"Adjective" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... course. Used as a noun—you know what a noun is, don't you? It means the name of anything. Wight means a person—any creature. Originally it meant a fairy, a supernatural being. As an adjective it means brave, valiant, strong or powerful. Or, it used ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... perfection of a civilized state, or polity, depends on the obedience of its members to these commands, the Stoics sometimes termed the pure reason the "political" nature. Unfortunately, the sense of the adjective has undergone so much modification, that the application of it to that which commands the sacrifice of self to the common good would now ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... gathered in such a manner is that it be reproduced exactly as first delivered. The man who told a woman that a critic had pronounced her singing "heavenly" had good intentions but he was not entirely accurate in changing to that nattering term the critic's actual adjective "unearthly." The frequency with which alleged statements published in the daily press are contradicted by the supposed utterers indicates how usual such misrepresentation is, though it may be honestly ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... perfected, perfect. As friendship and love yield the most exalted pleasure, from this root the natives drew a fund of words to express fondness, attachment, hospitality, charity; and from the same worthy source they selected that adjective [kije, kise], which they applied to the ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... Thesaurus gives more than fifty synonyms—colleagues would be the better word—of "celebrated," any one of which might be applied, either in prose or poetry, to Newton or to his works, no one of which comes near to the meaning which Conduitt's adjective immediately suggests. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... sound, the odd creature that goes Into Hottentots' traps when he follows his nose: But in sense 't is an adjective, short, spick and span, Well hated by Hunkers and kept under ban. My second it qualifies, also my third, Though a high fen between can't be crossed nor be stirred. Now my next, like a swindler when cleaned out of tin, Has always its tick, and takes most people in. Amphibious its habit, ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... through his life he never wasted an hour on controversy. He had no time, he said. But once when a rival made a particularly nasty attack upon him, he named a new plant after him, adding the descriptive adjective detestabilis—the detestable so-and-so. On the whole, he had the best of it; for the ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... word, wherein a cab-horse differs from the fifty others that follow or precede him.'... Whatever may be the thing which one wishes to say, there is but one word for expressing it; only one verb to animate it, but one adjective to qualify it. It is essential to search for this verb, for this adjective, until they are discovered, and never to be satisfied with ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... could see her face. Black hair that shone with a fine silken lustre grew thickly about a white forehead. Brows that lay like smooth touches of satin swept in two fine lines above gay, kind brown eyes. Her smile merited the adjective "sweet" more than any Sylvia had ever seen; but the boatman's next words ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... field artillery—furnished special occasions for organized—or disorganized—upheavals of animal spirits. For these exercises we then had scant respect. They were "soldiering;" and from time immemorial soldier had been an adjective to express uselessness, or that which was so easy as to pass no man's ability. A soldier's wind, for example, was a wind fair both ways—to go and to return; no demands on brains there, much less on seamanship. The curious irrelevancy of ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... sonatas are not really adapted to the intrinsic nature of the pianoforte, and hence fail to arouse the enthusiasm of those whose taste has been formed by the works of Chopin and Schumann. It was no doubt an instinctive antipathy to Beethoven's unpianistic style (if the adjective be permissible), which prevented Chopin from admiring Beethoven as deeply as he did some other composers, whom he would have admitted to be his inferiors. And Beethoven himself does not seem to have regarded his pianoforte works ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... must not be torn from our kindly associations with the old Iliad, that once was our most cherished companion, or our most looked-for prize, merely because Buttmann, Loewe, and Liddell have made us so much more accurate as to amphikupellon being an adjective, and not a substantive. Far be it from us to defend the faults of Pope, especially when we think of Chapman's fine, bold, rough old English;—far be it from, us to hold up his translation as what a translation of Homer might be. ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... peculiarity of its construction, it makes a kind of humming noise when it is drawn along; hence, the origin of the adjective humdrum. ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... ill indeed.' The young gentleman then shakes his head, and looks very desponding (he has been smiling perpetually up to this time), and after a short pause, gives his glove a great wrench at the wrist, and says, with a strong emphasis on the adjective, 'Good morning, good morning.' And making a great number of bows in acknowledgment of several little messages to his sister, walks backward a few paces, and comes with great violence against a lamp-post, knocking ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... mere subjects and citizens of their own state, may have had conferred upon themselves, or inherit, titles of dignity and privilege in a foreign one. We usually (as in the case of the Rothschilds, &c.) acknowledge their highest title in address, but without any adjective or epithets to qualify with honor, such as "honorable;" as is the case, too, with doctors of foreign universities, whose title from courtesy we also admit, though this does not place them on a footing with those of England. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... voice, and with an air of anxious simplicity, Doddle began, 'Article, noun, adjective, pronoun, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, interjection, outerjection, beginning with ies in the plural—as, baby, babies; lady, ladies; hady, hadies. Please, sir, isn't that ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... his marriage with Anne Boleyn. More's philosophy is best reflected in his Utopia, the description of an ideal commonwealth, modeled on Plato's Republic, and printed in 1516. The name signifies "no place" (Outopos), and has furnished an adjective to the language. The Utopia was in Latin, but More's History of Edward V. and Richard III., written in 1513, though not printed till 1557, was in English. It is the first example in the tongue of a history as distinguished ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... a copula, a bridge, a link, a word connecting sentences? That is undoubtedly its use, but what is its origin?" Mr. Tooke thought he had answered this question satisfactorily, and loosened the Gordian knot of grammarians, "familiar as his garter," when he said, "It is the common pronoun, adjective, or participle, that, with the noun, thing or proposition, implied, and the particular example following it." So he thought, and so every reader has thought since, with the exception of teachers and writers upon grammar. Mr. Windham, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... waiting secretary. He groped in the chambers of his imagery for some superlative adjective to express his emotion before this colossal display of wealth. But his ample vocabulary had faded quite. He could only shake his head and give vent to ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... at the masses of blond hair drawn softly back from the high round forehead, at the large blue eyes beneath the long sweep of darker lashes, at the exquisite curve of the lips and the firmly modeled chin. Yes; Jim had seen truly; the ordinary adjective "pretty"—applicable alike to a length of ribbon, a gown, or a girl of the commoner type—could not be applied to Lydia Orr. She was beautiful to the discerning eye, and ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... the laminitis following feeding on new oats that has caused us to apply to the food the adjective 'irritating.' Here, more often than not, the peristaltic action of the bowels is found to be abnormally in evidence, and the excessive use of the diet is always accompanied by a more or less fluid discharge of the ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... is not ever to be absolutely ours (and it is an impoverishing desire that she should be), we have beaten out the golden sentence—the essential she and we in one. But is it so precious after all? A suspicious ring of an adjective drops ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... pewter vessels glinting down from the dresser, than I heard the voice of Miss Irma asking to be informed if I had come. To Agnes Anne she called me "your big brother," and I hardly ever remember being so proud of anything as of that adjective. ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... translated here, quite correctly, 'transgression,' and intensified by that strong adjective attached, 'a great transgression,' literally means rebellion, revolt, or some such idea; and expresses, as the ultimate issue of conscious transgression prolonged and perpetuated into habit, an entire casting off of allegiance to God. 'No man can serve two masters.' 'His servants ye are ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... example, if I have read one, I have read twenty letters, addressed to newspapers, denouncing the name of a great quarter in London, Mary-le-bone, as ludicrously ungrammatical. The writers had learned (or were learning) French; and they had thus become aware, that neither the article nor the adjective was right. True, not right for the current age, but perfectly right for the age in which the name arose; but, for want of elder French, they did not know that in our Chaucer's time both were right. Le was then the article feminine as well as masculine, and bone was ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the darkness, "what did that American-heiress- globe-trotter-girl say last season when she was tipped out of her 'rickshaw turning a corner? Some absurd adjective that made the man ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... her earlier work, is heavy reading, the account given by "Old Age" in her "Four Ages of Man," of what he has seen and known of Puritan affairs, being in somewhat more lively strain. But lively was an adjective to which Mistress Anne had a rooted objection. Her contemporaries indulged in an occasional solemn pun, but the only one in her writings is found in the grim turn on Laud's name, in the "Dialogue" just quoted, in which is also a sombre jest on the ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... Note 3. This adjective also was peculiar to the peerage and the Royal Family. It was given to every relation except between husband and wife: and the French beau-pirt for father-in-law is doubtless derived from it. Nay, it was conferred on the Deity; and "Fair Father Jesu Christ" was by no means an uncommon title ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt
... abbey built by St. Etheldreda, and at this fair a famous "fairing" was "St. Audrey's laces." St. Audrey, or Etheldreda, in the days of her youthful vanity was very fond of wearing necklaces and jewels. "St. Audrey's laces" became corrupted into "Tawdry laces"; hence the adjective has come to be applied to all cheap and showy ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... Italian, and look at the word nicchia. Both from Alberti and from Baretti we find it to bear the meaning of "a charge, a duty, or an employment;" and if before this word we place the adjective piccola, we have piccola nicchia, "a small task, or trifling service to be performed." Now I think no one can fail to see the identity of the meanings of the expressions piccola nicchia and pique-nique; but it remains to show how the words themselves may be identical. Those who have ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... not like the adjective. "I am one of them," wondering what the effect of this admission would be. "I am not English, but of the brother race. Forgive me if I have imposed on you, but it was your fault. You said that I was English, and I was too lonesome to ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... of languages exhibits a fine and bold peculiarity—a double declension of its Adjectives, depending on a condition of syntax. The Anglo-Saxon adjective, in its ordinary (or, as grammarians have called it, Indefinite) declension, makes the nominative plural for all the genders in E; and this remains as the regular plural termination of the adjective to Chaucer. Thus we have, in the more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... Maggie?" answered the peace-officer, smiling and shaking his head with an ironical emphasis on the adjective, and a calmness calculated to provoke to ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... he had learned no more than forty words of this language, but believes that there are perhaps thirty more. Much however is expressed, as he says, by mere intonation. Anger, for instance; and scores of allied words, such as terrible, frightful, kill, whether noun, verb or adjective, are expressed, he says, by a mere growl. Nor is there any word for "Why,'' but queries are signified by the ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... flabber. Fat; puffed out. A very rare adjective, perhaps only here. The N.E.D. quotes this passage with a reference to the adjective 'flaberkin' puffed out, puffy, and a suggestion that it is akin to the substantive 'flab' ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... we live. Of course serenity does not always go with genuineness. We must say of Dr. Johnson that he was genuine, and yet we know that the stormy tyrant of the Turk's Head Tavern was not serene. Carlyle was genuine (though that is not quite the first adjective we should choose to describe him), but of serenity he allowed cooks and cocks and every modern and every ancient sham to deprive him. Serenity is a product, no doubt, of two very different things, namely, vision and digestion. Not the eye only, but the courses of the blood must ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... speak of KINDS of pleasure is to mean KINDS OF EXPERIENCE which have the common attribute of pleasantness. In themselves all kinds of experience that are equally pleasant are equally worthy; there is no meaning to that adjective as applied to intrinsic immediate good. "Worthy" and "unworthy" apply to experience only when we begin ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... should be the law of every language. Thus, having adopted the adjective fraternal, it is a root which should legitimate fraternity, fraternation, fraternization, fraternism, to fratenate, fraternize, fraternally. And give the word neologism to our language, as a root, and it should give us its ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... "H'm, the adjective appears to be an afterthought," grumbled the bachelor; then, when she merely laughed teasingly after the manner of women, ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... that I am" and the manifold modes of manifestation can only exist in reference to it. The eternal ignorance consists in this, that as there is but one substantive, but numberless adjectives, each adjective is capable of designating the All. Viewed in time the most permanent object or mood of the great knower at any moment represents the knower, and in a sense binds it with limitations. In fact, time itself is one of ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... cricket or hunting. He was therefore troubled by an unwonted confusion of feelings. For he felt that his ordinary vocabulary—made up of such substantives as lark, cheek, and bounder, and the comprehensive adjective "rum"—fell short of coping with this extraordinary speech. He even felt that he might possibly have answered in a different way, but for that unspeakable offer of money. And the rumble of Magin's bass ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... observe parallelism in form. (The stranger seemed courteous in his conduct and to have a solicitude for my welfare.) Although this sentence is grammatically correct, the shift in structure from the adjective and its phrase to the infinitive phrase leads to confusion in thought. How much clearer and smoother this rendering: (The stranger seemed courteous in his conduct ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... self-delusion, for he continued: 'All things considered, the present tranquillity of this country is to my mind perfectly miraculous. Already our presence has been infinitely beneficial in allaying animosities and in pointing out abuses.' If it had been the case that the country was tranquil, his adjective would have been singularly appropriate, but not precisely in the sense he ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... The moment he saw a possibility of a money return, he even began to plume himself upon his liberality and sagacity in having educated her. "I've spared nothin'—Sam—in giving her a——" he searched an instant for a suitable adjective, "a commodious education." The phrase pleased him so well that he smoked for awhile contemplatively, so as not to mar the effect of ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... to be found every day. In the past twenty years, perhaps, not more than two can be recalled who have visited the United States as mature, great artists,—Wilhelmj and Ysaye. Many violinists of excellent ability have been heard, and to some of them some day the adjective great may be applied. The fact that they have devoted their energies to concert work, and have been favourably received by the most important musical organisations, makes them celebrated, but the word great can apply ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... kirkyard, and there is only one historical instance in which judgment was reversed. It was a strong proof of Lachlan Campbell's individuality that he impressed himself twice on the parish, and each time with a marked adjective. ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... only an old saying about sailors. The children do it for fun when we're becalmed sometimes. Well, there's no signs of it yet. I'll tell you what I'll do, children. While you're whistling up the wind, I'll write an adjective ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... an aim and intelligent activity is enough to show its value—its function in experience. We are only too given to making an entity out of the abstract noun "consciousness." We forget that it comes from the adjective "conscious." To be conscious is to be aware of what we are about; conscious signifies the deliberate, observant, planning traits of activity. Consciousness is nothing which we have which gazes idly on the scene around one or which ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... circumstance of their being very much in nature's hands with Duchess Susan, of whom it might be said that her character was good, yet all the more alive to the temptations besetting the Spring season. He allied Chloe's adjective to a number of epithets equally applicable to nature and to women, according to current ideas, concluding: 'Count, they call your Caseldy at his lodgings. "The Count he is out for an airing." He is counted out. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... something so scientific and so logical as Esperanto. Take, for instance, analysis. I will not say it is difficult but I will say it is impossible to analyze an English word, because every word can be so many things. It can generally be an adjective, a noun, a verb, a preposition, a conjunction, and an interjection, that is, the same word, without any structural change, so that it is difficult for a child to discriminate and label the word. Take ...
— Esperanto: Hearings before the Committee on Education • Richard Bartholdt and A. Christen
... always have been decent reasons, and ours may best appear as we proceed, less than a brief seven seeming insufficient, and more, superfluous; again, so mystical a number has a staid propriety, and a due double climax of rise and fall. Now, as to our adjective "classical:" Why not, in heroic drama, have something a-kin to the old Greek chorus, with its running comment upon motives and moralities, somewhat as the mighty-master has set forth in his truly patriotic 'Henry the Fifth?'—However, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of Louis XVI. are fond of speaking of him as "virtuous." The adjective is singularly ill-chosen. His faults were of the will more than of the understanding. To have a vague notion of what is right, to desire it in a general way, and to lack the moral force to do it,—surely this is the ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... sylvaticus, salvaticus, that which pertains to a forest and is sylvan or wild. In its earliest usage it had reference to plants and beasts rather than to men. Wild apples, pears, or laurels are characterized by the epithet sylvaticus in Varro, De re rustica, i. 40; and either this adjective, or its equivalent silvestris, was used of wild animals as contrasted with domesticated beasts, as wild sheep and wild fowl, in Columella, vii. 2; viii. 12, or wolves, in Propertius, iii. 7, or mice, in Pliny, xxx. 22. (Occasionally ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... Mr Pickering with furtive side glances. He was not handsome, nor, on the other hand, was he repulsive. 'Undistinguished' was the adjective that would have described him. He was inclined to stoutness, but not unpardonably so; his hair was thin, but he was not aggressively bald; his face was dull, but certainly not stupid. There was nothing in his outer man which his millions would not offset. As regarded his other qualities, his ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... gradually came to use the English language with artistic effect and finish. His style is direct and energetic, and it shows his determination to say a thing as simply and as effectively as possible. One of the rules in Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar is, "As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out." He followed this rule. Some have complained that the great humorist's mind, like Emerson's, often worked in a disconnected fashion, but this trait has been exaggerated in the case of both. Mark Twain has certainly made a stronger impression ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... between many Russian and Welsh words, for example 'tchelo' ([Russian]) is the Russian for forehead, 'tal' is Welsh for the same; 'iasnhy' (neuter 'iasnoe') is the Russian for clear or radiant, 'iesin' the Welsh, so that if it were grammatical in Russian to place the adjective after the noun as is the custom in Welsh, the Welsh compound 'Taliesin' (Radiant forehead) might be rendered in Russian by 'Tchel[o]iasnoe,' which would be wondrously like the Welsh name; unfortunately, however, Russian grammar ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... Tennyson. Sometimes, as in The Sicilian Hermit, we get merely the metre of Locksley Hall without its music, merely its fine madness and not its fine magic. Still, elsewhere there is good work, and Caliban in East London has a great deal of power in it, though we do not like the adjective 'knockery' even ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Every adjective he uses has its significance. Take "ranch" eggs, how pastoral they sound and fanned by fresh zephyrs. The same with "yard" eggs, such an "out in the open—let the rest of the world go by" impression they confer. And ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... English language, the Daisy has had little influence, though some have derived "lackadaisy" and "lackadaisical" from the Daisy, but there is, certainly, no connection between the words. Daisy, however, was (and, perhaps, still is) a provincial adjective in the eastern counties. A writer in "Notes and Queries" (2nd Series, ix. 261) says that Samuel Parkis, in a letter to George Chalmers, dated February 16, 1799, notices the following provincialisms: "Daisy: remarkable, extraordinary excellent, as 'She's a Daisy lass to work,' i.e., 'She ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... Novellae is a classic adjective, but a barbarous substantive, (Ludewig, p. 245.) Justinian never collected them himself; the nine collations, the legal standard of modern tribunals, consist of ninety-eight Novels; but the number was increased by the diligence of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... that my companion was a man of about forty years of age, although he looked much older, his long untrimmed brown beard and un-kept hair being thickly streaked with grey. He was quiet in manner and speech, and the latter was entirely free from the Great Australian Adjective. His story, as far as he told it to me, was a simple one, yet with an element of ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... Clarke? Did you ever try to find anything by the help of Ayscough, when that was the best guide to be had? If you have, you remember your teasing search for the principal word in the passage,—how day seemed a less likely key than jocund, and yet, as this was only an adjective, perhaps tiptoe were better; or, if you pitched upon mountain-tops, it was a problem with which half of the compound to begin the search. Consider that Mrs. Clarke is no dry word-critic, to revel ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... works which a well- brought-up public ought to know by heart. You will do well therefore to reproduce them often. There is no criticism admissible on this subject; and, if you absolutely exact it that I should make one at all, it would only be on the adjective "celebrated," appended to the Schumann Quintet, which would do without it without disadvantage. Pardon ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... which they modify; and, by the help of a process no less simple than ingenious and profound, he has made the deaf and dumb comprehend the most arduous difficulty, the nature of abstraction; he has initiated them in the art of generalizing ideas by presenting to them the adjective in the noun, as the quality is in the object, and the quality subsisting alone and out of the object, having no support but in the mind, for him who considers it, and but in the abstract noun for him who reads the expression of it. He has, in like manner, separated ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... the summits are, as a rule, rounded, and the slopes gentle. The culminating points are in the centre of the range: Yumrukchal (7835 ft.), Maraguduk (7808 ft.), and Kadimlia (7464 ft.). The Balkans are known to the people of the country as the Stara Planina or "Old Mountain," the adjective denoting their greater size as compared with that of the adjacent ranges: "Balkan" is not a distinctive term, being applied by the Bulgarians, as well as the Turks, to all mountains. Closely parallel, on the south, are the minor ranges of the Sredna Gora or "Middle Mountains" ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... presented with the problem of interpreting the grammatical value of the word driving in the sentence, "The boy driving the horse is very noisy," he is compelled to apply to its interpretation the ideas noun, adjectival relation, and adjective, and also the ideas object, objective relation, and verb. In this way the child secures the mental elements which he may organize into the new experience, or knowledge (participle), and thus gain control of the ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... some more of us, wondered vaguely where the adjective applied, especially on a gloomy evening without candles, but she ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... make a sad abuse of the adjective little; I am quite aware of it, but how can I do otherwise? In describing this country, the temptation is great to use it ten times in every written line. Little, finical; affected,—all Japan is contained, both physically and morally, in ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... which, like ours, is becoming sated with cleverness, it is a delight to read the unvarnished story of Champlain. In saying that the adjective is ever the enemy of the noun, Voltaire could not have levelled the shaft at him, for few writers have been more sparing in their use of adjectives or other glowing words. His love of the sea and of the forest was profound, but he is never emotional in his expressions. Yet with all his soberness ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... my gig-lamps," puffed Beetle, emerging. "Wasn't it glorious? Didn't I 'Eric' 'em splendidly? Did you spot my cribs from King? Oh, blow!" His countenance clouded. "There's one adjective I didn't use—obscene. Don't know how I forgot that. It's one of ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... in the fourth group was named by Bancroft the "adjective" group, because they require the aid of a second body, named the mordant, to properly develop and to fix the colour of the dye-stuff on the wool. It is sometimes known as the "mordant dye-stuff" class, and ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... contributor in brief fiction to the Contrary Magazine; a beauty of the tea-after-tennis type; the best dancer in St. Swithin's Lenten Circle, and the most romantic creature that ever took up the cause of Progress with a large P. It would not be fair to call her strong-minded, because the adjective seems to imply some kind of a limitation in her strength. She was even stronger in her impulses than in her mind; original in every direction; in fact, originality was a kind of convention with her. It was wonderful how ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... with all his three livings no more than seven hundred a-year, and seeing no way of keeping his splendid mother and his sickly sister, not to reckon a second sister, who was usually spoken of without any adjective, in such ladylike ease as became their birth and habits, and at the same time providing for a family of his own—he remained, you see, at the age of eight-and-forty, a bachelor, not making any merit of that renunciation, but saying laughingly, if any one alluded ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... make the plurals poveren and sturnen. In the phrase, "o sy[gh]te[gh] so quyke[gh]"[53] (those sights so living), the -e[gh] ( -es) is a mark of the plural, very common in Southern writers of the fourteenth century, and employed as a plural inflexion of the adjective until a very late period in ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... Grammar doth us teach, That it hath nine parts of speech;— Article, adjective, and noun, Verb, conjunction, and pronoun, With preposition, and adverb, And interjection, as I've heard. The letters are just twenty-six, These form all words when rightly mix'd. The vowels are a, e, o, i, With u, and sometimes w ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... book published the present season which will more delight the wide-awake, adventure-loving boy. It is, to borrow the adjective from the title, ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... account of phenomena which had been seen; it was accompanied by measures, and the computations based on these led to heights and dimensions for mountains on Venus which were, to say the least, extravagant. The adjective will not seem too strong when we say that the very existence of the mountains themselves ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... searched it in vain for a trace of the suffering Machin. It was, however, full of typographical traces of himself and his family. The description of the reception was disturbingly journalistic, which adjective, for Mr. Prohack, unfortunately connoted the adjective vulgar. All the wrong people were in the list of guests, and all the decent quiet people were omitted. A value of twenty thousand pounds was put upon the necklace, contradicting another part of the report ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... it perfectly, beautiful, wonderfully lovely?" cried Jessie, getting more excited with each adjective, and when the others laughed merrily at the extravagance of her description, she added, defiantly, "I don't care; it is! I'll leave it ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... ever quite equalled the combined simplicity and majesty of this phrase, he has constantly come close to it. The Suspiria are full of such passages—there are even some who prefer Savannah la Mar to the Ladies of Sorrow. Beautiful as it is I do not, because the accursed superfluous adjective appears there. The famous passages of the Confessions are in every one's memory; and so I suppose is the Vision of Sudden Death. Many passages in The Caesars, though somewhat less florid, are hardly less good; and the ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... enough to embrace the legitimate desires of a civilized and enlightened people determined in all their relations to pursue a conscientious and religious life. We can not permit ourselves to be narrowed and dwarfed by slogans and phrases. It is not the adjective, but the substantive, which is of real importance. It is not the name of the action, but the result of the action, which is the chief concern. It will be well not to be too much disturbed by the thought of either isolation ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... they differ from one another either in mineral or chemical composition. Thus the terms Trachytic porphyry, Trachytic tuff, etc., merely refer to the same rock under different conditions of mechanical aggregation or crystalline development which would be more correctly expressed by the use of the adjective, as porphyritic trachyte, etc., but as these terms are so commonly employed it is considered advisable to direct the ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... Hannah, everything you would say if you could. But please skip the hysterics. We've all had them, and Kate has already used every possible adjective that you could think up. Now it's just this." And he hurriedly gave Mrs. Stetson a full account of the case, and told her plainly what he hoped and expected that ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... 'seemed very uneasy.' With the expression avoir l'air the adjective may agree indifferently with the subject or with air when it refers to either; but if it cannot refer to one of them it must agree with the other, e.g. cette pomme a l'air mre, not mr, because ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... instinct thus far could equally well be said of reflex action. A reflex is a native reaction, and it is taken care of by a team of neurones in the way just stated. We might speak of a reflex as "instinctive", using this adjective as equivalent to "native"; but we should shrink for some reason from speaking of the pupillary reflex to light as an instinct, or of the "knee jerk instinct", or the "swallowing instinct", or the "flexion instinct". There is some difference between the typical reflex and the typical instinct, ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... a plain sensible girl,' exclaimed the old gentleman the moment I entered the room.' (You will notice I put no comma after 'plain.' I am taking it he did not intend one. You can employ one adjective to qualify another, can't you?) 'And I will put it to her, What difference can it make to the Almighty whether I go to church ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... leader— something that flowed like water from a smooth-running pump. This I admit I could never manage to produce. Mr. Curtis's standard of style was solely governed by the question of the repetition of the same word. It was an unforgivable sin to repeat a substantive, adjective, or verb without an intervening space of at least four inches. This, of course, leads to that particular form of "journalese" in which a cricket-ball becomes a "leathern missile" and so forth. Apropos ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... an adjective, formed with the proper termination from the noun, batture, which means a bank upon which the sea beats, reef or sand-bank. Cap Batturier may therefore be rendered sand-bank cape, or the cape of ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... "commercial" banks (as the adjective indicates) serve mainly the special needs of the commercial elements of the community—business men borrowing for short terms to carry out particular transactions. Loans made on short-time commercial paper (quick assets) are very suitable to the needs of a bank that has its liabilities ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... Garrick speak the soliloquy, last night?"—"Oh! against all rule, my lord, most ungrammatically! Betwixt the substantive and the adjective, which should agree together in number, case, and gender, he made a breach thus——stopping, as if the point wanted settling; and betwixt the nominative case, which, your lordship knows, should govern the verb, he suspended his voice in the epilogue a dozen times, ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... Kshurupras, i.e., arrows sharp as razors, (2) Vatsadantas, i.e., arrows having heads like the calf-tooth, (3) Vipathas, i.e., long arrows having stout bodies, (4) Narachas, long arrows; Ardhachandrabhais, i.e., looking like shafts furnished with heads of the form of the half-moon; it is an adjective qualifying Narachis, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Fancy having orthodox unorthodox words! I remember one day getting into a third-class smoking carriage on the Metropolitan Railway about one o'clock, and finding it full of rough working men. Everything they said was seasoned with one incredibly stupid adjective, and no doubt they thought they were very desperate characters. At last I asked them not to say that word again. One forthwith asked me 'What the ——'—I really cannot quote these puerilities—'what the idiotic cliche ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... another source of the poet's obscurity; that in aiming at condensation he neglects the need that there is for care in the placing of words that are grammatically ambiguous. English swarms with words that have one identical form for substantive, adjective, and verb; and such a word should never be so placed as to allow of any doubt as to what part of speech it is used for; because such ambiguity or momentary uncertainty destroys the force of the sentence. Now our author not only neglects this essential propriety but he would seem ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... adjective French became in Federal mouths an epithet of abhorrence and abuse; up went the flag of dear Old England, the defender of the faith and of social order. The opposition party, on the contrary, saw in the success of the French people, in their overthrow of kings ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... to-day on the possibility that he may be an enemy to-morrow. And there is a wide and deeply-rooted prejudice in favour of holding the imperatives of integrity on the same terms. Our very language in this direction betrays us. We talk about "smart" business men, "smart" professional men, and by the adjective we may mean men who, though "keen," are yet honourable in their methods; or we may mean men who are just as scrupulous as the law of the land or the arbitrary criterions of society oblige them to be. And young men feel the impress of this widely-shared ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... draw your sister's younger brother into danger," Roger began. His adjective was tactfully chosen. "I am almost equally reluctant to implicate you in what seems likely to confront us, because you are an old friend of mine and a good deal younger than I am. But when the time comes to go home, ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... environment and properly corseted and gowned would have been set down unquestionably as "a voluptuous beauty." Here in the laundry, in stocking-feet and an unbelted black shirt-waist turned far in at the neck, she was merely "mushy," to use the adjective of her detractors. The queen owed her nickname to the boss, with whom she was said to "stand in," being "awful soft after him." She was a sort of assistant to the foreman, bossing the job when he was not around, and lending a hand in rush hours with true democratic simplicity such as ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... or "empty, hence, perhaps, leer horse, a horse without a rider; leer is an adjective meaning uncontrolled, hence 'leer drunkards'" (Halliwell); according to Nares, a leer (empty) horse meant also a ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... as his compeers irreverently termed him, was, by common consent of her Majesty's Guards, a "good fellow." Whether the St. James' Street definition of that adjective be the perfect one or not, we will not stay to inquire; but in the Guards' club-house it meant this: that Scoutbush had not an enemy in the world, because he deserved none; that he lent, and borrowed not; gave, and asked not again; envied not; hustled not; slandered ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... interesting," she remarked, in a reserved tone, which, nevertheless, sent the colour mounting slowly up her friend's sensitive cheek. They both understood that no more commendatory adjective than "interesting" was to be ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... children go to sleep, and now and then Jacky complains of being "skeezed." More room is made for him. Presently Tommy says: "Mother! listen to them (adjective) little possums. I'd like to screw their ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... Latin, the substantive deliciae, delight, pleasure, enjoyment; and the adjective (derived from the same root, and guiding us to the original meaning of the substantive) delicatus, which amongst other meanings, has that of tender, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... also called a round stone 'clogh crene', where the variation is merely dialectic. Hence, too, our crane-berries,—i.e., round berries,—from this Celtic adjective 'crene', round. ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Horse, it was considered quite impossible to convey the wires over sea, but now we are at a loss to comprehend where the difficulty lay! So wags the world. Tempora mutantur—excuse me for quoting the Etruscan. What would we do without the Atalantic telegraph? (Pundit says Atlantic was the ancient adjective.) We lay to a few minutes to ask the cutter some questions, and learned, among other glorious news, that civil war is raging in Africa, while the plague is doing its good work beautifully both in Yurope and Ayesher. Is it not truly remarkable that, before the magnificent light shed upon philosophy ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... 'ripping,' isn't it?" he said, smiling. "But whatever the adjective, the fact is the same. Lady Herenden's dinners are always the refinement ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... originally excited; or thirdly, of the operations of our minds, which are termed reflex ideas by metaphysical writers; or lastly, they are the names of our ideas of parts or properties of objects; and are termed by grammarians nouns adjective. ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... oak (Sanskrit, daru, a tree), and da, good. It is worth remarking that this idea survives in the personal name, Holyoak; for who ever heard of "Holyelm," or "Holyash," or a similar form compounded of the adjective and the name of any other tree than the oak. If there is an exception it is in the name of the holly. The Cornish Celtic word for holly was Celyn, from Celli (or Kelli), a grove; literally a grove-one; so that the holly was probably planted as a grove or screen round the sacred oak. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... there was only one door, and it was locked. On the second there was also only one door, but when I turned the handle it opened. There came forth to meet me the chill musty air that is characteristic of a long unoccupied room. With it there came an indescribable odour. I use the adjective advisedly. Though very faint, diluted as it were, it was nevertheless an odour that made my gorge rise. I had never smelt anything like it before, and I cannot ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... heard when he returned from St. Louis, a heavy-hearted, dispirited man. Two recent failures had borne heavily upon him. If last winter had been dull, there was no adjective to apply to this. His first step was to mortgage Hope Terrace. He had deeded it to his wife, unincumbered; but now it appeared his only chance of salvation. Mrs. Lawrence made a feeble protest at first, and demanded that Fred should be sent for, but there was no time. He met his pressing ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... and Doctor and Mrs. Strong in the back seat. Ten days afterward Marian's head of beautiful dark hair was muslin white. Now it framed a face of youth and beauty with peculiar pathos. "Striking" was perhaps the one adjective ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... as he averaged ten hours a day steady work, and when the spell was on him would pass night after night at his study table, rewriting, cutting, modelling his play, never contented, always striving after a more expressive adjective, a more harmonious or original rhyme, casting aside a month’s finished work without a second thought when he judged that another form expressed his ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... way intended by the writer; and in doing this he can receive assistance in various ways. Partly by the inflection of the words; partly by their arrangement; partly also by punctuation. As to inflection, we see in Latin an adjective and a substantive standing together, yet differing in gender, in number, or in case; and we know that the adjective does not qualify the substantive. But English has not the numerous inflections of Latin. More scrupulous ...
— "Stops" - Or How to Punctuate. A Practical Handbook for Writers and Students • Paul Allardyce
... "unconventional" on Mr. Moore's objection that he would be at the mercy of Mr. Sims' judgment if the word was retained. "The Independent Theatre" played the play and Mr. Sims paid the money. It was perhaps just as well for Mr. Moore that the adjective was withdrawn, for the play was little less conventional than "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" or "Sowing the Wind," to mention two successes of that year by play-makers that took their art a little more seriously than Mr. Sims. In a way, too, "The Strike ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... sometimes that it may have referred to some band of people, perhaps to these very gipsies in the plantation. I do not know whether the spotted handkerchiefs which so many of them wear over their heads might have suggested the strange adjective which she used." ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... course absolutely inexcusable, for it offends against good taste as well as good rhetoric; but the employment of words in a careless or perverted meaning is equally condemnable. It is also a mistake to use too many adjectives, to throw every adjective and adverb into the superlative degree, and in other ways to exaggerate every expression which you use. Much of this misuse of words is due to ignorance, but more to carelessness or laziness; in any case you can detect your faults if you seek for them, and you should take immediate ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... title of the work, in manuscript, from which the grammatical notices have been elaborated is Arte y Vocabulario de la lingua Dohema, Heve Eudeva; the adjective termination of the last and first name being evidently Spanish, as is also the plural terminations used elsewhere in some of the modifications of those words. We have only the definition of Heve with certainty given as "people;" to the word "nation" in the vocabulary, there being ...
— Grammatical Sketch of the Heve Language - Shea's Library Of American Linguistics. Volume III. • Buckingham Smith
... bright," he said contemptuously. "The average American is bright. If one prefixes no stronger adjective than that to his name, he accomplishes very little in life. Don't think me a pessimist," he added, smiling. "All over the country the Schools and colleges are instilling the principles of conservatism and practical politics on the old lines, and therein lies hope. I feel sure I shall ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... quite original. I told my cousin, Thayer, that if she could hail you with a new adjective, I should present you as a candidate for a ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... I read and sung hymns to them; they were very much surprised that I was not afraid to sleep alone in such a big room—said Miss Juliana and Miss Lynch, Mass' Sam and Mass' Willie and their Mamma used to sleep there. These people do not use any feminine adjective, and their "hims" are very confusing sometimes. Harriet walked down to the house behind me from school the other day for some sugar for a sick baby, and I asked her the name of a bird that flew across our path. ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... The adjective 'pretty' seemed so ridiculously inappropriate to one of Mr. Holt's dimensions and hairy development of face, that Robert could not forbear a smile. But the Canadian ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... adjective in the picturesque report of Columbus in regard to this sea and these islands that is not now as appropriate and fitting as in the days when its glowing words ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... Every epithet or adjective beyond what is needed to give the image, is a five-barred gate in the path of the eager mind travelling to ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... so charming as her father," replied Lady Laura, with whom that favourite adjective served for everything in the way of praise. To her the Pyramids and Niagara, a tropical thunderstorm, a mazourka by Chopin, and a Parisian bonnet, were all alike charming. "I suppose solidity isn't so nice in a girl," she went on, laughing; "but ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... players must describe the minister's cat, going right through the alphabet to do so. "The minister's cat is an angry cat," says one; "an anxious cat," says another; and so on until everyone has used an adjective beginning with "A." Then they take the "B's." "The minister's cat is a big cat," ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... (fate), Sa'd (fortune), Ru[d.][a] (favor), Wadd (love), Man[a]f (height), 'Au[d.] (time). Whether these are all abstract terms is doubtful. Wadd means also 'lover,' divine friend or patron. Sa'd occurs as adjective 'fortunate,' is the appellation of certain stars, and the god Sa'd is identified by an Arab poet with a certain rock[1190]—the rock is doubtless an old local divinity. Ru[d.][a] is found apparently only as a divine name (in Palmyrene ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... of Rutland. It may, however, be doubted whether the epithet "unconstitutional" could be properly applied to the bill on either ground. There is, indeed, a certain vagueness in the meaning, or at all events in the frequent use of this adjective. Sometimes it is used to imply a violation of the provisions of the Great Charter, or of its later development, the Bill of Rights; sometimes to impute some imagined departure from the principles which guided the framers of ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... it means anything at all; it may be made an adjective or a verb, or almost any part of speech, to serve a purpose or express a thought. Here it meant that there was to be no fooling at the helm, that she was to be steered as by Gunter himself. "Full an' by," was the word. "Full an' by, ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... music-case under his arm. He had an eternal interest for Jeremy because, whenever he was mentioned, the phrase was: "Poor little Mr. Dawson!" Why he was to be pitied Jeremy did not know. He looked spruce and bright enough, and generally whistled to himself as he walked; but "poor" was an exciting adjective, and Jeremy, when he passed him, felt a little shudder of ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... of which one small touch of color burned like a flame. And thus, little step after little step, they went from little wonder to little wonder. Dolly liked small things; it was the microscopic aspect of Nature that touched her heart; she had an adjective all her own for such: they were "baby" things—baby flowers, baby brooks, baby stars. This appealed less to Charles-Norton, hungry for big sweeps. And even now, he caught himself yawning once, and casting a look ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... the ranch and Prince sent to us. Now Prince had proved himself an excellent wheeler, yet he had to go into the lead and let the Outlaw retain his old place. There is an axiom that a good wheeler is a poor leader. I object to the last adjective. A good wheeler makes an infinitely worse kind of a leader than that. I know . . . now. I ought to know. Since that day I have driven Prince a few hundred miles in the lead. He is neither any better nor any worse than the first mile he ran in the lead; and his worst ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... to punning. There were times when the hungry boarders thought the name facetious, but they conceded it to be quite exact in a descriptive sense, if its brick and mortar were intended to honor monumentally the tales of the host. His first name, August, was not an adjective of limitation as to time, for the proprietor was A. Stuffer every month and day in the year; and his son Emil, a quiet, inoffensive student of birds, a taxidermist, ornithologist and mechanical engineer, and ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... Edwin held him by the legs, and his hand was on Edwin's cap. The feel of the boy was delightful; he was so lithe and so yielding, and yet firm; and his glance was so trustful and admiring. "Rough!" thought Edwin, remembering Maggie's adjective. "He isn't a bit rough! Unruly? Well, I dare say he can be unruly if he cares to be. It all depends how you handle him." Thus Edwin reflected in the pride of conquest, holding close to the boy, and savouring intimately his charm. Even the boy's slightness attracted him. Difficult to ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... Goosecappe? I assure your soule, they are as subtill with their suters, or loves, as the latine Dialect, where the nominative Case, and the Verbe, the Substantive, and the Adjective, the Verbe, and the [ad]Verbe, stand as far a sunder, as if they were perfect strangers one to another, and you shall hardly find them out; but then learne to Conster, and perse them, and you shall find them prepared and acquainted, ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... on watch were taking it easy. Like unto their officers, submarine sailors are an unusual lot. They are real sailors, or machinist sailors—boys for whose quality the navy has a flattering, picturesque, and quite unprintable adjective. A submarine man, mind you, works harder than perhaps any other man of his grade in the navy, because the vessel in which he lives is nothing ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... hedone. Pater's definition "the pleasure of the ideal now." The adjective monochronos means, literally, "single or unitary time." See also Marius the Epicurean, Vol. 1, Cyrenaicism, and Vol. 2, Second Thoughts, where Pater quotes ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... of grass. This smoke, also laden with arsenic, sometimes hovers over Butte like a London fog. More wealth is every year dug out of the earth in Butte, and more money is squandered there by more different kinds of people, than in any place of its size on earth. The dictionary needs one adjective which should qualify Butte and no other place. Many a time while there I've expected to see Satan rise up out of a hole. Whenever I start to leave I feel I am going away from the domain of ...
— Tales of the Road • Charles N. Crewdson
... it. Let those officious neighbors keep on talking; and when they have talked themselves blind, you may tell them, for me, that what money we have is safe," said Marcy, with a good deal of emphasis on the adjective. "If you want to see what mother brought back from the city, go and look at the servants. Every one of them is dressed in a new suit. Now go on and tell me the bad news. I'm getting impatient ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... the richest in the world, and yet somehow in moments when words count most we generally choose the wrong ones. The adjective "cross" as a description of his Jove-like wrath that consumed his whole being jarred upon Derek profoundly. It was as though Prometheus, with the vultures tearing his liver, had been ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... serve to vivify truth, to quicken or to widen the moral judgment, but Macaulay's hardy and habitual recourse to strenuous superlatives is fundamentally unscientific and untrue. There is no more instructive example in our literature than he, of the saying that the adjective is ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... in another place; they bear a marked relation to the theory of observation I have just laid down. Whatever the thing we wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it. We must seek till we find this noun, this verb, and this adjective, and never be content with getting very near it, never allow ourselves to play tricks, even happy ones, or have recourse to sleights ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... I would not give, For all their plotless plays, One round Flagstaffian adjective Or one ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... notably fair, notably discriminating, and notably independent. It gives its own views fearlessly, and resents any efforts made by publishers to get their own adjective-besprinkled puffs printed. In rush seasons it will make use of publisher's description, after carefully blue-pencilling obtrusive adjectives, but it goes no farther. In fact, the newspaper-review part of publishing ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... epithet marshalled to attend its noun in a last-century poet's dictionary. One would not have it away; one can hear the caress with which the master pronounces it, "making his mouth," as Swift did for his "little language." Nor does the customary adjective fail in later literature. It was dear to the Realist, and it is dear to the Symbolist. The only difference is that in the French of the ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt had been in the first. The manner of his criticism is not at all judicial. His prose is as lyrical as his verse, and his praise and blame both in excess—dithyrambic laudation or affluent billingsgate. In particular, he works the adjective "divine" so hard that it loses meaning. Yet stripped of its excited superlatives, and reduced to the cool temperature of ordinary speech, his critical work is found to be full of insight, and his judgment in matters ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... ill-natured—it wasn't that—was distinctly ironic. A very competent, good-looking young woman, you'd have said, if you'd seen her with her shoulder-blades flattened down and her chest up. Seeing her to-day, drooping a little over the cold lunch, you'd have left out the adjective young. ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... President of the United States with that of her Majesty on an occasion like this. I was struck, both in what he said, and in what our distinguished guest of the evening said, with the frequent recurrence of an adjective which is comparatively new—I mean the word "English-speaking." We continually hear nowadays of the "English-speaking race," of the "English-speaking population." I think this implies, not that we are to forget, not that it would be ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... which Carlingford would have been horrified to hear, and grasped Mrs Smith's shoulder with a closer pressure. "What did she tell you?" said the doctor. "Let me have it word for word. Did she say she was going away?—did she speak of this—this—fellow?" exclaimed the doctor, with an adjective over which charity drops a tear. "Can't you tell me without any ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... form or essence, (3) the end or design (in the sense of intention) of the act being performed, that is to say, at bottom, the design (in the sense of drawing) of the act supposed accomplished. These three aspects are those of the adjective, substantive and verb, and correspond to the three essential categories of language. After the explanations we have given above, we might, and perhaps we ought to, translate [Greek: eidos] by "view" or rather by "moment." For [Greek: eidos] is the stable view taken of the instability of things: ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... why Mrs. Smith, with her absurd figure—for really I can apply no other adjective to it—should wear that most absurdly tight dress. Some one should tell her what a fright it makes of her. She is nothing but convexities. She looks exactly like an hour-glass, or a sodawater machine. At a little distance you can hardly tell whether ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... pronoun. It is used as such in legal documents, but it is incorrect to employ it in business letters as other than an adjective. Use instead "they," ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... and which, moreover, is in current use, "survival of the best or of the best fitted," ought to be corrected. We must suppress the adjective best. This is simply a persisting relic of that teleology which used to see in Nature and history a premeditated goal to be reached by means of a process of continuous ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... partly because, as will be seen, it was more continuous. I must, however, warn my readers against a possible illusion of perspective. To Fitzjames himself the legal career always represented the substantive, and the literary career the adjective. Circumstances made journalism highly convenient, but his literary ambition was always to be auxiliary to his legal ambition. It would, of course, have been injurious to his prospects at the bar had it been supposed that the case was inverted; ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... a query about this alleged derivation of the name of the city, a competent Hebrew scholar writes to me: "The nearest approach to Nauvoo in Hebrew is an adjective which would be transliterated Naveh, meaning pleasant, a rather rare word. The letter correctly represented by v could not possibly do the double duty of uv, nor could a of the Hebrew ever be au in English, nor eh of the Hebrew be oo in English. ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... that brought out the beautiful lines of her figure, she turned her back upon the pawing, restless animal with as little concern as though she had delivered him to a correctly uniformed groom. No she was not pretty; she was—magnificent. The adjective forced itself upon him. ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... area was being reduced, but perhaps not with the same rapidity as at first when Mr Barelli was at the top of enthusiastic—if the adjective was applicable—vigor. Oftener and oftener and oftener he paused to sharpen his implement and I thought the cropped shocks were becoming smaller and smaller. As the movement of the scythe swept the guillotined grass backward, the trailing stolons entangled themselves with the uncut stand, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... the ideas embraced in mental science. In ancient times "pneuma" signified both mind and wind, or air. In later times it lost its physical currency, and no longer signifies, in its general currency, breath or air. The adjective, "pneumatikos," is never used in a physical sense. It came into use ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... Brown means 'young girls,'" said one of the nieces, who was not as slow in the uptake as her aunt, and it turned out that this was what Miss Brown did mean; but she had not known that in everyday life Maedchen without an adjective usually means a servant. She had heard of Das Maedchen aus der Fremde and Der Tod ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick |
