"Vernacular" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Dangerously she had filed at her emotions in the service of culture and she was now paying the penalty for her ardent confidence. His ideas, vocal with golden meanings, were never meant to be translated into the vernacular of life, never to be transposed from higher to lower levels; this base betrayal of his ideals she felt Keroulan had committed. Had he not said that love should be like "un baiser sur un miroir"? Was he, after ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... these villagers that then laid the foundation for the better half of a mighty city to come. The "act" concludes: "And then and there proceed to elect Five discreet freeholders, resident within said village, to be trustees thereof." So witness is borne to this vernacular quality of discretion in the ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... readers the most interesting of Aelfric's writings is his Colloquium, designed to teach Latin in the monastery at Winchester. The pupils were required to learn the Latin translation of his dialogues in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular. Some of these dialogues are today valuable illustrations of the social and industrial life of the time. The following is part of the conversation between the Teacher and ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... because you are obliged to pass in the vernacular, Wilson. So you need not take any credit to yourself ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... clownish air even to sentiments of the greatest dignity and decorum. — I have declared my opinion on this head to some of the most sensible men of this country, observing, at the same time, that if they would employ a few natives of England to teach the pronunciation of our vernacular tongue, in twenty years there would be no difference, in point of dialect, between the youth ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... younger person, with a beard upon a comparatively diminutive scale, and with the top of his hair very curiously cut in a circular form. He professed his readiness to accompany us immediately into the receptacle of departed imperial grandeur. He spoke Latin with myself, and his vernacular tongue with the valet. I was soon satisfied with the sepulchral spectacle. As a whole, it has a poor and even disagreeable effect: if you except one or two tombs, such as those of Francis I. Emperor of the Romans, and Maria Theresa—which latter is ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Houston, his face brightened, and he was about to spring forward to greet him, when the latter, with a quick motion of his hand, gave him the signal of their old college days, its equivalent in the western vernacular being, "Don't give me away," at the same time putting his finger on his lips. A look of intense surprise flashed across Van Dorn's face, but he grasped the situation at once, and silently giving the return signal, he turned and walked in the opposite direction ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... and the barber had an undefined conviction that it was mean to take it back after he had just paid it. Amidon was a notorious talker, and was called a very "dry sort of man," which, in the village vernacular, signified that ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... used, and in which I am now employing it, means that sort of education which is specially adapted to the needs of men whose business in life it is to pursue some kind of handicraft; it is, in fact, a fine Greco-Latin equivalent for what in good vernacular English would be called "the teaching of handicrafts." And probably, at this stage of our progress, it may occur to many of you to think of the story of the cobbler and his last, and to say to yourselves, though you will be too polite to put the question openly to me, What does the speaker know ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... work, a book of mixed prose and poetry on "Love and Virtue" (the Convito, or Banquet); a Latin treatise on Monarchy (de Monarchia), recommending the "divine right" of the Emperor; another in two parts, and in the same language, on the Vernacular Tongue (de Vulgari Eloquio); and learnt to know meanwhile, as he affectingly tells us, "how hard it was to climb other people's stairs, and how salt the taste of bread is that is not our own." It is even thought not improbable, from ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... agreed. . . . The lands of Madariaga were indeed greater than many principalities. This put the old plainsman in rare good humor and he exclaimed in the cowboy vernacular which had become second nature to him—"Then it wouldn't be absurd to proclaim myself king some day? Just imagine it, Frenchy;—Don Madariaga, the First. . . . The worst of it all is that I would also be the last, for the China will not give me a son. ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... inveighed against it. "We marvel much," he wrote, "that the archbishop should enter this labyrinth without consulting the prelates and chapters of the Church. Every one knows that translations into the vernacular have already given rise to frequent heresy.... It is said the Bible is capable of four different interpretations. Therefore it would imperil many souls were a mere literal translation made. Moreover, laymen cannot read the Bible even if it be translated, ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... marvellously intricate, almost defies acquisition. Suppose this difficult vernacular mastered; the would-be student discovers that literary works, even newspapers and ordinary correspondence, are not composed in it, but in another dialect, partly antiquated, partly artificial, differing as widely from the colloquial speech as Latin does from Italian. Make a second hazardous ...
— The Invention of a New Religion • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... is left alone at Heidelberg, in his own unassisted weakness, at such a distance from us all, I should not be surprised to hear that he had constituted himself the lord and master of some blue-eyed fraeulein with whom he could not exchange a dozen words in her own vernacular, and had become a dis-respectable pater familias at nineteen. In the midst of all the worry and anxiety which these considerations occasion, we are living here a most unsettled, flurried life of divided work and pleasure. We have gone out to Heaton every morning after rehearsal, and come in with ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... first Napoleon; just as the eagle—Prometheus and the eagle in one shape—was fast fettered by sheer force and strength to his rock in the Atlantic, there arose a man in Central Germany, on the old Thuringian soil, to whom it was given to assert the dignity of vernacular literature, to throw off the yoke of classical tyranny, and to claim for all the dialects of Teutonic speech a right of ancient inheritance and perfect freedom before unsuspected and unknown. It is almost needless ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... says his Riv'rence, jumping off his sate,—"you spoke first in the vernacular! I take Misther Anthony to witness," ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... enough to explain the phenomena we refer to. Dr. Davidson says: "The rudiments of an original oral Gospel were formed in Jerusalem, in the bosom of the first Christian Church; and the language of it must have been Aramaean, since the members consisted of Galileans, to whom that tongue was vernacular. It is natural to suppose that they were accustomed to converse with one another on the life, actions, and doctrines of their departed Lord, dwelling on the particulars that interested them most, and rectifying the accounts given by one another, where such accounts ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... seldom anything that is picturesque about the man-killer of the mountain country. He is lacking sadly in the romantic aspect and the delightfully studied vernacular with which an inspired school of fiction has invested our Western gun-fighter. No alluring jingle of belted accouterment goes with him, no gift of deadly humor adorns his equally deadly gun-play. He does his killing in an unemotional, unattractive kind of way, with absolutely no regard for costume ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... I.) confestim pater Baiocas mittens Botoni militiae suae principi nutriendum tradidit, ut, ibi lingua eruditus Danica, suis exterisque hominibus sciret aperte dare responsa, (Wilhelm. Gemeticensis de Ducibus Normannis, l. iii. c. 8, p. 623, edit. Camden.) Of the vernacular and favorite idiom of William the Conqueror, (A.D. 1035,) Selden (Opera, tom. ii. p. 1640-1656) has given a specimen, obsolete and obscure even ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... of an imperial court. It was there that the spirit of chivalry first laid aside its terrors, first took a humane and graceful form, first appeared as the inseparable associate of art and literature, of courtesy and love. The other vernacular dialects which, since the fifth century, had sprung up in the ancient provinces of the Roman empire, were still rude and imperfect. The sweet Tuscan, the rich and energetic English, were abandoned to artisans and shepherds. No clerk had ever condescended ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... these Letters one cannot fail to perceive how fittingly Spanish words and phrases are interwoven with her own English. At the time these Letters were written, many Spanish words were a part of the California vernacular, but to Shirley belongs the honor of introducing them into the literature of California; hence, in printing the Letters, such words are not italicized, as they usually are, by printers who ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... Gaelic derivation to write Corintich, Galataich, Ephesich, subjoining the Gaelic termination alone to the Primitive, rather than by introducing the syllable an, to form a Derivative of a mixed and redundant structure, partly vernacular, partly foreign? The word Samaritanaich, John iv. 40, is remarkably redundant, having no fewer than three Gentile Terminations. From [Greek: Samareia] is formed, agreeably to the Greek mode of derivation, [Greek: Samareitai]. To this the Latins added their own termination, and wrote Samaritani; ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... securities of the cat-and-dog variety, and it was in this particular branch of the science of investment and speculation that Milton excelled. Despite his expert knowledge, however, he was slightly stumped, as the vernacular has it, when Abe Potash produced B. Sheitlis' stock, for in all his bucketshop and curb experience he had never even heard of the Texas-Nevada ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... gave them the impetus to go elsewhere, and thus brought them fame and fortune." Whatever foundation there may be for these jibes, they are in themselves a sufficient evidence that Chicago is alive to her opportunities and responsibilities. She is, in her own vernacular, "making, culture hum." Mr. Fuller, I understand, reproached her with her stockyards—an injustice which even Mr. Bernard Shaw would scarcely have committed. Is it the fault of Chicago that the world is carnivorous? Was not "Nature ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... sahib—wounded. And I said unto him, 'How is it that you, who are Christians, treat the Tommies so? We' (Major D—— looks at me with the hint of a twinkle in his eye—for has he not told me at mess of that surprising change in the Indian vernacular whereby their speech is no longer of "Goora-log" and "Sahib-log" but of "We," which fraternal pronoun is significant of much)—'we shave you and feed you, we wash you and dress your wounds, even as one of ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... in the gaucho vernacular synonymous with "ostrich, be hanged!" adding, as he continues to gaze hopelessly around, "I wish I'd let the long-legged brute go its way. Like as not, it'll hinder me going mine, till too late. And ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... poets, many of them of high excellence. Frederick II. of Germany and Richard I. of England were both good poets, and were as proud of their verses as they were of their military exploits. Frederick II. may be said to have founded the vernacular in which Dante wrote; and Longfellow rendered into English a poem of Richard's which he composed during his cruel imprisonment in Austria. A knight who could not compose a song and sing it to the guitar was as rare as a modern gentleman of fashion who cannot play golf. When James Russell ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... died away Hira Singh rose to reply, for he was the cadet of a royal house, the son of a king's son, and knew what was due on these occasions. Thus he spoke in the vernacular:—'Colonel Sahib and officers of this regiment. Much honour have you done me. This will I remember. We came down from afar to play you. But we were beaten' ('No fault of yours, Ressaidar Sahib. Played ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... near when the elements are at strife. He was immensely satisfied with his diggings, he said, liked the natives, and considered this a splendid chance for improving his Spanish. He was reading "Don Quixote" in the vernacular. In a sense, I looked upon his presence as a perfect godsend to us, as he came in most appropriately as a Deus ex machina to create the character of Barbarossa's invented friend. O'Donovan was in good standing with the Republicans of the town, as he was ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... first time, we taste the Dryden of the Satires and the Fables. His Essay on Dramatic Poesy started modern prose. Hitherto English prose had suffered from long sentences, from involved sentences, and from clumsy Latinisms or too bald vernacular. Dryden happily united simplicity with grace, and gave us plain, straightforward sentences, musically arranged in well-ordered periods. This was the vehicle in which he introduced literary criticism, and he continued it in prefaces to most of his ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... religious than the American or the Britisher. He drinks as much whisky as they do light wines and beer. He "cusses" in the same unholy vernacular, only more vigorously. He strikes back as quickly. He hits as hard. He gives his enemy one cheek and then the other, and then both feet and fists; but the Canadian goes to church. One of the most amazing sights of the new frontier cities is to see a church debouching ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... southern peculiarities of costume and appearance supply the vintage with its pleasant characteristics. The clatter of tongues is incessant. A fire of jokes and jeers, of saucy questions and more saucy retorts—of what, in fact, in the humble and unpoetic, but expressive vernacular, is called "chaff"—is kept up with a vigour which seldom flags, except now and then, when the but-end of a song, or the twanging close of a chorus, strikes the general fancy, and procures for the morceau a lusty encore. Meantime, the master wine-grower ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... Latin in dry folios for a few learned monks, as in Copernicus's time, but promulgated and argued in rich Italian, illustrated by analogy, by experiment, and with cultured wit; taught not to a few scholars here and there in musty libraries, but proclaimed in the vernacular to the whole populace with all the energy and enthusiasm of a recent convert and a master of language! Had a bombshell been exploded among the fossilized professors it had been ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... Scottish Ballads, selected and edited by himself, in eight small volumes (Boston, 1857-1858). Thenceforward the leisure of his life—much increased by his transfer, in 1876, to the new professorship of English—was devoted to the comparative study of British vernacular ballads. He accumulated, in the university library, one of the largest folklore collections in existence, studied manuscript rather than printed sources, and carried his investigations into the ballads of all other tongues, meanwhile giving a sedulous but conservative hearing to popular ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... explanation had been made in fluent, vernacular Urdu, Amber's surprise at the girl's evident familiarity with that tongue was hardly to be concealed. "You ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... language of my conversation and studies, in which it was easier for me to write than in my mother tongue. After my return to England I continued the same practice, without any affectation, or design of repudiating (as Dr. Bentley would say) my vernacular idiom. But I should have escaped some Anti-gallican clamour, had I been content with the more natural character of an English author. I should have been more consistent had I rejected Mallet's advice, of prefixing an English dedication ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... He commented briefly on the opera, reviewed the newer plays at the theatres, touched on the now dormant gaiety which had made the season at nearby country clubs conspicuous; then drifted into the hunting field, gossiping pleasantly in the vernacular about horses and packs and drag-hunts and stables, and what people thought of the new English hounds of the trial pack, and how the new M. F. H., Maitland Gray, had managed to break so ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... fortnight ahead, or trying to solve a chess problem without the aid of the board. In appearance he was on the short side, and thin. He was in the Sixth, and a conscientious worker. Indeed, he was only saved from being considered a swot, to use the vernacular, by the fact that from childhood's earliest hour he had been in the habit of keeping wicket like an angel. To a good wicket-keeper ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... French laazim, Rashi introduced no innovation. His predecessors, especially his masters, had already made use of them, perhaps in imitation of the Christian commentators, who likewise inserted words of the vernacular in their Latin explanations. The Latin - speaking clergy were often forced to employ the common speech for instructing the people; and in the eleventh century beginnings were made in the translation of the Old and New Testament by the rendition of important passages. But ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... connotative terms without a distinctly ascertained connotation, and with no more precise notion of their meaning than can be loosely collected from observing what objects they are used to denote. It is in this manner that we all acquire, and inevitably so, our first knowledge of our vernacular language. A child learns the meaning of the words man, or white, by hearing them applied to a variety of individual objects, and finding out, by a process of generalization and analysis which he could not himself describe, what those different objects ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... the doctrine of Jesus derived their moral force from his credit, and so had to keep his gospel alive. When the Protestants translated the Bible into the vernacular and let it loose among the people, they did an extremely dangerous thing, as the mischief which followed proves; but they incidentally let loose the sayings of Jesus in open competition with the sayings of Paul and Koheleth ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... approached to exorcise the demon; but Sister Claire resisted, and pretending to spit in the face of the exorcist, put out her tongue at him, making indecent gestures, using a word in harmony with her actions. This word being in the vernacular was understood by ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... ancient reasons for union—symbolised by the living Latin speech of all clerks, of all scholars, of all engaged in serious affairs-were added the newer bonds of connexion involved in the common knightly and social ideals, in the general spread of a common art and a common vernacular language ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... said in the broadest vernacular dialect, as, indeed, was everything that dropped from the fishermen's lips. We take the liberty of modifying it a little, believing that strict fidelity here would entail inevitable loss of sense to many of ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... to identify me in case I get into a scrape with the 'bobbies.'" This last I said with a thrill; truly, I was gripping hold of the vernacular. ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... head out of the galley door and grinned encouragingly at me, at the same time jerking his thumb in the direction of the man who paced up and down by the hatchway. Thus I was given to understand that he was the captain, the "Old Man," in the cook's vernacular, the individual whom I must interview and put to the trouble of somehow getting me ashore. I had half started forward, to get over with what I was certain would be a stormy five minutes, when a more violent suffocating paroxysm seized the unfortunate person who was ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... tremble for such boldness, such rawness. In "this odd-kind chiel" such points hardly mar the rest. Not only are they in consonance with the underlying spirit of the pieces, but complete the full abandon and veracity of the farm-fields and the home-brew'd flavor of the Scotch vernacular. (Is there not often something in the very neglect, unfinish, careless nudity, slovenly hiatus, coming from intrinsic genius, and not "put on," that secretly pleases the soul more than the wrought and re-wrought polish of the most perfect ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Karika, Mundukya Upanishad, &c. Gayatri, the holiest verse of the Vedas. Gehs, Parsi prayers. Gelugpas, "Yellow Caps," the true Magi and their school, so called in Tibet. Gnansaki, the power of true knowledge, one of the six forces. Gujarathi, the vernacular dialect of Gujrat, a province of Western India. Gunas, qualities, properties. Gunava, endowed with qualities. Guru, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... his parish school (in many such schools he might have acquired Latin and Greek; in fact he did not), to a tutor who read with him some English and French; and he knew a modernised version of Blind Harry's Wallace; Locke's Essay; The Spectator, novels of the day, and vernacular Scots poets of his century, with a world of old Scots songs. These things, and such as these, were Burns's given literary materials. He used them in the only way open to him, in poems written for a rural audience, and published for an Edinburgh public. No classical, ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... both were more than seventy years old and had been successful in the acquisition of millions by methods of their own invention. They were no doubt equally unscrupulous, but, while Drew was by nature a pessimist and "bearish," Vanderbilt, in the Wall Street vernacular, was always a "bull." ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... sermons for the furtherance of their views, but, considering their attitude toward the Bible, that they should wish to put it into the hands of all the people in a form which they would be able to understand, that is in their own vernacular English. Hence sprang the Wiclifite translation. The usual supposition that from the outset, before the time of Wiclif, the Church had prohibited translations of the Bible from the Latin into the common tongues is a mistake; that ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... gusto and wealth, might have meant to Dutch literature. Just imagine the Colloquia written in the racy Dutch of the sixteenth century! What could he not have produced if, instead of gleaning and commenting upon classic Adagia, he had, for his themes, availed himself of the proverbs of the vernacular? To us such a proverb is perhaps even more sapid than the sometimes slightly ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... legal or oilier business with the municipal, sociologic or religious world—at which times his vocabulary consisted only of the most rudimentary pidgin—Mock spoke a fluent and even vernacular English learned at night school. Incidentally he was the head of the syndicate which controlled and dispensed the loo, faro, fan-tan and ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... there, took a fancy to him and attached him to his person as a body servant. He had never regretted it. Oku was one of those ideal retainers who, once they have found an attachment, would rather die than betray their trust. His command of the vernacular was only limited, but he was the very soul of courtesy and politeness, and when not otherwise able to make himself understood, would content himself by a number of low salaams, accompanied by most apologetic exclamations of: "Excuse, please—excuse, ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... enamelled ironware, soda-water and lemonade, patent medicines, and even cheap watches, declares plainly that the young Hindu of the present day does not live as his fathers did. Men go better dressed, and their children are clothed at an earlier age. The advertisements in vernacular languages that one meets with, circulated and posted up in all sorts of places, tell the same tale convincingly; for the advertiser knows his business, and will not ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... servant from good will and favor toward us. For the same reason "divine form" cannot properly mean "divine essence"; for divine essence is not visible, while the divine form was truly seen. Very well; then let us use the vernacular, and thus make ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... and sepulchral, but either the ghostly apparition that uttered the command had slipped up on its vernacular, or it was the spirit of a bandit. Some demand of the kind was, however, urgently necessary, for George did not, as formerly, show a desire to flee; his belligerent attitude suggested fight and he was a husky specimen with a handy club. Even though he might have suffered ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... a rush basket for flowers at a stall for the sale of wicker-work made by low-caste Hindus at Panipara, she overheard a conversation in the vernacular between one of the workers and an outsider of evil appearance. Their words were often unintelligible being drowned in the noises prevailing around her, but the drift of their talk held Honor rigid and attentive, with every faculty alert, and fear at her heart. Feeling ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... with her eyes fast on the wall, Cassidy relapsed into silence, during which he stared rather perplexedly at his chief, who seemed to be in the throes of unusual emotion. As the detective expressed it in his own vernacular: For the first time in his experience, the Inspector appeared to be ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... the vigour or impaired the beauty of those memorials that have survived the extinction of the Grecian states, and the glory of the eternal city; and such is the luminous correspondence of Language, that by transfusion into our vernacular idiom, we may receive a satisfactory measure of the original inspiration. Let it be kept in view, that Ideas, the frail associates of a perception, possess no permanence, are incapable of being transferred, and must fade away when our existence terminates. It is ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... survey and illustrate the development of the vernacular literatures of mediaeval and Europe; and for that purpose it is unnecessary to busy ourselves with more than a part of the Latin writing which, in a steadily decreasing but—until the end of the last century—an ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... of the boundless sea whence they come. They bring no consciousness of ebbing years and joys and strength; they bring rather a sense of eternal resource and beneficence. In Arden one never feels in haste; there is always time enough and to spare; in fact, the word "time" is never used in the vernacular of the Forest except when reference is made to the enslaved world without. There were moments at the beginning when we felt a little bewildered by our freedom, and I think Rosalind secretly longed for the familiar tones of the cuckoo ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... and attain distinction and influence, he should spare no pains in the cultivation of the faculty of speech. The culture of his vocal organs should keep pace with the culture of his mental powers. While acquiring a knowledge of literature and science, he should also form the habit of speaking his vernacular with propriety, grace, ease, and elegance, sparing no effort to acquire what has been aptly called "the music of the phrase; that clear, flowing, and decided sound of the whole sentence, which embraces both tone and accent, and which is only to be learned from the ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... with the blacks. One day an Irishman who had heard people talking about "mares' nests" was going along the big road—it is always the big road in contradistinction to neighborhood paths and by-paths, called in the vernacular "nigh-cuts"—when he came to a pumpkin—patch. The Irishman had never seen any of this fruit before, and he at once concluded that he had discovered a veritable mare's nest. Making the most of his ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... launched in after years against the slayers of the Vaudois. The Italian language is named by him among three which, about the time of his migration to the University, he had added to the classical and the vernacular, the other two being French and Hebrew. It has been remarked, however, that his use of "Penseroso," incorrect both in orthography and signification, shows that prior to his visit to Italy he was unacquainted with the niceties of the language. He entered as "a lesser pensioner" at Christ's ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... possible; but it was not her natural attitude toward the world, and by the time the veal had arrived (it was Wednesday night) she was laughing whole-heartedly at Kid's ingenuous conversation. Miss McCoy's vocabulary was rich in the vernacular of the plains, and in vacation she let herself go. During term time she was forced to curb her discourse, owing to the penny tax on slang. Otherwise, her entire allowance would have gone to ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... earthy—[88] genuine red earth of the old Adam—it was an ideal very different from that which the sacred Italian painters had evoked from the life of Italy, yet, in its best types, was not without a kind of natural religiousness. And in the achievement of a type of beauty so national and vernacular, the votaries of purely Dutch art might well feel that the Italianisers, like Berghem, Boll, and Jan Weenix went so far afield ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... simulating a vernacular origin.—These may occur in any mixed language whatever; they occur, however, oftener in the English ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... Oriental vernacular for verbena; the fragrant white variety is quite common in the country; so that I was justified in ignoring the fellow's rather impudent meaning. Assuming as wooden an expression as I could, I replied, "Yes, I have often observed the flower you speak ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... the old scheme of encouraging Oriental learning by stipends paid to students in Sanscrit, Persian, and Arabic; and by liberal grants for the publication of works in those languages. The other half were in favour of teaching the elements of knowledge in the vernacular tongues, and the higher branches in English. On his arrival, Macaulay was appointed President of the Committee; but he declined to take any active part in its proceedings until the Government had finally pronounced on the ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Seminary, and Speug had ransacked the resources of the stable yard in profanity, he declared that the time had now come for active operation, and that the war must be carried into the enemy's country. Speug declared his conviction in the vernacular of the school, which is here translated into respectable language, that the Bailie was a gentleman of doubtful birth and discreditable pedigree, that his conduct as a boy was beyond description, and that his private life was stained with every vice; that his intellect would give ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... horse were within hail; who rode to dances with a shawl thrown over her skirt; who wore her hair cropped and curling all over her head; who answered indifferently to the name of William or Bill; whose speech was heavy with the flowers of the vernacular; who could act in amateur theatricals, play on the banjo, rule eight servants and two horses, their accounts and their diseases, and look men slowly and deliberately between the eyes—even after they had proposed ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... few of the many proverbs which characterize woman in one vernacular only. Every other Indian tongue equally abounds in proverbial expressions which brand a woman as one of the greatest evils of the land. Sanskrit writers have exhausted vituperative language in describing woman. They represent her ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... of the largest islands in Europe. It contains thirty thousand square miles of surface, and has about seventy thousand inhabitants. Geographers have divided it into four parts, and we had to cross the southwest quarter which in the vernacular is ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... delight and despair.' Dr. Beattie (Life, p. 243) wrote on Jan. 5, 1778:—'We who live in Scotland are obliged to study English from books, like a dead language, which we understand, but cannot speak.' He adds:—'I have spent some years in labouring to acquire the art of giving a vernacular cast to the English we write.' Dr. A. Carlyle (Auto, p. 222) says:—'Since we began to affect speaking a foreign language, which the English dialect is to us, humour, it must be confessed, is less ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... frankly contemptuous. "All you English are mad," he said in the vernacular. "If she die not to-day, she will die to-morrow. And already there are too many ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... (official; regular use limited to literate minority), Mende (principal vernacular in the south), Temne (principal vernacular in the north), Krio (the language of the re-settled ex-slave population of the Freetown area ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... outrage—a frame-up," declared Jane, glad to recall the vernacular. "There are three witnesses here who saw the trouble and we'll find others if you want them. The fact is Officer Jamison is always cross with us students" (she put it mildly), "and he was, perhaps, too willing ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... Cleigh, falling into the old New England vernacular which was his birthright. "I brought you on board merely to lure him after you. I wanted you both on board so I could observe you. I intended to carry you both off on a cruise. I watched you from the door that night while you two were dining. I saw by ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... me. As the summer progressed I wondered more and more at this strange new acquaintance of mine; this rough looking tramp with the manners of a gentleman and the speech, except for a few lapses in the vernacular of the road, of a man of considerable education. The oddest thing of all was the feeling I had that somewhere, at some time, Jim and I had met before. Little tricks of voice and expression ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... which, in turn, was substituted by himself for the nickname "Bajolardus" given to him in his student days. However the name may have arisen, the famous scholar certainly adopted it very early in his career, and it went over into the vernacular as "Abelard" or "Abailard," though with a multiplicity of variations (in Villon's famous poem, for example, it appears ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... to the same extent as Hegel. The language of Plato or even of Aristotle is but slightly removed from that of common life, and was introduced naturally by a series of thinkers: the language of the scholastic logic has become technical to us, but in the Middle Ages was the vernacular Latin of priests and students. The higher spirit of philosophy, the spirit of Plato and Socrates, rebels against the Hegelian use of language ...
— Sophist • Plato
... to know something about Greek literature must have produced within a few years a pioneer bold enough to make the attempt, if the accident of a schoolmaster needing text-books in the vernacular for his scholars had not brought it about. The man who thus first clothed Greek poetry in a Latin dress, and who was always gratefully remembered by the Romans in spite of his sorry performance ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... Bible, then, our spelling and writing, and sums. After these, my mother read aloud from Grimshaw's History of England, simplifying the language when she considered it necessary, which was not often, while Mary 'Liza made up the first set of chemises (in the vernacular "shimmys,") she had undertaken for herself, and I knit twenty rounds on a stocking. My mother put in a "mark" of black silk every morning from which I could count the rounds upward. Mary 'Liza had knit a dozen pairs in all. In the tops of six, she had knit in openwork her initials ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... inaction which has been noted in the Bride. And, above all, there appears here a fault which had not been noticeable before, but which was to increase upon Scott,—the fault of introducing a character as if he were to be of great pith and moment, and then letting his interest, as the vernacular says, 'tail off.' The trouble taken about Halbert by personages natural and supernatural promises the case of some extraordinary figure, and he is but very ordinary. Still, at the works of how many novelists except Scott should we grumble, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time. And the most interesting parts of the Arthurian story are rarely handled at all in such early vernacular versions of it as we have, whether in verse or prose. Naturally enough, perhaps, it was the fabulous historic connection with British history, and the story of the great British enchanter Merlin, that attracted most attention. The Arthour and Merlin which is in the Auchinleck MS.; the ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... Bivens rose early and declared that he would try the ducks. The day before had been, in the local vernacular, a "weather breeder"—a day of breathless seas, a soft haze hanging from the sky, a lazy, sensuous, dreamy, alluring ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... total lack of tall trunks, frills, and curling-kids. Driven by the oestrum of a Yo-Semite pilgrimage, the San-Francisco belle forsakes (the Western vernacular is "goes back on") her back-hair, abandons her capillary "waterfalls" for those of the Sierra, and, like John Phoenix's old lady who had her whole osseous system removed by the patent tooth-puller, departs, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... De Genealogia Deorum Boccaccio wrote other treatises in Latin, which need not here be specified, and sixteen Eclogues in the same language, of which he was by no means a master. As for his minor works in the vernacular, the earlier of them shew that he had not as yet wrought himself free from the conventionalism which the polite literature of Italy inherited from the Sicilians. It is therefore inevitable that the twentieth century should find the Filocopo, Ameto, and Amorosa Visione ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... when he suddenly heard the well-known idioms lavished upon Madame Duvet and Mr Deep, who were enjoying them a great deal more than the concert, which, being principally in the vernacular, was not so intelligible and far less amusing. Mrs Jenkins was in her glory. Never had Mrs Rice Rice been so condescending before. She and Mr Deep made themselves more agreeable than she had supposed it possible for such grand people to be, and she frequently ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... flower that smiles down at you from the lowly roof above the door, with such an inviting expression, so delighted to see you no matter how poor and worthless a person you may be or what mischief you may have been at, that you begin to understand the significance of a strange vernacular name of ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... princely patrons, as they returned from their travels in France and Italy, full of admiration for everything that was not German. They were delighted to hear that in France, in Holland, and in Italy, it was respectable to write poetry in the modern vernacular, and set to work in good earnest. After the model of the literary academies in Italy, academies were founded at the small courts of Germany. Men like Opitz would hardly have thought it dignified to write verses in their native tongue had it not been for the moral support which they received ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... Donald had only to close his eyes to see the keen, subtle face surmounted by its huge white turban, and to hear the torrent of picturesque broken English that poured from the lips of one of the few Mohammedans in India who could curse the various natives in their own vernacular from the ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... he has kept close and not fooled away his time he is safe enough; but Wayne is Wayne, colonel, and I've known him to go poking off on side scouts and losing time 'topogging' over pretty country when he ought to have been making tracks for home." (Stannard would use the vernacular of the frontier when at all excited.) "Now it would be just like Wayne to have lost a day in just such a manner. I hope ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... kingfisher is blue, and I am puzzled to know why, on this one occasion, it appeared green. I have, in a former work, Argentine Ornithology, described a contrary effect in a small and beautiful tyrant-bird, Cyanotis azarae, variously called, in the vernacular, "All-colored or Many-colored Kinglet." It has a little blue on its head, but its entire back, from the nape to the tail, is deep green. It lives in beds of bulrushes, and when seen flying from the spectator in a very strong light, at a distance of twenty or thirty yards, its colour in appearance ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... It has been already observed that Naples was a Greek colony, and consequently Greek appears to have continued the vernacular tongue.] ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... no war-hospital orderly ever arranges any appointment without the proviso that he is liable to break it. The folk who imagine that the hospital orderly enjoys a "cushy job" (to use the appropriate vernacular) seldom make sufficient allowance for this painful aspect of it. The ordinary soldier in training in an English camp has his evenings free, and certain other free times, which are nearly as sure as the sun's rising. The hospital orderly is never—in theory at any rate—off duty. His ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... some open ground along the crest of a gentle ridge. Custer got Capehart into place just in time to lend a hand to Smith, who, severely pressed, came back on us here from his retreat along Chamberlain's "bed"—the vernacular for a woody swamp such as that through which Smith retired. A little later the brigades of Gregg and Gibbs, falling to the rear slowly and steadily, took up in the woods a line which covered the Boydton Road some distance to the right of ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 5 • P. H. Sheridan
... no human being so strange and mysterious, such an unknown quantity, to Caleb Thayer as his own son. He had not one trait of character in common with him—at least, not one so translated into his own vernacular that he could comprehend it. It was to Caleb as if he looked in a glass expecting to see his own face, and saw therein ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... horse brought by a butcher from West Bungtown. It was, in the vernacular, a buck-skin. Hide-bound, with ribs so prominent they suggested a wash-board. The two fore legs were well bent out at the knees; both hind legs were swelled near the hoofs. His ears nearly as large as a donkey's; one eye covered with a cataract, the other deeply sunken. A Roman ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... Wherever it exists there will be foolish and violent paragraphs in the newspapers, as there are, I am sorry to say, foolish and violent speeches in both houses of Congress. In truth, Sir, I must say that, in my opinion, the vernacular tongue of the country has become greatly vitiated, depraved, and corrupted by the style of our Congressional debates. And if it were possible for those debates to vitiate the principles of the people ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... made itself directly or indirectly responsible for the education of the province. At the headquarters of each district there is a high school for boys controlled by the Education Department. In each district there are Government middle schools, Anglo-vernacular or Vernacular, and primary schools, managed by the Municipal Committees and District Boards. Each middle school has a primary, and each high school a primary and a middle, department. For the convenience of pupils who cannot attend school while living at home hostels are attached ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... tending of vines and fig-trees and olive-orchards was a part of their daily lives. And so, naturally, the older noel writers without any thought of anachronism, and the modern writers by poetic instinct made complete their translation of the story of the Nativity into their vernacular by transferring its scene ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... sumach-leaves after the first hard frost. I began to feel myself slowly stiffening, my courage getting gently chilly. I tried to tell a story, but had to mangle it greatly, because I felt in the air around me that parts of it were too vernacular and emphatic; and then, as a man who is freezing makes desperate efforts to throw off the spell, and finds his brain beginning to turn, so I was beginning to be slightly insane, and was haunted with a desire to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... polls to register his vote. He has not done much more than this since his inception. His work alone has sufficed, for him, at least, though the time is past when he can bury himself in his professional work and, in the vernacular, get away with it. Men of the stamp of Herbert Hoover have demonstrated the very great need for men of scientific training in public affairs. Such places heretofore have been filled with business men and lawyers. These men served and served well. But since administration ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... her hidden glories to the sun. He has "no figures nor no fantasies, which busy passion draws in the brains of men:" neither the gorgeous machinery of mythologic lore, nor the splendid colours of poetic diction. His style is vernacular: he delivers household truths. He sees nothing loftier than human hopes; nothing deeper than the human heart. This he probes, this he tampers with, this he poises, with all its incalculable weight of thought and feeling, in his hands, and at the same time calms the throbbing ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Theology,' (10) 'Ethics, or Know Thyself,' (11) 'Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian,' (12) 'On the Intellects,' (12) 'On the Hexameron,' with a few short and unimportant fragments and tracts. None of Abelard's numerous poems in the vernacular, in which he celebrated his love for Heloise, which he sang ravishingly (for he was a famous singer), and which at once became widely popular, seem to have come down to us; but we have a somewhat lengthy poem, of considerable merit (though ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... during the fifteenth century the popularity of these plays increased enormously, records of their performance being found in all parts of England, including Cornwall and Wales, where they were acted in the vernacular. ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... "I am sorry to see a gentleman of your learning and gravity labouring under such strange blindness and delusion. Will you place the brief, the modern, and, as I may say, the vernacular name of Isaac Newton, in opposition to the grave and sonorous authorities of Dariot, Bonatus, Ptolemy, Haly, Eztler, Dieterick, Naibob, Harfurt, Zael, Taustettor, Agrippa, Duretus, Maginus, Origen, and Argol? Do not Christians and Heathens, ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... rhymes or perfect his metre, he gave the freest vent to his emotions. Some of the heart-glow which makes the exhilaration of Burns's poems infectious is found in his songs, but they are generally so entirely French that its scope is limited in a way that the Scotch poet's, despite his vernacular, was not. The Frenchman's sympathy is always with the harder side of life. In the 'Songs of the Soldier' he plays on chords of steel. These verses resound with the blast of the bugle, the roll of the drum, the flash of the sword, the rattle of musketry, the boom of the cannon; ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... attempted to reform French verse, by inspiring it with the enthusiasm of the Renaissance. His book L'Illustration de la langue Francaise is a plea for the study of ancient models and for the improvement of the vernacular. In this effort Du Bellay and Ronsard are the predecessors of Malherbe, and of Andre Chenier, more successful through their frank eagerness than the former, less fortunate in the possession of critical ...
— Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: with other Poems • Andrew Lang
... don't love the man, when it comes to that; but there's no denying he's right smart," replied Denyven, who occasionally marred his vernacular with Americanisms. "The Association couldn't do ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... into the lapidary style of ancient Rome, I confess it is often hard to improve on the brevity of the vernacular, though the admonition "to keep your end up" can be condensed from four words to two in "sursum cauda." Again the familiar eulogy, "Stout fellow," can be rendered in a single word by the Virgilian epithet "bellipotens." A distinguished ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 12, 1917 • Various
... thought, or rather it is the body of which thought is the soul; the former rises into being together with the latter, and the graces of the one are shadowed forth in the movements of the other. Goethe's language, even to a foreigner, is full of character and secondary meanings; polished, yet vernacular and cordial, it sounds like the dialect of wise, ancient, and true-hearted men: in poetry, brief, sharp, simple, and expressive; in prose, perhaps still more pleasing; for it is at once concise and full, rich, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... they are examining the work that has been done. When pruning, for instance, the duffadar should move from one end of the line to the other examining as he goes the trees just finished by the people. It is hardly necessary to say that a fluent command of the vernacular is of the utmost, or I may say, of the most indispensable importance, for, as an old planter once said to me, "A native thinks that a European who can't speak the language is a perfect fool." The reader will find a chapter in the "Experiences ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... understand equally the language of the laboratory and of the street. The modern journalist knows that anything can be made interesting to anybody, if he takes pains enough with the writing of it. It is not necessary, either, to pervert scientific truths in the process of translation into the vernacular. The facts are sensational enough without any ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... disgrace of the age; and, as regards the two universities, and the enormous responsibility they undertake for the books which they sanction by their official examinations for degrees, the name of Paley is their great opprobrium. But, on the other hand, for style, Paley is a master. Homely, racy, vernacular English, the rustic vigor of a style which intentionally foregoes the graces of polish on the one hand, and of scholastic precision on the other—that quality of merit has never been attained in a degree so eminent. This first interchange of thought upon a topic of literature did not tend ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... which mediaeval scholars studied all that they possessed of ancient literature. The relation of the art of the Middle Ages to the ancient world was quite different. There was no continuity between the vernacular poetry of the Middle Ages and that of the ancient world, and while there was a certain continuity in architecture and in mosaic painting, this amounted to little more than that the mediaeval artists took the formal structure or method as the starting-point of their own independent ...
— Progress and History • Various
... reported that the German Minister to Patagonia, with the assistance of the Swedish Charge d'Affaires, has caused the following Proclamation to be distributed, along with a translation into the vernacular, among the natives; alleging that it reproduces a leaflet composed by the ALL-HIGHEST and dropped from a German aeroplane ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... they were rising to take leave, a tall, lanky man, stuck his long scraggy neck in at the cabin-door, and, in the broadest Scotch vernacular, exclaimed,— ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... Those well-beloved words, Orange and Nassau, Maurice and William, intermingled with the names of many an ancient town and village, or with the simple patronymics of hardy navigators or honoured statesmen, were to make the vernacular of the new commonwealth a familiar sound in the remotest corners of the earth; while a fifth continent, discovered by the enterprise of Hollanders, was soon to be fitly baptized with the name of the fatherland. Posterity has been neither just nor grateful, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... herself sees the need of reform, spiritual and temporal, and has exhorted the clergy and nobles to employ care and diligence thereon, a fact corroborated by Mary of Guise herself, in a paper, soon to be quoted, of July 1559. {88c} They ask, as they have the reading of the Scriptures in the vernacular, for common prayers in the same. They wish for freedom to interpret and discuss the Bible "in our conventions," and that Baptism and the Communion may be done in Scots, and they demand the reform of the detestable lives of the ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... of plausibility to my picture of society when I got him into it. I lacked the touch of the literary diner-out; and I had, as the reader will probably find to his cost, the classical tradition which makes all the persons in a novel, except the comically vernacular ones, or the speakers of phonetically spelt dialect, utter themselves in the formal phrases and studied syntax of eighteenth century rhetoric. In short, I wrote in the style of Scott and Dickens; and as fashionable society then spoke and behaved, as it still does, in ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... which is not their mother tongue, they necessarily acquired an artificial and formal style, which, not so much through the merit of a few as owing to the perseverance of others, who for half a century seated themselves on the bench of criticism, has almost superseded the vernacular English of Addison and Swift. Our journals, indeed, have been the great corrupters of our style, and continue to be so, and not for this reason only. Men who write in newspapers, and magazines, and reviews, write ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... Imperator Tu Vincas", would be, as we know from other similar instances, the most frequently uttered acclamation. It is a curious instance of "survival" that this was always shouted in Latin, though Greek was the vernacular tongue of the vast majority of the inhabitants ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... why have there been so few good translators? why is it that there has been such great difficulty in combining the two necessary qualities, fidelity to the original and purity in the adopted vernacular? why is it that the authorized versions of the Church are often so inferior to the original as compositions, except that the Church is bound above all things to see that the version is doctrinally correct, and in a difficult problem is obliged to put up with defects ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Old Testament names it must be remembered that the people did not possess the Bible in the vernacular. The teaching of the parish priests made them familiar with selected episodes, from which they naturally took the names which appeared to contain the greatest element of holiness or of warlike ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... stronger than that; I know it was, in fact, but it is gone from my memory, apparently. However, it is no matter—probably it was too strong for print, anyway. It is the landmark in my memory which tells me where I first encountered the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... capitalization, could have sustained a policy of political reform, when, in the picturesque vernacular of the time and place, "the bottom had dropped out of the town." A rival newspaper, the LEDGER, in order to retrench, began a war on the Printers' Union, to break wages. Lane repudiated the effort ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... Bantu vernacular, French (official), English (official), Kiswahili (Swahili) used in ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... judge them by the standards of to-day—you must go back to the standards of the Revolution. Practically, they are the pioneers of that day and hardly a bit have they advanced. They are our contemporary ancestors." And then the Hon. Sam, having dropped his vernacular, lounged ponderously into what he was pleased to call his ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... that my jaw dropped open,—that, to use his own vernacular, I was 'all of a heap.' ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... close of the fourteenth century that we find a series of discourses by a known preacher written and pronounced in French. It is maintained that these Latin sermons, though prepared in the language of the Church, were delivered, when addressed to lay audiences, in the vernacular, and that those composite sermons in the macaronic style, that is, partly in French, partly in Latin, which appear in the thirteenth century and are frequent in the fifteenth, were the work of reporters or redactors among the auditory. On the ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... a double purpose in calling on Lindy; he actually wished to see her, for they had not met since the concert, but his principal wish was to meet a real old-fashioned country couple. To be sure, Deacon Mason and his wife often dropped into the vernacular, but the Deacon was a very dignified old gentleman and his wife was not a great talker. What he desired was to find one of the old-fashioned style of country women, with a tongue hung in the middle and running at both ends. His wish ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... several booths where the natives who were making the Government road were living. She began chatting with them, and then told them the Parable of the Lost Sheep. She told everything in a graphic way, and with a perfect knowledge of the vernacular, and they followed her with reverence and intense interest all through. To most of them, if not to all, that would be the first time they had heard of a God ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... science, scarcely omitting the work of Humboldt, in which he sought to represent the whole of geology by algebraic symbols. Percival's work actually demands, and would richly repay, a translation into the vernacular of descriptive geology,—the language and mode of illustration employed by Murchison and Hitchcock. In its present form, it is safe to say, it has never found a single reader among the persons for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... you,' and Esclairmonde took the girl's hand. 'You know how much I owe to Father Malcolm,' she softly added, as she led the maiden to a carved rood at the end of the cloister, and, before it, repeated the vernacular version of the Lord's Prayer till Eleanor knew it perfectly, and promised to follow up her 'Pater ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Marion Hayden's in the evenings, and from things he let fall, Clayton gathered that the irresponsible group which centered about Marion was, in the boy's own vernacular, rather "shot to pieces." Tommy Hale had gone to England to join the Royal Flying Corps. One or two of them were in Canada, trying to enlist there, and one evening Graham brought home to dinner an inordinately tall and thin ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Persian and Arabic languages. It is the language of law, of commerce, and of ordinary life to many millions. The Hindee in its various dialects, some of which almost rise to the dignity of languages, is the vernacular of the vast Hindu population of North-Western India. It rests mainly on the Sanscrit, and is written in the Sanscrit or Deonagree character. In some of the most popular books the languages are so strangely combined that it is impossible ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... not in the least recognize it. The fact is, Mr. Tippengray, I do not believe that your method of Greek pickling will answer to preserve our fiction for the future. It may do for histories and scientific work, but when you come to dialect and vernacular, if you once get it into Greek you can never get it back again as ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... away Hira Singh rose to reply, for he was the cadet of a royal house, the son of a king's son, and knew what was due on these occasions. Thus he spoke in the vernacular: - "Colonel Sahib and officers of this regiment. Much honour have you done me. This will I remember. We came down from afar to play you. But we were beaten." (" No fault of yours, Ressaidar Sahib. Played on our own ground, y' know. Your ponies were cramped ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... or other serious skin trouble and was peeling badly. There was a current superstition about the place to the effect that the bathroom and the water supply might on occasion be heated with a device known in the vernacular as a geezer. ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... in all the ancient voyages and travels, the names of persons, places, and things, are generally given in an extremely vicious orthography, often almost utterly unintelligible, as taken down orally, according to the vernacular modes of the respective writers, without any intimate knowledge of the native language, or the employment of any fixed general standard. To avoid the multiplication of notes, we have endeavoured to supply this defect, by subjoining ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... his persuasive powers!" she thought; Mr. Tillott's eloquence being, in fact, of a very limited order, chiefly exhibiting itself in little jerky questions about the spiritual and temporal welfare of his humble parishioners—questions which, in the vernacular language of agricultural labourers, "put a ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... then, in the vernacular of the great apes which constant association with the anthropoids had rendered the common language of the Oparians: "You have come back to me! La has ignored the mandates of her religion, waiting, always waiting for Tarzan—for her Tarzan. She has taken no mate, ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Anne and The Young Princess. There are also the humorous and pathetic studies in Roadside Philosophers and the like, in which, forty years ago, Meredith anticipated, with the dignity of a poet, the vernacular studies of others. And, finally, there is a section containing poems of impassioned meditation, beginning with the lofty and sustained ode to France, December 1870, and ending with the volcanic volume of Odes in Contribution to the Song of French ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... hearing, he would never have let his mother forget this speech. For had not she, the immaculate, the reprover, fallen herself into the slough of the vernacular? The fact is, it is easier to speak the truth in a patois, for it lies nearer to the simple realities than a ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... somewhat late we came to St. Andrews, a city once archiepiscopal; where that university still subsists in which philosophy was formerly taught by Buchanan, whose name has as fair a claim to immortality as can be conferred by modern latinity, and perhaps a fairer than the instability of vernacular languages admits. ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... French word which has no English equivalent), that is to say, the stock phrases which Heaven knows who first minted and which will pass till they are worn out of all knowledge. It has two great poets—one in the vernacular, one in the literary language—who are rich enough to keep a bank for their inferiors almost to the end of time. The depreciation of it by "glaikit Englishers" (I am a glaikit Englisher who does not depreciate), simply because it is unfamiliar and rustic-looking, is silly enough. But its best ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... the Herr Professor in the Traun dialect: 'Ibex may be stirring, as it is already late afternoon. We ought now to use our glasses.' My family," he added apologetically, "come from the Traunwald; I forget and employ the vernacular ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... Japanese language of a number of young men to be under obligations to serve the Government for a specified time as interpreters at the legation and the consulates in Japan. A limited number of Japanese youths might at the same time be educated in our own vernacular, and mutual benefits would result to both Governments. The importance of having our own citizens, competent and familiar with the language of Japan, to act as interpreters and in other capacities connected with the legation and the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... door was again gingerly opened. The same face appeared, that of a round blue-eyed Dutch girl. She turned her impassive gaze upon the visitor, who, by way of opening the conversation, taxed his limited knowledge of the vernacular so far as to ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... had received her. There had she continued, never exposed to tests of opinion, but pursuing her quiet course according to her Benedictine rule, faithfully keeping her vows, and following the guidance of the chaplain, a college friend of Bishop Ridley, and rejoicing in the use of the vernacular prayers and Scriptures. When Queen Mary had sent for her to consider of the revival of convents, her views had been found to have so far diverged from those of the Queen that Lord Walwyn was thankful to have her safe at home again; and yet she fancied herself firm to old Romsey ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to which, in other parts of Europe, Protestantism had owed its victory. It is well known that of all the instruments employed by the Reformers of Germany, of England, and of Scotland, for the purpose of moving the public mind, the most powerful was the Bible translated into the vernacular tongues. In Ireland the Protestant Church had been established near half a century before the New Testament was printed in Erse. The whole Bible was not printed in Erse till this Church had existed more than one hundred and twenty years. Nor did the publication at last take place under the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... prefigure the grand solution Of earth's municipal, insular schisms,— Statesmen draping self-love's conclusion In cheap vernacular patriotisms, Unable to ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... Cockburn, as a 'cheery swine' who, as he affirmed, had gone to church and preached a sermon an hour and a half long. The sheriff, too, was there in a red coat, and had no doubt got his place by interest. 'Pomp and 'umbug I calls it, and we poor chaps pays for it all.' Fitzjames heartily enjoyed good vernacular embodiments of popular imagination. He admitted that he was not quite insensible to the pleasures of pomp and humbug as represented by javelin men and trumpeters. His work, as my quotation indicates, included some duties that were trivial and some that were repulsive. In spite of all, however, ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen |
