottonade, "mouslin a dames," "jaconad," dozens of soap, pounds of tobacco, pairs of stockings, lace, etc.; but to our great pleasure each page corresponding closely, save in orthography and syntax, with a page of the new manuscript, and the page numbers of the old running higher than those of the new! Here was evidence which one could lay before a skeptical world that the transcriber had not expanded the work of the original memoirist. The manuscript passed into ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... to the grammars, but syntax has been given such treatment as seemed needed to supplement its treatment in the beginner's book. Teachers will therefore be able to postpone the use of a formal manual of grammar, if they so desire. Those who wish their classes to ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... Daddy Gilpin? Slowest of men, even of English men; yet delicious in his slowness, as is the light of a sleepy eye in woman. I always supposed "Dr. Syntax" was written to make fun of him. I have a whole set of his works, and am very proud of it, with its gray paper, and open type, and long ff, and orange-juice landscapes. The Pere Gilpin had the kind of science I like in the study of Nature,—a little ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... are mending. Broken windows are repaired; lost revenues are recovered; and the sons of Crispin have evacuated chambers once more consecrated to syntax and the syllogism. Through these spacious courts we recognize the progress of the man who has accomplished the arduous restoration. Tall, and in the prime of life, with cocked-hat and powdered hair, with lawn tops ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... learnt that the professor was Ikonin's guardian, and that Ikonin actually lived with him. I lost no time in answering the question in syntax which had been put to Ikonin, but the professor only pulled a long face and turned ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... perfectly read in these three languages." As he lived precisely five years, all he did was done at that little age, and it comprised this: "He got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and vice versa, construe and prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses, and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... filled the space of years. So much misery—so slow and hideous a growth of hatred and sin, may be compressed into a sentence! And men judge of each other's lives through this summary medium. They epitomize the experience of their fellow-mortal, and pronounce judgment on him in neat syntax, and feel themselves wise and virtuous—conquerors over the temptations they define in well-selected predicates. Seven years of wretchedness glide glibly over the lips of the man who has never counted them out in moments of chill disappointment, of head and heart throbbings, of ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... What to say, how to dress, How frown, how smile, How suitors to their dancing feet to bring, How in mere walking to beguile, What words cunningly said in what a way Will draw man's busy fancy astray, All the alphabet, grammar and syntax of love. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... has said that he has always conceived and thought of the life of his hero and of the book as a river. So far as the book has a plan, that is its plan. It has no literary artifice, no "plot." The words of it hang together in defiance of syntax, just as the thoughts of it follow one on the other in defiance of every system of philosophy. Every phase of the book is pregnant with the next phase. It is as direct and simple as life itself, for life is simple when the truth of it is known, as it was known instinctively ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... great erudition and much random acuteness (shown particularly in bold attempts to excise interpolations from the Gospels), but as devoid of the higher critical wisdom as was Bentley, whom he congenially criticised. To a reader of to-day, his arguments from Shakspere's diction and syntax ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... that era which professors still persist in calling the Great Age, hardly stimulated Des Esseintes. With its carefully premeditated style, its sameness, its stripping of supple syntax, its poverty of color and nuance, this language, pruned of all the rugged and often rich expressions of the preceding ages, was confined to the enunciation of the majestic banalities, the empty commonplaces tiresomely reiterated by the rhetoricians and poets; but ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... relatively pure "in grammatical forms, in syntax, and in vocabulary," could be kept thus clean without the aid of written texts, I am unable to imagine. If left merely to human memory and at the mercy of reciters and new poets, they would have become stained with "the defining article"—and, indeed, an employment of the article which startles ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... [Unix techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the name derives from their initials). It is characterized by C-like syntax, a declaration-free approach to variable typing and declarations, associative arrays, and field-oriented text processing. See also {Perl}. 2. n. Editing term for an expression awkward to manipulate through normal {regexp} ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... which different traits of character may be observed and recognized." This was a very scientific and well drawn scheme; and it was, on the whole, most faithfully and even brilliantly carried out. But with infinite art Boz emancipated himself from the formal hide-bound trammels of Syntax tours and the like, when it was reckoned that the hero and his friends would be exhibited like "Bob Logic" and "Tom and Jerry" in a regular series of public places. "Mr. Pickwick has an Adventure at Vauxhall," "Mr. Pickwick Goes to Margate," etc.: we had a narrow escape, it would ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... thou comest and pesterest me with this sorry prattle." "What more wouldst thou have?" replied he. "Allah hath bounteously bestowed on thee a Barber who is an astrologer, one learned in alchemy and white magic;[FN612] syntax, grammar, and lexicology; the arts of logic, rhetoric and elocution; mathematics, arithmetic and algebra; astronomy, astromancy and geometry; theology, the Traditions of the Apostle and the Commentaries on the Koran. Furthermore, I have read books galore and digested ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... why Mrs. Hay should be held in esteem and affection. Bill Hay himself was a diamond in the rough,—square, sturdy, uncompromising, generous and hospitable; his great pride and glory was his wife; his one great sorrow that their only child had died almost in infancy. His solecisms in syntax and society were many. He was given at times to profanity, and at others, when madame was away, to draw poker; but officers and men alike proclaimed him a man of mettle and never hesitated to go to him when in financial straits, sure of unusurious aid. But, ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... the Master discuss these knotty points of honor and expediency together, do you, as a recreation from the Greek syntax? I should like to ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... novelty of the sight), venting bitter imprecations against the lieutenant, and reproaching his scholars with treachery and rebellion; when the usher was admitted, whom my uncle accosted in this manner: "Harkee, Mr. Syntax, I believe you are an honest man, d'ye see—and I have a respect for you—but for all that, we must, for our own security, d'ye see, belay you for a short time." With these words, he pulled out some fathoms of cord, which the honest man no sooner saw than he protested with great ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... should be both perspicuous and sublime. In proportion as either of these two qualities is wanting, the language is imperfect. Perspicuity is the first and most necessary qualification; insomuch that a good-natured reader sometimes overlooks a little slip even in the grammar or syntax, where it is impossible for him to mistake the poet's sense. Of this kind is that passage in Milton, wherein he ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... history can be considered only, like the Iliad, as a continuation of that series of cyclic poems, which have already been candidates for bestowing immortality upon, at the same time that they receive it from, his character and adventures. In this point of view I have violated no rule of syntax in beginning my composition with a conjunction; the full stop which closes the poem continued by me being, like the full stops at the end of the Iliad and Odyssey, a full stop ...
— Peter Bell the Third • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the old system of punctuation may be less defensible, but I have retained it because it may now and then be of use in determining a point of syntax. The absence of a comma, for example, after the word hearse in the 58th line of the Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, printed by ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... its study of vocabulary, grammar, and structure. Spalding's Principles of Rhetoric 1.08 A supremely interesting presentation of the essentials. Strang's Exercises in English. Revised .56 Examples in syntax, accidence and ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... study of this question of prostitution I learned to know personally many of the characteristic White Slaves of the West and South Side "levees." One "Alice" I shall never, never forget. Beautiful aside from her dissipation, a high school graduate, grammar and syntax perfect, manner exquisite. "Alice," seduced at eighteen, was at the age of twenty-one away down the line in the West Side levee underworld. I used to talk many times with Alice as she sat in the back parlor of the "house" on Peoria ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... of this thing or that. It is the training of the mind for the work of daily life. The few women of fortune who pride themselves on their cleverness get a parrot-like acquaintance with the contents of books, enunciate charmingly, and are very learned on the syntax and spelling of an invitation to dinner; but of the great topics of the day, political, social, economical, financial, scientific, mechanical, theological, they are utterly ignorant and careless. I know some ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... Thy syntax conjures forth a morn Of spring, when blossoms rare Conspired the solemn earth to adorn, And spread themselves on bank and thorn, And ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... Text-books.—In one class are those that aim chiefly to present a course of technical grammar in the order of Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody. These books give large space to grammatical Etymology, and demand much memorizing of definitions, rules, declensions, and conjugations, and much formal word parsing,—work of which a considerable portion is merely the invention of grammarians, ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... with the vertebral column by a single occipital condyle" and so on. I also work spasmodically at Hindustani. I rather fancy my handwriting in the Perso-Arabic script. Arabic proper I am discouraged from by the perverse economy of its grammar and syntax. It needs must have two plurals, one for under ten and one for over, twenty-three conjugations, and yet be without the distinction of past and future. Which is worse even than the Hindustani alphabet with no vowels and four z's—so unnecessary, ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... a show of education; but I was disinclined to be overdone in syntax by a mere Indian, a member of a race to which we owe nothing except the land on which the United States ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... simpatii. Sympathy simpatio. Symphony simfonio. Symptom simptomo. Synagogue sinagogo. Syncope sveno. Syndicate sindikato. Synod sinodo. Synonym sinonimo, egalsenco. Synonymous sinonima, egalsenca. Synopsis resumo, sinopsiso. Syntax sintakso. Synthesis sintezo. Syphilis sifiliso. Syringe ensxprucigi. Syrup ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... The school takes and keeps the child three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon; it pours into these little heads all that is possible in such a length of time, all that they can hold and more too,—spelling, syntax, grammatical and logical analysis, rules of composition and of style, history, geography, arithmetic, geometry, drawing, notions of literature, politics, law, and finally a ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... myself with the rudiments, when I would fain have commented upon the various peculiarities of style in the ancient Greek and Latin authors; but now, all that has passed away. The eternal round of concord, prosody, and syntax has charms for me from habit: the rule of three is preferable to the problems of Euclid, and even the Latin grammar has its delights. In short, I have a hujus pleasure in hic, haec, hoc; [cluck cluck;] and even the flourishing of the twigs of that tree of ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... cause as she passed from infancy to adolescence. The contrast between the styles of these prayers impressed Zulma very strongly. The former were such as she herself knew, complete, appropriate and pathetic in their very phraseology. The latter were fragmentary, rude, and sometimes incongruous in syntax, but they spoke the poetry of the heart, and their yearning fervour and indubiety made Zulma understand, as she listened to them through her tears, how it is that wayside statues of stone, and wooden figures of the Madonna in lofty niches, are said to hear and answer by visible tokens ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... of that intensely stupid custom, the teaching of grammar to children. As M. Marcel says:—"It may without hesitation be affirmed that grammar is not the stepping-stone, but the finishing instrument." As Mr. Wyse argues:—"Grammar and Syntax are a collection of laws and rules. Rules are gathered from practice; they are the results of induction to which we come by long observation and comparison of facts. It is, in fine, the science, the philosophy of language. In following the process of nature, neither individuals nor ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... language, which it is hoped will prove interesting and instructive to the more ambitious pupil. At the end of the book will be found an Index to the Sources of the Illustrative Examples cited in the Syntax. ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... countenance not surpassed by their grandfathers. Thus initiated they are qualified to deliver an opinion in public at a time of life when an English schoolboy could scarcely return an answer to a question beyond the limits of his grammar or syntax, which he has learned by rote. It is not a little unaccountable that this people, who hold the art of speaking in such high esteem, and evidently pique themselves on the attainment of it, should yet take so much pains ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... these which perhaps distracts the mind from his message. (Is he a Marinettist, I wonder?) There are not enough words in the language for him, so he invents fresh ones at will; while as for grammar and syntax he passionately throttled them in Chapter I.; nor did they recover. I will own that notwithstanding all this the author has a way of making you read on to find out what it is all about. You don't find out; but there, life's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... classics, and to learn none of them. On the other hand, by "Grammar" is now more commonly meant, as Johnson defines it, "the art of using words properly," and it "comprises four parts—Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody." Grammar, in this sense, is the scientific analysis of language, and to be conversant with it, as regards a particular language, is to be able to understand the meaning and force of that language when thrown ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... grandfather, also William Beeston, to whom the satirical Elizabethan, Thomas Nash, dedicated in 1593, with good-humoured irony, one of his insolent libels on Gabriel Harvey, a scholar who had defamed the memory of a dead friend. Nash laughed at his patron's struggles with syntax in his efforts to write poetry, and at his indulgence in drink, which betrayed itself in his red nose. But, in spite of Nash's characteristic frankness, he greeted the first William Beeston as a boon companion ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... laughter greeted this infraction of one of the most elementary rules of syntax, and several of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of a literature irreparably attacked in its organism, weakened by the age of ideas, overworn by the excess of syntax, sensible only of the curiosity which fevers sick people, but nevertheless hastening to explain everything in its decline, desirous of repairing all the omissions of its youth, to bequeath all the most subtle souvenirs of its suffering on its deathbed, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... been a large lump of the Blarney-Stone, conglomerate probably, kept in the desk of our reverend instructor in the ways of syntax and the dismal paths of numbers. We have a lively recollection of the countless tables of foreign coins which we committed to memory, and of the provoking additions and subtractions we underwent to reduce to dollars and cents of the Federal denomination ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... little complexity in the construction of his sentences, that they may generally be reduced to a few of the first and simplest rules of syntax. On these he rings what changes he may, by putting the verb before its nominative or vocative case. Thus in the following verses ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... look for so wistfully in each other is the raw material of poetry. We can make the finished article for ourselves, given enough matter; and indeed the poetry which is imagined in contemplation is apt to be much finer than that which has passed through the claws of prosody and syntax. The fact, to be short with it, is that literature has an eye upon the consumer. Whether it is marketable or not, it is intended for the public. Now no man will undress in public with design. It may be a pity, but so it is. Undesignedly, I don't say. It would be possible, ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... variations, the syntax, and the genius of the language, must in this, as well as in several other modern European tongues, have been derived from the Celtic; it being well known, that the frequent use of articles, the distinction of cases by prepositions, ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... abode with him a month or two months at a time. The boy ceased not to increase in beauty and loveliness with increase of years, till he attained the age of fifteen and was unique in his perfection and symmetry. He learnt writing and Koran reading; history, syntax and lexicography; archery, spearplay and horsemanship and what not else behoveth the sons of Kings; nor was there one of the children of the folk of the city, men or women, but would talk of the youth's charms, for he was of surpassing beauty and perfection, even such an one ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... unfold a scheme for restoring vigour to the exhausted language by destroying its articulations. These he declared to be purely arbitrary, therefore fatal to the development of a spontaneous and individual style. By breaking up the rigid ties of syntax, you do more than create new forms of prose moving in perfect freedom, you deliver the creative spirit itself from the abominable contact with dead ideas. Association, fixed and eternalized by the structure of the language, is the tyranny that keeps ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... concerning the syntax and disposition of studies; that men may know in what order ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... Bessie's sentiment and Bessie's syntax. "There is the railway, and Oxford is on the road. I intend always ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... New Testament, of which he had reported to Mr. Fuller:—"It has undergone one correction, but must undergo several more. I employ a pundit merely for this purpose, with whom I go through the whole in as exact a manner as I can. He judges of the style and syntax, and I of the faithfulness of the translation. I have, however, translated several chapters together, which have not required any alteration in the syntax whatever: yet I always submit this article entirely to his judgment. I can also, by hearing him read, judge whether he understands ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... work was Lohengrin. When we came out he said: "That swan's neck was rather stiff." And it was all he did say. We went and had a drink. He was not mistaken. His observation was most just; but his perspective was that of those literary critics who give ten lines to pointing out three slips of syntax, and three lines to an ungrammatical admission that the novel under ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... and on the following day a courier started for Washington with a letter from Jackson tendering the services of twenty-five hundred Tennesseeans and assuring the President, with better patriotism than syntax, that wherever it might please him to find a place of duty for these men he could depend upon them to stay "till they or the ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... shore and began to build his batteries. As soon as the British had made themselves secure Vaudreuil thought it time to turn them out. But he sent only 1,500 men; and so many of these were boys and youths at school and college that the French troops dubbed them 'The Royal Syntax.' These precious 1,500 went up the north shore, crossed over after dark, and started to march, in two separate columns, down the south shore towards Levis. Presently the first column heard a noise in the woods and ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... my own part as yet, but it is of course certain that the distinction of masculine and feminine existed in the spoken language, and it must exist somewhere in the glyphs. And it will have to be a prefix, not a postfix; for what I may call the syntax of glyph formation must follow that of the speech. At the bottom of Dres. 61 and 62 are seven identical Oc-glyphs with subfix, and with prefixes. Five of these prefixes are faces with the woman's curl, recognized ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... confusion of syntax, excusable in a person of his circumstances. Now, suppose they—or he—the man whose brains are out—goes about with his coffin under his arm, like my worthy uncle? and suppose he blandly, politely, relentlessly insists upon reading to you, out of that octavo sarcophagus, ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... I do command, That you your birch do take in hand, Read concord and syntax on; The bays, your own, are only mine, Do you then still your nouns decline, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... I! all my I! He's a heretic dog who but adds Betty Martin!' Thus cried the God with high imperial tone: In robe of stiffest state, that scoff'd at beauty, A pronoun-verb imperative he shone— Then substantive and plural-singular grown, He thus spake on:—'Behold in I alone (For Ethics boast a syntax of their own) Or if in ye, yet as I doth depute ye, In O! I, you, the vocative of duty! I of the world's whole Lexicon the root! Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight, The genitive and ablative to boot: The accusative of wrong, the nom'native of right, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... in verses written about three hundred years ago there should be found some crudities in style, some lapses in syntax, and not a few words strange to us or having a meaning somewhat different from their present significance. Among such lapses in syntax we find the slight confusion of tenses in the first stanza, caused in the poet's mind by the necessity of making a rhyme ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... word in the Bible, he has recourse to Talmudic Hebrew or to the Aramaic. He pays careful attention to the precise meaning of words and to distinctions among synonyms, and he had perception for delicate shading in syntax and vocabulary. Owing to this thorough knowledge of Hebrew he readily obtained insight into the true sense of the text. By subjecting the thought of the Holy Scriptures to a simple and entirely rational examination, he not seldom succeeds in determining it. Thus, as it were by ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... different kinds to which the following appertain. In their most famous magic pamphlet Rasiel, which the Kabbalistae hold in great respect, in the first place three secret alphabets are read, which, in many things, are wanting in the common form and syntax of usual Hebrew. The first is called Scriptura coelestis (the writing of heaven); the next, [Hebrew: ML'KYM] or [Hebrew: MLKYM], that is, of angels or kings (angelorum sive regum); and the third the writing of the crossing of the flood."[50] ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... a literature which by general admission is now the richest and most liberal in the world of living speech. English is a tongue less sonorous than Italian, less fine than French, less homely than German, but more expressive, more flexible, than these and all others. Its syntax imposes no burdens, its traditions are weighty only upon the vulgar and the bizarre. Without its literary history, American literature in general, and usually in particular, is not to be understood. That we have sprung from a Puritanical ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... type.... The penmanship of the copy furnished was good, but the grammar, spelling and punctuation were done by John H. Gilbert, who was chief compositor in the office. I have heard him swear many a time at the syntax and orthography of Cowdery, and declare that he would not set another line of the type. There were no paragraphs, no punctuation and no capitals. All that was done in the printing office, and what a time there used to be in straightening sentences out, too. During the printing of the book ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... for which in your day school-boys used to be whipped. You were not. It's important, because when lawyers get on to the interpretation of the law, loose syntax gives them their opportunity; they make fortunes out of the grammatical errors of Parliament. And, of course, it was a lawyer who drew ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... commercial interests. Sick of 'sheep and cattle dressings', he grew tired of chemistry altogether, and presently of physical science in general. His evenings were given to poetry and history; he took up the classical schoolbooks again, and found a charm in Latin syntax hitherto unperceived. It was plain to him now how he had been wronged by the necessity of leaving school when his education ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... as he could read; frequently he had not read the Bible or studied the rudiments of grammar. The Gaon insisted that every one should first master the twenty-four books of the Bible, their etymology, prosody, and syntax, then the six divisions of the Mishnah with the important commentaries and the suggested emendations, and finally the Talmud in general, without wasting much time on pilpul, which brings no practical result. "These ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... shall be written; but it is a terrible thing to have to draw up any document for the approval of others. One's choicest words are torn away, one's figures of speech are maltreated, one's stops are misunderstood, and one's very syntax is put to confusion; and then, at last, whole paragraphs are cashiered as unnecessary. First comes the torture and then the execution. "Come, Wilkins, you have the pen of a ready writer; prepare for ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... them the finishing stroke by declaring that there never had been, and never could be positive orthography. They concluded that syntax is a whim ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... appeal to his enslaved country no poet had challenged the old Roman spirit which Petrarch had striven to rouse. While the literati were busy discussing Alfieri's blank verse, while the grammarians wrangled over his syntax and ridiculed his solecisms, the public, heedless of such niceties, was glowing with the new wine which he had poured into the old vessels of classic story. "Liberty" was the cry that rang on the lips of all his heroes, in accents so new and stirring that his audience ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Tom, and I notice that the flowers of the white man's syntax have left his tongue. He is the original proposition in bear's claws and copper color. 'Me bring,' says he, and he lays the kid in his mother's arms. 'Run fifteen mile,' says John Tom—'Ugh! Catch ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... haw! but you can't help me at Logic, as you used at Syntax. Why, all the world knows a girl ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... the more salient features of the Khasi language, its grammar, and syntax, it seems to be of importance to show how intimately connected Khasi is with some of the languages of Further India. In the middle of the last century Logan pointed out affinity between Khasi and these languages, but it has been left to Professor Kuhn to prove this connection to demonstration. ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... that of music would it be tolerated that the theoretical rules of grammar and syntax should be so completely separated from the actual literature from which they are derived, that the pupil should never have perceived that there was any ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... that the good woman should tread down the heel of the hip-gut pangs, by virtue of a solemn protestation put in by the little testiculated or codsted fishes, which, to tell the truth, were at that time very necessary for understanding the syntax and construction of old boots. Therefore John Calf, her cousin gervais once removed with a log from the woodstack, very seriously advised her not to put herself into the hazard of quagswagging in the lee, to be scoured with a buck of linen clothes till first she had kindled the paper. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... literally in the woods, and experienced the usual privations and vicissitudes attendant on pioneer life. The new country and poverty of his parents prevented his receiving a common English education, and it was not until after he was of age that he mastered Murray's syntax and ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... You find Persian half Arabicized; Armenian come to be almost a dialect of Persian; Latin growing up through English; Greek almost totally submerged under Latin, Slavonic, and Turkish, and now with a tendency to grow back into Greek; Celtic preserving in itself an older than Aryan syntax, and conveying that in its turn to the English spoken by Celts. Language is, to say the truth, a shifting kaleidoscopic thing: a momentary aspect of racial expression. In a thousand years it becomes unintelligible; we are modifying ours every day, upon laws ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Secondly, the worthy pedagogues of that day found no readier way of leading the most studious of boys to a love of science than corporal punishment. "At the expense of many tears and some blood I purchased the knowledge of the Latin syntax." Whether all love of study would have been flogged out of him if he had remained at school, it is difficult to say, but it is not an improbable supposition that this would have happened. The risk was removed by his complete failure of health. "A strange nervous ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... as my literary godfather, who had held me at the Font of the Muses, and was answerable to the company for my moral principles and my syntax, always made "the speech"; my father used most often to answer for me in few words, but with wet eyes: (there was a general understanding that any good or sorrow that might come to me in literary life were infinitely more his) and the two Mr. Richmonds held themselves responsible ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... were travelling, like the renowned Doctor Syntax, in search of the picturesque, we hurried through this populous and highly-civilized region of Cornwall as rapidly as possible. I doubt much whether we should not have passed as unceremoniously through the large town of Redruth—the capital ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... for a long time, ready at the coast, had looked out into the distance eagerly for the dear men. This changes the syntax of 'leofra manna.' ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... root of the Anatolian peninsula, the Orthodox Greek population, submerged beneath the Turkish flood more than eight centuries ago, has retained little individuality except in its religion, and nothing of its native speech but a garbled vocabulary embedded in a Turkified syntax. Yet even this dwindling rear-guard has been overtaken just in time by the returning current of national life, bringing with it the Greek school, and with the school a community of outlook with Hellenism the world ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... at nightfall, A girl within each arm, And kisses quick and light fall On lips that take no harm. Lip language serves them better Who have no parts of speech: No syntax there to fetter The ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... class— partly for fear of being excluded by detention or otherwise from Saturday's celebration, and partly because the healthy condition of their bodies had begotten for the time being a healthier condition of mind. Arthur and the baronet actually knew their syntax for two days running, and the astounding phenomenon of a perfectly empty detention- room occurred on both the Friday and the Saturday. The latter event was specially satisfactory to Railsford, as he ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... miscellaneous part of the Miscellany. The greater part of the Uncertain Authors are less ambitious, but also less irregular than Wyatt, while they fall far short of Surrey in every respect. Sometimes, as in the famous "I loath that I did love," both syntax and prosody hardly show the reform at all; they recall the ruder snatches of an earlier time. But, on the whole, the characteristics of these poets, both in matter and form, are sufficiently uniform and sufficiently interesting. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... attention and interest. There are four kinds of figures, viz.: (1) Figures of Orthography which change the spelling of a word; (2) Figures of Etymology which change the form of words; (3) Figures of Syntax which change the construction of sentences; (4) Figures of Rhetoric or the art of speaking and writing effectively which ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... was obliged with the utmost care to copy a written model, in order to show it to their parents, because this article is most particularly examined, as everybody can tell what is or is not good writing. The boys knew all the rules of syntax by heart. ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... morning with a black, extravasated eye, which he bathed at intervals with a rag, he was regarded by most of us as absolute scum. The German master, a tall, good-looking man, was treated as utterly incompetent because, when he asked a question in grammar or syntax, he walked up and down with the book in front of him, and quite plainly compared the answer with the book. We boys thought that anyone could be a master, with a book in his hand. History and Geography were taught by an old man, overflowing with good-humour, loquacious, but ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... him because he is probably better known to readers than any other writer who affects similar methods. In his later publications Mr. Joyce does deliberately go to work to break up the traditional sentence, throwing overboard sequence, syntax, and, indeed, most of those conventions which men habitually employ for the exchange of precise ideas. Effectually, and with a will, he rags the literary instrument: unluckily, this will has at its service talents which though genuine are moderate only. ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... paranoiac," and Elbert Hubbard says, "He writes so well that he grows enamoured of his own style and is subdued like the dyer's hand; he becomes intoxicated on the lure of lines and the roll of phrases. He is woozy on words—locoed by syntax and prosody. The libation he pours is flavoured with euphues. It is all like a cherry in a morning Martini." A phrase which Remy de Gourmont uses to describe Villiers de l'Isle Adam might be applied with equal success to the author of "The Lords of the Ghostland": "L'idealisme ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... not to stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which connects the epithets "deaf and silent," with the apostrophized eye: or (if we are to refer it to the preceding word, "Philosopher"), the faulty and equivocal syntax of the passage; and without examining the propriety of making a "Master brood o'er a Slave," or "the Day" brood at all; we will merely ask, what does all this mean? In what sense is a child of that age a Philosopher? In what sense does he read "the eternal deep?" ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... take up a short abode there, and felt that the days would be well spent and full of happiness. But time forbade the indulgence, as time generally forbids all such luxuries to the workers in the world. Only those whose occupation in life is the pursuit of pleasure can, like Dr. Syntax, go off in search of the picturesque, and wander about at their own sweet desire like a will-o'-the-wisp. Such luxuries were not ours; and so it came to pass that, very soon after we had seen the sad procession winding down the hill, we were ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... previously stated, the language or dialect of the German settlers in Brazil underwent an almost immediate change, not in its syntax, but in its vocabulary. Had the immigrants and their descendants only adopted such words as had no equivalent in their mother-tongue, our case would be much simpler. They went, however, much further, and, as a result even many of the commonest words dealing with the household or farm were replaced ...
— The German Element in Brazil - Colonies and Dialect • Benjamin Franklin Schappelle
... a prevailing impression that novel-writing must be tremendous fun; and this is so cheering that it is really impossible to be angry with her. Otherwise I might have some very sharp things to say about her light-hearted disregard of syntax and punctuation. Her pronouns, for example, are so elusive that not only am I frequently in doubt as to whom the heroine will marry in the end but as to which of the characters is speaking at any given moment. And not infrequently what can only be careless ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... know as he has anything to say about it," said Annie, mimicking Mrs. Bolton's accent and syntax. ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... 15. What is Syntax? That science which treats of the relation and connection of words in the construction of ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... days before he finds out that they are talking English. And they speak two different dialects. The first, used with strangers, is 'blackman's English,'intelligible enough despite the liberties it takes with pronunciation, grammar, and syntax. The second is a kind of 'pidgin English,' spoken amongst themselves, like Bolognese or Venetians when they have some reason for not talking Italian. One of the Gospels was printed in it; I need hardly say with what ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... etymological compost), but like a spirit, by mysterious contact of Spirit; Thought kindling itself at the fire of living Thought? How shall he give kindling, in whose own inward man there is no live coal, but all is burnt-out to a dead grammatical cinder? The Hinterschlag Professors knew syntax enough; and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty called Memory, and could be acted-on through the muscular integument by ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... SYNTAX. Introductory Definitions Chapter I. Of Sentences The Rules of Syntax General or Critical Obs. on Syntax The Analyzing of Sentences The several Methods of Analysis Observations on Methods of Analysis Examples for Parsing, Praxis XII Chapter II. Of the Articles ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... settle for ever the meaning of this phrase, which, by a mere grammatical quibble, has countenanced the General Government in a claim of universal power. For in the phrase, 'to lay taxes, to pay the debts and provide for the general welfare,' it is a mere question of syntax, whether the two last infinitives are governed by the first, or are distinct and co-ordinate powers; a question unequivocally decided by the exact definition of powers immediately following. It is fortunate for ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Ware's book of poems, 'The Rhymes of Ironquill', and had declared his work to rank with the very greatest of American poetry—I think he called it the most truly American in flavor. I remember that at the luncheon he noted Ware's big, splendid physique and his Western liberties of syntax with a curious intentness. I believe he regarded him as being nearer his own type in mind and expression than any ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... into life; and Rossetti, who painted poems and made poetry that is pictorial. Sculpture was the only art that had resisted this universal disintegration, this imbroglio of the arts. No sculptor before Rodin had dared to break the line, dared to shiver the syntax of stone. For sculpture is a static, not a dynamic art—is it not? Let us observe the rules, though we preserve the chill spirit of the cemetery. What Mallarme attempted to do with French poetry Rodin accomplished in clay. His marbles do not represent but present emotion, are the ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... mathematical mortification; for she delighted in new words, and quickly found that there was an English Key at the end, which would make her very wise about Latin, at slight expense. She presently made up her mind to skip the rules in the Syntax, the examples became so absorbing. These mysterious sentences, snatched from an unknown context,—like strange horns of beasts, and leaves of unknown plants, brought from some far-off region,—gave boundless scope to her imagination, and were all the more fascinating because ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... have a grammar adapted to their own age, although its rules of syntax are more general than ours. And if we were to pay close attention to them, we should be astonished at the exactness with which they follow certain analogies, very faulty if you will, but very regular, that are displeasing only because harsh, or because ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... but I am"; and, with superb disregard for doctors and syntax alike, Quin put a firm arm around that slender yielding figure and swept ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... twenty-five books De Lingua Latina, only v.-x. have been preserved, but the scope of the whole is known from Varro's own words. Book i. was introductory; ii.-vii. dealt with etymology; viii.-xiii. with inflexions; xiv.-xxv. with syntax. Varro's derivations are ridiculed by Quintilian i. 6, 37, 'Sed cui non post Varronem sit venia, qui agrum quia in eo agatur aliquid, et graculos quia gregatim volent dictos voluit persuadere Ciceroni?' From Book v. onwards the work was dedicated to Cicero, ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... to say that if I had been them, I should have burst out laughing and said what a couple of young asses we were!" The Hon. Percival was very colloquial, but syntax was not of the essence of the contract, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... don't like his tail. Did you observe what a mean scrubby tail he has?' 'What a fool you are, brother,' said Mr. Petulengro; 'that very tail of his shows his breeding. No good bred horse ever yet carried a fine tail—'tis your scrubby-tailed horses that are your out-and-outers. Did you ever hear of Syntax, brother? That tail of his puts me in mind of Syntax. Well, I say nothing more, have your own way—all I wonder at is, that a horse like him was ever brought to such a fair of dog ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... unintelligible stupidity, have been considered as novelties, have by that means gained the admiration of Criticism and the praise of Fashion, until a more absurd novelty pushed them from their preferments and caused them to be as suddenly forgotten! The vulgar, tasteless jargon of "Dr. Syntax," with all the above-mentioned excellencies to excite public notice from the butterflies of fashion, soon found what it sought, though some of the plates or illustrations possess the disadvantageous merit of being good. Yet the letter-press doubly made up for all, ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... lane that has no turning," as the proverb says, and Parson, after all, was destined to enjoy one brief glimpse of the smiles of fortune that day. The first boy put up to translate stumbled over a somewhat intricate point of syntax. Now Mr Warton, the master—as the manner of many masters is—was writing a little book on Latin Syntax, and this particular passage happened to be a superb example of a certain style of construction which till this moment had escaped his notice. Delighted with the discovery, he launched ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... at that time head master, a quick discerning man, but hasty and severe, sent for the master of the grammar school, and inquired about Coleridge; from him he learnt that he was a dull and inapt scholar, and that he could not be made to repeat a single rule of syntax, although he would give a rule ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... truth of the statement that the Indo-Germanic languages constitute in themselves a family sprung from the same source, marked by the same characteristics, and differentiated from all other languages by formation, by vocabulary, and by syntax. The historical method was applied to language long before it reached biology. Nearly a quarter of a century before Charles Darwin was born, Sir William Jones had made the first suggestion of a comparative ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... so to say, a grammar of their own, whose rules and syntax are more general than our own; if you attend carefully you will be surprised to find how exactly they follow certain analogies, very much mistaken if you like, but very regular; these forms are only ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... of a-b-c's, and the travels of the centre of gravity, it would so amaze and confound him, that he would scarcely believe he could ever again perform such a tremendous operation as that of walking. Children, if they were early to hear grammarians talk of the parts of speech, and of syntax, would conclude, that to speak must be one of the most difficult arts in the world; but children, who are not usually so unfortunate as to have grammarians for their preceptors, when they first begin to speak, acquire language, without being aware ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... things—rhapsodic prose-poems, weak in syntax but strong in the quality miscalled imagination. Her pen name was George Bishop: following the example of the three Georges so dear to the believer in sexless literature—George Sand, George Eliot and George Egerton. She ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... than details of their future housekeeping, and his preparations for the same, with innumerable 'my dears' sprinkled in disconnectedly, to show the depth of his affection without the inconveniences of syntax. ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... there any in which one may not at every step verify the connection or incoherence of the parts.[3221]—The procedure used in arranging a simple sentence also governs that of the period, the paragraph and the series of paragraphs; it forms the style as it forms the syntax. Each small edifice occupies a distinct position, and but one, in the great total edifice. As the discourse advances, each section must in turn file in, never before, never after, no parasitic member being allowed ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... education whatever. For—and this I never reflected upon until the present moment—I could not for the life of me 'analyse' the simplest sentence, in the rather odd scholastic sense of that word. Inherited instinct and long practice make me aware, I believe, of an error in syntax, when I chance upon one. But I could only tell you that it was wrong, and never how or why. I know something of literature, but less of mathematics than I assume to be known by the modern ten-year-old schoolboy; ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... the fraternity, to be not only Astrologers, but Conjurers too, if I do not produce a hundred instances in all their Almanacks, to convince any reasonable man that they do not so much as understand Grammar and Syntax; that they are not able to spell any word out of the usual road, nor even, in their Prefaces, to write common sense, or ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... 'hemistich'; 'apogaeon' (Fairfax) and 'apogeum' (Browne) 'apogee'; 'sumphonia' (Lodge) 'symphony'; 'prototypon' (Jackson) 'prototype'; 'synonymon' (Jeremy Taylor) or 'synonymum' (Hacket), and 'synonyma' (Milton, prose), became severally 'synonym' and 'synonyms'; 'syntaxis' (Fuller) became 'syntax'; 'extasis' (Burton) 'ecstasy'; 'parallelogrammon' (Holland) 'parallelogram'; 'programma' (Warton) 'program'; 'epitheton' (Cowell) 'epithet'; 'epocha' (South) 'epoch'; 'biographia' (Dryden) 'biography'; ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... the wrongs of the working-man; others appealed to a gay experience of the high seas; but vastly the greater part to memories and associations of an Irish origin; some still uttered the poetry of plantation life in the artless accents of the end—man. Where they trusted themselves, with syntax that yielded promptly to any exigency of rhythmic art, to the ordinary American speech, it was to strike directly for the affections, to celebrate the domestic ties, and, above all, to embalm the memories of angel and martyr mothers ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... The syntax of the classic languages, which had been my weak point as a school-boy, now aroused the deepest interest, and I was grateful to Lepsius for having so earnestly insisted upon my pursuing philology. I soon felt the warmest appreciation of the Roman comedies, which served as the foundation ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... professors, who drilled me in syntax and scansion, ye would deem me ungrateful indeed were I to give utterance to the contempt and indignation which I then felt for ye—then, when I looked back upon ten years of wasted existence spent under your tutelage—then, when, after believing myself an educated man, the illusion ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... stammering out such blundering distinctions, as the auditors perhaps may sometimes gape at, but seldom apprehend: and they take such a liberty in their speaking of Latin, that they scorn to stick at the exactness of syntax or concord; pretending it is below the majesty of a divine to talk like a pedagogue, and be tied to the slavish observance of the ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... finest, and some would say the finest, works of classical music by an American. It reflects the musical innovations of its creator, featuring revolutionary atmospheric effects, unprecedented atonal musical syntax, and surprising technical approaches to playing the piano, such as pressing down on over 10 notes simultaneously using a ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... in Belhaven's oration which equals this in intensity, there is power and pathos, as well as Ciceronian syntax, in the period: "Hannibal, my lord, is at our gates; Hannibal is come within our gates; Hannibal is come the length of this table; he is at the foot of this throne; if we take not notice he'll seize upon these regalia, he'll take them as our spolia opima, ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... him a typical provincial; it will prevent him from being a representative or skilful interpreter. Horace Greeley said that when the rules of the English language got in his way, they did not stand a chance. We may be sure that if by violating the rules of syntax Horace Greeley sometimes added forcefulness to his editorials, he violated them deliberately and not in ignorance. Luminosity is not stumbled into. The richly savored and deliciously unlettered speech of Thomas Hardy's rustics was the creation ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... I've forgotten as well as what lingers In this old brain of mine that's but ill able To give you even this poor version Of the speech I spoil, as it were, with stammering! —More fault of those who had the hammering Or prosody into me and syntax, {700} And did it, not with hobnails but tintacks! But to return from this excursion,— Just, do you mark, when the song was sweetest, The peace most deep and the charm completest, There came, shall I say, a snap— And the charm vanished! And my sense returned, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... and I had, as the reader will probably find to his cost, the classical tradition which makes all the persons in a novel, except the comically vernacular ones, or the speakers of phonetically spelt dialect, utter themselves in the formal phrases and studied syntax of eighteenth century rhetoric. In short, I wrote in the style of Scott and Dickens; and as fashionable society then spoke and behaved, as it still does, in no style at all, my transcriptions of Oxford and Mayfair may ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... Plural, Genders of Nouns, Cases of Nouns, Comparison of Adjectives, Personal Pronouns, Relative Pronouns, Demonstrative Pronouns, Regular and Irregular Verbs, Shall and Will, The Adverb, Misapplication of Words, Division of Words, Capital Letters, Rules for Spelling Double l and p, A Short Syntax, Punctuation, etc. ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... talking syntax all this time,' said Elizabeth; 'we will keep prosody for the evening, ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... erupit—off slogs boy; Off like bird, avi similis—(you observed The dative? Pretty i' the Mantuan!)—Anglice Off in three flea skips. Hactenus, so far, So good, tam bene. Bene, satis, male -, Where was I with my trope 'bout one in a quag? I did once hitch the syntax into verse: Verbum personale, a verb personal, Concordat—ay, "agrees," old Fatchaps—cum Nominativo, with its nominative, Genere, i' point o' gender, numero, O' number, et persona, and person. Ut, Instance: Sol ruit, down flops sun, et and, Montes umbrantur, ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... speech in a simple form in the third and fourth grades and in each succeeding year to review these topics, gradually enlarging and expanding the definitions, inflections, and constructions into a fuller etymology and syntax. In United States history we are beginning to adopt a similar plan of repetitions, and the frequent reviews in arithmetic are designed to make good the lack of thoroughness and mastery which should characterize each ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... something's here with name uncivil, For our cook christens it "A Devil," "A Devil, in any shape, sweet maid, A parson fears not," Syntax said; "I'll make him minced meat; ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss
... schools, who, on being asked by the inspectors whether he knew any thing of mathematics, answered that he didn't know Matthew, although he had seen a good deal of one Tom Mattocks, in Rhode Island; but he'd never hearn of his having any brother. So with Mrs. Wheelwright—Mr. Syntax was equally a stranger to her. But she had seen some coarse pieces of embroidery from the rustic pupils of country boarding schools, and knew that they were needlework, of some sort. She therefore set herself to teaching ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... etymology: thou antipode of grammar: thou executioner of construction: thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded: thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax: thou scavenger of mood and tense: thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance: thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense: thou faithful recorder ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... don't know. They never forget their syntax, children, when once they've been taught it. But I think some of them are, on the whole, worse than any of you. Not that it's amiable of you to look so radiant, all in ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... stood alone in Norwegian literature. The reading public was content to go to Denmark, and the growing Landsmaal literature was concerned with other matters—first of all, with the task of establishing itself and the even more complicated problem of finding a form—orthography, syntax, and inflexions which should command general acceptance. For the Landsmaal of Ivar Aasen was frankly based on "the best dialects," and by this he meant, of course, the dialects that best preserved the forms of the Old Norse. These were the dialects ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... that silly novels by lady novelists rarely introduce us into any other than very lofty and fashionable society. We had imagined that destitute women turned novelists, as they turned governesses, because they had no other "ladylike" means of getting their bread. On this supposition, vacillating syntax, and improbable incident had a certain pathos for us, like the extremely supererogatory pincushions and ill-devised nightcaps that are offered for sale by a blind man. We felt the commodity to be a nuisance, but we were glad to think that the ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... may Concern" was not his only attempt at influential composition. He sometimes persuaded himself that he had literary ability; but his orthography and pronunciation were worse than his syntax. The paper deposited with J. S. Clarke was useful as showing his power to entertain a deliberate purpose. It has one or two smart passages ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... item interesting to our friends who revel in syntax and prosody. Any machine or apparatus for lifting has been called a "jack" since the days of Shakespeare. The jack was the bearer of bundles, a lifter, a puller, a worker. Any coarse bit of mechanism was called ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... manuscripts, I should insist that the letters of Patrick Henry are witnesses to the fact and quality of real intellectual cultivation: these are not the manuscripts of an uneducated person. In penmanship, punctuation, spelling, syntax, they are, upon the whole, rather better than the letters of most of the great actors in our Revolution. But, aside from the mere mechanics of written speech, there is in the diction of Patrick Henry's letters the nameless felicity which, even with great ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... negroes, as a whole, guilty of these charges? In the first place, the negro race of America is not ignorant. In the year 1833 John C. Calhoun, senator from South Carolina, is reported to have said that if he could find a single negro who understood the Greek syntax, he would believe the negro was human and would treat him as such. At that time it was a very safe test. God accepted the challenge in behalf of the negro race, and inspired his white sons and daughters both in the North and South to ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton
... and there never can be wanting some who distinguish desert, who will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since, while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding and some falling away; that a whole life can not be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he whose design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not understand; that a writer will sometimes be hurried by eagerness to the end, and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... used constantly the possessive pronominal form itts, instead of his; or the other fact that he used the termination en in the singular of the verb, was alone enough to stamp the poems as spurious. Tyrwhitt also showed that the syntax, diction, idioms, and stanza forms were modern; that if modern words were substituted throughout for the antique, and the spelling modernized, the verse would read like eighteenth-century work. "If anyone," says Scott, in his review ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the original as a source of spiritual education? or that our appreciation of Holy Writ would not be a hundred-fold increased if it were fortified by a knowledge of the first principles of Hebraic syntax and by an elementary acquaintance with Hebraic composition. It is impossible to estimate the influence of such knowledge in tending to endear the Bible to our youth. To me indeed it has always been incomprehensible ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... signification of the word "syntax," and, catching the last syllable, concluded that R. referred to the system universally adopted to supply the pecuniary wants of a government; and therefore the ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... Amil) in an awful long note (pp. 195 to 224) by "mode," grammatical or logical. The value of his disquisition is its proving that, as the Arabs borrowed their romance from the Persians, so they took their physics and metaphysics of grammar and syntax; logic and science in general, from ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... influence on the new age greater than yours, more largely prepared the way of the newest music. You are indeed the good friend of all who dream of a new musical language, a new musical syntax and balance and structure, and set out to explore the vast, vague regions, the terra incognita of tone. For you are their ancestor. If, in its general, homophonic nature, your work belongs primarily to the romantic period, your conviction that the content conditions the form of every piece ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... could to poison the wells of mutual trust and mutual understanding among civilized men. Do they think that these things will make a good advertisement for the explosive guttural sounds and the huddled deformed syntax of the speech in which they express their arrogance and their hate? Which of the chief European languages will come first, after the War, with the little nations? Will Serbia be content to speak German? Will Norway and Denmark feel a new affection for the speech of the men ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs. He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and leveling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way into ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... Whittier in fact had not arrived at the clear splendor of his later work without some earlier turbidity; he was still from time to time capable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn. As for the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' her syntax was such a snare to her that it sometimes needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the assistant editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... result gave Hazlitt opportunity to say:[367] "We should think the writer could not possibly read the manuscript after he has once written it, or overlook the press."[368] His habit of carrying two trains of thought on together was also responsible for slips in diction and syntax. An amanuensis working for him noticed this peculiarity, and Scott said in his Journal: "There must be two currents of ideas going on in my mind at the same time.... I always laugh when I hear people say, Do one thing at once. I have done ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... expedite your flame," or of the pedantic school-boyism of calling a housekeeper "nymph." In fact, it is by the merest accident that I am now enabled to give them in their genuine shape. An old school-fellow, whom I have not seen since the days of syntax, and whose name I had utterly forgotten, enclosed ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... little more matter than details of their future housekeeping, and his preparations for the same, with innumerable 'my dears' sprinkled in disconnectedly, to show the depth of his affection without the inconveniences of syntax. ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... two I have mentioned, or any other of the fraternity, to be not only astrologers, but conjurers too, if I do not produce a hundred instances in all their almanacks, to convince any reasonable man, that they do not so much as understand common grammar and syntax; that they are not able to spell any word out of the usual road, nor even in their prefaces write common sense or intelligible English. Then for their observations and predictions, they are such as will equally suit any age or country in the world. "This ...
— The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers • Jonathan Swift
... shake the truth of the statement that the Indo-Germanic languages constitute in themselves a family sprung from the same source, marked by the same characteristics, and differentiated from all other languages by formation, by vocabulary, and by syntax. The historical method was applied to language long before it reached biology. Nearly a quarter of a century before Charles Darwin was born, Sir William Jones had made the first suggestion of a comparative study of languages. Bopp's Comparative Grammar began to be published ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... of it: perhaps it will strike you as intolerably violent and artificial.' And again on Nov. 6, '87: 'I want Harry Ploughman to be a vivid figure before the mind's eye; if he is not that the sonnet fails. The difficulties are of syntax no doubt. Dividing a compound word by a clause sandwiched into it was a desperate deed, I feel, and I do not feel that it was ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... connection or incoherence of the parts.[3221]—The procedure used in arranging a simple sentence also governs that of the period, the paragraph and the series of paragraphs; it forms the style as it forms the syntax. Each small edifice occupies a distinct position, and but one, in the great total edifice. As the discourse advances, each section must in turn file in, never before, never after, no parasitic member being allowed to intrude, and no regular member being allowed ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... foremost scholars of his time were proud to place him with Homer and with Virgil on the roll of the poets. Ronsard's peculiarity in style was the free use of words and constructions not properly French. Boileau indicated whence he enriched his vocabulary and his syntax, by satirically saying that Ronsard spoke Greek and Latin in French. At his death, Ronsard was almost literally buried under praises. Sainte-Beuve strikingly says that he seemed to go forward into posterity as ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... circumstances, except that instead of perambulate, the Rev. Amos wrote preambulate, and instead of 'if haply', 'if happily', the contingency indicated being the reverse of happy. Mr. Barton had not the gift of perfect accuracy in English orthography and syntax, which was unfortunate, as he was known not to be a Hebrew scholar, and not in the least suspected of being an accomplished Grecian. These lapses, in a man who had gone through the Eleusinian mysteries ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... at odd times set some type.... The penmanship of the copy furnished was good, but the grammar, spelling and punctuation were done by John H. Gilbert, who was chief compositor in the office. I have heard him swear many a time at the syntax and orthography of Cowdery, and declare that he would not set another line of the type. There were no paragraphs, no punctuation and no capitals. All that was done in the printing office, and what a time there used to be in straightening sentences out, too. ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... children in all the academies go home for four weeks), everyone was obliged with the utmost care to copy a written model, in order to show it to their parents, because this article is most particularly examined, as everybody can tell what is or is not good writing. The boys knew all the rules of syntax by heart. ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... exultation at the novelty of the sight), venting bitter imprecations against the lieutenant, and reproaching his scholars with treachery and rebellion; when the usher was admitted, whom my uncle accosted in this manner: "Harkee, Mr. Syntax, I believe you are an honest man, d'ye see—and I have a respect for you—but for all that, we must, for our own security, d'ye see, belay you for a short time." With these words, he pulled out some fathoms of cord, which the honest man no sooner saw than ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... between Zaid and Amru?" He smiled, and asked me the place of my nativity. I answered: "The territory of Shiraz." He said: "Do you recollect any of Sa'di's compositions?" I replied: "I am enamoured with the reader of the syntax, who, taking offence, assails me in like manner as Zaid does Amru. And Zaid, when read Zaidin, cannot raise his head; and how canst thou give a zammah to a word accented with ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... similis—(you observed The dative? Pretty i' the Mantuan!)—Anglice Off in three flea skips. Hactenus, so far, So good, tam bene. Bene, satis, male,— Where was I with my trope 'bout one in a quag? I did once hitch the Syntax into verse Verbum personale, a verb personal, Concordat—"ay", agrees old Fatchops—cum Nominativo, with its nominative, Genere, i' point of gender, numero, O' number, et persona, and person. Ut, Instance: Sol ruit, down ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... some tenderness for Alpine piety. While he was near the high-altar some people came in at the west door; but he did not notice them, and was presently engaged in deciphering a curious old German epitaph on one of the mural tablets. At last he turned away, wondering whether its syntax or its theology was the more uncomfortable, and, to this infinite surprise, found himself confronted with the Prince ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... an item interesting to our friends who revel in syntax and prosody. Any machine or apparatus for lifting has been called a "jack" since the days of Shakespeare. The jack was the bearer of bundles, a lifter, a puller, a worker. Any coarse bit of mechanism was called a jack, and is yet. In most factories ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... prostitution I learned to know personally many of the characteristic White Slaves of the West and South Side "levees." One "Alice" I shall never, never forget. Beautiful aside from her dissipation, a high school graduate, grammar and syntax perfect, manner exquisite. "Alice," seduced at eighteen, was at the age of twenty-one away down the line in the West Side levee underworld. I used to talk many times with Alice as she sat in the back parlor of the "house" ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... jingle in them, a Nothing could be Something, and the point were gained! It is becoming a horror to me,—as all speech without meaning more and more is. I said to Richard Milnes, "Now in honesty what is the use of putting your accusative before the verb, and otherwise entangling the syntax; if there really is an image of any object, thought, or thing within you, for God's sake let me have it the shortest way, and I will so cheerfully excuse the omission of the jingle at the end: cannot I do without that!"—Milnes answered, "Ah, my dear ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... not thus and thus was the social millennium to be brought about, it was open to his hearers to conceive the practical course. For the rest, the heresiarch had a mighty flow of vituperative speech. Aspirates troubled him, so that for the most part he cast them away, and the syntax of his periods was often anacoluthic; but these matters ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... then, may be defined as a thing which one wants given by a person whom one likes. But our English syntax falls short of my meaning, for what I would wish to say is rather, in Teutonic fashion, "a by a person one likes to one given object one wants." The stress of the sentence should be laid on the word wants. For much of the charm, and ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... is the sole judge of what shall be written; but it is a terrible thing to have to draw up any document for the approval of others. One's choicest words are torn away, one's figures of speech are maltreated, one's stops are misunderstood, and one's very syntax is put to confusion; and then, at last, whole paragraphs are cashiered as unnecessary. First comes the torture and then the execution. "Come, Wilkins, you have the pen of a ready writer; prepare for us this document." In such words is the victim addressed by his colleagues. Unhappy ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... language—only in the platters or the chairs. Marie Louise caught an angry look also in the eye of Nicholas Easton, though he, too, had been incisive in his comments on the theme of the dinner. His English had been uncannily correct, his phrases formal with the exactitude of a book on syntax or the dialogue of a gentleman in a novel. But he also was drinking too much, and as his lips fuddled he had trouble with a very formal "without which." It resulted first as "veetowit veech," then as "whidthout witch." He made it ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... whom the satirical Elizabethan, Thomas Nash, dedicated in 1593, with good-humoured irony, one of his insolent libels on Gabriel Harvey, a scholar who had defamed the memory of a dead friend. Nash laughed at his patron's struggles with syntax in his efforts to write poetry, and at his indulgence in drink, which betrayed itself in his red nose. But, in spite of Nash's characteristic frankness, he greeted the first William Beeston as a boon companion who was generous in his entertainment ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... LANGUAGE.—The Japanese is considered as belonging to the isolated languages, as philologists have thus far failed to classify it. It is agglutinative in its syntax, each word consisting of an unchangeable root and one or several suffixes. Before the art of writing was known, poems, odes to the gods, and other fragments which still exist had been composed in this tongue, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... tart. When, therefore, we find Mrs. Piozzi using words or idioms rejected by modern taste or fastidiousness, we must not be too ready to accuse her of ignorance or vulgarity. I have commonly retained her original syntax, and her spelling, which ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... or two months at a time. The boy ceased not to increase in beauty and loveliness with increase of years, till he attained the age of fifteen and was unique in his perfection and symmetry. He learnt writing and Koran reading; history, syntax and lexicography; archery, spearplay and horsemanship and what not else behoveth the sons of Kings; nor was there one of the children of the folk of the city, men or women, but would talk of the youth's charms, for he was of surpassing beauty and perfection, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... in the construction of his sentences, that they may generally be reduced to a few of the first and simplest rules of syntax. On these he rings what changes he may, by putting the verb before its nominative or vocative case. Thus in the following verses from the Temple ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... every Class of Learners, and especially for Self-instruction. Containing the Elements of the SPANISH Language, and the Rules of Etymology and Syntax Exemplified; with NOTES and APPENDIX, consisting of Dialogues, Select ...
— The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition • Anonymous
... of Exercises in All Parts of French Syntax, methodically arranged after Poitevin's "Syntaxe Francaise"; to which are added Ten Appendices. Designed for the Use of Academies, Colleges, and Private Learners. By Frederick T. Winkelmann, A.M., Ph.D., Professor of Latin, French, and German in the Packer Collegiate Institute of Brooklyn, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... old Daddy Gilpin? Slowest of men, even of English men; yet delicious in his slowness, as is the light of a sleepy eye in woman. I always supposed "Dr. Syntax" was written to make fun of him. I have a whole set of his works, and am very proud of it, with its gray paper, and open type, and long ff, and orange-juice landscapes. The Pere Gilpin had the kind of science I like in the study of Nature,—a little less ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... takes and keeps the child three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon; it pours into these little heads all that is possible in such a length of time, all that they can hold and more too,—spelling, syntax, grammatical and logical analysis, rules of composition and of style, history, geography, arithmetic, geometry, drawing, notions of literature, politics, law, and finally a ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... as well as what lingers 695 In this old brain of mine that's but ill able To give you even this poor version Of the speech I spoil, as it were, with stammering —More fault of those who had the hammering Of prosody into me and syntax, 700 And did it, not with hobnails but tin-tacks! But to return from this excursion— Just, do you mark, when the song was sweetest, The peace most deep and the charm completest, There came, shall I say, a snap— 705 And the charm vanished! And my sense returned, so ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... there, with none so poor to do him reverence! He was a type—and, by reason of his happy temperament, an exceedingly favourable type—of the 'gentleman,' shifting for himself under normal conditions of back-country life. Urbane address, faultless syntax, even that good part which shall not be taken away, namely, the calm consciousness of inherent superiority, are of little use here. And yet your Australian novelist finds no inconsistency in placing the bookish student, or the city dandy, many degrees above the bushman, or the digger, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... to have a grammar adapted to their own age, although its rules of syntax are more general than ours. And if we were to pay close attention to them, we should be astonished at the exactness with which they follow certain analogies, very faulty if you will, but very regular, that are displeasing only because harsh, ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... plunged the child into the mazes of Talmudic casuistry as soon as he could read; frequently he had not read the Bible or studied the rudiments of grammar. The Gaon insisted that every one should first master the twenty-four books of the Bible, their etymology, prosody, and syntax, then the six divisions of the Mishnah with the important commentaries and the suggested emendations, and finally the Talmud in general, without wasting much time on pilpul, which brings no practical result. "These few lines," says ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... system of punctuation may be less defensible, but I have retained it because it may now and then be of use in determining a point of syntax. The absence of a comma, for example, after the word hearse in the 58th line of the Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... mentioned, or any others of the fraternity, to be not only Astrologers, but Conjurers too, if I do not produce a hundred instances in all their Almanacks, to convince any reasonable man that they do not so much as understand Grammar and Syntax; that they are not able to spell any word out of the usual road, nor even, in their Prefaces, to write common ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... superior at Bessie's sentiment and Bessie's syntax. "There is the railway, and Oxford is on the road. I intend always ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... language belongs to the entire group, and a character of homogeneity may, with certain distinctions, be observed among all the various members composing it. The unity of language is threefold: it may be traced in the roots, in the inflections, and in the general features of the syntax. The roots are, as a rule, bilateral or trilateral, composed (that is) of two or three letters, all of which are consonants. The consonants determine the general sense of the words, and are alone expressed in the primitive writing; the vowel sounds do but modify more ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... that in verses written about three hundred years ago there should be found some crudities in style, some lapses in syntax, and not a few words strange to us or having a meaning somewhat different from their present significance. Among such lapses in syntax we find the slight confusion of tenses in the first stanza, caused in the poet's mind by the necessity of making a rhyme for France, though this might have ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... and epitaphs show us that the language of the common people in the provinces did not differ materially from that spoken in Italy. It was the language of the Roman soldier, colonist, and trader, with common characteristics in the way of diction, form, phraseology, and syntax, dropping into some slight local peculiarities, but kept essentially a unit by the desire which each community felt to imitate its officials and ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... vicissitudes attendant on pioneer life. The new country and poverty of his parents prevented his receiving a common English education, and it was not until after he was of age that he mastered Murray's syntax and ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... of the Babylonian-Assyrian language has been clearly set forth in all its essential particulars: the substantive and verb formation is as definitely known as that of any other Semitic language, the general principles of the syntax, as well as many detailed points, have been carefully investigated, and as for the reading of the cuneiform texts, thanks to the various helps at our disposal, and the further elucidation of the various principles that the Babylonians ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... in Comanche. I was not so sure of the correctness of my words— either of the pronunciation or the syntax—but I had the gratification to perceive that I was understood. Perhaps my gestures helped the savages to comprehend me—the meaning of these was not to ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... fact that Rowley used constantly the possessive pronominal form itts, instead of his; or the other fact that he used the termination en in the singular of the verb, was alone enough to stamp the poems as spurious. Tyrwhitt also showed that the syntax, diction, idioms, and stanza forms were modern; that if modern words were substituted throughout for the antique, and the spelling modernized, the verse would read like eighteenth-century work. "If anyone," says Scott, in his review of the Southey and Cottle edition, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... an influence on the new age greater than yours, more largely prepared the way of the newest music. You are indeed the good friend of all who dream of a new musical language, a new musical syntax and balance and structure, and set out to explore the vast, vague regions, the terra incognita of tone. For you are their ancestor. If, in its general, homophonic nature, your work belongs primarily to the romantic period, your conviction that ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... impossible. It is a literature which by general admission is now the richest and most liberal in the world of living speech. English is a tongue less sonorous than Italian, less fine than French, less homely than German, but more expressive, more flexible, than these and all others. Its syntax imposes no burdens, its traditions are weighty only upon the vulgar and the bizarre. Without its literary history, American literature in general, and usually in particular, is not to be understood. That we have sprung from a Puritanical loin, and been nourished ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... possession of him. By this time his clothes are off, and he is snug in bed; not a wink can he sleep; that "fain" is domineering over him,—and he breaks out into what is as genuine passion and poetry, as anything from Sappho to Tennyson—abrupt, vivid, heedless of syntax. "Simmer's a pleasant time." Would any of our greatest geniuses, being limited to one word, have done better than take "pleasant?" and then the fine vagueness of "time!" "Flowers o' every color;" ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... preserved by memory amongst the Gitanos, its grammatical peculiarities have disappeared, the entire language having been modified and subjected to the rules of Spanish grammar, with which it now coincides in syntax, in the conjugation of verbs, and in the declension of its nouns. Were it possible or necessary to collect all the relics of this speech, they would probably amount to four or five thousand words; ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... addressing a mass meeting called to "ratify" the declaration of war, and on the following day a courier started for Washington with a letter from Jackson tendering the services of twenty-five hundred Tennesseeans and assuring the President, with better patriotism than syntax, that wherever it might please him to find a place of duty for these men he could depend upon them to stay "till they or ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... very "informal" approach to grammar and syntax; so apparently did his editor. I corrected several obvious errors in the book and listed them at the end of the text. Many more doubtful spellings and countless abbreviations remain as they ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... adjuvant strain is found in the enthusiasm of Slang. Slowly its rhetorical power has won foothold in the language. It has won many a verb and substantive, it has conquered idiom and diction, and now it is strong enough to assault the very syntax of our ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... previous. I had expected 'food' an' wouldn't have hardly batted an' eye at 'viands,' an' the caliginous part of it is good, only, if you aim to obfuscate my convolutions you'll have to dig a little deeper. Entirely irrelevant to syntax an' the allied trades, as the feller says, I'll add that them leggin's of yourn is on the wrong legs, an' here comes Winthrup ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... astonishment, imitated the doctor's voice, and quoted prosody syntax, and Latin. Timothy and I were still in astonishment, when he continued, "If I had not found out that you were in want of employ, and further, that your services would be useful to me, I should not have made this ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... have meant, not to turn from one language into another, but to explain the construction, or what is called by the Greek name syntax, much like what in regard to a single word ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... sphere of the first wants, not one of them knew how to express in writing any thing but ideas of sense and wants of the first necessity. The nature of the verb, the relations of tenses, that of other words comprehended in the phrase, and which form the syntax of languages, were utterly unknown to them. And, indeed, how could they answer the most trifling question? Every thing in the construction of a period ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... of style, acuteness of perception, and a more than common accuracy of discrimination; and Mrs. Piozzi brought to the task, a jargon long since become proverbial for its vulgarity, an utter incapacity of defining a single term in the language, and just as much Latin from a child's syntax as sufficed to expose the ignorance she so anxiously labours to conceal." See Baviad ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... well-meaning young lady who wrote me the other day from America that her epistle was prompted "neither by love nor admiration." If I hint that popular lady novelists do not invariably produce masterpieces of style and syntax, I am accused of inflicting the "tarantulous bites of envious detractors." I am driven—most reluctantly—to a suspicion that has long been faintly glimmering in my bosom, a suspicion that ladies have no sense of humour. It is gravely pointed out to me by incensed ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... formed. Whittier in fact had not arrived at the clear splendor of his later work without some earlier turbidity; he was still from time to time capable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn. As for the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' her syntax was such a snare to her that it sometimes needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the assistant editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction of solecisms, in transposition ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... "instep." And Trimble was temporarily suspended from the service of the Conversation Club because he had put a decimal dot in the wrong place. Public feeling ran so high that any departure from the rules of syntax or algebra was regarded as treason against the house, and dealt ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... to make a show of education; but I was disinclined to be overdone in syntax by a mere Indian, a member of a race to which we owe nothing except the land on which the United States ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... regard to the parts of speech. At the end of three weeks nobody in the city had fired even a blank syllable in my direction except the waiter in the grub emporium where I fed. And as his outpourings of syntax wasn't nothing but plagiarisms from the bill of fare, he never satisfied my yearnings, which was to have somebody hit. If I stood next to a man at a bar he'd edge off and give a Baldwin-Ziegler look as if he suspected me of having the North Pole concealed on my person. I began to ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... brickbats, and it is the effort of dodging these which perhaps distracts the mind from his message. (Is he a Marinettist, I wonder?) There are not enough words in the language for him, so he invents fresh ones at will; while as for grammar and syntax he passionately throttled them in Chapter I.; nor did they recover. I will own that notwithstanding all this the author has a way of making you read on to find out what it is all about. You don't find out; but there, life's like that, isn't it? The author's ideas ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... "To Whom it may Concern" was not his only attempt at influential composition. He sometimes persuaded himself that he had literary ability; but his orthography and pronunciation were worse than his syntax. The paper deposited with J. S. Clarke was useful as showing his power to entertain a deliberate purpose. It has one or two smart ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... phraseology, and seldom final. The subtle artfulness of Stevenson is beyond him; but he has a rarer quality—that subtler artlessness which has belonged in some measure to all the greater writers of sentiment. It is a quality independent of the mechanics of writing; whether the author echoes the syntax of Addison or the diction of Goldsmith is an indifferent question. All that we know is that, through his use of words or in spite of it, a new melody has come into being, a golden motif which is to ring in the world's ears nobody knows ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... the parts of speech in a simple form in the third and fourth grades and in each succeeding year to review these topics, gradually enlarging and expanding the definitions, inflections, and constructions into a fuller etymology and syntax. In United States history we are beginning to adopt a similar plan of repetitions, and the frequent reviews in arithmetic are designed to make good the lack of thoroughness and mastery which should characterize each successive grade ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... Capitaine," he continued aloud, "if I had used such French in my exercises at the Lycee my instituteur would have said I deserved to be shot. Pray allow me to make it a little more graceful." But the Prussian's ignorance of French syntax was only equalled by his suspicion of it. The maire's irony merely irritated him and his coolness puzzled him. "I give you thirty seconds to sign," he said, as he took out his watch and the inevitable revolver. The maire took up a needle-like pen, dipped it in the ink, and with a sigh wrote ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... go hang. But, do you know what my trouble is now? Though I can't, for the life of me, understand your words, the music haunts me. Now, it's just the other way round with the Pundit. His words are clear enough, and they obey the rules of syntax quite correctly. But the tune!—No, it's no use telling you ...
— The Cycle of Spring • Rabindranath Tagore
... Bowyer, and made of the elder scholar, Middleton by name, a steady friend and counselor for years. Yet at this time Coleridge was considered by the lower-master, under whom he was, "a dull and inept scholar who could not be made to repeat a single rule of syntax, although he would give a rule in his own way." The life, however, of this great school, with all its injudicious liberties and confinements, must have been anything but a healthy one. Starved and solitary, careless of ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... some would say the finest, works of classical music by an American. It reflects the musical innovations of its creator, featuring revolutionary atmospheric effects, unprecedented atonal musical syntax, and surprising technical approaches to playing the piano, such as pressing down on over 10 notes simultaneously using a flat ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... days would be well spent and full of happiness. But time forbade the indulgence, as time generally forbids all such luxuries to the workers in the world. Only those whose occupation in life is the pursuit of pleasure can, like Dr. Syntax, go off in search of the picturesque, and wander about at their own sweet desire like a will-o'-the-wisp. Such luxuries were not ours; and so it came to pass that, very soon after we had seen the sad procession winding down the hill, we were ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... best usage, which you, poor fellow! are not. I am therefore able to decide this matter without argument or citations, and your best course is to take my corrections in silence or with thankfulness." It is easy to understand how all interest in orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody speedily disappears in a controversy of this sort, and how the disputants begin to burn with mutual dislike, and how each longs to inflict pain and anguish on his opponent, and make him, no matter by what means, an object of popular pity and contempt, and make his parts ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... and indeed of awe, with which a scholar approaches the task of translating the Agamemnon depends directly on its greatness as poetry. It is in part a matter of diction. The language of Aeschylus is an extraordinary thing, the syntax stiff and simple, the vocabulary obscure, unexpected, and steeped in splendour. Its peculiarities cannot be disregarded, or the translation will be false in character. Yet not Milton himself could produce in English the same great music, and a translator who ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... ye pale professors, who drilled me in syntax and scansion, ye would deem me ungrateful indeed were I to give utterance to the contempt and indignation which I then felt for ye—then, when I looked back upon ten years of wasted existence spent under your tutelage—then, when, after believing myself an educated man, the illusion vanished, ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... imports a distinct and clear idea of itself; and it is not to lose its importance and dignity, it is not to be turned into a poor, ambiguous, senseless, unmeaning adjective, for the purpose of accommodating any new set of political notions. Sir, we reject his new rules of syntax altogether. We will not give up our forms of political speech to the grammarians of the school of nullification. By the Constitution, we mean, not a "constitutional compact," but, simply and directly, the Constitution, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... obtain estimates for printing the New Testament, of which he had reported to Mr. Fuller:—"It has undergone one correction, but must undergo several more. I employ a pundit merely for this purpose, with whom I go through the whole in as exact a manner as I can. He judges of the style and syntax, and I of the faithfulness of the translation. I have, however, translated several chapters together, which have not required any alteration in the syntax whatever: yet I always submit this article entirely to his judgment. I can also, by hearing him read, judge whether he understands ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... era which professors still persist in calling the Great Age, hardly stimulated Des Esseintes. With its carefully premeditated style, its sameness, its stripping of supple syntax, its poverty of color and nuance, this language, pruned of all the rugged and often rich expressions of the preceding ages, was confined to the enunciation of the majestic banalities, the empty commonplaces tiresomely reiterated by the rhetoricians and poets; but it betrayed such a lack of curiosity ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Grammarians may criticize the syntax of the President's message, and the style. It reads uneasy, forced, tortuous, and it declares that it is impossible to subdue the rebels by force of arms. Of course it is impossible with Lincoln for President, ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... passage give the richest individual words their penetrating power, just as the weight of the axe-head sinks the blade into the wood. "Futurist" poets like Marinetti have protested against the bonds of syntax, the necessity of logical subject and predicate, and have experimented with nouns alone. "Words delivered from the fetters of punctuation," says Marinetti, "will flash against one another, will interlace their various forms of magnetism, and follow the uninterrupted dynamics of force." [Footnote: ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... not onely skill to reade most written hands, but to decline all the nouns, conjugate the verbs regular, and most of ye irregular; learn'd out "Puerilis," got by heart almost ye entire vocabularie of Latine and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turne English into Latine, and vice versa, construe and prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, elipses, and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comenius's ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... the entirety of a satisfactory elementary education. Like the kindergarten, the elementary school must touch life; like the kindergarten, it must provide for child needs. Everywhere schools are turning from the old methods of teaching spelling, multiplication, and syntax to the new methods of teaching children,—yes, and teaching them those things which they need, irrespective of name. Three R's no longer suffice. The child requires training from the Alpha to ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... likewise been taught nothing. But he knew the meaning of a few obsolete words in a few plays of Shakespeare. He had not learnt how to express himself orally in any language, but through hard drilling he was so genuinely erudite in accidence and syntax that he could parse and analyse with superb assurance the most magnificent sentences of Milton, Virgil, and Racine. This skill, together with an equal skill in utilising the elementary properties of numbers and geometrical figures, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... quasi-artistic accomplishments and a knowledge of processes and incidents which do not conduce directly to the furtherance of human life. So, for instance, in our time there is the knowledge of the dead languages and the occult sciences; of correct spelling; of syntax and prosody; of the various forms of domestic music and other household art; of the latest properties of dress, furniture, and equipage; of games, sports, and fancy-bred animals, such as dogs and race-horses. In ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... unnatural animosity against Great Britain, and every measure which she was supposed to approve. In the hurly-burly of wind and dust that was blown up under that passing cloud, it is not to be wondered that Dickens and copyright were as completely forgotten as orthography, etymology, syntax and prosody, and whatever else goes to the art of using language correctly. A strip of land that would not purchase the copyright of an almanac, became the subject of the fiercest congressional interest; and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... intellectual development, and checking political progress. Ingenious speculations about the possible organisation of the working classes and grandiose views of the future of humanity are so much more interesting and agreeable than the rules of Latin syntax ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the name derives from their initials). It is characterized by C-like syntax, a declaration-free approach to variable typing and declarations, associative arrays, and field-oriented text processing. See also {Perl}. 2. n. Editing term for an expression awkward to manipulate through normal {regexp} facilities (for example, one containing ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... and I have never been quite sure of her syntax to this day. "Them! It's Mr. and Mrs. Hasketh, and some young lady! I saw them through the window coming ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... syntax, and his unreasoning loyalty to Billings is an established fact of such standing that his remarks ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... like wheels and beams and valves so much better than I like syntax and subjunctives," he urged. "I'd be willing to work for it, papa; it's interesting and it really counts for something, ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... language is completed. There is, indeed, no tribe so undeveloped as to use the primitive forms of speech. The most savage of the races of mankind have made some progress in the art of combining words, gained some ideas of syntax and grammatical forms. Yet in certain instances the progress has been very slight, and in all we can see the living traces of the earlier method of speech from which ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... I am very guilty; I should have written to you long ago; and now, though it must be done, I am so stupid that I can only boldly recapitulate. A phrase of three members is the outside of my syntax. ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pseudo-antique strophe such as Klopstock often used; the substance a rhetorical denunciation of military ambition. The most awful curses are imprecated upon the head of the ruthless 'conqueror', whose badness is portrayed in lurid images and wild syntax that fairly rack the German language.[9] No wonder that editor Haug cautioned the young poet against nonsense, obscurity and ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... America," "that Charles I died in his bed," "that all philosophers are wise," are propositions. Not any series of words is a proposition, but only such series of words as have "meaning," or, in our phraseology, "objective reference." Given the meanings of separate words, and the rules of syntax, the meaning of a proposition is determinate. This is the reason why we can understand a sentence we never heard before. You probably never heard before the proposition "that the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands habitually eat stewed hippopotamus for dinner," but there is ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... last a prevailing impression that novel-writing must be tremendous fun; and this is so cheering that it is really impossible to be angry with her. Otherwise I might have some very sharp things to say about her light-hearted disregard of syntax and punctuation. Her pronouns, for example, are so elusive that not only am I frequently in doubt as to whom the heroine will marry in the end but as to which of the characters is speaking at any given moment. And not infrequently what can only be careless proofreading leaves sentences ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... part as yet, but it is of course certain that the distinction of masculine and feminine existed in the spoken language, and it must exist somewhere in the glyphs. And it will have to be a prefix, not a postfix; for what I may call the syntax of glyph formation must follow that of the speech. At the bottom of Dres. 61 and 62 are seven identical Oc-glyphs with subfix, and with prefixes. Five of these prefixes are faces with the woman's curl, recognized on ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... bathed at intervals with a rag, he was regarded by most of us as absolute scum. The German master, a tall, good-looking man, was treated as utterly incompetent because, when he asked a question in grammar or syntax, he walked up and down with the book in front of him, and quite plainly compared the answer with the book. We boys thought that anyone could be a master, with a book in his hand. History and Geography were taught by an old man, overflowing with good-humour, ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... some things—rhapsodic prose-poems, weak in syntax but strong in the quality miscalled imagination. Her pen name was George Bishop: following the example of the three Georges so dear to the believer in sexless literature—George Sand, George Eliot and George Egerton. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... followed, though not for the sake of reading books, for except the Bible and the Prayer-Book Hyacinth was taught to read no English books. He learned Latin after a fashion, not with nice attention to complexities of syntax, but as a language meant to be used, read, and even spoken now and then ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... fairly at a loss. The figure which Martial grammarians call "the suppressed alternative" is a great favourite, and derives peculiar force from the varied emphasis their syntax allows. But, resolved not to understand a meaning much more distinctly conveyed in her words than in my translation, I replied, "I shall say nothing then, except—don't do it again;" and I extricated ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... of Stevenson's style cannot be exhausted in a description of his use of individual words or his memory of individual phrases. His mastery of syntax, the orderly and emphatic arrangement of words in sentences, a branch of art so seldom mastered, was even greater. And here he could owe no great debt to his romantic predecessors in prose. Dumas, it ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... Elbert Hubbard says, "He writes so well that he grows enamoured of his own style and is subdued like the dyer's hand; he becomes intoxicated on the lure of lines and the roll of phrases. He is woozy on words—locoed by syntax and prosody. The libation he pours is flavoured with euphues. It is all like a cherry in a morning Martini." A phrase which Remy de Gourmont uses to describe Villiers de l'Isle Adam might be applied with equal success to the author of "The Lords of the Ghostland": ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... the sex. That species of knowledge, which appears to be the result of reflection rather than of science, sits peculiarly well on women. It is not uncommon to find a lady, who, though she does not know a rule of Syntax, scarcely ever violates one; and who constructs every sentence she utters, with more propriety than many a learned dunce, who has every rule of Aristotle by heart, and who can lace his own thread-bare discourse with the golden shreds of ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... disputations; to see how proud they are of talking such hard gibberish, and stammering out such blundering distinctions, as the auditors perhaps may sometimes gape at, but seldom apprehend: and they take such a liberty in their speaking of Latin, that they scorn to stick at the exactness of syntax or concord; pretending it is below the majesty of a divine to talk like a pedagogue, and be tied to the slavish observance of ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... remarks read as gracefully as Addison's 'Spectator.' I knew a phonographer in Washington whose entire business it was to weed out from Congressmen's speeches the sins against Anglo-Saxon; but the work was too much for him, and he died of delirium tremens, from having drank too much of the wine of syntax, in his ravings imagining that 'interrogations' were crawling over him like snakes, and that 'interjections' were thrusting him through with daggers and 'periods' struck him like bullets, and his body seemed torn apart by disjunctive conjunctions. No, Mr. Givemfits, you are too ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... 'sumphonia' (Lodge) 'symphony'; 'prototypon' (Jackson) 'prototype'; 'synonymon' (Jeremy Taylor) or 'synonymum' (Hacket), and 'synonyma' (Milton, prose), became severally 'synonym' and 'synonyms'; 'syntaxis' (Fuller) became 'syntax'; 'extasis' (Burton) 'ecstasy'; 'parallelogrammon' (Holland) 'parallelogram'; 'programma' (Warton) 'program'; 'epitheton' (Cowell) 'epithet'; 'epocha' (South) 'epoch'; 'biographia' (Dryden) 'biography'; 'apostata' (Massinger) ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... ancestor, and to remove allusions open to ignorant misconstruction. Instead, therefore, of giving an exact transcript of the original poems, he set himself to soften down their harshness, to clear away their obscurity, to amplify, transpose, and mutilate according to his own ideas of syntax, taste, and rhetoric. On the Dantesque ruggedness of Michael Angelo he engrafted the prettiness of the seventeenth Petrarchisti; and where he thought the morality of the poems was questionable, especially in the case of those addressed to Cavalieri, he did not hesitate to introduce ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... and the Master discuss these knotty points of honor and expediency together, do you, as a recreation from the Greek syntax? I should like to ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... only, like the Iliad, as a continuation of that series of cyclic poems, which have already been candidates for bestowing immortality upon, at the same time that they receive it from, his character and adventures. In this point of view I have violated no rule of syntax in beginning my composition with a conjunction; the full stop which closes the poem continued by me being, like the full stops at the end of the Iliad and Odyssey, a full stop of a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... in the entertainment there came a wearisome dissertation on harmonic inflections, double emphasis, the echoing words, and the monotones. But, to borrow from Meg Dods, "Oh, what a style of language!" The elocutionist, evidently an untaught and grossly ignorant man, had not an idea of composition. Syntax, grammar, and good sense, were set at nought in every sentence; but then, on the other hand, the inflections were carefully maintained, and went rising and falling over the nonsense beneath, like the wave of some shallow bay over a bottom of mud and comminuted sea-weed. After the ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... painted poems and made poetry that is pictorial. Sculpture was the only art that had resisted this universal disintegration, this imbroglio of the arts. No sculptor before Rodin had dared to break the line, dared to shiver the syntax of stone. For sculpture is a static, not a dynamic art—is it not? Let us observe the rules, though we preserve the chill spirit of the cemetery. What Mallarme attempted to do with French poetry Rodin accomplished in clay. His marbles do not represent but present emotion, are the evocation of ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... bridle (the truants of that busy day could have anticipated its application), walked down the Lawnmarket with Mr. Saddletree, each talking as he could get a word thrust in, the one on the laws of Scotland, the other on those of syntax, and neither listening to a word which his ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... or Harry:" the names like John Doe and Richard Roe are used indefinitely in Arab. Grammar and Syntax. I have noted that Amru is written and pronounced Amr: hence Amru, the Conqueror of Egypt, when told by an astrologer that Jerusalem would be taken only by a trium literarum homo, with three letters in his name sent for the Caliph Omar ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... hard, Bart. You'll have to take your book into the field as I did. After every row of corn I learned a rule of syntax or arithmetic or a fact in geography while I rested, and my thought and memory took hold of it as I plied the hoe. I don't want you to stop the reading, but from now on you must spend half of every evening on ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... intermixed[118]. This is the more remarkable, as a most extraordinary change has taken place in the language of these islands during the latter half of the eighteenth century; insomuch that the language of the Indian inhabitants consists entirely of Spanish words, but all the inflexions, the syntax, and the idiomatic manner of expression are Chilese, that is to say exactly corresponding to the Moluchese ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... were very pleasant matters to David. Even the Latin Grammar, over whose tedious pages so many boys have yawned and trifled from generation to generation, even declensions and conjugations, and rules of Syntax, and other matters which, as a general thing, are such hopeless mysteries to boys of nine or ten, were made matters of interest to David when his father took ...
— The Inglises - How the Way Opened • Margaret Murray Robertson
... Rhymes of Ironquill', and had declared his work to rank with the very greatest of American poetry—I think he called it the most truly American in flavor. I remember that at the luncheon he noted Ware's big, splendid physique and his Western liberties of syntax with a curious intentness. I believe he regarded him as being nearer his own type in mind and expression than any one he ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... jay was sternly reproved for her mutinous and treasonable assertions by the husband of her mistress, Raja Ram, who, although still a bridegroom, had not forgotten the gallant rule of his syntax— ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... full of repetition. She wrote rather doubtful grammar sometimes, and in her verses took all sorts of liberties with the metre. But oh, mesdames, if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and tetrameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that it should be insignificant in the sphere of the ideal and of the beautiful. In Art and Literature the influence of Germany has been purely superficial, although the beautiful Russian language has often been spoiled by the influence of a cumbrous German syntax. With the exception of Nietzsche, no German writer has left his mark on Russian literature. The literary influence of Great Britain has been much more extensive, and has grown enormously during the last generation. But it is the literature of France ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... who writes rhymes is not necessarily a poet. So, too, there are poets who do not express their inspirations according to the rules of metre and syntax. ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... the prophets" from the days of old, (ch. x. 7.) The great, the universal change consists in this:—"The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ." The English supplement,—"the kingdoms," is justified and required, equally by the sense and the laws of syntax: and he is a deceiver, if a scholar, who insists upon any other, to supply the ellipsis. Indeed, the omission of similar supplements, has occasioned needless obscurity to the unlearned in other parts of this book. (See chs. xix. 10; xxii. 9.) The greatest of all revolutions consists in restoring ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
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