"Colloquial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to report grave conversations and light colloquial passages of arms among the members of the circle. I expected to hear, perhaps to read, a paper now and then. I expected to have, from time to time, a poem from some one of The Teacups, for I felt sure there must be among them one or more poets,—Teacups of the finer and ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... a very good presiding officer. He never called anybody to order. He was not informed as to parliamentary law, or as to the rules of the Senate. He had a familiar and colloquial fashion, if any Senator questioned his ruling, of saying, "But, my dear sir"; or, "But, pray consider." He was very irreverently called by somebody, during a rather disorderly scene in the Senate, where he lost control of ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... the world in propriae personae in my own name which I have not tormented with the file. I sometimes suspect that my foul copy would often appear to general readers more polished than my fair copy. Many of the feeble and colloquial expressions have been industriously substituted for others which struck me as artificial, and not standing the test; as being neither the language of passion, nor distinct conceptions. Dear sir, indulge me with looking still further on in ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... support as a partisan, generally with clamour. An Australian football term dating from about 1880. The verb has been ruled unparliamentary by the Speaker in the Victorian Legislative Assembly. It is, however, in very common colloquial use. It is from the aboriginal word borak (q.v.), and the sense of jeering is earlier than that of supporting, but jeering at one side is akin to cheering for the other. Another suggested derivation is from the Irish pronunciation of "Bark," as (according to the usually ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... writing on ordinary things there is no excuse for writing so as not to be clearly understood, or for writing in such a long and round-about way that people are tired instead of refreshed by reading. Nor is there any excuse for the use of words and phrases which are vulgar or too colloquial for the subject; yet how often is this done in the modern newspaper. It may seem unnecessary to speak to boys and girls of the faults of newspaper writers. But the boys and girls of to-day are the newspaper writers ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... I have thought it worthwhile to vary the interpretation of this word, because though "habitus" may be equivalent to all the senses of [Greek: exis], "habit" is not, at least according to our colloquial usage we commonly denote by "habit" a state formed ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... in the once thriving New England village of Dolton had Edward been born. In Dolton Bumpus was once a name of names, rooted there since the seventeenth century, and if you had cared to listen he would have told you, in a dialect precise but colloquial, the history of a family that by right of priority and service should have been destined to inherit the land, but whose descendants were preserved to see it delivered to the alien. The God of Cotton ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... compliment, however unintentional." There is, as Scott points out, a much closer resemblance to Southey's "English Eclogues, in which moral truths are expressed, to use the poet's own language, 'in an almost colloquial plainness of language,' and an air of quaint and original expression assumed, to render the sentiment ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... entertain masses of ideas. He would never have gained celebrity as an author; but as a critic, upon whatever subject, his qualifications have rarely been surpassed, though in literary matters and the fine arts they were only exhibited in conversation. His colloquial powers were impressive and fascinating, though he generally seemed a listener rather than a talker; but never failed to say a proper thing in ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... speaking with the Ottoman Ambassador, who is always a Persian linguist (Persian being an obligatory subject of qualification for the Tehran post), he passed on to a Minister who was a good Persian scholar. Further on he found an equally well—qualified colloquial proficient in another; and on finding himself before a well-known very clever diplomatist for whom he had a great personal liking, he smiled and said pleasantly, 'Have you learnt any Persian yet?' The Minister bowed, and, looking duly serious, said in Persian, 'I know something.' ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... acquisition. Suppose this difficult vernacular mastered; the would-be student discovers that literary works, even newspapers and ordinary correspondence, are not composed in it, but in another dialect, partly antiquated, partly artificial, differing as widely from the colloquial speech as Latin does from Italian. Make a second hazardous supposition. Assume that the grammar and vocabulary of this second indispensable Japanese language have been learnt, in addition to the first. You are still but at the threshold ...
— The Invention of a New Religion • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... knowledge of German, which they insisted upon airing. We had to explain that the Herr Professor was in London to learn English, and had taken a vow during his residence neither to speak nor listen to his native tongue. It was remarked that his acquaintance with colloquial English slang, for a foreigner, was quite unusual. Occasionally he was too rude, even for a scientist, informing ladies, clamouring to know how he liked English women, that he didn't like them silly; telling one gentleman, a friend ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... some one you have known who has the gift of racy colloquial utterance. Make a list of offhand, homely, or picturesque expressions you have heard him employ, and ask yourself what it is in these expressions that has made them linger in your memory. With them in mind, and with your knowledge of the man's methods ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... spirit of the man's whole vagabond life burst out of him irresistibly in his first exclamation. "Who the devil would have thought it? She can act, after all!" The instant the words escaped his lips he recovered himself, and glided off into his ordinary colloquial channels. Magdalen stopped him in the middle of his first compliment. "No," she said; "I have forced the truth out of you for once. ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... of the old legends," he was saying through a big yawn, as Smith made connection. He used a colloquial type of language, quite different from the lofty, dignified speech of the Sanusians. "That is, of course, if the woman is telling ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... playwrights may have owed to the Spanish drama, which under Lope and Cervantes sprang suddenly into a grandeur that almost rivalled their own. In the intermixture of tragedy and comedy, in the abandonment of the solemn uniformity of poetic diction for the colloquial language of real life, the use of unexpected incidents, the complication of their plots and intrigues, the dramas of England and Spain are remarkably alike; but the likeness seems rather to have sprung from a similarity ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... main point of your last letter (which crossed mine), namely, the question as to where the next Tonkunstler-Versammlung is to be held, let me add the following in colloquial form. ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... enchanting women, but they used colloquialisms freely, and had an ingenuous habit of referring to the prices of things. Bettina Vanderpoel, who was the richest and cleverest and most promisingly handsome among them, was colloquial to slanginess, but she had a deep, mellow, child voice ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... school days will be recognized as truthful pictures of every-day occurrence. The style is colloquial and pleasant, and therefore well suited to those for whose perusal it ...
— Cat and Dog - Memoirs of Puss and the Captain • Julia Charlotte Maitland
... characters are either not distinguishable, or are distinguished only by peculiarities of the most glaring kind. But the dialogue is resplendent with wit and eloquence, which indeed are so abundant that the fool comes in for an ample share, and yet preserves a certain colloquial air, a certain indescribable ease of which Wycherley had given no example, and which Sheridan in vain attempted to imitate. The author, divided between pride and shame, pride at having written a good play, and shame at having done an ungentlemanlike thing, pretended that he had merely scribbled ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... still less unanimity of judgment. The wits of the Restoration answered the question very differently from the way in which it would be answered now; even Pope and his contemporaries would not be accepted as quite infallible arbiters of social and colloquial refinement in an age like the present. Whether Horace is grave or gay in his familiar writings, his charm depends almost wholly on his manner: a modern who attempts to reproduce him runs an imminent risk first of losing all ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... subjects Euripides often arbitrarily departed from the received legends, and diminished the dignity of tragedy by depriving it of its ideal character, and by bringing it down to the level of every-day life. His dialogue was garrulous and colloquial, wanting in heroic dignity, and frequently frigid through misplaced philosophical disquisitions. Yet in spite of all these faults Euripides has many beauties, and is particularly remarkable for pathos, so that Aristotle calls him "the most tragic ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... dalmatic, and a cap resembling a biretta,—was recounting to a congregation, composed chiefly of women, old men, and children, the virtues of their deceased benefactor. Presently, the sermon came to an end, and the colloquial delivery of the discourse was changed for the monotone of a litany recitation: the people answering with ready response, and many of them employing the aid of their rosaries. The fragrance of incense filled the air; tapers and flowers adorned the altar, above which was the statue, ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... merry-looking woman, chiefly remarkable (as I soon discovered) for a peculiar mental obliquity, leading her always to think of the wrong thing at the wrong time, whereby she was perpetually becoming involved in grievous colloquial entanglements, and meeting with innumerable small personal accidents, at which no one laughed so ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... till the end of that century, were preserved, by their sound studies and logical habits of mind, from any of those faults into which men fall who write loosely because they think loosely. The pedantry of one class and the colloquial vulgarity of another had their day; the faults of each were strongly contrasted, and better writers kept the mean between them. More lasting effect was produced by translators, who in later times have corrupted ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... in six months, during the remainder of his life rarely found courage for any more sustained effort than a song. And the nature of the songs is itself characteristic of these idle later years; for they are often as polished and elaborate as his earlier works were frank, and headlong, and colloquial; and this sort of verbal elaboration in short flights is, for a man of literary turn, simply the most agreeable of pastimes. The change in manner coincides exactly with the Edinburgh visit. In 1786 he had written the "Address to a Louse," which may be taken as an extreme ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the pen must at length comply with the tongue; illiterate writers will at one time or other, by publick infatuation, rise into renown, who, not knowing the original import of words, will use them with colloquial licentiousness, confound distinction, and forget propriety. As politeness increases, some expressions will be considered as too gross and vulgar for the delicate, others as too formal and ceremonious for the gay and airy; new phrases are therefore adopted, which must, for the same reasons, be ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... graphic, lively, natural to the highest degree; and whatever he describes, we see the whole, and, as it were, from all points of view. Language flowed from his pen with a facility, simplicity, expressiveness, and accuracy, not surpassed or often equalled. He wrote as men talk, using colloquial expressions without reserve, but always to the point. When we read, we hear him; abbreviating names, and clipping words, as in the most familiar and unguarded conversation. He was not hampered by fear of offending ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... not know one word of French beyond the colloquial phrases with which everybody is familiar; but he would ask his daughter to read the crisp and tinkling tongue to him for hours at a time. He would hammer softly and file gently as she read, so that he might not lose a word of it. He would hear no news but that which she ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... quaking, "Yes, I know all about it, and I want to drop just this one hint ... tell the boys they can come. Tell them they'll be welcome ... So far I've had no trouble here ... everybody has been right decent with me," affecting a Western, colloquial drawl, "and I've tried to treat everybody, for my part, like a ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... syntax, the colloquial diction, the chatty tone, the run-on lines, the conscious roughness of meter and rhyme, may have derived from Churchill, but they become here more relevant than in any of Churchill's satires. They combine with the intemperate tone and the satirist's concluding confession, his self-identification ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... difference of pronunciation, not the other way about. For metal in its literal sense was originally a scientific word, and in that sense may have been pronounced carefully by people who would pronounce it carelessly when they used it in a colloquial transferred sense approaching ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... with reference to the subject at issue and concluded by moving a vote of thanks. This was really outside our practice at the institute. I thanked the Lord Mayor for his kind remarks, and in quite a colloquial way said that it was distressing to go round the public parks about Sydney on holidays and Saturday afternoons and see thousands of young men sitting on fences smoking cigarettes, content to loaf and look on while a few men played games. It happened that ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... as he spoke the words, and there came to Marcia a sudden memory of two occasions when she had used the ancient saying—the colloquial "never" of Rome. Once it had bound her to Iddilcar, and once, far back, in happier times, it had parted her forever from Sergius. Tears rolled down her cheeks. A dim light seemed to be creeping into the room—very dim, but as her eyes grew dry again, she could begin ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... Dialogus of Tacitus, a work which, whatever the date of its actual composition, certainly refers to a period less than ten years after the death of T. Petronius; there is the style of the work itself; wherever the writer abandons the colloquial Latin, in which so much of the work is written, we find a finished diction, whether in prose or verse, which no unprejudiced judge could place later than the accession of Trajan, and which has nothing in it to prevent its attribution to the reign ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... great gaiety on the lawn under the cedar. Her offspring were unusually sweet that day, they had new blue cotton sunbonnets, and Baby and Annette at least succeeded in being pretty. And Millicent, under the new Swiss governess, had acquired, it seemed quite suddenly, a glib colloquial French that somehow reconciled one to the extreme thinness and shapelessness ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... industries peculiar to certain tribes, such as the various kinds of basket weaving, canoe building, smith work, and blanket work. Above all, the Indian boys and girls should be given confident command of colloquial English, and should ordinarily be prepared for a vigorous struggle with the conditions under which their people live, rather than for immediate absorption into some more ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... without restraint. Chapels were erected, assemblies collected, and schools gathered from the Chinese; and while her husband labored among the former, Mrs. Shuck instructed the latter. She possessed considerable knowledge of the written language, and still greater familiarity with the colloquial of the Chinese, and devoted joyfully and successfully her acquirements, time, and talents to the interests of the mission. During the last year of her life a new school house had been erected and a school gathered under her care of twenty ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... he relied on his extempore ability to carry him through. Now, had he been in spirits, or had he gathered animation and kindled by his own emotion, no written lecture could have been more effectual than one of his unpremeditated colloquial harangues. But either he was depressed originally below the point from which reascent was possible, or else this reaction was intercepted by continual disgust from looking back upon his own ill success; for assuredly he never once recovered ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... This is colloquial, it really means "chance" or "haphazard." In other words, it was the piece of ground that fell to the settler ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... speech, which it took much labour to overcome. To improve his knowledge of French, he spent some months with a French family in Madawaska, among the descendants of the ancient Acadians. In this way he acquired a colloquial ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... Dr. Johnson found fault with Boswell for using the phrase to make money: "Don't you see the impropriety of it? To make money is to coin it: you should say get money." Johnson, adds Boswell, "was jealous of infractions upon the genuine English language, and prompt to repress colloquial barbarisms; such as pledging myself, for undertaking; line for department or branch, as the civil line, the banking line. He was particularly indignant against the almost universal use of the word idea in the sense of notion or opinion, when it is clear that ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... Colloquial language uses the terms Midge and Gnat to describe the tiny insects which we often see dancing in a ray of sunlight. There is something of everything in those aerial ballets. It is possible that the persecutrix of the Cabbage-caterpillar ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... pleasures of youth, had made him so. For many years past the vast variety of works he had been obliged to consult in preparing his Dictionary had stored an uncommonly retentive memory with facts on all kinds of subjects; making it a perfect colloquial armory. "He had all his life," says Boswell, "habituated himself to consider conversation as a trial of intellectual vigor and skill. He had disciplined himself as a talker as well as a writer, making it a rule to impart whatever he ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... champion of faith and sound philosophy against deism, atheism, and David Hume. They loved to see him, as Goldsmith said, wind into his subject like a serpent. Everybody felt at the Literary Club that he had no superior in knowledge, and in colloquial dialectics only one equal. Garrick was there, and of all the names of the time he is the man whom one would perhaps most willingly have seen, because the gifts which threw not only Englishmen, but Frenchmen like Diderot, and Germans like Lichtenberg, into amazement ...
— Burke • John Morley
... himself about examining and quoting authorities with punctilious accuracy, and trusting too frequently to the ipse-dixits of good friends:—with a quick discernment—a sparkling fancy—great store of classical knowledge, and a never ceasing play of colloquial wit, he moved right onwards in his manly course—the delight of the gay, and the admiration of the learned! He wrote much and variously: but in an evil hour the demon Malice caught him abroad—watched his deviations—noted ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... has the widest appeal, although many would cast their votes for Old Mortality, The Antiquary or Rob Roy because of the rich humor of those romances. Scott's dialect, although true to nature, is not difficult, as he did not consider it necessary to give all the colloquial terms, ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... behind them passed, looked back, stopped and returned. "Gen'lemen, sirs, to you. Mr. Mahch, escuse me by pyo accident earwhilin' yo' colloquial terms. I know e'zacly what cause yo' sick transit. Yass, seh. Thass the ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... reception of the girl, strung up, as she was, to an acute pitch of emotion, might have been somewhat in the nature of an anticlimax. And then, was it possible that the feeling was on her side only? Could it be that the priceless pearl of her love was cast before—I was tempted to use the colloquial singular and call him an "unappreciative swine!" The thing was almost unthinkable to me, and yet I was tempted to dwell upon it; for when a man is in love—and I could no longer disguise my condition from myself—he is inclined to be humble and to gather ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... morning school next day, the School porter entered the Upper Fifth form-room and informed Mr Sims, who was engaged in trying to drive the beauties of Plautus' colloquial style into the Upper Fifth brain, that the Headmaster wished to see Lorimer, Lorimer's conscience was so abnormally good that for the life of him he could not think why he had been sent for. As far as he could remember, there was no possible way in which ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... the other parts of speech by gesture. But the attache of legation, who has been poring over their orthography, and hammering at principle, often proves the uselessness of his acquisitions for colloquial purposes. However, we might have done very well with a little more knowledge than we possessed on this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... guaranteeing the non-renewal of the revolt; no slight act of devotion, when one considers that the obligations of the contracting parties reposed rather on expediency than on moral principles. Here he made the acquaintance of all the leading personages at the Ottoman Porte, and learned colloquial Turkish in perfection. Petronievitch is astute by education and position, but he has a good heart and a capacious intellect, and his defects belong not to the man, but to the man's education and circumstances. Although placable in his resentments, he ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... cannot speak without expressing a keen admiration. It is my honest belief that he was, in the matter of style, the greatest leader-writer who has ever appeared in the English Press. He developed the exact compromise between a literary dignity and a colloquial easiness of exposition which completely fills the requirements of journalism. He was never pompous, never dull, or common, and never trivial. When I say that he was the greatest of leader-writers I am not forgetting that at ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... playwright begins to feel the absolute necessity for writing decent dialogue—not mere stage dialect that may be scamped and ranted ad libitum by the "star" to suit his own taste, or want of it, but real dialogue, which, while ideally reflecting the colloquial language of the day, taxes the intelligence and feeling of the actor ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... style. In its ease and purity, it most resembles that of Swift, Addison, or Goldsmith. Thackeray writes as a cultured, ideal, old gentleman may be imagined to talk to the young people, while he sits in his comfortable armchair in a corner by the fireplace. The charm of freshness, quaintness, and colloquial familiarity is seldom absent from the delightfully ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... wanting to see each other; and when they returned home, they would cry out with a glad voice, saying, "We made sixteen calls and found fourteen of them out" —not meaning that they found out anything important against the fourteen—no, that was only a colloquial phrase to signify that they were not at home—and their manner of saying it expressed their lively satisfaction in that fact. Now their pretence of wanting to see the fourteen—and the other two whom they ...
— On the Decay of the Art of Lying • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
... Fitzpatrick, despairing of success in her efforts with Paulina, called in the aid of Anka Kusmuk, who, as domestic in the New West Hotel where Mrs. Fitzpatrick served as charwoman two days in the week, had become more or less expert in the colloquial English of her environment. Together they laboured with Paulina, but with little effect. She was quite unmoved, because quite unconscious, of moral shock. It disturbed Mrs. Fitzpatrick not a little to discover during the progress of her missionary labours that even Anka, of whose goodness ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... now a rising man. He was by no means diffident. With strong native sense, imperturbable self-confidence, a memory almost miraculously stored with rude anecdotes, and an astonishing command of colloquial and slang language, he was never embarrassed, and never at a loss as to what to ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... of passion and tragedy we pass by easy steps into the jocular-colloquial region in which the volume opened. Painting in these later days of Browning's has ceased to yield high, or even serious poetry, and Baldinucci's tale of shabby trickery cannot be compared, even for grotesque ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... to apologize for the constant use of the word English in speaking of the British Expedition to France. At the beginning of the war this was a colloquial error into which we all fell over here, even the French press. Everything in khaki was spoken of as "English," even though we knew perfectly well that Scotch, Irish, and Welsh were equally well ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... topic is his really famous "obscurity." This obscurity is variously ascribed to a diction unduly learned, or almost unintelligibly colloquial, or grotesquely inventive; to figures of speech drawn from sources too unfamiliar or elaborated to the point of confusion; to sentences complicated by startling inversions, by double parentheses, by broken constructions, or by a grammatical structure defying ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... demand exaltation; for instance, Hamlet's first address to the Ghost lifts his disposition to an altitude far beyond the ordinary reaches of our souls, and his manner of speech should be adapted to this sentiment. But such exaltation of utterance is wholly out of place in the purely colloquial scene with the Gravedigger. When Macbeth says, "Go, bid thy mistress, when my drink is ready, she strike upon the bell," he would not ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... we read these stanzas so as to make the rhymes perceptible, even tri-syllable rhymes could scarcely produce an equal sense of oddity and strangeness, as we feel here in finding rhymes at all in sentences so exclusively colloquial. I would further ask whether, but for that visionary state, into which the figure of the woman and the susceptibility of his own genius had placed the poet's imagination (a state, which spreads its influence and colouring over all, that co-exists ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... rested her colloquial fame, as Dr. Johnson would have said, upon a compliment so evidently acceptable, but no one knows where to stop. She thrust her broad, good-natured, delighted countenance forward, and sending her voice from the bottom to the top of the table, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... Leipzig he announced a course of lectures to be delivered in the German language. The outcry was great against him; but he persevered, and henceforth delivered all his lectures in his mother tongue. Since his time the use of Latin, as a colloquial, has gradually decreased, and at the present day the German is the chief language employed at the universities. Thomasius was also the first to combat the system of prosecutions for witchcraft, and the application of torture in criminal trials. ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... mysterious in its causes and perhaps impossible to prevent. This is the kind of blight which attacks many of our most ancient, beautiful, and expressive words, rendering them first of all unsuitable for colloquial use, though they may be still used in prose. Next they are driven out of the prose vocabulary into that of poetry, and at last removed into that limbo of archaisms and affectations to which so many beautiful but dead words of our language have ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... Here I cannot attempt to render the various plays upon words; but the term "omo[:i]" needs explanation. It means "thought" or "thoughts;" but in colloquial phraseology it is often used as a euphemism for a dying person's last desire of vengeance. In various dramas it has been used in the signification of "avenging ghost." Thus the exclamation, "His thought ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... necessary to explain here that Pesca prided himself on being a perfect Englishman in his language, as well as in his dress, manners, and amusements. Having picked up a few of our most familiar colloquial expressions, he scattered them about over his conversation whenever they happened to occur to him, turning them, in his high relish for their sound and his general ignorance of their sense, into compound words and repetitions of his own, and always running them into each other, as if they consisted ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... rendering, although they worked from the same MS. copy, that of M. Houdas, lent by him to Burton and afterwards to Payne. Arabists tell us that in practically every instance Payne is right, Burton wrong. The truth is that, while in colloquial Arabic Burton was perfect, in literary Arabic he was far to seek, [568] whereas Mr. Payne had studied the subject carefully and deeply for years. But Burton's weakness here is not surprising. A Frenchman might speak excellent English, and yet find some difficulty ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... but with many curious particulars; the gentleman in one of Dr. King's Dialogues inquires the secretary's opinion of the causes of this man's wonderful pliability of limbs; a question which Sloane had thus solved, with colloquial ease: it depended upon "bringing the body to it, by using ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... cultivate our gardens, we should have more; but then the Turks would demand more, so our spirits are broken, and we are eaten up. We have no heart to work for our oppressors." Continue to read the Arabic New Testament, which aids me in colloquial disquisitions with the people. The Ghadamsee people persist in not taking medicines during the fast. One told me, "Even if a man dies, and medicine could save him, he must not take it." I have therefore fewer patients during the inexorable ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... we have need to learn Latin anyway, why not kill two birds with one stone, and make Latin our universal language? Why not have a colloquial, every-day Latin, such as the Romans used to speak in Italy? In point of fact, Latin was the universal language with travelers and educated people all through the Middle Ages. We need to learn it anyhow, so why not make it our needed ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... of teaching, it was colloquial; questions were asked and answered in Latin. This method, according to Dr. Rouse of Perse School, brings boys on much more rapidly than does our current fashion, as may readily be imagined; but experts ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... Now all this "colloquial romancing," as one styled it, is a violation of duty to God and our fellow creatures. It is a deviation from the truth of God; it is unjust to those, of whom, and to whom, it is daily addressed. She, who is soon to be exposed to this moral contagion, ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... there is left of Plymouth Rock a piece large enough to make a gunflint of!" "This," Professor Phelps says, "is purest idiomatic English." He adds, "The old Scotch interrogative, 'What for?' is as pure English in written as in colloquial speech." ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... His command of language was wonderful. The antithetical manner of expressing himself gave piquancy and vim to his conversation, making it very captivating. He was too impatient, and had too much nervous irritability and too rapid a flow of ideas, to indulge in familiar and colloquial conversation. He would talk all, or none. He inaugurated a subject and exhausted it, and there were few who desired more than to listen when he talked. Two or three evenings in the week there would assemble at Mr. ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... at his command a style more nervous, more varied, more flexible, or more direct than Mark Twain's. His colloquial ease should not hide from us his mastery of all the devices of rhetoric. He may seem to disobey the letter of the law sometimes, but he is always obedient to the spirit. He never speaks unless he has something to say; and then he says it tersely, sharply, with a ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... associate with the wits of London; but with so little success, that Foote said, 'What can he mean by coming among us? He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others.' Trying him by the test of his colloquial powers, Johnson had found him very defective. He once said to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'This man now has been ten years about town, and has made nothing of it;' meaning as a companion. He said to me, 'I never heard any thing from ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... hearers. His faults were that he was drunken, dirty, quarrelsome, dissolute, and somewhat of a cheat. I put up with all his deficiences, because he dressed my hair to my taste, and his constant chattering offered me the opportunity of practising the colloquial French which cannot be acquired from books. He has always assured me that he was born in Picardy, the son of a common peasant, and that he had deserted from the French army. He may have deceived me when he said that ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... a similar embarrassment was not infrequent here in the case of our public men, among whom the study of French had been very uncommon; and for many of them the old colonial habit of fitting boys for college by training them to the colloquial use of Latin proved to be a great convenience. Colonel Fontaine's anecdote implies, what is altogether probable, that Patrick Henry's early drill in Latin had included the ordinary colloquial use of ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... even Mantuan, latinized. The contrast between the modern form of the word and its Roman garb produces the most amusing effect. In the original it is sometimes difficult to read, for Folengo has no objection to using the most colloquial ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... found myself quite on the wrong tack. She screwed up her little mouth, as if tasting some nasty medicine, and then said in excellent colloquial English: ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... call it by its common colloquial name) we were detained a few days in those unsteaming times by foul winds. Our time, however, thanks to the hospitality of a certain Captain Skinner on that station, did not hang heavy on our hands, though we were imprisoned, as ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... this tribute, and Mr. Nash, rising too, said with his bright colloquial air: "But, Miss Dormer, he had eyes. He was made to see—to see all over, to see everything. There ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Gershom a great deal. He was useful to me once, and I recognize my debt; but the fact remains, that I don't owe him or any other man the shirt on my back!" As he met Stephen's glance he lowered his voice, and added in a tone of boyish candour that was very winning in spite of his colloquial speech: "I like your face, and I'm going to ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... pretentiousness was due to the fact that he habitually expressed himself in a book learned language, wholly remote from anything personal, native, or homely. Mrs. Kronborg spoke Swedish to her own sisters and to her sister-in-law Tillie, and colloquial English to her neighbors. Thea, who had a rather sensitive ear, until she went to school never spoke at all, except in monosyllables, and her mother was convinced that she was tongue-tied. She was ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... say that if I had been them, I should have burst out laughing and said what a couple of young asses we were!" The Hon. Percival was very colloquial, but syntax was not of the essence of ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the jongleurs, had texts, and that these were studied by the makers of the Vulgate, interpolations and errors might creep in by this way. As to changes in language, "a poetical dialect... is liable to be gradually modified by the influence of the ever-changing colloquial speech. And, in the early times, when writing was little used, this influence would be especially operative." [Footnote: Monro, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... his companions; and took occasion to speak a few words in praise of young Milnwood, of whom, as of a champion of the Covenant, he augured great things. The second part he applied to the punishments which were about to fall upon the persecuting government. At times he was familiar and colloquial; now he was loud, energetic, and boisterous;—some parts of his discourse might be called sublime, and others sunk below burlesque. Occasionally he vindicated with great animation the right of every freeman ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... day I heard a woman say that she had got to begin banting. A nice verb, to bant, though not approved of by the dictionary, which scornfully terms it "humorous and colloquial". The humor, to be sure, is usually for other people, not for the person banting. Do you know, I wonder, the derivation of this word? It means, of course, to induce this too, too solid flesh to melt, by the careful avoidance ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... dedications, eulogies, and all the train of special public gatherings, offer rare opportunities for the display of tact and good sense in handling occasion, theme, and audience. When to be dignified and when colloquial, when to soar and when to ramble arm in arm with your hearers, when to flame and when to soothe, when to instruct and when to amuse—in a word, the whole matter of APPROPRIATENESS must constantly be in mind lest you write ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... run away with me! Let me refer to your esteemed favor again! Ah! we have worked down to the bed-rock, or—in Hugh Miller's colloquial phrasing—to the "old red sandstone," of the fact that you want Jack. You state the fact with what you designate as brutal candor—and I reply with candied brutality, that I have thought that all along. If you are averse to my view of the matter, ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... apparently, colloquial phrase is a deep stroke of art. The form of expression is always used to express an habitual and characteristic action. A knight is described 'lance in rest'—a dragoon, 'sword in hand'—so, as the idea ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... store-room, and had plenty of patients. I used to hear continual talking and laughing going on there, and by this means Mr. McDougall learnt to talk the Malay language, which he only knew from books when he first arrived. The pure Malay of books is very different from the colloquial patois of Kuching. To my sorrow, I learnt this some time after, when I was trying to prepare two women for baptism: they listened to me for some time, and then one said to the other, "She talks like a book," which I fear meant that ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... whole period of Minnesota's political existence, and having taken part in most of the leading events in her history, both savage and civilized, I propose to treat the various subjects that compose her history in a narrative and colloquial manner that may not rise to the dignity of history, but which, I think, while giving facts, will not detract from the interest or pleasure of the reader. If I should in the course of my narrative so far forget myself ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... temperament. There is something not quite good, something almost sinister, about it—at least, in its more complex forms, though in its simple form, as we find it in outdoor nature, it is innocent enough; and, indeed, is it not used in colloquial metaphor as an adjective for innocence itself? Innocence has but two colours, white or green. But Becky Sharp's eyes also were green, and the green of the aesthete does not suggest innocence. There will always be wearers of the green carnation; but the popular vogue which green has enjoyed ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... you chaps shove it under our noses." Beetle dropped into a drawling parody of King's most biting colloquial style—the gentle rain after the thunder-storm. "Well, it's all very sufficiently vile and disgraceful, isn't it? I don't know who comes out of it worst: Tulke, who happens to have been caught; or the other fellows who haven't. And we—" here he wheeled fiercely on the ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... the previous night, I was recalling dazedly, there had been only three men wearing the horizon blue. Who was this fourth figure, who knew my name and spoke such colloquial English? I raised my candle as high as possible and scanned ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... exercises designed to show the students that the classical languages were at one time in daily use among living people and were the media of ordinary conversation[74]. Students in such courses commonly memorize certain colloquial phrases and take part in simple conversations in which these phrases can be used. Such methods, skillfully employed, undoubtedly relieve the tedium of the familiar drill in grammar and "prose composition," and may help materially in imparting both a knowledge of the ancient ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... the Senator. "He used the word tote in the African sense, to carry, to bear. Tote in this sense is defined in our standard dictionaries as a colloquial word of the Southern States, ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... audience in Jermyn Street, in 1855; the other, undated, from Mr. Jodrell, a great benefactor of science, who had heard him at the Royal Institution. These warned him against his habits of lecturing in a colloquial tone, which might suit a knot of students gathered round his table, but not a large audience; of running his words, especially technical terms, together, and of pouring out unfamiliar matter at breakneck ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... trust you, as I trust your sister. Between you I'm safe. And now, you lay low! That's my advice." He dropped from his mystery and his mastery to a level of colloquial teasing. "I'm going to rest under your humble roof to-night, and to-morrow I'm going to the mansion of Peter Hingston. His gates will be set wide for me, and all the double log-cabin palaces and frame houses of this royal ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... with a German lady of rank, he contrived to assure her that in his humble opinion she was a ——. Hard it is to fill up the hiatus decorously; but, in fact, the word very coarsely expressed that she was no better than she should be. Which reminds us of a parallel misadventure to a German, whose colloquial English had been equally neglected. Having obtained an interview with an English lady, he opened his business (whatever it might be) thus—'High-born madam, since your husband have kicked de bucket'——'Sir!' interrupted ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... apologize for the imperfect manner in which I am obliged to exhibit Johnson's conversation at this period. In the early part of my acquaintance with him, I was so wrapt in admiration of his extraordinary colloquial talents, and so little accustomed to his peculiar mode of expression, that I found it extremely difficult to recollect and record his conversation with its genuine vigour and vivacity. In progress of time, when my mind was, as it ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... The vivid colloquial scenes in prose have much of that pungent semi-satirical humour of which Browning had shown the first glimpse in Sordello. Besides these, there is one intermediate scene in verse, the talk of the "poor girls" on the Duomo steps, which seems to me one of the most ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... away a plate full of some occult mystery which he had secreted there. He nodded to me brightly, and then for the first time it occurred to me that if he came from his nameplace he might know a little French. I knew remarkably little myself; I could read it with difficulty. My colloquial French was then, as now, intensely and intolerably English. I said, "Bon ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... it exceedingly. It says just what ought to be said, and that in style colloquial, short, sharp, and ...
— Publisher's Advertising (1872) • Anonymous
... sentence of mankind, I have at least endeavoured to deserve their kindness. I have laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations. Something, perhaps, I have added to the elegance of its construction, and something to the harmony of its cadence. When common words were less pleasing to the ear, or less ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... multitude of readers who, being, like all multitude, mediocre, demand the mediocre in literature. And I know that it is equally foolish to neglect the popular elements in the developing American genius—that genius which is so colloquial now, and yet so inventive; so vulgar sometimes, and yet, when sophistication is not forced upon it, so fresh. I have no wish to evade the necessity for consulting the wishes and the taste of the public, which good sense and commercial ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Gaulli, called Baciccio, one of the most eminent Genoese painters, was no less celebrated for portraits than for history. Pascoli says he painted no less than seven different Pontiffs, besides many illustrious personages. Possessing great colloquial powers, he engaged his sitters in the most animated conversation, and thus transferred their features to his canvas, so full of life and expression, that they looked as though they were about to speak to the beholder. He also had a remarkable talent of painting the dead, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... man was a contradiction to himself. Tom was a person of few words, and so intensely lazy that it required a strong effort of will to enable him to answer the questions of inquiring friends; and when at length aroused to exercise his colloquial powers, he performed the task in so original a manner that it never failed to upset the gravity of the interrogator. When he raised his large, prominent, leaden-coloured eyes from the ground, and looked the inquirer steadily in the face, the effect was irresistible; the laugh would come—do ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... shipwrecked upon them, more than once your desires—those of a young marrying man—(where, alas, is that time!) have seen their richly laden gondolas go to pieces there: the flower of the cargo went to the bottom, the ballast of the marriage remained. In short, to make use of a colloquial expression, as you talk over your marriage with yourself you say, as you look at Caroline, "She is not what ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... the classics; he rewrote some of the more descriptive and romantic passages, putting his finest and most florid epithets into them with what he felt was very like disinterestedness, and a reckless waste of good material. And he cut down the dialogue in places, or gave it a more colloquial turn, so as to suit the tastes of the average reader, and he worked up some of the crises which struck him ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... Britain, therefore, is less to be depended on than their hatred to America. A general idea has gone abroad regarding their taciturnity which does not accord with my experience. Far from being averse to colloquial intercourse, they delight in it; none more welcome to an Indian wigwam than one who can talk freely. They pass the winter evenings in relating their adventures, hunting being their usual theme, or in telling stories; ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... of a number of marsupial species of the genus Wallabia, etc., related to the kangaroo, but smaller; (colloquial) "on the wallaby (track)", on the move, ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson |
