"Ungrammatical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hearing, and even if he had not been, his mind to-night was proof against all the consolations of philosophy. Mr. Scogan replaced his pipe between his teeth and resumed his meditative pacing. "Under any circumstances," he repeated to himself. It was ungrammatical to begin with; was it true? And is life really its own reward? He wondered. When his pipe had burned itself to its stinking conclusion he took a drink of gin and went to bed. In ten minutes he was deeply, ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... of Michelangelo's poetry is rather psychological than purely literary. He never claimed to be more than an amateur, writing to amuse himself. His style is obscure, crabbed, ungrammatical. Expression only finds a smooth and flowing outlet when the man's nature is profoundly stirred by some powerful emotion, as in the sonnets to Cavalieri, or the sonnets on the deaths of Vittoria Colonna and Urbino, or the sonnets on the thought of his own death. For the most part, it is clear that ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... the pen, slip of the tongue; lapsus linguae[Lat]; slipslop[obs3]; bull; barbarism, impropriety. V. use bad grammar, faulty grammar; solecize[obs3], commit a solecism; murder the King's English, murder the Queen's English, break Priscian's head. Adj. ungrammatical; incorrect, inaccurate; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... combinations, putting the abstract for the concrete, transferring the perception of one sense to another, intermingling the nomenclature of arts, and using a great variety of metaphorical and even ungrammatical phrases. Poets owe much of their power to such combinations, and we find that allusions, which are confessedly the reverse of true, are often the most beautiful, touch the heart deepest, and live longest in the memory. Thus the lover delights ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... of condolence may be abrupt, badly constructed, ungrammatical—never mind. Grace of expression counts for nothing; sincerity alone is of value. It is the expression, however clumsily put, of a personal something which was loved, and will ever be missed, that alone brings solace to those who are left. Your message may speak merely ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... announced of the house in which Shakespeare was born. It had long been a show-place in private hands. A general feeling declared itself in favour of the purchase of the house for the nation. Public sentiment was in accord with the ungrammatical grandiloquence of the auctioneer, the famous Robins, whose advertisement of the sale included the sentence: "It is trusted the feeling of the country will be so evinced that the structure may be secured, hallowed, and cherished as a national monument almost ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... many of his heroes have already wearied two generations of readers. At times his characters will speak with something far beyond propriety with a true heroic note; but on the next page they will he wading wearily forward with an ungrammatical and undramatic rigmarole of words. The man who could conceive and write the character of Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot, as Scott has conceived and written it, had not only splendid romantic, but splendid tragic gifts. How comes it, then, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on before, Iought, no doubt, to have called attention to it. But similar anomalous forms occur in Epic literature also, and more than that, attention had but lately been called to them by a very eminent Dutch scholar, Dr. Kern, who, in his translation of the B{ri}hat-Sa{m}hit, remarks that the ungrammatical nom. plur. vidushas is by no means rare in the Mahbhrata and kindred works. If Professor Whitney had only read as far as the eleventh hymn in the first book of the Rig-Veda, he would have met there in abibhyushas an undoubted nom. ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... astonished at the little woman's indignation. She said just those things which make you feel as if somebody had been calling you names or kicking you—Was I really a doctor? and so on. It did not gain by being put in the ungrammatical tongue of Quakers. However, I never did fancy smallpox, and what could a fellow get by doctoring wretches like these? So I held my tongue and went away. About a week afterwards I met Evans, the dispensary man, a very common fellow, who ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... had only an ungrammatical knowledge, like many of his race in Russia. This turn for versifying drew him to a gloomy and depressed schoolfellow, the son of a poor Russian general, who was considered in the school to be a great future light in literature. The latter patronised him. ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... his attention had been so concentrated on the ungrammatical form in which she had conveyed the information, that the fact itself had made no impression. Now his anger against Mrs. Leadbatter dwindled. After all, she was wise in not giving Mary Ann the run of the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... servir de Memoire et de Relation du Voyage que j'ay fait sur le Lac Ontario pour attirer au nouvel Etablissement de La Presentation les Sauvages Iroquois des Cinq Nations, 1751. The last passage given above is condensed in the rendering, as the original is extremely involved and ungrammatical.] ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... wonderful information that you once had an aunt Susan. The unseen world imagined in our hypothesis is not connected with the present material universe by any such "invisible bonds" as would allow Bacon and Addison to come to Boston and write the silliest twaddle in the most ungrammatical English before a roomful of people who have never learned how to test what they are pleased to call the "evidence of their senses." Our hypothesis is expressly framed so as to exclude all intercourse whatever between the unseen world of spirit unconditioned by matter and the present world ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... fowls Blinking wonderfully wise, With our great round eyes— Sitting singly in the gloaming and no longer two and two, As unwilling to be wedded as unpracticed how to woo; With regard to being mated, Asking still with aggravated Ungrammatical acerbity: ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... all said in the middle of dictation of orders, and so I expect it's ungrammatical, but you ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... certainly not by Johnson. It contains more than one ungrammatical passage. It is impossible to believe that he wrote such a sentence as the following:—'Another having a cask of wine sealed up at the top, but his servant boring a hole at the bottom stole the greatest part of it away; sometime ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... eyes that fairly blazed with the radiance of rectitude, "who do you take me for?" If Mr. BEZZLE had been less violent he would probably have said, "Whom do you take me for," and so have spared himself the ignominy of sinking to the ungrammatical level of the Common Herd. But the fact is, his proud spirit was chafed and fretted at the spectacle of sordid self-seeking that everywhere met his gaze, and excess of sentiment made him forgetful of syntax. "Mark me, my friend, I am not to be bought," he continued in unconscious blank verse. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various
... year was a proper rent for it even at the inflated rates. He made this statement with excellent brevity, moderation, and good temper, and concluded by moving that the term be two instead of ten years. A robust young man, with a bull neck and of ungrammatical habits, said, in a tone of impatient disdain, that the landlord of the building had 'refused' $1500 a year for it. 'Question!' 'Question!' shouted half a dozen angry voices; the question was instantly put, when a perfect war of noes voted down Mr. Pullman's amendment. ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... entrance to the communicating stairway is groined also. Otherwise the church, though noble as a whole, is somewhat devoid of objects of interest. Note, however (1) the fine roof, (2) old brass lectern with ungrammatical inscription, (3) 16th-cent. brass on floor of chancel, (4) 15th-cent. brass to an ecclesiastic. Yeovil contains few old houses, as it was burnt out in the 15th cent., but in Middle Street two buildings deserve attention: (a) an old chantry house, now transformed into the "Castle" ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... "waterfall"; Angus McMullen, alone, his father detained professionally; Mrs. Cathcart and Georgie; young Bradford carrying his banjo, his wonderful raiment and his air of vast leisure; Welton, the lumberman, red-faced, jolly, popular and ungrammatical. The women guarded baskets. All greeted the Ordes with various degrees of hilarity. When the noise had died down, a massive and impressive lady, heretofore unnamed, stepped forward. She held a jewelled ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... & Company direct ten days before you came prancing in with your head all swelled up with a brand-new idea for making a lot of easy money in a hurry. Me charter to them—me!" In his superb scorn Cappy waxed ungrammatical. "I should kiss a pig! Why, if sawmills were selling for six bits each I wouldn't trust that concern with a hatful of sawdust—not that they weren't honest and capable, but they haven't got any money to ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... with her since they were children together, so there could be no possible doubt in the matter. But whether she cared a jot for him and his feelings he could not clearly make out, from the style of the hurried, ungrammatical sentences, crammed with abbreviations and unpermissible elisions. True, she said three times that she hoped he would come to America; but America was a long way off, and she very likely reckoned on his laziness and dislike to foreign traveling. It is so easy for ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... murderous light in her eyes, nor any dramatic gesture with the words; but she was a little paler than before, and there was an odd fixedness in her expression, and Marcello knew that she was deeply moved, by the way she fell back into her primitive peasant's speech, not ungrammatical, but oddly rough and forcible compared with the language of educated society which she had now learned ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... I was going, sir," said the parson, dryly, for he was much offended at that vague and ungrammatical remark applicable to his horsemanship, that "he ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was well grounded in my youth by an old gentleman, a friend of my family, and I may say my guardian,' said I; 'but I have forgotten it since. God forbid I should delude you into thinking me a herald, sir! I am only an ungrammatical amateur.' ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "tells his churlish tale in his manner," of which manner the less said the better; while in the "Reeve's Tale," Chaucer even, after the manner of a comic dramatist, gives his Northern undergraduate a vulgar ungrammatical phraseology, probably designedly, since the poet was himself a "Southern man." The "Pardoner" is exuberant in his sample-eloquence; the "Doctor of Physic" is gravely and ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... house. I wouldn't mind his bad grammar now. I've learned one or two valuable little things out yonder, and one is that it doesn't matter if a man's grammar is askew, so long as he doesn't swear at you. By the way, is Peter as ungrammatical as ever?" ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of pedantry to be always wrong. Your true prig of a pedant goes immensely out of his way to be vastly more correct than other people, and succeeds in the end in being vastly more ungrammatical, or vastly more illogical, or both at ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... the same time the manner of the fair one altered; she met her admirer's gaze with a disingenuously languishing eye, she pressed his hand at meeting and at parting, she replied to his frequent letters in fervent if ungrammatical terms. Old Moore was in the ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... of his (a certain Sir Jervis Redwood), who was in search of a secretary. Being in favor of letting the women compete for employment with the men, Sir Jervis was willing to try, what he calls, 'a female.' Isn't that a horrid way of speaking of us? and Miss Ladd says it's ungrammatical, besides. Papa had written back to say he knew of no lady whom he could recommend. When he got my letter speaking of Emily, he kindly wrote again. In the interval, Sir Jervis had received two applications for the vacant ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... is not "ungrammatical" as far as the Hebrew language is concerned, notwithstanding that it was rejected in the reign of James I. *lechem*, "bread," is evidently the accusative noun to the transitive verb *yiten*, "He shall ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... considerable mines in Durham, threatened the small tradesmen in "his" town of Seaham with his most high displeasure if they should continue to give credit to "his" rebellious workers. This "noble" lord made himself the first clown of the turnout in consequence of the ridiculous, pompous, ungrammatical ukases addressed to the workers, which he published from time to time, with no other result than the merriment of the nation. When none of their efforts produced any effect, the mine owners imported, ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... come snatches of a humorously amorous nature—"Hallo, Hallo, Who's Your Lady Friend?"; "You're my Baby"; and the ungrammatical "Who Were You With Last Night?" Another great favourite is an involved composition which always appears to begin in the middle. It deals severely with the precocity of a youthful lover who has been detected wooing his lady in the Park. ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... greatly taken with cribbage. It was an essentially vulgar game, I have heard her say,—disputing with her uncle, who was very partial to it. She could never heartily bring her mouth to pronounce "go"—or "that's a go." She called it an ungrammatical game. The pegging teased her. I once knew her to forfeit a rubber (a five dollar stake), because she would not take advantage of the turn-up knave, which would have given it her, but which she must have claimed ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... "Don't be ungrammatical, whatever you do. She's a cashier in a restaurant, and she's a fine girl," he added, steadily, as if combating a prejudice. He forgot for the moment that such prejudices did not exist ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... perfectly plain," Janet replied consolingly. "You thought she was me while all the time she was she and me was me,"—the hodge-podge of pronouns and their ungrammatical use was too much for poor Chuck. He buried his head in his hands, ...
— Phyllis - A Twin • Dorothy Whitehill
... speech was seldom ungrammatical, and her intonation was not flagrantly vulgar, but the accent of the London poor, which brands as with hereditary baseness, still clung to her words, rendering futile such propriety of phrase as she owed to years of association ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... did say. We went and had a drink. He was not mistaken. His observation was most just; but his perspective was that of those literary critics who give ten lines to pointing out three slips of syntax, and three lines to an ungrammatical admission that the novel under survey is not ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... are more than could have happened without the concurrence of many causes. The stile of Shakespeare was in itself ungrammatical, perplexed and obscure; his works were transcribed for the players by those who may be supposed to have seldom understood them; they were transmitted by copiers equally unskilful, who still multiplied errours; they were perhaps sometimes mutilated by the ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... was unfinished: there are many prosaical passages in it, many lame and harsh lines, incorrect and even ungrammatical expressions, trivial images, and, above all, many Lombard provincialisms, which are not in their nature of a "significant or graceful" sort,[6] and which shocked the fastidious Florentines, the arbiters of Italian taste. It was to avoid ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... uncouth to look upon: thy face is unshaven, thy shirt dirty, and lo! thy overalls smell of paint and grease; thy speech is ungrammatical, and thy manners unpolished—but give us the grasp of thy honest hand, and the warm feelings of thy generous heart, fifty, yes a million times sooner than the mean heart and niggard hand of the selfish cur that calls itself ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... lifelong indebtedness to Chancellor Hoyt. He was suffering fearfully with old-fashioned consumption, but he used to send for me to read to him to distract his thoughts. He would also criticize my conversation, never letting one word pass that was ungrammatical or incorrectly pronounced. If I said, "I am so glad," he would ask, "So glad that what? You don't give the correlative." He warned against reliance on the aid of alliteration. The books read to him were discussed and the ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... Jasper wished that he knew more of the history back of Pierre and the girl. A man could do little but look out for his own interests, when he worked in the dark. Which would be the better man for Jane?—this Jane so trained, so educated, so far removed superficially from the ungrammatical, bronzed, clumsily dressed, graceful visitor. In every worldly respect, doubtless, Prosper Gael. Only—there were Pierre's eyes and the soul looking ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... concessions.' [628] Pax conventa, 'the peace which is agreed upon.' Observe the rare use of the passive participle; for convenire is commonly intransitive—as pax convenit, a 'peace is concluded.' [629] In potestatem habere is ungrammatical for in potestate habere, but is found now and then. See Zumpt, S 316. [630] The expression is somewhat contorted; for the inserted clause non sua ignavia sed ob rem publicam should have a verb of its own, which, however, would ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... Shakespeare imploring him to aid them. Greene himself sent to the dramatist 'a note of inconveniences [to the corporation that] would happen by the enclosure.' But although an ambiguous entry of a later date (September 1615) in the few extant pages of Greene's ungrammatical diary has been unjustifiably tortured into an expression of disgust on Shakespeare's part at Combe's conduct, {271} it is plain that, in the spirit of his agreement with Combe's agent, he continued to lend Combe his countenance. Happily Combe's efforts ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... were outcast by them, she came to know more of the ways and customs, and even the thoughts, of the white people better than of her own. Being quick to imitate, she spoke in the correcter language of those whom she knew best, rather than the soft, ungrammatical dialect of the plantation slave or the grunt and mumble of the isolated African. Realizing that service was to be her lot, she elected to render that service where and to whom ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... is signified the use of good English. It precludes the use of all slang words, vulgar phrases, obsolete terms, foreign idioms, ambiguous expressions or any ungrammatical language whatsoever. Neither does it sanction the use of any newly coined word until such word is adopted by ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... which he dictated, finding it better than any I had sent, for, though here and there a little ungrammatical or inelegant, each sentence came to me briefly worded, but most expressive, full of excellent counsel to the boy, tenderly bequeathing "mother and Lizzie" to his care, and bidding him good-by in words the sadder for their simplicity. He added a few lines, with steady hand, and, as I sealed ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... etiquette and polished manners do to truth and nature. To realize the difference between the poetry of the school and the poetry of nature compare the faultless English and elegant sweetness of the Idylls of the King with the vigorous and expressive, but often ungrammatical, prose of Mallory, or compare Virgil with Homer, Horace with Sappho, a chorale by Mendelssohn with a chorale by Bach. Or compare a modern refrain dragged in for no other reason than because the poet has ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... del Rio revelled in their work of butchery; and in all parts of the Netherlands the executioners were busy. It was of no use for the accused to appeal to the charters and privileges of their provinces. All alike were summoned to Brussels; non curamus privilegios vestros declared Vargas in his ungrammatical Latin. Hand in hand with the wholesale sentences of death went the confiscation of property. Vast sums went into the treasury. The whole land for awhile was terror-stricken. All organised opposition was crushed, and no one dared to raise his voice ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... to cultivate the art of conversation, one should at least be correct in speech. One should not permit slovenly expressions, or slang, or the thousand and one faults of mispronunciation and ungrammatical construction into which people fall, to be characteristic of one's speaking. For if one has time to go into society, one should have time and money enough to make one's self presentable mentally as well as physically, and nothing so clearly shows lack of intelligence ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... a chair, you might have passed him off for a baronet or a military officer; but let him rise, and it was Fo'c's'le Jack that came rolling toward you, crab-like; let him but open his lips, and it was Fo'c's'le Jack that piped and drawled his ungrammatical gibberish. He had sailed (among other places) much among the islands; and after a Cape Horn passage with its snow-squalls and its frozen sheets, he announced his intention of "taking a turn among them Kanakas." I thought I should have ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... purity of the language in which they express their thoughts, and yet few of them can read or write; whereas the peasantry of England, whose education is in general much superior, are in their conversation coarse and dull almost to brutality, and absurdly ungrammatical in their language, though the English tongue is upon the whole more simple in its structure than ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... money; his skin has got to be the exact colour of Munz. He has the greenish-yellow eyes of those elective, thrice-abhorred vampyres who feed on patriot-blood. He is condemned without trial by his villainous countenance, like an ungrammatical preface to a book. His tongue refuses to confess, but nature is stronger:—observe his knees. Now this is guilt. It is execrable guilt. He is a nasty object. Nature has in her wisdom shortened his stature ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... must make it all too apparent to the girl. The revelation of the moment made her at once triumphant and humiliated. This white man had come to make love to her, that was apparent; but that he, ungrammatical, crude, and rough, should think he had but to put out his hand, and she in whom every subtle emotion and influence had delicate response, whose words and ways were as far removed from his as day from night, would ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... speech. It is said that one can tell during a conversation that lasts not longer than a summer shower whether or not a man is cultivated. Often it does not take even so long, for a raucous tone of voice and grossly ungrammatical or vulgar expressions brand a man at once as beyond the ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... Militia, and giving them authority, under his own hand and seal, to fight with teeth and toe-nails against the outside barbarians that he himself had invoked to cut their throats. When, however, he had come to himself, and had to front the frowns and ungrammatical curses of the "Border Ruffians," he was fain to lay the blame on the sparkling wine of the feast, and the more sparkling eyes and sparkling wit ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... difficulty mastering his great rage, "may and shall offer words of explanation to the inspired Kin Yen, setting forth the reason of his pictures being used, not with the high-minded story of the elegant Tong-king for which they were executed, but accompanying exceedingly base, foolish, and ungrammatical words written by Klan-hi, the Peking remover of gravity—words which will evermore brand the dew-like Tien as a person of light speech and no refinement"; and in his agony this person struck the lacquered table several times ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... these rustics had not attained that quaint sententious wisdom proper to the rustics of fiction. In their ungrammatical way they talked much like ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... The sentence, brief and ungrammatical, served its purpose. Mrs. Leslie's voice could be heard inside: 'It's only Rupert, Miss Aleyn. May he come ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... at Forbes when he told it, which made Miss Lamont blush, and appear what the artist had described her to King—the sweetest thing in life. Mrs. Benson beamed with motherly content, and was quite as tearful as ungrammatical, but her mind was practical and forecasting. "There'll have to be," she confided to Miss Lamont, "more curtains in the parlor, and I don't know but new paper." Mr. Meigs was not present. Mrs. Farquhar noticed this, and Mrs. Benson remembered ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... after periods of much autogenous mirth, Sir Joseph Bullion dropped an H. But he never noticed it. It was a sort of unconscious reverberation of former days; as if his lowly past, especially that portion of it which had been spent with the first and ungrammatical Mrs. Bullion, insisted on revealing itself to the world, to be acknowledged and congratulated on ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... finger of the right hand—carried conviction even to the most disorderly. Ecclesiastical radicals, boiling over with new schemes, and boasting to admiring circles of MacWheeps that they would not be brow-beaten by red tape officials, became ungrammatical before that firm gaze, and ended in abject surrender. Self-contained and self-sufficing, the clerk took no part in debate, save at critical moments to lay down the law, but wrote his minutes unmoved ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... prepared for this development of their finer senses they will come to you. There is no need to go into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in. If they do come they won't stay—why should they? They have not got there yet, to use a thoroughly hateful and ungrammatical but absolutely ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... girl, With an unromantic style, With borrowed colour and curl, With fixed mechanical smile, With many a hackneyed wile, With ungrammatical lips, And corns that ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... the work. In art, lines and masses and color are not unlike what words and sentences and what we call style are in literature. Even if a writer has good and beautiful ideas, much of the pleasure we might derive is lost when the words are ill chosen, the sentences are bungling, perhaps even ungrammatical, and the whole expression is ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... steal! That's a command Which grips us with an iron hand; And "he who prigs what isn't his'n, When he is cotched shall go to prison!" So runs the Cockney doggerel, clear If ungrammatical, austere, With not a saving clause to qualify Its rigid Spartan rule, or mollify Theft's Nemesis. Thou shalt not steal! At least,—ahem!—well, all must feel That property in thoughts and phrases, The verbal filagree that raises Flat fustian into "oratory," ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 21, 1892 • Various
... both. Sidney had taken a room in Islington, and two rooms on the floor beneath him were tenanted by a man who was a widower and had two children. In those days, our young friend found much satisfaction in spending his Sunday evenings on Clerkenwell Green, where fervent, if ungrammatical, oratory was to be heard, and participation in debate was open to all whom the spirit moved. One whom the spirit did very frequently move was Sidney's fellow-lodger; he had no gift of expression whatever, but his brief, stammering protests against this or that social ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... a time; but as the notes increased the corrections decreased, and at last nothing was said of ungrammatical French or comical English and the little notes ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... hilarious. At one moment I have a tendency to emulate Marguerite doing the Jewel-Song in Faust. "This isn't me! This isn't me!" I keep protesting to myself. But Marguerite, I know, would never be so ungrammatical. And then I begin to foresee difficulties. The mere thought of leaving Casa Grande tears my heart. When we go away, as that wise man of Paris once said, we die a little. This will always seem my home. I could ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... creatures of habit—that tears don't come kindly and easily to express where laughter leaves off and a something better begins. Which is all very ungrammatical and entirely me, as I am when I get ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... ungrammatical sentence! Poor little me! I should think not; I could not breathe freely in such a confined atmosphere. Why don't you give it up and let yourself alone? I would not be only a bundle of fears and feelings if ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... and most copious use of this detailed knowledge in his works of imagination; and thirdly, that he possessed a vocabulary of the most wonderful wealth. His style is strong, homely, and vigorous, but the sentences are long, loose, clumsy, and sometimes ungrammatical. Like Sir Walter Scott, he was too eager to produce large and broad effects to take time to balance his clauses or to polish his sentences. Like Sir Walter Scott, again, he possesses in the highest ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... Peak had ceased to hold communication with any of his own stock save the younger brother Andrew. With him he occasionally exchanged a letter, but Andrew's share in the correspondence was limited to ungrammatical and often unintelligible hints of numerous projects for money-making. Just after the removal of the bereaved family to Twybridge, they were surprised by a visit from Andrew, in answer to one of whose letters Mrs. Peak had sent ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... the words deanamh, bualadh, in the phrases adduced, were real Participles, then in all similar instances, it would be not only unnecessary, but ungrammatical, to introduce the preposition ag at all. But this is far from being the case. In all verbs beginning with a vowel, the preposition ag or its unequivocal representative g is indispensable; as, ta iad ag iarruidh, ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules—almost as completely as that created by Carlyle. To readers who have taught themselves to regard language, it must therefore be unpleasant. But the critic is driven to feel the weakness ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... I couldn't possibly do nothing—I do not mean this in the ungrammatical sense in which it is so often used—I thought I would be obliged to take up some new calling or diversion. Time hung heavily on my hands and I thought too much about myself, as usual. A mental healer had told me that I was too ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... would have thought this uneducated but strenuous partisan an extremely intelligent woman. He hurried away now with an uncomfortable smile. If an opinion is the right opinion, why should it have an air of absurdity thrown upon it by being thus uttered in ungrammatical language by a poulterer's wife? Truth is the same by whomsoever stated; but yet, was not dogmatism on any subject the sign of an inexperienced and uncultivated, or a rude and untutored mind? What did this woman know of the Parsonage, which she supposed she helped to pay for? What ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... is not due to ungrammatical sentences or to a poor style, but to a wrong viewpoint: the writer presents a proposition from his own viewpoint instead of that of the reader. The correspondent has gone far towards success when he can VISUALIZE his ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... a dubious sigma to a comma, they have utterly spoilt that sublime trilogy by making "Peace upon earth, goodwill towards men," read "Peace upon earth among men in whom he is well pleased." How clumsy and how ungrammatical, in whom! The whole dear Bible has been terribly damaged by their 36,000 needless alterations in the New Testament (not 100 having been really necessary), and I know not how many more myriads in the Old, but happily their ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... conviction that she was still occupying herself with him. He looked round almost furtively to detect whether any one else was aware of it, this connection that she was blazoning between them, and then relapsed, staring at his hat, into a sense of ungrammatical iterations beating through a room full of stuffy smells. When Laura spoke again his eye leaped to hers in a rapt effort to tell her that he perceived her intention. That he should be grateful, that he should approve, was neither here nor there; the indispensable ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... expression of some obstinate and radical property-holder. Occupying a limited space between two fashionable thoroughfares, it refused to conform to circumstances, but sturdily paraded its unkempt glories, and frequently asserted itself in ungrammatical language. My window—a rear room on the ground floor—in this way derived blended light and shadow from the court. So low was the window-sill that, had I been the least disposed to somnambulism, it would have broken ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... said Violet, with ungrammatical candor. "Your Irvings and your Terrys, your Mary Andersons and your Langtrys,—they're good enough for your fine drawing-rooms, and get more invitations out than they can accept. And none of them have got half my talent, I tell you! Lord bless my soul! if they're respectable enough ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... welcomed Coquelin in a nice little French speech, John Drew did the like for me in English, & then the fun began. Coquelin did some excellent French monologues—one of them an ungrammatical Englishman telling a colorless historiette in French. It nearly killed the fifteen or twenty ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... was given a prominent position facing advertising matter in the heavy magazines when he met with his regrettably early end. Apart from his poems he left no literary remains, except a few letters too hideously ungrammatical for publication. The sole materials for a biography lay in the memory of Toller, who by a stroke of luck happened ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... hymns, and was attended with like agitations. The singing-school for winter evenings became an almost universal social institution; and there actually grew up an American school of composition, quaint, rude, and ungrammatical, which had great vogue toward the end of the last century, and is even now remembered by some with admiration and regret. It was devoted mainly to psalmody tunes of an elaborate sort, in which the first half-stanza would be sung in plain counterpoint, after which the voices would ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... publish. But here it is:—"The stuff that is palmed off upon a hapless public by aspiring idiots, who are vain enough to imagine that they are novelists, is astounding. The latest of these is a certain WILLIAM WHORBOYS, whose book, The Foundling's Farewell, is remarkable only for its ungrammatical dulness, &c, &c." The next post brought me the same cutting, sent gratuitously, out of spite, I suppose, by the two Extract Companies to whom I had preferred the U.A.C.P., and from four others who desired my custom. During the following week not a day passed without the receipt of that accursed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... to find his old schoolfellow ungrammatical and bumptious, but he was not prepared to find him peevish. Athletes, he believed, were simple, straightforward people, cruel and brutal if you like, but never petty. They knocked you down and hurt you, and then went on their way ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... writer.[64] She was a sincere, pure-minded woman, of intense devotion, but she was a strongly emotional type of person, and lived in a kind of permanent borderland of visions and revelations. Her language, like that also of Pordage, is ungrammatical, of involved style, and full of overwrought and fanciful imagination. Christopher Walton, who in many ways respected her, calls her writings "a huge mass of parabolicalism and idiocratic deformity!"[64] In her Message to the Philadelphian Society she reports a curious vision from heaven ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... endure—ah, till the introduction of a newer catchword! I assure you the most successful book—the wittiest comedy, the divinest poem, have never won for their authors the immediate and sensational reputation which this singer has obtained at a bound with a few doggerel verses and an ungrammatical refrain. Isn't there genius ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... Grattan, he has had a good many years of hard work since then, making strong, serviceable boots and shoes, and serving the Lord in other ways besides. He is ungrammatical still, and queer, and some people smile at him, and pretend to think lightly of him, even when he is most in earnest,—people who, in point of moral worth or heavenly power, are not worthy to tie his shoes. But many a "tempted poor soul" in Littleton ...
— Stephen Grattan's Faith - A Canadian Story • Margaret M. Robertson
... seems to me an inversion of the order of nature. I think America is a sort of "United" States of Probation, out of which all wise people, being once delivered, and having obtained entrance into this better world, should never be expected to return (sentence irremediably ungrammatical), particularly when they have been making themselves cruelly pleasant to friends here. My friend Norton, whom I met first on this very blue lake water, had no business to go back to Boston again, any ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... situation; how a girl of her apparent refinement and gentility could ever be attracted by a rough, brutal type such as Ned Beaton so evidently was. Why, the man's lack of taste in dress, the expression of his face, his ungrammatical language, stamped him as belonging to a ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... he had but little opportunity to attend school, and his sentences were framed in the quaint construction of his people, and nearly all of them were ungrammatical. There were many who would have regarded him as ignorant. By the standards that hold that education is enlightenment that comes from acquaintance with books and that wisdom is a knowledge of the ways of the world, he was. But he had a training that is rare; advantages ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... violence is, according to the character of the persons against whom it is exercised, and the divine and eternal laws which it vindicates or violates. We must not burn a man alive for saying that the Athanasian creed is ungrammatical, nor stop a bishop's salary because we are getting the worst of an argument with him; neither must we let drunken men howl in the public streets at night. There is much that is true in the part of Mr. Mill's essay on Liberty ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... to be a false and even ungrammatical rendering of Irenaeus's words. The 'columen et fundamentum fidei', are the Creed, or economy ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... of a corporation, by which the Guildhall would have passed by law to the members for the time being; but that it was necessary to convey it to certain persons as feoffees or trustees." Stoford, however, had its official seal, bearing the ungrammatical, but intelligible, legend, ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... is Mahindram (king of earth, or king); the Bombay reading is Mahendram (the great Indra). Without iva any word to that effect, Mahendram would be ungrammatical. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... in must have been interesting, even though the French was halting and ungrammatical. Of all the companies' Messes, this one took the most serious view of the future, and earned for itself the nickname of "Les Miserables." The Senior Subaltern said openly that this calm preceded a storm. The papers they got—Le ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... Helen had taken the tone she had with them—had showed them in "that cowgirl" just what they had expected to find. She would be bluff and rude and ungrammatical and ill-bred. Perhaps the spirit in which Helen did this was not to be commended; but she had begun it on the impulse of the moment and she felt she must keep it up during her stay in the ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... seventh, named Alphabet Precis. Mr. Precis' peculiar forte was a singular happiness in official phraseology. Much that he wrote would doubtless have been considered in the purlieus of Paternoster Row as ungrammatical, if not unintelligible; but according to the syntax of Downing Street, it was equal to Macaulay, and superior to Gibbon. He had frequently said to his intimate friends, that in official writing, style was ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... of this nobility of sex, accept the allegiance! The citizeness may "follow him," certainly,—so long as she is not in the way,—and she must "love him always;" but he is not bound. Why should he be? It would be quite ungrammatical. ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... was mainly frequented by rich Americans full of ready money, and by rich Russians of large credit. Better Americans and worse, went, like the English, to smaller and cheaper hotels; and Clementina's acquaintance was confined to mothers as shy and ungrammatical as Mrs. Lander herself, and daughters blankly indifferent to her. Mrs. Lander drove out every day when it did not rain, and she took Clementina with her, because the doctor said it would do them both ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... had made his money out of nothing, or, at least, from a beginning of utter poverty. But in his last years he came to a sense of its worthlessness, such as few men who have made their money ever have. He was a common man, in a great many ways; he was imperfectly educated, and he was ungrammatical, and he never was at home in society; but he had a tender heart and an honest nature, and I revere his memory, as no one would believe I could without knowing him as I did. His money became a burden and a terror to him; he did not know what ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... ancient Scholiast, whose name is unknown, unless it is Donatus himself, which is doubtful. It would appear that Luscus Lavinius had lately made a translation of this Play, which, from its servile adherence to the language of the original, had been couched in ungrammatical language, and probably not approved of by the Audience. Donatus thinks that this is the meaning of the passage, and that, content with this slight reference to a well-known fact, the author passes it ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... sitting in the background, the men seemed to like him, and, when they said, "See you again," at parting, it was with the convincing manner of real friendliness. Sometimes, even now, his language was ungrammatical, but so, for the matter of that, was theirs.... The great writer smiled with his slow, humorous lighting of the eyes as he ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... Army's future influence. During the last twenty years we have been pressing forward amongst a very large number of Church and missionary efforts. Our speakers have notoriously been amongst the most unlearned and ungrammatical, and therefore often despised, while so many thousands of university men were preaching and writing of Christ. But no one now disputes the fact that the old-fashioned proclamation of the doctrine of Jesus Christ as a Divine Saviour of the lost has largely gone out of fashion. The influence ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... guess,' she cried, and offered him three guesses. 'Out with it!' he shouted; and in one ungrammatical sentence, as long as the ribbons conjurers pull from their mouths, she told of the capture ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... Liberty. "The Blessings of Peace and the Curses of War," with its inscription—"Such Britain was, such Flanders, Spain and Holland now is (sic); from such a sad reverse, O Gracious God, preserve our country!"—is an eloquent, if slightly ungrammatical, appeal (Jan. 17, 1795) to his fellow-countrymen, an appeal to which our artist must have been stirred by the horrible carnage and misery which the French armies were then inflicting upon the continent of Europe; while "John Bull ground down" (June 1, 1795) ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... telling, and picturesque through six large volumes of everyday experience, which deals with the whole matter of a life, and yet is rarely wearisome, which condescends to the most fastidious particulars, and yet sweeps all away in the forthright current of the narrative,—such a style may be ungrammatical, it may be inelegant, it may be one tissue of mistakes, but it can never be devoid of merit. The first and the true function of the writer has been thoroughly performed throughout; and though the manner of his ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... copy, and that too but lamely taken from the Greek original; secondly, that the English language was then unpolished, and far from the perfection which it has since attained; so that the first version is not only ungrammatical and ungraceful, but in many places almost unintelligible." There is another English version, by the Langhornes, which has often been reprinted; there is an edition of it with notes by Wrangham. I have compared my translation carefully with the German ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... ungrammatical reply. He does not wish to give the real, painful answer, and so replies confusedly, as if he had been asked, 'What makes you?' instead ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... her, until she gave me what I asked for, in her own writing. In a very few minutes she reappeared and handed me a paper, whereon she had written: 'I am so glad you have kept them so nicely, Your Marie.' (As her skull was shared by Sister Belle, I suppose Marie was strictly logical, if ungrammatical, in referring to it as 'them.') It was enough; in a few minutes after, Marie reappeared wearing the amber ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... Barbadoes with his brother Lawrence in 1751-52, another of his trip to Fort Le Boeuf to warn out the French, and yet another of his Fort Necessity campaign. The words are often misspelled, many expressions are ungrammatical, but the handwriting is good and the judgments expressed, even those set down when he was only sixteen, are the mature ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... didn't know it was him," signalled the ungrammatical Dicky across the room, "I should ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... its application to public affairs; most of the twenty-eight papers have their special point in personal character. The writing is not elegant; it is sometimes ungrammatical; but it is intelligible, and with its bluntness could hardly fail to make itself felt. It is when one compares it with similar work of Franklin's, as "The Whistle," for example, that one is reminded of its inartistic form. But Webster ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... well; twice, almost falsetto, for a hint of danger. This time it was the single deep bass cough. But it was followed after half a minute by the two high-pitched barks, and Grim held up a hand for silence. At the end of perhaps a minute there came from the veranda a perfect imitation of the lascar's ungrammatical, whining singsong ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... the barn-yard to the ash-lane, heard a hearty roll of bassos from the kitchen, and did not doubt but that he was its target. He reined in his horse at the bare flower-beds and glowered back at the door. Then, with a mutter, ungrammatical but eloquent, he spurred on toward the lonely, supperless shack ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... ungrammatical editor says: "We have received a basket of fine grapes from our friend ——, for which he will please accept our compliments, some of which are nearly one ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... writer, Dr. G.W. Brown, in slip-shod and often ungrammatical English assails the memory of Old John Brown, charges him with active participation in various bloody crimes, and abuses his biographers and eulogists. Dr. Brown writes as an eye-witness of many of the things which he describes; ...
— John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe
... his Election Address with 'This is pitiful balderdash and most ungrammatical' written plainly at the bottom of it. What would be your feelings if you ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 8, 1916 • Various
... advantage of treating a libretto of great power and beauty, the work of the poet Romani, a tragedy which, both in sentiment and diction, contrasts very strongly with the ungrammatical balderdash which composers are so often called upon to set to music. Norma, the high priestess of the Druids, forgetting her faith and the traditions of her race, has secretly wedded Pollio, a Roman general, and borne him two children. In spite of the ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... the last note had soared up and died, the old man folded his hands and began to pray. It was an old-fashioned prayer, such as the girl had never heard from the Bishop's lips; ungrammatical, inelegant, and long. A quiet talk with God, manly in its straightforward confession of short-comings, childlike in its appeal for guidance, fervent in its gratitude for all good gifts, and the crowning one of loving children. As if close intercourse had made the ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... my parents in Michigan, reading it first himself, and admonishing him not to lend it. I also wrote to my parents telling them what they might look for in the mails, and cautioning them never to have it printed, for the writing was so ungrammatical and the spelling so incorrect that it would ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... whose barbaric splendour Mr. Peat and his Melton customers are to forswear pigskin and severe simplicity—not to say utility and comfort. If poetic diction be different in species from plain English, then let us have it as poetical as possible, and as unlike English; as ungrammatical, abrupt, involved, transposed, as the clumsiness, carelessness, or caprice of man can make it. If it be correct to express human thought by writing whole pages of vague and bald abstract metaphysic, and then trying to explain them by concrete ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... any modern magazine that at all resembled the delicate, pointed and picturesque phraseology of the Sieur Amadis! Strange, coarse slang-words were used,—and the news of the day was slung together in loose ungrammatical sentences and chopped-up paragraphs of clumsy construction, lacking all pith and eloquence. So, repelled by the horror of twentieth-century "style," she had hidden her manuscripts deeper than ever in the old bureau, under little silk sachets ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... so much to do with refinement that we expect a lady to be educated as a matter of course, at least in some directions, mathematics and science being thus far not included. George Eliot says of Nancy in "Silas Marner," that she often used ungrammatical language, and was not highly educated, but that she was a thorough lady because she had delicate personal habits ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... was not always correct or polished; on the contrary, he was sometimes ungrammatical, negligent, and unenforcing, for he concealed his art, and was superior to the knack of oratory. Upon many occasions he abated the vigour of his eloquence, but even then, like the spinning of a cannon ball, he was still alive with fatal, ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... wonderful new form of miracle play in which she presently captivates London and Paris as the reincarnate Notre Dame de Bruges. So much of the tale I indicate; the rest is your affair. It is told in a pleasant haphazard fashion, enriched with flashes of caustic wit and disfigured with a good deal of ungrammatical and slovenly writing. I think I never met a novelist who did more execution among the infinitives. Also I suspect that Mrs. SAUNDERS' zeal for theatrical setting outran her knowledge of it, otherwise she would hardly have permitted a dramatist to speak of his "caste," or the leading lady to ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... mucho bueno, Tejano!" given in like ungrammatical phrase, in order that it may be intelligible to the person ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... owned, does not write well. He has reason to envy, as he does, the grace of the female style. He is not only ungrammatical, which, in a familiar letter, is a matter of very small consequence, but somewhat stilted. Perhaps it was like the "Madam," the fashion of the Johnsonian era. Yet beneath the buckram you always feel that there is a heart. Persons even of the same profession are cast in very different ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... put in the Captain, in ungrammatical haste, "that Eve would come and live with me. It isn't a grand house—just a little cottage. But such as it is, she'll have a ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... definitions committed to memory, and the judgment exercised upon their application. At the same time every recitation of a child, as well as all his conversation, ought to be made an incidental and unconscious lesson in grammar. Only never allow him to use unchallenged an incorrect or ungrammatical expression, train his ear to detect and revolt at it, as at a discordant note in music, let him if possible hear nothing but sterling, honest English, and he will then learn grammar to some purpose. If, on the contrary, he is allowed to recite and to talk in whatever language ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart |
