"Idiomatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... repeated, he began to say that he had many mercies to be thankful for. Then he higgled and hammered and fumbled for the said mercies, and tried to enumerate them, but in phrases conventional and derived from tracts and sermons; whereas his statement of grievances had been idiomatic. ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... m esa nia; there are two idiomatic uses in this phrase: 1. cualquiera in an ironic sense nadie (a frequent use); 2. quitaba quitara, a substitution of tense often found in the main clause of a contrary to fact, or less vivid ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... "house-hen;" one of those idiomatic terms of endearment which cannot be reproduced ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... khwaja means "chief," or "master;" it is generally applied to rich merchants, &c., such as we would call "men of respectability." The idiomatic London English for it is "governor," or (as it ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... Bunyan's popularity is the felicity of his style. His English is vernacular, idiomatic, universal; varying with the subject; homely in the continuous narrative; racy and pungent in his lively and often rapid discourse; and, when occasion requires, "a model of unaffected dignity and rhythmical flow;" but always plain, strong, and natural. However, ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... crois bien: on l'entendait d'une lieue, 'I should rather think it was talking, you could hear it a mile off.' The sentence is elliptical, vous demandez being understood before s'il. Note the idiomatic use of bien, and cf. je le veux bien, 'I am perfectly willing'; voulez-vous bien vous en aller, 'won't you go away!' je donnerais bien un franc, 'I shouldn't mind giving ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... but for a moment saw no one. Then, deep in the shadow of the wall, he descried two figures walking slowly side by side. One was a man and the other a woman. They were talking in a French so rapid and idiomatic that Rushford could distinguish no word of it, except that the man addressed his companion ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... L'Estrange among his rivals was esteemed as the most perfect model of political writing. He was a strong party-writer on the government side, for Charles the Second, and the compositions of the author seem to us coarse, yet they contain much idiomatic expression. His AEsop's Fables are a curious specimen of familiar style. Queen Mary showed a due contempt of him, after ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... her pronunciation of Spanish was faultless, and I always took particular pleasure in hearing her read the idiomatic Castilian of Cervantes. Nevertheless, my mind wandered; and, try as I might, I could not help thinking more of the theft of the diamonds than the doughty deeds of the Don and the shrewd sayings of Sancho Panza. Not that the loss gave me serious concern. A few ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... for a plank, he will jump in and rescue me. Under these circumstances, I am perfectly safe in talking French to him "Mais je ne vous attendais ce matin"—I've got an idea that this is something uncommonly grammatical—"a cause de votre lettre que je viens de recevoir"—this, I'll swear, is idiomatic—"ce matin. La voila!" I pride myself on "La," as representing my knowledge that "lettre," to which it refers, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 22, 1891 • Various
... the Romans of the second and third centuries wrote in Greek instead of Latin. The consequence will be, that the language in question will tend to lose its nationality—that is, its distinctive character; it will cease to be idiomatic in the sense in which it once was so; and whatever grace or propriety it may retain, it will be comparatively tame and spiritless; or, on the other hand, it will be corrupted by the admixture of ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... himself particularly to the elder sister. Indeed, his acquaintance with La Cica, as he afterward confessed, had given him a taste for foreign ladies. He carried on little conversations with the Senorita in broken English. The Senorita's English was pretty, but not very idiomatic. The Senator imitated her English remarkably well, and no doubt did it out of compliment. He also astonished the company by speaking at the very top of a voice whose ordinary tone ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... less agile natures to follow the tracks of light and emulate the choice examples set before them, with swifter movements and with richer results than they could ever have attained, if not thus encouraged. Proverbial axioms flourish copiously in the idiomatic ground and vernacular climate of unlearned, undisciplined, unreflective minds, as thistles on the highway where every ass may gather them. But precious maxims, those "short sentences drawn from a long experience," as Cervantes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... Idiomatic Items Important to Publishers Indian, The Interesting to Bone Boilers Interior Illumination Indian Question, The Information Wanted Inspiration vs. Perspiration Items from our ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various
... has been laborious and difficult. Luther's complaints concerning the seriousness of his task in attempting to teach the patriarch Job to speak idiomatic German might doubtless have found an echo in the experience of this corps of scholars in forcing Luther into idiomatic English. We are confident, however, that, as in Luther's case, so also here, the general verdict of readers will be that they have been eminently successful. ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... periodical. It has been fortunate enough to receive much commendation from military men, and for them it is now specially issued in its present form. For the general public it may be as well to add that, where translations are appended to the French phrases, those translations usually follow the idiomatic and particular meaning attached to these expressions in the argot of the Army of Algeria, and not the correct or literal one given to such words or sentences ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... relishing? Finally, is not in many cases that which is spoken of as something extraneous, dragged in aforethought, for the purpose of singularity, the result more truly of a most earnest and single-minded labor after the utmost rendering of idiomatic conversational truth; the rejection of all stop-gap words; about the most literal transcript of fact compatible with the ends of poetry and true feeling for Art? This a point worthy note, and not ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... study, tends to make the mind acute, discriminating, and exact. It tends also, in a most especial manner, to fit a person to train the minds of others to acuteness, discrimination, and exactness. The person who has learned to express a thought with entire exactness and idiomatic propriety in two languages; or where, from the want of analogy between the two languages, he finds this impracticable, to perceive the exact shade of difference between the two expressions; who can trace historically and logically the ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... point. Adj. special, particular, individual, specific, proper, personal, original, private, respective, definite, determinate, especial, certain, esoteric, endemic, partial, party, peculiar, appropriate, several, characteristic, diagnostic, exclusive; singular &c (exceptional) 83; idiomatic; idiotypical; typical. this, that; yon, yonder. Adv. specially, especially, particularly &c adj.; in particular, in propria persona [Lat.]; ad hominem [Lat.]; for my part. each, apiece, one by one, one at a time; severally, respectively, each ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... intelligence, his delicacy, or his good-breeding. The patience, gentleness, and kind feeling, with which he contrived at once to excuse and to remedy certain blunders made by the workmen in the execution of his orders, and the clearness with which, in perfectly correct and idiomatic English, slightly tinged with a foreign accent, he explained the mechanical and scientific reasons for the construction he had suggested, gave evidence at once of no common talent, and of a considerate-ness and good-nature ...
— Country Lodgings • Mary Russell Mitford
... Ain't paying out good credits for you to sit there like you was buying on your own!" The Salarkian who loomed above him spoke accentless, idiomatic Basic Space which came strangely from between his yellow lips. A furred hand thrust the handle of a mop-up stick at the young man, a taloned thumb jerked the direction in which to use that evil-smelling object. Vye Lansor levered himself up ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... The idiomatic passages "aohe puko momona o Kohala," etc., and (on page 387) "e huna oukou i ko oukou mau maka i ke ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... not without merit in the details and examples of English construction. But its fault even in that part is that he confounds the genius of the English language, making it periphrastic and literal, instead of elliptical and idiomatic. According to Mr. Murray, hardly any of our best writers ever wrote a ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... Devil is a mere prologue, intended to bring Napoleon and Ivan-angel on the stage and lay the foundation of the plot. The story-teller's keen sense of fun and humor is shown in many little touches, but he never means to be irreverent. The whole legend is set forth in the racy, idiomatic, highly elliptical language of the common Russian muzhik, and is therefore extremely difficult of translation; but I have tried to preserve, as far as possible, the spirit ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... of emendation, omissions have been {xvi} supplied, idiomatic phrases have been collected and inserted, some alterations have been made by simplifying or compressing particular parts, and new examples and illustrations have been introduced throughout, according as the advantages which the author ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... better hands. He was highly intelligent, and he interpreted my statements with a fluency and accuracy which were astonishing. Only now and again did he stumble and hesitate. This was when he was presented with an unfamiliar expression or idiomatic sentence. ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... how difficult it is to convey the broken Indian language to a French reader. This is one of the best features of Cooper's novels—the striking manner in which he portrays the language of the North American Indian and his idiomatic expressions. Yet such is the charm of his stories that they have found their way over Europe. The translations into the French language must ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... ENGLISH. "The most important peculiarity of American English is a laxity, irregularity, and confusion in the use of particles. The same thing is, indeed, observable in England, but not to the same extent, though some gross departures from idiomatic propriety, such as different to for different from, are common in England, which none but very ignorant persons would be guilty of in America.... In the tenses of the verbs, I am inclined to think that well-educated ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... circumstance that "ten" and "four," in horary reckoning, were convertible terms. The old Roman method of naming the hours, wherein noon was the sixth, was long preserved, especially in conventual establishments: and I have no doubt that the English idiomatic phrase "o'clock" originated in the necessity for some distinguishing mark between hours "of the clock" reckoned from midnight, and hours of the day reckoned from sunrise, or more frequently from six A.M. With such an ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... guide. One sole rule, if he will attend to it, governs in a paramount sense the total possibilities and compass of pronunciation. A very famous line of Horace states it. What line? What is the supreme law in every language for correct pronunciation no less than for idiomatic propriety? ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... theory was that books should he written in the same colloquial and idiomatic language which is employed by cultivated persons in conversation, "Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;" and vulgar she certainly was not, although she sometimes indulged her fondness for familiarity too far. The period was unluckily chosen for carrying such a theory ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... of temperaments, the English character must be classed not under the phlegmatic but under the melancholic temperament; and the French under the sanguine. The character of a nation may be judged of in this particular by examining its idiomatic language. The French, in whom the lower forms of passion are constantly bubbling up from the shallow and superficial character of their feelings, have appropriated all the phrases of passion to the service of trivial and ordinary life: and hence they have no language of passion for the service of ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... mythological names and terms, as well as in idiomatic expressions, and the preparation of the explanatory notes has therefore been a perplexing task. A fairly complete statement under each mythological reference would in the aggregate reach the proportions of a treatise on Norse mythology, but the limitations of space made such elaboration ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... met him, a few days later, he must have been struck by the sudden warmth of my friendship—the quick idiomatic cordiality of my French to him. This mutual friendship of ours lasted till his death in '88. And so did ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... which inspired Morton with great distrust and aversion. Mr. Birnie not only spoke French like a native, but all his habits, his gestures, his tricks of manner, were, French; not the French of good society, but more idiomatic, as it were, and popular. He was not exactly a vulgar person, he was too silent for that, but he was evidently of low extraction and coarse breeding; his accomplishments were of a mechanical nature; he was an extraordinary arithmetician, he was a very skilful chemist, and kept a laboratory ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... difficulty, every experience of joy or sorrow, of peace or temptation, is put into the form and discourse of a living character. Other allegorists write in poetry and their characters are shadowy and unreal; but Bunyan speaks in terse, idiomatic prose, and his characters are living men and women. There are Mr. Worldly Wiseman, a self-satisfied and dogmatic kind of man, youthful Ignorance, sweet Piety, courteous Demas, garrulous Talkative, honest Faithful, and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... surrounded by all his splendour, and assisted by the seductive arts of Terpsichore and Bacchus) to whisper to Mrs. M'Catchley those soft words which—but why not here let Mr. Richard Avenel use his own idiomatic and unsophisticated expression? "Please the pigs, then," said Mr. Avenel to himself, "I ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... indicated the nature of the great contest in language between the conventional and the idiomatic. Idioms are just what their name implies. They are the commonalty of language,—private, proletarian words, who do the work, "dum alteri tulerunt honores." They come to us from all handiworks and callings, where you will ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... rendered this, besides, of such peculiar advantage to me in after life, as a literary man, was, that I heard them as often in the Irish language as in the English, if not oftener, in circumstance which enabled me in my writings to transfer the genius, the idiomatic peculiarity and conversational spirit of the one language into the other, precisely as the people themselves do in their dialogue, whenever the heart or imagination happens to be moved by ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... one particular advantage possessed by the Teutonic over the Romance languages in idiomatic clearness and precision it is that conferred by their ownership of a possessive case, almost the sole remaining monument to the fact that our ancestors spoke an inflected tongue. That we should still be able to speak of "the baker's wife's dog" instead of "the dog of the wife of the ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... The idiomatic expressions in this dialect are numerous, many will be found in the Glossary; the following may be mentioned. I'd 'sley do it, for I would as lief do it. I have occasionally in the Glossary suggested the etymology of some words; by far the greater part have an Anglo-Saxon, some perhaps ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... The idiomatic sentences of the bluff fisherman, as in their racy vernacular they were blithely given utterance to by the manly voice of the Reader, seemed to supply a fitting introduction to the drama, as though from the lips of a Yarmouth Chorus. Scarcely had the social carouse there in the old ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... of reckoning time continued for a long time to exist contemporaneously. Hence it became necessary to distinguish one from the other by name, and thus the notation from midnight gave rise, as I have remarked in one of my papers on Chaucer, to the English idiomatic phrase "of the clock;" or the reckoning of the clock, commencing at midnight, as distinguished from Roman equinoctial hours, commencing at six o'clock A.M. This was what Ben Jonson was meaning by attainment of majority at six o'clock, and not, as PROFESSOR DE MORGAN supposes, "probably a certain ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 214, December 3, 1853 • Various
... He was German, and didn't care who knew it. He was unlike the man who had disguised himself as an English officer, at the house of the heliograph, but had betrayed himself and set this whole train of adventure going by his single slip and fall from idiomatic English that Harry Fleming's sharp ...
— The Boy Scout Aviators • George Durston
... sauntering in the mild though tainted air; bargaining, blaspheming, drinking, wrangling: and varying their business and their potations, their fierce strife and their impious irreverence, with flashes of rich humour, gleams of native wit, and racy phrases of idiomatic slang. ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... read either literally or in its idiomatic sense, i.e., "Folk convicted or suspected of murder or ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... "And you think me incapable of keeping your secret, ah, gimmick, I believe is the idiomatic term you used." ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... that despite unseemly tendencies, there is evident originality and even genius in the pages of this unusual book. In a comparatively temperate review, August 4, 1860, the Cosmopolite, of Boston, while deploring that nature is treated here without fig-leaves, declares the style wonderfully idiomatic and graphic, adding: "In his frenzy, in the fire of his inspiration, are fused and poured out together elements hitherto considered antagonistic in poetry—passion, arrogance, animality, philosophy, brag, humility, rowdyism, spirituality, ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... familiarity. But to translate the Swedish "du" with the English "thou" is as erroneous as it is awkward. Tytler laid down his "Principles of Translation" in 1791—and a majority of translators are still unaware of their existence. Yet it ought to seem self-evident to every thinking mind that idiomatic equivalence, not verbal identity, must form the basis of a good and faithful translation. When an English mother uses "you" to her child, she establishes thereby the only rational equivalent for the "du" used under similar circumstances by ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... highest returns into the first, and is both mediate and immediate. As Luther's Bible was written in the language of the common people, so Hegel seems to have thought that he gave his philosophy a truly German character by the use of idiomatic German words. But it may be doubted whether the attempt has been successful. First because such words as 'in sich seyn,' 'an sich seyn,' 'an und fur sich seyn,' though the simplest combinations of ...
— Sophist • Plato |
