Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Primer   Listen
adjective
Primer  adj.  First; original; primary. (Obs.) "The primer English kings."
Primer fine (O. Eng. Law), a fine due to the king on the writ or commencement of a suit by fine.
Primer seizin (Feudal Law), the right of the king, when a tenant in capite died seized of a knight's fee, to receive of the heir, if of full age, one year's profits of the land if in possession, and half a year's profits if the land was in reversion expectant on an estate for life; now abolished.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Primer" Quotes from Famous Books



... Murray: Early Quaker Injunctions regarding Schools. 200. Statutes: Apprenticeship Laws in the Southern Colonies. (a) Virginia Statutes. (b) North Carolina Court Records. 201. Stiles: A New England Indenture of Apprenticeship. 202. The New England Primer: Description ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... side there sprang up also a higher Latin instruction. We have shown in the previous epoch how Latin elementary instruction raised its character; how the place of the Twelve Tables was taken by the Latin Odyssey as a sort of improved primer, and the Roman boy was now trained to the knowledge and delivery of his mother-tongue by means of this translation, as the Greek by means of the original: how noted teachers of the Greek language and literature, Andronicus, Ennius, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... age has finer literary feeling or more dispassionate judgment than Matthew Arnold; and he has edited the second section of Isaiah as a text book for the culture of the imagination in English schools. In the introduction to this Primer he observes: "What a course of eloquence and poetry is the ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton

... demas de su vida y hechos los infantes de Mexico Ytzcoatzin y Xiuhcozcatzin, y otros Poetas y Historicos en los anales de las tres cabezas de esta Nueva Espana, y en particular en los anales que hizo el infante Quauhtlazaciulotzin, primer Senor del pueblo de Chiauhtla; y asimismo se halla en las relaciones que escribieron los infantes de la ciudad de Tezcuco, Don Pablo, Don Toribio, Don Hernando Pimentel y Juan de Pomar hijos y nietos del Rey ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton

... life, when only heard their voices came as though earth and air were speaking. "Sponge out.—All right. Fire! Hot while it lasts, but it won't last long. I have every confidence in Old Jack and Old Dick. Drat that primer! All right!—Three seconds! Jerusalem! that created a sensation. The Louisianians are coming up that cleft between the hills. All the Stonewall regiments in the centre. Ewell to flank their left. Did you ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... The School and Family Primer: Introductory to the Series of School and Family Readers. By Marcius Willson, Author of "American History," "Outlines of General History," etc. New York. Harper & Brothers. 12mo. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various

... je fais tous les jours, et je n'en suis pas surprise. Du caractere dont elle est, celui du Marquis doit etre de son gout. La Comtesse est une femme brusque, qui aime a primer, a gouverner, a etre la maitresse. Le Marquis est un homme doux, paisible, aise a conduire; et voila ce qu'il faut a la Comtesse. Aussi ne parle-t-elle de lui qu'avec eloge. Son air de naivete lui plait: c'est, dit-elle, le meilleur homme, le plus complaisant, ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux

... instructed and amused; and thus, with nature for his hornbook, and art for his primer, did the little parlour of Edward Forster ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat

... Hampshire, Maine had come a strange company, earnest, patient, determined, unschooled in even the primer of refinement, hungry for something the significance of which, when they had it, they could not even guess, anxious to be called great, determined so to be without ever knowing how. Here came the dreamy gentleman of the South, robbed of his patrimony; the hopeful ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... weary, old, blind man on crutches, and, lastly, as a ransomed soul raised up by angels, had always had the most intense interest for August, and he had made, not one history for him, but a thousand; he seldom told them the same tale twice. He had never seen a storybook in his life; his primer and his Mass book were all the volumes he had. But nature had given him Fancy, and she is a good fairy that makes up for the want of very many things! only, alas! her wings are so very soon broken, poor thing! and then she is of no use ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee

... actally askt if her minnyster mite be aloud to come and prepair me for Heavn; but I told the uzzy to prepair herself for another place and gav her a munths warnin to soot herself—but about the parleymeant—Hurl Grey the Primer has a load on his sholders wich I hop he will be able to discharg an all go off quiet: He has pledgd himself for to the caws for Riform an says hell Redrench evry Place where he has Grounds: and they all talk about Pooling Mesurs; but the Wetterun Bishop Sincurers and Cloaths borrowers ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 472 - Vol. XVII. No. 472., Saturday, January 22, 1831 • Various

... you a little primer this morning," she remarked after a short silence, "and I want you to say a lesson ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun

... replied the wife, examining the substance with a puzzled expression, "I do believe it's the primer!" ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne

... percussion patch of composition and the composition ring, B B, which burns round at a given rate until it reaches the communication passage, C, when it flashes through the percussion pellet, E, and ignites the magazine, D, and so ignites the primer shown in Fig. 6, flashes down the central tube of the shell, and explodes the bursting charge in the base, Fig. 5. The length of time during which the fuse burns depends on how far the composition ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various

... her the Salve Regina, and when it was ended she bade him go, for she would fain spend some time in prayer upon her primer. ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless

... from .50 to .25 About 100 volumes covering literature for high school reading. Send for list. Hooker's Study Book in English Literature 1.00 A handbook to accompany the appreciative study of the greater writers. Howes's Primer of American Literature .52 A brief, satisfactory account of the facts of American literary history. Howes's Primer of English Literature .52 The essentials concerning great writers and important periods. Meiklejohn's History of the English ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various

... Osborn, handing a book out of the pulpit. "It's a larger character—'long primer,' as I believe the printers call it. We'll have the lamps directly; but we are all of us rather partial to blind man's holiday—not to mention that oil is oil, and that Brother Spiers doesn't give it away. We know he couldn't afford to do ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... particularly procur'd us from the Quakers the printing forty sheets of their history, the rest being to be done by Keimer; and upon this we work'd exceedingly hard, for the price was low. It was a folio, pro patria size, in pica, with long primer notes.[55] I compos'd of it a sheet a day, and Meredith worked it off at press; it was often eleven at night, and sometimes later, before I had finished my distribution for the next day's work, for ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin

... childhood by their white playmates. Others knew their letters, but could not "put them together," as they said. I remember of a summer's afternoon seeing a young married woman, perhaps twenty-five years old, seated on a door-step with her primer before her, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various

... he drew out of the roar and commotion with a look of dumb terror on his countenance. He was defeated, puzzled, discomfited, frightened. Other cities had been to him as long primer to read; as country maidens quickly to fathom; as send-price-of-subscription-with-answer refuses to solve; as oyster cocktails to swallow; but here was one as cold, glittering, serene, impossible as a four-carat ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

... paper; and as it is set in long primer leaded and has a page of advertisements, there is no room for the crimes, disasters, and general sweepings of the outside world—thanks be! Today I find only a single importation of the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... drill regulations. As soon as you have got beyond the mere parade-ground work (and that is all the civilian ever sees) the book brings you to a region where nothing else is considered than the one thing, attack, attack, attack. There is something very grim and inexorable in this primer of war, this A B C of the principles of destruction. And if the innocent little pocket manual contains a codification, so condensed as to be amazing, of the ways to slay your enemy, the officers are ready with every possible amplification of its dry paragraphs. Get forward, always get ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French

... contained in this book. To Mr. Guy Wetmore Carryl, whose "Fables for the Frivolous" are published by Messrs. Harper & Brothers; to Mr. Charles E. Carryl, whose verses appeared originally in St. Nicholas; to Mr. Oliver Herford, whose "Child's Primer of Natural History" is published by Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons; to the same author for the selection from "Alphabet of Celebrities," published by Messrs. Small, Maynard & Co.; and Messrs. Harper & Brothers, the publishers of du Maurier's "A Legend of Camelot;" and to Messrs. Little, Brown ...
— The Best Nonsense Verses • Various

... sort of statement that!" continued the Idiot. "It's something like asserting that a man looks like himself, or, as in the case of a child's primer...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs

... health. In my childhood, he taught me and other, I fear, reluctant pupils all we were capable of learning of the Westminster Assembly's Shorter Catechism, contained, at that time, in a small but miscellaneous volume called the Primer. He was a great lover of the writings of Cowper, which name, in the English manner, he always pronounced Cooper, and of the Psalms and Hymns and the lyrical productions, in general, of Dr. Watts; and long after I had grown up, he pointed out to me a verse in one of those Hymns, ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous

... present day. The fourth form school boy of our age is acquainted with truths to know which Archimedes would have laid down his life. What would we not give to be able to get a glimpse of some book which will be used as a school-primer a hundred ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan

... lnguido latido, Sentimiento inefable de ternura, [900] Suspiro fiel de amor correspondido, El primer s de la ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup

... '&,' and had very few tied letters, in fact none but the absolutely necessary ones. Keeping my end steadily in view, I designed a black-letter type which I think I may claim to be as readable as a Roman one, and to say the truth I prefer it to the Roman. This type is of the size called Great Primer (the Roman type is of 'English' size); but later on I was driven by the necessities of the Chaucer (a double-columned book) to get a smaller Gothic type of ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris

... table and neatly-folded mattress. On the table is a Bible and Prayer-book, and sometimes a third book for amusement or instruction. In some of the cells, where the inmates are learning to read and write, there is a spelling primer and a copybook for pothooks. The female prisoners are not in their cells, but we shortly after find them assembled in a large room above, seated and at work. They all rose at our entrance, and I had a good look at their faces. There was not a single decent honest face amongst ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles

... irrefragable axiom because a Latin poet had said it, but it exactly met the case in point. He would convince the scorners that poetry might be seriously useful, and show Master Bull his new way of making fine words butter parsnips, in a rhymed moral primer. Allegory, as then practised, was imagination adapted for beginners, in words of one syllable and illustrated with cuts, and would thus serve both his ethical and pictorial purpose. Such a primer, or a first instalment of ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... began his scholastic career by running away in the course of the first year. They brought him back, whipped him well, and set him down to his books. Four times did he bury his primer in the earth; and four times, after giving him a sound thrashing, did they buy him a new one. But he would no doubt have repeated this feat for the fifth time, had not his father given him a solemn assurance that he would ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... stranger gazed at the books on the table: "Nutting's Grammar," "Adams' Arithmetic," "David's Tears" and the "New England Primer and Catechism"—all useful books undoubtedly, but not calculated long to engross the attention of the traveler. Turning from these prosaic volumes, the occupant of the chamber drew aside the curtain of the window and ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... keep well in a scientific atmosphere. Frozen theology has been experimented with by Archdeacon Farrar and others, and has some vogue. But the popular taste prefers it tinned. And yet it is very tough, in Articles. I am surprised that no one has written a simple explanation of them: "Primer of the Thirty-nine Articles," "The Thirty-nine Articles made Easy," or "Thirty-nine Articles for Beginners;" but no one ever has. It is a book that is very much needed, and if I had any influence with the theologians I would ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang

... Amoretti's printed version of the Ms., which is wrong in many particulars. Amoretti attempted to change the original Ms. into modern Italian, with disastrous result. It is to be regretted that Walls y Merino followed the same garbled text, in his Primer viaje alrededor ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal

... conquering and to conquer, he took with him a thousand bayonets on one side, and a Connecticut woman with her school-books on the other (applause). Where he planted the standard of the Union, she planted its institutions; and where he waved the sword, she waved the primer. ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... dreamy yet very oft-recurring memories of my life in childhood, as, for instance, that just before I was quite three years old I had given to me a copy of the old New England Primer, which I could not then read, yet learned from others the rhymes with the quaint ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... "Dissertation upon English Typographical Founders and Foundries," says Caxton's letter was originally of the sort called Secretary, and of this he had two fonts; afterward he came nearer to the English face, and had three fonts of Great Primer, a rude one which he used anno 1474, another something better, and a third cut about 1482; one of Double Pica, good, which first appears 1490; and one of Long Primer, at least nearly agreeing with the bodies which have since been called by ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... truths which the human spirit, at whatever stage of immaturity, imbibes with such eager interest. Pearl, therefore—so large were the attainments of her three years' lifetime—could have borne a fair examination in the New England Primer, or the first column of the Westminster Catechisms, although unacquainted with the outward form of either of those celebrated works. But that perversity, which all children have more or less of, and of which little Pearl had a tenfold portion, now, at the most inopportune ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... muy sobresaltado.) Ser Miguel! Y an estoy sin vestir! Entretenle un poco. Mal haya amn mi suerte![2] (Vase precipitadamente por la primer puerta de la derecha.) ...
— Ms vale maa que fuerza • Manuel Tamayo y Baus

... christened by the names applied to them, though always so called in the family from the places of their birth in barracks—are respectively employed on three-legged stools, the younger (some five or six years old) in learning her letters out of a penny primer, the elder (eight or nine perhaps) in teaching her and sewing with great assiduity. Both hail Mr. George with acclamations as an old friend and after some kissing and romping plant their ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... desterrado de la patria mia, De una patria que adoro, Perdida miro su primer valia ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various

... be learning that lesson, which is the primer of eternal life, then I hardly pity him, though I see him from youth to age tearing with weak hands at the gates of brass, and beating his soul's wings to pieces against the bars of the iron cage. But, alas! the majority of mankind ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... el primer pueblo en donde se encendera esta guerra patriotica que solo puede libertar a Europa.—Hemos oido esto en Inglaterra a varios de los que estaban alli presentes. Muchas veces ha oido lo mismo al duque de Wellington el general Don ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton

... follower of military science. Amid an environment of unfavourable conditions Soko preached the cult of bushido, and was the first to embody that philosophy in a written system. His books—the Shi-do (Way of the Warrior) and Bukyo Shogaku (Military Primer)—contain minute instructions as to the practice and the morale of the samurai. Soko rejected the Chutsz interpretation, then in vogue, of the Chinese classics, and insisted on the pure doctrine of the ancient sages, so that he found himself out of touch with the educational ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... reformatory. pulpit, lectern, soap box desk, reading desk, ambo[obs3], lecture room, theater, auditorium, amphitheater, forum, state, rostrum, platform, hustings, tribune. school book, horn book, text book; grammar, primer, abecedary[obs3], rudiments, manual, vade mecum; encyclopedia, cyclopedia; Lindley Murray, Cocker; dictionary, lexicon. professorship, lectureship, readership, fellowship, tutorship; chair. School Board Council of Education; Board ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... a simple, comprehensive presentation of the Freudian principles I have attempted to meet in this primer of psychotherapy, providing enough of biological and psychological background to make them intelligible, and enough application and illustration to make them useful to the general practitioner or the ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

... That yarn had been going the rounds of print since 1746. The Old Man was an absent-minded old child, and I knew it, so I turned my fancy loose and enlarged the paragraph to a full galley of long primer, composing the awful details as I set the type and made it a thriller. The Old Man never "held copy" reading proof, so he passed it all right and I saw myself an author in print for the first ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock

... invented. The dame who hobbled along in spectacles, dropping a low curtsey to the "quality," taught the hornbook and the primer to a select few of the progeny of the farmers and artisans, and the young ladies would no more have thought of assisting her labours than the blacksmith's. They only clubbed their pocket money to clothe and pay the schooling of one little orphan, who acknowledged them by a succession of the ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Aunt Comfort, who in honour of this extraordinary occasion, had retrimmed her cap, which was resplendent with bows of red ribbon as large as peonies. She had a Sunday-school primer in her hand, and was repeating the letters with the utmost regularity, as Miss Cass pronounced them. They got on charmingly until after crossing over the letter O, as a matter of course they ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb

... produces this effect. If you look at a straight stick set up in the water, it will appear to be bent, and this is caused by refraction. The learned gentlemen present will excuse me for going back to the primer of physics." ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic

... to live that life; and I, in my capacity, am only striving to teach what Nature has been showing you for thousands of centuries, though you have not cared to master her lessons. The science of to-day is but Nature's first primer—a spelling-book as it were, with the alphabet set out in pictures. You are told by sagacious professors,—who after all are no more than children in their newly studied wisdom,—that human life was evolved in the ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli

... imprisoned than to listen to the archbishop's harangues. From Hereford it was announced that "rebellion is rampant, attendance at church is contemptuous, and John Hareley read so loudly on his latin popish primer (that he understands not) that he troubles both minister and people." In Oxford and amongst the lawyers in the Inns of Court and in the Inns of Chancery popery and ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey

... as Justicia Mayor de los Estados Unidos, (what had become of Marshall? was he dead, or banished?) and another made known, by news received from Vera Cruz, that "El Vizconde Melbourne" had returned to the office of "primer ministro," in place of Sir Roberto Peel. (Sir Robert Peel had been minister, then? and where were Earl Grey and the Duke of Wellington?) Here were the outlines of a grand parliamentary overturn, the filling up of which I could imagine at ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... was of proper age, his father sent him over to the road-side school at Long Benton, kept by Rutter, the parish clerk. But the education which Rutter could give was of a very limited kind, scarcely extending beyond the primer and pothooks. While working as a brakesman on the pit-head at Killingworth, the father had often bethought him of the obstructions he had himself encountered in life through his want of schooling; and he formed the noble determination that no labour, ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles

... German Shakespeare Society (English translation, 1874) are worth studying. A less ambitious effort of the same kind by Samuel Neil (1861) is seriously injured by the writer's acceptance of Collier's forgeries. Professor Dowden's 'Shakspere Primer' (1877) and his 'Introduction to Shakspere' (1893), and Dr. Furnivall's 'Introduction to the Leopold Shakspere,' are all useful ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... godliness wants to stay next to cleanliness when she's around it has to keep on the jump. I always buy shirts two degrees heavier'n I need, 'cause I know she'll have 'em scrubbed thin in a fortni't. When it comes to real Domestic Science, Caroline, Abbie ain't in the back row of the primer class, now ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln

... All of these was white. They wasn't colored teachers. After the War, that was. I have the book I used when I went to school. Here is the little Arithmetic I used. Here is the Blue Back Speller. I have a McGuffy's Primer too. I didn't use that. I got that out of the trash basket at the white people's house where I work. One day they throwed it out. That is what they use ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Arkansas Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration

... Psalter with Brady and Tate, And laid the Primer above them all, I've nailed a horseshoe over the grate, And hung a wig to my parlor wall Once worn by a learned Judge, they say, At Salem court ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... had made his kill, again one of the Pal-ul-don specimens of antelope, all species of which Tarzan had known since childhood as Bara, the deer, since in the little primer that had been the basis of his education the picture of a deer had been the nearest approach to the likeness of the antelope, from the giant eland to the smaller bushbuck of the ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Professor Jevons wrote a "Primer of Political Economy" (1878), which is a simple, bird's-eye view of the subject in a very ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill

... preguntar a las toninas de la mar y a las palomas qe andauan por el ayre y vltimamente lo fueron a preguntar al temblor de la tierra, al qual dixo qe era necesario qe se casasen para qe Vbiese hombres en el mundo y ellos se casaron y El primer hijo que tubieron se llamo sibo, y despues una hija qe se llamo samar y estos dos hermanos Vbieron otra hija que se llamo lupluban y esta se caso con vn hijo de los primeros hombres qe se llamo ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various

... M.P., who has apparently a somewhat elementary knowledge of ancient history, and who seems to rely for information on a primer such as "Little Willie's First History Book," recommends Communism because "In Sparta there were not only common lands, but also a common table, whilst dogs and horses were practically common property also. Sparta, which kept its Communism almost to the end, was also the Republic from ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... is printed on the finest paper, from large, clear type, leaded, Long Primer in size, that all can read, the whole containing near Six Hundred full page Illustrations, printed on tinted paper, from designs by Cruikshank, Phiz, Browne, Maclise, McLenan, and other artists. The following books are each contained in ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens

... percibir un extrano rumor de voces delgadas, dulces y misteriosas que hablaban entre si, reian o cantaban cada cual por su parte y una cosa diferente, formando una algarabia tan ruidosa y confusa como la de los pajaros que despiertan al primer rayo del sol entre las frondas ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

... a little larger, they obtained the power of speaking articulate sounds by external revelation, hearing and imitating the sounds made by others. Further, upon a memorable day, they had a "book revelation" made to them, in the shape of a penny primer, and were initiated into the mysteries of A, B, C, by "the instructions of another, be he who he may." There was absolutely not the least "insight," or "spiritual faculty," or "self-consciousness" in one of them, by which they then could, or ever to this hour did, "find true within them" any sort ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... emigrants, and (to help point the moral) within the year, in an almost similar case, another shipload had been drowned through that same blind, helpless, hopeless panic. The pride of race bubbled through the British Daily Press in prosaic long primer and double-leaded bourgeois. There was no saying aloud, "We rejoice that an Englishman has done this thing, after having it proved to us that it was above the foreigner's strength." The newspaper man does not rhapsodize. But the sentiment was there all the same, and it was that which ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

... to the half-witted children at the Idiot Asylum. The trick of rhyming cannot be more usefully employed than in furnishing a pleasant amusement to the poor feeble-minded children. I should feel that I was well employed in getting up a Primer for the pupils of the Asylum, and other young persons who are incapable of serious thought and connected expression. I would start in the ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... October day when Columbus discovered the new world, Martin, a boy of very nearly nine, was sitting at his desk in the school at Mansfeld. Though both diligent and quick, he found the crabbed Latin primer, itself written in abstract Latin, very difficult, and was flogged fourteen times in one morning by {63} brutal masters for faltering in a declension. When he returned home he found his mother bending under a load of wood she had gathered in the forest. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... to sound this warning, as I know whereof I speak, as I have traveled this Romish road of despair for thirty years, and I know her cunning and dastardly deception so well that her history and her teachings are to me like the primer is to the ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg

... Kindergarten, what? A primer of Reading and Writing for the Intermediate Class, and Primary Schools ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel

... be said to reflect: they are all impulse; and so, instead of expounding dogmas, the missionaries give them the large type, pleasing cuts, and short and easy lessons of the primer. Hence, anything like a permanent religious impression is seldom or ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville

... trial was connected with a visit to a school. I was getting proud of my ability to spell small words. A primer-maker had attempted to help the association of letters with objects by placing them in juxtaposition, but through a mistake he led me to my undoing. I knew my letters and I knew some things. I plainly distinguished the letters P-A-N. Against them I was puzzled by a picture of a ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock

... question has been put by the Mayor, inasmuch as I hope I may receive it as a token that he has forgiven me those extremely large letters, which I must say, from the glimpse I caught of them when I arrived in the town, looked like a leaf from the first primer of ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens

... suffered from ill-health. My parents let me play about in the open air, and did not put me to school until I had turned my sixth year. One day, playing in the shoemaker's shop, William Farrel asked me if I knew my letters. I answered 'No.' He then took down a primer from a shelf, and began to teach me the alphabet, at the same time amusing me by likening the letters to familiar objects in his shop. I soon learned to read, and in about six weeks I surprised my father by ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles

... Consolidated. Affairs in those theaters of commercial effort were as they should be. Things were moving slowly, they must of necessity move slowly, and Storri had grown impatient. The Russian's warmth was expected; Mr. Harley had read him long since like a primer book. Storri was excitable, volatile, full of fever and impulse, prone to go off at tangents. In some stress of nerves he had sent for Mr. Harley to urge expedition or ask for explanations. The thing had chanced before. Mr. Harley would cool him into calmness with a dozen words. Storri's ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis

... as a companion to the Outline Sketch of English Literature, published last year for the Chautauqua Circle. In writing it I have followed the same plan, aiming to present the subject in a sort of continuous essay rather than in the form of a "primer" or elementary manual. I have not undertaken to describe or even to mention every American author or book of importance, but only those which seemed to me of most significance. Nevertheless I believe that the sketch contains enough detail to make it of some use as a guide-book ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... fourpence, of a Miscellany, to be continued every eighth day, under the name of "The Watchman", by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This Miscellany will be comprised in two sheets, or thirty-two pages, closely printed in 8vo; the type, long primer. Its contents, 1:—A history of the domestic and foreign policy of the preceding days. 2:—The speeches in both Houses of Parliament; and, during the recess, select parliamentary speeches from the commencement of the reign of Charles I. to the present aera, with notes historical and biographical. ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... his primer to follow the hangman's lumbering cart up Tyburn Hill, and, still a mere imp of mischief, he would run the weary way from Kensington to Shoe Lane on the distant chance of a cock-fight. He was present, so he would relate in after years, when Sir Thomas Jermin's man put his famous trick upon ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley

... Fetchke had her Russian lesson I was told to go and play. I am sorry to say that I was disobedient on these occasions, as on many others. I did not go and play; I looked on, I listened, when Fetchke rehearsed her lesson at home. And one evening I stole the Russian primer and repaired to a secret place I knew of. It was a storeroom for broken chairs and rusty utensils and dried apples. Nobody would look for me in that dusty hole. Nobody did look there, but they looked everywhere else, in the house, and in the yard, and in the barn, and down the ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... all the alphabet. No student of Greek or Hebrew ever deserved so much praise for ingenuity and diligence. But the years pass on, and still you cannot read. Your master-brother now and then gives you a copper. You hoard them, and buy a primer; screening yourself from suspicion, by telling the bookseller that your master wants it for his sister's little boy. You find the picture of a cat, with three letters by its side; and now you know how cat is ...
— The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 9, An Appeal To The Legislators Of Massachusetts • Lydia Maria Child

... beyond dispute. The familiar use of these tongues disappeared long ago, so they are content to imitate what they find in books, and they call that talking. If the master's Greek and Latin is such poor stuff, what about the children? They have scarcely learnt their primer by heart, without understanding a word of it, when they are set to translate a French speech into Latin words; then when they are more advanced they piece together a few phrases of Cicero for prose or a few lines of Vergil ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... that behind every part of the vault of blue reposed the mysteries of the sky would also spur our imaginings. When our Pundit, in illustration of some lesson in our Bengali science primer, told us that the blue sphere was not an enclosure, how thunderstruck we were! "Put ladder upon ladder," said he, "and go on mounting away, but you will never bump your head." He must be sparing of his ladders, I opined, ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore

... beyond measure. Flanagan's eyes bulged. Captain Martin was unruffled. He dealt with that sort of deviltry every day, and read the mind of Smith as if it were a child's primer. He gave the impression of knowing all about the mysterious Stuffer feature of the case. If the hotel proprietor had robbed Mr. Tescheron, I was surprised he had not mentioned the matter to me. He said nothing of ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... to be much confusion among writers who have referred to this subject in regard to the "Black Deities" of the codices. Dr Brinton's remarks on this subject in his late work, "A Primer of Mayan Hieroglyphics," does not clear up the confusion. Apparently he has not discovered that quite a number of these are merely black figures of well-recognized deities not thus usually colored. It appears also, judging by his statements, that Dr. Brinton has failed to identify ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas

... of remarkable diligence and perseverance, he got ahead of his mother in knowledge. If learning was carried on in secret, there had rarely been found a more ardent pupil. Without inconvenient questions being asked, he succeeded in purchasing a copy-book and spelling primer, which were well used on all possible occasions. He actually went through the whole of the Bible when he could not master more than one in eight of the words. This man afterwards enjoyed the benefit of a college education in England, so that his case is worthy of being ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike

... we rarely had trouble, for the greatest number of guns is twenty-one—a national salute—and on our main deck we had thirty, any part of which could be ready. If one missed fire, the gun next abaft stepped in. If near enough, you might hear the primer snap, but the error of interval was barely appreciable—the effect stood. Laymen may not know that the manner of the salute was, and is, for the officer conducting it to give the orders, "Starboard, fire!" "Port, fire!" the discharges thus ranging from forward, ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan

... passages of this play, the death of Agamemnon, at the hand of Clytemnes'tra, is a scene that the poet paints with terrible effect. Says MR. EUGENE LAWRENCE, [Footnote: "A Primer of Greek Literature," by Eugene Lawrence, p.55.] "Mr. E. C. Stedman's version of the death of Agamemnon is an excellent one. A horror rests upon the palace at Mycenae; there is a scent of blood, the exhalations of the tomb. The queen, Clytemnestra, enters the inner room, terrible ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... articles they were! Fine writing and redundancy of style were both discarded, and when the news of Waterloo arrived, the editor's comment upon the great epoch-making victory was expressed in a dozen lines. One sighs at the thought of the miles of "long primer" that would be expended if we had the opportunity of commenting upon such a theme to-day. Yet the twelve-line article in the Leeds Mercury of June, 1815, really said everything that was to the point on the subject ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.

... messes and mashes to be prepared for cows with calf; the use of the stored vegetables and fruits, and meat dried and salted in such generous quantity that she marvelled at it. All the farm woman's primer she learned, bit by bit, seeing how it supplemented and harmonized with that life of the fields that ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... important and pregnant principle of all, viz., that Art is one, is not partial, but includes all times and forms and sorts—is not exclusively aristocratic or democratic, or oriental or occidental. My favorite symbol would be a good font of type, where the impeccable long-primer rejects nothing. Or the old Dutch flour-miller who said, "I never bother myself what road the folks come—I only want ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... Dr. Swishtail's scholars, and was "taken down" continually by little fellows with pink faces and pinafores when he marched up with the lower form, a giant amongst them, with his downcast, stupefied look, his dog's-eared primer, and his tight corduroys. High and low, all made fun of him. They sewed up those corduroys, tight as they were. They cut his bed-springs. They upset buckets and benches, so that he might break his shins over them, which he never failed to do. They sent him parcels, ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... maybe pardoned for aiming at the same results with the chivalrous "gift of the Gods." I cannot endure to be one of those shallow beings who can never get beyond the primer of experience,—who ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... you are good, and love your book, as the boys in the primer are told to do," said ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... which the great barons and their followers held their lands. For their tenure was liable to homage and fealty, as understood in the feudal sense, to wardships and impediments to marriage, to fines for alienations, to what English legists call primer seizins, rents, reliefs, escheats, and, finally, forfeitures; this last was at all times more strictly observed in England than in any other feudal country, and by its enactments so many noble families have, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... "desk" copies of Clodd's Childhood of the World, two of that excellent series of History Primers, and The Young Geologist, all carefully selected, in the fulness of Mary's ignorance, for the little pupils of her imagination. She had brought no primer, as Mrs. Yellett's letter had distinctly said that the youngest child was ten and that all were comparatively advanced in their studies. More than ever Mary longed to penetrate the mystery of that Irish linen decoy, for without doubt it was to be her melancholy ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... he repeated again and again, unhesitatingly; but A he would not, and persisted in declaring that he could not say. He was severely whipped, but still persisted. It now became a contest of wills. He was whipped again and again and again. In the intervals between the whippings the primer was presented to him, and he was told that he would be whipped again if he did not mind his mother and say A. I forget how many times he was whipped; but it was almost too many times to be believed. The fight was a terrible one. At last, in a paroxysm of his crying under the blows, the mother ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson

... 264.; Brev. Sarisb. fol. 85." Bishop Lloyd remarks on this verse and response as follows:—"I do not know what Burnet means by stating that this response was made in the year 1549, on the occasion of political occurrences, for this answer is found in all the foreign breviaries, in the Salisbury primer, and in the primer of Hen. VIII. See Burnet's Hist. Ref. p. ii. b. 1. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various

... the first to be exercised by our young men who lead that life; and quite in the spirit of that education which would repeat in the child the history of the race, we are scarce out of the swaddling bands of the primer and catechism before we would remove all questions to the court of our own jurisdiction. The mind is not a tabula rasa at birth, we learn, but, so soon as may be, we will remedy that, and erase all records copied there. The treasure ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... obscurity, with not a charm that could attract even a man of her own lowly class—It was such a good joke that he would have teased Josephine about it but for his knowledge of the world—a knowledge in whose primer it was taught that teasing is both bad taste and bad judgment. Also, it was beneath his dignity, it was offense to his vanity, to couple his name with the name of one so beneath him that even the matter of sex did not make the ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips

... reached the mouth of the coulee, Lite turned into the trail that led to town. All down the coulee the trail had been dug deep with the hoofprints of a galloping horse; and now, on the town trail, they were as plain as a primer to one schooled in the open. But Jean was too upset to notice them, and for that Lite was thankful. They did not talk much, beyond the commonplace speculations which tragedy always brings to the lips of the bystanders. Comments that were perfectly obvious they made, ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower

... desk, and an old spotted dog lay asleep on the step, and looked wise and old enough to have gone to school with several generations of children. It was half past three o'clock in the afternoon, and the primer class, settled into the apathy of after-recess fatigue, presented a straggling front, as they stood listlessly on the floor. As for the big boys and girls, they also were longing to be at liberty, but the pretty teacher, Miss Marilla Hender, seemed quite ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett

... the figures practised in the ring of pleasure, or the more active steps taken in the pantomimic fight. Shooting with the bow, the gun, and the pistol, is an exercise for Circassian boys at an age when those of countries more civilized are spelling, syllable by syllable, the lessons of the primer and the catechism. The art of thieving adroitly is also reckoned an accomplishment by these mountaineers, as formerly by the Spartans, when the despoiled is an enemy, or at least a member of another tribe. And as in their council-rings there is as often ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie

... Landewednack, Mr. Francis Robinson, used to preach in Cornish down to the year 1678, that being the only tongue well understood by his parishioners. Scawen mentions the MSS. of the aforesaid “Anguin,” as he spells him, and laments their destruction. He also speaks of a “Matins” (possibly a Primer, or Hours of our Lady) in Cornish, which had belonged to ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner



Words linked to "Primer" :   time-fuse, ground, primer coat, detonating fuse, fusee, schoolbook, safety fuse, speller, fuze, priming, text, lighter, couch, priming coat, fuse, hornbook



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com