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More "Verbiage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... His Adam's apple bobbed like a cork, and no one spoke. Finally Dr. Nesbit spoke in his high-keyed voice: "I presume legal verbiage is all they talk in ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... misery and death. By such old systems with their foolish and unreliable suggestions, of how to guide the doctor in treating diseases which have proven unworthy of respect, if merit is to be our rule of the weights and measures of intelligence. I have become so disgusted with such verbiage with the sense that follows the pens that have written treatise on disease, that I have concluded to do like Adam of old, give names that may appear novel to the reader when I wish to draw the attention ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... hypotheses, and archaiological lore that assailed me, and wish them, should they ever visit Nismes, that which was denied me—a tranquil and uninterrupted contemplation of its interesting antiquities, free from the verbiage of a conscientious cicerone, who thinks himself in duty bound to relate all that he has ever heard or read relative to the ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... Even the Holy Alliance, the pet offspring of his pietism, does not deserve the sinister reputation it has since obtained. To the other powers it seemed, at best "verbiage'' and "exalted nonsense,'' at worst an effort of the tsar to establish the hegemony of Russia on the goodwill of the smaller signatory powers. To the Liberals, then and afterwards it was clearly a hypocritical conspiracy against freedom. Yet to ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... removed until the memory of the first occurrence has faded, lies on a once used word. The causes of this anxiety for a varied expression are manifold. Where there is merely a column to fill, poverty of thought drives the hackney author into an illicit fulness, until the trick of verbiage passes from his practice into his creed, and makes him the dupe of his own puppets. A commonplace book, a dictionary of synonyms, and another of phrase and fable equip him for his task; if he be called upon to marshal his ideas on the question whether oysters breed typhoid, ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... I believe, genuine. And these foolish books, as much as anything, have helped to keep up the popular prejudice against one who, in spite of all his faults was a true pioneer of science. {15} I believe (with those moderns who have tried to do him justice) that under all his verbiage and confusion there was a vein of sound ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... what controversial battlefields of sulphurous smoke and scattering fire might it prevent. He has been called a public benefactor who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before. He is as great a benefactor, who in an age of verbiage makes one word perform the function of two. Wonderful is the precision with which this mental mechanism may be made to work. Some men can even think their best on their feet in the presence of a great assembly. ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... scientific speculation, he had the misfortune about this time to read in paper or magazine something on the subject of heredity, the idle verbiage of some half-informed scribbler. It set him anxiously thinking whether his son would develop the vices of the mother's mind, and from that day he read all the printed chatter regarding natural inheritance that he could ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... more striking results were non-existent. But the latter abound so that we can afford to overlook the innumerable failures and self-deceptions that are mixed in with them (for in everything human failure is a matter of course), and we can also overlook the verbiage of a good deal of the mind-cure literature, some of which is so moonstruck with optimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained intellect finds it almost impossible to read it ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... conceptions. Now, however, Yourii perceived that it could not have been otherwise for it was these trivial things that constituted life, the real life, full of sensations, emotions, enjoyments; and that all these lofty conceptions were but empty thoughts, vain verbiage, powerless to influence in the slightest the great mystery of life and death. Important, complete though these might be, other words, other thoughts no less weighty and important must follow ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... might ye be makin' for, then?' At this point I realised for the first time the grave disadvantages of redundance in speech, of unnecessary verbiage. There had been no earthly need for my last words, and now that my fatal fluency had found me out, for the life of me I could not think of the name of a likely place. At length, with clumsily affected carelessness, ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... of the Athenaeum contained the manifesto of the new school, written by Friedrich Schlegel, the seminal mind of the coterie. The terms of this pronunciamento are somewhat rapt and transcendental; but through its mist of verbiage, one discerns that the ideal of romantic art is announced to be: beauty for beauty's sake, the union of poetry and life, and the absolute freedom of the artist to express himself. "Romantic poetry," says Schlegel—"and, in a certain ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of folly to present these discussions to the laity in their original form, hence the necessity for condensation and presentation of the needful facts in the language of the people in whose interests the book is printed. In a book of fiction there may be need for useless verbiage for the sake of "making pages," but facts of vital importance and usefulness in our daily welfare need to be well boiled down and put into shape for ready reference. This has been done in "Mothers' Remedies" and I think it quite fulfills the ideal ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... after all, what is a work—any or every work—but a desert with fountains, and, perhaps, a grove or two every day's journey? To be sure, in mademoiselle, what we often mistake and 'pant for' as the 'cooling stream,' turns out to be the 'mirage' (critice, verbiage); but we do, at last, get to something like the temple of Jupiter Ammon, and then the waste we have passed is only remembered to gladden ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... voted to Amherst and Boscawen. Boscawen received them in person, being a member of the House of Commons. The speaker read the address, which was couched in the usual verbiage worked up by one of the select committees employed on such occasions. But Boscawen replied, as men of action should, with fewer words and much more force and point: 'Mr Speaker, Sir, I am happy to have been able ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... to get to the point. The Heptameron if not equal in narrative vigour and lightness to Boccaccio before and La Fontaine afterwards, is not in the least exposed to the charge of clumsiness of any kind, employs a simple, natural, and sufficiently picturesque vocabulary, avoids all verbiage and roundabout writing, and both in the narratives and in the connecting conversation displays a very considerable advance upon nearly all the writers of the time, except Rabelais, Marot, and Desperiers, in easy command of the vernacular. It is, therefore, not wonderful that there has, at different ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... Neither the taste of the writer nor his manner of expression was happy. Of this Dominic was quite sensible. Patronage, especially after his period of independence, was far from agreeable to him. Yet behind the verbiage, the platitudes and bombastic phrases, his ear detected a very human cry of fear and cry for help. Should he accede, doing his best to allay that fear and ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... said Of Pope, that "he could only rank with ingenious men," and that his works are superabundant with superfluous and unmeaning verbiage - his translations even replete with tautology, a fault which is to refinement as midnight is to noonday; and, what is truly surprising, that the fourth book of the Dunciad, his last publication, is more full of redundancy and incorrectness ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... within me as clearly as though written on this page. My mother had written it there, unscientifically yet indelibly, in my boyhood days, and Mr. Pound had added his few words, almost hidden beneath a mass of verbiage about Ahasuerus, and before them my forebears had every one of them left imprinted some sage injunction gained from their experience in living. So I gathered my strength to do my best. But there was a lack of definiteness ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... dead could do nothing, neither could he change his mind, but having left an indelible record of his ideas by the strenuous verbiage of his virile and inspiring rhetoric, there was no room for doubt. As in all political and religious faiths founded on the ideas of dead heroes, this made for solidarity and power and quite prevented any adaptation ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... that public speaking is the almost universal object of ambition, and consequently, both at school and at college, nothing is thought of but oratory. Vain attempts at oratory, result in nine cases out of ten, in grandiloquence and empty verbiage;—common thoughts ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... much better than the other, but I should choose to say. "The reason of his conduct was not fully explained." For, surely, the "one idea or circumstance" of his "having acted in the manner in which he did act," may be quite as forcibly named by the one word conduct, as by all this verbiage, this "substantive phrase," or "entire clause," of such ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... calculation of future pleasure and pain, or something which, in no sense, is a true account of what men do mean by right. To say that moral principles "carry conviction with them, and prove themselves" (i.e., are self-evident), unless, as we suspect, it is mere verbiage conveying nothing particular to Mr. Laing's brain, is to deny that right has reference to the consequences of action as bearing on human progress and evolution, which is to deny the very theory he wishes ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... legitimate bargain, one wonders in silence at his standard of morality and honour. Is he not a scoundrel who first gives his word of honour and afterwards tries to strike a bargain with the same? Stripped of all verbiage that is Germany's proposal in its naked immorality, and the author chronicles with pleasure that the House of Commons cried down even its discussion. It recalls to his memory the fact, that the Reichstag—Germany's highest legislative assembly—cheered ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... the quasi-historical chapters in this section (which I have followed M. Pauthier in making into a Fourth Book) are the merest verbiage and repetition of narrative formulae without the slightest value. I have therefore thought it undesirable to print all at length, and have given merely the gist (marked thus ), or an extract, of such chapters. They will ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... but even more in the marvellous vivacity and fertility of his creation. For the very first time in English prose fiction every character is alive, every incident is capable of having happened. There are lively touches in the Elizabethan romances; but they are buried in verbiage, swathed in stage costume, choked and fettered by their authors' want of art. The quality of Bunyan's knowledge of men was not much inferior to Shakespeare's, or at least to Fielding's; but the range and the results of it were cramped by his single theological ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... what the danger to himself, if he could smite a lie upon the head and kill it, he was better pleased than by a thousand lives. We hear much of Luther's doctrine about faith. Stripped of theological verbiage, that doctrine means this. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... stopped at the next floor down to take on a pair of maids, he strolled over to the shaft, and without frills or verbiage consigned me and my detail to perdition. But I liked him. He had pluck and was unafraid, and he knew, as well as I, that death ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... find it hard to unlearn that lesson. Yet, rest assured, it is not on dubious testimony, that I found my conviction of his being corrupted by the lax morality of these evil times, in which one party deems an attachment to the antient constitution an excuse for debauchery, and the other uses the verbiage of religion as a commutation for obedience to its precepts. It is most true, Eustace was publicly disgraced by Lord Hopton, accused of crimes to which he pleaded guilty, suspected of others which he faintly denied. With horror I must tell ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... such a farce to give them the courtesy title of sovereignty. I don't think you realize, never having been in this country, what a farce it really is. I am not able to write you a learned book. All I can do is to write you these letters, which are surely devoid of all legal verbiage, because I don't know any. If I were a scholar, a student of international politics, I would wrap all my statements in fine, well-chosen language, quoting treaties and acts and agreements and all the rest of it, and you wouldn't know what it all meant. I can only give you ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... poetical as well as a dramatic tragedy. With this end in view he accumulated the mass of rhetoric with which we are now so familiar. It as been Mr. IRVING's task to prune this well-meant but somewhat excessive verbiage so that the real dramatic stuff can at last "get over." But he has done no more. Any rumour to the effect that he has introduced American songs or dances, or that a "joy plank" bisects the stalls of the Savoy is untrue and deserves ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various
... traditional stories parallel in general nature to 'The Canterbury Tales.' He is generally a smooth and fluent versifier, but his fluency is his undoing; he wraps up his material in too great a mass of verbiage. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... fashionable preacher, Hortensio Felix Paravicino (q.v.), in a sermon preached before Philip IV.; [v.04 p.0985] Calderon retorted by introducing into El Principe constante a mocking reference (afterwards cancelled) to Paravicino's gongoristic verbiage, and was committed to prison. He was soon released, grew rapidly in reputation as a playwright, and, on the death of Lope de Vega in 1635, was recognized as the foremost Spanish dramatist of the age. A volume of his plays, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... My country is all right, but it's sick. It's got a nauseous dose of verbiage to spew up—something it's swallowed—something about being too proud to fight.... My brother and I couldn't stand it, so we came to France.... He was in the photo air service. He was in mufti—and about two miles up, I believe. Six Huns went for him.... And winged him. He had to land ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... magnetism in the rush of Jasper Ewold's junketing verbiage which carried the listener on the bosom of a pleasant stream. Jack was suddenly reminded that it must be very late and he had far overstayed the retiring hour of the desert, where the Eternal Painter commands ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... should rather say there were, imbibed at the university so many attachments at one time to words in place of things, that the collegian in after life became liable to reproach upon this head. Pedants are bred everywhere out of literature, and the variety in verbiage once exhibited by some university men has been justly condemned. But while such word-worms were crawling here and there out of the porches of our colleges, giants in acquirement were striding over them in their petty ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... succeeding years make it easy to comprehend the failure of the project: the villanously rhymed effusions fairly imposthumate all the ribald vulgarity of the times; coarseness and dulness of subject and thought being rivalled only by the super-coarseness of the verbiage. I do not say that the newspapers provoked these stupid rhymes, which are about as much poetry as is a game of crambo; but I do not find them until "newspaper-time," and fear the extra circulation through the weekly press ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Balder had so far forgotten himself as to throw Hiero into the sea; but it was the part of good-breeding, as well as of Christianity, to forget such errors, and heal the bruise with an extra application of balsamic verbiage. ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... Lamb by their petty tradesman morality, and which hardly represent a very lofty ideal. But the recognised representative of the moralists was the ponderous Samuel Johnson. It is hard when reading the Rambler to recognise the massive common sense and deep feeling struggling with the ponderous verbiage and elephantine facetiousness; yet it was not only a treasure of wisdom to the learned ladies, Mrs. Chapone, and Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and the like, who were now beginning to appear, but was received, ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... read plenty of ancient verbiage on that subject, I have read likewise most of what has been said by modern writers, but neither all that has been said, nor what I have thought about it, when I was young and now that I am no longer so, nothing, in fact, can make me agree that love is a trifling vanity. It ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... beginning in 1704, it was not until 1763 that a bookstore pulled out the stops with half a column of lively prose in behalf of Dr. Hill's four unpatented nostrums.[41] It seems a safe assumption that not only the medicines but the verbiage were imported from London, where Dr. Hill had been at work endeavoring to restore a Greek secret which "converts a Glass of Water into the Nature and Quality of Asses Milk, with the ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... exercised a legitimate poetical ingenuity by versifying such knowledge as he had. These various causes make Manilius one of the most difficult of authors. Few can wade through the mingled solecisms in language and mistakes in science, the empty verbiage that dilates on a platitude in one place, and the jejune abstract that hurries over a knotty argument in another, without regretting that so unreadable a poet should have ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... them: an they would receive it, so; an they would not receive it, so. There was no offence against decorum in all this; nothing to condemn, to damn. Not an irreverent symptom of a sound was to be heard. The procession of verbiage stalked on through four and five acts, no one venturing to predict what would come of it, when, towards the winding-up of the latter, Antonio, with an irrelevancy that seemed to stagger Elvira herself,—for she had been coolly arguing the point of honor with him,—suddenly whips out a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... the Secretary," said she at last, a nervous laugh quivering in her first words, "from all this wondrous verbiage I am to take it that ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... occurred about the business of the day. Once, twice, and thrice I tried to slide the subject in, but was discouraged by the stoic apathy of Rufe, and beaten down before the pouring verbiage of his wife. There is nothing of the Indian brave about me, and I began to grill with impatience. At last, like a highway robber, I cornered Hanson, and bade him stand and deliver his business. Thereupon he gravely rose, as though to hint that this was not a proper place, nor ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in a like state of preparedness, with his thoughts already gathered, moulded, polished and clothed in the words that fit them best; with every argument as definite and well knitted as a proposition in Euclid; the page swept clear of superfluous verbiage; each idea standing out bright as a jewel in its setting, and the whole so thoroughly committed to memory that he can defy the most critical to discover a trace of effort. He should come, holding his elocutionary ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... of Mr. Verity's friends. It is impossible to comprehend what is meant by such a statement as that every truth is somehow connected with religion. It may be that the notion—if it really is not, as I suspect it to be, mere verbiage and clap-trap, used by certain fools to mislead others—means that there is some such coherency between all truths as there is, for instance, between the elements of the body. I would admit that, but is not blood a different and perfectly severable thing from bone? Each ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... only carried out the consequences of the great principles which Judaism had established, but which the official classes of the nation tended more and more to despise. The Greek and Roman prayers were almost always mere egotistical verbiage. Never had Pagan priest said to the faithful, "If thou bring thy offering to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled with thy brother, ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... Plato the honour of patronising him, as a Representative Man; but their real text-book, you will find, is Proclus. That hapless philosophaster's a priori method, even his very verbiage, is dear to their souls; for they copy it through wet and dry, through sense and nonsense. But as for Plato-when I find them using Plato's weapons, I shall believe in their understanding and love ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... laid down the waiting pen. Eells drew up his lip, Lapham shuffled uneasily, and Wilhelmina took up the contract. She glanced through it page by page, dipping in here and there and then turning impatiently ahead; and as she struggled with its verbiage the sweat burst from Eells' face and ran ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... time forward, and deluged him with interviews, canvasses, meetings, great and little, and perpetual calls on his attention. His conscientiousness made him work almost unremittingly, for he determined his part in the struggle to be far more than a matter of mere verbiage and smiles. Mr. Chrysler, like a sensible fellow-Member, quite comprehended the situation, and was content to note the admirable way in which his friend did everything; to receive a smile or friendly direction here and there, and to fall back on the attentions of ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... poetry from Dryden, whom, whenever an opportunity was presented, he praised through the whole period of his existence with unvaried liberality; and perhaps his character may receive some illustration, of a comparison he instituted between him and the man whose pupil he was" much of the verbiage may be eliminated and the ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... psychology. France has always believed that to say a thing is the same as to do it, as though speech were action, as though rhetoric were capable of modifying the tendencies, habits, and character of real beings, and as though verbiage were an efficient substitute for ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... man, could gather but a fraction of its import—and the sailors nothing. No profanity in giving orders, no sheath-knives, Midway Island and any other port the master may direct, not to exceed six calendar months, and to this port to be paid off: so it seemed to run, with surprising verbiage; so ended. And with the end, the commissioner, in each case, fetched a deep breath, resumed his natural voice, and proceeded to business. "Now, my man," he would say, "you ship A. B. at so many dollars, American gold coin. Sign your name here, if you have one, ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... constant tautology and verbiage, with not infrequent flatness, are on all this gracious story as told by Chrestien.[25] Among the traps and temptations which are thrown in Lancelot's way to the Queen is one of a highly "sensational" nature. In the night Lancelot hears a damsel, who is his hostess, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... v. 1, and ix. 2, the temple worship was assiduously practised, but without a living piety of heart, and in a hypocritical and self-justifying manner; the complaints in this regard remind us vividly of similar ones of the prophet Malachi—chap. i. 6, etc." What then is the basis for all this verbiage about the temple worship? Here it is: "Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God, and be more ready to hear than to give the sacrifice of fools: for they consider not that they do evil." This sentence shows that it is ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... stuff of the same kind, the inconceivable merits and the superhuman perfections of his eternal Panselinos. The dissertations of this spiritual schoolmaster diverted me very little, as you may well suppose, and I was furious that in spite of myself his tiresome verbiage rooted itself in my memory, which is the most tenacious ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... a possibility in every service, possibly, but it ought to be. It is a possibility in every successful service. I heard of a preacher once who thought that what his congregation wanted was beautiful epigrams. He thought that they were more hungry for bejeweled verbiage than for the Bread of Life. He thought they were thirsting more for a stream of eloquence than for the Water of Life. But he was mistaken. And once he came into the pulpit to find a card lying before him on which was written this word: "Sir, we ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... happy to record, but for the fact that it would occupy more than half of one number of the JOURNAL OF MAN. Nevertheless, I cannot deprive my readers of the pleasure and amusement derived from this correspondence. I have condensed the responses into a readable compass leaving out their useless verbiage, and putting them in a poetic form, as poetry best expresses the essence and spirit of an author's thought. I think the learned gentlemen, if they could peruse these doggerel rhymes, would acknowledge that their meaning has been expressed even more plainly and forcibly than in their own prose. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... metaphors and hyperboles, paraded lumbering predicates and hurled out epithets, foaming and floundering. He had started so many things in a speech that he scarce knew when or how to stop. Commons, both sides, rather liked to hear him struggle with his verbiage. Later he developed the rapier thrust, some snatches of humor, a trifle of contempt. He learned the value of playing with a rhetorical period that he might later leap upon a climax. Frank B. Carvell was periodically egged on to bait the member of Portage. ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... ability employing itself with literature which was so unlike literary ability. Godolphin conceived perfectly of the literary intention in the fine passages of the play, and enjoyed their beauty, but he did not value them any more than the poorest and crudest verbiage that promised him a point. In fact, Maxwell found that in two or three places the actor was making a wholly wrong version of his words, and maturing in his mind an effect from his error that he was rather loath to give up, though when he was instructed ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... and must be clear and straightforward. It can still remain a very attractive instrument of speech or writing, and in Addison's hands it fulfilled to perfection the needs of the essay style. He avoids verbiage and excessive adornment, he is content to tell what he sees or knows or thinks as simply as possible (and even with a tendency towards the conversational), and he has an inimitable feeling for just the right word, just the most elegantly turned phrase and period. Do not imagine this sort ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... may throw aside a mass of useless verbiage, with which our inquiry is usually encumbered. We are eternally told that Kentucky has fallen behind Ohio, and Virginia behind Pennsylvania, because their energies have been crippled, and their ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... had been overdone, and it had been a capital error in Socrates to make that interpretation exclusive and to substitute it for natural philosophy. Locke, who was himself a medical man, knew what a black cloak for ignorance and villainy Scholastic verbiage might be in that profession. He also knew, being an enthusiast for experimental science, that in order to control the movement of matter—which is to realise those virtues and perfections—it is better to trace the movement of matter materialistically; for it is in ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... of Bernard Shaw would, I think, certainly have seen through this fallacy and verbiage had it not been that another important event about this time came to the help of Nietzsche and established the Superman on his pedestal. It is the third of the things which I have called stepping-stones to Man and Superman, and it is very important. It is ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... nihil [Lat.]; a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing; sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. nonsense, utter nonsense, gibberish; jargon, jabber, mere words, hocus-pocus, fustian, rant, bombast, balderdash, palaver, flummery, verbiage, babble, baverdage, baragouin^, platitude, niaiserie^; inanity; flap-doodle; rigmarole, rodomontade; truism; nugae canorae [Lat.]; twaddle, twattle, fudge, trash, garbage, humbug; poppy-cock [U.S.]; stuff, stuff and nonsense; bosh, rubbish, moonshine, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... there is an immense deal of Balzac—of the great artist who was so capable at times of self-deceptive charlatanism. "Louis Lambert," as a whole, is now quite unreadable; it contains some admirable descriptions, but the "scientific" portion is mere fantastic verbiage. There is something extremely characteristic in the way Balzac speaks of its having been optional with him to make it a "purely learned" work. His pretentiousness was simply colossal, and there is nothing surprising ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... Ishii-Lansing Agreement was concluded, by which "the Government of the United States recognizes that Japan has special interests in China, particularly for the parts to which her possessions are contiguous." The rest of the agreement (which is long) consists of empty verbiage.[68] ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... "It is more agreeable, without a doubt, to take lunch with Monsieur Carl Freudenberg, and to speak openly, than to exchange long-winded interviews, the true meaning of which is too much concealed by diplomatic verbiage, with the excellent gentleman to whose good offices are intrusted the destinies of Herr ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... recalled the full force of what he had only half apprehended at earlier times, particularly of that sweet kiss she had impressed on his lips when she supposed him dying,—these vivid realizations are difficult to tell in slow verbiage. He could remain there no longer, and with an electrified heart ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... hold of it and dived in the verbiage. He came up again with a discovery. In spite of its feebleness, verbosity, obscurity, and idiotic way of expressing itself, the Deed managed to convey to David and Mrs. Dodd a life interest in nine thousand five hundred pounds, with reversion ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... indulging in sheer doggerel. If his lines do not stagnate, they foam and fret like a mountain brook, instead of flowing continuously and majestically like a great river. He surpasses Pope chiefly, as it seems to me, where Pope's conventional verbiage smothers and conceals some vivid image from nature. Pope, of course, was a thorough man of forms, and when he has to speak of sea or sky or mountain generally draws upon the current coin of poetic phraseology, which has lost all sharpness of impression ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... ere he die By love I mean the forgetfulness of self Cheapness of this verbiage Delighting in the present moment Distrust of her own feelings to give way to them completely "Each of us," he said, "has a shadow in those places." Fear of meddling too much, of not meddling enough Governed ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... She answered, 'then ye know the Prince?' and he: 'The climax of his age! as though there were One rose in all the world, your Highness that, He worships your ideal:' she replied: 'We scarcely thought in our own hall to hear This barren verbiage, current among men, Light coin, the tinsel clink of compliment. Your flight from out your bookless wilds would seem As arguing love of knowledge and of power; Your language proves you still the child. Indeed, We dream not of him: when we set our hand To this great work, ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... step; or possibly its members thought that, as the greater includes the less, should freedom of conscience be established a state church would be impossible, and the article might therefore be stripped of supererogation and verbiage. At any rate, it was reduced one half, and finally adopted in this simpler form: "That religion, or the duty we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and, therefore, all men are equally ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... character which he had assumed and worn until it seemed even to him his own, that he felt as if he were constrained to some ghastly masquerade. Even the society of the moonshiners as their guest was a reproach to one who had always piously, and in such involuted and redundant verbiage, spurned the ways and haunts of the evil-doer. According to the dictates of policy he should have rested content with his advantage over the silenced lad. But his sense of injury engendered a desire of reprisal, and he impulsively carried the ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... work is well written and printed, and its verbiage such as to be comprehensible to the workman no less than to the master. The careful and general perusal of a work of this nature cannot but be attended by beneficial results of a far-reaching nature, and we therefore heartily recommend the book to our readers. ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... from the foot-lights. In operatic performances, however, the words are of very inferior importance to the music; the composer quite eclipses the author. A musician has been known to call a libretto the "verbiage" of his opera. The term was not perhaps altogether inappropriate. Even actors are apt to underrate the importance of the speeches they are called upon to deliver, laying the greater stress upon the "business" they propose to originate, or the scenic effects ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... determined to know the worst once for all. The time had come when I must. My doctor at home had put me off with vague hopes and perhapses. So I went to a noted physician in the city. I told him I wanted the whole truth—I made him tell it. Stripped of all softening verbiage it is this: I have perhaps eight months or a year ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Nature, it is true, is a part of Revelation—a much greater part doubtless than is yet believed—and one could have anticipated nothing but harmony here. But that a derived Theology, in spite of the venerable verbiage which has gathered round it, should be at bottom and in all cardinal respects so faithful a transcript of "the truth as it is in Nature" came as a surprise and to me at least as a rebuke. How, under the rigid necessity of incorporating ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... his confessor, if to secrets of State, to Prince Metternich. What the confessor may have thought of the Czar's political evangel is not known: the opinion delivered by the Minister was not a sympathetic one. "It is verbiage," said Metternich; and his master, though unwillingly, signed the treaty. With England the case was still worse. As the Prince Regent was not in Paris, Alexander had to confide the articles of the Holy Alliance to Lord Castlereagh. Of all things in the world the most incomprehensible ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... Inspiration makes short work with the usage of the best authors and ready-made elegances of diction; but where Wordsworth is not possessed by his demon, as Moliere said of Corneille, he equals Thomson in verbiage, out-Miltons Milton in artifice of style, and Latinizes his diction beyond Dryden. The fact was, that he took up his early opinions on instinct, and insensibly modified them as he studied the masters of what may be called the Middle Period of English verse.[2] ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... was sitting in the drawing-room, listening to the insinuating tones of Gedeonovsky's wearisome verbiage, he suddenly turned round, he knew not why, and caught the deep, attentive, inquiring look of Liza's eyes. That enigmatical look was directed towards him. The whole night long Lavretsky thought of it. His love was not like that of a boy, nor was it consistent with his age to sigh and ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... up of my own fancy. The attempts to lop off excrescences are not, perhaps, always happy. There might, perhaps, have been a fuller adherence to the original language and expressions; but if so, what a world of verbiage must have been retained. The Indians are prolix, and attach value to many minutiae in the relation which not only does not help forward the denouement, but is tedious and witless to the last degree. The gems of the legends—the ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... crime, carefully omitting to state the compulsion as used upon McGuire. Hawk Kennedy lied. If Peter had ever needed any further proof of the honesty of his employer he read it in the shifting eye and uncertain verbiage of his guest, whose tongue now wagged loosely while he talked of the two papers, one of which was in McGuire's possession, the other in his own. Hawk was no pleasant companion for an evening's entertainment. From the interesting adventurer of the Bermudian, Jim Coast had been slowly changing ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... a confused mass of verbiage in order to impress upon her that he was kept back by more serious considerations; that he had business on hand which it would take a long time to dispose of; that even his inheritance had been placed in jeopardy (Louise cut all this explanation short with one plain word); that, last of all, ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... emotional in his expressions. Yet with all his soberness and steadiness he possessed imagination. In its strength and depth his enthusiasm for colonization proves this, even if we omit his picture of the fancied Ludovica. But {139} as a man of action rather than of letters he instinctively omits verbiage. In some respects we suffer from Champlain's directness of mind, for on much that he saw he could have lingered with profit. But very special inducements are needed to draw him from his plain tale into a digression. Such inducements occur at times when he is writing ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... this childish and feigned regret," cried Wilhelm with rude impatience. "I pray you end the farce with less of verbiage and of pretended justice. You have his Majesty here a prisoner. You have, through my own folly, my neck at the mercy of your axe or your rope. There stands the executioner eager for his gruesome work. Finish that which you have already decided upon, and ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... which he has listened, in the newspapers next morning, can readily appreciate. Hazy ideas have become clear, mutilated and unintelligible sentences have been neatly and properly arranged, needless repetitions and tautological verbiage have disappeared; there is no sign of hesitation; hums and haws, and other inexpressible ejaculations, grunts, and interpolations find no place; the thread of an argument is shown where none was visible before, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in all the published editions of the work the text remains as it was. It is usual to credit the composer's friend, Baron van Swieten, with the "unintelligible jargon." The baron certainly had a considerable hand in the adaptation of the text. But in reality it owes its very uncouth verbiage largely to the circumstance that it was first translated from English into German, and then re-translated back into English; the words, with the exception of the first chorus, being adapted to the music. Considering the ways of translators, the best libretto in the world could ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... through the Central Empires; they had done much to arouse the subject peoples of Austria-Hungary to revolt for their freedom, and also to weaken the morale of the German people. The value of Wilson's "verbiage drives" was questioned in this country. Abroad, his insistence upon a peace of justice was generally reckoned a vital moral force in the political movements that supplemented the victories of Marshal Foch. Jugoslavs consented to ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... be fixed in the memory. Nor is this the only advantage to be gained. The act of reproducing the illustration cited will emphasise and render clear technical and mechanical features that would require many words to explain, with the attendant risk of confusing the mind by mere verbiage. ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... us, when we may, reduce phrases and even clauses to a word. Thus the clause at the beginning and the phrase at the close of the following sentence constitute sheer verbiage: "Men who have let their temper get the better of them are often in a mood to do harm to somebody." The sentence tells us nothing that may not be told in five words: "Angry ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... this description, can scarcely avoid believing that he is eminently original and impressive:— All sorts of commonplace notions and expressions are sanctified in his eyes, by the sublime ends for which they are employed; and the mystical verbiage of the methodist pulpit is repeated, till the speaker entertains no doubt that he is the elected organ of divine truth and persuasion. But if such be the common hazards of seeking inspiration from ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... perceive you both know the South Seas, wherefore, without undue expenditure of verbiage on my part, I am assured that you will appreciate the charm of my princess, the Princess Tui-nui of Talofa, the Princess ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... either of the contending parties, as that of Kant's noumenon, in the battle of impulses which rages in the breast of man. Metaphysicians, as a rule, are sadly deficient in the sense of humour; or they would surely abstain from advancing propositions which, when stripped of the verbiage in which they are disguised, appear to the profane eye to be bare ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... whirl of Paris caught me and left me little time for conjecture. I wrote once or twice to Joanna; but my letters were egotistical outpourings; the mythological picture at Menilmontant inspired sheets of excited verbiage. She replied in her pretty sympathetic way, but gave me little news of Paragot. It was hardly to be expected that she should write romantically, like a young girl foolishly in love, gushing to a bosom friend. Paragot himself, ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... mask of verbiage, however, the manifesto of the Emergency Convention of the Socialist Party of America joins with the famous Preamble of the I. W. W. and the manifestoes and programs of the Communist and Communist Labor ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... In long sentences you see processes; in short, results. Eloquence delights in long sentences, wit in short. Long sentences impress more at the time; short sentences, if nervous, cling more to the memory. From long sentences you must, in general, deduct a considerable quantum of verbiage; short have often a meagre and skeleton air. The reading of long sentences is more painful at first, less so afterward; a volume composed entirely of short sentences becomes soon as wearisome as a jest-book. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... imagination has contributed to it has been the names of the actors,—true names having been withheld, lest, perhaps, friends might be grieved,—the filling up of the dialogues, in which, while thoughts and sentiments have been remembered, the verbiage that clothed them has been forgotten, and, in a few instances, the grouping together of incidents that actually occurred at wider intervals than here represented, for the sake of ...
— The Runaway - The Adventures of Rodney Roverton • Unknown
... begin with the trifle, note something slipshod and vague in the mere verbiage, typical of those who prefer a catchword to a creed. "This cigarette business" might mean anything. It might mean Messrs. Salmon and Gluckstein's business. But the pastor at Bromley will not interfere with that, for the indignation of his school of thought, even when it is sincere, always instinctively ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... injustice regarding my poor father's speech in the City hall. He had caused me to suffer so much that I generally felt for myself when he appealed for sympathy, or provoked some pity: but I was past suffering, and letting kindly recollection divest the speech of its verbiage, I took it to my heart. It was true that he had in his blind way struck the keynote of his position, much as I myself had conceived it before. Harsh trials had made me think of my own fortunes more than of his. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... man surviving in his children, or in his works, or in the universal consciousness, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only those who suffer from affective stupidity, and who, for the rest, may be persons of a certain cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess great talent, or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... describe the mountains with their many charms. I listened to a lecture lately where a man was struggling to do this, and it was positively painful. The flowery verbiage, the accumulated adjectives, the poetical quotations were overpowering. I seemed actually sinking into luscious mellifluousness. I shook it off my fingers, as if it were maple syrup. Then, as he climbed higher and higher, on and up, never ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... could hardly suppress their jubilation. Stripped of their official verbiage, the letters informed the young men that each of them was made a corporal, Joe for valorous service in saving the lives of "three Americans entombed in a cave; Slim for heroism and presence of mind in saving and bringing back to the lines an American soldier," and Jerry "for coolness and ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... contemporaries. They are interesting in their exhibit of a bitter and eccentric individuality, witty, incisive, and expressed in a pungent and familiar style which contrasts refreshingly with the diplomatic language and glittering generalities of most congressional oratory, whose verbiage seems to keep its subject always ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Khan's message to the pope which—more or less mixed up with the vague notions about Prester John—had evidently left a deep impression upon the European mind. In translating the above sentence I have somewhat retrenched its excessive verbiage ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... hurried down the street crying an extra on the inquest. Brannan snatched one from his hand and the two men perused it eagerly. The finding, couched in usual verbiage, recited the obvious facts that Jenkins, alias Simpson, perished by strangulation and that "an association of citizens styling themselves a Committee of Vigilance," ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... artless and instinctive beneath all its sedulous art. It is no longer necessary, as I hinted above, to fight the battle of this prose. Whether it appeal to one not, no critic worth attention any longer disparages it as mere ornate and perfumed verbiage, the elaborate mannerism of a writer hiding the poverty of his thought beneath a pretentious raiment of decorated expression. It is understood to be the organic utterance of one with a vision of the world all his own striving through words, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... they perish (as he strangely thought, without apparently attempting to verify his belief) in the winter. How, he asks, can they reappear? Is it not more likely that these simple organisms are themselves regenerated? After much verbiage and ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... the pair, and then some sharp pain contracted her brows, but there was no other appearance of emotion; she would control even that instantly, and bending her head once more, listen patiently to her persecutor's verbiage. ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... over the oracular, which is likely to monopolize such assemblies. I was in that eagerness of early and incomplete knowledge which is more ready in expression than that of riper years, and it is probable that I distinguished myself by fluency of verbiage. It became customary to look to me for the most hazardous reaches of conjecture or inquiry, though certainly Mrs. Brown was worth far more than I was. I had already solved several problems which to-day are not clear to me, and I had always a ready answer to most mysteries. Talk ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... the logician's power to strip a subject bare of all superfluous and concealing verbiage, and to exhibit the gleaming jewels of truth and reality in splendid simplicity. This supreme quality, this ability to make the complex simple, the power to subordinate the non-essential, gave to his conversation, to his lectures, to his writings, and in no less degree to ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... they were to be tolerated, they were a part of us; doubtless the nether part, yet not the less a part for which we are bound to exercise a specially considerate care, or else we suffer, for we are sensitive there: this is justice but the indications by fiddle-faddle verbiage of anything objectionable to the whole in the part aroused an irritability that speedily endued him with the sense of sanity opposing lunacy; when, not having a wide command of the undecorated plain speech ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... name than verbiage for wordiness would be emptiness. Witness: "Clearness may be developed and cultivated in three ways, (a) By constantly practicing in heart and life the thoughts and ways of honesty and frankness." The first sentence evidently means, ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... the latest critic of Lowell's poetry, says of this poem: "The ode is too long, its evolution is defective, it contains verbiage, it preaches. But passages of it—the most famous having characteristically been interpolated after its delivery—are equal to anything of the kind. The temptation to quote from it is hard to withstand. ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... words which we have to use in the sequel. (See Appendix VI.) Much education sums itself in making men economize their words, and understand them. Nor is it possible to estimate the harm which has been done, in matters of higher speculation and conduct, by loose verbiage, though we may guess at it by observing the dislike which people show to having anything about their religion said to them in simple words, because then they understand it. Thus congregations meet weekly to invoke the influence ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... into a new course of conduct. What are these warnings? We have had at least three. The first is from England, and is a friendly warning. England has warned us by several matters of fact, according to her custom, rather than verbiage, that the Colonies had entered upon a new era of existence, a new phase in their career. She has given us this warning in several different shapes—when she gave us 'Responsible Government'—when she adopted Free Trade—when she repealed ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... he really did tell. The veiled allusions were so thoroughly veiled in words that they were buried as if under mountains of veils. Each slight hint was swamped in morasses of quotations and fine flourishes, overgrown and hidden by tropical verbiage, and covered up by philosophical and political phrases until nothing of the hint could be seen. As he read on the attorney could see Doc Weaver talking, as plainly as if he stood before him; he could see him at his desk in a frenzy of composition, and he recognized the apt quotations ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... brokenly, "it cannot hurt him now. He has found his 'cure.' As a candle-flame in this broad sunlight, so all those earthly longings"—The old gentleman could not finish his sentence, though a sentence was dear to him almost as the truth from which, even in his love of verbiage, his speech never deviated. "So we leave it here," he said at last. "It is between us and our blessed dead. No one else need know what you have had the courage to tell me. Your confession concerns no other living soul, unless it be your ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... hear these men—I am sure they were good men—prattling like bib-and-tucker babies about Irish affairs, and speaking of Gladstone as possessing a quality which we Catholics only ascribe to the Pope. Ha! ha! They think that vain old cataract of verbiage to be infallible. He knows nothing of the matter, does not understand the tools he is working with, any one of whom could buy and sell him and simple, clever Morley twenty times over. Both Gladstone and Morley are clever in books, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... explanation, stripped of its unnecessary verbiage, amounts to this: It is now stated that some months ago, somebody, whose name, observe, is not given, forwarded to the office of the Sunday Sun a manuscript in his own handwriting, containing some fifth-rate verses with my name appended to them as their author. ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... same difficulty when we come to literature. What would Chaucer or Spenser have thought of Browning or Swinburne? Would such poetry have seemed to them like an inspired product of art, or a delirious torrent of unintelligible verbiage? Of course, they would not have understood the language, to begin with; and the thought, the interfusion of philosophy, the new problems, would have been absolutely incomprehensible. Probably if one could have questioned Spenser, he would have felt that the ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... was first engendered." But how his "sum-total of external conditions," acting upon dead matter, can "engender" living matter, is one of those "related heterogenetic phenomena" which he does not condescend to explain. It is by this sort of scientific verbiage that he gets rid of the pre-existing vital principle, or germinal principle of life, which the biblical genesis declares to be in ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... retrograde party was to misunderstand everything. The plainest things were found to need a world of debate; the simplest things became entangled; the noble assemblies played solemnly a ludicrous game of cross-purposes. Straightway came a notice from the Emperor which, stripped of official verbiage, said that they must understand. This set all in motion again. Imperial notices were sent to province after province, explanatory documents were issued, good men and strong were ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... shifting sands. The incense the sycophant world burned before him became a stench in his nostrils. The fetishes he had tossed to the crowd now faced him as real gods; and they were not to be blinded with dust, nor bought with gold. The specious and tortured verbiage of twisted law never for one moment deceived the open ears of Justice, even though it tied her hands, and her voice was the voice of condemnation. Honor—he had sold it. Faith—he had not kept it. Truth—he had distorted to fit whatever garb he had chosen for her to wear. ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... girls of her class, had received a tincture of learning in the day schools of the nuns; but, although the paper was her marriage contract, it puzzled her greatly to pick out the few chips of plain sense that floated in the sea of legal verbiage it contained. Zoe, with a perfect comprehension of the claims of meum and tuum, was at no loss, however, in arriving at a satisfactory solution of the true merits of her matrimonial contract with honest Antoine ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... enforced by a positive law, with penal provisions, to punish offenders who mutilate or deface books that are public property. A good model of such a statute is the following, slightly abridged as to verbiage, from an act of Congress, of which we procured the enactment ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... the authentic monuments of its thought—the speeches of Robespierre and Saint-Just, the debates of the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, the harangues, addresses, and reports of Girondists and Montagnards. Never did men speak so much to say so little; the empty verbiage and swollen emphasis swamp any truth there may be beneath their monotony and their turgidity. The Jacobin is full of respect for the phantoms of his reasoning brain; in his eyes they are more real ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... wild with excitement; and from the violated cell arose a prodigious crash of thudding fists, the smashing of a splintered chair, the sickening impact of locked bodies falling against the stone walls or upon the complaining bunk, accompanied by verbiage, and also by rattling of iron doors, hoots, cheers and catcalls from the other ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... that if two apparently different definitions of the reality before us should have identical consequences, those two definitions would really be identical definitions, made delusively to appear different merely by the different verbiage in ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... staggered minions of the local constabulary—are assuaged by the brilliant narrative manner in which The Wisdom of Father Brown (CASSELL) is set forth. Here is the paradoxical world of Mr. CHESTERTON'S imagination described in his own verbiage and proved by actual and grisly events. In that starry dream of a detective story which I sometimes have, where sleuth-hounds are pattering along the Milky Way and pursue at last the Great Bear to his den, Father Brown and Sherlock ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... hand. This sense of constraint became an irritation—due in part to the slight headache, coming and going, which reminded her of her bad night. Among the things she meant to do this morning was the writing of several letters to so-called friends, who had addressed her in the wonted verbiage on the subject of her engagement. Five minutes proved the task impossible. She tore up a futile attempt at civility, and rose from the desk ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... of its legal verbiage, was the document which Roger, by the same hand that executed it, was invited, if he wished, to destroy. Perhaps for a moment, as his eyes glanced once more across the park, and a vision of Rosalind flitted across his mind, he was tempted ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... four separate paragraphs, five lines, and thirty-five words to express, in almost idiotic verbiage, the following: ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... difficulties, evident even to the capacities of a child, have never been removed by divines the most practised in dialectics. You will find in their replies only subtle distinctions, metaphysical subterfuges, unintelligible verbiage, which can never be the language of truth, and which demonstrates the embarrassment, the impotence, and the bad faith of those who are interested by their position in sustaining a desperate cause. In a word, the difficulties which ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... subtle, form of begging the question is what is known as "arguing in a circle." Usually the fallacy is so wrapped up in verbiage that it is hard to pick out. Here is a clear and well-put detection ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... Confessions lied about what it pretended to expose. The smell of the indecent and venal informer exhaled from the pages. The vital feature, however, lay in the revelation of Sister Claire's character, between the lines. Beneath the vulgarity and obscenity, poorly veiled in a mock-modest verbiage, pulsated a burning sensuality reaching the horror of mania. A well-set trap would have easy work in catching the feet of a woman related to the nymphs. Small wonder that the Livingstone party kept her afar off from their perfumed and reputable society ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... windings of a stream under the shadows of the trees. Past waterfall and banks of flowers and choiring of the birds, he goes on forever, except he force himself to pause. Shakespeare is always an enticement, whose turns of poetic thought and verbiage are a pure delight. Note this quality in the quotations—a word naturally expresses a thought. Shakespeare's figures express a series of thoughts as varied landscapes seen in pictures; in consequence, to read him is to see resemblances in things, because we have sharpened vision and can not, after ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... words borrowed from Latin through French, when wearied with 'velleities' and 'solidarities' and 'altruisms' and 'homologators,' or when vainly endeavouring to discover the real meaning which lies hidden in a jungle of Parliamentary verbiage, I have said to myself, remembering my similar labour upon the 'Variae,' 'How like ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... all the rare and far-fetched artifices that idle curiosity has taught them. Then the love-thoughts of the heart clothed themselves simply and naturally as the heart conceived them, nor sought to commend themselves by forced and rambling verbiage. Fraud, deceit, or malice had then not yet mingled with truth and sincerity. Justice held her ground, undisturbed and unassailed by the efforts of favour and of interest, that now so much impair, pervert, and beset her. Arbitrary law had not yet established itself in the mind of the judge, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... pounds for the sole right to deal with the thing on your behalf. My solicitors will send you a document full of verbiage which you had better send off to your solicitor to look through before you sign it. It will be all right. I'm going to take the proofs. Of course this stops publishing," he remarked, looking round from the dressing-table where ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... no more than half what is said. But Roger Carbury was certainly not one of these. As he sat on the garden wall at Carbury, with his cousin's letter in his hand, her words had their full weight with him. He did not try to convince himself that all this was the verbiage of an enthusiastic girl, who might soon be turned and trained to another mode of thinking by fitting admonitions. To him now, as he read and re-read Hetta's letter sitting on the wall, there was not at any rate further hope for himself. Though he was altogether unchanged ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... Stripped of verbiage and technicalities, the case is within the humblest comprehension. The chief justice and a majority of his associates held that Dred Scott, who sued his master for his freedom in the Federal court, had been already legally declared to be the slave of that same master by the highest ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... collateral matter, was cleared away from it, all the chaff was fanned out of it, it was a bare absurdity,—no less than that a thing may be lawfully driven away from where it has a lawful right to be. Clear it of all the verbiage, and that is the naked truth of his proposition,—that a thing may be lawfully driven from the place where it has a lawful right to stay. Well, it was because the judge could n't help seeing this that he has had so much trouble with it; and what ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... childhood? Where is [sic] the light of those eyes and the bloom of that countenance?" . . . "Who is young and who is old? Whither are we going and what shall we become?" And yet the author of this mawkish verbiage probably fancied that he was improving upon the stately English of the Common Prayer. It is a ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... refuge for the past few days had left him in ignorance of the public exasperation in his regard, the sermons, the dithyrambs with which the newspapers were filled on the subject of his corrupting wealth, articles written for effect, hypocritical verbiage to which public opinion resorts from time to time to revenge itself on the innocent for all its concessions to the guilty. It was a terrible disappointment, which caused him at first more pain than anger. Deeply moved, he concealed his distress behind his opera-glass, ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... renderings of traditional stories parallel in general nature to 'The Canterbury Tales.' He is generally a smooth and fluent versifier, but his fluency is his undoing; he wraps up his material in too great a mass of verbiage. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... always believed that to say a thing is the same as to do it, as though speech were action, as though rhetoric were capable of modifying the tendencies, habits, and character of real beings, and as though verbiage were an efficient substitute ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Behind all this verbiage the merchant of the Rue du Mail—"Commission-Exportation"—had a very definite idea. He wished to give up his shop, to retire from business, and for some time he had been thinking of going to see Sidonie, in order to interest ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... glories of Beatrice and Laura were even less substantial than they; and, though that could {132} not hinder great poets from making fine poetry out of them, it was fatal to the ordinary sonnetteer, and gave the sonnet a tradition of overblown and insincere verbiage. From all this Milton emancipated it and, as Landor said, "gave the notes to glory." To glory and to other things; for not all his sonnets are consecrated to glory. They deal with various subjects; but each, whether ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... offender. This violation was denounced by the fashionable preacher, Hortensio Felix Paravicino (q.v.), in a sermon preached before Philip IV.; [v.04 p.0985] Calderon retorted by introducing into El Principe constante a mocking reference (afterwards cancelled) to Paravicino's gongoristic verbiage, and was committed to prison. He was soon released, grew rapidly in reputation as a playwright, and, on the death of Lope de Vega in 1635, was recognized as the foremost Spanish dramatist of the age. A volume of his plays, edited by his ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... was over, and welcomed the Ottawa speakers with a relaxation of the tension that had held me, for I had been upon the rack. Mind and ear had been taxed to miss no word or intonation, for a slighted syllable might lose our cause. The speeches had droned like flies at midday, but all the verbiage had been heavy with significance. I spoke French, Huron, and Ottawa in turn, and through it all I listened, listened for the opening ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... often subtle, form of begging the question is what is known as "arguing in a circle." Usually the fallacy is so wrapped up in verbiage that it is hard to pick out. Here is a clear and well-put detection of ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... words. Whatever the means of communication, the problem is the same. The two methods of inquiry may supplement each other; but their substantial agreement is the test of their accuracy. If Johnson, as a writer, appears to us to be a mere windbag and manufacturer of sesquipedalian verbiage, whilst, as a talker, he appears to be one of the most genuine and deeply feeling of men, we may be sure that our analysis has been somewhere defective. The discrepancy is, of course, partly explained by the faults of Johnson's style; but ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... a railroad to the Pacific Ocean; they want to carry slavery to the Pacific and have a base line from which they can operate for the conquest of the continent south." [Footnote: The Congressional Globe. Thirty-fifth Congress, Second Session, 1858-59, Part II, Appendix: 291.] In fiery verbiage the Southern Senators slashed back, taunting the Northerners with seeking to wipe out the system of chattel slavery, only to extend and enforce all the more effectually their own system of white slavery. The honorable Senators unleashed themselves; Senatorial dignity ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... opportunity of display, of which, there is no doubt, he with his accustomed felicity availed himself. The reporter of the speech, however, has, as usual, contrived, with an art near akin to that of reducing diamonds to charcoal, to turn all the brilliancy of his wit into dull and opake verbiage. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... leant back in his easy chair, and began dictating from his notes with tantalising deliberateness. This was the last will and testament of him, Marmaduke Courtney Ashurst. Its verbiage wearied me. I was eager for him to come to the point about Harold. Instead of that, he did what it seems is usual in such cases—set out with a number of unimportant legacies to old family servants and other hangers-on among 'our ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... these so-called syllogisms are not really syllogisms at all, we should agree with him. But then they are not only the brief and formal expression of long-winded so-called arguments, which are not really arguments at all, but which, veiled in floods of verbiage, are duly presented to the public, from platform and Press, as though they really were so. Moral:—The clear analysis of stump-oratory generally takes the form of a reductio ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 18, 1892 • Various
... word misplaced, not a word too many, and fraught with that strange power over the feelings, lent by sadness and despondency, a state of mind, I think, most favorable to real eloquence, in which all verbiage is eschewed, and the burden [64] upon the heart is too heavy to allow the ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... indignant scribes who cried aloud against the sins and sinners of the courts. When simple folk had expended their rage in denunciations of venal eloquence and unjust judgments, they amused themselves with laughing at the antiquated verbiage of the rascals who sought to conceal their bad morality under worse Latin. 'A New Modell, or the Conversion of the Infidell Terms of the Law: For the Better promoting of misunderstanding according to Common Sense,' is a publication consisting of a cover or ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... an advertisement there is often too much waste by using too much verbiage, too many unnecessary words or sentences, sometimes too much display. Prudence in the arrangement, and care in editing an advertisement, will save much expense. The size of an advertisement of this class has really little to do with its ...
— Practical Pointers for Patentees • Franklin Cresee
... throw down the pen, saying to myself, "it is all folly, all verbiage. There is a history within worth perusing, but I cannot bring it forth to light. I turn over page after page with the fingers of thought. I see characters glowing or darkened with passion,—lines alternately bright and shadowy, distinct and obscure, and it seems an easy thing to make a transcript ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... requisite amount of money became, during the next few weeks, the anxious theme of all Ralph's thoughts. His lawyers' enquiries soon brought the confirmation of Clare's surmise, and it became clear that—for reasons swathed in all the ingenuities of legal verbiage—Undine might, in return for a substantial consideration, be prevailed on to admit that it was for her son's advantage to remain ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... present these discussions to the laity in their original form, hence the necessity for condensation and presentation of the needful facts in the language of the people in whose interests the book is printed. In a book of fiction there may be need for useless verbiage for the sake of "making pages," but facts of vital importance and usefulness in our daily welfare need to be well boiled down and put into shape for ready reference. This has been done in "Mothers' Remedies" and I think it quite fulfills the ideal ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... interdict, not removed until the memory of the first occurrence has faded, lies on a once used word. The causes of this anxiety for a varied expression are manifold. Where there is merely a column to fill, poverty of thought drives the hackney author into an illicit fulness, until the trick of verbiage passes from his practice into his creed, and makes him the dupe of his own puppets. A commonplace book, a dictionary of synonyms, and another of phrase and fable equip him for his task; if he be called upon to marshal his ideas on the question whether oysters breed typhoid, ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... from the action of the Roman Catholic priests and the native Christians of that faith.... Had they (the Chinese Goverment) stated their complaints in brief, without circumlocution, and stripped of all useless verbiage, they would have charged that the Roman Catholic missionaries, when residing away from the open ports, claim to occupy a semi-official position, which places them on an equality with the provincial officer; that they deny the authority of the Chinese officials ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... elaborate details, profound speculations, ingenious hypotheses, and archaiological lore that assailed me, and wish them, should they ever visit Nismes, that which was denied me—a tranquil and uninterrupted contemplation of its interesting antiquities, free from the verbiage of a conscientious cicerone, who thinks himself in duty bound to relate all that he has ever heard or read relative to the ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... and a little less rhetoric. We are most grateful to them that they have not as yet accepted any frigid formula, nor stereotyped themselves into a school, but we wish that they would talk less and think more. They lead us through a barren desert of verbiage to a mirage that they call life; we wander aimlessly through a very wilderness of words in search of one touch of nature. However, one should not be too severe on English novels: they are the only relaxation of the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... purports to be, and probably is in substance, the diary from which he made up his letters to the London "Times"; and it is rather amusing, as well as instructive, to see the somewhat muddy sources which, swelled by affluents of verbiage and invention, gather head enough to contribute their share to the sonorous shallowness of "the leading journal of Europe." When we learn, as we do from this "Diary," what a contributor to that eminent journal is, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... critical to feel through all Fenimore Cooper's verbiage the real lakes and woods, or the wild fervour of romance beneath dear Sir Walter's mat of words. You lose the unreclaimable flavour of books. A friend you may irretrievably lose when you lose a friend—if ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... way that which is being done now by the most rigid of Mr. Verity's friends. It is impossible to comprehend what is meant by such a statement as that every truth is somehow connected with religion. It may be that the notion—if it really is not, as I suspect it to be, mere verbiage and clap-trap, used by certain fools to mislead others—means that there is some such coherency between all truths as there is, for instance, between the elements of the body. I would admit that, but is not blood a different and perfectly severable thing from bone? Each ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... criticism, but even more in the marvellous vivacity and fertility of his creation. For the very first time in English prose fiction every character is alive, every incident is capable of having happened. There are lively touches in the Elizabethan romances; but they are buried in verbiage, swathed in stage costume, choked and fettered by their authors' want of art. The quality of Bunyan's knowledge of men was not much inferior to Shakespeare's, or at least to Fielding's; but the range and the results of it were ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... Without a check from ten till five, Extracting from stale news some phrase To shock, to startle or amaze, Or found a daring innuendo— All swelling in one long crescendo, Till, shortly after five o'clock, When business people homeward flock, From all superfluous verbiage freed Comes JOFFRE'S calm laconic screed, And all the bellowings of the town Quelled by the voice of Truth die down, Enabling you and me to win Twelve hours' release ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 9, 1914 • Various
... excellent pathos delivered out to them: an they would receive it, so; an they would not receive it, so. There was no offence against decorum in all this; nothing to condemn, to damn. Not an irreverent symptom of a sound was to be heard. The procession of verbiage stalked on through four and five acts, no one venturing to predict what would come of it, when towards the winding up of the latter, Antonio, with an irrelevancy that seemed to stagger Elvira herself—for she had been coolly arguing ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... the Holy Alliance, the pet offspring of his pietism, does not deserve the sinister reputation it has since obtained. To the other powers it seemed, at best "verbiage'' and "exalted nonsense,'' at worst an effort of the tsar to establish the hegemony of Russia on the goodwill of the smaller signatory powers. To the Liberals, then and afterwards it was clearly a hypocritical ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... With much verbiage the will proceeded to state that the testatrix left the residue of her private savings to Meshach, 'to dispose of absolutely according to his own discretion,' in case he should survive her; and that ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... praised through the whole period of his existence with unvaried liberality; and perhaps his character may receive some illustration, of a comparison he instituted between him and the man whose pupil he was" much of the verbiage may be eliminated and the sentence ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... book of criticism of the highest excellence, even when it has passed through the salutary process of drastic editing, such as that to which, in the present case,[15] the competent hands of Mr George Sampson have submitted it. Its garrulity, its digressions, its verbiage, the marks which even the finest portions show of submersion in the tepid transcendentalism that wrought such havoc upon Coleridge's mind—these are its familiar disfigurements. They are not easily removed; for they enter fairly deeply even in the ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... power to stop them. Failing some such measure, table articles and food may continue to be smeared by hands soiled with syphilitic material, as in case 1; section 6 of the Social Hygiene Act remains mere useless verbiage, and the infecting of innocents, as in case 3, ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... and thought of opening it to him, say for a quarter of an hour or half an hour, he gave you oftentimes two hours or more, according as he found himself at liberty. Yet he was without verbiage, compliments, prefaces, pleasantries, or other hindrances; went straight to the point, and allowed ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... well written and printed, and its verbiage such as to be comprehensible to the workman no less than to the master. The careful and general perusal of a work of this nature cannot but be attended by beneficial results of a far-reaching nature, and we therefore heartily recommend the book to our ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... "notices to quit," and was able to extract their import from any verbiage whatever, so he drank by and to himself, and immediately sauntered out of town, with an air of bravado in his carriage, and a very lonesome look in ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... unlike literary ability. Godolphin conceived perfectly of the literary intention in the fine passages of the play, and enjoyed their beauty, but he did not value them any more than the poorest and crudest verbiage that promised him a point. In fact, Maxwell found that in two or three places the actor was making a wholly wrong version of his words, and maturing in his mind an effect from his error that he was rather loath to give up, though when he was instructed as ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... as Lavretsky was sitting in the drawing-room, listening to the insinuating tones of Gedeonovsky's wearisome verbiage, he suddenly turned round, he knew not why, and caught the deep, attentive, inquiring look of Liza's eyes. That enigmatical look was directed towards him. The whole night long Lavretsky thought of it. His love was not like that of a boy, nor was it consistent with his age to sigh ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... suppose not; yet it hurts my liver to offer the old boy incomprehensible reasons or verbiage like 'compulsion neurosis' when all he wants is to protect me from my own impulses as he protected me from the army. Florence and I delight in him—he comes again next week if possible—but we cannot convey to ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Apology. To William himself is undoubtedly due the material which the document embodies and the argument it contains, but it was almost certainly not written by him, but by his chaplain, Pierre L'Oyseleur, Seigneur de Villiers, to whom it owes its rather ponderous prolixity and redundant verbiage. Historically it is of very considerable value, though the facts are not always to be relied upon as strictly accurate. The Apology was translated into several languages and distributed to the leading ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... had the misfortune about this time to read in paper or magazine something on the subject of heredity, the idle verbiage of some half-informed scribbler. It set him anxiously thinking whether his son would develop the vices of the mother's mind, and from that day he read all the printed chatter regarding natural inheritance that he could ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... mathematicians; and that the geometrician, if he employs his method in philosophy, will succeed only in building card-castles, while the employment of the philosophical method in mathematics can result in nothing but mere verbiage. The essential business of philosophy, indeed, is to mark out the limits of the science; and even the mathematician, unless his talent is naturally circumscribed and limited to this particular department of knowledge, ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... hinders them from following. To the old pastor of the village, Seraphita-Seraphitus talks with assurance of the essence of phenomena and the invisible world, but, forsooth, only to initiate the shades that visit spiritualistic seances, and to say what is either obscure verbiage, or a hash-up of philosophies often digested without much sustenance derived from them. In the end, this dual personage vanishes from our mundane atmosphere, translated bodily to heaven; and leaves his or her lovers to repair their loss—just like a forlorn widow or widower—by ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... la Peyrade, "what does all this verbiage mean? Have you anything to propose to me? What's the price ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... avoiding the use of a knife with their fish. Pio Nono, who sat opposite the Menghyi, tucked his napkin over his ample paunch and went in with a will. He was in a most hilarious mood, and taxed his memory for reminiscences of his visit to England. These were not expressed with useless expenditure of verbiage, nor did they flow in unbroken sequence. It was as if he dug in his memory with a spade, and found every now and then a gem in the shape of a name, which he brandished aloft in triumph. He kept up ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... sensibility. The instinct was present in them, but the sacred fire died out in the vacuum of their social experience, and neither Warton had the energy to build up a style in prose or verse. They struggled for a little while, and then they succumbed to the worn verbiage of their age, from which it is sometimes no light task to disengage their thought. In their later days they made some sad defections, and I can never forgive Thomas Warton for arriving at Marlowe's Hero and Leander ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... surprise and genuine anguish upon receiving, one bright April morning, a communication in German, which, being translated by Mr. Otto Bartels with something more than his customary stolidity, proved to read, stripped of all superfluous verbiage, substantially ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... inexperienced, hot-headed young man; and putting it aside, much as a great lawyer dismisses as balderdash the florid rhetoric of some junior counsel, rhetoric in which the great lawyer had once indulged, or as a woman for whom romance is over dismisses as idle verbiage some romantic sentiment that befools her young daughter, Mrs. Cameron simply replied, "All this is hollow talk, Mr. Chillingly; let us come to the point. After all I have said, do you mean to persist in your suit ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... notable event, as the Landing of the Pilgrims, or the Surrender of Cornwallis, or the Invention of Gunpowder, or the Discovery of America. Its nature invites the orator to a great range of talk; he may browse at large in all the fields of verbiage without seeming to break bounds. It rests with him, of course, to decide whether he will talk too long, for the danger that he may do so cannot be guarded from the outside. The only good after-dinner speaker is the man who likes to speak, and the man who likes ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... dementia and delusion in terms of religion. Later we have the same facts interpreted in terms of positive knowledge and the religious explanation is rejected. And that, in a sentence is the whole history of religion, once we have cleared away the verbiage with which the subject ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... university so many attachments at one time to words in place of things, that the collegian in after life became liable to reproach upon this head. Pedants are bred everywhere out of literature, and the variety in verbiage once exhibited by some university men has been justly condemned. But while such word-worms were crawling here and there out of the porches of our colleges, giants in acquirement were striding over them in their petty convolutions. ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... was released, and the Attorney for the United States called Blennerhassett's servants to prove the array at the island and the embarkment upon the Ohio. They did their best with a deal of verbiage, of "Colonel Burr said" and "Mr. Blennerhassett said," and with no little bewilderment under cross-examination. "Yes, sir; I'm telling you, sir. Mr. Blennerhassett allowed that Colonel Burr and he and a few friends had bought ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... A precision of speech, born of clear thinking, what controversial battlefields of sulphurous smoke and scattering fire might it prevent. He has been called a public benefactor who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before. He is as great a benefactor, who in an age of verbiage makes one word perform the function of two. Wonderful is the precision with which this mental mechanism may be made to work. Some men can even think their best on their feet in the presence of a great assembly. There are others whose spontaneous thoughts move ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... its mask of verbiage, however, the manifesto of the Emergency Convention of the Socialist Party of America joins with the famous Preamble of the I. W. W. and the manifestoes and programs of the Communist and Communist Labor Parties in advocating the plundering of mankind by proletarians, the elimination ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... speeches had been carefully distributed through the Central Empires; they had done much to arouse the subject peoples of Austria-Hungary to revolt for their freedom, and also to weaken the morale of the German people. The value of Wilson's "verbiage drives" was questioned in this country. Abroad, his insistence upon a peace of justice was generally reckoned a vital moral force in the political movements that supplemented the victories of Marshal Foch. Jugoslavs consented to cooeperate with their Italian ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... prolixity, surplusage, verbiage, periphrasis, redundance, tautology, verbosity, pleonasm, redundancy, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... tall?' 'We of the court' said Cyril. 'From the court' She answered, 'then ye know the Prince?' and he: 'The climax of his age! as though there were One rose in all the world, your Highness that, He worships your ideal:' she replied: 'We scarcely thought in our own hall to hear This barren verbiage, current among men, Light coin, the tinsel clink of compliment. Your flight from out your bookless wilds would seem As arguing love of knowledge and of power; Your language proves you still the child. Indeed, We dream not of him: when we set ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... had the shell of a cocoanut, its meat would, in my opinion, sustain about the same relation to its bulk as the gist of the usual legal proceeding sustains to the mass of verbiage in which it is enshrouded. For this reason you will not expect me to give a detailed account of this trial. I couldn't if I would, and I wouldn't if I could. My knowledge of legal procedure is far from profound, albeit I once began the study of law. My memories ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... title of sovereignty. I don't think you realize, never having been in this country, what a farce it really is. I am not able to write you a learned book. All I can do is to write you these letters, which are surely devoid of all legal verbiage, because I don't know any. If I were a scholar, a student of international politics, I would wrap all my statements in fine, well-chosen language, quoting treaties and acts and agreements and all the rest of it, and you wouldn't know what it all meant. I can only give you the facts as they disclose ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... not; only the verbiage had gone. All that was worthy of preservation remained in what the printer calls a "stickful." That was ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... our way in the old days that Judge Priest administered law inside his courthouse and justice outside of it. Perhaps they were right. Certainly he had a way of seeking short cuts through thickets of legal verbiage to the rights of things, the which often gave acute sorrow to the souls of those members of the bar who venerated the very ink in which the statutory act had been printed and worshiped manfully before the graven images of precedent. But elsewise, generally ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... have lost her for ever. She had waited on this eventful day only for the return of her domestic. His arrest on the night before had deranged her plans; and when he had returned, his mixture of French verbiage and Irish raptures, his guard-house terrors and his Castle feasting, formed a melange so unintelligible, that she was compelled to believe him under the influence of a spell—that spell which is supposed to inspire so much of the wit and wisdom of one of the cleverest and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... history of philosophy, the systems reduce themselves to a few main types which, under all the technical verbiage in which the ingenious intellect of man envelops them, are just so many visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the whole drift of life, forced on one by one's total character and experience, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... stripped of its unnecessary verbiage, amounts to this: It is now stated that some months ago, somebody, whose name, observe, is not given, forwarded to the office of the Sunday Sun a manuscript in his own handwriting, containing some fifth-rate verses with my name appended to them as their author. The assistant ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... time. Gentlemen, I am not going to burst forth into laudatory rodomontade, (which is a word, gentlemen that I employ only among an enlightened community such as I now have the honour of addressing),—neither do I propose to waste your time in purposeless verbiage, (which is another of the same kind, gentlemen),—therefore, without further preface, or preamble, we will proceed at once to business. The first lot I have to offer you is a screen,—six foot high,—bring out the screen, Theodore! There it is, gentlemen,—open it out, Theodore! Observe, Gentlemen ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... poet. The robustness is omnipresent, and takes several forms. A grandiloquence that sways uneasily between rodomontade and mere verbiage, a rotundity of diction, a choice of subjects which can only be described as sanguinolent, the use of the bludgeon where others ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... was a dramatist, historian, poet, or philosopher, did not know, and his professor deemed the question improper. I visited the eleventh recitation in Othello in a high school class of nineteen pupils, not one of whom knew how the story ended, so intent had they been kept on its verbiage. Hence, too, has come the twelve feet of text-books on English on my shelves with many standard works, edited for schools, with more notes than text. Fashion that works from above down the grades and college entrance requirements ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... but it has been transformed into an oil warehouse. John de Troyes, senior of the Faculty of Theology, was the spokesman, and read the decisions of the faculty on each of the twelve articles. It is unnecessary to go through the long verbiage of abuse and blasphemy with which these theologians thought it their duty ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... wretched; it is really too bad that a man should be Secretary for Foreign Affairs who cannot speak better. The Duke made no case for the Terceira business, and delivered a very poor speech; but I like his speaking—it is so much to the point, no nonsense and verbiage about it, and he says strongly and simply what he has to say. The other night on Greece there was a very brisk skirmish between Palmerston and Peel, and the former spoke, they say, remarkably well; the latter, as ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Elspeth's ear as it could have done at any period of her life. She spoke also herself clearly, distinctly, and slowly, as if anxious that the intelligence she communicated should be fully understood; concisely at the same time, and with none of the verbiage or circumlocutory additions natural to those of her sex and condition. In short, her language bespoke a better education, as well as an uncommonly firm and resolved mind, and a character of that sort from which great virtues or great crimes may ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the substance of those fifty-three articles, so painfully elaborated by Viglius, so handsomely drawn up into shape by Councillor d'Assonleville? Simply to substitute the halter for the fagot. After elimination of all verbiage, this fact was the only residuum. It was most distinctly laid down that all forms of religion except the Roman Catholic were forbidden; that no public or secret conventicles were to be allowed; that all heretical writings were to be suppressed; that all curious ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... suggestion, his poem would have fallen into windy chaos. The "philosophical poems" of his age did so fall. Henry More's Platonick Song of the Soul (1642), wherein are treated the Life of the Soul, her Immortality, the Sleep of the Soul, the Unity of Souls, and Memory after Death, is a dust-storm of verbiage. Such words as "calefaction," "exility," "self-reduplication," "tricentreity," "individuation," "circumvolution," "presentifick circularity," struggle and sprawl within the narrow room of the Spenserian stanza. ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... had been a capital error in Socrates to make that interpretation exclusive and to substitute it for natural philosophy. Locke, who was himself a medical man, knew what a black cloak for ignorance and villainy Scholastic verbiage might be in that profession. He also knew, being an enthusiast for experimental science, that in order to control the movement of matter—which is to realise those virtues and perfections—it is better to trace the movement of matter materialistically; ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... under the load she has cast upon him. He warns her to be out of the house on his arrival, because, if she is not, "she will find in him a tyrant." The whole letter is indicative of a low-down unworthy scamp, a mere collection of transparent verbiage, intended as a means of ridding himself of a woman he had nothing in common with, and a cover ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... ideas." "The Cloud" is "simple nonsense." "Prometheus Unbound" is a "great storehouse of the obscure and unintelligible." In the "Sensitive Plant" there is "no meaning." And for Shelley himself, he is guilty of a great many terrible things, including verbiage, impiety, ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... the latter abound so that we can afford to overlook the innumerable failures and self-deceptions that are mixed in with them (for in everything human failure is a matter of course), and we can also overlook the verbiage of a good deal of the mind-cure literature, some of which is so moonstruck with optimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained intellect finds it almost impossible to ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... ix. 2, the temple worship was assiduously practised, but without a living piety of heart, and in a hypocritical and self-justifying manner; the complaints in this regard remind us vividly of similar ones of the prophet Malachi—chap. i. 6, etc." What then is the basis for all this verbiage about the temple worship? Here it is: "Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God, and be more ready to hear than to give the sacrifice of fools: for they consider not that they do evil." This sentence shows that it is impossible that Solomon wrote the book: there ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... the shade of this immense growth of pseudo-classical verbiage was a very modest undertaking indeed and developed little beyond the primary school and classical academy first established. These were housed in a little building in Detroit, twenty-four by fifty feet, on the west side of Bates Street near Congress, ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... predicates and hurled out epithets, foaming and floundering. He had started so many things in a speech that he scarce knew when or how to stop. Commons, both sides, rather liked to hear him struggle with his verbiage. Later he developed the rapier thrust, some snatches of humor, a trifle of contempt. He learned the value of playing with a rhetorical period that he might later leap upon a climax. Frank B. Carvell was periodically ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... not attempt to describe the mountains with their many charms. I listened to a lecture lately where a man was struggling to do this, and it was positively painful. The flowery verbiage, the accumulated adjectives, the poetical quotations were overpowering. I seemed actually sinking into luscious mellifluousness. I shook it off my fingers, as if it were maple syrup. Then, as he climbed higher and higher, on and up, never getting away from the richest verdure and the ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... you might think, to the joys of the table and the grosser things of life. You should see his eyes sometimes when the right note is struck, watch his mouth when he sits and thinks. He uses words for an ambush and a barricade. He talks often like a gay fool, a flood of empty verbiage streams from his lips, and behind, all the ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of literature exists on the subject of the Rhine and its legends, but with few exceptions the works on it which are accessible to English-speaking peoples are antiquated in spirit and verbiage, and their authors have been content to accept the first version of such legends and traditions as came their way without submitting them to any critical examination. It is claimed for this book that much of its matter was collected on the ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... Troward was given the logician's power to strip a subject bare of all superfluous and concealing verbiage, and to exhibit the gleaming jewels of truth and reality in splendid simplicity. This supreme quality, this ability to make the complex simple, the power to subordinate the non-essential, gave to his conversation, to his lectures, to his writings, and in ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... of the speaking, the proceedings bear an advantageous comparison with those of any popular movement with which we are acquainted, either in this country or in America. Very rarely in the oratory of public meetings is the part of verbiage and declamation so small, and that of calm good sense ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... bravely and becomingly decked as our Court dames with all the rare and far-fetched artifices that idle curiosity has taught them. Then the love-thoughts of the heart clothed themselves simply and naturally as the heart conceived them, nor sought to commend themselves by forced and rambling verbiage. Fraud, deceit, or malice had then not yet mingled with truth and sincerity. Justice held her ground, undisturbed and unassailed by the efforts of favour and of interest, that now so much impair, pervert, and beset her. Arbitrary law had not yet established ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... who care about the character of public men, and who have some feeling of national pride and vanity in the super-eminence of English statesmen for integrity and high-mindedness. It is not very difficult to extract the truth from the mass of verbiage and contradictory assertions in which it is involved, and it appears that Urquhart, having got hold of the papers, communicated them to Palmerston, offered to publish them, and was encouraged by him to do so. Urquhart, who was appointed secretary of embassy at Constantinople ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... a man surviving in his children, or in his works, or in the universal consciousness, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only those who suffer from affective stupidity, and who, for the rest, may be persons of a certain cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess great talent, or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid as regards the feelings ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... hand, to read selections here and there, as most of us do, is to get a wrong idea of the man and to join either in fulsome praise of his brilliant oratory, or in honest confession that his periods are ponderous and his ideas often buried under Johnsonian verbiage. Such are the contrasts to be found on successive pages of Burke's twelve volumes, which cover the enormous range of the political and economic thought of the age, and which mingle fact and fancy, philosophy, statistics, and brilliant flights of the imagination, to a degree never before seen ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Although enveloped in the verbiage and complimentary phrases which the Spanish language so abundantly supplies, the real meaning of the despatch was evident enough to Count Villabuena. Courted when he could be of use, he was now, like ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... that it can be comprehended, needs no argument in its support. In debate, therefore, one's first effort should be to state his own side so clearly and concisely as to make the principles involved easily understood. His second object should be so to divest his opponent's argument of useless verbiage as to make it stand forth clearly; for as truth is self-evident, so error bears upon its face its own condemnation. Error needs only to be exposed ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... country-house and the staggered minions of the local constabulary—are assuaged by the brilliant narrative manner in which The Wisdom of Father Brown (CASSELL) is set forth. Here is the paradoxical world of Mr. CHESTERTON'S imagination described in his own verbiage and proved by actual and grisly events. In that starry dream of a detective story which I sometimes have, where sleuth-hounds are pattering along the Milky Way and pursue at last the Great Bear to his den, Father Brown and Sherlock Holmes, the one spectacled, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... bargain, until he discovered that he no sooner had arrived from the coalhouse with a bucket of coal than it was necessary for him to make a return trip with a bucket of ashes, Toomey now hurled anathemas upon the embryo coal baron. It was not empty verbiage when he asserted that, by spring, at the rate he was wearing a trench to the ash can, nothing but the top of ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... which, a little more than a century ago, the Royal Institution of Great Britain came into existence and received its legal christening. If one reads on he finds that the things thus graciously "given and granted," despite all the official verbiage, amount to nothing more than royal sanction and approval, but doubtless that meant more in the way of assuring popular approval than might at first glimpse appear. So, too, of the list of earls, baronets, and the like, who appear as officers and managers of the undertaking, and ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... fermenting soil. Consider the authentic monuments of its thought—the speeches of Robespierre and Saint-Just, the debates of the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, the harangues, addresses, and reports of Girondists and Montagnards. Never did men speak so much to say so little; the empty verbiage and swollen emphasis swamp any truth there may be beneath their monotony and their turgidity. The Jacobin is full of respect for the phantoms of his reasoning brain; in his eyes they are more real than living men, and their suffrage is the only ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... and stocks of steel and light-metal alloys. The city was full of warehouses, and the warehouses were crammed with valuables. In spite of the socialistic and egalitarian verbiage behind which the government operated, there seemed to be a numerous elite class and if gold were not a monetary metal it was not despised for purposes of ostentation. There were several large art museums. Vann Larch, their nearest approach ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... recognised representative of the moralists was the ponderous Samuel Johnson. It is hard when reading the Rambler to recognise the massive common sense and deep feeling struggling with the ponderous verbiage and elephantine facetiousness; yet it was not only a treasure of wisdom to the learned ladies, Mrs. Chapone, and Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and the like, who were now beginning to appear, but was received, without provoking ridicule, by the whole literary class. ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... measure, your debt towards me and mine." More followed to the same effect. Neither the taste of the writer nor his manner of expression was happy. Of this Dominic was quite sensible. Patronage, especially after his period of independence, was far from agreeable to him. Yet behind the verbiage, the platitudes and bombastic phrases, his ear detected a very human cry of fear and cry for help. Should he accede, doing his best to allay that ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... makin' for, then?' At this point I realised for the first time the grave disadvantages of redundance in speech, of unnecessary verbiage. There had been no earthly need for my last words, and now that my fatal fluency had found me out, for the life of me I could not think of the name of a likely place. At length, with clumsily affected carelessness, I had to say, 'Oh, just down south ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... like one thinking about matters of profound import. Mr. Travers talked; he talked inflexibly, in a harsh blank voice, as if reading a proclamation. The other two, as if in a state of incomplete trance, had their ears assailed by fragments of official verbiage. ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... same account as has been given on a former page, the verbiage differing slightly, and the remark regarding truthfulness will apply to it as well as ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... work the text remains as it was. It is usual to credit the composer's friend, Baron van Swieten, with the "unintelligible jargon." The baron certainly had a considerable hand in the adaptation of the text. But in reality it owes its very uncouth verbiage largely to the circumstance that it was first translated from English into German, and then re-translated back into English; the words, with the exception of the first chorus, being adapted to the music. Considering the ways of translators, ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... of the contending parties, as that of Kant's noumenon, in the battle of impulses which rages in the breast of man. Metaphysicians, as a rule, are sadly deficient in the sense of humour; or they would surely abstain from advancing propositions which, when stripped of the verbiage in which they are disguised, appear to the profane eye to be bare shams, naked but ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... For an analysis of the nature of Self-consciousness see vol. iii, p. 375 sq. of the three ponderous tomes by Wilhelm Wundt—Grund-zuge der Physiologischen Psychologie—in which amid an enormous mass of verbiage occasional gleams of useful ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... produced respectively in 1903, 1904, and 1905, show that Synge came at once into full possession of his dramatic power. Even in his earliest written play, The Well of The Saints, we find a style stripped of superfluous verbiage and vibrant with emotion. In the Shadow of the Glen, his first staged play, consumes only a half hour. The scene is laid in a cabin far off in a lonely glen, and the four actors,—a woman oppressed by loneliness, an unfeeling husband who feigns death, and two visitors,—make ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... allusions were so thoroughly veiled in words that they were buried as if under mountains of veils. Each slight hint was swamped in morasses of quotations and fine flourishes, overgrown and hidden by tropical verbiage, and covered up by philosophical and political phrases until nothing of the hint could be seen. As he read on the attorney could see Doc Weaver talking, as plainly as if he stood before him; he could see him at his desk in a frenzy of composition, and he recognized the apt quotations ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... By all this verbiage, and more beside, the bewildered lady was induced to follow the advice of the old woman, insomuch that, in less than four hours after the departure of the friends, their housekeeper making all arrangements, and Cornelia consenting, the ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... when you advise him to die. Say to him rather, that it is a disgraceful thing for a man to allow his spirit to be crushed and broken by pain, that it is shameful to yield to it. For as for your maxim, if it is violent it is short, if it lasts long it is slight, that is mere empty verbiage. The only real way to mitigate pain is by the application of virtue, of magnanimity, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... surprising and more repugnant, than the importance attached by politicians to formulae which have long since lost whatever significance they may once have possessed. Democracy, representation, trust in the people and the rest, all this to us is the idlest verbiage. It is notorious, even to those who make most play with these phrases, that the people do not govern themselves, that they cannot do so, and that they would make a great mess of it if they could. The truth is, ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
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