"Gender" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of this title to his professional brother who has no degree; and in a university town to say that John Smith is a doctor would be inconveniently ambiguous. 'Medical man' is cumbrous, and has the further disadvantage (in these days) of not being of common gender. Now the lack of any proper word for a meaning so constantly needing to be expressed is certainly a serious defect in modern (insular) English. The Americans have some right to crow over us here; but their 'physician' ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... and baptizing children at Tubac for a year or two, and had a good many godchildren named Carlos or Carlotta according to gender, and began to feel quite patriarchal, when Bishop Lame sent down Father Mashboef, (Vicar Apostolic,) of New Mexico, to look after the spiritual condition ...
— Building a State in Apache Land • Charles D. Poston
... majority of the smart shops in Paris cater to women; a large majority of the smart shops in London cater to men. It shows in their voices; for cities have voices just as individuals have voices. New York is not yet old enough to have found its own sex. It belongs still to the neuter gender. New York is not even a noun—it's a verb transitive; but its voice is a female voice, just as Paris' voice is. New York, like Paris, is full of strident, shrieking sounds, shrill outcries, hysterical babblings—a women's bridge-whist club at the hour of casting up the score; but London now ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... the same inflexions for number and case as the nouns they qualify, and are placed after them. They are without gender. ...
— The Wiradyuri and Other Languages of New South Wales • Robert Hamilton Mathews
... time; at length his curiosity was excited, and, one day, instead of knocking at the door, as usual, the instant he reached it, he applied his ear to the key-hole, and like Bottom, in the Midsummer Night's Dream, 'spied a voice,' which he guessed to be of the feminine gender, and knew to be not Scythrop's, whose deeper tones he distinguished at intervals. Having attempted in vain to catch a syllable of the discourse, he knocked violently at the door, and roared for immediate ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... inward light is needful—day by day Men wanting both are mated with the best And loftiest of God's feminine creation, Whose love takes no distinction but of gender And ridicules the very ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... Dinmont, having had his hopes as well as another, had hitherto sate sulky enough in the armchair formerly appropriated to the deceased, and in which she would have been not a little scandalised to have seen this colossal specimen of the masculine gender lolling at length. His employment had been rolling up into the form of a coiled snake the long lash of his horse-whip, and then by a jerk causing it to unroll itself into the middle of the floor. The first words he said when he had digested ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... quietly across the camp to where Tommy was fast asleep. I woke him up and said, "Here, Tommy, here's Laura come to say 'good-bye' to you, and she wants to give you a kiss." To this the uncultivated young cub replied, rubbing his eyes, "I don't want to kiss him, let him kiss himself!" What was gender, to a fiend like this? and how was poor ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... admirable old glass. I spent half an hour there one morning, listening to what the church had to say, in perfect solitude. Not a worshipper entered, not even an old man with a broom. I have always thought there be a sex in fine buildings; and Saint Julian, with its noble nave, is of the gender of the name ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... competitive method banished from the Zone. In the Canal Record, the government organ, the government commissary advertised a sale of excellent $7 rain-coats at $1 each. The "Record"! It is like reading it in the Bible. Witness the rush of bargain hunters, who, it proves, are by no means of one gender. Yet those splendid rain-coats, as manager, clerks, and even negro sweepers well knew and could not refrain from snickering to themselves at thought of, were just as rain-proof as a poor grade of cheese-cloth. I do not speak from hear-say for I was numbered among the bargain ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... characters in. It is too often filled with traditional common-place conceptions of the part, handed down from sire to son, and suited to the taste of THE GREAT VULGAR AND THE SMALL.—''Tis an unweeded garden: things rank and gross do merely gender in it!' If a man of genius comes once in an age to clear away the rubbish, to make it fruitful and wholesome, they cry, "Tis a bad school: it may be like nature, it may be like Shakespeare, but it is not like ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... tonight will help to close them. But we know that the discrimination gap has not been fully closed either. Discrimination or violence because of race or religion, ancestry or gender, disability or sexual orientation, is wrong and it ought to be illegal. Therefore, I ask Congress to make the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and the Hate Crimes Prevention Act the law ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William J. Clinton • William J. Clinton
... is why the word here already assumes a slight tinge of the comic. But let us go further still, and suppose that our attention is attracted to the material side of the metaphor by the choice of a relationship which is incompatible with the gender of the two words composing the metaphorical expression: we get a laughable result. Such is the well-known saying, also attributed to M. Prudhomme, "Tous les arts (masculine) sont soeurs (feminine)." "He is always running after a joke," was said in Boufflers' ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... voice, Tom made, as he would have himself defined it, stret tracks for the table. And a mighty different table it was from that to which we had sat down on the preceding morning. Timothy—unscared by the wonder of the mountain nymphs, who deemed a being of the masculine gender as an intruder, scarce to be tolerated, on the mysteries of the culinary art—had exerted his whole skill, and brought forth all the contents of his canteen! We had a superb steak of the fattest venison, graced by cranberries stewed with cayenne ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... were delayed by a portentous old parishioner of the female gender, who was one of the plagues of their lives, and with whom they bore with most exemplary sweetness and good-humour, notwithstanding her having an infection of absurdity about her, that communicated itself to everything with which, and everybody with whom, she ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... mother, it wouldn't have mattered, because she would have known it was a screw he had lost, and she would have known just what comfort he would have needed; whereas a Fraulein would know nothing about a screw, beyond the German for it, and the gender, of course. And of what use is that to a child? It may sound very unconventional, and I suppose it was so, to go to a strange house and ask for Thomas, and my only excuse a small ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... dishes appear. At long intervals, or spaces of separation from each other—say five for the whole length of the boat—you behold tumblers arranged, with two forlorn radishes in each. The butter lies like gravy in the plate; the malodorous passengers of the masculine gender draw nigh to the scanty board; the captain comes near, to act his oft-repeated part, as President of the day. Oh, gracious! 'tis a scene of enormous cry and scanty wool. It mendicants description. . . . But the grand charm and scene of a canal packet is ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... Bernard modestly. "I'm not tall enough to please everyone of the feminine gender. But you think ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... gender of the doubtful kind; A something, nothing, not to be defined; 'Twould puzzle worlds its sex to ascertain, So very empty, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... this time. He would talk to her amiably when he met her at the Opera; but, if she invited him to dinner, he invented an excuse, if possible, for not going. "Don't speak to me," he would say, "of this writer of the neuter gender. Nature ought to have given her more ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... I wot you can suddenly change your gender at a pinch," said the clerk, chuckling at his own impertinence. But the prisoner, no longer dumb, as aforetime at the farm, answered, in a voice that awed even this presuming minion, with all the attributes of both law ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... Danish the sun is of the feminine gender, and not, as with us, when personified, spoken of as "he." We beg to make this observation, lest the roses' wish "to kiss the sun," be thought unmaidenly. We are anxious, also, to remove a stumbling block, which might perchance trip up exquisitely-refined ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... went its way then, and Fairchild his, still wondering; the sheriff's question, with a different gender, ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... quimen to know, quimchi wise; and these, by the interposition of no, become negative, as tuenotu not terrestrial, quimnochi ignorant. The adjectives, participles, and derivative pronouns are unsusceptible of number or gender, in which they resemble the English; yet when it is necessary to distinguish the sexes, alca is used for the masculine, and domo for the feminine. The comparative is formed by prefixing jod or doi to the positive, and the superlative by cad or mu. Thus from chu limpid, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... now, what is't that strikes thy sceptic mind, Constraining thee to sundry arguments Against belief that from insensate germs The sensible is gendered?—Verily, 'Tis this: that liquids, earth, and wood, though mixed, Are yet unable to gender vital sense. And, therefore, 'twill be well in these affairs This to remember: that I have not said Senses are born, under conditions all, From all things absolutely which create Objects that feel; but much it matters here Firstly, how small the ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... is quite easy," answered Josef. "The female silkworm spins a house which, like an egg, is a little sharper at one end than at the other. We'll choose about the same number of each gender. There is a knack in selecting good cocoons for breeding, and you've got to know lots of things about them. And after we have chosen them there will be the rest of the cocoons to sort. That will require care, too. We cannot do it as experts do, but still ...
— The Story of Silk • Sara Ware Bassett
... warmth but entertains, Oh frost! oh snow! oh hail! forbid the banes. One drop now deads a spark, but if the same Once gets a force, floods cannot quench the flame. Rather than love, let me be ever lost, Or let me 'gender ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... we are in private, let's wanton it a little, and talk waggishly.—Sir John, I am telling sir Amorous here, that you two govern the ladies wherever you come; you carry the feminine gender afore you. ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... languages is because ours has so far outgrown them by throwing off not only inflections but many old rules of syntax, that we have had to go backward to an earlier and more obsolescent stage of human development. In 1414, at the Council of Constance, when Emperor Sigismund was rebuked for a wrong gender, he replied, "I am King of the Romans and above grammar." Thomas Jefferson later wrote, "Where strictures of grammar does not weaken expression it should be attended to; but where by a small grammatical negligence the energy of an ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... personified objects. According to Professor Max Mueller, animism, or the investing all things with life, springs not in the first place from man's thought, but from the language in which he clothes it. Man, he says, found himself speaking of all things in words having "a termination expressive of gender, and this naturally produced in the mind the corresponding idea of sex." He thus came to invest all objects with "something of an individual, active, sexual, and at last personal character." However hard it may be to discover the reason for the origin of the tendency to animism, ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... be of the feminine gender," returned Borroughcliffe, with an air somewhat splenetic, "we must abide the fury of the king of beasts. His paw is, even now, at the outer door; and, if my orders have been obeyed, his entrance will be yet easier than ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... to all the substances enjoined in that section (as instrumental towards the end of the sacrifice). And the use of the feminine case-termination of the word is merely meant to suggest a special instance (viz. the cow) of all the things, of whatever gender, which are enjoined in that section. Tawniness must not therefore be restricted to the cow one year old only.— Of this purvapaksha the Sutra disposes in the following words: 'There being oneness of sense, and hence connexion of substance and quality with one action, there is restriction.'—The fact ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... of living beings are either masculine or feminine, and names of things without life are neuter. This is called /natural gender. Yet in English there are some names of things to which we refer as if they were feminine; as, "Have you seen my yacht? She is a beauty." And there are some names of living beings to which we refer as if they were neuter; as, "Is the baby here? No, the nurse has taken it home." ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... first of the adjectives agreeing with les sentimens in the wrong gender? The blot may be a trifling one, but I think I may say that it defaces every copy of this well-known billet-doux. I have seen many editions of The Sentimental Journey, some by the best publishers of the time in which they lived, and I find the same mistake ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... this genus is often written Productus, just as Spirifera is often given in the masculine gender as Spirifer (the name originally given to it). The masculine termination to these names is, however, grammatically incorrect, as the feminine noun cochlea (shell) ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... that on snow crust, I ever knew to gender I'll hint no more about this whore For fear I should ...
— Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America • Henry Reed Stiles
... thirty of these signs and the ideas which they were supposed to embody, he had before him only the skeleton of a sentence, from which the flesh and sinews had disappeared; the tone and rhythm of the words were wanting, as were also the indications of gender, number, person, and inflection, which distinguish the different parts of speech and determine the varying relations between them. Besides this, in order to understand for himself and to guess the meaning of the author, the reader was obliged to translate the symbols which he deciphered, by ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... there except the toggery of some of honest Joe's female gender. As the door is not fastened with any extraordinary care, you have only to look for yourself, since ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... knowledge of horses, of harness, of farm subjects in general made good soil for conversation with her host, and her love for the motherless colt called her to the barn and made special openings for communications. Nathan called the colt, which was of the feminine gender, Pat, because its upper lip was so long, and that too the girl enjoyed, and entered into the joke by softening the name to Patsie. They were good friends. Having decided to befriend her, the man's interest in ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... heretofore spoken of the Navajo weavers always as of the feminine gender because the large majority of them are women. There are, however, a few men who practice the textile art, and among them are to found the best ...
— Navajo weavers • Washington Matthews
... trained from their childhood to be sympathetic, altruistic, devoted, self-sacrificing, and were thus much better prepared than the men for the germs of amorous sentiment, which can grow only in such a soil of self-denial. Hence it is that Hindoo love-poems are usually of the feminine gender. This is notably the case with the Saptacatakam of Hala, an anthology of seven hundred Prakrit verses made from a countless number of love-poems that are intended to be sung—"songs," says Albrecht Weber, "such as the girls of India, especially perhaps the bayaderes or temple girls may have been ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... heavily and the sea ran high. The likeness passed away, like a breath along the surface of the gaunt pier-glass behind her, on the frame of which, a hospital procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples, were offering black baskets of Dead Sea fruit to black divinities of the feminine gender—and he made his ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... ever surrounded these lovely and noble blonde women had driven me into an unnatural reserve in regard to my own people and country. I had always perceived the utter absence of my allusion to the masculine gender, and conceiving that it must be occasioned by some more than ordinary circumstances, I refrained from intruding ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... she would light a candle, and that if she had expected me she would have waited up in spite of the cold. I felt as if I were in the middle of an iceberg. I heard the girl laughing, and going up to the bed and passing my hand over it I came across some plain tokens of the masculine gender. I had got hold of her brother. In the meanwhile the mother had got a candle, and I saw the girl with the bedclothes up to her chin, for, like her brother, she was as naked as my hand. Although no ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of commercial femininity we have two types—one, the business man; the other, an individual without gender, impersonal, capable. She never does anything ill-bred, certainly, but one no more thinks of specifying that she is a lady than that her hair is black; ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... writings of the prophets the feminine gender is often used when speaking of the House of Israel, and the masculine when denoting the House of Judah. Quite frequently Israel is spoken of as a divorced woman, as being cast off, and as being barren. Judah remaining faithful to the throne of David and the temple service, and abiding in the ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... over the invasion of their territories by a man and a gentleman. He was a half-pay captain, and had obtained some situation on a neighbouring railroad, which had been vehemently petitioned against by the little town; and if, in addition to his masculine gender, and his connection with the obnoxious railroad, he was so brazen as to talk of being poor—why, then, indeed, he must be sent to Coventry. Death was as true and as common as poverty; yet people never spoke about that, loud out in the streets. It was a word not to be mentioned to ears polite. ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... of blood. Now, who or what fearful apparition was inflicting this punishment on the poor fellow remained an impenetrable mystery to me. The blows were given by a person of grisly aspect, with a head almost bald, and sunken cheeks, apparently of the feminine gender, though hardly to be classed in the gentler sex. There being no teeth to modulate the voice, it had a mumbled fierceness, not passionate, but stern, which absolutely made me quiver like calf's-foot jelly. Who could the phantom be? The most awful circumstance of the ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... writers who had preceded him avoided, but which constantly manifested itself in the richer manner of his own contemporaries—the abuse of treating the uninflected English language as if it were an inflected language, in which variations and distinctions of case and gender and number help to connect adjective with substantive, and relative with antecedent. Sometimes, though less often, he distorts the natural order of the English in order to secure the Latin desideratum of finishing with the most emphatic and important ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... of Scython changing his sex, is perhaps based upon the fact, that the country of Thrace, which took the name of Thracia from a famous sorceress, was before called Scython; and that as it lost a name of the masculine gender for one of the feminine, in after times it became reported that Scython ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... and, when he forgot himself so far as to utter a few genial, silly, well-worn reflections upon femininity at large, I turned upon him and revealed to him some of the characteristics of his own sex, gained from an exhaustive study of the barnyard fowl of the masculine gender. He went into the house discomfited, though chuckling a little at my vehemence; but at least I have made it for ever impossible for him to watch his hens without an occasional glance ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... from this hardly conclusive mark of identity there was nothing positive, nothing definite, about her. She was neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, neither grave nor gay. She gave the impression of a young person of the feminine gender—that, and nothing more. She was plainly dressed, like thousands of other girls, in darkish blue jacket and skirt and white shirt waist. Her boots and gloves were neat, her hair simply and well arranged. Perhaps in these respects—in ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... have forgotten it; all that I remember is that Latin has no article, that it has a vocative, and that the head belongs to the neuter gender." ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... the Rabbis say, "we are to understand either male or female." "If so," it is asked, "why the term 'witch,' in Exod. xxii. 18, in the Hebrew verse 17, is in the feminine gender?" "Because," it is answered, "most women ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... loved a lass, For she was tall and slender; Amas, amat—she laid me flat, Though of the feminine gender. ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... thus murmuring to himself, a dubious-looking being of the feminine gender, of whom it was difficult to judge whether she was a spouse or a scullery-maid, appeared at the extreme end of the dike, which led towards the ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... that I can conceive as checking for a moment her exultation would be the natural womanly horror at the sight of blood and physical suffering, the expression of which seems to me not only natural to her, as of the "feminine gender," but not altogether superfluous to reconcile an English audience to so unfeminine a proceeding as stabbing a man. To conciliate all this I adopted the course of immediately dropping the arm that held the dagger, and with the other ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... all things else, whether outward objects or abstract ideas, are relegated to the class of neuters. Hardly in some flight of poetry do we ever endue any of them with the characteristics of a sentient being, and then only by speaking of them in the feminine gender. The virtues may be pictured in female forms, but they are not so described in language; a ship is humorously supposed to be the sailor's bride; more doubtful are the personifications of church and country as females. Now the genius of the Greek language is the ...
— Charmides • Plato
... male or female—if virtues admit of grammatical distinctions, if virtues acknowledge the more worthy gender and the less worthy of the grammar, show me a virtue male or female that can long exist without truth. Even that emphatically termed the virtue of our sex, Helen, on which social happiness rests, society depends, ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... his nose violently. "Truly—though used for either gender, by the context masculine," he responded gravely. "Ah," he added, leaning over Clarence, and scanning his work hastily, "Good, very good! And now, possibly," he continued, passing his hand like a damp sponge over ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... gender was ever more capable of presenting to the mind the elegaic nature of an old maid than Mademoiselle Sophie Gamard. In order to describe a being whose character gives a momentous interest to the petty events of the present drama and to the anterior lives of the actors in it, it may be useful to give ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... on imagination, sympathy and sensibility, vanity and temper. The masculine pronoun he, has been used for grammatical convenience, not at all because we agree with the prejudiced, and uncourteous grammarian, who asserts, "that the masculine is the more worthy gender." ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... is no living, responsible thing, But he gives it the gender of life; And, seeing his fancy is free in the wing, It suits him as ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... Gender is distinguished by the word "quay," either prefixed or added to nouns, to indicate ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... What is here in italics is in manuscript in the original. There is no Monsieur nor Madame, the word anglais showing the gender of the person to whom the pass was granted, and ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss
... arbitrate betwixt His terra cotta, plain or mix'd, And thy earth-gender'd sonnet; Small cause has he th' award to dread:— Thy Images are in the head, And his, poor boy, are ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... words obsolete and antiquated, and such were found by the later scribes in the sacred books and noted by them with a view to the books being publicly read according to custom. (100) For this reason the word nahgar is always found marked because its gender was originally common, and it had the same meaning as the Latin juvenis (a young person). (101) So also the Hebrew capital was anciently called Jerusalem, not Jerusalaim. (102) As to the pronouns himself and herself, I think that the later ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... her a faint, unconscious contempt for men—creatures always at the beck and call of her smile, and so easily disquieted by a little frown—gave her also a secret yearning for companions of her own gender. Any girl or woman that she did chance to meet always took a fancy to her, because she was so nice to them, which made the transitory nature of these friendships tantalizing. She was incapable of jealousies or backbiting. Let men beware of such—there is coiled in their ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... vices of low, sordid, and illiberal minds infect that high situation,—when theft, bribery, and peculation, attended with fraud, prevarication, falsehood, misrepresentation, and forgery—when all these follow in one train,—when these vices, which gender and spawn in dirt, and are nursed in dunghills, come and pollute with their slime that throne which ought to be a seat of dignity and purity, the evil is much greater; it may operate daily and hourly; it is not only imitable, but improvable, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... standing, in the nominative case, purposely, killed, by shooting an arrow, he, the one animate, sitting, in the objective case." "For the form of the verb to kill would have to be selected, and the verb changes its form by inflection, and by incorporated particles, to denote person, number and gender, as animate or inanimate, ...
— The Dakotan Languages, and Their Relations to Other Languages • Andrew Woods Williamson
... the root, and a whole race of plants are sometimes worn out by mixture from too close a proximity of the different families of the same genus. In the laws which Moses gave to the children of Israel, we find a provision against the evils of intermixtures in the precept: "Thy cattle shall not gender with diverse kind." "Thou shalt not sow the field with, divers seeds." In these precepts God has taken care to guard the wholesome generation of plants as well as ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... plan is to address the article as "little angel." The noun "angel" being of common gender suits the case admirably, and the epithet is sure of being favorably received. "Pet" or "beauty" are useful for variety's sake, but "angel" is the term that brings you the greatest credit for sense and good-feeling. The word should be preceded by a short giggle and accompanied by ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... canalla is feminine in its usual collective meaning: rabble. Applied to an individual, however, it agrees in gender. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... sight of men; ay, friend, she would ha' shrieked if she had but seen a man till she was in her teens. As I'm a person, 'tis true. She was never suffered to play with a male child, though but in coats. Nay, her very babies were of the feminine gender. Oh, she never looked a man in the face but her own father or the chaplain, and him we made a shift to put upon her for a woman, by the help of his long garments, and his sleek face, till she ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... set foot on the peninsula. Nor is this all; no female animal is suffered on the holy mountain, not even a hen. I suppose, tho I do not know, that the monks have an inspector of eggs, whose inherited instincts of aversion to the feminine gender enable him to detect and reject all those in which lurk the dangerous sex. Few of the monks eat meat, half the days of the year are fast days, they practise occasionally abstinence from food for two or three days, reducing their pulses to the feeblest beating, and subduing their bodies to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... and consequently impersonal, meaning God The Absolute, yet we suggest that the use of the masculine pronoun may be due entirely to the translators and commentators (of whom there have been many), and that, in their zeal to reconcile the song with the ecclesiastical ideas of spirituality, the gender of the pronoun has been changed. We submit that the idea is more than possible, and indeed in view of the avowed predilections of the ancient king and sage, ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... If heaven is a father, it is easy to go on from that. Earth will be the corresponding mother (an idea found all over the world); and all men will be their children. If the sun is invested with a name of masculine gender (but the sun is frequently feminine), he must do feats becoming such a character. If the storm is a male god, he will be a warrior or a huntsman. Thus the god acquires a personal character and an independent ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... ten, of the original of which it is in fact an extremely reduced form; but it is less obvious that twen- is a shortened form of twain. And perhaps none but scholars of Teutonic languages are aware that twain was once of the masculine gender only, while two was so restricted that it could only be applied to things that were feminine or neuter. As a somewhat hackneyed example of phonetic decay, we may take the case of the Latin mea domina, i.e. my mistress, which became ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... as female persons. I need hardly say to you that we did not inherit this simplicity from others, but, like the Danes, in so far as they have done the like, have made it for ourselves. Whether we turn to the Latin, or, which is for us more important, to the old Gothic, we find gender; and in all daughter languages which have descended from the Latin, in most of those which have descended from the ancient Gothic stock, it is fully established to this day. The practical, business-like character of the English mind asserted itself in the rejection of a distinction, ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... word may affect more than one category. In such a Latin word as cor "heart," for instance, not only is a concrete concept conveyed, but there cling to the form, which is actually shorter than its own radical element (cord-), the three distinct, yet intertwined, formal concepts of singularity, gender classification (neuter), and case (subjective-objective). The complete grammatical formula for cor is, then, A (0) (0) (0), though the merely external, phonetic formula would be (A)—, (A) indicating the abstracted "stem" cord-, ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... prayer; and she that rears With words auguster temples. Happy thou Healing that leper with thy virgin kiss! A leprosy there is more direful, child!— Therein the nations rot when flesh is lord And spirit dies. Such ruin Arts debased Gender, or, gendered long, exasperate more. But thou, rejoice! From this pure centre Arts Unfallen shall breathe their freshness through the land, With kiss like thine healing a nation's wound Year after ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... cried out for mercy, and called to all the folk in words like these: "Behold ye of what sort are the angels of paradise! for though they are called angels, here shall ye see that they are not all of the male gender." Then with a ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... The sex of this fabulous animal is not clearly made out! It tells Zal that it had nursed him like a father, and therefore I have, in this place, adopted the masculine gender, though the preserver of young ones might authorize its being considered a female. The Simurgh is probably neither one nor the other, or both! Some have likened the Simurgh to the Ippogrif or Griffin; but the Simurgh is plainly a biped; others again have supposed ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... TERMAGANT.—This is a talker chiefly of the female sex; and it is in this gender ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... proprietor was a single man, there had been no division of affection, as there would have been had the dog belonged to a family of several members. Turk regarded nobody but his owner. (I shall now honour Turk by the masculine gender.) ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... Mrs. Eddy says, there was God, "All and in all, the eternal Principle." This Principle is both masculine and feminine; "Gender is embraced in Spirit, else God could never have shadowed forth from out Himself, the idea of male and female." But, Mrs. Eddy adds, "We have not as much authority for calling God masculine as feminine, the latter being the last, therefore highest ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... Fratricide Is an old custom of our ancient house; And you, ye Gods, I thank, that ye resolve Childless to root me hence. Thee let me counsel To view too fondly neither sun nor stars. Come follow to the gloomy realms below! As dragons, gender'd in the sulphur pool, Swallow each other with voracious rage, So our accurs'd race destroys itself. Childless and guiltless come below with me! There's pity in thy look! oh, gaze not so,— 'Twas with such looks that Clytemnestra ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... romping; and yet you see, she looks as fresh and sweet as when starting out, with the addition of much becoming trimming; and where she has gone heartily, yet with a girlish grace, the other has gone pell-mell, as though in defiance of any restriction on feminine gender. Do you know ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... figuratively called the daughter of Rocks and Mountains; because it is a country abounding with rocks and stones. And the Greeks, really supposing Cepha, a rock or stone, to have been the young ladies father, added their sign of the masculine gender to it, and it became Cepha-us. And mount Cassius being its southern boundary was called Cassiobi; from its being also the boundary of the overflowed Nile, called Obi, which the Greeks {566} ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... the Chippewa, must agree in number and tense with the noun. They must also agree in gender, that is, verbs animate must have nouns animate. They must also have animate pronouns and animate adjectives. Vitality, or the want of vitality, seems to be the distinction which the inventors of the language, seized upon, to set up the ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... at least some saltatory exhibition; but, alack! she remained sotto voce and hermetically sealed; and though other characters, in addition to the elderly gentlemen, appeared, they were all exclusively masculine in gender, and there was nothing done but to converse by twos and threes. When the third portion opened with a long-desiderated peep of petticoats, I told my neighbour confidently that now at last we were to see this dancing girl and the abduction; but she replied that ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... are reading and talking; but to talk he must have a book in his hand. The charm of the room lies in the absence of certain pedantic tones—the browns, blacks and grays—which distinguish most libraries. The apartment is of the feminine gender. There are half a dozen light colors scattered about—pink in the carpet, tender blue in the curtains, yellow in the chairs. The result is a general look of brightness and lightness; it expresses even a certain cynicism. You perceive the place to be the home, not of a man of learning, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... take the place of a person; certainly no mere influence could take the place of Jesus Christ, the greatest personality that ever lived. Again, Christ, in speaking of the Spirit as the Comforter, uses the masculine definite article, and thus, by His choice of gender, teaches the personality of the Holy Spirit. There can be no parity between a person ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... donkey, and cried cheerily on the inhabitants. He was a lean, nervous flibbertigibbet of a man, with something the look of an actor, and something the look of a horse-jockey. He had evidently prospered without any of the favours of education; for he adhered with stern simplicity to the masculine gender, and in the course of the evening passed off some fancy futures in a very florid style of architecture. With him came his wife, a comely young woman with her hair tied in a yellow kerchief, and their son, a little ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... RATIO FEMINARUM, and of men whose natures are of the epicene gender. It is a luxury we must forego in the face of the stern duties which evil compels us ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... provocative of much merriment. Here is one. The writer is one "Bill Pumpkin," H.M.S. "Ugly Mug," who states that the holder, Mary Brown (who does not know Mary the ubiquitous Mary), "has a strange knack of forgetting the gender of a shirt, for it not unfrequently happens that you may find her with that article of male apparel on her own 'proper person,' otherwise, he says, she is all that can be desired." The said Mary B being unable to read English—or for that matter any other language—holds ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... the gender in titles of respect, and from force of habit he continued to do so in addressing Tyler Sudley for many a year after he ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... and since you are laying down a rule, you are right," said Raymond. "But this is a particular case and an exception. We owe some duties to the feminine gender as well as to patriotism. The greater shouldn't always be swallowed up ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Kaiser and King of the Romans. But this passage of his opening speech is what I recollect best of him there: "Right reverend Fathers, date operam ut illa nefanda schisma eradicetur," exclaims Sigismund, intent on having the Bohemian schism well dealt with—which he reckons to be of the feminine gender. To which a cardinal mildly remarking, "Domine, schisma est generis neutrius (schisma is neuter, your Majesty)," Sigismund loftily replies: "Ego sum Rex Romanus et super grammaticam (I am King of the Romans, and above Grammar)!" For which reason I call him in my note-books ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... turns men into monkeys, wheel-barrows, and whatever else best humours his fancy, hath so strangely metamorphosed the human shape; nor the great Cibber, who confounds all number, gender, and breaks through every rule of grammar at his will, hath so distorted the English language as thou dost metamorphose and distort ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... popular of all superlatives—"prettiest." So accustomed am I to squaring my estimate of beauty by the good, old adage, "he handsome is who handsome does," or "she beautiful is who beautiful does"—to employ a gender more appropriate to the case. Well, then, "the prettiest," withal, as you may easily believe when I tell you that her hair was so gold-like, her eyes so sky-like, her brow so lily-like, her cheeks so rose-like, her lips ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... language is largely polysyllabic. It is burdened with personal pronouns, and its adjectives have numerous changes in addition to their degrees of comparison. We find no inflections to suggest case or gender. The adjective mpolo, which means "large," carries seven or eight forms. While it is impossible to tell whether a noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter, they use one adjective for all four declensions, changing its form to ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... pp. 464 sq., 472 sq. The genital members of the men over whom the canoe was dragged were cut off and hung on a sacred tree (akau-tambu), "which was already artificially prolific in fruit, both of the masculine and feminine gender." The tree which bore such remarkable fruit was commonly an ironweed tree standing in a conspicuous situation. As to these sacrifices compare Ch. Wilkes, op. cit. iii. 97; Lorimer Fison, Tales from ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... grocerly thieves Turn over new leaves, Without much mending their lives or their tea - No, never since cup was filled or stirred Were such wild and horrible anecdotes heard, As blackened their neighbours of either gender, Especially that, which is called the Tender, But instead of the softness we fancy therewith, Was hardened in vice as the ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... Ella, "I think it's quite nice to take a meal occasionally without the presence of anybody of the masculine gender." ...
— Elsie's Kith and Kin • Martha Finley
... non-meritorious actions; for neither of those two is the topic of discussion or has been mentioned previously. Nor can the term 'work' denote the enumerated persons, since the latter are mentioned separately—in the clause, 'He who is the maker of those persons'—and as inferential marks (viz. the neuter gender and the singular number of the word karman, work) contradict that assumption. Nor, again, can the term 'work' denote either the activity whose object the persons are, or the result of that activity, since those two are already implied in the mention of the agent (in the clause, 'He who is the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... or root, as it is sometimes called, and a formative element. The formative element is used with a great many different words to define or qualify them; that is, to indicate mode, tense, number, person, gender, etc., of verbs, nouns, and other parts ...
— On the Evolution of Language • John Wesley Powell
... bank-books of their remembrance, to have transferred all the stock of filial affection into their mother's name. Mr. Bagnet is one of these. Perhaps his exalted appreciation of the merits of the old girl causes him usually to make the noun-substantive "goodness" of the feminine gender. ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... clouds, the timid inhabitant of the terrace appeared to be encouraged to come out altogether. D'Harmental then saw, by his black velvet knee-breeches, and by his silk stockings, that the personage who had just entered on the scene was of the masculine gender. ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... looked to my eye (I use the masculine gender because it was a male bird, but an Irishman laboring in the field, to whom I related my discovery, spoke touchingly of the bird as "she," and I notice that the old poets do the same); his long, sharp wings, and something in his manner of flight suggested a shore-bird. ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... very happy, and then, after slapping Harry on the back, and asking why he hadn't been over before, the Judge asked every body to walk in. They did so—the Judge leading the way—and calling to several individuals of the female gender, as Miss Squires would say, for light. The call was a necessary one, for the day had been as hot and sultry as though it were August; and on a summer evening, in both town and country, it is a frequent custom to sit in the dark ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... its nominative. Now you may write, at the head of the first column, the word Nouns, and at the head of the second, Nom., for nominative. Then rule a line for the third column. What shall this contain?" "The declension." "Yes; and the fourth?" "Gender." "The fifth?" "Number." ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... that the royal bedchamber is in fact a third house of Parliament—that the affairs of the state are always to be put in the feminine gender? ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... on the system of inflections. In the second period, that of Old Danish, bringing us down to 1400, the change of the system of vowels begins to be settled, and masculine and feminine are mingled in a common gender. An indefinite article has been formed, and in the conjugation of the verb a great simplicity sets in. In the third period, 1400-1530, the influence of German upon the language is supreme, and culminates in the Reformation. The fourth period, from 1530 to about 1680, completes the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... absurd person, singular back number, tutor gender, objectionable case governed by the word I," ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... will illustrate the philosophy better than any attempt at interpretation, and the humor of the telling only intensifies the tragedy. "The name of the father of Ginx's Baby was Ginx. By a not unexceptional coincidence, its mother was Mrs. Ginx. The gender of Ginx's Baby was masculine." That is the first paragraph of the book, and there you have a hint of the flippant flavor; also a very strong suggestion of Mr. Charles Dickens. The hero of the book was a thirteenth child. Ominously humorous! The mother previously had ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... science, has perhaps had most to do with humanising our humanistic studies. It was a great step when boys who could not make verses were allowed to make if it was but a smell; and even breaking a test-tube once in a while is more educative than breaking the gender-rules every day of the week. Many of my friends, who label themselves humanists, are in a panic about this, and look upon me sadly as a renegade because I, who owe almost everything to a "classical education," am ready (they think) to sell the pass of "compulsory Greek" to a horde of money-grubbing ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... sister of Osiris. As to the etymology of her name the Maya affords it in I[C]IN—the younger sister. As Queen of the Amenti, of the West, she also is represented in hieroglyphs by the same characters as her husband—a leopard, with an eye above, and the sign of the feminine gender an oval or egg. But as a goddess she is always portrayed with wings; the vulture being dedicated to her; and, ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... child. The birth is especially remarkable: fifteen-year-old Emmeline, alone in the jungle, loses consciousness and awakes to find a baby boy on the ground near her. Naming the boy Hannah (an example of Stacpoole's penchant for gender reversals), the Lestranges live in familial bliss until they are unexpectedly expelled from their ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... rules of Philosophie may easelie resolue a man of the contrarie: For it is a sure principle of that arte, that nothing can be diuided in sexes, except such liuing bodies as must haue a naturall seede to genere by. But we know spirites hath no seede proper to themselues, nor yet can they gender one with an other. ...
— Daemonologie. • King James I
... indicated for nouns ending in o which are masculine, nor for those in a which are feminine, nor for those nouns whose gender is inherent. The feminine ending in a has not been indicated for adjectives ending in o. In other cases the feminine has been indicated except ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... researches perceived a large bell, to which she made such effectual application as alarmed every soul in the family. In a moment she was surrounded by Hatchway, Pipes, and all the rest of the servants half-dressed; but seeing none of the feminine gender appear, she began to storm at the sloth and laziness of the maids, who, she observed, ought to have been at work an hour at least before she called; and then, for the first time, understood that no woman was permitted to sleep ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... which, She's so coniunctiue to my life, and soule; That as the Starre moues not but in his Sphere, I could not but by her. The other Motiue, Why to a publike count I might not go, Is the great loue the generall gender beare him, Who dipping all his Faults in their affection, Would like the Spring that turneth Wood to Stone, Conuert his Gyues to Graces. So that my Arrowes Too slightly timbred for so loud a Winde, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... cries "vermin powder," is more advanced than those who occupy themselves with Nature, seeing that she is a proud jade and a capricious one, and only allows herself to be seen at certain times. Do you understand? So in all languages does she belong to the feminine gender, being a thing essentially changeable and fruitful ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... the fourth day began heat to gender upon the face of the earth, preventing the ice and snow from overcoming the life of vegetation in the circuit of life which the creator had decreed upon the plains of the world. And the sun went forth upon his circuit and came around again to the ...
— The Secret of the Creation • Howard D. Pollyen
... fire he has a cinder; Auld Tubal-Cain's fire-shool and fender; That which distinguished the gender O' Balaam's ass; A broom-stick o' the witch o' Endor, Weel shod ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... how sorry I am!" Martha returned with feeling. "I'd kinder counted on you for—for what they calls moral support, that bein' the kind the male gender is mainly good for, these days. But, of course, if you ain't been invited, it wouldn't be genteel for you to press yourself. I can understand your feelin's. They does credit to your head an' to your heart. As I said ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann
... talk about. I wish it were, because—well, the fact is, now that you are here it appears I may have considerable trouble in making you believe that I'm not merely developing a most womanish case of nerves. Cold feet, I suppose, might not be far from correct, if we put it in the proper gender. No, it's not the work itself. You know the first few miles at this end afford pretty plain sailing. We figured on that: or we wouldn't stand any chance of finishing the job. And we are quite nicely ahead of our schedule, so far. But have you—I ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... parish as the Eton grammar distinguishes nouns of the neuter gender. It is omne quod exit in -um; for so end nine out of ten of the Frisian villages. Now, throughout the whole length and breadth of the Brekkelums, and Stadums, &c., that lie along the coast, from Ripe north to ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... possession of his curacy, he married a young woman, who brought him beauty and modesty as her dower, and subsequently pledges of mutual love ad lib. But He that giveth, taketh away; and out of nearly a score of these interesting but expensive presents to her husband, only three, all of the masculine gender, arrived at years of maturity. John (or Jock as he usually was called), who was the eldest, was despatched to London, where he studied the law under a relation; who, perceiving that Mrs Forster's annual presentation of the living was not followed up by any presentation ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... and ess, generally signify the person who, or thing which. The last is an affix denoting the feminine gender. ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... her mistress, just a step above her in the social scale; and although the class contains among them many excellent, kind-hearted women, it also contains some very rough specimens of the feminine gender, and to some of these it occasionally falls to give our maid-of-all-work her first lessons in her multifarious occupations: the mistress's commands are the measure of the maid-of-all-work's duties. By the time she has become ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... the new President had arrived—by which means we obtained a satisfactory view of two cows, three geese, one big boy in a white apron and one small one in a blue apron, three darkies of feminine gender and one old horse; but Harrison himself we saw not. Mr. Persico says it's Tyler's luck to get into office by the death of his superior, and declares Harrison must infallibly die to secure John Tyler's fate. It's to be hoped this won't ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... German idea. I say to myself, "REGEN (rain) is masculine—or maybe it is feminine—or possibly neuter—it is too much trouble to look now. Therefore, it is either DER (the) Regen, or DIE (the) Regen, or DAS (the) Regen, according to which gender it may turn out to be when I look. In the interest of science, I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it is masculine. Very well—then THE rain is DER Regen, if it is simply in the quiescent state of being MENTIONED, without enlargement or discussion—Nominative ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain |
