"Slang" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... But the genius of the place, its omnipresent and all-pervading goddess, was Jovita! Smiling, joyous, indefatigable in suavity and attention; all-embracing in her courtesies; frank of speech and eye; quick at repartee and deftly handling the slang of the day and the locality with a childlike appreciation and an infantine accent that seemed to redeem it from vulgarity or unfeminine boldness! Few could resist the volatile infection of her presence. A smile was the only tribute she exacted, ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... two months he missed her a little in the Runaway, where her presence had secured for him an extra mark of distinction; but he had rather the feeling of a man surfeited. He put it to himself in modern slang: "I was fed up," he said. "She only wanted me to get the tickets and look after her luggage, and turn up when I was wanted, and be a kind of unpaid courier, while she travelled about getting ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... quaint terms of endearment, slang, and epithets, but as she grew into a beautiful and refined and dignified girl, it was still more piquant to be addressed in the highly unladylike (or un-Smelliean) terms ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... is a nautical slang term. In the British navy there were formerly two days in each week on which meat formed no part of the men's rations. These were called banyan days, in allusion to the vegetarian diet of the Hindu merchants. Banyan hospital also became a slang term for a hospital ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... sprung in. For the sake of the uninitiated, I must explain that, in digger's slang, a ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... not find in his prose the flatting and sharping he censured in Fenimore Cooper's. His style has none of the cold perfection of an antique statue; it is too modern and too American for that, and too completely the expression of the man himself, sincere and straightforward. It is not free from slang, altho this is far less frequent than one might expect; but it does its work swiftly and cleanly. And it is capable of immense variety. Consider the tale of the Blue Jay in 'A Tramp Abroad,' wherein the humor is sustained by unstated pathos; what could be better told than this, with every ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... to employ a slightly slang expression, gazed across Ballard Field. In the stands, the students responding thunderously to their cheer-leaders' megaphoned requests, roared, "Play ball! Play ball! Play ball!" Gay pennants and banners fluttered in the glorious sunshine of the ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... while you make gay what circle fits ye, Bandy Venetian slang with the Benzon, Or play at company with the Albrizzi, The self-pleased pedant, and patrician crone, Grimanis, Mocenigos, Balbis, Rizzi, Compassionate our cruel case,—alone, Our pleasure an academy of frogs, Who nightly serenade us from the bogs," ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... The blue eyes and the baby smile went up, confidingly, to the young ragamuffin's face. There had been kindness here. The boy had taken to Jo, it seemed; and was benevolently evincing it, in the best way he could, by teaching her good-natured slang. ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Yankees, whom I represent, and the Jews, and this alone ought to give us a friendly feeling toward one another. We are both misunderstood and caricatured. The Yankee stands for a peculiar sort of closeness in money matters and a shrewdness which has even given its slang name to a neighboring New England State, the "Nutmeg State." Perhaps we have both done too much in the past to deserve this reputation for super-cleverness. One of you has referred to the fact that there are Jews who do not like to acknowledge their race. In that respect we are alike, for there ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... assuming that he was the party pointed at, attacked what he called "the bishop's gross and virulent invective—his malignant, calumnious, and false insinuations—his well-known powers of pamphleteering slang." Here the noble lord was called to order, and the Earl of Winchelsea moved that the words "false insinuations" and "pamphleteering slang" should be taken down. After some observations from Earl Grey, Lord Holland, and the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Durham went on to state that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... evident? And where else is it so spoilt? There is no vulgarity like the vulgarity of vulgar eyelids. They have a slang all their own, of an intolerable kind. And eyelids have looked all the cruel looks that have ever made wounds in innocent souls ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... I answered, delighted to hear the word from the lips of my gentle daughter. She very seldom used a slang word, and when she did, she used it like a lady. Shall I tell you what she was like? Ah! you could not see her as I saw her that morning if I did. I will, however, try to give you a general idea, just in order that you and I should ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... published, of which the Athenaeum said, "They are prose poems, carefully meditated, and exquisitely touched in by a teacher ready to sympathize with every joy and sorrow." The five stories are told in simple and clear language, and without slang, to which she heartily objects. For one so rich in imagination as Miss Ingelow, her prose is singularly free ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... strange sort of criminal, she thought, with his humour and ready address, his sudden shifts from slang of the street to phrases chosen with a discriminating taste in English, his cool indifference to her threatening attitude, and his paradoxical pose of warm—it seemed—personal interest in and consideration for a complete and, to say the least, very ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... endeavoring to walk upstairs. Any effort is almost paralyzed because the range of fluctuation of energy, the ability to mobilize energy, in turn dependent upon an ability to increase the metabolic rate, is limited. In slang phrase, she cannot step on it. Her existence is set to go at a rate in the neighborhood of forty per cent below the normal. By the administration of thyroxin, her metabolic rate can be raised to any desired figure, the spark can be adjusted, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... not understand this slang; but she understood that Eva felt depressed, and said, 'A walk will do you all good, and you will just have time to go over the hill ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... "Slang!" said Massachusetts, looking up again. "One cent for the missionary fund. You will clothe the heathen at this rate, Maine. That is the ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... unconscious of sex, though she has told me since how full she was of protesting curiosities and restrained emotions. She spoke, as indeed she has always spoken, simply, clearly, and vividly; schoolgirl slang mingled with words that marked ample voracious reading, and she moved quickly with the free directness of some graceful young animal. She took many of the easy freedoms a man or a sister might have done with me. She would touch my arm, lay a hand on my shoulder ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... uproar his silence was for some time unheeded; but at length Harry Whitaker, his old college chum, now lieutenant in his Majesty's navy, and with a considerable portion of broad sailor's humour and slang, observed it, and slapping him roundly on the back, cried, "Hilloa, Frank! what are you dodging about?—quizzing the rig of your convoy, because they have too much light duck set to ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... stones was declared by the refiners of London to contain gold. There was at once—as we should say in modern slang—a boom for these Arctic regions. Queen Elizabeth took part in it, and on the 27th of May, 1577, a considerable fleet, under the command of Frobisher, sailed past the Orkneys for the south end of Greenland. It did not reach as far as ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... eventually hung at Tyburn Turnpike, in the presence of a vast crowd. According to Mr. J.T. Smith, in his "Streets of London," a Whig mug-house existed as early as 1694. It has been said the slang word "mug" owes its derivation to Lord Shaftesbury's "ugly mug," which the beer cups were moulded ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Herford in The Manchester Guardian.—'Bell's talk is full of salt and vivacity, a brilliant stream in which city slang reinforces rustic idiom, and both are re-manipulated by inexhaustible native wit. She is the most remarkable creation in a gallery where not a single figure is indistinct or conventional.... Mr. Gibson's ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... equivalent for the German word being not seldom a pure coinage that never had any existence out of Germany. Other instances there are, in which the words, though not of foreign manufacture, are almost as useless to the English student as if they were; slang-words, I mean, from the slang vocabulary, current about the latter end of the seventeenth century. These must have been laboriously culled from the works of Tom Brown, Sir Roger L'Estrange, Echard, Jeremy Collier, and others, from 1660 to 1700, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... ousting the elder brother, who later on becomes his nephew's confederate in gambling. The elder brother is true to the old religion, and as the law stood in the last century, the younger brother, by changing his religion, was able to turn him out. Barry, when a boy, learns the slang and the gait of the debauched gentlemen of the day. He is specially proud of being a gentleman by birth and manners. He had been kidnapped, and made to serve as a common soldier, but boasts that he was at once fit for ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... reeson keepin' em out in their little thin dresses in the cold, and pinch their little arms black and blue if they went to tell any of their tricks. And they learnt the older ones to be deceitful and sly and cowerdly. Learnt 'em to use jest the same slang phrases and low language that they did; tell the same lies, and so they wuz a spilin' 'em in every way; spilin' their brains with narcotics, their bodies by neglect and bad usage, and their minds and ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... reference to "Granny" (the fifteen-inch howitzer) in orders "mother" is the name given to the twelve-inch howitzer. The trench language is changing so quickly that I think the staff in the rear are unable to keep up to date, because they have recently issued an order to the effect that slang must not be used in official correspondence. Now instead of reporting that a "dud Minnie" arrived over back of "mud lane," it is necessary to put, "I have the honor to report that a projectile from a German Minnenwerfer landed in rear of Trench F 26 ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... they were absolutely terrified by this act of 'boycotting' (the slang word then current for such acts of abstention). Their counsels became wild and vacillating to the last degree: one hour they were for giving way for the present till they could hatch another plot; the next they all but sent an order for the arrest in the lump of all the workmen's committees; ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... till she shakes me, Dan!" laughed the other, lapsing into the slang of the men as ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... described in a previous chapter. On another occasion, a prisoner complained that there was a beetle in his hash. An examination was made; but whether the beetle was alive and got away, or whether the prisoner himself had "bugs," as the slang is, at any rate the examiners reported no beetle. The matter was then brought before the authorities, who ordered the complainant to the ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... with his good taste; that is to say, I have so far deviated from that stereotyped rule-so strictly observed by all our great authors-as to make my hero, who is what is curiously enough called a "Yankee Character," speak tolerably good English, instead of vulgar slang. In truth, so closely do "our great writers" adhere to this rule of depicting the eccentric American as a lean, scraggy individual, dressed most outlandishly, making splinters of the king's English, while drawling it with offensive ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... we shall find his stately and elaborate style rather too much for our nerves. He is conscious that, as a great master of language, he can play what tricks he pleases, without danger of remonstrance. And therefore, he every now and then plunges into slang, not irreverently, as a vulgar writer might do, but of malice prepense. The shock is almost as great as if an organist performing a solemn tune should suddenly introduce an imitation of the mewing of a cat. Now, he seems to say, you can't accuse me of being dull and pompous. ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... ripples, as each new point of the forest-clad banks opened out, Nilssen gave him courses and cross bearings, dazing enough to the unprofessional ear, but easily stored in a trained seaman's brain. He discoursed in easy slang of the cut-offs, the currents, the sludge-shallows, the floods, and the other vagaries of the great river's course, and punctuated his discourse with draughts of Rabeira's wine, and comments on the tangled mass of black humanity under ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... custom of inventing an arbitrary private vocabulary of words and phrases for the purpose of disguising references to functions and parts of the body regarded as immodest and indecent, first began to become common. Such private slang, growing up independently in families, and especially among women, as well as between lovers, is now almost universal. It is not confined to any European country, and has been studied in Italy by Niceforo (Il Gergo, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... across the brine Are exceedingly strong on Auld Lang Syne, But they're lost in the push when they strike a gang That is strong on American new line slang! ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... is styled 'plew' on board, in the slang of the training-ship; possibly, through some association with the 'sky blue' known in the boarding-schools ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... according to the notions and practices of those with whom he was brought up, and which he thinks the go everywhere. In a word, this character is not the offspring of untutored nature but of bad habits; it is made up of ignorance and conceit. It has a mixture of slang in it. All slang phrases are for the same reason vulgar; but there is nothing vulgar in the common English idiom. Simplicity is not vulgarity; but the looking to affectation of any sort for distinction is. A cockney is a vulgar character, whose imagination cannot wander beyond the suburbs ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Sterne for pattern or inspiration. Now Rabelais is a perpetual fount of inspiration, an inexhaustible magazine of patterns to the most "serious" novelist whose seriousness is not of the kind designated by that term in dissenting slang. That abounding narrative faculty which has been so much dwelt on touches so many subjects, and manages to carry along with it so many moods, thoughts, and even feelings, that it could not but suggest to any subsequent writer who ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... slang, Jimmie!" cautioned Ned, half laughing. "But you see the German officer, von Liebknecht, is really more than a little bit right ...
— Boy Scouts Mysterious Signal - or Perils of the Black Bear Patrol • G. Harvey Ralphson
... wailing through the busy streets, whilst the listening crowd looks on them pityingly and wonderingly, as if they were so many hungry shepherds from the mountains of Calabria. This flood of strange minstrels partly drowned the slang melodies and the monotonous strains of ordinary street musicians for a while. The professional gleeman "paled his ineffectual fire" before these mournful songsters. I think there never was so much sacred music heard ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... had picked up a good deal of slang from the nature of his associates, and she set to work to improve his language, and teach ...
— Adrift in New York - Tom and Florence Braving the World • Horatio Alger
... slang. You know every side-wheel steamer has a statement of her destination painted on her wheel house. I meant to ask what ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... his heart crying for the child he had adored and lost, he could compare himself to 'an old black rotter of a boat' past service, and could see, when criticised for it, nothing discordant in that slang rotter dropped into such verse!" A good deal of Henley is in both answers. This curious blend must have especially struck everybody who saw him and listened to him in his own home. I can recall summer Sunday afternoons at Addiscombe, with Henley sitting on a rug spread on the ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Souvenirs, 1900: "Whoever reads Berlioz's scores before hearing them played can have no real idea of their effect. The instruments appear to be arranged in defiance of all common sense; and it would seem, to use professional slang, that cela ne dut pas sonner, but cela sonne wonderfully. If we find here and there obscurities of style, they do not appear in the orchestra; light streams into it and plays there as in ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... and chaste of all the poets of the newer comedy. Unlike Plautus, he draws his characters from good society, and his comedies, if not moral, were decent. Plautus wrote for the multitude; Terence for the few. Plautus delighted in a noisy dialogue and slang expressions; Terence confines himself to quiet conversation and elegant expressions, for which he was admired by Cicero and Quintilian, and other great critics. He aspired to the approval of the good, rather than the applause of the vulgar; and it ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... whispered—"Caution." "Well, Miss Hypocrisy," quoth the Student, "what serious offence shall I commit against propriety or morality by reading a whimsical jeu-d'esprit, penned to explain the peculiar lingual localisms of Eton, and display her chief characteristic follies." "It is slang," said Prudence. "Granted," said Horatio: "but he who undertakes to depict real life must not expect to make a pleasing or a correct picture, without the due proportions of light and shade. 'Vice to be hated needs but to be seen.' ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... significant. Voler, or faire la vole (from the Latin vola, palm of the hand), means to take all the tricks in a game of ombre; so that le voleur, the robber, is the capitalist who takes all, who gets the lion's share. Probably this verb voler had its origin in the professional slang of thieves, whence it has passed into common use, and, consequently into the phraseology of ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Olivia; she was pretty and merry and kind; and, above all, she had mastered to perfection the rare art of letting children alone. If we kept ourselves tolerably clean, and refrained from quarrelling or talking slang, Aunt Olivia did not worry us. Aunt Janet, on the contrary, gave us so much good advice and was so constantly telling us to do this or not to do the other thing, that we could not remember half her ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... buck up, old girl," said Dorothy Kip abruptly. "Oh, excuse me, Mrs. Hollister, but sometimes I just love to use slang. You go ahead and wish hard for what you want and you'll get it. I always do. Say, don't you know that you can influence others to think exactly as you do? By wishing with all your might you can will ...
— How Ethel Hollister Became a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... elaborate art, but it still bears some birthmarks, some signs of the early popular chant, out of which it sprung, as the garden-rose springs from the wild stock, When this is recognised the demand for ballad-like simplicity and 'ballad-slang' ceases to exist, and then all Homeric translations in the ballad manner cease to represent our conception of Homer. After the belief in the ballad manner follows the recognition of the romantic vein in Homer, and, as ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... entertaining this high opinion of themselves can scarcely be wondered at; they were low fellows, but masters of driving; driving was in fashion, and sprigs of nobility used to dress as coachmen and imitate the slang and behaviour of coachmen, from whom occasionally they would take lessons in driving as they sat beside them on the box, which post of honour any sprig of nobility who happened to take a place on a coach claimed as his unquestionable right; ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... a man to go out to Belgium and get some good 'stuff.' [Stuff, let me say, is the technical or slang term for film pictures.] How would you like ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... said Billy briefly, "and I'm blowed if I'll ask my dear old dad to come to the rescue. He's had to cough up (shame on your slang, Billy) far too much already. I tell you, Gordon, I'm so fixed that I can't explain these things unless I'm actually brought to trial. It's—it's—well—you have no secret societies at the Point as we do at college, so you can't fathom it. I'm no more afraid of standing trial than I am of ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... There is a slang expression current among the irreverent youth of the present day, when referring to a man wise in his own conceit, to the effect that "what that fellow does not know is torn out." So I, quoting my juniors, ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... petted; whom the Prince had just seen, very elegant with his stick and eyeglass, and his careless, disdainful air; and who had said, like a man accustomed to every magnificence, fatigued with luxury, blase with pleasure, and caring only for what is truly pschutt (to use the latest slang): "Pretty women so ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... after a few preliminary remarks, all tending towards and leading up to the point he had in his mind, inquired if we happened to be acquainted with the Dowager Lady Snorflerer. On our replying in the negative, he presumed we had often met Lord Slang, or beyond all doubt, that we were on intimate terms with Sir Chipkins Glogwog. Finding that we were equally unable to lay claim to either of these distinctions, he expressed great astonishment, and turning to his wife with a retrospective ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... But he never can get any real "life" out of any of these things. He is neither a fool, nor a cad, nor anything discreditable or disagreeable. He is "only an or'nary person," to reach the rhythm of the original by adopting a slang form in not quite the slang sense. And perhaps it is not unnatural that other ordinary persons should find him too faithful to their type to be welcome. In this respect at least I may claim not to be ordinary. One goes down so many empty wells, or wells with mere rubbish at the bottom ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Hall. It was a conventional occasion, and they were received by Mrs. Morrison and the teachers, and responded with an elaborate politeness that was the cult of the College. For the space of three hours an extremely high-toned atmosphere prevailed, not a word of slang offended the ear, and everybody behaved with the dignity and courtesy demanded by such a stately ceremony. Mrs. Morrison, in black silk and old lace, her white hair dressed high, was an imposing figure, and set a standard of cultured deportment that was copied by ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... arrived in their native province, and found it absorbed in the unremitting toil of the wine-crop of 1836; there could therefore be no public demonstration in their favor. "We have fallen flat," said Lousteau to his companion, in the slang of ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... here to mention the use, or rather misuse, of words which are often called "slang," such as "awfully jolly," "fearfully tedious," "horribly dull," or the expression "quite alarming," which young ladies, I think, have now happily forgotten, and the equally silly use of the word "howling" by young men. Such expressions mean absolutely nothing, ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... was a bit of slang, and I like to use bits of English slang when I can; they'll be so useful to know by-and-by when I am scolding my people. ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... heads were moved by one muscle, all the faces were turned toward him with wide, derisive grins. He seemed to hear some one make a humorous remark in a low tone. At it the others all crowed and cackled. He was a slang phrase. ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... Caroms! Will you be so good as to spare us your slang speeches," continued Mademoiselle de Corandeuil, who seemed to become more crabbed as the young girl's confusion increased. "What a fine education for a young lady! and one who has just come from the 'Sacred Heart'! One that has taken five prizes not fifteen days ago! I really do not know what to ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... sure, you must seek. But orderly thought, patience and fine craftsmanship in carrying out your idea frequently count for more than the originality or brilliance of the idea itself. Owing to the restlessness of the world situation—wars and rumors of wars, strikes and overtendency towards jazz and slang—there is already, especially in the work of youngsters, too evident an urge to be different; different merely for the sake of ...
— Pictorial Photography in America 1922 • Pictorial Photographers of America
... that," laughed Miss Day with one of her delicious excursions into slang, "it was just for Maman's writing things—but I'm that ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... a la porra is a vulgarism almost the same in meaning and use as the English slang, "Tell it to the policeman," porra being the Spanish term for the ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... are but astral appearances resulting from the projection of powerful thought-forms from the mind of the magician or other wonder-worker, of whom India has a plentiful supply. Even the ignorant fakirs (I use the word in its true sense, not in the sense given it by American slang)—even these itinerant showmen of psychic phenomena, are able to produce phenomena of this kind which seems miraculous to those witnessing them. As for the trained occultists of India, I may say that their ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... the guests at the dinner said that the Americans by the introduction of slang were ruining the English language. Mr. James Russell Lowell had come evidently prepared for this controversy. He said that American slang was the common language of that part of England from which the Pilgrims sailed, and that it had been preserved ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... His first edition of the Bengali New Testament appeared in 1801, his Grammar in the same year, and at the same time his Colloquies, or "dialogues intended to facilitate the acquiring of the Bengali language," which he wrote out of the abundance of his knowledge of native thought, idioms, and even slang, to enable students to converse with all classes of society, as Erasmus had done in another way. His Dictionary of 80,000 words began to appear in 1815. Knowing, however, that in the long run the literature of a nation must be of indigenous growth, he at once pressed the natives ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... with sidus, star, as in considerare, to examine the stars with attention, hence, to look closely at. If this is so, the history of the transition in meaning is unknown. J. B. Greenough (Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, i. 96) has suggested that the word is a military slang term. According to this theory desiderare meant originally to miss a soldier from the ranks at roll-call, the root being that seen in sedere, to sit, sedes, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... the sound of approaching footsteps, it half raises its head and hisses. Often have I come to a sudden pull-up on foot and on horseback, on hearing their dreaded warning! There is also the cobra-capello, nearly as dangerous, several black snakes, and the boem-slang, or tree-snake, less deadly, one of which I once shot seven feet long. The Cape is also infested by scorpions, whose sting is little less virulent than a snake-bite; and by the spider called the tarantula, which is extremely dreaded.—The ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... couple was spewed forth from the maw of the metropolis—"Henery and Bessie Dobbs", as they subscribed themselves. "Henery" proved to be the adult stage of the East Side "gamin"; lean and cynical, full of slang and humor and the odor of cigarettes. He was fresh from a "ticket-chopper's" job in the subway, and he knew no more about farming than Thyrsis did; but he put up a clever "bluff", and was so prompt with his wits ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... Chancellor, the judges, the lawyers, the ministers of the Crown, and many other distinguished people were accustomed to use the same expression, I would fain hope that it was not meant for profanity, but was a sort of fashionable slang intended only to be emphatic. Fifty years have seen a great improvement in the use of language, and the vulgarism which then appeared to be of slight importance is now regarded, almost universally with gentlemen, to be ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it, and smote the Philistine in his forehead; and the stone sank into his forehead, and he fell upon his face ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... enough to devise a governmental machine which will work without effort on the part of the people, we can sit at home while elections run themselves so well that only what the good people desire in political action will necessarily result. We want the equivalent of what, in the slang of practical mechanics, we call a fool-proof machine, because anybody can run it and no fool can interfere with its normal operation. So these political reformers are hunting a corrupt-politician-proof machine for government. It does not and cannot exist. No government can exist which ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... examining the papers. Suddenly this cautious, strong-minded man looked up into Yuba Bill's waiting face, and said quietly, in the despicable slang of ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... they think BOULANGER "mizzles," After all his recent "fizzles"? (Most expressive slang, the Yankee!) Pas si bete, my friends. No thank ye! Came a cropper? Very true! But I remount—my hobby's new, So's my trumpet. Rooey-too! France go softly? Pas de danger! Whilst she ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... he has learned no end of Yankee tricks. Do you suppose that if left to himself he would ever have been up to this morning's performance? Oh, we've polished his wicked wits for him! Even his dialect is no longer pure South Carolinian; it is corrupted by Northern slang. We have ruined his religious principles, too. The crackers haven't much of any morality, but they are very religious,—all Southerners are. But Demming is an unconscious Agnostic. 'I tell ye,' he says to ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... gently. "I'm sorry if I hit too hard. But I feel rather strongly on that subject. I've no wish to slang you. I only want to set you on your feet, and keep you there. So we may as well get ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... how true this is of that common property of the vulgar and fashionable—slang. The apt phrase falls and applause follows, and then down it goes. The essential feature of slang is words misapplied; the essential distinction of a coarse mind from one refined, an inability to appreciate fine distinctions and minor discords; the essential ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... doorway Marion checked herself abruptly, because she had resolved to purify her vocabulary of slang and all frivolous expressions. Her eyelids were pink, her lips were moist and tremulous, her face was all ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... things, she would not have dared to say so; for there was a time still near in her memory, though unknown to any now upon the farm except her brother, when the Mains of Glashruach was the talk of Daurside because of certain inexplicable nightly disorders that fell out there; the slang rows, or the Scotch remishs (a form of the English romage), would perhaps come nearest to a designation of them, consisting as they did of confused noises, rumblings, ejaculations; and the fact itself was a reason for silence, seeing a word ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... P. was a very dignified gentleman and did not revert to his boyhood's slang except under extreme provocation. "He shouldn't have allowed you to urge him. And what about the brilliant prospect you gave up once just because his father was ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... despise it, aw can't tell, It's plain to understand; An sure aw am it saands as weel, Tho' happen net soa grand. Tell fowk they're courtin, they're enraged, They call that vulgar slang; But if aw tell 'em they're engaged, That's net ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... mental degradation, follow in the train of this class of writers. In what consists the merit of Uncle Tom's Cabin? It is hard to tell. Look at its dark design—its injustice—its falsehoods! Its vulgarisms, negroisms, localisms, and common place slang! Its tendency to pervert public taste, and corrupt public morals. How remarkable that a work of its character, should have been so much read and admired! We may boast of our intelligence and virtue to our hearts ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... "is Army slang. Your 'striker' is a private soldier, whom you hire at so many a dollars a month to do the rougher work in your quarters. You make whatever bargain you choose with the soldier. At this post the bachelor officers usually pay a striker eight dollars ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... ran away from home, he said. At first he found that a wholly new place and new people took him out of himself ("surprised me," he said, "so that I could not live everything beforehand"). Thus he fled. The slang he used, "chased himself all over the country," seemed peculiarly expressive. He had been in foreign countries; he had herded sheep in Australia (so he said), and certainly from his knowledge of the country he had wandered with the gamboleros of South America; he had gone ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... was not pretty. It seemed to me that even the sad sea waves were kinder to the Pretty Girl, such is the influence of youth and beauty. There were various men—heavy swells I should call some of them, only that that would be slang; but heavy swells were the order of the day. Then there was a benevolent old lady who believed in everything—in the music, and the Jane Moseley, and the long days, and the summer. There was another old lady of restless mind, who evidently believed in nothing, hoped for nothing, expected nothing. ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... Bailey. "And you'll come near beating, too. We shall have to work harder than ever, but I'll beat Jack Allingham—or bust! Excuse the slang, Gertie, but I've ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... flippancy. We could cite many instances of felicitous expression, some, also, of bad taste, and some of hasty assertion. "Clubable" is hardly a good enough word to bear frequent repetition. "This question was a complete baffler" is too much like slang to be admitted into the good company which Mr. Parton's sentences usually keep. We were not aware that "Physician, heal thyself" was a stock classical allusion. We do not believe—for Dante and Milton would rise up in judgment against us, even if the vast majority ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... of humanity that gathered nightly there I felt I had indeed sunk to the lowest depths. The place was a regular thieves' kitchen ... what is called in the hideous Yiddish jargon that is the criminal slang of modern Germany a "Kaschemme." Never in my life have I seen such brutish faces as those that leered at me nightly through the smoke haze as I shuffled from table to table in my mean German clothes. ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... of the slang language that the older midshipmen use when conversing together. Many somewhat obscure points in the regulations were made ...
— Dave Darrin's First Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock
... said mother, drily. "I think, my dear, you can 'tell that yarn to the marines,' as you say in your favourite sea slang. I know what sort of spirits ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... from our camp at the "Twenty-five," I was astonished to find Coolgardie almost deserted, not even the usual "Sunday School" going on. Now I am sorry to disappoint my readers who are not conversant with miners' slang, but they must not picture rows of good little children sitting in the shade of the gum-trees, to whom some kind-hearted digger is expounding the Scriptures. No indeed! The miners' school is neither more nor less than a largely attended game of pitch-and-toss, at which sometimes hundreds of ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... the sergeants and corporals were a little uncertain about Gerhardt. His laconic speech, never embroidered by the picturesque slang they relished, his gravity, and his rare, incredulous smile, alike puzzled them. Was the new officer a dude? Sergeant Hicks asked of his chum, Dell Able. No, he wasn't a dude. Was he a swellhead? ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... to say that he found out as many as seventeen words incorrectly spelt in one letter. But she deftly excused herself by saying that she used archaic forms. "Never mind St. George," she writes good-humouredly, to Mrs. E. G. Burton, "I like old spelling." She did not excuse her slang by calling it old, or refer her friends ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... boys or youths organized, armed and trained on volunteer military lines. Derived from "cadet," through the Scots form "cadee," comes "caddie," a messenger-boy, and particularly one who carries clubs at golf, and also the slang word "cad," a vulgar, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... were left alone, neither the first nor the second nor'-wester of brandy-and-water could arouse him from his sullen mood. He told me frankly, and in his own sea-slang, that he could not disintegrate the idea of a lawyer from that of the devil, and that he was assured that neither I nor my cause would prosper if I permitted the interference of a land-shark. I was even obliged ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... monotony of existence among the gum-trees. The typical Australian is an odd combination of the practical and the ideal. He is a student who learns to read to himself a foreign language, but does not attain to its pronunciation. He has no knowledge of the current jargon or society slang. He has unconsciously rejected vulgarisms and shallow conceits; but all the deeper thoughts, the poetry of life, which appeal to the soul, he has ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... In the slang of the day, Goliah had delivered the goods. The nine captains of industry who had failed to accept his invitation were dead. A sort of violent disintegration of the tissues was the report of the various autopsies held on the bodies ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... world he is," she answered archly, employing the A.E.F. slang she had already learned from Donald. She linked her arm in old Hector's and steered him down the hall to the living-room. "Your grandson is in there," she said, and opening the door she gently propelled him ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... reproductions of their desert homes. Representing other native races, there are the Samoan Village, the Maori Village, and the Tehuantepec Village. All these people are genuine and live in primitive style on the Zone, though, to tell the truth, they are quite likely to use college slang and know which fork to use first. Not on the Zone, but proper to be mentioned here, are the Blackfoot Indians brought to the Exposition from Glacier Park by the Great Northern Railroad. Eagle Calf is a real chief of the old days, and his band is ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... my wood cottage, it is quite close to the Rossert, as you see. Some people call me the wood-woman, others Frau Holle," she said. "The Old King (the mountain called Altkoenig) is my brother; Olle (slang in German for old) or Holle, it is all the same, we are all relations in the Taunus, ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... Newnham Darsie and Hannah fell gradually and happily into the routine of college life. They grew to recognise their companions by name, and to place them according to their several "shops"; they entertained cocoa parties in their rooms; picked up slang terms, and talked condescendingly of "townees"; they paid up subscriptions to "Hall," "Games," "Flowers," and "Fic"; slept, played, and laughed and talked, and, above all, worked, with heart and mind, and with every day that passed were more convinced that to be a student at Cambridge was ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... eminent writers; some, misapplications that weaken and disfigure the style of him who adopts them; and some, downright vulgarisms—that is, phrases that come from below, and are thrust into clean company with the odors of slang about them. These last are often a device for giving piquancy to style. Against such abuses we should be the more heedful, because, from the convenience of some of them, they get so incorporated into daily speech ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... Zero. — N. zero, nothing; null, nul, naught, nought, void; cipher, goose egg; none, nobody, no one; nichts[Ger.], nixie*, nix*; zilch, zip, zippo [all slang]; not a soul; ame qui vive[Fr]; absence &c. 187; unsubstantiality &c. 4[obs3]. Adj. not one, not a one, not any, nary a one [dial.];not a, never a; not a whit of, not an iota of, not a drop of, not a speck of, not a jot; not a trace of, not a hint of, not a smidgen of, not a suspicion ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... fixed on the jovial party he had left, and straining his ears to catch if possible a little of their conversation. This he soon found was to no purpose for what did actually reach his ears was disguised so completely by the use of cant words and the thieves-latin called slang, that even when he caught the words, he found himself as far as ever from the sense of their conversation. At length he ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... rules. She held a surprise inspection of the juniors' desks and drawers, and pounced upon illicit packets of chocolate; she examined their books, and confiscated any which she considered unsuitable; she put a ban upon slang, and wrote out a new set of dormitory regulations. Her efforts were hardly so much appreciated as they deserved. The girls grumbled at this ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... piffle," replied the Eurasian without turning his head. Two things he dearly loved to acquire: a bit of American slang and a bit of English silver. He was invariably changing his rupees into shillings, and Warrington could not convince him that he was always ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... example by Professor Masson, who spoke of "the shrewdness and sagacity of some of his critical prefaces to his novels, where he discusses principles of literature without seeming to call them such."[491] Scott was quick to notice "cant and slang"[492] in the professional language of men in all arts; and he valued most highly the remarks of those whose intelligence had not been overlaid by a ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... see you at your Berlin wools. Pardon me - but whenever I see a lady busy with her needle and a bit of canvass, I always think she is hard up for something to think of. Pardon again, Daisy. I know you have no mercy upon slang." ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the smugglers and owlers who had used the Woolpack as their headquarters long ago, riding by moonlight to the cross-roads, with their mouths full of slang—cant talk of "mackerel" and "fencing" ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... of tautology which, together with a fondness for misplaced pleasantry, gives rise to the vicious style described above. It gives some practical rules for writing a long sentence clearly and impressively; and it also examines the difference between slang, conversation, and written prose. Both for translating from foreign languages into English, and for writing original English composition, these rules have been used in teaching, and, we venture to ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... assure the Blade neophyte, it is all the rage to ask for "Two of swipes, ducky." Go in boldly, bang down your money as loudly as possible, and shout that out at the top of your voice. If it is a barman, though, you had better not say "ducky." The slang will, we can ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... novels alone it would be difficult to determine his rank; but judging him by his high aim and distinguished style (a style remarkable for its charm and purity in an age too much influenced by newspaper slang and smartness) he is certainly one of the best of our recent prose writers. Since his first modest volume appeared in 1860 he has published many poems, sketches of travel, appreciations of literature, parlor comedies, novels,—an ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... use the word "flabbergasted" as expressing Miss Baker's immediate state of mind, I should draw down on myself the just anger of the critics, in that I had condescended to the use of slang; but what other word will so well express what is meant? She had fully intended to go back to Littlebath, and had intended to do so at the earliest moment that would be possible. Was not Sir Lionel still at Littlebath? ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... his pony, pulled up the lariat pin which held him out upon the prairie and scampered for home, and Billy and Davie Dunn, his chum, were forced to "hoof it," as the western slang ...
— Beadle's Boy's Library of Sport, Story and Adventure, Vol. I, No. 1. - Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood to Manhood • Prentiss Ingraham
... buzzing noxious insects swarm out of their childish mouths; frightful nicknames, thieves' slang, sailors' oaths, that they perhaps had learnt down on the wharf; and they are both so engaged that they do not notice my landlady, who rushes out to see what is ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... dying out there, and the "dishonourable" trade of the show-shops and slop-shops—the plate-glass palaces, where gents—and, alas! those who would be indignant at that name—buy their cheap-and-nasty clothes. The two names are the tailors' own slang; slang is true and expressive enough, though, now and then. The honourable shops in the West End number only sixty; the dishonourable, four hundred and more; while at the East End the dishonourable trade ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... the marvellous progress of Scientific Inventions, hailing from the keen-brained West, you could condone the degradation of the English language in the mouths of Shakespeare's countrymen and countrywomen by the use of American slang phrases, common, vulgar, coarse, alternating with choice expressions culled from the vocabulary of ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... logical sequence or congruity, or for striking a key of expression and keeping it, but becomes simply the most spontaneous and unstudied of human beings. He has at his command the whole vocabularies of the English and Scottish languages, classical and slang, with good stores of the French, and tosses and tumbles them about irresponsibly to convey the impression or affection, the mood or freak of the moment; pouring himself out in all manner of rhapsodical confessions and speculations, grave or gay, notes of observation and criticism, snatches of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "meritote," and explains it from Spelman as a game in which children made themselves giddy by whirling on ropes. In French, "virer" means to turn; and the explanation may, therefore, suit either reading. In modern slang parlance, Gerveis would probably have said, "on the rampage," or "on the swing" — not ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... gentry, nay, I verily believe the most important personages of the realm, and their entertaining this high opinion of themselves can scarcely be wondered at; they were low fellows, but masters at driving; driving was in fashion, and sprigs of nobility used to dress as coachmen and imitate the slang and behaviour of the coachmen, from whom occasionally they would take lessons in driving as they sat beside them on the box, which post of honour any sprig of nobility who happened to take a place on a coach claimed as his unquestionable right; and these sprigs ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... best to avoid those faults which the habit of public speaking is likely to generate. He was so nervously apprehensive of sliding into some colloquial incorrectness, of debasing his style by a mixture of parliamentary slang, that he ran into the opposite error, and purified his vocabulary with a scrupulosity unknown to any purist. "Ciceronem Allobroga dixit." He would not allow Addison, Bolingbroke, or Middleton to be a ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... wrong when we've come to this, and the wrong does not lie with these people but with those they imitate—Gorgeous Girls, new-rich with sickly consciences and lack of principle and common sense; and these Gorgeous Girls in turn take their styles, slang phrases, and modes of recreation, as well as theories of life from the boldest dancer, the most sensational chorus girl—and it's wrong and not what America should be called upon to endure. And it all reverts back ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley |
