"Locution" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that she might have said: "Did you want to see father?" ... in the idiom of the shop-girl or clerk, and that if she had said 'did' he would have been gravely disappointed and hurt. But she had not. Of course she had not! Of course she was incapable of such a locution, and it was silly of him to have thought otherwise, even momentarily. She was an artist. Entirely different from the blonde and fluffy Mrs. John Orgreave—(and a good thing too, for Mrs. John with her eternal womanishness ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... with which we are concerned the French public are too much afraid, I think, of crudities and of calling things by their proper name. By veiled words and by indirect locution one may say anything, but I have decided not to employ such subterfuges in treating of such a vital social question with the seriousness that it requires. It seems that there is a fear of young people hearing the sexual question spoken of freely and ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... Parmentier, made a thousand efforts to have pomme de terre [potato] pronounced parmentiere, and succeeded therein not at all. The Abbe Gregoire, ex-bishop, ex-conventionary, ex-senator, had passed, in the royalist polemics, to the state of "Infamous Gregoire." The locution of which we have made use—passed to the state of—has been condemned as a neologism by M. Royer Collard. Under the third arch of the Pont de Jena, the new stone with which, the two years previously, the mining aperture made by Blucher to blow up the bridge had been stopped up, was still ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo |
