"Grammatical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pure "in grammatical forms, in syntax, and in vocabulary," could be kept thus clean without the aid of written texts, I am unable to imagine. If left merely to human memory and at the mercy of reciters and new poets, they would have become stained with "the defining article"—and, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... not too priggishly grammatical Lady Jane; "nowadays those sort of people dress like duchesses, and think themselves as ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... they saw the tip of a great mountain coming up out of the sea, and the great serpents were coiled around the top and were sliding down the sides into the waters, and there was not a cracker there for John. And so, with scarcely a grammatical sentence and with most unfitting words, he went on for an hour with a discourse full of wildness and weirdness, and full of untruth, while the people looked on with amazement at the wonderful knowledge and power of the man. Twenty or thirty years ago you might hear many similar ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 1, March, 1898 • Various
... have such a specimen here! a man who discourses extemporaneously, positively without the power of constructing one grammatical sentence; but who is (ungrammatically) deep in Heaven's confidence on the abstrusest points, and discloses some of his private information with an idiotic complacency insupportable ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... enactments are most magniloquently worded, but not always with precise grammatical correctness. That for the famous Bay State of Massachusetts runs as follows: "Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... story of a grammatical difficulty which was to be settled by reference to a book in templo Pacis, in the forum of Vespasian; and again, when a particular book was wanted, "we hunted for it diligently," he says, "and, when we had found it in the temple ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... product of matchless talent and ingenuity Pope's Translation of the Iliad; still a point was looked for at the end of each second line, and the whole was, as it were, a sorites, or, if I may exchange a logical for a grammatical metaphor, a conjunction disjunctive, of epigrams. Meantime the matter and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry. On this last point, I had occasion to render my own thoughts ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... ardently. Humboldt mentions that not a single Roman author ever alludes to the Alps from a descriptive point of view except to complain of their impassableness and like qualities, and that Julius Caesar employed the leisure hours of an Alpine journey to complete a dry grammatical ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... maitresse similarly elevated. At the back of the estrade, and attached to a moveable partition dividing this schoolroom from another beyond, was a large tableau of wood painted black and varnished; a thick crayon of white chalk lay on my desk for the convenience of elucidating any grammatical or verbal obscurity which might occur in my lessons by writing it upon the tableau; a wet sponge appeared beside the chalk, to enable me to efface the marks when they ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... Archbishop of Seville during forty years, and died in 635. See Mariana, Hist. 1. vi. c. 7. Mosheim, whose critical opinions in general must be taken with some allowance, observes that "his grammatical theological, and historical productions, discover more learning and pedantry, than ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... Sir, let not this discountenance or disgallant you a whit; you must not sink under the first disaster. It is with your young grammatical courtier, as with your neophyte player, a thing usual to be daunted at the first presence or interview: you saw, there was Hedon, and Anaides, far more practised gallants than yourself, who were both out, to comfort you. It is ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... popularity of its rimed chronicles, are proof that literature was ceasing to be the possession of a purely intellectual class, and was beginning to appeal to the nation at large. The correspondence of the Paston family not only displays a fluency and grammatical correctness which would have been impossible a few years before, but shows country squires discussing about books and gathering libraries. The increased use of linen paper in place of the costlier ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... are, however, no traces of sealing-wax or wax upon it, whence I infer that it was sent open, which, from its being written in a foreign language, would have been perfectly safe. I have purposely left the few grammatical errors it contains, as the smallest alteration of this gem would appear to me in the light of a treason against the ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... while the historic leads decidedly to an opposite conclusion. There is a far closer analogy between the Palestinian group of languages—Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite, and the Assyro-Babylonian, than between either of these and the Aramaic. The Aramaic is scanty both in variety of grammatical forms and in vocabulary; the Phoenician and Assyro-Babylonian are comparatively copious.[36] The Aramaic has the character of a degraded language; the Assyro-Babylonian and the Phoenician are modelled on a primitive type.[37] In some respects ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... concealment on her own part, so that we talked of ourselves, of our prospects, of the journey, of the weather, of each other—of everything but our host and hostess. It must be confessed that Miggles's conversation was never elegant, rarely grammatical, and that at times she employed expletives the use of which had generally been yielded to our sex. But they were delivered with such a lighting-up of teeth and eyes, and were usually followed by a laugh—a laugh peculiar to Miggles—so ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... or one of the Knights of the Round Table, poking about among a lot of strange people, doing wonderful things for them, until they are all ready to worship you. It is all very well for you, I say; but what would you do if you were me?' cried Jill, in her shrill treble, and quite oblivious of grammatical niceties; 'how would you like to be poor me, shut up ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... sufficiently accurate to answer all the purposes, either of history or of the useful arts. It is admitted that the case is quite different, if there be a mystery in these writings, the truth of which depends on literary criticism, or grammatical exactness; but if these writings are nothing more than the bare opinions and discoveries of men, and of men too, as liable to error as ourselves, and if no one was to view them in a different light, I apprehend there would be all the confidence placed in ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... enamoured, not of a reality, but of an illusion born of ignorance or of vulgar bewilderment. They were carried away because they breathed the same atmosphere as the singer; and being undistracted by ethical, or grammatical, or metrical offences, they not only read these poems with avidity, but understood enough of what they read to be touched by their vitality, to ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... This is of course a grammatical irregularity—the verb should be 'is.' It is not the only instance of the same ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... having received a grammatical education, and been brought up as a peruke-maker from my earliest years—besides having seen a deal of high life, and the world in general, in carrying false curls, bandeaux, and other artificial head-gear paraphernalia, in bandboxes to boarding schools, and so on—a desire naturally ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... apt to use very slip-shod English in drafting their bills. This should not be. How can they expect to Parse a bill unless it is couched in grammatical language? ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... was the homeliest and simplest of men. On the bench he wore his baggy old alpaca coat as though it were a silken robe. And, as has been heretofore remarked, he had for his official and his private lives two different modes of speech. As His Honor, presiding, his language was invariably grammatical and precise and as carefully accented as might be expected of a man whose people never had very much use anyway for the consonant "r." As William Pitman Priest, Esq., citizen, taxpayer, and Confederate veteran he mishandled the king's English as though he ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... rub! If you said 'what,' you would be more grammatical. Norton swears that it was not human, and, indeed, from the scratches on his throat, I should be ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... desire, have been busy under the roof of St. Martin, in dispensing to some the honey of the Holy Scriptures. Others I strive to inebriate with the old wine of ancient studies; these I nourish with the fruit of grammatical knowledge; in the eyes of these again I seek to make bright the courses of the stars.... But I have need of the most excellent books of scholastic learning, which I had procured in my own country, either by the devoted care of my master, ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... suppose it would really make any difference who you modeled yourself on," said the Terror, desirous rather of being frank than grammatical. ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... instinctively that her companion was attracting more attention than her bonnet; and twitching her dress bade her sit down. Sal obeyed; but she had no opportunity that morning of deciding whether the sermon were grammatical or not, for she was constantly on the look out, and whenever she saw any one scrutinizing Mary or herself more closely than they ought, a shake of her fist and a horrid face warned them to desist. Twice during church time Mary thought, nay felt sure that she caught ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... that age differed widely from the manner of life. These scholastic, grammatical, rhetorical, and logical subtleties were decidedly out of consonance with the times, never had any connection with and never were encountered in actual life. Those who studied them could not apply their knowledge to anything whatever, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... not use two or three short sentences to express ideas which will make a more unified impression in one sentence. Place subordinate ideas in subordinate grammatical constructions. ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... the religious and legal formulae preserved to us by Varro, Cicero, Livy, and others, from proverbs and popular sayings. It would take us too far afield to analyze these documents here, but it may be observed that we notice in them, among other characteristics, an indifference to strict grammatical structure, not that subordination of clauses to a main clause which comes only from an appreciation of the logical relation of ideas to one another, but a co-ordination of clauses, the heaping up of synonymous words, a tendency to use ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... grandfather's tuition at Nancepean. None of his masters had been enough of a scholar or enough of a gentleman (and to teach Latin and Greek well one must be one or the other) to educate his taste. The result was an assortment of grammatical facts to which he was incapable of giving life. If the Rector of Wych-on-the-Wold was not a great scholar, he was at least able to repair the neglect of, more than the neglect of, the positive damage done to Mark's education by the meanness of Haverton House; moreover, after Mark had ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... also I do not see any great reason to complain of the "words" left out by Mivart, as they do not seem to me materially to affect the meaning. Your expression, "and tends to depart in a slight degree," I think hardly grammatical; a tendency to depart cannot very well be said to be in a slight degree; a departure can, but a tendency must be either a slight tendency or a strong tendency; the degree to which the departure may reach must depend on favourable or unfavourable causes in ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... that used by the French savant. In the notes to his edition of the Arabic text of Aladdin, M. Zotenberg gives a number of extracts from this MS., from which it appears that it is written in a very vulgar modern Syrian style and abounds in grammatical errors, inconsistencies and incoherences of every description, to say nothing of the fact that the Syrian ecclesiastic seems, with the characteristic want of taste and presumption which might be expected ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... either from the ancient English or the low Dutch; if the one, by tradition, if the other, from the use of it by medical men. Cancrum is an odd grammatical blunder; being, in reality, nothing but the accusative of Cancer, put instead of the nominative. The latter name was, as is well known, frequently applied by the older surgeons, in a vague manner, to any terrific ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... from thence he gave laws to the Jews." But, then, how was it possible for them to tarry forty days in a desert place where there was no water, and at the same time to pass all over the country between that and Judea in the six days? And as for this grammatical translation of the word Sabbath, it either contains an instance of his great impudence or gross ignorance; for the words Sabbo and Sabbath are widely different from one another; for the word Sabbath in the Jewish language ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
... of the translator becomes doubly hazardous in case of translating a European language into Japanese, or vice versa. Between any of the European languages and Japanese there is no visible kinship in word-form, significance, grammatical system, rhetorical arrangements. It may be said that the inspiration of the two languages is totally different. A want of similarity of customs, habits, traditions, national sentiments and traits makes the work of translation all the more difficult. A novel written in Japanese which had ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... strongly reminiscent of twenty-first century North American, but with somewhat peculiar grammatical formations, the oldest of the group told of their having walked for many weeks from their ...
— Out of the Earth • George Edrich
... Before you can tell what a man means, you must have patience to find out what he says. So far from wishing our grammatical and philological education to be less severe than it is, I think it is not severe enough. In an age like this—an age of lectures, and of popular literature, and of self-culture, too often random and capricious, however earnest, we cannot be too careful in asking ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... mind that, dearest Faith. Sit down here, while I send the boy up with your box." And then, with some little desire to show his sister how well he was acquainted with the language, he blundered out his directions in very grammatical Welsh; so grammatical, in fact, and so badly pronounced, that the boy, ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... note first, in this passage, the prelude, including verses 1, 2, and 3. We need not discuss the grammatical connection of these verses, nor the relation of verses 2 and 3 to the following section. However that be settled, the result, for our present purpose, is the same. Mark considers that John's mission is the beginning of the gospel. Here are two ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... learned little good in the classical lecture. His fellow-students there were too dull, as in mathematics they were too learned for him. Mr. Buck, the tutor, was no better a scholar than many a fifth-form boy at Grey Friars; might have some stupid humdrum notions about the metre and grammatical construction of a passage of Aeschylus or Aristophanes, but had no more notion of the poetry than Mrs. Binge, his bed-maker; and Pen grew weary of hearing the dull students and tutor blunder through a few lines of a play, which ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a thing, cannot be wanted in the broad highways of religion. What we do want is humility, docility, reverence for God, and love for man. These are sown broadcast amongst human hearts. Now, these apply themselves to the sense of Scripture, not to its grammatical niceties. But if so, even that case shows indirectly how little could depend upon the mere verbal attire of the Bible, when the chief masters of verbal science were so ready to go astray—riding on the billows ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... "invention, dissemination, conservation, and metamorphosis of language" has been very great, and she has been par excellence the teacher of language, as indeed she is to-day in our schools when expression and savoir faire in speech, rather than deep philological learning and dry grammatical analysis, have ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... and elegant studies of philology and criticism have little need of any foreign help. Though our language, not being very analogical, gives few opportunities for grammatical researches, yet we have not wanted authors who have considered the principles of speech; and with critical writings we abound sufficiently to enable pedantry to impose rules which can seldom be observed, and vanity to talk of books which are ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... chastity. Thackeray would knock a qualifying adverb across the street, or thrust it under your nose to make room for the vivid force of an idea. Trollope would give the idea a decent funeral for the sake of having his adverb appear at the grave above reproach from grammatical gossip. Whenever I have risen from the splendid psychological perspective of old Job, the solemn introspective howls of Ecclesiasticus and the generous living philosophy of Shakespeare it has always been with the desire—of course it is undignified, but it is human—to go and get an English grammar ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... hundred exclamations and little comments and questions that required no answers, and broken sentences of pity, of raillery, of pleasure, that had no beginning and no ending as grammatical constructions. ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... classical works recorded in the foregoing letter was not only read through, but read with care, is proved by the pencil marks, single, double, and treble, which meander down the margin of such passages as excited the admiration of the student; and by the remarks, literary, historical, and grammatical, with which the critic has interspersed every volume, and sometimes every page. In the case of a favourite writer, Macaulay frequently corrects the errors of the press, and even the punctuation, as minutely as if he were ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Typographical and grammatical errors and misspellings have been corrected, but 19th-century variants have been retained. Question marks ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the essentials, the presence of which constitutes language, while their absence negatives it altogether, we find that Professor Max Muller restricts them to the use of grammatical articulate words that we can write or speak, and denies that anything can be called language unless it can be written or spoken in articulate words and sentences. He also denies that we can think at all unless ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... character. Himself a diligent self-educator, he gave ready encouragement to deserving youths in his employment, stimulating their talents and fostering their energies. During his own busy life, he contrived to save time to master French and Italian, of which he acquired an accurate and grammatical knowledge. His mind was largely stored with the results of a careful study of the best literature, and there were few subjects on which he had not formed for himself shrewd and accurate views. The two thousand workpeople in his employment regarded him ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... his work. This is not exactly my case, for I shall be very glad to receive this same tripartite Grammar which Mr. Brandram is hunting for, my ideas respecting Mandchou construction being still very vague and wandering, and I should also be happy if you could and would procure for me the original grammatical work of Amyot, printed in the Memoires, etc. Present my kind regards to Mr. Hattersley, and thank him in my name for his kind letter, but at the same time tell him that I was sorry to learn that he was ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... I dictated it to Frau Professor Kindermann. "Where there is wood also deer and hare"—she was not quite clear in her spelling at first, indeed, in this respect she sometimes reminds one of a foreigner—as also in the matter of her grammatical mistakes. ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... of the Euphrates were Arm and Anat, and Rimmon. Anu, whose name is written Anah in Hebrew, was the god of the sky, and he stood at the head of the Babylonian pantheon. His wife Anat was but a colourless reflection of himself, a grammatical creation of the Semitic languages. But she shared in the honours that were paid to her consort, and the divinity that resided in him was reflected upon her. Anat, like Ashtoreth, became multiplied under many forms, and the Anathoth or "Anat" signified ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... The original appearance and wording is reproduced in the html version. For the text version, more meaningful and grammatical captions have been provided as the original captions comprised a series of separate breed or species names used to label the animals ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... said; for much of the pencil writing had been made under such disadvantages and was so faint that at times she could decipher it only under direct sunlight. She had succeeded, however, in making a copy, verbatim except for occasional improvement in the grammatical form of a sentence, or now and then the omission, for brevity's sake, of something unessential. The narrative has since been severely abridged to bring it within ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... Davies misunderstands the grammatical connection of the words in the second line of this verse. K. T. Telang, following Sreedhara, says, the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... pitch, or makes a noise when performing any little job that requires skill. It would seem as if his good parents were inspired in bestowing a name upon him. They called him Lifter. We have slightly varied the name, took a small grammatical liberty with it, so to speak. We call him The Lifter. Let me, Mr. Gray, introduce you to The Lifter.' Roland bowed with the same air of haughtiness and disgust. But now that he was among the unholy crew he felt that he must make the best of the situation, conformably, of course, ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... in sterilizing his vocabulary whenever he crossed that boundary between the masculine and feminine element on the ranch, the bridge. Mrs. Kate did not approve of slang. Ford found himself carefully eliminating from his speech certain grammatical inaccuracies in her presence, and would not so much as split an infinitive if he remembered in time. It was trying, to be sure. Ford thanked God that he still retained a smattering of the rules he had reluctantly ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... winter. But I am here just to converse in a quiet way, as between man and man; to talk over the past, to ask you how your conduct is and to inquire if I can do you any good in any way whatever. This is no time to speak pieces and ask in a grammatical way, 'To what you are indebted for this call.' My main object in coming up here was to take you by the hand and ask you how your memory is this spring? Judging from what I could hear, I was led to believe that it was a little ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... worked more severely. The varlet was not suffered to stand up in his place; but was summoned to take his station near the master's table, where the voice of no prompter could reach him; and, in this defenceless condition, he was so harassed, that he at last gathered up some grammatical rules, and prepared himself for his lessons. While this tormenting process was inflicted upon him, I now and then upbraided him. But you will take notice that he did not incur any corporal punishment for his idleness: ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... complications of the remote border. Besides understanding the Cheyenne language as well as his native tongue, he also spoke three other Indian dialects, French, and Spanish, but with many Western expressions that sometimes grated harshly upon the grammatical ear. ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... to speak, all gloves. He must cover up her coarse speech, as he had covered up her coarse hands. He owed that to the gloves; it was the least he could do for them. So, whenever Mary Ann made a mistake, Lancelot corrected her. He found these grammatical dialogues not uninteresting, and a vent for his ill-humour against publishers to boot. Very often his verbal corrections sounded astonishingly like reprimands. Here, again, Mary Ann was forearmed by her feeling that she deserved them. She would have been proud had she known how much Mr. Lancelot ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... accent may best be reserved for grammatical or dictionary accent—the greater emphasis placed according to standard usage upon one syllable of a word as compared with the others. Thus portion has an accent on the first syllable, material on the second, apprehension ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... the most common grammatical error. "I don't," "you don't," "they don't,' are correct. "Don't" is a contraction of "do not." You wouldn't say "he do not," "she do not," would you? Then don't say "he ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... language is our glory, our pride, the theme of all our memories, the golden book of our traditions. Proud and free in its accent, noble and learned in its picturesque and sonorous expressions, its formation and grammatical form are both simple and sublime; add to which, the people preserve it with a ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... narrative and therefore reports the words of others [5:4]. I shall not retort this charge of 'falsification,' because I do not think that the cause of truth is served by imputing immoral motives to those from whom we differ; and indeed the context shows that our author is altogether blind to the grammatical necessity. But I would venture to ask whether it would not have been more prudent, as well as more seemly, if he had paused before venturing, under the shelter of an anonymous publication, to throw ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... the two dialects Santali and Mundari shows that they closely resemble each other and differ only in minor particulars. The difference is mainly to be found in the vocabulary borrowed from Aryan neighbours, and in the grammatical modifications occasioned by the neighbouring Aryan forms of speech. [489] Of Mundari he says: "Aspirated letters are used as in Santali, the semi-consonants are apparently pronounced in the same way as in Santali; genders and numbers are the same, the personal ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... never have any use for a literary style in English. Some six or eight young men instantly dissented from this proposition, and insisted that they were capable of acquiring the best literary style. Not one of them could have written a page of clear, grammatical, idiomatic English. I tried to make it clear to them that literary English and colloquial English are two different things, and that what they needed was plain, precise English as a medium of exchange in business, and I said, incidentally, that such ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... trading adventure which go by the name of Shares"—"the unlabelled, undocketed state of mind which shall enable a man to encounter the Unknown"—"the qualifying words which correct the imprudences and derange the grammatical structure of a Queen's Speech": but these are islets in the sea of narrative, not, as in "Eothen," woof-threads which ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... of Robert Coplande; and about 1527 Giles du Guez or du Wes (anglicized Dewes), French teacher to the Lady Mary, afterwards Queen Mary, published his 'Introductorie for to lerne to rede, to pronounce and to speke French trewly.' In addition to grammatical rules and dialogues, it contains a select vocabulary English and French. In 1514, Mary Tudor, younger sister of Henry VIII, became the unwilling bride of Louis XII of France. To initiate the princess in her husband's tongue, John Palsgrave, a native of London and graduate of Cambridge, who ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray
... have been a light trial to the mother to know that contact with her was regarded as her child's greatest danger; but in her humility and her love for Marian she offered no resistance. And so it came to pass that one day the little girl, hearing her mother make some flagrant grammatical error, turned to the other parent and asked gravely: 'Why doesn't mother speak as properly as we do?' Well, that is one of the results of such marriages, one of the myriad miseries that result ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... town is different," said Norah, striving after patience. "We like to look after everyone here—and I think it's grand when everyone's nice to everyone!" She paused; it was hard to be patient and grammatical, too. ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... spoken language diverged farther and farther from the written. Latin is a troublesome speech on account of its complicated inflections and grammatical rules, which can be mastered only after a great deal of study. The people of the Roman provinces and the incoming barbarians naturally paid very little attention to the niceties of syntax and found easy ways of saying what they wished.[160] Yet ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... of speech there are openings for specious amendments, sometimes for real ones, especially in ironical expressions. But as in pronunciation we regard usage rather than etymology, so in sense the true meaning is not the literal or grammatical, but the conventional. Much indifferent humour is made of question and answer;—the reply being given falsely, as if the interrogation were put in a different sense from that intended, an occasion for the quibble being given by some loose or perhaps literal meaning of the words. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... That is only true for the minority of boys who reach the stage at which real Latin prose is written. Most flounder about all their time in the stage of artificial Latin prose, wherein is nothing more than the meticulous application of a set of laboriously acquired grammatical rules—a tolerable training in conscientious application, such as any subject can supply, but nothing more. Yet it may well be true—on this point we feel uncertain—that an elementary knowledge of Latin supplies such a foundation for the understanding both of English and French, ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... generations of song. In the words of Mr. Myers, "without ceasing to be a logical step in the argument, a phrase becomes a centre of emotional force. The complex associations which it evokes, modify the associations evoked by other words in the same passage, in a way distinct from logical or grammatical connection." The poet suggests much more than he says, or as Milton himself has phrased it, "more is ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... be so good to answer me in the same. Not that I am apprehensive of your forgetting to speak French: since it is probable that two-thirds of our daily prattle is in that language; and because, if you leave off writing French, you may perhaps neglect that grammatical purity, and accurate orthography, which, in other languages, you excel in; and really, even in French, it is better to write well than ill. However, as this is a language very proper for sprightly, gay subjects, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... the things which do not really belong to the Greeks but to the vapid pedants of vanished ages. I passionately desire that as many people as possible should enjoy Hellenic culture. I want to clear away the smoky mist of grammatical ineptitude which keeps men from the great books and great minds of antiquity and prevents the soul of the Greek and the soul of the Englishman—natural allies, for some strange ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... grammatical objection. You know the way in which it makes you wince, if ever you have lived in Australia or New Zealand or Canada, to hear people talk of "the colonies" or "the colonials." The people who use the words do ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... all, one has even gone too far with this "one thinks"—even the "one" contains an INTERPRETATION of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the usual grammatical formula—"To think is an activity; every activity requires an agency that is active; consequently"... It was pretty much on the same lines that the older atomism sought, besides the operating "power," the material particle wherein it resides ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... The proper grammatical formation of the English language, so that one may acquit himself as a correct conversationalist in the best society or be able to write and express his thoughts and ideas upon paper in the right manner, may be acquired in a ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... now except in conjunction with another; Liberty and Equality. In like manner, what, in a reign of Liberty and Equality, can these words, 'Sir,' 'obedient Servant,' 'Honour to be,' and such like, signify? Tatters and fibres of old Feudality; which, were it only in the Grammatical province, ought to be rooted out! The Mother Society has long since had proposals to that effect: these she could not entertain, not at the moment. Note too how the Jacobin Brethren are mounting new symbolical headgear: the Woollen Cap or Nightcap, bonnet de ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... about him and read it later. The message was in Flavia's hand; he had seen her write more than once. But if he had not, he knew that neither James nor the O'Beirnes were capable of penning a grammatical sentence. Colonel John's spirits rose ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... "a translation! What should I do with a translation? This is the Icelandic original, in the magnificent idiomatic vernacular, which is both rich and simple, and admits of an infinite variety of grammatical combinations and verbal modifications." ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... be the final 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 ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... new advance in the study; and, above all, a faculty which seemed peculiar to himself, and which can hardly be described as other than instinctive, of seizing and comprehending by a single effort the general outlines of the grammatical structure of a language from a few faint indications—as a comparative anatomist will build up an entire skeleton from a single bone—enabled him to overleap all the difficulties which beset the path of ordinary linguists, and to attain, almost by intuition, at least so much of the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... so well, at this period: for while he was framing the statutes by which his little community was to be governed, he did not fail to keep the presses of Wynkyn De Worde and Pynson pretty constantly at work, by publishing the grammatical treatises of Grocyn, Linacre, Stanbridge, Lilye, Holte, Whittington, and others—for the benefit, as well of the public, as of his own particular circle. I take it, his library must have been both choice and copious; for books now began to be multiplied in an immense ratio, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... publication of the book copied out in longhand twenty-five hundred pages of the manuscript. He brought suit against Mrs. Eddy for payment for "copying the manuscript of the book 'Science and Health,' and aiding in the arrangement of capital letters and some of the grammatical constructions." He produced some of Mrs. Eddy's manuscript in court, and the judge allowed him more than the usual copyist's rate "on account of the difficulty which a portion of the pages presented to the copyist by reason ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... literary men in their train. All these travellers tell us only of the steep and abominable roads; the romantic aspect of scenery never engages their attention. It is even known that Julius Caesar, when he returned to his legions in Gaul, employed his time while crossing the Alps in writing his grammatical ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... published are too diffuse and elaborate for the purposes of schools, or too contracted to give any thing more than a skeleton of the tongue. Mr. Robinson has adopted a system eminently practical, and made two books which entitle him to the thanks of pupil and teacher. As he states, grammatical legislation is abandoned and example substituted for rules. Extensive tables of verbs, prepositions and idioms, have been prepared, which do away with almost all of the difficulties connected with the study of that tongue a monarch ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... Metre.—A knowledge of this is indispensable in translating verse. To scan the lines will help you to determine the grammatical force of a word, and a knowledge of metre will enable you to grasp the poet's meaning as conveyed by the position which he assigns to the various words, and the varying emphasis which results from variation ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... its extreme acuity and yet its vagueness. "We live in a world of odor," Zwaardemaker remarks (L'Annee Psychologique, 1898, p. 203), "as we live in a world of light and of sound. But smell yields us no distinct ideas grouped in regular order, still less that are fixed in the memory as a grammatical discipline. Olfactory sensations awake vague and half-understood perceptions, which are accompanied by very strong emotion. The emotion dominates us, but the sensation which was the cause of it remains unperceived." Even in the same individual ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... The correct grammatical construction would be "el cual cliente"; but however much some grammarians disclaim this employment of cuyo, it is in the language and found in the best books and therefore ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... was known of the works of Fronto, except a grammatical treatise; but in 1815 Cardinal Mai published a number of letters and some short essays of Fronto, which he had discovered in a palimpsest at Milan. Other parts of the same MS. he found later in the ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... good mothers can conceive what it is to write a story in words of one syllable, and make it interesting, sensible, and grammatical? If they can not, I entreat them to try a page or two of this utterly distracting style of composition; they will very soon have a realizing sense of the pleasing emotions of a lunatic confined in a strait-jacket. Above ...
— The First Little Pet Book with Ten Short Stories in Words of Three and Four Letters • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... in section 3, line 4, the omission of the word "he" after the word "corrupt," which destroys the grammatical construction of the language and was probably ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... say last week, in speaking of the Stewards' Cup horses? By the well-known grammatical figure known as the hysteroproteron, I mentioned Marvel last, intending, of course, as even a buffalo-headed Bedlamite might have seen, that he should be first. And he was first. But to make assurance doubly sure, and to bring prophecy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... seated, all four, in the small sitting-room of Signora Lucca, listening to her remarkable narrative of those sinister events, the ending of which we had chanced to witness. She spoke in rapid and fluent but very unconventional English, which, for the sake of clearness, I will make grammatical. ...
— The Adventure of the Red Circle • Arthur Conan Doyle
... speak one language, with but slight local diversities of dialect. It is extremely simple, being almost devoid of inflections, and of very simple grammatical structure, relying largely on intonation. It is closely allied ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... 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 analysis. It would be quite possible to illustrate each of these points from Browning's works, and it cannot be denied that his poetry is sometimes needlessly and inexcusably hard reading. But in reality the ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... by my brother-players, I carefully commit the whole of my part to memory, noting the grammatical errors, which are numerous, and the fragments of English which occasionally appear. I am punctual in my attendance at the rehearsals, which is more than some of my fellow-comedians can say. When an actor of the Teatro Real de Cuba is absent from rehearsal, ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... a liberty, as you say, sir," replied Lira, stiffly, and looking straight before him. "But since you have met me, say what you have to say quickly." He talked in the same curious constructions as formerly, but I will spare you the grammatical vagaries. ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... notes on the vanity of the triple Editory of the Edin. Annual Register,) my 'Hints,' I say, stand still, and why?—I have not a friend in the world (but you and Drury) who can construe Horace's Latin or my English well enough to adjust them for the press, or to correct the proofs in a grammatical way. So that, unless you have bowels when you return to town (I am too far off to do it for myself), this ineffable work will be lost to the world for—I don't ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... we tried to put the sheets together in their order, going by the grammatical sequence of the end of one page with the beginning of the next, but rarely could we obtain more than three or four of such consecutive pages. We were confused, too, by at least a dozen ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... here expressed may seem commonplace and the language hardly grammatical, yet this extract clearly reveals the darling ambition that was now haunting the heart of Burns. It was the same wish which he expressed better in rhyme at a later day in his Epistle to the ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... very clearly defined as "critical in a grammatical way." "Allegory is writing highly colored, as Pope's works"; "allegory is writing of something that never happened, but it is purely imaginary, often a wandering from the main point." A common mistake regarding the meaning of the word bibliography ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... the serious and candid perusal of this book, I shall only add, that I have faithfully transcribed these sermons from the manuscript copy without the smallest alteration of his sentiments. I have endeavoured to rectify a few grammatical errors of the transcribers and the old form of spelling, and altered a few words not now used in our modern sermons, for words of the same meaning. As I have added several sermons of this author upon the kingdom of God, which I transcribed since the proposals of this ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... written by a pupil in 1873, he gently indicated faults while giving encouragement, and wrote in July, "It shows you are marching in your accomplishments. It is a very promising beginning.... On reading it, I thought I had found some grammatical faults, but perhaps more is discovered in the province of discords, concords, and coincidences of notes than when I was a boy." And in September of the same year, "Thank you for your new edition of St. Magnus. On what occasion did he march? I know Bishops were warlike in the ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... philosophers, accordingly, have conceived of the whole world after the analogy of some particular feature of it which has particularly captivated their attention. Thus, the theists take their cue from manufacture, the pantheists from growth. For one man, the world is like a thought or a grammatical sentence in which a thought is expressed. For such a philosopher, the whole must logically be prior to the parts; for letters would never have been invented without syllables to spell, or ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... between the gods. Some gods, it is said, are spirit-gods; some are work-gods. They are born of spirit and of works, respectively. The difference, however, is not essential, but functional; so that one may conclude from this authority, the Nirukta (a grammatical and epexigetical work), that all the gods have a like nature; and that the spirit-gods, who are the older, differ only in lack of specific functions from the work-gods. A not uninteresting debate follows this passage in ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... standing upon a gentle elevation, at some distance from the street, with pleasant grounds in its front and rear, was appropriately named by its original proprietor "Mount Rural," though not, perhaps, with the most exact observance of the requirements of grammatical construction. Still, it has some authority for being considered idiomatic, for does not "Pilgrim's Progress" tell us of the "Palace Beautiful?" And doubtless many other instances might be cited of the ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... been contemptuously rejected by Eunica, a girl of the town, protests that he is beautiful, and that Eunica is prouder than Cybele, Selene, and Aphrodite, all of whom loved mortal herdsmen. For grammatical and other reasons, some critics ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... instruct several boys of differing and unequal capacities, are infinitely mistaken; and 'tis no wonder, if in a whole multitude of scholars, there are not found above two or three who bring away any good account of their time and discipline. Let the master not only examine him about the grammatical construction of the bare words of his lesson, but about the sense and let him judge of the profit he has made, not by the testimony of his memory, but by that of his life. Let him make him put what he has learned into a hundred several forms, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... REED'S THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. A brief history of the grammatical changes of the language and its vocabulary, with exercises on synonyms, prefixes, suffixes, word-analysis, and word-building. A text-book for high schools and colleges. 226 pages, ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... himself out. No puerile repetition; no slovenly, slipshod work there. It was the performance of a born orator and poet, and one who, like Timothy, had known the Scriptures from a child—a long, involved litany of seething malediction, delivered, moreover, with a measured and effortless eloquence and a grammatical exactitude which left St. Ernulphus a bad second. The other fellows pursued their work in awe-stricken silence, till at length Cooper, glancing toward the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... text is published by A. Poebel with transcription, commentary, etc., in Historical Texts, Philadelphia, 1914, and Historical and Grammatical Texts, Philadelphia, 1914. ...
— The Babylonian Story of the Deluge - as Told by Assyrian Tablets from Nineveh • E. A. Wallis Budge
... I fell into the habit of speaking the native tongue, until I suddenly found that the practice was obtaining such a firm hold upon me that I was forgetting French altogether; whilst it was only with difficulty that I could form grammatical sentences in English. I soon came to the conclusion, therefore, that it was necessary for me to hold much more converse in English than I had hitherto done; and from the moment that this curious "scare" ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... delicacy, but these were not beyond the powers of other writers then living. The circumstance which inclines us to reject the external evidence in favour of this play being Shakespeare's is, that the grammatical construction is constantly false and mixed up with vulgar abbreviations, a fault that never occurs in any of his genuine plays. A similar defect, and the halting measure of the verse are the chief objections to PERICLES OF TYRE, if we except the far-fetched ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... always been to open all the doors to the innocence of the natives; and many of the advocates are of that same class or are Chinese mestizos. The language which they use is often indecorous, bold, lacking in purity and idiom, and even in grammatical construction. The Audiencia endures it as it is the old style custom, for in times past there were few advocates capable of explaining themselves better. The Filipinos believe that composed and moderate writs can have no effect at court, and they are only contented with those which are full ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... succeeded in having him defeated for one Congress, but he was successful at the next election. He was a true frontiersman, with a small dash of civilization and a great deal of shrewdness transplanted in political life. He was neither grammatical nor graceful, but no rudeness of language can disguise strong sense and shrewdness, and a "demonstration," as Bulwer says, "will force its way through all perversions of grammar." Some one undertook to publish his life, but he promptly denied the authenticity of the work, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... points of interest untouched) upon the manner in which Mrs. Fremont has treated her subject. It is novel, but not ineffective. Zagonyi tells much of the story in his own words; and we are sure that it loses nothing of vividness from his terse and vigorous, though not always strictly grammatical language. "Zagonyi's English," says some one who has heard it, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... we learn language in childhood? Is it not solely on authority and by example? A child who lives in a family where no language is used but that which is logically and grammatically correct, will learn to speak with logical and grammatical correctness long before it is able to give any account of the processes of its own mind in the matter, or indeed to understand those processes when explained by others. In other words, practice in language precedes theory. It should do so in other things. The parent ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... at least domesticity, is certainly prior to war, although war may have noticeably strengthened it. Why, moreover, if such was the origin of the idea as well as of the thing, should they not have said, instead of serv-us, serv-atus, in conformity with grammatical deduction? To me the real etymology is revealed in the opposition of serv-are and serv-ire, the primitive theme of which is ser-o, in-sero, to join, to press,whence ser-ies, joint, continuity, ser-a, lock, sertir, insert, etc. All these words imply the idea of a principal thing, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... I mean, of course, that the predecessor whose name I bear did and felt them. The I of to-day is (? am) cool towards Carmen; and Carmen, I regret to say, does not take the slightest interest in him (? me). And now enough of this juggling with past and present Shaws. The grammatical complications of being a first person and several extinct third persons at the same moment are so frightful that I must return to the ordinary misusage, and ask the reader to make the necessary corrections in his ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... the infantile chord in the crowd heart; it brought back the happiest days of life, the schooldays: again, its naive Malapropisms appealed to the crowd, because we are all glad to laugh at the social and grammatical errors we have made ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... merely for the tinkle; each has always its part in producing an impression which is produced always through language. Words are perhaps the hardest of all material of art: for they must be used to express both visual beauty and beauty of sound, as well as communicating a grammatical statement. It would be interesting to compare Pound's use of images with Mallarme's; I think it will be found that the former's, by the contrast, will appear always sharp in outline, even if arbitrary and not photographic. Such images as those quoted ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... (Priscianus Caesariensis) formed the standard grammatical and philological textbook of the Middle Ages, its importance being fairly indicated by the fact that today there exist about a thousand manuscript copies ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... language, may be mentioned, though not with strict grammatical accuracy, two standing characteristics of the Professor's style,—at least as rendered into English: First, the composition of words, such as 'snow-and-rosebloom maiden:' an attractive damsel doubtless in Germany, but, with all her charms, somewhat uncouth here. 'Life-vision' is another example; ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... debate, but always triumphant in oratory. A careful study of Mr. Douglass's speeches from the time he began his career as a public speaker down to the present time reveals wonderful progress in their grammatical and synthetical structure. He grew all the time. On the 12th of May, 1846, he delivered a speech at Finsbury Chapel, Moorfields, England, from which ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... But he could not elbow his way in a crowd, could not make farming pay, and was always pushed to the wall. He cared nothing for books, and although he studied grammar when a boy, and could parse, he never could write a grammatical sentence. He died at the age ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... arithmetic, but in any branch of academical literature. The little regard that is paid to the literary improvement of females, even among people of rank and fortune, and the general inattention to the grammatical purity and elegance of our native language, are faults in the education of youth that more gentlemen have taken pains to censure than correct. Any young gentlemen and ladies, who wish to acquaint themselves with ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... existed from the very birth of animated nature; and it is remarkable that a man of learning and piety in Germany has made the strange if not absurd statement that in the beginning "Adam was externally sexless." [116] Another idea, more excusable, but equally preposterous, is, that grammatical gender has been the cause of the male and female personation of deities, when really it has been the result. The cause, no doubt, was inherent in man's constitution; and was the inevitable effect of thought and expression. The same necessity of natural language ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... to your admonitions and good-will, administer to some in the house of St. Martin, the sweets of the Holy Scriptures, Sanctarum mella Scripturarum: others I inebriate with the study of ancient wisdom; and others I fill with the fruits of grammatical lore. Many I seek to instruct in the order of the stars which illuminate the glorious vault of heaven; so that they may be made ornaments to the holy church of God and the court of your imperial ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... having found a match, held it unlighted in his fingers and watched the commotion from his perch on the bar. In the very midst of the clamor towered the melancholy Alexander P. Dill, and he was endeavoring to explain, in his quiet, grammatical fashion. A lull that must have been an accident carried the words clearly ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... mean isn't it?" added the delicate Slim Goodwin, and, partly to hide his grammatical error, but mostly to express his enthusiasm, he gave Joe a one-hundred-and-seventy-pound whack on the back that sent him sliding out of the chair and half way under the ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... to sustain the fact that the real revelations of the Godhead, be it in any form, are true. Second, that our translators were not inspired, and that we have strong presumptive proof that prejudice of education was in some instances stronger than the grammatical context, in translating these contested points. For instance, the word translated obey between husband and wife, is in but one instance in the New Testament the word used between master and servant, parent and child, but is the ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... is a joy which may yet be ours—some day. But my writer of romances, who is such a stickler for grammatical accuracy, is surely the younger of a family ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... Nobility by birth, has a kind of superficial polish put upon his Hyperboreanisms; he has been in foreign countries, doing legations, diplomacies, for which, at least for the vulpine parts of which, he has a turn. He writes and speaks articulate grammatical French; but neither in that, nor in native Pommerish Platt-Deutsch, does he show us much, except the depths of his own greed, of his own astucities and stealthy audacities. Of which we shall hear more than enough by ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... would still be of service to him, in particular "this same tripartite Grammar which Mr Brandram is hunting for, my ideas respecting Manchu construction being still very vague and wandering." {100b} There is also a request for "the original grammatical work of Amyot, printed in the ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... language which contains half a dozen different forms of address. The illiterate peasant is no whit behind the man of culture in the purity of his Portuguese. In no country in Europe is the language kept freer from dialect, and this notwithstanding the fact that it is one of involved grammatical forms. In France the use of the imperfect subjunctive is given up by the lower classes and by foreigners, but in Portugal the peasant has still deeper subtleties of speech at the end of his tongue. Add to this that he has a vocabulary of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... restored me, and I am possessed of it; so that herein his Tzarskoy majestie's near Boyars and Councellors are doubtless ill grounded. But again I say concerning the value of the words Illustrissimus and Serenissimus compared together, seeing we must here from affaires of State, fall into Grammatical contests concerning the Latin tongue; that the word Serenus signifieth nothing but still and calm; and, therefore, though of late times adopted into the Titles of great Princes by reason of that benigne tranquility which properly dwells in ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... trifling is absurd; I wish instead that someone would try to compose a really new minuet." To Dies he remarked further: "Supposing an idea struck me as good and thoroughly satisfactory both to the ear and the heart, I would far rather pass over some slight grammatical error than sacrifice what seemed to me beautiful to any mere pedantic trifling." These were sensible views. Practice must always precede theory. When we find a great composer infringing some rule of the old text-books, ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... bottom of each page, and will be found to be as complete and definite as possible on geographical, biographical, historical, or other points that may not be familiar to the student or the teacher. All grammatical or syntactical matter, unless of a difficult or peculiar character, has been omitted, while the literary citations that abound will, it is hoped, stimulate the student to do further reading and to make literary comparisons of ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... behalf of my mother: The arrival of the rector: I gain his favour: Am adopted by him: And effect a family reconciliation. Anecdotes of a school-fellow, and his sister: Grammatical and musical studies: Causes of discontent between the Squire and the rector: Tythes and law produce quarrels: The tragi-comic tale of ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... day indicates the unification very clearly. Besides being a tirade against schismatics of all classes, the discourse was often a discussion of grammatical principles, accompanied with a description of the spiritual condition of every hearer. After the singing of the hymn in the middle of its delivery, the people adjusted themselves to hear the application in which their ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... Quaker in it. Everywhere they are laying aside their peculiarities of costume, and in many instances, also, their peculiarities of speech, which are barbarous enough as they actually exist, though, if they would but speak with grammatical propriety, their forms of discourse are as commodious as venerable, and I would be content to see them generally adopted. I hope they will be slow to lay aside their better characteristics: their abhorrence of violence, and ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... simplicity and the least possible taxation of the memory. There were no exceptions or irregularities, and few unnecessary distinctions; while words were so connected and related that the mastery of a few simple grammatical forms and of a certain number of roots enabled me to guess at, and by and by to feel tolerably sure of, the meaning of a new word. The verb has six tenses, formed by the addition of a consonant to the root, and six persons, plural ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... loose spelling prevalent at the publication of this folio, and for many years after, by the standard of the more regular and approximately analogous fashion of a later period, and also in the establishment of grammatical concords, which, entirely disregarded in the former period, were observed by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... in giving him a quarter and dismissing him without further questioning. I always noticed that these circular letters, when written in the vernacular, were remarkable for their beautiful caligraphy and grammatical inaccuracy, and that they all seem to have been written by the same hand. Perhaps indigence exercises a peculiar and equal ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... constantly addressing me, and of course I could not understand a word they said. In the meantime, Bigg talked away for both of us; and although I very much doubt if his language was particularly grammatical, he seemed to get on famously with the savages; and acting on an idea which came into his head, he confirmed the notion they had adopted that I was a person of no ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... learnt anything in the navy when I was a youngster, except a little rule-of-thumb mathematics. One picked up a sort of smattering of a language or two knocking about the world, but no grammatical knowledge, nothing scientific. If a boy doesn't get a method, he is beating to windward in a crank craft all his life. He hasn't got any regular place to stow away what he gets into his brains, and so it lies tumbling about ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... republic the substantial blessing of liberty: to his Catholic Majesty the grammatical quirk. When the twelve years should expire, Spain might reconquer the United Provinces if she could; relying upon the great truth that an adverb was not a preposition. And France or Great Britain might attempt the same thing if ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... should be separate when used in regular grammatical relations and construction unless they are jointly ...
— Compound Words - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #36 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... with a certain country girl, whose name is Cowslip, to whom he makes a declaration of his passion in a strange mythological, grammatical style and manner, and to whom, among other fooleries, he sings, quite enraptured, the following air, and seems to work himself at least up to such a transport of passion as quite overpowers him. He begins, you will observe, with the conjugation, and ends with ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... as a mental discipline, and argued that the best way to acquire a good English style is to know the ancient languages, a proposition discredited by many examples to the contrary. It is really this insistence on grammatical minutiae that has proved repellent to young people and suggested the dictum that "it doesn't much matter what you teach a boy so long as he hates it." Better had it been, abandoning the notion that every one should learn Greek, ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... first. Though there had always been negro servants in the house, and though on the streets colored people were more numerous than those of her own race, and though she was so familiar with their dialect that she might almost be said to speak it, barring certain characteristic grammatical inaccuracies, she had never been brought in personal contact with so many of them at once as when she confronted the fifty or sixty faces—of colors ranging from a white almost as clear as her own to the darkest livery of ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt |
