"Provincialism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Thomas Hutchinson, was proud to have it thought that his mind as well as his house was furnished after the best English fashion. Even more than others, those who were condemned to be provincials of the province consciously endeavored, to avoid provincialism of the spirit; to be mistaken in London for an English gentleman of parts was a much-sought compensation for being, at Williamsburg or Boston, no more than the first gentleman of America. In the middle of the eighteenth century, eccentricity was not yet a mark of genius; and the "best people ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... than to be lax in pronunciation and it is absolutely necessary to rise above provincialism. "Maria" is not a rhyming companion for "fire" except in dialect verse, though this pairing sounds natural enough ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... origin were now sunk out of sight, covered with the infamy of the Reign of Terror and the responsibility of the series of desolating wars which had followed it, and no man dared to speak for them. Those were dark days for Ireland. Her parliament was gone, and in the blighting shade of the provincialism to which she was reduced, genius and courage seemed to have died out from the land. Thousands of her bravest and most devoted children had perished in her cause—some on the scaffold, and others on the field of battle—and many whose presence ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... certainty, and perfection of manner. The limitation, however, stops there. The world in which the artist works is the universal world of man's nature, just as much as is Shakespeare's. He escapes from provincialism here, in the substance, because he was a New Englander, not in spite of that fact; for the spirituality which is the central fact of New England life itself escapes from provincialism, being a pure expression of that Christianity in which ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... the knowledge of another's success. Margaret Edes was inwardly writhing. To think that Annie Eustace, little Annie Eustace, who had worshipped at her own shrine, whom she had regarded with a lazy, scarcely concealed contempt, for her incredible lack of wordly knowledge, her provincialism, her ill-fitting attire, should have achieved a triumph which she herself could never achieve. A cold hatred of the girl swept over the woman. She forced her lips into a smile, but her ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... about the place is its provincialism," she answered. "It is the most provincial city in America, in the sense that nothing really exists for it outside of itself. If I think of New York for ten minutes I have no longer ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... isolation are seen in a class provincialism that is hard to eradicate, and in the development of minds less alert to seize business advantages and less far-sighted than are developed by the intense industrial life of the town. There is time to brood ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... nature and to reveal the good that lurks in the lawless ways of a young society. He is there to explain himself, voluble, with a glossary for his own artless slang. But his colonialism is only provincialism very articulate. The new air does but make old decadences seem more stale; the young soil does but set into fresh conditions the ready-made, the uncostly, the refuse feeling of a race decivilising. American fancy played long this pattering part of youth. The New-Englander hastened ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... viii., p. 125.).—The use of the word pure pointed out by OXONIENSIS is nothing new. It is a common provincialism now, and was formerly good English. Here are two examples from Swift (Letters, by Hawkesworth, vol. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... extreme of the emphasis and caprice; the Bohemian, showing a great deal of impetuosity;—which, however, they lose in their productions in proportion as they become polished and finished writers. Bohemianism, in German music, has more the character of provincialism than ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... of Oldport society are formed chiefly by importation, and have the one advantage of a variety of origin which puts provincialism out of the question. The mild winter climate and the supposed cheapness of living draw scattered families from the various Atlantic cities; and, coming from such different sources, these visitors leave some exclusiveness behind. The boast of ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... at least, has always had an active and swift communication with the rest of the world. As a people, we are, beyond a question, decidedly provincial; but our provincialism is not exactly one of external appearance. The men are negligent of dress, for they are much occupied, have few servants, and clothes are expensive; but the women dress remarkably near the Parisian modes. We have not sufficient confidence ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Hohenzollern kings, and none of them more than the Great Elector and Frederick the Great, were incessant travellers, they will reply that their kings had to be so at a time when the Empire was not yet established, when rebellious nobles had to be subdued, and when the spirit of provincialism and particularism had to be counteracted. Hence, they say, former Hohenzollerns had to exercise personal control in all parts of their dominions, see that their military dispositions were carried out, and study social and economic conditions on the spot; but nowadays, when the Empire is firmly ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... yielded little in the way of literature that is of any permanent interest. There would seem to be something in the relation of a colony to the mother-country which dooms the thought and art of the former to a helpless provincialism. Canada and Australia are great provinces, wealthier and more populous than the thirteen colonies at the time of their separation from England. They have cities whose inhabitants number hundreds of thousands, well-equipped universities, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... in the legs of a horse. Decidedly, it is at the Overseas Club all the world over that you get to know some little of the life of the community. London is egoistical, and the world for her ends with the four-mile cab radius. There is no provincialism like the provincialism of London. That big slack-water coated with the drift and rubbish of a thousand men's thoughts esteems itself the open sea because the waves of all the oceans break on her borders. To those in her midst she is terribly imposing, ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... years. He was less a dreamer than Yancey. A man big of brain and warm of heart he had gone from the ironclad provincialism of South Carolina to the windswept vagaries of Texas. He believed wholly the Yancey confession of faith; that secession was a constitutional right; that African slavery was ordained of God; that the South was paramount, the ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... the suddenness of the transition makes the stranger guest a little dizzy at first. There are handsome buildings in Denver—blocks that would do credit to any city under the sun; but there was for years an upstart air, a palpable provincialism, a kind of ill-disguised "previousness," noticeable that made her seem like the brisk suburb of some other place, and that other place, alas! invisible to mortal eye. Rectangular blocks make a checker-board ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... and interested besides in the contrast between the boy's oddly noble face and good bearing on the one hand, and on the other the drawl of his bluntly articulated speech and the coarseness of his tone, both seeming to her in the extreme of provincialism, promised; and Robert, entranced by all the qualities of her voice and speech, and nothing disenchanted by the nearer view of her lovely face, ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... obliterate swamps, conquer stormy lakes, master great rivers and endless plains; but, as their labors are judged today, the greater service which these men rendered appears in its true light. They stifled provincialism; they battered down Chinese Walls of prejudice and separatism; they reduced the aimless rivalry of bickering provinces to a businesslike common denominator; and, perhaps more than any class of men, they ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... Lancashire, and indeed throughout the North of England, and it appears Scotland also, the term "sneck the door" is used indiscriminately with "shut the door" or "toin't dur." And there can be little doubt but that this provincialism was known to Shakspeare, as his works are full of such; many of which have either been passed over by his commentators, or have been wrongly noted, as the one now ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... and a fence or stone wall is a "mound." The Cotswold folk do not talk about houses; they stick to the old Saxon termination, and call their dwellings "housen"; they also use the Anglo-Saxon "hire" for hear. The word "bowssen," too, is very frequently heard in these parts; it is a provincialism for a stall or shed where oxen are kept. "Boose" is the word from which it originally sprang. A very expressive phrase in common use is to "quad" or "quat"; it is equivalent to the word "squat." Other words in this ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... conversation Laurence, who had a keen ear for that sort of thing, could not help noticing the other's voice. It was a pleasing voice, a cultured voice, and refined withal, nor could his fastidious ear detect the faintest trace of provincialism or vulgarity about it. The intonation was perfect. There is nothing so quick to betray to the sensitive ear any strain of plebeian descent as the voice, and of this no one was more thoroughly aware than Laurence Stanninghame. This man, he ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... ordained a public fast on the news of the massacre of white women and children by the Sepoys. Thousands of Canadians enlisted in the Northern armies. The Papal Zouaves went from Quebec to the aid of the Pope against Garibaldi. All these were symptoms that Canadians were beginning to outgrow their narrow provincialism and to perceive their relations to the outer world, and especially towards Britain. The country was reaching out towards the role which in our own day she has played in ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... humour, a constant glee about him, heightened by an inveterate provincialism of North Country dialect, absolutely took away the sting from ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... national life. "The Decadence of New England" is a popular topic at present. It is the fashion to sneer at her limitations. Our best novelists delight in giving her barrenness, her unloveliness in all individual life—her provincialism and conceit, and ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... matters of speech, choice of words and ideas, as it is with matters of feeling. The mind can rust as well as the body if it is not rubbed up in Paris; but the thing on which provincialism most sets its stamp is gesture, gait, and movement; these soon lose the briskness which Paris constantly keeps alive. The provincial is used to walk and move in a world devoid of accident or change, there is nothing to be avoided; so in Paris she walks ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... the Senora's provincialism. What a great world lay outside that of her own, of which she ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... until my attention was called to this word in the proof did I know that in this sense it is a provincialism. It is so used, at least in half the country, and yet neither of our American ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... musical voice was trained and softened; the delicate, refined accent retained no trace of provincialism. Everything about Dora pleased the eye and gratified the taste; the girlish figure had grown matronly and dignified; the sweet face had in it a tinge of sadness one may often see in the face of a mother who has lost a child. Lady Helena, fastidious and critical, ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... mockeries becomes most thoroughly obvious, it is the situation presented by an attempt to imitate the conventional society life in a woman's college. And yet—she had gone over the whole question so often—what a desert of awkwardness and learned provincialism such a college would be without the attempt! How often she had cordially agreed to the statement that it was precisely because of its insistence upon this connection with the forms and relations of normal life that her college was so successfully ...
— A Reversion To Type • Josephine Daskam
... there is but one sign language in North America, any deviation from which is either blunder, corruption, or a dialect in the nature of provincialism, may be examined in reference to some of the misconceived facts which gave it origin and credence. It may not appear to be necessary that such examination should be directed to any mode of collecting and comparing ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... myself cannot be he, still I can be his John the Baptist, testifying of him, happy and enthusiastic in my solitude, in this desert of caddishness and provincialism. ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... still nothing beyond the reach of the very general reader. The notable point is that he refrains from passing judgment on the entire body of French poetry because it is unlike English poetry. He is not infected with the wilful provincialism of Lamb nor with the spirit of John Bullishness which seriously proclaims in its rivals "equally a want of books and men."[57] "We may be sure of this," says Hazlitt, "that when we see nothing but grossness and ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... no means so popular as Tom, I got along fairly well. I had escaped from provincialism, from the obscure purgatory of the wholesale grocery business; new vistas, exciting and stimulating, had been opened up; nor did I offend the sensibilities and prejudices of the new friends I made, but gave a hearty consent ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of books,—that passion being absolutely endless, and inexorable as the grave,—stepped between me and my intentions; until one day, upon arranging my toilet hastily before dinner, I suddenly made the discovery that I had no waistcoat (or vest, as it is now called, through conceit or provincialism), which was not torn or otherwise dilapidated; whereupon, buttoning up my coat to the throat, and drawing my gown as close about me as possible, I went into the public "hall" (so is called in Oxford the public eating-room) with no misgiving. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... pleases. But, Margaret, don't get to use these horrid Milton words. "Slack of work:" it is a provincialism. What will your aunt Shaw say, if she hears you ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... their title to be regarded as members of the common race of humanity. As the special features of Greek civilization faded, the lineaments of this common humanity emerged more clearly into view, and the Greek, when he was compelled to give up his parochialism and provincialism, found himself already in spirit prepared to take his place as a citizen of the world. He had learned his lesson, and to him the whole world went to school, first to learn of him what civilization meant and then ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... local colorists passed by the immediate problems of Americans—social, theological, political, economic; nor did they frequently rise above the local to the universal. They were, in short, ordinarily provincial, without, however, the rude durability or the homely truthfulness of provincialism at ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... at that time, as it served to increase existing jealousies between the troops from the different States, and so far impair the morale of the army. It excites a smile to-day to read that men from New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland charged New Englanders generally with provincialism and cowardice, and that the charge was resented; but such was the fact. The feeling between them grew to such an extent that Washington was obliged to issue orders condemning its indulgence. The Kip's Bay panic offered a favorable opportunity ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... Bertram fairly by surprise. He was wholly unacquainted with that rank form of provincialism which we know as patriotism. He leaned across towards her with a look of deep pain ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... intercourse, being less under the action of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions." To this I reply; that a rustic's language, purified from all provincialism and grossness, and so far reconstructed as to be made consistent with the rules of grammar— (which are in essence no other than the laws of universal logic, applied to psychological materials)—will not differ from the language of any other man of ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... misconceived. But how many th sounds does he mean to rob us of? And how was moth really pronounced? Ben Jonson rhymes it with sloth and cloth; Herrick, with cloth. Alexander Gill tells us (p. 16) that it was a Northern provincialism to pronounce cloth long (like both), and accordingly we are safe in believing that moth was pronounced precisely as it is now. Mr. White again endeavors to find support in the fact that Armado and renegado are spelt Armatho and renegatho in the Folio. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... In conversation all provincialism, affectations of foreign accents, mannerisms, exaggerations and slang are detestable. Equally to be avoided are inaccuracies of expression, hesitation, an undue use of foreign words, and anything approaching to flippancy, coarseness, triviality or provocation. Gentlemen sometimes ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... something very pleasant about all this, but what specially strikes me is a curious flavor of city provincialism. There are little centres in the heart of great cities, just as there are small fresh-water ponds in great islands with the salt sea roaring all round them, and bays and creeks penetrating them as briny as the ocean itself. Irving has ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... claimed the privilege to know and discuss their characters, and where there were few topics of public interest to take off their attention, a very considerable portion of town talk and criticism fell upon him. The old town had a certain provincialism, which is less the characteristic of towns in these days, when society circulates so freely, than then: besides, it was a very rude epoch, just when the country had come through the war of the Revolution, and while the surges of that commotion ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that he was more provincial than he had to be; for that matter, there is no provincialism so rampant as that of the thronging, striving, self-sufficient city. But isolation in any sort is a thing to be reckoned with. The two pioneering years in the Rockies had done their work,—of narrowing, as well as of broadening,—and ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... outgrown provincialism. He has seen much of the world, and he knows the varied worth of varied lands. He travels more widely than the man of any other state, and he has the education which travel gives. As a rule, the well-to-do Californian knows Europe better than the average Eastern man ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan
... is used only in a limited part of the country is called a provincialism. It must be known and recognized for what it is worth, but not obtruded where it ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... the caviler against missions; we shall raise the negro in the face of those who say he can not be raised; we shall see the latter-day miracles, and the lame man healed and rejoicing at the Temple gate. Thus may the breath of God sweep across our pastorates and dismiss timidity, provincialism, ease, and narrowness of outlook. And thus may the power be demonstrated as of heaven because it is the power unto salvation. Let us fear not men who shall die, nor be content to fill our peaceful lot and occupy a respectable grave. The new world needs ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... were the Franciscans received with more enthusiasm than in Norfolk. They appear to have established themselves at Lynn, Yarmouth, and Norwich in 1226. Clergy and laity, rich and poor, united in offering to them a ready homage. To this day a certain grudging provincialism is observable in the East Anglian character. A Norfolk man distrusts the settler from "the Shires," who comes in with new-fangled reforms. To this day the home of wisdom is supposed to be in the East. When it was understood ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... "the good old Knickerbocker days." But the truth is, odious though the millionnaire's ascendancy may be at present, that of the Knickerbocker was once hardly less so. Vulgar, brassy, and intolerable the "I'm-better-than-you" strut and swagger of plutocracy surely is; but in the smug, pert provincialism of those former New York autocrats who defined as "family" their descent of two or three generations from raw Dutch immigrants, there was very little comfort indeed. The present writer has seen something of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... Since provincialism is by no means the exclusive distinction of the landward bred, there was an immediate restirring of the gossip pool when the story of Tom's befriending of Nancy Bryerson and her child got abroad in Gordonia and ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... crops, with very little manure, and the surface is level. There are sixty-three tenants occupying plots varying in size, according to circumstances, from 48 "lug" downwards—25, 30, 16, &c. A "lug" is a provincialism for perch. The rent is 5d. per "lug" or perch, and each occupier on becoming a tenant receives a card on which the following rules ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... far in the direction of local autonomy that he exalted the state above the nation in the Kentucky resolutions of 1798, declaring the Constitution to be a mere compact and the states competent to interpret and nullify federal law. This was provincialism with a vengeance. "It is jealousy, not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions," wrote Jefferson for the Kentucky legislature. Jealousy of the national government, not confidence in it—this is the ideal that reflected the provincial and ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... heard a dog called a fice. She feared it might be something very terrible. Afterwards she learned that it was a Southern provincialism for a common dog. ...
— A Little Florida Lady • Dorothy C. Paine
... footsteps on the road of life, I had no beacons to look for in Germany. I had never lingered in that land which, on the whole, is so singularly barren of memorable manifestations of generous sympathies and magnanimous impulses. An ineradicable, invincible, provincialism of envy and vanity clings to the forms of its thought like a frowsy garment. Even while yet very young I turned my eyes away from it instinctively as from a threatening phantom. I believe that children ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... Amiens of a Russian father and an English mother, Paul Bourget inherited Anglo-Saxon as well as Gallic intuitions. He is very proud of the cosmopolitan spirit which exempts him from the usual French provincialism, and has sought to develop it by travel and study. He endeavors to know intimately the phases of life which he wishes to describe, and then to treat them in the light of a large knowledge of many peoples. Yet he feels a somewhat bitter realization that so general a view as his ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... have been for the wisest ruler, it was rendered much more difficult by the conflict between Capodistrias' own ideal and the character of the people among whom he had to work. Communal or local self-government lay at the very root of Greek nationality. In many different forms this intense provincialism had maintained itself unimpaired up to the end of the war, in spite of national assemblies and national armaments. The Hydriote ship-owners, the Primates of the Morea, the guerilla leaders of the north, had each a type of life and a body of institutions as distinct as ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... and cultural bohemians in the group that has since come to be called the "Chicago Renaissance." Anderson soon adopted the posture of a free, liberated spirit, and like many writers of the time, he presented himself as a sardonic critic of American provincialism and materialism. It was in the freedom of the city, in its readiness to put up with deviant styles of life, that Anderson found the strength to settle accounts with—but also to release his affection for—the world of small-town America. The dream of an unconditional ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... M. Mauperin!" said Mme. Mauperin, blushing at being convicted of the most flagrant provincialism; and then, turning upon her daughter, she exclaimed, "Oh, dear, Renee, how you stoop! Do sit ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... her appreciate the whole manner of being at the Hall. By her dear old friends the Miss Brownings she was petted and caressed so much that she became ashamed of noticing the coarser and louder tones in which they spoke, the provincialism of their pronunciation, the absence of interest in things, and their greediness of details about persons. They asked her questions which she was puzzled enough to answer about her future stepmother; her loyalty to her father forbidding her to reply fully and truthfully. She was always glad ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... of all the trouble between McCulloch and Price lay in particularism, a phase of state rights, and, in its last analysis, provincialism. Now particularism was especially pronounced and especially pernicious in the middle southwest. Missouri had always more than her share of it. Her politicians were impregnated by it. They were interested in their own locality exclusively and seemed quite incapable of taking any broad ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... not carry with him to Europe that narrow provincialism, which asserts itself in either condemning or ridiculing everything that differs essentially from American ways and methods. On the contrary, when he compares the old country with the new,—for instance, the English scenery with that of New England,—Hawthorne ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... style. The chapter finished, the tall elder (as I took him to be) prayed,—the congregation standing. The prayer was short and appropriate, and the language tolerably correct; but the tone and pronunciation were queer. I supposed them to indicate some provincialism with which I was not acquainted. Along with that peculiar nasal sound for which nearly all Americans are distinguished, there was in the voice a mixture of coaxing and familiarity which was a little offensive; still, as a "layman's" exercise, it was very good. He prayed ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... Raven's Nest, makes Mr. Aristobulus Brag use the provincialism "I swanny;" "by which," observes the author, "I suppose he meant—I swear!" Of course, this has nothing to do with swearing by swans, more than sounding like it; argument of sound being very different from sound argument. Mr. Cooper does not seem to have given a thought ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various
... our love of the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature that inspired us. We could not give her over to a lumberman, doubly accursed by wealth and provincialism. We shuddered to think of Milly, with her voice modulated and her elbows covered, pouring tea in the marble teepee of a tree murderer. No! In Cypher's she belonged—in the bacon smoke, the cabbage perfume, the grand, Wagnerian chorus of hurled ironstone ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... was the memorial wreaths on the battlefields; of the other it was the prophetic smoke of the factories. From where she stood in High Street, she could see this incense to Mammon rising above the spires of the churches, above the houses and the hovels, above the charm and the provincialism which made the Dinwiddie of the eighties. And this charm, as well as this provincialism, appeared to her to be so inalienable a part of the old order, with its intrepid faith in itself, with its militant enthusiasm, with its courageous battle ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... the situation to make friends with an Austrian Jew representing another nationality and another religion, both of which cut into all his most cherished prejudices, he finds it harder to utilize them a second time and gradually loses them. He thus modifies his provincialism, for if an old enemy working by his side has turned into a friend, almost anything may happen. When, therefore, I became identified with the peace movement both in its International and National Conventions, I hoped that this internationalism ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... celebrated tree when I approach it for the first time. Provincialism has no SCALE of excellence in man or vegetable; it never knows a first-rate article of either kind when it has it, and is constantly taking second and third rate ones for Nature's best. I have often fancied the tree was afraid of me, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... course that's why he does nothing," May exclaimed. "Fancy!" Her provincialism was becoming very marked. "A lord with hardly enough to live upon! But I'm astonished that ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... used the Scottish idiom in his first address, but in such a manner that it could hardly be distinguished whether he was passing upon his friend a sort of jocose mockery, or whether it was his own native dialect, for his ordinary discourse had little provincialism. ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... engine and, as they passed on up the line of a dozen cars, loudly proclaimed their admiration of the entire arrangement. "They are just like prairie schooners," said one young man, to Lily's huge delight, for she had never before seen so much provincialism all at once. The platform was thick with people rushing to find their cars at the last minute. All was hurry and excitement and colour and laughter. The orange of Woodbridge and the olive of Hartley were everywhere. Each person boldly displayed ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... them intellectually or socially. Strong and peculiar individuals and families were often developed at the expense of a friendly community life: neighbourhood feuds were common. Country life was marked with the rigidity of a hard provincialism. All this, however, is rapidly changing. The closer settlement of the land, the rural delivery of mails (the morning newspaper reaches the tin box at the end of my lane at noon), the farmer's telephone, the spreading ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... rouse himself and become a berserker." The great numbers of these men in many cities and in some of the Western States enabled them to have German taught in the public schools, though it is only fair to say that the underlying motive was liberalism rather than Prussian provincialism. Frederick Kapp, a distinguished interpreter of the spirit of these Forty-eighters, expressed their conviction when he said that those who cared to remain German should remain in Germany and that those who came to America were under ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... purist, purism, euphuism, euphuist, euphuistic, euphuize, euphemism, euphemistic, euphemize, charism, locution, provincial, provincialism, localism, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Lyapinsky house, I related my impressions to a friend. The friend, an inhabitant of the city, began to tell me, not without satisfaction, that this was the most natural phenomenon of town life possible, that I only saw something extraordinary in it because of my provincialism, that it had always been so, and always would be so, and that such must be and is the inevitable condition of civilization. In London it is even worse. Of course there is nothing wrong about it, and it is impossible to be displeased with it. I began to reply to my friend, but with ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... a Hindoo and a brother to the man who knows his vernacular. And a Frenchman is French because he speaks his own language. But the American has no language. He is dialect, slang, provincialism, accent, and so forth. Now that I have heard their voices, all the beauty of Bret Harte is being ruined for me, because I find myself catching through the roll of his rhythmical prose the cadence ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... malapropism, antiphrasis[obs3]. pun, paranomasia[obs3], play upon words; word play &c. (wit) 842; double-entendre &c. (ambiguity) 520[Fr]; palindrome, paragram[obs3], anagram, clinch; abuse of language, abuse of terms. dialect, brogue, idiom, accent, patois; provincialism, regionalism, localism; broken English, lingua franca; Anglicism, Briticism, Gallicism, Scotticism, Hibernicism; Americanism[obs3]; Gypsy lingo, Romany; pidgin, pidgin English, pigeon English; Volapuk, Chinook, Esperanto, Hindustani, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... though for Joe Howe there could be but one side. It was taken for granted that he, who had spoken so many eloquent words, all pointing to the magnificent future of British North America, all tending to inspire its youth with love of country as something far higher than mere provincialism, would now be among the advocates of federation, and the wise and loving critic of the scheme to be submitted to the legislatures. Though his ideal had ever looked beyond to a wider Imperial federation, he had at his best always regarded Canadian federation as a necessary preparation for it. In ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... between Webster and Hayne, the broad nationalism of the former stands out in splendid contrast with the narrow provincialism of the latter. Hayne's theme was small and sectional—it wanted bulk; hence, he continually intrudes himself in his subject: the subject is half, and Hayne and Webster the other and more important half. Webster, on the contrary, is completely absorbed in the magnitude of his subject; he forgets ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... now what's intilt." Whether her guest now understood her meaning, or whether he had to succumb, contented with his ignorance, we are not informed; but few of my readers need to be told that "intilt" is a Scotch provincialism for "into it," and that the landlady meant by using it to signify that the particulars enumerated entered as constituents into ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... be the reason of this undeniable provincialism of the English Puritans and Protestant Nonconformists, a provincialism which has two main types,—a bitter type and a smug type,—but which in both its types is vulgarising, and thwarts the full perfection ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... population forced upon her a system of emigration, that drew off her youth to the great centres of the world and established large colonies in every leading city. Israel was never left to settle down again into provincialism, but was stirred by the currents of the great world of thought that poured in upon her from Greece and Egypt, from Rome and the far East. "A cross-fertilization of ideas" was thus carried on by Providence. The result of grafting the richest varieties of thought upon such a ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... of petty feudal states, practically independent and almost always at strife. Henceforward there was peace; and throughout the whole of this northern part of his domains it was the constant policy of Philip gradually to abolish provincialism and to establish a centralised government. He was far too wise a statesman to attempt to abolish suddenly or arbitrarily the various rights and privileges, which the Flemings, Brabanters and Hollanders had wrung from their sovereigns, and to which they were ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... winter resort, and she had the advantage of meeting many types. In Mrs. Wayland she had a useful mentor. This lady in her younger days had been familiar with the best phases of metropolitan society, and she counteracted in Madge all tendencies toward provincialism. Thus it gradually became recognized that the "shy, sickly little girl," as she had been characterized at first, was growing into a very attractive young woman. Indeed, after an absence of only a year her own sister would ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... we all become absolutely wearied of it. Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on. Yesterday evening Mrs. Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she called it. Of course I had to look at it. She is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing. And ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... in rapt meditation. He marveled at himself for having ever accepted his present position. Its limitations were so narrow and so palpable, its possibilities were so restricted, its complacent provincialism so glaring, that the imaginative glories with which he had once enwrapped it seemed now simply grotesque. As long as he remained, he was an entombed nonentity. Beyond the college walls, out of the reach of the contemptible bigotry of the trustees of ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... leaves of "Our Lady's thistle" were caused by some drops of her milk falling upon them, and in Cheshire we find the same idea connected with the pulmonaria or "lady's milk sile," the word "sile" being a provincialism for "soil," or "stain." A German tradition makes the common fern (Polypodium vulgare) to have sprung from ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... living knowledge of geography. Merely running about with a guide-book will not achieve these ends, although a guide-book is a very important asset: sympathy, trying to understand what one sees, will. Travelling takes away provincialism because it broadens the outlook. In a very real sense ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... the movement of opened fans. And then, too, ennui, a gloomy ennui, the ennui of seeing the same faces always in the same places, with their defects or their poses, that uniformity of fashionable gatherings which ends by establishing in Paris each winter a spiteful and gossiping provincialism more petty than that of ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... in his career that I met GRUBLET. He was pointed out to me as a young man of promise who had a trenchant style, and had lately written an article on "Provincialism in Literature," which had caused some stir by its bitter and uncompromising attacks upon certain well-known authors and journalists. I looked at the man with some interest. I saw a pale-faced, sandy-haired little creature ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... of moving regiments about from one garrison to another is a good cure for provincialism," said the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... The aspirate is rarely misplaced, unless by a recent immigrant. The misuse of the aspirate is, indeed, a peculiar part of the birthright of an Englishman. No one ever yet heard it from the poorest or most illiterate class in the United States. In Australia, says Mr. Froude, 'no provincialism has yet developed itself. The tone is soft, the language good.' The young people looked fresh and healthy, 'not lean and sun-dried, but fair, fleshy, lymphatic.' Mr. Froude could not see any difference between his countrymen at home and those who had settled ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... top of a rounded hill; the head of a bank, or the most elevated part of a submarine shoal. [Perhaps derived from nowl, a provincialism for head.] ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... to dress in the eighteenth century than in the previous one. The colonists had become more prosperous, a little more worldly, and certainly far less afraid of the wrath of God and the judges. As travel to Europe became safer and more common, visitors brought new fashions, and provincialism in manner, style, and costume became much less apparent. Madame Knight, who wrote an account of her journey from Boston to New York in 1704, has left some record of dress in the different colonies. Of the country women in Connecticut ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... himself, "to hang about her. But somehow I can't help it—I can't!" And the truth was, he loved her as much as a boy of his age is capable of loving, and he would have gone on and married her but for the snobbishness smeared on him by the provincialism of the small town and burned in by the toadyism of his fashionable college set. As he looked at her he saw beauty beyond any he had ever seen elsewhere and a sweetness and honesty that made him ashamed before her. "No, I couldn't harm her," he told himself. "I'm not such a dog as that. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... for their poverty; but for their brotherhood, and for their calm indifference to all the rest of the world whom they did not care to receive into their kingdom of Bohemia. There is human nature in this; more human nature than there is in most provincialism. Take a community of one hundred people and let any ten of its members join themselves together and dictate the terms on which an eleventh may be admitted to their band. The whole remaining eighty-nine will quarrel for the twelfth place. But take a community of a thousand, and let ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... of the casual analogy is another mark of provincialism!" The Grey Cat raised her tufted chin. "I am going to sleep. With my social obligations I must snatch rest when I can; but, as our old friend here says, Noblesse oblige.... Pity me! Three functions to-night in the village, and a barn dance across ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... cynicism, of snobbishness. This little epoch of fermentation has three or four drawbacks for the critic—drawbacks, however, that may be overlooked by a person for whom it has an interest of association. It bore, intellectually, the stamp of provincialism; it was a beginning without a fruition, a dawn without a noon; and it produced, with a single exception, no great talents. It produced a great deal of writing, but (always putting Hawthorne aside, as a ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... being too prudent to offend even an opponent unnecessarily. His language, though natural and easy, was choice and refined. He was evidently a man who had read, and not a little; and there was no taint of vulgarity, scarcely a provincialism, ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... that Grayson will make a display of provincialism to-night," he said. "America will have to blush for herself. I have copies of the Monitor, and all our London cables show the greatest amazement in Great Britain and on the Continent that we should put up such an outre Western character for President, one of the Boys, ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... single community, with closely similar inheritance and environment, we find marked divergence in moral judgment. And when we compare widely different times and places we are apt to wonder if there is any common ground. It is only a very smug provincialism that can attribute the alien standards of other races and nations to a disregard of the light. Mohammedans and Buddhists have believed as firmly in, and fought as passionately for, their moral convictions as Christians have for theirs. When we survey the vast amount ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... returning health and leisure for reflection, that he began to consider the whole question of Anglicanism and Catholicism. He describes some of the little experiences which turned his mind in this direction. He became aware of the isolation and what he calls the "provincialism" of the Anglican Church. He saw many kinds of churches and varieties of worship. He went on through the Holy Land, and at Jerusalem celebrated the Communion in the Chapel of Abraham; at Damascus he heard with a sort of horror of the submission of ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Fouter (Fr. foutre; Lat. futuere), verbum obscaenum. cf. the noun in phrase 'to care not a fouter' (footra, footre, foutre), 2 Henry IV, V, iii. To 'fouter' is also used (a vulgarism and a provincialism) in a much mitigated sense to meddle about aimlessly, to waste time and tongue doing nothing, as ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... general stock; and were since all collected and bound up by one Mr Webster. With the exception of a few words coined for local uses (such as snags and sawyers, on the Mississippi,) I do not recollect a word which I have not traced to be either a provincialism of some English county, or else to be obsolete English. There are a few from the Dutch, such as stoup, for the porch of a door, etcetera. I was once talking with an American about Webster's dictionary, and he observed, "Well now, sir, I understand it's the only ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the first time. Provincialism has no scale of excellence in man or vegetable; it never knows a first-rate article of either kind when it has it, and is constantly taking second and third rate ones for Nature's best. I have often fancied the tree was afraid of me, and that a sort of shiver came over ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... arles-penny. And no breakfast-time, pray, but undern. You may also do a little word-formation of your own on occasion, and enact that a person good, at exposition shall be known as a clarifier, a sensible one as a cogitant, or a pantomime as a manuactor. If you commit a blunder or provincialism, you have only to carry it off boldly with an instant reference to the authority of some poet or historian, who need not exist or ever have existed; your phrase has his approval, and he was a wise man and a past master in language. As for your reading, leave ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... at boarding-school I had consumed a quarter of an inch of as many as a half-dozen cigarettes. In some amateur theatricals the winter before, in which I took the part of a young man, I had bravely smoked through half of one, and made my speeches too. What this man had said of Hilton and its provincialism was in my mind now. I meant no wickedness, no harm. I took one of the proffered cigarettes with the grand indifference of having done it many times before. Mr. Sewall watched me closely, and when he produced a match, lit it, ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... the vanished brio of youth, he carried morbidity to perfection. Only when he was travelling (as, for example, in Egypt) do his letters lose for a time their distemper. His love-letters are often ignobly inept, and nearly always spoilt by the crass provincialism of the refined and cultivated hermit. His mistress was a woman difficult to handle and indeed a Tartar in egotism, but as the recipient of Flaubert's love-letters she must win ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... cannot say. The easier presumption is that it is equally one and the other, and always has been. Even were we rash enough to pronounce progress to be on the whole prevalent within the narrow field of our own experience, surely it were nothing but the inevitable "provincialism" of the human mind to pass per saltum from that, to a generalization for all possible experience. Our optimism, our faith that right, truth, and order will eventually prevail, can find only a delusive basis in ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... inarticulate "million hall-room boys who want to be geniuses," the ordinary, unshaved, not over-bathed, ungrammatical young men of any American city, so nearly transcend provincialism as in an enthusiasm over their favorite minor cynic, Elbert Hubbard or John Kendrick Bangs, or, in Walter Babson's case, Mr. Fitzgerald's variations on Omar. Una had read Omar as a pretty poem about roses and murmurous courts, but read him she had; and such was Walter's delight ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... favourite but by no means his only subjects. For "Scenes of Clerical Life" he stands admittedly alone in France, and has naturally been dealt with most often from this point of view. Of that intense provincialism, in the good sense, which is characteristic of French literature, there have been few better representatives. Wordsworth himself is scarcely more the poet of our Lake and Hill country than Fabre is the novelist of the Cevennes. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... whom it charms by an appearance of liberality, which in their view, contrasts very favourably with the narrowness of us sectarians. I am free to admit that in our zeal about small matters (and in a certain 'provincialism,' so to speak, which characterised the type of English Christianity till within a recent period) we needed, and still need, the lesson, and I will thankfully accept the rebuke that reminds me of what I ever tend to forget, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... an attitude makes on the American in Europe is painful, whether it be expressed in personal letters, in newspapers and magazines, or in diplomatic "notes." He becomes impatient with the provincialism of his own people, ashamed of their transparent selfishness, astonished that human values should have got so fatally distorted in our fat, comfortable world. To the European, American neutrality has become a matter of public indifference, of private contempt. ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... of this day could possibly write an autobiography or any other kind of book co-ordinate in value with Crockett's "classic in homespun." In his time, Crockett could exercise intelligence and still retain his provincial point of view. Provincialism was in the air over his land. In these changed times, something in the ambient air prevents any active intelligence from being unconscious of lands, peoples, struggles ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... be easily understood that such authoritative utterances as that of Dieterich must have produced a great effect throughout Protestant Christendom; and in due time we see their working in New England. That same tendency to provincialism, which, save at rare intervals, has been the bane of Massachusetts thought from that day to this, appeared; and in 1664 we find Samuel Danforth arguing from the Bible that "comets are portentous signals ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... surface. And then, just as we are beginning to think our own soil has a monopoly of heroes as well as of cotton, up turns a regiment of gallant Irishmen, like the Sixty-Ninth, to show us that continental provincialism is as bad as that of Coos County, New Hampshire, or of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... reason to fear that the Federalist Senate would not confirm the nomination. The Federalists could never forget that Gallatin was a Swiss by birth—an alien of supposedly radical tendencies. The partisan press never exhibited its crass provincialism more shamefully than when it made fun of Gallatin's imperfect pronunciation of English. He had come to America, indeed, too late to acquire a perfect control of a new tongue, but not too late to become a loyal son ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... delightfully. The available translations leave much to be desired, but to the student of Latin Livy's style is pure and simple, and possesses that charm which purity and simplicity always give. If there is anything to justify the charge of "Patavinity," or provincialism, made by Asinius Pollio, we, at least, are not learned enough in Latin to detect it; and Pollio, too, appears to have been no gentle critic if we may judge by his equally severe strictures upon Cicero, Caesar, and Sallust. This ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... people throughout the world, Zionism should serve as a leaven, quickening and stimulating the Jewish activities of this country, and rescue them from the greatest danger of Diaspora Judaism, the danger of provincialism, of falling away from the main body of universal Israel. In the particular situation confronting us Zionism ought to assert the claims of Palestine, in addition to those of the Diaspora. But the Zionists cannot replace the present agencies of American ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... on the Frenchman, who only wants to make the most of his own without encroaching on anybody's else property and is disinterested in human incubation for the purpose of overwhelming his neighbors. True internationalism will spring from the provincialism that holds fast to its own home and does not interfere with the worship by other countries ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... sneering at its buildings, comparing them with the architecture of Colonel Telfair's residence in Jackson, Miss., whence you hail, and you will not be set upon. But in New York you must be either a New Yorker or an invader of a modern Troy, concealed in the wooden horse of your conceited provincialism. And this dreary preamble is only to introduce to you the unimportant figures ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... king walked and looked, of the rivalry between Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Baddeley, of Charles Fox's debts and eloquence, of the vogue of Cecilia Davis, or "L'Inglesina." To Janice, hungry with the true appetite of provincialism, it was all the most delicious of comfits. To talk to a man who could imitate the way the Duke of Gloucester limped at a levee when suffering from the gout, and who was able to introduce a story by saying, "As Lady Rochford once said to me at ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... readers of varied tastes and developed a desire for literary entertainment, as well as for instruction. Works like those of Irving and Cooper gained wide circulation only because of the new demands, due to the increasing population, to the decline in colonial provincialism, and to the growth of the new national spirit. Probably no one would have been inspired, twenty-five years earlier, to write a work like Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York. Even if it had been produced earlier, the country would not have been ready to receive it. This remarkable ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... from New England to the District of Columbia, George Peabody had moved into a comparatively foreign country, and in the process had sloughed most of his provincialism. It is beautiful to be a New Englander, but to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... us another extract from his manuscript. I ran my eye over it, and so far as I have noticed it is correct enough in its versification. I suppose we are getting gradually over our hemispherical provincialism, which allowed a set of monks to pull their hoods over our eyes and tell us there was no meaning in any religious symbolism but our own. If I am mistaken about this advance I am very glad to print the young man's somewhat outspoken lines to help us ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... forces that were moving me. My Polotzk I knew well before I began to judge it and experiment with it. America was bewilderingly strange, unimaginably complex, delightfully unexplored. I rushed impetuously out of the cage of my provincialism and looked eagerly about the brilliant universe. My question was, What have we here?—not, What does this mean? That query came much later. When I now become retrospectively introspective, I fall into the predicament of the centipede in the rhyme, who got along very smoothly ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... "as there is use in the world for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues," and that, in respect of America, "the huge animals nourish huge parasites, and the rancor of the disease attests the strength of the constitution." He ridicules our unsuspecting provincialism: "Have you seen the dozen great men of New York and Boston? Then you may as well die!" He does not spare our tendency to spread- eagleism and declamation, and having quoted a shrewd foreigner as saying of Americans that, "Whatever they say has a little the ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... with its valleys. It is only necessary, therefore, to remark that as these Idylls are drawn from a once famous valley in the North-east division of the county, the provincialism is peculiar to that valley—indeed, it would be more correct to say, to that section of the ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... from one to the other. This is shown clearly enough by the inscriptions which have been found on the sites of these ancient towns,[1] and as late as the close of the third century before our era, Plautus pokes fun in his comedies at the provincialism ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... their own works show an uncouth attempt to adopt that greatness, which comes out in exaggeration of colour even more than of form, and speaks for that want of taste which is the indelible stamp of provincialism. But there were Venetian towns without the traditions even of the schools of Vicenza and Brescia, where, if you wanted to learn painting, you had to apprentice yourself to somebody who had been taught by somebody who had been a pupil of one of Giovanni Bellini's pupils. This was ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... of the introduction of competition in any society is to break up all types of isolation and provincialism based upon lack of communication and contact. But as competition continues, natural and social selection comes into play. Successful types emerge in the process of competitive struggle while variant individuals who fail to maintain the pace or conform to standard withdraw or are ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... is obsolete or too new to have gained a place in the language, or that is a provincialism, should ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... laying on the lash was ever let slip; but the effects expected to be produced from it were something very different from contrition or mortification. There was in William Wales a perpetual fund of humor, a constant glee about him, which, heightened by an inveterate provincialism of north-country dialect, absolutely took away the sting from his severities. His punishments were a game at patience, in which the master was not always worst contented when he found himself at times overcome by his pupil. ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... absence there had been a change; or at least a change seemed to have occurred. Perhaps he had brought the change with him. It was evident that the Niagara of news pouring out of Europe into the press and periodicals of the day had inundated the provincialism of his countrymen. People were floundering about in a daze of facts—groping ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... percentage of the student body elects this course under present conditions, and because the majority of those who do elect it never have an opportunity to continue the study of government, it is thought that the selection of American government for the beginning subject has the tendency to foster provincialism. When but one course is taken this one, it is contended, should deal with foreign governments, to supply a broader basis for the comparison of political institutions. As the study of government is introduced in the grades and thorough and effective instruction is offered in the high school, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... affectionate, or manly—Mr. Hugh Roger Littlepage, Senior, then, had a system of his own, in the way of aiding the scales to fall from American eyes, by means of seeing more clearly than one does, or can, at home, let him belong where he may, and in clearing the specks of provincialism from off the diamond of republican water. He had already seen enough to ascertain that while "our country," as this blessed nation is very apt on all occasions, appropriate or not, to be called by all who belong to it, as well as by a good many who do not, could teach a ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... gesticulating about their States-General, their Montgolfier, their St. Pierre, their Condorcet, their Parny, their Necker, who had not even the decent feeling to know Italian, and who bowed and smiled and doubtless mixed him up with Metastasio and Goldoni when introduced by the Countess to so odd a piece of provincialism as an Italian poet. "Does Monsieur write comedies or tragedies?" One fancies one can hear the politely indifferent question put with a charming smile by some powdered and embroidered French wit to Mme. d'Albany in Alfieri's hearing; nay, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... overwhelming mediocrity. Of society there was but little; for what it suited the caprice of certain people to call such was little more than the noisy, screeching, hoydenish romping of both sexes. The taint of provincialism was diffused over all feelings and beliefs. Of arts and letters the country possessed none or next to none. Moreover, there was no genuine sympathy with either. To all this dismal prospect there was slight hope of improvement, because there was a disposition ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... head and assuming an unnecessary air of age, and a provincialism of accent—"Ah! I mind when there warn't ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... sincere and valuable must be acquired by each man separately; it must correspond to the character and disposition of him who acquires it, or it is a thin disguise of vanity and idleness. To what, then, may we attribute this passion for the lecture hall? Perhaps it is partly due to the provincialism characteristic of America, and partly to an invincible energy, which quickens the popular ambition and urges men to acquire information as they acquire wealth, by the shortest route, ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... various elements that contributed to the development of the national spirit, to the destruction of that provincialism so marked in the colonies before 1750, and to the creation in each of breadth of thought and clearness of vision, trade and commerce had their part. Because of them, came increasing knowledge of the widely different habits of life in the thirteen colonies. It came also from ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... notion of a number, as in early English: it is also spelt anow, and in Chaucer ynowe, and is the plural of enough. It still occurs as a provincialism in England. On lines 780-799 Masson says: "A recurrence, by the sister, with much more mystic fervour, to that Platonic and Miltonic doctrine which had already been propounded by the ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... convinced at the bottom of their hearts that Cumberland and Westmoreland constituted the choicest, best, and most highly civilised part of England. And she was one of those of whom I was thinking, when in a former chapter I spoke of highly educated people whom I had known to affect provincialism of speech. Lady Musgrave always, or perhaps it would be more correct to say generally, called a cow a "coo," and though I suspect she would have left Westmoreland behind if evil fate had called her to ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... noticed the strange lack in Eglantine of any sense of decoration. She dressed charmingly, but with regard to surroundings she was entirely devoid of taste. She had the curious provincialism so often seen in cosmopolitans who have lived most of their lives in hotels, without apparently noticing or caring ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... is often used redundantly with definitions of time. This is still a provincialism. See Abbott, Sect. 114. "Messala writeth, that Cassius having spoken these last words unto him, he bade him farewell, and willed him to come to supper to him the next night following, because it ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... and religious problems of the hour. "The Church cannot remain an isolated factor in the nation. The Catholic Church possesses spiritual and moral resources which are at the command of the nation in every great crisis. The message to the nation to forget local boundaries and provincialism is a message likewise to the Catholic Church. Parochial, diocesan and provincial limits must be forgotten in the face of the greater tasks which burden our collective religious resources." (Card. Gibbons.) Let us give to the people that broad, Catholic vision of our present ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... as well aware of the provincialism of English as Bacon was; but he knew that great poetry, being universal in its appeal to human nature, can make any language classic, and that the men whose appreciation is immortality will mine through any dialect to get at an original soul. He had as much confidence ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... seen the great in the little, and ennobled the humbler ways of existence with spiritual insight. They have set to music the homely service and simple enjoyments of common life. They have touched the chords that speak to the universal heart. The very provincialism of our poets endears them to us. Their work, as some foreign critic said, has been done in a corner. We do not deny it. But, verily we believe, that New England is the corner lot of our national estate. Our poets ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... expected in so huge a collection of knowledge. Thus, Bronchlemmitis is not Polypus bronchialis, but Croup.—The accent of laryngeal and pharyngeal is incorrectly placed on the third syllable. In this wilderness of words we look in vain for the New York provincialism "Sprue." The work has a right to some scores, perhaps hundreds, of such errors, without forfeiting its character. If the Elzevirs could not print the "Corpus Juris Civilis" without a false heading to a chapter, we may excuse a dictionary-maker and his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... considers the character of American culture, its lack of unity, and the still youthful nature of its people, it is easy to understand the pride in its budding art and maturer literature, the sensitiveness to foreign criticism, the provincialism which demands attention and a "place in the sun." Carlyle's scorn and Macaulay's contempt were indeed as irritating as they were unjust, for America had gone a long way since the rough backwoodsman, Andrew Jackson, came to the Presidency ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... sending Althea and myself to school at Brook Farm. The idea met with a good deal of opposition from the Dutch side of the house, which was my side for all I was worth, but I suppose father opined that it was time some of the provincialism of the Old Colonie should be rubbed off. Through his acquaintance with Thurlow Weed he came to know Mr. Greeley and through Mr. Greeley was introduced to Dr. Ripley and the Transcendentalists, gaining, by the way, broader views and a wider range ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... strictly Lancastrian provincialism is supposed to be a corruption of "choose how." Its exact pronunciation can hardly be put ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... make them minister to his perfection. The one most cultured may come out of a factory, and the man of least culture may be found in a university. Indeed colleges and universities, not infrequently, are haunts of provincialism and of dread of enthusiasm. The object of culture is the perfection of the spirit to the end that all that hinders, or limits, may disappear and only pure power, clear vision, and full self-realization remain. Those whose growth is most evident are ever eager to use all experiences as means of progress. ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... impatience. Many of the things that seemed so important to him were valueless in her more practical eyes. Instead of a regime which ennobled those who enjoyed its privileges, she saw only a slavish devotion to worn-out traditions, and a clannish provincialism which proved to her all the more clearly the narrow-mindedness of the people who sustained and defended them. So far as she could judge, the qualities that she deemed necessary in the make-up of a robust life, instinct with purpose and accomplishment, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... tending? This anxiety of man to know the aim and the end is essentially human; it is a kind of infirmity or provincialism of the mind, and has nothing in common with universal reality. Have things an aim? Why should they have; and what aim or end can there ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... was addressed chiefly to the English public and was thought in this country to be a trifle unsympathetic; in particular in its patronizing way of dwelling upon the thinness of the American social environment and the consequent provincialism of Hawthorne's books. The "American Note Books," in particular, seem to Mr. James a chronicle of small beer, and he marvels at the triviality of an existence which could reduce the diarist to recording an impression that ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... churches have been few in number, and they have suffered from isolation and provincialism. These defects of the earlier period have now in part passed away, new traditions have been created, a cosmopolitan spirit has been developed, and Unitarianism has become a world movement. This was conspicuously indicated at the seventy-fifth anniversary ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke |
