"Idiom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... heard anything like that?" I interrupted. "What does Anarky know about the popular idea concerning the Chinese? About as much as I should know if you were to talk to me about the Teutonic idiom ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... from Soudan or Abyssinia who had fallen into the hands of the natives of an archipelago of the Pacific, it might be that he could speak English or one or two words of the European languages which Godfrey understood. But it was soon apparent that the unhappy man only used an idiom that was absolutely incomprehensible—probably the language of the aborigines among whom he had doubtless arrived when very young. In fact, Godfrey had immediately interrogated him in English, and had obtained no reply. He then made him ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... generally on the tops of omnibuses, receptive, absorbent, mostly silent. He did try once or twice to talk to the bus drivers—he had been told it was a thing to do if you wanted to get hold of the point of view of a particular class; but the thick London idiom defeated him, and he found they grew surly when he asked them too often to repeat their replies. He felt a little surly himself after a while, when they asked him, as they nearly always did, if he wasn't an American. "Yes," he would say in the end, "but ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... He began to tell Scotch stories, memories of his old Parliament House days. He told them admirably, with a raciness of idiom which I had thought beyond him. They were long tales, and some were as broad as they were long, but Mr. Cargill disarmed criticism. His audience, rather scandalised at the start, were soon captured, and political troubles were forgotten ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... intensely animated in an instant. 'Oh yes!' she said, using her favourite English idiom. 'The door was open as always, monsieur, and I shut it as always. But it is necessary to explain. Listen! When I enter the room of madame from the other door in there—ah! but if monsieur will ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... a language which is desirous of saying all yet concealing all is that it is rich in figures. Metaphor is an enigma, wherein the thief who is plotting a stroke, the prisoner who is arranging an escape, take refuge. No idiom is more metaphorical than slang: devisser le coco (to unscrew the nut), to twist the neck; tortiller (to wriggle), to eat; etre gerbe, to be tried; a rat, a bread thief; il lansquine, it rains, a striking, ancient figure which partly bears ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... and to the further disadvantage that it lacks wholly or partly several consonants,[43] it will be practically impossible, as the Japanese have already found, to apply the new alphabet to the traditional literary idiom. Neither can it be employed for the needs of education, journalism, of the administration, or for telegraphing. It will, however, be of great value for elementary instruction and for postal correspondence. It is also certain to develop and extend. But its main ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... abuses of the last years of the Athenian democracy. It was then demonstrated that the impoverishing of the rich could not enrich the poor, and that a state without wealth will soon be a state without liberty. In the idiom of the gallery gods, ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... Mikuli], Chopin made great demands on the talent and diligence of the pupil. Consequently, there were often des lecons orageuses, as it was called in the school idiom, and many a beautiful eye left the high altar of the Cite d'Orleans, Rue St. Lazare, bedewed with tears, without, on that account, ever bearing the dearly-beloved master the least grudge. For was not the severity which was not easily satisfied with anything, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... deyakonakarondon, "yea, of chiefs,"—literally, "yea, having horns." The custom of wearing horns as part of the head-dress of a chief has been long disused among the Iroquois; but the idiom remains in the language, and the horns, in common parlance, indicate the chief, as the coronet suggests the nobleman in England. Among the western Indians, as is well known, the usage still survives. ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... American nor markedly foreign in appearance, being rather of that composite caste that peoples the outer reaches of the far West, they were all deeply browned by sun and weather, and spoke the universal idiom of the sea. There were men here from Finland and Florida, Portugal and Maine, fused into one nondescript type by the melting-pot of the frontier. Some wore the northern mackinaw in spite of the balmy April morning, others were dressed ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... chapter also assigns to Sheba a different origin. It couples him with Dedan, and sees in him a descendant of Ham, a kinsman of Egypt and Canaan. Both genealogies are right. They are geographical, not ethnic, and denote, in accordance with Semitic idiom, the geographical relationships of the races and nations of the ancient world. Sheba belonged not only to south Arabia but to northern Arabia as well. The rule of the Sabaean princes extended to the borders of Egypt and Canaan, and Sheba was the brother of ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... Seville, and he believed a Greek. Upon hearing this I instantly went up to the stranger, and accosted him in the Greek language in which, though I speak it very ill, I can make myself understood. He replied in the same idiom, and, flattered by the interest which I a foreigner expressed for his nation, was not slow in communicating to me his history. He told me, that his name was Dionysius; that he was a native of Cephalonia, and had been educated for ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... and his hair very white. After having pump-handled Benson's arm for some time, he made an attack on Le Roi, whom he just knew by name, and inquired if he had just come de l'autre cote, meaning the other side of the Atlantic, according to a common New-York idiom; but the Vicomte not unnaturally took it to mean from the other side of the road, and gave a corresponding answer in English as felicitous as Mr. Simpson's French. Then he digressed upon Ashburner, whom ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... be not now necessary for him."[328] From this passage it seems that these books must have been first written before Caesar's death. Caesar, at the time of Catiline's conspiracy, had endeavored to annul all debts—that is, to establish "new tables" according to the Roman idiom—but had failed by Cicero's efforts. He had since affected it, although he might have held his power without seeking for the assistance of such debtors. Who could that be but Caesar? In the beginning of the third book there is another passage declaring the same thing: "I have not strength ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... large number of Turkish words which are rejected in the artificial literary language. The revival of the various Balkan nationalities was in every case accompanied or preceded by a literary movement; in Servian literature, under the influence of Obradovich and Vuk Karajich, the popular idiom, notwithstanding the opposition of the priesthood, superseded the ecclesiastical Russian-Slavonic; in Bulgaria the eastern dialect, that of the Sredna Gora, prevailed. Among the Greeks, whose literature never suffered a complete ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... an odd, affectionate animal,' said Father Piret, dropping unconsciously into a French idiom to express his meaning. 'The little sprig had been kept as a talisman, and no saintly relic was ever more honored; the Emperor ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... following out this apposition of the Russian and the Englishman, one may well start with that little matter of "truth." The Englishman has what I would call a passion for the forms of truth; his word is his bond—nearly always; he will not tell a lie—not often; honesty, in his idiom, is the best policy. But he has little or no regard for the spirit of truth. Quite unconsciously he revels in self-deception and flies from knowledge of anything which will injure his intention to "make good," as Americans say. He is, before ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... position, a thousand miles from the sea-coast, it is perhaps the most backward of all the South American capitals. Although under Spanish rule for three hundred years, the natives still retain the old Indian language and the Guarani idiom is spoken by all. ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... blushes, smiles, and tears. Mr. Madison rose to reply with unexpected alacrity, and Louis was soon relieved from anxiety, at least, as far as regarded his eloquence, for he thought in the majestic Spanish idiom, ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... end in the shortest time possible. He is for ever correcting the same mistakes and rebuking the same stupidity, and the wonder is, not that he loses his temper, but that he should ever be able to preserve it. He understands men, and approaches them in an idiom that is likely ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... this speech, word for word, to his own troops, in the Romance language, in that idiom derived from a mixture of Latin and of the tongues of ancient Gaul, and spoken, thenceforth, with varieties of dialect and pronunciation, in nearly all parts of Frankish Gaul. After this address, Louis pronounced ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of themselves by reason of her color and her fluency in their idiom, displayed an ability to master those remorseless obscurities of spelling and arithmetic which had seemed sufficient to dethrone reason in any but a Saxon mind, then the peon children began to find some personal ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... of pure Castilian idiom, the young lady answers with a smile expressing assent, at the same time taking hold of her guitar. As she reseats herself, and commences tuning the instrument, ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... mine to the canine family in general, and their affection towards myself, have induced me, like the Vizier in the "Arabian Nights," of happy memory, to devote some time to the study of their language. Its idiom is not so difficult as many would suppose. There is a simplicity about it that often shames the dialects of man; which have been so altered and refined that we discover people often saying one thing when they mean exactly the reverse. Nothing of ...
— The Adventures of a Dog, and a Good Dog Too • Alfred Elwes
... hopes, fears, and wishes. On this occasion he spoke in the Indian dialect—one of those that he knew the bee-hunter understood. And we translate what he said freely into English, preserving as much of the original idiom as the ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... nature; and it appears to me in his case, and in that of some other Highlanders whom I have known, that, when familiar and facetious, they used the Lowland Scottish dialect,—when serious and impassioned, their thoughts arranged themselves in the idiom of their native language; and in the latter case, as they uttered the corresponding ideas in English, the expressions sounded wild, elevated, and poetical. In fact, the language of passion is almost always pure ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... style with rhetorical ornament.[5] Instead of unfamiliar terms, he uses "the pure and open words of the language of this people."[6] In connection with the translation of the Bible he lays down the principle that Latin must give way to English idiom.[7] For all these things Aelfric has definite reasons. Keeping always in mind a clear conception of the nature of his audience, he does whatever seems to him necessary to make his work attractive and, consequently, ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... many ambitious and earnest students play, it would seem that they had their minds fixed upon something which could not be conveyed to the world in any other form than that of the sounds which come from the piano. Of course, the piano has an idiom peculiarly its own, and some composers have employed this idiom with such natural freedom that their music suffers when transposed for any other instrument. The music of Chopin is peculiarly pianistic, but it is, first of all, music, and any one of the wonderful melodies which came from ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... in Anpu and Bata—almost entirely retranslated the original papyrus. The material followed in each instance will be found stated in the notes accompanying the tales. As to the actual phraseology, I am alone responsible for that. How far original idiom should be retained in any translation is always a debated question, and must entirely depend on the object in view. Here the purpose of rendering the work intelligible to ordinary readers required the modifying of some idioms and the paraphrasing of others. But ...
— Egyptian Tales, First Series • ed. by W. M. Flinders Petrie
... received from abroad. No one near him looked more likely to help than Mrs. Nightingale, but she could do nothing when applied to; although, she said, she had been taught French in her youth. But she felt certain Mr. Fenwick could be of use—at her house. French idiom was evidently unfamiliar in the neighbourhood, for the young gentleman from the office jumped at the opportunity. He went away with Mrs. Nightingale's card, inscribed with a message, and came back before she had done shopping (not that that means such a very short time), ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... the restoration of Greek independence came within view, there were some who proposed to revive artificially each form used in the ancient language, and thus, without any real blending, to add the old to the new: others, seeing this to be impossible, desired that the common idiom, corrupt as it was, should be accepted as a literary language. Koraes chose the middle and the rational path. Taking the best written Greek of the day as his material, he recommended that the forms ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... practically admitted in the fullest way by Dr. Lightfoot himself. "Tischendorf's words," he says, "are 'und deshalb, sagen sie, habe der Herr den Ausspruch gethan.' He might have spared the 'sagen sie,' because the German idiom 'habe' enables him to express the main fact that the words were not Irenaeus's own without this addition." Writing of a brother apologist of course he apologetically adds: "But he has not altered any idea which the original ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... pointless slang phrases without real suggestion or merit is one of our most familiar forms of factory-made humour. Now the English people are apt to turn away from the whole field of slang. In the first place it puzzles them—they don't know whether each particular word or phrase is a sort of idiom already known to Americans, or something (as with O. Henry) never said before and to be analysed for its own sake. The result is that with the English public the great mass of American slang writing (genius apart) doesn't go. I have even found English ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... these divisions rests upon the employment of the lowest form of conventional musical idiom. The material which the natural world provides for imitation by the musician is exceedingly scant. Unless we descend to mere noise, as in the descriptions of storms and battles (the shrieking of the wind, the crashing of thunder, ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... 1769:—'There is some of our retinue who, not understanding a word of your language, mimic your gesture and your action: so great an impression did it make upon their minds, the scene of daggers has been repeated in dumb show a hundred times, and those most ignorant of the English idiom can cry out with rapture, "A horse, a horse; my kingdom for a horse!"' Garrick Corres. i. 375. See ante, vol. iv. under ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... gesticulatory and other, went on for a little while like stray fireworks accidentally ignited, and then sank into immovable silence. Mr. Bult was not surprised that Klesmer's opinions should be flighty, but was astonished at his command of English idiom and his ability to put a point in a way that would have told at a constituents' dinner—to be accounted for probably by his being a Pole, or a Czech, or something of that fermenting sort, in a state of political refugeeism ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... the hardships of so severe a climate and so barren a soil, never attempted to mix with the original and more sturdy inhabitants of that unfavoured spot; but left them and their language, which could only be a Celtic idiom, in the primitive state in which ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... the most amazing escapes is that of a soldier from Bordeaux, told partly in his own racy idiom, and fully vouched for by the author. After relating how he left the railway at Nanteuil and traversed a hamlet pillaged by ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... great pleasure, a very great pleasure, Miss Messiter," he thanked her warmly, his Western idiom sloughed with his villainy for the moment. "It has been a good many months since I have heard any decent music. With your permission I shall ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.") The absence of a love affair will deprive him of the only "human interest" he can be really sure of. The Chestertonian idiom, above all, will soon lead him to expect nothing, because he can never get any idea of what he is to receive, and will bring him to a proper submissiveness. The later stages are simple. The reader will wonder why it never before ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... this poem, (still preserved at Bivar, the hero's birth-place,) bears the date of 1207, or at latest 1307, for there is some obscurity in the writing. Its learned editor, Sanchez, has been led by the peculiarities of its orthography, metre, and idiom, to refer its composition to as early a date as 1153. (Coleccion de Poesias Castellanas anteriores al Siglo XV. (Madrid 1779-90,) ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... betrays his Irish personality by a phrase which he uses of Oenna. Ciaran bids his followers to fetch materiam abbatis uestri—"the makings of your abbot." This is a regular idiom for an heir-apparent, and it shows that if the writer be not actually translating from an Irish document, he is at least thinking in Irish as ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... of those men of genius born to create a new era in the history of their nation. The first English author who may be regarded as the founder of our prose style was Roger Ascham, the venerable parent of our native literature. At a time when our scholars affected to contemn the vernacular idiom, and in their Latin works were losing their better fame, that of being understood by all their countrymen, Ascham boldly avowed the design of setting an example, in his own words, TO SPEAK AS THE COMMON PEOPLE, TO THINK AS WISE ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... revolution which substituted for the studies and methods of mediaevalism the ideas of the Revival of Letters. Like all his educated contemporaries, he learned to speak and write Latin with perfect fluency; but it was always with an idiom that showed he had none of the humanist's scruples regarding purity of language. What he learned from Major was the art for which that scholar was renowned throughout Europe—the art of logical exercitation; and Knox's ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... phrase "was graduated," applied not to a vernier, but to a student, be legitimate or not; it is certainly so used by the best American writers. Another common American idiom that sounds queer to British ears is, "The minutes were ordered printed" (for "to be printed"). Misquotations and misuse of foreign phrases are terribly rife; and even so spirited and entertaining a writer as Miss F.C. Baylor will write: "This Jenny, with the esprit de l'escalier of her sex, had ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... [FN211] In Arab. idiom a long hand or arm means power, a phrase not wholly unused in European languages. Chavis and Cazotte paraphrase "He who keeps his hands crossed upon his breast, shall not see them ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... low contrivance on both sides, by which all the grand work of home-building, all the noble pains and heroic toils of home-education,—that education where the parents learn more than they teach,—shall be (let us use the expressive Yankee idiom) shirked. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... laughter. The native idiom, unheard for half a century, made her face shine under the tears. "Don't let your granny excite herself, Bobby. Let me give her her drink." She moved the boy aside, and Mercy's lips ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... person, and among the rest, for Lord Braxfield, than to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation against his abstract vices. He was the last judge on the Scots bench to employ the pure Scots idiom. His opinions, thus given in Doric, and conceived in a lively, rugged, conversational style, were full of point and authority. Out of the bar, or off the bench, he was a convivial man, a lover of wine, and one who "shone perculiarly" at tavern ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... effect that, whereas the divine art of printing had been abused for the sake of lucre and whereas by this means even Christ's books, missals and other works on religion, were thumbed by the vulgar, and whereas the German idiom was too poor to express such mysteries, and common persons too ignorant to understand them, therefore every work translated into German must be approved by the doctors of the university of Mayence ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... put the hand to it. It may be remarked, however, that this is a form of expression even in our own country; although there is certainly no trace of the singular custom in question having ever prevailed among our ancestors. Whatever may be the fact as to the Russian idiom, our own undoubtedly refers merely to the application of the hand with the pen in it. Each chief appears to be intimately acquainted with the peculiarities ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... case we have a mere coincidence of idiom; in the former a proverbial allusion.[57] An uncritical pursuit of such mere accidents of resemblance has led Mr. Feis to such enormities as the assertion that Shakspere's contemporaries knew Hamlet's use of his tablets to be a parody of the "much-scribbling Montaigne," who had avowed that he made ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... are given. And if it be true, as it is, that the mind makes the patterns for sorting and naming of things, I leave it to be considered who makes the boundaries of the sort or species; since with me SPECIES and SORT have no other difference than that of a Latin and English idiom. ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... as it were, groping after ours, have already frayed the temper of our staff. It was inevitable that under such constant irritation these ex-Service men of ours would one day burst into strong military idiom, so we have disconnected our telephone in order to avoid the calamity of losing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... of these new colonists have not forgotten their origin; they inherit the manners of their fathers; wear the same thick hair and long coats. Their drawling pronunciation, peculiar idiom, and the slowness of their movements, make them easily distinguished from the lively Gascons. A curious mixture of dialect resulted from the re-union of so many provinces with the patois of the country, and the language still heard there is a ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... hesitate in his movements, and Attim, trotting quietly by his side, looked inquiringly up into his face once or twice with the obvious question, "What's the matter?" in his soft brown eyes—or some Dogrib idiom ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... Grace, bitterly, "I speak them, as the parrot repeats words that he does not understand. But Eve Effingham has used these languages as means, and she does not tell you merely what such a phrase or idiom signifies, but what the greatest writers ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... misfortune and anguish, and all manner of human vicissitudes, every day? Young Wentworth knew what to say to that woman in her distress; and so might the Rector, had her distress concerned a disputed translation, or a disused idiom. The good man was startled in his composure and calm. To-day he had visibly failed in a duty which even in All-Souls was certainly known to be one of the duties of a Christian priest. Was he a Christian priest, or what was he? He was troubled to the very depths of his soul. ...
— The Rector • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... pleased to see you are recovered," he said, with the faint, indefinable foreign accent and the lack of idiom which combined to deprive his ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... a ten-strike, I hear," he volunteered, in an expressive, if inelegant, idiom of the money game; "there's a story going the rounds that Mills and Severance have been gunning together and that some one else got burned. Anyway, I hear they've lined their ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... them attentively for a few minutes, and spoke again in another language. But this second idiom was no more intelligible than the first. Certain words, however, caught Glenarvan's ear as sounding like Spanish, a few sentences of ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... a clever Indian girl, who understands Spanish as well as her native idiom, and who translated various Castilian words for us into the original Tarrascan, which sounds very liquid and harmonious. To-morrow we shall leave Uruapa and this hospitable family, whose kindness ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... cried the Arab with the bound of a wild beast, springing up, flashing the blade out, and uttering the taunt, which in his own idiom was but a couple of ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... in all cases of secret writing—the first question regards the language of the cipher; for the principles of solution, so far, especially, as the more simple ciphers are concerned, depend on, and are varied by, the genius of the particular idiom. In general, there is no alternative but experiment (directed by probabilities) of every tongue known to him who attempts the solution, until the true one be attained. But, with the cipher now before us, all difficulty ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... obliterate the clause telling where the speaker was when the Lord led him, and to make the whole a continuous expression of the one fact—'As for me, the Lord hath led me in the way to the house of my master's brethren.' The literal rendering is, 'I in the way, Jehovah led me.' No doubt the Hebrew idiom admits of the 'I' being thus emphatically premised, and then repeated as 'me' after the verb, and possibly no more is to be made of the words than that. But the fuller and more impressive meaning is possible, and I ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... wanting to a species of instruction the object of which is to establish between the deaf and dumb, and the man who hears and speaks, a communication like that established between all men by the knowledge and practice of the same idiom; when the deaf and dumb man, by the help of the education given him, succeeds in decomposing into phrases the longest period; into simple propositions, the most complex phrase; into words, each proposition; into simple words, words the most complex: ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... be a notable leader of men. His marriage with Thorey was a romance of as exquisite a flavour as any that our sophisticated age can show, and its tragic end wrings the heart with its infinite pathos. By some singular discretion Mr. HEWLETT has chosen to eschew the least approach to Wardour-Street idiom, and this gives the narrative a simplicity, a sanity and a vivid sense of reality which are extraordinarily more effective than the goodliest tushery, of which flamboyant art Mr. HEWLETT is no mean master. I am sure he has chosen this time a more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... one of his own sons, Eve one of her own daughters. This, however, is authorized by Grecian usage in the severest writers. Neither can it be alleged that these might be bold poetic expressions, harmonizing with the Grecian idiom; for Poppo has illustrated this singular form of expression in a prose-writer, as philosophic and austere as Thucydides; a form which (as it offends against logic) must offend equally in all languages. Some beauty must have been described in the idiom, such as atoned ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... on turtle soup and Tokay because of my exquisite intimacy with the style and idiom of Heine and Richter. The English governing class is fed on turtle soup and Tokay to represent the past, of which it is literally ignorant, as I am of German irregular verbs; and to represent the ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... the commencement of the nineteenth century the common man of Somerset and the common man of Yorkshire, the Sussex peasant, the Caithness cottar and the common Ulsterman, would have been almost incomprehensible to one another. They differed in accent, in idiom, and in their very names for things. They differed in their ideas about things. They were, in plain English, foreigners one to another. Now they differ only in accent, and even that is a dwindling difference. Their language has become ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... that as soon as the child can read he has his own Bible, that it is in large, readable type, as much like any other book as possible. It is no evidence of grace to ruin the eyes over diamond-text Bibles. If possible, also provide separate books of the Bible, in modern literary form and some in the idiom ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... I did not learn very much, except that boys everywhere are pretty similar, especially in the badness of their manners. I also learnt that shrugging the shoulders while exhibiting the palms of the hands, and smiting oneself vehemently on the chest, are indispensable elements of the French idiom. The indiscriminate use of the word 'parfaitement' I also noticed to be essential when at a loss for either language or ideas, and have made valuable ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... children more easily understood by such travellers as are not over strong in their language than in the Friese country. Nevertheless, it is but a well-taught lesson; and by no means excuses the neglect of the native idiom. ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... matter of debate in her mind), "I want your opinion; will you give it me? Apropos of slang, why does it sit well on some people? It certainly does not vulgarize them. After all, in many cases, it is what they call 'racy idiom.' Perhaps our delicacy ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... more subtle, more beautiful than the theme; but still the theme is there, a precise and definite dogma for fancy to embroider. It is only in Hellas that Shelley's power of narrative (in Hassan's story), his irrepressible lyrical gift, and his passion which at length could speak in its own idiom, combine to make a masterpiece which owes to Godwin only some general ideas. If the transcript became less literal, it was not that the influence had waned. It was rather that Shelley was gaining the full mastery of his own native powers of expression. In these poems he assumes or preaches all ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... overturning systems and in exploring paths hitherto untrodden, but in developing existing materials to the highest conceivable pitch of beauty and completeness. His music has nothing to do with theories, it is the voice of nature speaking in the idiom of art. ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... wanted. Even if it be so, I observe that in three places where Polo uses Ondanique (here, ch. xxi., and ch. xlii.), the phrase is always "steel and ondanique." This looks as if his mental expression were Pulad-i-Hundwani, rendered by an idiom like ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... possessed fluency and facility, but not the strongest imagination. As a classic, he was admirable; and his prose themes upon different subjects displayed an acquaintance with the Latin idiom and phraseology seldom acquired even by scholastic life, and the practice of later years. Beyond this, he read much of everything that appeared, knew every thing, and was acquainted with every ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... of writing in Japan, the spoken and written language was identical, but with the study of the Chinese literature and the composition of native works almost exclusively in that language, there grew up differences between the colloquial and literary idiom, and the infusion of Chinese words steadily increased. In writing, the Chinese characters occupy the most important place. But all those words which express the wants, feelings, and concerns of everyday life, all that ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... the Nile ran into it, even though Snay said he thought the Jub river drained the N'yanza. All these statements were, when literally translated into English, the reverse of what the speakers, using a peculiar Arab idiom, meant to say; for all the statements made as to the flow of rivers by the negroes—who apparently give the same meaning to "out" and "in" as we do—contradicted the Arabs in their descriptions of the direction of the ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... they will have to learn an absolutely new and an unheard-of language if they would speak with Behmen and have Behmen speak with them. For Behmen's books are written neither in German nor in English of any age or idiom, but in the most original and uncouth Behmenese. Like John Bunyan, but never with John Bunyan's literary grace, Behmen will borrow, now a Latin word or phrase from his reading of learned authors, or, more often, from the conversations ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... Tl[)a]niw[)a] or mythic hawk, the Gul[)i]sgul[)i] or great crested flycatcher (Myiarchus crinitus), the Tsts or martin (Progne subis), and the Anigstaya or chimney swift (Chtura pelasgia). In the idiom of the formulas it is said that these "have just come and are sticking to them" (the players), the same word (dantsglani'ga) being used to express the devoted attention of a lover to his mistress. The Watatuga, a small species of dragon-fly, is also ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... tenses." Lancelot himself seems to have had a glimmering of the essential incredibility of this statement; for, though he attempts to substantiate it by citing from Greek authors a number of passages in which the Greek idiom happens to differ from the Latin,—passages, however, which Mr. Goodwin would have been glad to use, had they fallen in his way, to illustrate the regular constructions of the language,—he feels it necessary to appeal to the authority ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... advanced in years. His looks expressed sagacity and good-humour: and the air of respectability which his dress announced, was well supported by his clear eye, ruddy cheek, and grey hair. He used the Scottish idiom in his first address, but in such a manner that it could hardly be distinguished whether he was passing upon his friend a sort of jocose mockery, or whether it was his own native dialect, for his ordinary discourse had ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... likewise, of Schiller's History of the Thirty Years' War, diminished the motives thereto. In the translation, I have endeavoured to render my author literally, wherever I was not prevented by absolute differences of idiom; but I am conscious, that in two or three short passages, I have been guilty of dilating the original; and, from anxiety to give the full meaning, have weakened the force. In the metre I have availed myself of no other liberties, than those which Schiller had permitted ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... evening I attended a reception of representative American society, among whom were many frequenters of the Metropolitan. Many of them spoke to me of the opera Marouf. I was surprised, for this modern French opera belongs to the new idiom, and is difficult to understand. 'Do you really like the music of Marouf?' I asked. 'Oh, yes indeed,' every one said. It is one of my longest parts, but not ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... interesting to give a specimen of Gibbon's French style. His command of that language was not inferior to his command of his native idiom. One might even be inclined to say that his French prose is controlled by a purer taste than his English prose. The following excerpt, describing the Battle of Morgarten, will enable the reader to judge. It is taken from his early unfinished work on the History of the Swiss Republic, ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... philological pursuits. Ancient literature, from century to century, had constituted the sole labours of the learned; and "variae lectiones" were long their pride and their reward. Latin was the literary language of Europe. The vernacular idiom in Italy was held in such contempt that their youths were not suffered to read Italian books, their native productions. Varchi tells a curious anecdote of his father sending him to prison, where ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... disproportion of the extremities, the loose muscular attachment of the ligatures, and the harsh features were exemplified in the notable instance of the late President Lincoln. A like individuality appears in their idiom. It lacks the Doric breadth of the Virginian of the other slope, and is equally removed from the soft vowels and liquid intonation of the southern plain. It has verbal and phraseological peculiarities ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... loitering in front of the jewellers' windows. They might have had a cavalier in the person of old M. Pigeonneau, who possessed a high appreciation of their charms, but who, owing to the absence of a common idiom, was deprived of the pleasures of intimacy. He knew no English, and Mrs. Ruck and her daughter had, as it seemed, an incurable mistrust of the beautiful tongue which, as the old man endeavoured to impress upon them, was ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... was no idiom, he had used Latin words instead of English. At last he was interrupted by the wheels of a car stopping at his door. Father Meehan! Meehan could revise his Latin! None had written such good Latin ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... certain line of conduct and no other. Five minutes had not gone by in talk before each found in the other's presence that sense of repose which comes from similar habits of thought and a common native idiom. Whatever grounds for difference they might find, they were, at least, ranged on the same side in that battle which the two hemispheres half unconsciously wage upon each other as to the main purposes of life. Thus they were able ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... les yeux rouges et la joue ruisselante: note the absence of a preposition corresponding to the English 'with.' It is a very characteristic French idiom. ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... oddities. In his 'Hydriotaphia' and, indeed, almost all his works the entireness of his mental action is very observable; he metamorphoses every thing, be it what it may, into the subject under consideration. But Sir Thomas Brown with all his faults had a genuine idiom; and it is the existence of an individual idiom in each, that makes the principal writers before the Restoration the great patterns or integers of English style. In them the precise intended meaning of a word can never be mistaken; whereas ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... Oscar Swanson, heavy, slow-moving, blond as Harold Haarfagar, a veritable Scandinavian colossus; Wyndham, clean-bred, clean-built, an English gentleman to his fingers' tips; old Ike James, whose tongue carried the idiom and soft-slurring drawl of his native South; Eugene Brule, three parts Quebec French and one part Cree; Carter, O'Gara, Bullen, Westwick, and half ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... University of Leyden. In his inaugural oration on The Dignity and Utility of the Hebrew Tongue, he puts himself on record in favour of the Divine origin and miraculous purity of that language. "Who," he says, "can call in question the fact that the Hebrew idiom is coeval with the world itself, save such as seek to win vainglory for ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the needle-gun had given him "the needle," if the popular idiom is admissible, or that he scented an enemy of his race, the lion, who had hitherto regarded the Tarasconians with sovereign scorn, and yawned in their faces, was all at once affected by ire. At first ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... interposed Morris Woolridge, who had been giving the native lessons in English, for he mixed with it the German idiom. ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... think that emotional sympathy for self is as true a part of art as sympathy for others; and a prejudice in favor of the good and bad of one personality against the virtue of many personalities. It may be that when a poet or a whistler becomes conscious that he is in the easy path of any particular idiom,—that he is helplessly prejudiced in favor of any particular means of expression,—that his manner can be catalogued as modern or classic,—that he favors a contrapuntal groove, a sound-coloring one, a sensuous one, a successful ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... age of thirty the face of a woman is a book written in a foreign tongue, which one may still translate in spite of all the feminisms of the idiom; but on passing her fortieth year a woman becomes an insoluble riddle; and if any one can see through an old woman, it ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... condition of your horses. They must, as a consequence, receive always your first consideration. As long as they have rest and food, you are sure of getting along; as soon as they fail, you are reduced to difficulties. So absolute is this truth that it has passed into an idiom. When a Westerner wants to tell you that he lacks a thing, he informs you he is "afoot" for it. "Give me a fill for my pipe," he begs; "I'm ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... able to do it, will often lead 'em into such Errors and Mistakes, as perhaps they'll ne're get clear of. So that this will be of great use even to School-Boys and Learners: Beside the great Advantage of teaching 'em, perhaps not the worst English; and something of the Idiom of ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... identical. But formerly the one [the second] expression was not there, and it has been poorly and unintelligibly translated into German eine Gemeinschaft der Heiligen, a communion of saints. If it is to be rendered plainly, it must be expressed quite differently in the German idiom; for the word ecclesia properly means in German eine Versammlung, an assembly. But we are accustomed to the word church, by which the simple do not understand an assembled multitude, but the consecrated house or building, although the house ought not to be called a church, except only for ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... or noticeable idiom of the word began: Yes! and a very beautiful idiom it is: the first colloquy or ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... common to all the Western Counties, and to have descended to them from that Wessex language that is commonly called Anglo-Saxon—a language in which we have a more extensive and varied literature than exists in any other Germanic idiom of so early a date, itself the purest of all German idioms. It is a mistake to suppose that it is the parent of modern English. This has been formed upon the dialect of Mercia, that of the Midland Counties; ...
— A Glossary of Provincial Words & Phrases in use in Somersetshire • Wadham Pigott Williams
... day. Why not shillinged, farthinged, tenpenced, &c.? The formation of a participle passive from a noun is a licence that nothing but a very peculiar felicity can excuse. If mere convenience is to justify such attempts upon the idiom, you cannot stop till the language becomes, in the proper sense of the word, corrupt. Most of these pieces of slang come ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... voice was gentle, the child had caught the idiom and pronunciation of the fisherman's family; but even in that respect there was a natural refinement in the tone of her voice; and as Adam was a God-fearing man, and had brought up his sons to fear God also, no coarse language or objectionable ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... methods, I frankly admit, science was absent. In simple, primitive fashion that would have charmed a Darwinian disciple to observe, I "went for" the whole crowd. To employ the expressive idiom of the neighbourhood, I was "all over it and inside." Something clung about my feet. By kicking myself free and then standing on it I gained the advantage of quite an extra foot in height; I don't know what it was and didn't care. ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome |
