"Vocabulary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... my entire vocabulary is at your service in an affair of the heart." The Judge beamed on Delaven and bowed to Madame Caron as though including her in the circle where Love's ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... be hardened, to give them strong constitutions. Am I and my brother the worse for it?" said Sylvie. "You'll make Pierrette a peakling"; this was a word in the Rogron vocabulary which meant a puny and ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... breakfast at General Soult's, he observed the countenances of his soldiers rather inclined to laughter than to wrath; and he heard some jests, significant enough in the vocabulary of encampments, and which informed him that contempt was not the sentiment with which your navy had inspired his troops. The occurrences of these two days hastened his departure from the coast for Aix-la-Chapelle, where the ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... there may be found exemplified his characteristically vivacious and memorable style, his delicate appreciations brilliantly and precisely expressed, his concrete and persuasive argument. Perhaps no single critical document of our time has contributed so many phrases to the current literary vocabulary, or has stimulated so many readers to the use of lofty ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... butterfly bursts the chrysalis. Her life till then had been mere grub existence; now she could fly and had seen the sun drawing the scent from flowers. Great ideas filled her soul; new emotions awoke; she was like a baby trying to utter the thing he has no word for; her vocabulary broke down under the strain, and as she walked she gave thanks to Nature in a mere wordless song, like the lark, because she could not put her acknowledgment into language. But the great Mother, to whom Life is all in all, the living individual nothing, looked on at a world wakening from sleep and ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... not only a whole vocabulary of his own, both in conversation, from twittering to oratory, and in calls from assembly cries and notes of warning to screams of derision and defiance, but he is an imitator in certain lines. He will ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... all possible, he could reach the author. The journey to Oxford was made, and Bok was introduced to the don, who turned out to be no less a person than the original possessor of the highly colored vocabulary of the "White Rabbit" of ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... a speaking and understanding knowledge of any other in this region. It is important to note that these dialects belong to the Philippine group, and there seems to be very little evidence of Chinese influence [27] either in structure or vocabulary. [28] ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... are, sir, what is called nowadays, a beautiful soul. What is 'a beautiful soul?' I know nothing of the species." While thus speaking he seemed to be looking by turns for a fly on the ceiling and a pin on the floor. "I have old-fashioned ideas of everything, and I do not understand the vocabulary of my age. I know a beautiful horse very well or a beautiful woman;—but A BEAUTIFUL SOUL! Do you know how to explain to me, sir, what 'this ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... managed that the effect of distance, light, and shade are lost. Thus a man will so insist upon the use of difficult words by George Elliot that a person unacquainted with her writings would think that the whole merit or demerit of that author lay in her vocabulary. A man will so exalt the pathos of Dickens or Thackeray that he will throw their wit and humour into the background. Some person's only remark on seeing Turner's Modern Italy will be that the colours are cracked, or, upon ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... their own languages that democratic nations attempt to perpetrate innovations. From time to time they resume forgotten expressions in their vocabulary, which they restore to use; or they borrow from some particular class of the community a term peculiar to it, which they introduce with a figurative meaning into the language of daily life. Many expressions which originally belonged to the technical ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Islands," writes Professor Chamberlain, "the Japanese language has no kindred, and its classification under any of the recognized linguistic families remains doubtful. In structure, though not to any appreciable extent in vocabulary, it closely resembles Korean, and both it and Korean may possibly be related to Mongol and to Manchu, and might therefore lay claim to be included in the so-called 'Altaic group' In any case, Japanese is what philologists call an agglutinative tongue; that is to say, it builds ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... is, the Japanese use synonyms instead of the words themselves. That's why their English is so queer," remarked Mary, better trained in English than any of the others and with a remarkably good vocabulary when she could be persuaded to talk. "Now a synonym of 'to warn' is 'to summon.' Maybe Onoye wanted to tell you that some one wished ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... many dog names familiar to him, and Hal added a few. But, although the animal wagged his tail with evident pleasure at thus being talked to, he gave no evidence of owning any of the names in the boys' vocabulary. ...
— The Boy Allies On the Firing Line - Or, Twelve Days Battle Along the Marne • Clair W. Hayes
... his attention facts lying within the experience of all, and to cause him to classify these so as to refer any given mental process to the class or classes where it belongs. This calls for definition, the making of distinctions, the analysis of complex facts, the use of a technical vocabulary, and in general for much more precision of statement than the student has been used to employ in speaking of such matters. Some laws of mental action, verifiable within ordinary experience, are also brought to ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... effort he had scarcely an equal. His command of language was extraordinary, tho he had little imagination and his vocabulary was limited; but he possest the faculty of expressing himself in a racy, virile manner, within the apprehension of every reader. As he treated every topic in a practical rather than a philosophical spirit, and with strong feeling ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... arrange a proper speech, and they had, what was still better, the remembrance of a certain patent-medicine vender's discourse at the Milltown Fair. His method, when once observed, could never be forgotten; nor his manner, nor his vocabulary. Emma Jane practiced it on Rebecca, ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... communicate with an object implies such an acquaintance with it, as renders it capable of being discriminately reflected on; the distinct knowledge of an uneducated rustic would furnish a very scanty vocabulary. The few things and modes of action requisite for his bodily conveniences would alone be individualized; while all the rest of nature would be expressed by a small number of confused general terms. Secondly, I deny that the words and combinations of words derived from the objects, with which ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... born in London, April 5, 1837. He was educated partly in France, at Eton, and at Balliol College, Oxford. He left the University without a degree to spend several years in travel. He is a master of English, using a wider vocabulary than any of his contemporaries, and the musical effects of his many varied meters have won for him a unique position in poetry. He has been called "the greatest metrical inventor in English literature." ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... all the Seven Seas either to tarry awhile and then to depart for ever, unwelcome sojourners only, or to settle down at last and found a family soon asserting equality with the oldest inhabitants of the vocabulary. Seafaring terms came to us from Scandinavia and from the Low Countries. Words of warfare on land crossed the channel, in exchange for words of warfare at sea which migrated from England to France. Dead tongues, Greek and Latin, have been revived to replenish our verbal population with the terms ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... a riddle?" he returned, lazily. "I give it up." Then he contemplated his small daughter with much satisfaction. "I wonder none of you advanced women have ever turned your attention to baby-language," he observed presently; "we are studying the ape-vocabulary, you know. Dot has got quite a little language of her own. As far as I can make out each sentence is finished off with a 'gurgle-doe.' Something between the 'gobble, gobble' of a turkey and the coo of the ring-dove. I ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... long delay on the railway or an interminable "wait" at the theatre as a direct visitation of Providence, against which it would be useless folly to direct cat-calls, grumbles, or letters to the Times. Americans invented the slang word "kicker," but so far as I could see their vocabulary is here miles ahead of their practice; they dream noble deeds, but do not do them; Englishmen "kick" much better, without having a name for it. The right of the individual to do as he will is respected to such an extent that an entire company will put up with inconvenience rather than infringe ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Annie's vocabulary was emphatic, rather than choice. Entirely without education, she made no pretense at being what she was not and therein perhaps lay her chief charm. As Howard stooped to kiss her, ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... distinguished at fifty paces, and upon which glittered a gold chain and a bunch of trinkets, was under the yoke of this Catherine II. of commerce. Short and fat, harnessed with spectacles and a shirt-collar worn above his ears, he was chiefly distinguished for his bass voice and the richness of his vocabulary. He never said Corneille, but "the sublime Corneille"; Racine was "the gentle Racine"; Voltaire, "Oh! Voltaire, second in everything, with more wit than genius, but nevertheless a man of genius"; Rousseau, "a gloomy mind, a man full of pride, who hanged himself." He related in his prosy way vulgar ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... that the State (which, according to established metaphor, is a vessel par excellence) should admit Jack upon quarterdeck, yet, what with talking against lords and aristocracy, jobs and abuses, and searching through no very refined vocabulary for the strongest epithets to apply to those irritating nouns-substantive, his bile had got the better of his understanding, and he became fuddled, as it were, by his own eloquence. Thus, though as innocent of Jacobinical designs as he was incapable of setting the Thames on fire, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... generations of wholesalers and strong probabilities about the respectability of still another generation, was her ideal of a Christian gentleman. She wore a full white muslin gown with a blue sash, her hair primly parted in the middle, her right hand laid flat over her left in her lap. Her vocabulary was choice. For a second, when she referred to winter sports at Lake Placid, she forgot herself and tucked one smooth, silk-clad, un-mid-Victorian leg under her, but instantly she recovered her poise ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... considerable deviations exist in their vocabularies, if not in the grammatical construction. For instance, take two words that one hears oftener than any others: On the Alaska coast they say "na-koo-ruk," a word meaning "good," "all right," etc.; on the Siberian coast "mah-zink-ah," while a vocabulary collected during Lieutenant Schwatka's expedition gives the word "mah-muk'-poo" for "good." The first two of these words are so characteristic of the tribes on the respective shores above the straits that a better designation than any yet given to them ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... ownership. Quite naturally, therefore, he thinks because he possesses a farm, he owns a farm. Possession and ownership mean exactly the same thing to a man who begins by ignoring God. When you hear this man talk you find that the only pronouns he has in his vocabulary are "I," "My" and "Mine." He knows only the grammar of atheism. He is acquainted only with the vocabulary of the fool. "His" and "Ours" and "Yours" are not found in ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... philosopher. This description is industriously and carefully elaborated, and, like the whole book, is overballasted with, not always unavoidable, philosophical expressions, which is all the more annoying in that the writer does not hold to the vocabulary of one and the same school nor even of Feuerbach himself, but mixes up expressions of very different schools, and especially of the present epidemic of ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... Tone did not feel constrained to explain the finesse which prompted him to abandon the vocabulary which he had derived from a year's ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... regarded him in speechless amaze, then realising a vocabulary to which Miss Wheeler had acted as a safety-valve all the evening, he turned up a side street and stamped his way back to the ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... of Rentgen's vocabulary, by his want of logic, Alixe asked herself many times whether she was wrong and her husband right. She wished to be loyal. His devotion to his work, his inspiration springing as it did from poetic sources, counted for something. Why not? All composers should read the ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... arraignment, except by the exploded cry of "the bloody shirt," or claimed that a single thing stated by me as fact was not true. I referred to the "tenderfoot" who would not hurt anyone's feelings, who would banish the word "rebel" from our vocabulary, who would not denounce crimes against our fellow-citizens when they occurred, who thought that, like Cromwell's Roundheads, we must surrender our captured flags to the rebels who bore them, and our Grand Army boys, bent and gray, must march under the new flag, under the flag of Grover ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... suppose, from you," said Charles Osmond. "I wish you could have seen her delight over it. Words absolutely failed her. I don't think any one else noticed it, but, her own vocabulary coming to an end, she turned to ours, it was 'What HEAVENLY person can have ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... dupe. Monsieur de Rochefide, like all little minds, was terribly afraid of being carotte. The noun has become a verb. From the very start of his passion for Madame Schontz, Arthur was on his guard, and he was, therefore, very rat, to use another word of the same vocabulary. The word rat, when applied to a young girl, means the guest or the one entertained, but applied to a man it signifies the giver of the ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... of life, when a little girl's vocabulary was, somewhat at random, growing larger, belong a few brave phrases hazarded to express a meaning well realized—a personal matter. Questioned as to the eating of an uncertain number of buns just before ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... patience he spent in giving her a swell private education. There never was a bird that could swear so copiously as that bird of Bob's. He taught her every thing she knew. He worked day and night to provide her with an up-to-date vocabulary. He used to lie awake nights thinking up new words for old Polly to conquer. Now he says the blamed old rip was deceiving him all the time. She began springing expletives on him that he'd never heard of before in all his forty years before the mast. She first began using them a couple ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... vocabulary of my own; I "pass away time," when it is ill and uneasy, but when 'tis good I do not pass it away: "I taste it over again and adhere to it"; one must run over the ill and settle upon the good. This ordinary phrase of pastime, and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... made of prefixes and suffixes, every one of which has a clear, fixed meaning. Great economy of vocabulary is thus effected, one root-word in Esperanto sufficing, when modified by suitable affixes, to translate many English words. Many of the affixes are often met with as single words. In such cases the English ...
— Esperanto Self-Taught with Phonetic Pronunciation • William W. Mann
... only the most direct and the simplest thought, and are purely colloquial and wanting in the modifications always necessary for communication by writing. The sense is largely eked out by manner and action. Mincopie is the first word in Colebrooke's vocabulary for "Andaman Island, or native country,'' and the term—though probably a mishearing on Colebrooke's part for Mongebe ("I am an Onge,'' i.e. a member of the Onge tribe)—has thus become a persistent book-name for the people. Attempts to civilize the Andamanese have met with little success either ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... blast her fair soul—rob her of all dignity—destroy her virtue, and annihilate in her person all the graces that adorn the character of virtuous womanhood? I ask, how would you regard me, if such were my conduct? Oh! the vocabulary of the damned would not afford a word sufficiently infernal to express your idea of my God-provoking wickedness. Yet, sir, your treatment of my beloved sisters is in all essential points precisely like the case I have now supposed. Damning as would be such a deed on my part, ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... wonders which I surveyed, an American gentleman, to my great amusement, tapped me on the shoulder, and "guessed" that it was "pretty droll!" It was difficult to avoid laughing in his face; yet I could not help envying him his vocabulary, which had so eloquently released ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... most gifted orators of natural compass, white or black, in the United States. He has a voice that reminds men of Henry Grady, and controls an almost inexhaustible vocabulary." ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... for the support of all loyal Englishmen to increase their numbers and strengthen their hands. Orangeism, which had at first only been known in Ireland, began to spread widely throughout Great Britain. Orange Lodges were everywhere formed; Orange Grand Masters were appointed; a whole vocabulary of Orange titles, passwords, and phrases was invented; a complete hierarchy of Orange officialism was created, and an invisible network of Orangeism held the members of the organization together. The Orange conspiracy, if {276} we may call ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... influence of the Arabic on European literature in general, there can be no reasonable doubt that it has been considerable on the Provencal and the Castilian. In the latter especially, so far from being confined to the vocabulary, or to external forms of composition, it seems to have penetrated deep into its spirit, and is plainly discernible in that affectation of stateliness and Oriental hyberbole, which characterizes Spanish writers even ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... Having exhausted her vocabulary, both English and Hindustani, Tessa broke at last into tears and wept stormily for many minutes. Monck sat through the storm without ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... speak to him again; and he paid the L600 a year out of his own pocket as long as Curran lived. As a specimen of Curran's wit, one day when Lord Moira had been making a speech in his usual style full of sounding phrases and long words, Curran said, 'Upon my word his lordship has been airing his vocabulary in a very ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... ashamed of the term 'shell-shock.' It was a bad word, and should be wiped out of the vocabulary of every scientific man. It was really molecular abnormality of the nervous system, characterised by abnormal reactions to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... unknown reason, this epithet was the most scathing in the girls' vocabulary, and either was ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... of the traditional Italian terms of expression and the substitution of English words and phrases, which are used freely and with adroitness to indicate every shade of the composer's meaning. In place of the stereotyped terms of the music-maker's familiarly limited vocabulary, we have such a system of direct and elastic expression as Schumann adopted. Thus one finds, in the "Prologue," such unmistakable and illuminating directions as: "with sturdy good humour," "pleadingly," "mockingly"; in the "Soubrette"—"poutingly"; ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... him ten dollars in as many seconds had not helped his self-confidence though he kept wondering if there was a sliding scale of penalties for improper language applied to the police of St. Louis and just what would have happened if he had called the large blue policeman anything out of his A.E.F. vocabulary. Also the desk, when he called there for his key, reminded him twingingly of the dock, and the clerk behind it looked at him so knowingly as he made the request that Oliver began to construct a hasty ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... we had dropped the word 'culture' out of our vocabulary because of Germany, the Archdeacon of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... with exemplary patience, only snatching the very earliest opportunity to take to his heels. Where a sharp tongue will not serve the purpose, they trust to the sharpness of their finger-nails, or incarnate a whole vocabulary of vituperative words in a resounding slap, or the downright blow of a doubled fist. All English people, I imagine, are influenced in a far greater degree than ourselves by this simple and honest ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... give Monsieur Correlli an opportunity to say one word, until she had exhausted her seemingly endless vocabulary; but he was as colorless as a piece of his own statuary, and a lurid, desperate light burned in his eyes—a gleam, which, if she had been less intent upon venting her own passion, would have warned her that she was doing her cause, whatever it might ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... authority, that a finding and sentence of court-martial rendered in time of war should be regarded as res adjudicata, produced in my mind the painful impression that a very great man did not find the word "justice" anywhere in his vocabulary; and I watched for many years the conversation and writings and public speeches of that man without finding that he ever made use of that word, or ever gave as a reason for doing or not doing anything that it would be just or unjust. In his mind, whatever ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... on street corners arrayed like the lilies of the conservatory and busy with nail files and penknives. Thus displayed as a guarantee of good faith, they carried on an innocuous conversation in a 200-word vocabulary, to the casual observer as innocent and immaterial as that heard in clubs seven ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... inflections have largely disappeared. Some of the early Jesuit missionaries, men of great natural ability who steeped themselves in Oriental learning, have left very different opinions on record. Chinese appeared to them as admirable for the superabundant richness of its vocabulary as for the conciseness of its literary style. And among modern scholars there is a decided tendency to accept this view as embodying a great deal ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... the beating of the wings of victory. Nothing could undermine that, since it was victory simply to be acted. It would be victory even to be acted badly; a reflection that didn't prevent him, however, from banishing, in his politic optimism, the word "bad" from his vocabulary. It had no application, in the compromise of practice; it didn't apply even to his play, which he was conscious he had already outlived and as to which he foresaw that, in the coming weeks, frequent alarm would alternate, in his spirit, with frequent esteem. When he went down to the dusky ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James
... be used invidiously; and folly in the vocabulary of envy or baseness may signify courage and magnanimity. Hardihood and foolhardiness are indeed as different as green and yellow, yet will appear the same to the jaundiced eye. Courage multiplies the chances of success by sometimes making opportunities, and always ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... geology. We had had revolutionary orators, reformers, martyrs; it was but a few years since Abner Kneeland had been sent to jail for expressing an opinion about the great First Cause; but we had had nothing like this man, with his seraphic voice and countenance, his choice vocabulary, his refined utterance, his gentle courage, which, with a different manner, might have been called audacity, his temperate statement of opinions which threatened to shake the existing order of thought ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... to perform tasks that have no value when once provision has been made for perpetuating the species. Finally the mode by which the colony grows and amplifies is in all respects like the embryonic development of an egg into a Hydra, so that we may add the phrase "social embryology" to our vocabulary. The original female is an undifferentiated master of all trades; the small tribe she first establishes is little better off than a horde of savages; but during its seasonal existence the community increases ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... may not stumble in pronouncing any unfamiliar names to be met with in the stories, the editor has prepared and included in the volume a Pronouncing Vocabulary of Difficult Names. To which is added a collection of Shakespearean Quotations, classified in alphabetical order, illustrative of the wisdom and genius of the world's ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... sick man's fancy. Still he strove to analyse the sound. Sonorous as thunder was it, mellow as a golden bell, thin and sweet as a thrummed taut cord of silver—no; it was none of these, nor a blend of these. There were no words nor semblances in his vocabulary and experience with which to describe the totality of ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... another entirely in genius and capacity of expression. Greek is probably the best of all languages in melody, richness, elasticity, and simplicity; so much so, that in spite of its complex inflections, when once a vocabulary is acquired, it is more easy and natural for a modern than his ancestral Latin itself. Latin is the stiffer tongue; it is by nature at once laconic and grandiloquent, and the exceptional condensation and transposition ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... word in the vocabulary of the photoplaywright. To be able to see in fancy his thoughts transformed into action is to have gained one goal for which every photoplay ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... was a Canadian who spoke villanous French and worse English; his vocabulary being largely interspersed with "enfant de garce," "sacre," "sacre enfant," and "damn" until it was a difficult matter to tell what ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... "breakfast" (which had temporarily slipped from his vocabulary) the famished professor wheeled so quickly that his knee twisted. Miss Farr smiled, her cool and ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... I have consulted on the subject, and I do not fear to say that the laudable efforts she is making are greatly handicapped by statements of this kind, nor to urge her as a friend and well-wisher to banish from her vocabulary all such allusions as a source of weakness to the cause ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... they have withdrawn themselves from the church; many of them have become its mordant critics; the more extreme of them have disowned religion as well as its organized form, and the violently radical would dethrone any conception of the Divine and take the word God out of our vocabulary. This extreme group has not for the most part associated itself with the new religious movement, but here at least has been a ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... Gipsy. "We have met," says one writer, "in London with a poor Mohammedan Hindu of Calcutta. This man had in his youth lived with these wanderers, and been, in fact, one of them. He had also, as is common with intelligent Mohammedans, written his autobiography, embodying in it a vocabulary of the Indian Gipsy language. This MS. had unfortunately been burned by his English wife, who informed the writer that she had done so 'because she was tired of seeing a book lying about which she could ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... table, stared straight in front of him, giving no sign of knowledge of the other's presence. Sloane fidgeted with the smelling-salts, emitting now and then long-drawn, tremulous sighs that were his own special vocabulary of ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... Breton voice could be heard asserting itself. Though every man spoke in French, for the purposes of the common parliament, each man swore in his own tongue; and they all swore briskly and crisply, with a seemingly inexhaustible vocabulary of blasphemy and obscenity, so that the foul air of that inn parlor was rendered fouler still by the volley of oaths—German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Biscayan, and Breton—that were fired into its steaming, stinking atmosphere. ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... intelligently and with appreciation such selections as appear in this volume he can read anything that is set before him. There may be some things that will require effort and perhaps explanation, but it is merely a question of vocabulary and parallel information. Besides the stories, there are selections in every department of literature except those that have been passed in the progress of the plan of grading. The legendary heroes, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... drooped. In a shamed whisper she confessed that Miss Hillary's wonderful vocabulary had tempted her. She dared not look up and did not see that ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... the Calvinistic theology in which his youth was trammelled, but it had secured him against the conscious ethicism of the prevailing Unitarian doctrine which supremely worshipped Conduct; and it had colored his vocabulary to such strange effects that he spoke of moral men with abhorrence; as more hopelessly lost than sinners. Any one whose sphere tempted him to recognition of the foibles of others, he called the Devil; ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the Hebrew writers often used a vivid form of warning and invective is not a reason why we should keep on doing it. The Hebrew writer was a primitive speaking to primitives. Meaning what we mean, he required a stronger, fiercer vocabulary than we ever need. In saying this I am not dodging the issue; I am stating a fact which rules in all historical interpretation. To make the phraseology of two thousand years before Christ the literal expression of the thought of two thousand years ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... store-house for the problems of mind. But the work has been much overestimated. It is the product of a confused though laborious mind. It contains contradictions not merely incidental, such as any great novel work must retain (since no man can at once remodel his whole vocabulary and opinions) but contradictions absolutely fundamental and inexcusable, like that between the transcendental function of intellect and its limited authority, or that between the efficacy of things-in-themselves ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the condition of the roadways, the vocabulary of blame had been exhausted long before I arrived. Two things, however, struck me in New York which I had not heard of by report: the greasiness of the streets, transforming every automobile into a skidding death-trap at the least sign of moisture, and the leisureliness ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... friendship was, however, very brief. Before many weeks had passed there was no vituperative epithet that Leicester was not in the daily habit of bestowing upon Paul. The Earl's vocabulary of abuse was not a limited one, but he exhausted it on the head of the Advocate. He lacked at last words and breath to utter what was like him. He pronounced his former friend "a very dangerous man, altogether hated of the people and the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... only one language spoken in Quaker Hill. Indeed only one or two persons have any other than English as their native tongue.[35] And very few have acquired any other as a matter of culture. The vocabulary used is limited. An intelligent observer says: "The vocabulary of the native community is the meagerest I have ever known, except that of the immigrant." There are, however, very few illiterates; none, indeed, in the literal meaning of ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... struck with the good qualities of your new Premier. I am sure his great wish will be to make the best possible Minister of the Crown. His task will be very difficult. "Bread, cheap bread," "the poor oppressed by the aristocratie," etc.—a whole vocabulary of exciting words of that kind will be put forward to inflame the popular mind; and of all the Sovereigns, the Sovereign "People" is certainly one of the most fanciful and fickle. Our neighbour in France shows this more than ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... wherein more definitely critical questions can be discussed. There are a few Irish words which have been retained in the translation and which require a word of explanation: The Old Irish geis (later, also geas[12]; plural geasa) has as much right to a place in the English vocabulary as the Polynesian word tabu, by which it is often translated. It is sometimes Englished "injunction," "condition," "prohibition," "bond," "ban," "charm," "magical decree," or translated by the Scots-Gaelic ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... dinner with the man, however, and Jack added further to his vocabulary in finding that the drivers of the ox teams were called "bullwhackers," and those of the ...
— The Voyage of the Rattletrap • Hayden Carruth
... The homeliness of his vocabulary amused Barstein. Evidently the dictionary was his fount of inspiration. Without it Niagara was reduced to a trickle. He seemed indeed quite shy of speech, preferring to gaze ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... imaginings in regard to the Spirits of the Bells—something of the grace and goblinry of which, Maclise's pencil shadowed forth in the lovely frontispiece to the little volume in the form in which it was first of all published—has exhausted the vocabulary of wonder in his elvish delineation of the Goblin Sight beheld in the old church-tower on New Year's ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... up!" said the man, his hands in his pockets—James Wentworth's vocabulary had grown twenty years younger in ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... to him that he had not noticed it at first, the almost Hanoverian purity of her speech and the freedom with which she spoke. The average peasant is diffident, with a vocabulary of few words, ignorant of art or music or where the ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... grisette, the lady, the pretentious woman in middle life, and the actress, among whom Adolphe has chosen his belle (according to the Fischtaminellian vocabulary). ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... religious, for I don't look down on folks like you at all," said Janetta, calmly adopting Mrs. Brand's vocabulary. ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... protection of the restraining rules and the humanizing usages of civilized warfare? [Cheers.] We think we cannot. [Cheers.] The enemy, borrowing what I may, perhaps, for this purpose call a neutral flag from the vocabulary of diplomacy, describe these newly adopted measures by a grotesque and puerile perversion of language as a "blockade." [Laughter.] What is a blockade? A blockade consists in sealing up the war ports of a belligerent against sea-borne traffic by encircling their coasts with an impenetrable ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... in only two years, and succeeded her first child, which was brought from Sacramento at considerable expense by a Mr. William Dodd, also a teamster, on her seventh birthday. This, by one of those rare inventions known only to a child's vocabulary, she at once called "Misery"—probably a combination of "Missy," as she herself was formerly termed by strangers, and "Missouri," her native State. It was an excessively large doll at first—Mr. Dodd wishing to get the worth of his money—but time, and perhaps an excess of maternal ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... peculiar to the country; and his profanity was enriched with all the flavor of the provincial's elation in the committing of sin. From the earliest moment of our starting, the stream of his talk had been unending. His vocabulary was such as to have excited the envy and despair of a French realist, impassioned in ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... the death of Henry Johnson. It contained a long interview with Edward J. Hannigan, in which the latter described in full the performance of Johnson at the fire. There was also an editorial built from all the best words in the vocabulary of the staff. The town halted in its accustomed road of thought, and turned a reverent attention to the memory of this hostler. In the breasts of many people was the regret that they had not known enough to give him a hand and a lift when he was alive, and ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... you, Helen, that you can take it so. Personally, I believe in nothing which I cannot fully explain and understand. 'Faith,' in your sense of the word, has no place in my vocabulary. I was a very small boy when my faith took to itself wings and flew away; and, curiously enough, it was while I was singing lustily, in the village church at Dinglevale: 'As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... you possess about the beautiful! Now, if there were question of a new railroad-bridge, the vocabulary ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... I'd heard it alleviated dermal irritations. Lathering my face, I glanced over the list culled from the dictionary and stuck in the mirror the night before, for I have never been too tired to improve my mind. By this easy method of increasing my vocabulary I had progressed, at the time, down ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... motor-bicycle. Owing to the lack of proper accommodation in my nursery my literary labours are carried on under the greatest difficulties and hampered by constant interruptions from my nurse, a vulgar woman with a limited vocabulary and no aspirates. I say nothing, though I might say much, of the jealousy of adult authors, the pusillanimity of unenterprising publishers, the senile indifference of Parliament. But I warn them that, unless the just claims of youth to economic and intellectual ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... flowers of every hue, affording abundance of interest as we proceeded. Marian was delighted, and was continually crying out, "Oh, what a lovely flower!—what a graceful tree!—see that magnificent bird!—oh, what a gorgeous butterfly!" till she had exhausted her vocabulary of suitable epithets. ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... much On the Spot with Mrs. Eyton-Eyton. Nursery governess was a comprehensive word in the Eyton-Eyton vocabulary; covered every duty that in a nursery must be performed. One must do the nursery fire, sweep the nursery floor, bring up and carry down the nursery meals—servants, you see, object to waiting upon one whom, as Mrs. Eyton-Eyton ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... characteristics of the Authorized Version, the beauty of its rhythm, the vigor of its native Saxon vocabulary, there is little to prepare one in the comment of its translators or their predecessors. Apparently the faithful effort to render the original truly resulted in a perfection of style of which the translator himself was largely unconscious. ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... The Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, one of the wellsprings of hacker culture. The 1959 "Dictionary of the TMRC Language" compiled by Peter Samson included several terms that became basics of the hackish vocabulary (see esp. {foo}, ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... or rather he never took time, preferring invariably quantity to quality. What work of his has survived till to-day is read, not for its style, but in spite of its style. His syntax is loose and unscholarly; his vocabulary is copious, but often inaccurate; many of his sentences ramble on interminably, lacking unity, precision, and balance. Figures of speech he seldom abuses because he seldom uses; his imagination, as noticed before, being extremely limited in range. That Defoe, in spite of these ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... and to which touchy people who have no genius attach so much importance. No leader who had not been tampered with by the psychopathic monomaniacs could ever put any construction but the obvious and innocent one on these passages. But the general vocabulary of the sonnets to Pembroke (or whoever "Mr W. H." really was) is so overcharged according to modern ideas that a reply on the general ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... women on remote farms are tragic beyond belief. They appear natural and commonplace only because the victims are trained in endurance, not in the vocabulary of expression. There are thousands of farmers' wives in every rural community who endure hardships undreamed of in the sweatshops of commerce. There are no laws to protect them from long hours, nor any to protect their children. They average sixteen hours a day, while ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... and dignity, &c. &c. &c.: We are not masters of the whole vocabulary. See any novel by ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... self-sacrificing men by the hand; while, aside from their special claims to honor, it will be so pleasant to meet cultivated human beings once more! They are Germans, but their head-quarters are at London; they will speak English; and if their vocabulary prove scanty, we will try to eke it out with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... feelings, Petrea got into such excessively high spirits, that she infected therewith her companions in misfortune; or, according to her vocabulary, good fortune. But now, however, came on a horrible tempest, with hail, whose great stones made themselves thou to such a degree with Petrea's nose as astonished and almost offended her. The Assessor looked out for shelter; and Petrea, quite charmed that she was nearly blown away, followed ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... has 'chucked' it into the next yard, and the janitor will have to climb the fence,—at his age! Oh, if I could eliminate the irregular verb 'to chuck' from the vocabulary of this school, I could 'make out of the broken sounds of life a song, and out of life itself a melody,'" and she flew down-stairs like a breeze, to find the patient Mr. Bowker. Mr. Bowker was a nice little man, who had not all ...
— The Story of Patsy • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... steak, pork, and potatoes, biscuits, light bread, coffee, and iced teas, but only such light goods as canned tomatoes, green corn, beans, salmon, and fresh fish, I will tell them how to make "cush." You will not find this word in the dictionaries of the day, but it was in the soldier's vocabulary, now obsolete. Chip up bacon in fine particles, place in an oven and fry to a crisp. Fill the oven one-third or one-half full of branch water, then take the stale corn bread, the more moldy the better, rub into fine ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... as the word ought to be rendered, not 'full of glory' but 'glorified.' Unspeakable. Still waters run deep. It is poor wealth that can be counted; it is shallow emotion that can be crammed into the narrow limits of any human vocabulary. Fathers and mothers, parents and children, husbands and wives, know that. And the depths of the joy that a believing soul has in Jesus Christ are not to be spoken. Perhaps it is better that it should not ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... Magog, who travelled in cars, occupying first one territory with their flocks, but not cultivating the land, then leaving it to nature and taking up another resting-place. It is certain that the Russians have many Asiatic words in their vocabulary, which must necessarily have occurred from their being for more than two centuries sometimes under Tatar, and sometimes under Mongol domination; and the origin of this word tsar or car may leave to be sought on the plateaus of North-east Asia. In the Shemitic ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... historian of Greece, who had learned this lesson from the Peloponnesian war, and who took sides with the Southern States, to the great dismay of his fellow-radicals, who could not see, as George Grote saw, the real point at issue in the controversy. Submission is slavery, and the bitterest taunt in the vocabulary of those who advocated secession was "submissionist." But where does submission begin? Who is to mark the point of encroachment? That is a matter which must be decided by the sovereign; and on the theory that the States are sovereign, each State must be the judge. The extreme Southern ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... through Giovanna's charitable disposition that we make the acquaintance of two weird sisters, who live not far from us in Calle Falier, and whom we know to this day merely as the Creatures— creatura being in the vocabulary of Venetian pity the term for a fellow-being somewhat more pitiable than a poveretta. Our Creatures are both well stricken in years, and one of them has some incurable disorder which frequently confines her to the wretched cellar in which they live with ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... the interior tumult by the artifice of filling his mouth with sweets and comfits. When GOLDONI found his sleep disturbed by the obtrusive ideas still floating from the studies of the day, he contrived to lull himself to rest by conning in his mind a vocabulary of the Venetian dialect, translating some word into Tuscan and French; which being a very uninteresting occupation, at the third or fourth version this recipe never failed. This was an art of withdrawing attention from the greater ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... heels and pulling methodically but slowly at the weeds, digging with their pangas, carrying loads: to and fro, or solemnly pushing a lawn mower, blankets wrapped shamelessly about their necks. They were harried about by a red-faced beefy English gardener with a marvellous vocabulary of several native languages and a short hippo-hide whip. He talked himself absolutely purple in the face without, as far as my observation went, penetrating an inch below the surface. The Kikuyus went right on doing what they were already doing in exactly the same manner. Probably the purple ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... got your vocabulary all warmed up," observed Little Joe, so-called because of two hundred pounds of iron-hard sinew and muscle. Slim was wandering towards the door to execute his mission, but he kept his head cocked towards his prostrated ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... gain and rage for improvement which keep our people continually on the move, and our country towns incessantly in a state of transition. There the magic phrases, "town lots," "water privileges," "railroads," and other comprehensive and soul-stirring words from the speculator's vocabulary, are never heard. The residents dwell in the houses built by their forefathers, without thinking of enlarging or modernizing them, or pulling them down and turning them into granite stores. The trees, under which they have been born and have played in infancy, flourish undisturbed; ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... indifferent politicians! Nay, and the orator treads in a beaten round; the matters he discusses have been discussed a thousand times before; language is ready-shaped to his purpose; he speaks out of a cut-and-dry vocabulary. But you—may it not be that your defence reposes on some subtlety of feeling, not so much as touched upon in Shakespeare, to express which, like a pioneer, you must venture forth into zones of thought still unsurveyed, and become yourself a literary innovator? ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hand, he hadn't made a fortune or bought a car or given her any reason for feeling compensated for the lack of marital excitement. His friends called him a nice fellow—in some ways as damning a thing as one could say about anybody—and let it go at that. However, Helen Starratt's vocabulary was just as limited when it came to characterizing her conventional aims and ambitions. If, occasionally, her speculations stirred the muddy reaches of certain furtive desires, she took care that they ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... distinguished from that of knowledge, is vibratory or oscillating, as distinguished from fixed. That is the nearest literal representation of the fact; but it is only literal to the intellect, not to the intuition. For this part of man's consciousness a different vocabulary is needed. The idea of "fixed" might perhaps be transposed into that of "at home." In sensation no permanent home can be found, because change is the law of this vibratory existence. That fact is the first one which must be learned by the disciple. It is useless ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... lesson. On the screen appeared objects which Urg would name, to have his sibilant uttering repeated by Garin. As the American later learned, the ray treatment he had undergone had quickened his mental powers, and in an incredibly short time he had a working vocabulary. ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North |
