"Verbiage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when one has been asked not to stop sooner, and it so happened, moreover, that cook was somewhat busy that morning and began at length to indicate distinctly that unless her friend had some matter of importance to communicate she would regard further verbiage with disfavour. At this juncture Mary decided that twenty minutes was practically as good as half an ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... less welcome than the stronger and more indignant scribes who cried aloud against the sins and sinners of the courts. When simple folk had expended their rage in denunciations of venal eloquence and unjust judgments, they amused themselves with laughing at the antiquated verbiage of the rascals who sought to conceal their bad morality under worse Latin. 'A New Modell, or the Conversion of the Infidell Terms of the Law: For the Better promoting of misunderstanding according to Common Sense,' is a publication ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... the principal objections to be urged against the Indian languages, considered as media of communication, is their cumbrousness. There is certainly a great deal of verbiage and tautology about them. The paucity of terms leads not only to the use of figures and metaphors, but is the cause of circumlocution. This day we ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... /n./ 1. [coined by Ted Nelson] Obfuscatory tech-talk. Verbiage with a high {MEGO} factor. The computer equivalent of bureaucratese. 2. Incomprehensible stuff embedded in email. First there were the "Received" headers that show how mail flows through systems, then MIME (Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions) headers and part boundaries, and now huge blocks ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... Foreign Office, and he receives a huge pile of documents, numbered, scheduled, and red-taped (as Bulwer says in his pamphlet), the contents of which he is informed are to serve as a guide for his proceedings. He reads them over with all their verbiage and technicalities, sighs for Cobbett's pure Saxon, and when he has finished, feels not a little puzzled. Document Number 4 contradicting document Number 12, and document Number 1 opposed to Number 66; that is, as he reads and understands English. Determined ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... His Adam's apple bobbed like a cork, and no one spoke. Finally Dr. Nesbit spoke in his high-keyed voice: "I presume legal verbiage is all they talk in ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... misery and death. By such old systems with their foolish and unreliable suggestions, of how to guide the doctor in treating diseases which have proven unworthy of respect, if merit is to be our rule of the weights and measures of intelligence. I have become so disgusted with such verbiage with the sense that follows the pens that have written treatise on disease, that I have concluded to do like Adam of old, give names that may appear novel to the reader when I wish to draw the attention ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... hypotheses, and archaiological lore that assailed me, and wish them, should they ever visit Nismes, that which was denied me—a tranquil and uninterrupted contemplation of its interesting antiquities, free from the verbiage of a conscientious cicerone, who thinks himself in duty bound to relate all that he has ever heard or read relative to the ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... Even the Holy Alliance, the pet offspring of his pietism, does not deserve the sinister reputation it has since obtained. To the other powers it seemed, at best "verbiage'' and "exalted nonsense,'' at worst an effort of the tsar to establish the hegemony of Russia on the goodwill of the smaller signatory powers. To the Liberals, then and afterwards it was clearly a hypocritical conspiracy against freedom. Yet to ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... removed until the memory of the first occurrence has faded, lies on a once used word. The causes of this anxiety for a varied expression are manifold. Where there is merely a column to fill, poverty of thought drives the hackney author into an illicit fulness, until the trick of verbiage passes from his practice into his creed, and makes him the dupe of his own puppets. A commonplace book, a dictionary of synonyms, and another of phrase and fable equip him for his task; if he be called upon to marshal his ideas on the question whether oysters breed typhoid, ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... I believe, genuine. And these foolish books, as much as anything, have helped to keep up the popular prejudice against one who, in spite of all his faults was a true pioneer of science. {15} I believe (with those moderns who have tried to do him justice) that under all his verbiage and confusion there was a vein of sound ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... what controversial battlefields of sulphurous smoke and scattering fire might it prevent. He has been called a public benefactor who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before. He is as great a benefactor, who in an age of verbiage makes one word perform the function of two. Wonderful is the precision with which this mental mechanism may be made to work. Some men can even think their best on their feet in the presence of a great assembly. ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... scientific speculation, he had the misfortune about this time to read in paper or magazine something on the subject of heredity, the idle verbiage of some half-informed scribbler. It set him anxiously thinking whether his son would develop the vices of the mother's mind, and from that day he read all the printed chatter regarding natural inheritance that he could ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... more striking results were non-existent. But the latter abound so that we can afford to overlook the innumerable failures and self-deceptions that are mixed in with them (for in everything human failure is a matter of course), and we can also overlook the verbiage of a good deal of the mind-cure literature, some of which is so moonstruck with optimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained intellect finds it almost impossible to read it ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... conceptions. Now, however, Yourii perceived that it could not have been otherwise for it was these trivial things that constituted life, the real life, full of sensations, emotions, enjoyments; and that all these lofty conceptions were but empty thoughts, vain verbiage, powerless to influence in the slightest the great mystery of life and death. Important, complete though these might be, other words, other thoughts no less weighty and important must follow ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... might ye be makin' for, then?' At this point I realised for the first time the grave disadvantages of redundance in speech, of unnecessary verbiage. There had been no earthly need for my last words, and now that my fatal fluency had found me out, for the life of me I could not think of the name of a likely place. At length, with clumsily affected carelessness, ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... of the Athenaeum contained the manifesto of the new school, written by Friedrich Schlegel, the seminal mind of the coterie. The terms of this pronunciamento are somewhat rapt and transcendental; but through its mist of verbiage, one discerns that the ideal of romantic art is announced to be: beauty for beauty's sake, the union of poetry and life, and the absolute freedom of the artist to express himself. "Romantic poetry," says Schlegel—"and, in a certain ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of folly to present these discussions to the laity in their original form, hence the necessity for condensation and presentation of the needful facts in the language of the people in whose interests the book is printed. In a book of fiction there may be need for useless verbiage for the sake of "making pages," but facts of vital importance and usefulness in our daily welfare need to be well boiled down and put into shape for ready reference. This has been done in "Mothers' Remedies" and I think it quite fulfills the ideal ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... after all, what is a work—any or every work—but a desert with fountains, and, perhaps, a grove or two every day's journey? To be sure, in mademoiselle, what we often mistake and 'pant for' as the 'cooling stream,' turns out to be the 'mirage' (critice, verbiage); but we do, at last, get to something like the temple of Jupiter Ammon, and then the waste we have passed is only remembered to gladden ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... voted to Amherst and Boscawen. Boscawen received them in person, being a member of the House of Commons. The speaker read the address, which was couched in the usual verbiage worked up by one of the select committees employed on such occasions. But Boscawen replied, as men of action should, with fewer words and much more force and point: 'Mr Speaker, Sir, I am happy to have been able ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... to get to the point. The Heptameron if not equal in narrative vigour and lightness to Boccaccio before and La Fontaine afterwards, is not in the least exposed to the charge of clumsiness of any kind, employs a simple, natural, and sufficiently picturesque vocabulary, avoids all verbiage and roundabout writing, and both in the narratives and in the connecting conversation displays a very considerable advance upon nearly all the writers of the time, except Rabelais, Marot, and Desperiers, in easy command of the vernacular. It is, therefore, not wonderful that there has, at different ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... Neither the taste of the writer nor his manner of expression was happy. Of this Dominic was quite sensible. Patronage, especially after his period of independence, was far from agreeable to him. Yet behind the verbiage, the platitudes and bombastic phrases, his ear detected a very human cry of fear and cry for help. Should he accede, doing his best to allay that fear and ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... said Of Pope, that "he could only rank with ingenious men," and that his works are superabundant with superfluous and unmeaning verbiage - his translations even replete with tautology, a fault which is to refinement as midnight is to noonday; and, what is truly surprising, that the fourth book of the Dunciad, his last publication, is more full of redundancy and incorrectness ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... within me as clearly as though written on this page. My mother had written it there, unscientifically yet indelibly, in my boyhood days, and Mr. Pound had added his few words, almost hidden beneath a mass of verbiage about Ahasuerus, and before them my forebears had every one of them left imprinted some sage injunction gained from their experience in living. So I gathered my strength to do my best. But there was a lack of definiteness ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... dead could do nothing, neither could he change his mind, but having left an indelible record of his ideas by the strenuous verbiage of his virile and inspiring rhetoric, there was no room for doubt. As in all political and religious faiths founded on the ideas of dead heroes, this made for solidarity and power and quite prevented any adaptation ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... that public speaking is the almost universal object of ambition, and consequently, both at school and at college, nothing is thought of but oratory. Vain attempts at oratory, result in nine cases out of ten, in grandiloquence and empty verbiage;—common thoughts ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... much better than the other, but I should choose to say. "The reason of his conduct was not fully explained." For, surely, the "one idea or circumstance" of his "having acted in the manner in which he did act," may be quite as forcibly named by the one word conduct, as by all this verbiage, this "substantive phrase," or "entire clause," of such ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... calculation of future pleasure and pain, or something which, in no sense, is a true account of what men do mean by right. To say that moral principles "carry conviction with them, and prove themselves" (i.e., are self-evident), unless, as we suspect, it is mere verbiage conveying nothing particular to Mr. Laing's brain, is to deny that right has reference to the consequences of action as bearing on human progress and evolution, which is to deny the very theory he wishes ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... legitimate bargain, one wonders in silence at his standard of morality and honour. Is he not a scoundrel who first gives his word of honour and afterwards tries to strike a bargain with the same? Stripped of all verbiage that is Germany's proposal in its naked immorality, and the author chronicles with pleasure that the House of Commons cried down even its discussion. It recalls to his memory the fact, that the Reichstag—Germany's highest legislative assembly—cheered ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... the quasi-historical chapters in this section (which I have followed M. Pauthier in making into a Fourth Book) are the merest verbiage and repetition of narrative formulae without the slightest value. I have therefore thought it undesirable to print all at length, and have given merely the gist (marked thus ), or an extract, of such chapters. They will ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... but even more in the marvellous vivacity and fertility of his creation. For the very first time in English prose fiction every character is alive, every incident is capable of having happened. There are lively touches in the Elizabethan romances; but they are buried in verbiage, swathed in stage costume, choked and fettered by their authors' want of art. The quality of Bunyan's knowledge of men was not much inferior to Shakespeare's, or at least to Fielding's; but the range and the results of it were cramped by his single theological ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... what the danger to himself, if he could smite a lie upon the head and kill it, he was better pleased than by a thousand lives. We hear much of Luther's doctrine about faith. Stripped of theological verbiage, that doctrine means this. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... stopped at the next floor down to take on a pair of maids, he strolled over to the shaft, and without frills or verbiage consigned me and my detail to perdition. But I liked him. He had pluck and was unafraid, and he knew, as well as I, that death ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... find it hard to unlearn that lesson. Yet, rest assured, it is not on dubious testimony, that I found my conviction of his being corrupted by the lax morality of these evil times, in which one party deems an attachment to the antient constitution an excuse for debauchery, and the other uses the verbiage of religion as a commutation for obedience to its precepts. It is most true, Eustace was publicly disgraced by Lord Hopton, accused of crimes to which he pleaded guilty, suspected of others which he faintly denied. With horror I must tell ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... such a farce to give them the courtesy title of sovereignty. I don't think you realize, never having been in this country, what a farce it really is. I am not able to write you a learned book. All I can do is to write you these letters, which are surely devoid of all legal verbiage, because I don't know any. If I were a scholar, a student of international politics, I would wrap all my statements in fine, well-chosen language, quoting treaties and acts and agreements and all the rest of it, and you wouldn't know what it all meant. I can only give you ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... poetical as well as a dramatic tragedy. With this end in view he accumulated the mass of rhetoric with which we are now so familiar. It as been Mr. IRVING's task to prune this well-meant but somewhat excessive verbiage so that the real dramatic stuff can at last "get over." But he has done no more. Any rumour to the effect that he has introduced American songs or dances, or that a "joy plank" bisects the stalls of the Savoy is untrue and deserves ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various
... traditional stories parallel in general nature to 'The Canterbury Tales.' He is generally a smooth and fluent versifier, but his fluency is his undoing; he wraps up his material in too great a mass of verbiage. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... fashionable preacher, Hortensio Felix Paravicino (q.v.), in a sermon preached before Philip IV.; [v.04 p.0985] Calderon retorted by introducing into El Principe constante a mocking reference (afterwards cancelled) to Paravicino's gongoristic verbiage, and was committed to prison. He was soon released, grew rapidly in reputation as a playwright, and, on the death of Lope de Vega in 1635, was recognized as the foremost Spanish dramatist of the age. A volume of his plays, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... My country is all right, but it's sick. It's got a nauseous dose of verbiage to spew up—something it's swallowed—something about being too proud to fight.... My brother and I couldn't stand it, so we came to France.... He was in the photo air service. He was in mufti—and about two miles up, I believe. Six Huns went for him.... And winged him. He had to land ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... magnetism in the rush of Jasper Ewold's junketing verbiage which carried the listener on the bosom of a pleasant stream. Jack was suddenly reminded that it must be very late and he had far overstayed the retiring hour of the desert, where the Eternal Painter commands ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... should rather say there were, imbibed at the university so many attachments at one time to words in place of things, that the collegian in after life became liable to reproach upon this head. Pedants are bred everywhere out of literature, and the variety in verbiage once exhibited by some university men has been justly condemned. But while such word-worms were crawling here and there out of the porches of our colleges, giants in acquirement were striding over them in their petty ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... succeeding years make it easy to comprehend the failure of the project: the villanously rhymed effusions fairly imposthumate all the ribald vulgarity of the times; coarseness and dulness of subject and thought being rivalled only by the super-coarseness of the verbiage. I do not say that the newspapers provoked these stupid rhymes, which are about as much poetry as is a game of crambo; but I do not find them until "newspaper-time," and fear the extra circulation through the weekly press ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Balder had so far forgotten himself as to throw Hiero into the sea; but it was the part of good-breeding, as well as of Christianity, to forget such errors, and heal the bruise with an extra application of balsamic verbiage. ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... Lamb by their petty tradesman morality, and which hardly represent a very lofty ideal. But the recognised representative of the moralists was the ponderous Samuel Johnson. It is hard when reading the Rambler to recognise the massive common sense and deep feeling struggling with the ponderous verbiage and elephantine facetiousness; yet it was not only a treasure of wisdom to the learned ladies, Mrs. Chapone, and Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and the like, who were now beginning to appear, but was received, ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... read plenty of ancient verbiage on that subject, I have read likewise most of what has been said by modern writers, but neither all that has been said, nor what I have thought about it, when I was young and now that I am no longer so, nothing, in fact, can make me agree that love is a trifling vanity. It ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... beginning in 1704, it was not until 1763 that a bookstore pulled out the stops with half a column of lively prose in behalf of Dr. Hill's four unpatented nostrums.[41] It seems a safe assumption that not only the medicines but the verbiage were imported from London, where Dr. Hill had been at work endeavoring to restore a Greek secret which "converts a Glass of Water into the Nature and Quality of Asses Milk, with the ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... exercised a legitimate poetical ingenuity by versifying such knowledge as he had. These various causes make Manilius one of the most difficult of authors. Few can wade through the mingled solecisms in language and mistakes in science, the empty verbiage that dilates on a platitude in one place, and the jejune abstract that hurries over a knotty argument in another, without regretting that so unreadable a poet should have ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... them: an they would receive it, so; an they would not receive it, so. There was no offence against decorum in all this; nothing to condemn, to damn. Not an irreverent symptom of a sound was to be heard. The procession of verbiage stalked on through four and five acts, no one venturing to predict what would come of it, when, towards the winding-up of the latter, Antonio, with an irrelevancy that seemed to stagger Elvira herself,—for she had been coolly arguing the point of honor with him,—suddenly whips out a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... the Secretary," said she at last, a nervous laugh quivering in her first words, "from all this wondrous verbiage I am to take it that ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... occurred about the business of the day. Once, twice, and thrice I tried to slide the subject in, but was discouraged by the stoic apathy of Rufe, and beaten down before the pouring verbiage of his wife. There is nothing of the Indian brave about me, and I began to grill with impatience. At last, like a highway robber, I cornered Hanson, and bade him stand and deliver his business. Thereupon he gravely rose, as though to hint that this was not a proper place, nor ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in a like state of preparedness, with his thoughts already gathered, moulded, polished and clothed in the words that fit them best; with every argument as definite and well knitted as a proposition in Euclid; the page swept clear of superfluous verbiage; each idea standing out bright as a jewel in its setting, and the whole so thoroughly committed to memory that he can defy the most critical to discover a trace of effort. He should come, holding his elocutionary ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... of Mr. Verity's friends. It is impossible to comprehend what is meant by such a statement as that every truth is somehow connected with religion. It may be that the notion—if it really is not, as I suspect it to be, mere verbiage and clap-trap, used by certain fools to mislead others—means that there is some such coherency between all truths as there is, for instance, between the elements of the body. I would admit that, but is not blood a different and perfectly severable thing from bone? Each ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... only carried out the consequences of the great principles which Judaism had established, but which the official classes of the nation tended more and more to despise. The Greek and Roman prayers were almost always mere egotistical verbiage. Never had Pagan priest said to the faithful, "If thou bring thy offering to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled with thy brother, ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... Plato the honour of patronising him, as a Representative Man; but their real text-book, you will find, is Proclus. That hapless philosophaster's a priori method, even his very verbiage, is dear to their souls; for they copy it through wet and dry, through sense and nonsense. But as for Plato-when I find them using Plato's weapons, I shall believe in their understanding and love ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... laid down the waiting pen. Eells drew up his lip, Lapham shuffled uneasily, and Wilhelmina took up the contract. She glanced through it page by page, dipping in here and there and then turning impatiently ahead; and as she struggled with its verbiage the sweat burst from Eells' face and ran ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... time forward, and deluged him with interviews, canvasses, meetings, great and little, and perpetual calls on his attention. His conscientiousness made him work almost unremittingly, for he determined his part in the struggle to be far more than a matter of mere verbiage and smiles. Mr. Chrysler, like a sensible fellow-Member, quite comprehended the situation, and was content to note the admirable way in which his friend did everything; to receive a smile or friendly direction here and there, and to fall back on the attentions of ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... poetry from Dryden, whom, whenever an opportunity was presented, he praised through the whole period of his existence with unvaried liberality; and perhaps his character may receive some illustration, of a comparison he instituted between him and the man whose pupil he was" much of the verbiage may be eliminated and the ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... psychology. France has always believed that to say a thing is the same as to do it, as though speech were action, as though rhetoric were capable of modifying the tendencies, habits, and character of real beings, and as though verbiage were an efficient substitute for ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... man, could gather but a fraction of its import—and the sailors nothing. No profanity in giving orders, no sheath-knives, Midway Island and any other port the master may direct, not to exceed six calendar months, and to this port to be paid off: so it seemed to run, with surprising verbiage; so ended. And with the end, the commissioner, in each case, fetched a deep breath, resumed his natural voice, and proceeded to business. "Now, my man," he would say, "you ship A. B. at so many dollars, American gold coin. Sign your name here, if you have one, ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... constant tautology and verbiage, with not infrequent flatness, are on all this gracious story as told by Chrestien.[25] Among the traps and temptations which are thrown in Lancelot's way to the Queen is one of a highly "sensational" nature. In the night Lancelot hears a damsel, who is his hostess, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... v. 1, and ix. 2, the temple worship was assiduously practised, but without a living piety of heart, and in a hypocritical and self-justifying manner; the complaints in this regard remind us vividly of similar ones of the prophet Malachi—chap. i. 6, etc." What then is the basis for all this verbiage about the temple worship? Here it is: "Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God, and be more ready to hear than to give the sacrifice of fools: for they consider not that they do evil." This sentence shows that it is ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... stuff of the same kind, the inconceivable merits and the superhuman perfections of his eternal Panselinos. The dissertations of this spiritual schoolmaster diverted me very little, as you may well suppose, and I was furious that in spite of myself his tiresome verbiage rooted itself in my memory, which is the most tenacious ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... a possibility in every service, possibly, but it ought to be. It is a possibility in every successful service. I heard of a preacher once who thought that what his congregation wanted was beautiful epigrams. He thought that they were more hungry for bejeweled verbiage than for the Bread of Life. He thought they were thirsting more for a stream of eloquence than for the Water of Life. But he was mistaken. And once he came into the pulpit to find a card lying before him on which was written this word: "Sir, we ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... happy to record, but for the fact that it would occupy more than half of one number of the JOURNAL OF MAN. Nevertheless, I cannot deprive my readers of the pleasure and amusement derived from this correspondence. I have condensed the responses into a readable compass leaving out their useless verbiage, and putting them in a poetic form, as poetry best expresses the essence and spirit of an author's thought. I think the learned gentlemen, if they could peruse these doggerel rhymes, would acknowledge that their meaning has been expressed even more plainly and forcibly than in their own prose. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... metaphors and hyperboles, paraded lumbering predicates and hurled out epithets, foaming and floundering. He had started so many things in a speech that he scarce knew when or how to stop. Commons, both sides, rather liked to hear him struggle with his verbiage. Later he developed the rapier thrust, some snatches of humor, a trifle of contempt. He learned the value of playing with a rhetorical period that he might later leap upon a climax. Frank B. Carvell was periodically egged on to bait the member of Portage. ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... ability employing itself with literature which was so unlike literary ability. Godolphin conceived perfectly of the literary intention in the fine passages of the play, and enjoyed their beauty, but he did not value them any more than the poorest and crudest verbiage that promised him a point. In fact, Maxwell found that in two or three places the actor was making a wholly wrong version of his words, and maturing in his mind an effect from his error that he was rather loath to give up, though when he was instructed ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... and must be clear and straightforward. It can still remain a very attractive instrument of speech or writing, and in Addison's hands it fulfilled to perfection the needs of the essay style. He avoids verbiage and excessive adornment, he is content to tell what he sees or knows or thinks as simply as possible (and even with a tendency towards the conversational), and he has an inimitable feeling for just the right word, just the most elegantly turned phrase and period. Do not imagine this sort ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... may throw aside a mass of useless verbiage, with which our inquiry is usually encumbered. We are eternally told that Kentucky has fallen behind Ohio, and Virginia behind Pennsylvania, because their energies have been crippled, and their ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... had been overdone, and it had been a capital error in Socrates to make that interpretation exclusive and to substitute it for natural philosophy. Locke, who was himself a medical man, knew what a black cloak for ignorance and villainy Scholastic verbiage might be in that profession. He also knew, being an enthusiast for experimental science, that in order to control the movement of matter—which is to realise those virtues and perfections—it is better to trace the movement of matter materialistically; for it is in ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... of Bernard Shaw would, I think, certainly have seen through this fallacy and verbiage had it not been that another important event about this time came to the help of Nietzsche and established the Superman on his pedestal. It is the third of the things which I have called stepping-stones to Man and Superman, and it is very important. It is ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... nihil [Lat.]; a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing; sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. nonsense, utter nonsense, gibberish; jargon, jabber, mere words, hocus-pocus, fustian, rant, bombast, balderdash, palaver, flummery, verbiage, babble, baverdage, baragouin^, platitude, niaiserie^; inanity; flap-doodle; rigmarole, rodomontade; truism; nugae canorae [Lat.]; twaddle, twattle, fudge, trash, garbage, humbug; poppy-cock [U.S.]; stuff, stuff and nonsense; bosh, rubbish, moonshine, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... there is an immense deal of Balzac—of the great artist who was so capable at times of self-deceptive charlatanism. "Louis Lambert," as a whole, is now quite unreadable; it contains some admirable descriptions, but the "scientific" portion is mere fantastic verbiage. There is something extremely characteristic in the way Balzac speaks of its having been optional with him to make it a "purely learned" work. His pretentiousness was simply colossal, and there is nothing surprising ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... Ishii-Lansing Agreement was concluded, by which "the Government of the United States recognizes that Japan has special interests in China, particularly for the parts to which her possessions are contiguous." The rest of the agreement (which is long) consists of empty verbiage.[68] ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... "It is more agreeable, without a doubt, to take lunch with Monsieur Carl Freudenberg, and to speak openly, than to exchange long-winded interviews, the true meaning of which is too much concealed by diplomatic verbiage, with the excellent gentleman to whose good offices are intrusted the destinies of Herr ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... recalled the full force of what he had only half apprehended at earlier times, particularly of that sweet kiss she had impressed on his lips when she supposed him dying,—these vivid realizations are difficult to tell in slow verbiage. He could remain there no longer, and with an electrified heart ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... hold of it and dived in the verbiage. He came up again with a discovery. In spite of its feebleness, verbosity, obscurity, and idiotic way of expressing itself, the Deed managed to convey to David and Mrs. Dodd a life interest in nine thousand five hundred pounds, with reversion ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... indulging in sheer doggerel. If his lines do not stagnate, they foam and fret like a mountain brook, instead of flowing continuously and majestically like a great river. He surpasses Pope chiefly, as it seems to me, where Pope's conventional verbiage smothers and conceals some vivid image from nature. Pope, of course, was a thorough man of forms, and when he has to speak of sea or sky or mountain generally draws upon the current coin of poetic phraseology, which has lost all sharpness of impression ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... ere he die By love I mean the forgetfulness of self Cheapness of this verbiage Delighting in the present moment Distrust of her own feelings to give way to them completely "Each of us," he said, "has a shadow in those places." Fear of meddling too much, of not meddling enough Governed ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... She answered, 'then ye know the Prince?' and he: 'The climax of his age! as though there were One rose in all the world, your Highness that, He worships your ideal:' she replied: 'We scarcely thought in our own hall to hear This barren verbiage, current among men, Light coin, the tinsel clink of compliment. Your flight from out your bookless wilds would seem As arguing love of knowledge and of power; Your language proves you still the child. Indeed, We dream not of him: when we set our hand To this great work, ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... step; or possibly its members thought that, as the greater includes the less, should freedom of conscience be established a state church would be impossible, and the article might therefore be stripped of supererogation and verbiage. At any rate, it was reduced one half, and finally adopted in this simpler form: "That religion, or the duty we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and, therefore, all men are equally ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... character which he had assumed and worn until it seemed even to him his own, that he felt as if he were constrained to some ghastly masquerade. Even the society of the moonshiners as their guest was a reproach to one who had always piously, and in such involuted and redundant verbiage, spurned the ways and haunts of the evil-doer. According to the dictates of policy he should have rested content with his advantage over the silenced lad. But his sense of injury engendered a desire of reprisal, and he impulsively carried the ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... work is well written and printed, and its verbiage such as to be comprehensible to the workman no less than to the master. The careful and general perusal of a work of this nature cannot but be attended by beneficial results of a far-reaching nature, and we therefore heartily recommend the book to our readers. ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... from the foot-lights. In operatic performances, however, the words are of very inferior importance to the music; the composer quite eclipses the author. A musician has been known to call a libretto the "verbiage" of his opera. The term was not perhaps altogether inappropriate. Even actors are apt to underrate the importance of the speeches they are called upon to deliver, laying the greater stress upon the "business" they propose to originate, or the scenic effects ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... determined to know the worst once for all. The time had come when I must. My doctor at home had put me off with vague hopes and perhapses. So I went to a noted physician in the city. I told him I wanted the whole truth—I made him tell it. Stripped of all softening verbiage it is this: I have perhaps eight months or a year ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Nature, it is true, is a part of Revelation—a much greater part doubtless than is yet believed—and one could have anticipated nothing but harmony here. But that a derived Theology, in spite of the venerable verbiage which has gathered round it, should be at bottom and in all cardinal respects so faithful a transcript of "the truth as it is in Nature" came as a surprise and to me at least as a rebuke. How, under the rigid necessity of incorporating ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... his confessor, if to secrets of State, to Prince Metternich. What the confessor may have thought of the Czar's political evangel is not known: the opinion delivered by the Minister was not a sympathetic one. "It is verbiage," said Metternich; and his master, though unwillingly, signed the treaty. With England the case was still worse. As the Prince Regent was not in Paris, Alexander had to confide the articles of the Holy Alliance to Lord Castlereagh. Of all things in the world the most incomprehensible ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... Inspiration makes short work with the usage of the best authors and ready-made elegances of diction; but where Wordsworth is not possessed by his demon, as Moliere said of Corneille, he equals Thomson in verbiage, out-Miltons Milton in artifice of style, and Latinizes his diction beyond Dryden. The fact was, that he took up his early opinions on instinct, and insensibly modified them as he studied the masters of what may be called the Middle Period of English verse.[2] ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... was sitting in the drawing-room, listening to the insinuating tones of Gedeonovsky's wearisome verbiage, he suddenly turned round, he knew not why, and caught the deep, attentive, inquiring look of Liza's eyes. That enigmatical look was directed towards him. The whole night long Lavretsky thought of it. His love was not like that of a boy, nor was it consistent with his age to sigh and ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... up of my own fancy. The attempts to lop off excrescences are not, perhaps, always happy. There might, perhaps, have been a fuller adherence to the original language and expressions; but if so, what a world of verbiage must have been retained. The Indians are prolix, and attach value to many minutiae in the relation which not only does not help forward the denouement, but is tedious and witless to the last degree. The gems of the legends—the ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... crime, carefully omitting to state the compulsion as used upon McGuire. Hawk Kennedy lied. If Peter had ever needed any further proof of the honesty of his employer he read it in the shifting eye and uncertain verbiage of his guest, whose tongue now wagged loosely while he talked of the two papers, one of which was in McGuire's possession, the other in his own. Hawk was no pleasant companion for an evening's entertainment. From the interesting adventurer of the Bermudian, Jim Coast had been slowly changing ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... a confused mass of verbiage in order to impress upon her that he was kept back by more serious considerations; that he had business on hand which it would take a long time to dispose of; that even his inheritance had been placed in jeopardy (Louise cut all this explanation short with one plain word); that, last of all, ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... emotional in his expressions. Yet with all his soberness and steadiness he possessed imagination. In its strength and depth his enthusiasm for colonization proves this, even if we omit his picture of the fancied Ludovica. But {139} as a man of action rather than of letters he instinctively omits verbiage. In some respects we suffer from Champlain's directness of mind, for on much that he saw he could have lingered with profit. But very special inducements are needed to draw him from his plain tale into a digression. Such inducements occur at times when he is writing ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... this childish and feigned regret," cried Wilhelm with rude impatience. "I pray you end the farce with less of verbiage and of pretended justice. You have his Majesty here a prisoner. You have, through my own folly, my neck at the mercy of your axe or your rope. There stands the executioner eager for his gruesome work. Finish that which you have already decided upon, and ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... which he has listened, in the newspapers next morning, can readily appreciate. Hazy ideas have become clear, mutilated and unintelligible sentences have been neatly and properly arranged, needless repetitions and tautological verbiage have disappeared; there is no sign of hesitation; hums and haws, and other inexpressible ejaculations, grunts, and interpolations find no place; the thread of an argument is shown where none was visible before, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in all the published editions of the work the text remains as it was. It is usual to credit the composer's friend, Baron van Swieten, with the "unintelligible jargon." The baron certainly had a considerable hand in the adaptation of the text. But in reality it owes its very uncouth verbiage largely to the circumstance that it was first translated from English into German, and then re-translated back into English; the words, with the exception of the first chorus, being adapted to the music. Considering the ways of translators, the best libretto in the world could ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... through the Central Empires; they had done much to arouse the subject peoples of Austria-Hungary to revolt for their freedom, and also to weaken the morale of the German people. The value of Wilson's "verbiage drives" was questioned in this country. Abroad, his insistence upon a peace of justice was generally reckoned a vital moral force in the political movements that supplemented the victories of Marshal Foch. Jugoslavs consented to ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... be fixed in the memory. Nor is this the only advantage to be gained. The act of reproducing the illustration cited will emphasise and render clear technical and mechanical features that would require many words to explain, with the attendant risk of confusing the mind by mere verbiage. ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... us, when we may, reduce phrases and even clauses to a word. Thus the clause at the beginning and the phrase at the close of the following sentence constitute sheer verbiage: "Men who have let their temper get the better of them are often in a mood to do harm to somebody." The sentence tells us nothing that may not be told in five words: "Angry ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... this description, can scarcely avoid believing that he is eminently original and impressive:— All sorts of commonplace notions and expressions are sanctified in his eyes, by the sublime ends for which they are employed; and the mystical verbiage of the methodist pulpit is repeated, till the speaker entertains no doubt that he is the elected organ of divine truth and persuasion. But if such be the common hazards of seeking inspiration from ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... perceive you both know the South Seas, wherefore, without undue expenditure of verbiage on my part, I am assured that you will appreciate the charm of my princess, the Princess Tui-nui of Talofa, the Princess ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... either of the contending parties, as that of Kant's noumenon, in the battle of impulses which rages in the breast of man. Metaphysicians, as a rule, are sadly deficient in the sense of humour; or they would surely abstain from advancing propositions which, when stripped of the verbiage in which they are disguised, appear to the profane eye to be bare ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... whirl of Paris caught me and left me little time for conjecture. I wrote once or twice to Joanna; but my letters were egotistical outpourings; the mythological picture at Menilmontant inspired sheets of excited verbiage. She replied in her pretty sympathetic way, but gave me little news of Paragot. It was hardly to be expected that she should write romantically, like a young girl foolishly in love, gushing to a bosom friend. Paragot himself, ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... mask of verbiage, however, the manifesto of the Emergency Convention of the Socialist Party of America joins with the famous Preamble of the I. W. W. and the manifestoes and programs of the Communist and Communist Labor ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... In long sentences you see processes; in short, results. Eloquence delights in long sentences, wit in short. Long sentences impress more at the time; short sentences, if nervous, cling more to the memory. From long sentences you must, in general, deduct a considerable quantum of verbiage; short have often a meagre and skeleton air. The reading of long sentences is more painful at first, less so afterward; a volume composed entirely of short sentences becomes soon as wearisome as a jest-book. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... imagination has contributed to it has been the names of the actors,—true names having been withheld, lest, perhaps, friends might be grieved,—the filling up of the dialogues, in which, while thoughts and sentiments have been remembered, the verbiage that clothed them has been forgotten, and, in a few instances, the grouping together of incidents that actually occurred at wider intervals than here represented, for the sake of ...
— The Runaway - The Adventures of Rodney Roverton • Unknown
... begin with the trifle, note something slipshod and vague in the mere verbiage, typical of those who prefer a catchword to a creed. "This cigarette business" might mean anything. It might mean Messrs. Salmon and Gluckstein's business. But the pastor at Bromley will not interfere with that, for the indignation of his school of thought, even when it is sincere, always instinctively ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... injustice regarding my poor father's speech in the City hall. He had caused me to suffer so much that I generally felt for myself when he appealed for sympathy, or provoked some pity: but I was past suffering, and letting kindly recollection divest the speech of its verbiage, I took it to my heart. It was true that he had in his blind way struck the keynote of his position, much as I myself had conceived it before. Harsh trials had made me think of my own fortunes more than of his. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... man surviving in his children, or in his works, or in the universal consciousness, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only those who suffer from affective stupidity, and who, for the rest, may be persons of a certain cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess great talent, or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... describe the mountains with their many charms. I listened to a lecture lately where a man was struggling to do this, and it was positively painful. The flowery verbiage, the accumulated adjectives, the poetical quotations were overpowering. I seemed actually sinking into luscious mellifluousness. I shook it off my fingers, as if it were maple syrup. Then, as he climbed higher and higher, on and up, never ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... could hardly suppress their jubilation. Stripped of their official verbiage, the letters informed the young men that each of them was made a corporal, Joe for valorous service in saving the lives of "three Americans entombed in a cave; Slim for heroism and presence of mind in saving and bringing back to the lines an American soldier," and Jerry "for coolness and ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... contemporaries. They are interesting in their exhibit of a bitter and eccentric individuality, witty, incisive, and expressed in a pungent and familiar style which contrasts refreshingly with the diplomatic language and glittering generalities of most congressional oratory, whose verbiage seems to keep its subject always ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Khan's message to the pope which—more or less mixed up with the vague notions about Prester John—had evidently left a deep impression upon the European mind. In translating the above sentence I have somewhat retrenched its excessive verbiage ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... hurried down the street crying an extra on the inquest. Brannan snatched one from his hand and the two men perused it eagerly. The finding, couched in usual verbiage, recited the obvious facts that Jenkins, alias Simpson, perished by strangulation and that "an association of citizens styling themselves a Committee of Vigilance," ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... artless and instinctive beneath all its sedulous art. It is no longer necessary, as I hinted above, to fight the battle of this prose. Whether it appeal to one not, no critic worth attention any longer disparages it as mere ornate and perfumed verbiage, the elaborate mannerism of a writer hiding the poverty of his thought beneath a pretentious raiment of decorated expression. It is understood to be the organic utterance of one with a vision of the world all his own striving through words, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... they perish (as he strangely thought, without apparently attempting to verify his belief) in the winter. How, he asks, can they reappear? Is it not more likely that these simple organisms are themselves regenerated? After much verbiage and ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... the pair, and then some sharp pain contracted her brows, but there was no other appearance of emotion; she would control even that instantly, and bending her head once more, listen patiently to her persecutor's verbiage. ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... over the oracular, which is likely to monopolize such assemblies. I was in that eagerness of early and incomplete knowledge which is more ready in expression than that of riper years, and it is probable that I distinguished myself by fluency of verbiage. It became customary to look to me for the most hazardous reaches of conjecture or inquiry, though certainly Mrs. Brown was worth far more than I was. I had already solved several problems which to-day are not clear to me, and I had always a ready answer to most mysteries. Talk ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... the logician's power to strip a subject bare of all superfluous and concealing verbiage, and to exhibit the gleaming jewels of truth and reality in splendid simplicity. This supreme quality, this ability to make the complex simple, the power to subordinate the non-essential, gave to his conversation, to his lectures, to his writings, and in no less degree to ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... they were to be tolerated, they were a part of us; doubtless the nether part, yet not the less a part for which we are bound to exercise a specially considerate care, or else we suffer, for we are sensitive there: this is justice but the indications by fiddle-faddle verbiage of anything objectionable to the whole in the part aroused an irritability that speedily endued him with the sense of sanity opposing lunacy; when, not having a wide command of the undecorated plain speech ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... name than verbiage for wordiness would be emptiness. Witness: "Clearness may be developed and cultivated in three ways, (a) By constantly practicing in heart and life the thoughts and ways of honesty and frankness." The first sentence evidently means, ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... the latest critic of Lowell's poetry, says of this poem: "The ode is too long, its evolution is defective, it contains verbiage, it preaches. But passages of it—the most famous having characteristically been interpolated after its delivery—are equal to anything of the kind. The temptation to quote from it is hard to withstand. ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... words which we have to use in the sequel. (See Appendix VI.) Much education sums itself in making men economize their words, and understand them. Nor is it possible to estimate the harm which has been done, in matters of higher speculation and conduct, by loose verbiage, though we may guess at it by observing the dislike which people show to having anything about their religion said to them in simple words, because then they understand it. Thus congregations meet weekly to invoke the influence ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... into a new course of conduct. What are these warnings? We have had at least three. The first is from England, and is a friendly warning. England has warned us by several matters of fact, according to her custom, rather than verbiage, that the Colonies had entered upon a new era of existence, a new phase in their career. She has given us this warning in several different shapes—when she gave us 'Responsible Government'—when she adopted Free Trade—when she repealed ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... he really did tell. The veiled allusions were so thoroughly veiled in words that they were buried as if under mountains of veils. Each slight hint was swamped in morasses of quotations and fine flourishes, overgrown and hidden by tropical verbiage, and covered up by philosophical and political phrases until nothing of the hint could be seen. As he read on the attorney could see Doc Weaver talking, as plainly as if he stood before him; he could see him at his desk in a frenzy of composition, and he recognized the apt quotations ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... brokenly, "it cannot hurt him now. He has found his 'cure.' As a candle-flame in this broad sunlight, so all those earthly longings"—The old gentleman could not finish his sentence, though a sentence was dear to him almost as the truth from which, even in his love of verbiage, his speech never deviated. "So we leave it here," he said at last. "It is between us and our blessed dead. No one else need know what you have had the courage to tell me. Your confession concerns no other living soul, unless it be your ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... hear these men—I am sure they were good men—prattling like bib-and-tucker babies about Irish affairs, and speaking of Gladstone as possessing a quality which we Catholics only ascribe to the Pope. Ha! ha! They think that vain old cataract of verbiage to be infallible. He knows nothing of the matter, does not understand the tools he is working with, any one of whom could buy and sell him and simple, clever Morley twenty times over. Both Gladstone and Morley are clever in books, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... explanation, stripped of its unnecessary verbiage, amounts to this: It is now stated that some months ago, somebody, whose name, observe, is not given, forwarded to the office of the Sunday Sun a manuscript in his own handwriting, containing some fifth-rate verses with my name appended to them as their author. ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... same difficulty when we come to literature. What would Chaucer or Spenser have thought of Browning or Swinburne? Would such poetry have seemed to them like an inspired product of art, or a delirious torrent of unintelligible verbiage? Of course, they would not have understood the language, to begin with; and the thought, the interfusion of philosophy, the new problems, would have been absolutely incomprehensible. Probably if one could have questioned Spenser, he would have felt that the ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... was first engendered." But how his "sum-total of external conditions," acting upon dead matter, can "engender" living matter, is one of those "related heterogenetic phenomena" which he does not condescend to explain. It is by this sort of scientific verbiage that he gets rid of the pre-existing vital principle, or germinal principle of life, which the biblical genesis declares to be in ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... retrograde party was to misunderstand everything. The plainest things were found to need a world of debate; the simplest things became entangled; the noble assemblies played solemnly a ludicrous game of cross-purposes. Straightway came a notice from the Emperor which, stripped of official verbiage, said that they must understand. This set all in motion again. Imperial notices were sent to province after province, explanatory documents were issued, good men and strong were ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... shifting sands. The incense the sycophant world burned before him became a stench in his nostrils. The fetishes he had tossed to the crowd now faced him as real gods; and they were not to be blinded with dust, nor bought with gold. The specious and tortured verbiage of twisted law never for one moment deceived the open ears of Justice, even though it tied her hands, and her voice was the voice of condemnation. Honor—he had sold it. Faith—he had not kept it. Truth—he had distorted to fit whatever garb he had chosen for her to wear. ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... girls of her class, had received a tincture of learning in the day schools of the nuns; but, although the paper was her marriage contract, it puzzled her greatly to pick out the few chips of plain sense that floated in the sea of legal verbiage it contained. Zoe, with a perfect comprehension of the claims of meum and tuum, was at no loss, however, in arriving at a satisfactory solution of the true merits of her matrimonial contract with honest Antoine ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... enforced by a positive law, with penal provisions, to punish offenders who mutilate or deface books that are public property. A good model of such a statute is the following, slightly abridged as to verbiage, from an act of Congress, of which we procured the enactment ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... the authentic monuments of its thought—the speeches of Robespierre and Saint-Just, the debates of the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, the harangues, addresses, and reports of Girondists and Montagnards. Never did men speak so much to say so little; the empty verbiage and swollen emphasis swamp any truth there may be beneath their monotony and their turgidity. The Jacobin is full of respect for the phantoms of his reasoning brain; in his eyes they are more real ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... wild with excitement; and from the violated cell arose a prodigious crash of thudding fists, the smashing of a splintered chair, the sickening impact of locked bodies falling against the stone walls or upon the complaining bunk, accompanied by verbiage, and also by rattling of iron doors, hoots, cheers and catcalls from the other ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... that if two apparently different definitions of the reality before us should have identical consequences, those two definitions would really be identical definitions, made delusively to appear different merely by the different verbiage in ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... staggered minions of the local constabulary—are assuaged by the brilliant narrative manner in which The Wisdom of Father Brown (CASSELL) is set forth. Here is the paradoxical world of Mr. CHESTERTON'S imagination described in his own verbiage and proved by actual and grisly events. In that starry dream of a detective story which I sometimes have, where sleuth-hounds are pattering along the Milky Way and pursue at last the Great Bear to his den, Father Brown and Sherlock ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... hand. This sense of constraint became an irritation—due in part to the slight headache, coming and going, which reminded her of her bad night. Among the things she meant to do this morning was the writing of several letters to so-called friends, who had addressed her in the wonted verbiage on the subject of her engagement. Five minutes proved the task impossible. She tore up a futile attempt at civility, and rose from the desk ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... of its legal verbiage, was the document which Roger, by the same hand that executed it, was invited, if he wished, to destroy. Perhaps for a moment, as his eyes glanced once more across the park, and a vision of Rosalind flitted across his mind, he was tempted ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... four separate paragraphs, five lines, and thirty-five words to express, in almost idiotic verbiage, the following: ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... difficulties, evident even to the capacities of a child, have never been removed by divines the most practised in dialectics. You will find in their replies only subtle distinctions, metaphysical subterfuges, unintelligible verbiage, which can never be the language of truth, and which demonstrates the embarrassment, the impotence, and the bad faith of those who are interested by their position in sustaining a desperate cause. In a word, the difficulties which ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... subtle, form of begging the question is what is known as "arguing in a circle." Usually the fallacy is so wrapped up in verbiage that it is hard to pick out. Here is a clear and well-put detection ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... Confessions lied about what it pretended to expose. The smell of the indecent and venal informer exhaled from the pages. The vital feature, however, lay in the revelation of Sister Claire's character, between the lines. Beneath the vulgarity and obscenity, poorly veiled in a mock-modest verbiage, pulsated a burning sensuality reaching the horror of mania. A well-set trap would have easy work in catching the feet of a woman related to the nymphs. Small wonder that the Livingstone party kept her afar off from their perfumed and reputable society ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... windings of a stream under the shadows of the trees. Past waterfall and banks of flowers and choiring of the birds, he goes on forever, except he force himself to pause. Shakespeare is always an enticement, whose turns of poetic thought and verbiage are a pure delight. Note this quality in the quotations—a word naturally expresses a thought. Shakespeare's figures express a series of thoughts as varied landscapes seen in pictures; in consequence, to read him is to see resemblances in things, because we have sharpened vision and can not, after ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... words borrowed from Latin through French, when wearied with 'velleities' and 'solidarities' and 'altruisms' and 'homologators,' or when vainly endeavouring to discover the real meaning which lies hidden in a jungle of Parliamentary verbiage, I have said to myself, remembering my similar labour upon the 'Variae,' 'How like ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... all the rare and far-fetched artifices that idle curiosity has taught them. Then the love-thoughts of the heart clothed themselves simply and naturally as the heart conceived them, nor sought to commend themselves by forced and rambling verbiage. Fraud, deceit, or malice had then not yet mingled with truth and sincerity. Justice held her ground, undisturbed and unassailed by the efforts of favour and of interest, that now so much impair, pervert, and beset her. Arbitrary law had not yet established itself in the mind of the judge, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra |
