"Polyglot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Service became a separate unit of the Imperial Forces. The first public appearance of the sailor airmen was at a proposed review of the fleet by the King at a test mobilization. The King was unable to attend, but the naval pilots carried out their part of the programme very creditably considering the polyglot nature of their sea-planes. A few weeks later and the country was ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... are all Germans, like their leader, but, like him also, all gifted with a polyglot mastery of tongues that has stood them in good stead in their intercourse with the biologists of many nationalities who came to work at the laboratory. I must not pause to dwell upon the personnel of the staff in general, but there is one other member ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... Russian tongue renders topical a phrase once used, not unhappily, by Mr Cecil Raleigh concerning the qualifications of the dramatic critic. After listening to a somewhat extravagant speech about the duties of the critic, he said that the dramatic critic ought, apparently, to be a "polyglot archangel." During the last few years we have had plays in Russian, Japanese, Bavarian patois, Dutch, German, French and Italian, to say nothing of East End performances in Hebrew and Yiddish, ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... tales—extensions of the scheme and manner of the Oeuvres de Jeunesse, or attempts at the goguenard story of 1830—a thing for which Balzac's hand was hardly light enough. Here are interesting evidences of striving to be cosmopolitan and polyglot—the most interesting of all of which, I think, is the mention of certain British products as "mufflings." "Muffling" used to be a domestic joke for "muffin;" but whether some wicked Briton deluded Balzac into the idea that it was the proper form or not it is impossible ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... chance and the inhumanity of an elder brother might have kept him an eternal prisoner at the Hotel de Hollande (where, for all Bernard knew to the contrary, he had been obliged to work out his destiny in the arduous character of a polyglot waiter); so that the poor young girl, casting backward glances along the path of Mrs. Vivian's retreat, and failing to detect the onward rush of a rescuing cavalier, had perforce believed herself forsaken, and had been obliged to summon ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... comment, even though the IPO still firmly held that they were technically misaddressed. And, privately, even the IPO officials admitted that the numbers were easier to say and remember than the polyglot street names that had been tagged on by the ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... grim truth had been forced on him, bitterly, bafflingly, after he had climbed the narrow streets of that town which always seemed to him a patchwork of nationalities, a polyglot mosaic of outlandish tongues, climbed up through alien-looking lanes and courts, past Moorish bazaars and Turkish lace-stores and English tobacco-shops, in final and frenzied search ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... missed the alien tongues of Continental streets that reminded them of their own polyglot cities. In England all men spoke one tongue, speciously like American to the ear, but ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... That the polyglot, smoky settlement sprawling on both sides of an historic river should be a part of his native New England seemed at times to be a hideous dream; nor could he comprehend what had happened to him, and to the world of order and standards and religious sanctions into which he had been born. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Isn't it excessively odd? It comes from Beatrice's being so religious and so tremendously moral—so a cheval on fifty thousand riguardi. And then of course we mustn't forget," my companion added, a little unexpectedly, to this polyglot proposition, "that some of Mark's ideas are—well, really—rather impossible, ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... Continent's sociable races; Country-people of ours—the New World's confident children, Proud of America always, and even vain of the Troubles As of disaster laid out on a scale unequalled in Europe; Polyglot Russians that spoke all languages better than natives; White-coated Austrian officers, anglicized Austrian dandies; Gorgeous Levantine figures of Greek, and Turk, and Albanian— These, and the throngs that moved through ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... another amusing incident. Unable to get at my towels packed in my registered baggage, and ignorant of the Russian language, I inquired of a polyglot fellow-passenger what was the Russian word for towel, so that I could ask the ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... involves a population so small that it is highly susceptible to the effects of intercrossing. Too restricted to absorb the constant influx of foreign elements, the inhabitants tend to become a highly mixed, polyglot breed. This they continue to be by the constant addition of foreign strains, so long as the islands remain foci of trade or strategic points for the control of the marine highways. Diomede Island in Bering Strait is the great market place of the polar tribes. Here Siberian ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... stairs," said Lady Mabel, "has been amusing us at dinner with his version of our adventure at the ford of the Cayo; and a very good story he makes of it, giving some rich samples of Captain Hatton's polyglot eloquence. He, alone, seems not to have been in the dark; and saw all, and more than all, that occurred—nor does he forget you in the picture. But, papa cannot see the ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... Interpretationes nominum Hebraicorum, an etymological index of Hebrew proper names, appeared first in the Bible of Sweynheym and Pannartz, Rome, 1471, and was reprinted without change in most of the editions previous to 1515. In the Complutensian Polyglot it underwent revision and the revised form appears in all the editions of Yolande Bonhomme, with due acknowledgment to Cardinal Ximenes. The Index rerum et sententiarum, however, announced in the title as ...
— Catalogue of the William Loring Andrews Collection of Early Books in the Library of Yale University • Anonymous
... France, Switzerland, and Ireland. It was while officiating at the chapel of the Bavarian Legation in London that he began contributing the Prout papers to Fraser's Magazine. These consisted of fanciful narratives, each serving as a vehicle for the display of his wonderful polyglot learning, and containing translations of well-known English songs into Latin, Greek, French, and Italian verse, which later he seriously represented as the true originals from which the English authors had boldly plagiarized. He also introduced into his stories the songs of France ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... Signorelli and Raphael in their arabesques are deeply struck by it: Durer, defying and playing with it alternately, is almost beaten down again and again in the distorted faces, hewing halberts, and suspended satyrs of his arabesques round the polyglot Lord's Prayer; it takes entire possession of Balzac in the Contes Drolatiques; it struck Scott in the earliest days of his childish 'visions' intensified by the axe-stroke murder of his grand aunt; L. i. 142, and see close of this note. It chose for him the subject of the Heart ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Ranald MacEagh, springing to his feet. His chains clattered as he rose, while he drew himself as far as they permitted from the quarter whence the voice appeared to proceed. His fear in some degree communicated itself to Captain Dalgetty, who began to repeat, in a sort of polyglot gibberish, all the exorcisms he had ever heard of, without being able to remember more than a word ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... conversant with all European languages, a neat assortment of the Asiatic languages, and a few of the African tongues, such as Abyssinian, Ashantee, Zulu, and Soudanese. But how few in the nature of things can approximate this polyglot versatility. Often in Eastern Europe, and in Afghanistan, I have envied Messrs. Swinton, Smalley, Whitelaw Reed, and the other notable war correspondents of the American Civil War, in that they had not the difficulties ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... where the Hindu clerk sold tea and biscuits. The train disgorged its passengers and there was a scramble in the tiny ticket office like the rush to get through turnstiles at a football game at home, only that the crowd was more polyglot and ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... her head playfully as he said, "What a polyglot family we are! Your grandfather's Spanish, your grandmother's French, and your father's English, all mixed up in an olla ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... put to sea with queer cargoes—cargoes that smelled sweet and spicy, with the spice of the far South Seas. Office sailor though he was, Blair Elliston commanded the respect of even the roughest of his polyglot crews—a respect not wholly uncommingled ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... taking special pains to translate into it the best thought of the world. This is a truly marvellous work. It has been done during the present generation, and Webster's Dictionary defines it as a polyglot jargon used for inter-communication by Jews from ...
— Third class in Indian railways • Mahatma Gandhi
... ambition to become a great poet. His favorite amusement was a puppet-show, for which he invented elaborate plays. From his tenth year on he wrote a great deal of verse, early acquiring technical facility and local renown and coming to regard himself as a "thunderer." He attempted a polyglot novel, also a biblical tale on the subject of Joseph, which he destroyed on observing that the hero did nothing but pray and weep. When he was ready for the university he wished to go to Goettingen to study the old humanities, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... a pert young housemaid, in love with Robin. She hates Polyglot, the tutor of "Master Charles," but is very fond of Charles. Molly tries to get "the tuterer Polypot" into a scrape, but finds, to her consternation, that Master Charles is in reality the party to be blamed.—J. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... just sipping his tea, and a South-Sea-Islander (with undeveloped possibilities) drinking the milk of a cocoa-nut, each one of whom, if he had been born in the gambrel-roofed house, and cultivated my little sand-patch, and grown up in "the study" from the height of Walton's Polyglot Bible to that of the shelf which held the Elzevir Tacitus and Casaubon's Polybius, with all the complex influences about him that surrounded me, would have been so nearly what I am that I should have loved him like a brother,—always ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... number of those who have gone home to Europe have returned to America with bride or family. As a result the larger cities of the United States are congeries of foreign quarters, whose alarming fecundity fills the streets with progeny and whose polyglot chatter on pay night turns even many a demure New England ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... literary labour in his preface. "As for myself, I have been unceasingly occupied for such a number of years in this mass," Molendino he calls them, "that that day seemed, as it were, a holiday in which I have not laboured so much as sixteen or eighteen hours in these enlarging lexicons and Polyglot Bibles." ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Frida's library offered him an amazing choice of polyglot fiction. It contained nearly all Balzac and the elder Dumas, Tolstoi and Turgenieff, Bjoernsen and Ibsen, besides a great deal of miscellaneous literature, chiefly Russian and Norwegian. Here and there he came across some odd volumes ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... strolling to the baths stood curiously for a while to watch one of the rapidly increasing sect of Christians, who leaned from a balcony over the street and exhorted a polyglot crowd of freedmen, slaves and idlers. He was bearded, brown-skinned from exposure, ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... aided in preventing the repeal of the prohibitory law in Indian Territory, the resubmission of the prohibitory constitution of Maine, and in preserving the prohibitory law of Vermont. It has secured 20,000,000 signatures and attestations, including 7,000,000 on the Polyglot Petition to the governments of the world. Thousands of girls have been rescued from lives of shame and tens of thousands of men have signed the total abstinence pledge and been redeemed from inebriety through ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... despatched to Fathpur, which was more than twelve hundred miles away. Akbar awaited their arrival with the utmost impatience. He received them with every mark of favor. They delivered their presents, consisting of a polyglot Bible in four languages and the images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. To their unspeakable delight the Great Mogul placed the Bible on his head and kissed the images. So eager was he for instruction that he spent the whole night in conversation with the fathers. He provided them with lodgings ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... at, some new accomplishment to admire. On one occasion—it was at the opera bouffe—this musical prodigy exhibited a playfulness and an exuberance of wit and humor that Aurora had never dreamed of. He ran the gamut of vocal conceit, and the polyglot fertility of his fancy simply astounded his rapt auditor. She was dazed, enchanted, spellbound. So here we find the fair Aurora passing from the condition of pity into the ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... every case they agreed with those he had given me. He used to sing a Hebrew drinking-song, which he had learned from some Jews with whom he had once travelled and astonished by joining in their conversation." {23} Borrow's colloquial gift was, to all appearance, closely allied to that of this polyglot Fleming. ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... Foreign English.—Several ludicrous examples have of late been communicated (see Vol. ii., pp. 57. 138.), but none, perhaps, comparable with the following, which I copied about two years since at Havre, from a Polyglot advertisement of various Local Regulations, for the convenience of persons visiting that favourite watering-place. Amongst ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various
... A Walton's Polyglot, 1657, had evidently been prepared for chaining, and in a novel fashion, the plate to carry the chain being attached to the left-hand board close to the back of the volume (fig. 86)—so that it was evidently set on the shelf in the ordinary way, and not with the fore-edge turned to the spectator, ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... "Historia Literaria," and Sir Walter Raleigh's "History of the World," and a whole array of Christian Fathers, and Plato, and Aristotle, and Stanley's book of Philosophers, with Effigies, and the Junta Galen, and the Hippocrates of Foesius, and Walton's Polyglot, supported by Father Sanchez on one side and Fox's "Acts and Monuments" on the other,—an odd collection, as folios from lower ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... other. V. be different &c. adj.; differ, vary, ablude|, mismatch, contrast; divaricate; differ toto coelo[Lat], differ longo intervallo[It]. vary, modify &c. (change) 140. discriminate &c. 465. Adj. differing &c. v.; different, diverse, heterogeneous, multifarious, polyglot; distinguishable, dissimilar; varied, modified; diversified, various, divers, all manner of, all kinds of; variform &c. 81[obs3]; daedal[obs3]. other, another, not the same; unequal &c. 28. unmatched; widely apart, poles apart, distinctive, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... An hour passed in polyglot expostulations with the stranger on the score of his obstinacy, but all to no purpose; to use a popular expression, he was as dumb as the Doges. He deigned, however, to empty at a single draught ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... on a great part of the Old and New Testaments. From the Samaritan Pentateuch Usher furnished some extracts for his friend Selden's Marmora Arundeliana, and he deposited the manuscript itself in the Cottonian Library. Dr. Walton also found Usher's collection of much use in preparing his Polyglot Bible. Several of the manuscripts which had belonged to Usher were given to the Bodleian Library by James Tyrrell, the historian, who was the Archbishop's grandson. It was Usher's intention to have left his library to Trinity College, but having lost all his other property he ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... it was very much through his urgent recommendation that the foreman of the printing office gave him a chance. The foreman did not in the least believe that the green-looking young fellow before him could set in type one page of the polyglot Testament for which help ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... and polyglot audience inside the room, Helen soon became aware of nearly as many more spectators and listeners outside the building crowded about the open windows. The night was warm and still. The chapel had three windows on each side, and two at the rear behind the platform, and at each ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... of the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire, which collapsed during World War I. The country fell under communist rule following World War II. In 1956, a revolt and announced withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact were met with a massive military intervention by Moscow. ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... streets and its polyglot population, Matadi is a picturesque spot. It is the goal of every official through the long years of his service in the bush for at this place he boards the steamer that takes him to Europe. This is the pleasant side of the picture. On the other hand, ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson |
