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Primer   /prˈaɪmər/   Listen
Primer

noun
1.
An introductory textbook.
2.
Any igniter that is used to initiate the burning of a propellant.  Synonyms: fuse, fusee, fuze, fuzee, priming.
3.
The first or preliminary coat of paint or size applied to a surface.  Synonyms: flat coat, ground, primer coat, priming, priming coat, undercoat.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Primer" Quotes from Famous Books



... A primer of information about composing sticks, galleys, leads, brass rules, cutting and mitering machines, etc. 47 pp.; illustrated; 50 ...
— Punctuation - A Primer of Information about the Marks of Punctuation and - their Use Both Grammatically and Typographically • Frederick W. Hamilton

... or heated oil priming, will dry faster and be more penetrating than cold. I consider heated "boiled oil" and red lead the best primer for iron. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various

... a text-book on physiology for schools do not permit so full a description of the voice as the subject deserves. For additional details, the student is referred to Cohen's The Throat and the Voice, a volume in the "American Health Primer Series." Price ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... follows: "Sir Godfrey Disseisin at home Wednesday morning, December the twenty-fifth, from half after eleven until the following day. Dancing; also a Dragon will be roasted. R. S. V. P." The Disseisin crest with its spirited motto, "Saute qui peult," originated by the venerable Primer Disseisin, followed by his son Tortious Disseisin, and borne with so much renown in and out of a hundred battles by a thousand subsequent Disseisins, ornamented ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister

... would forego in the sea-fight that almost inaudible, breathless whisper of "Our ammunition is nearly done"? or again the moment when Skinner pokes Mr. Hardie lightly in the side and says, "But—I've—got—THE RECEIPT"? And could anything express the state of young Reginald's mind so ineffably as the primer type of his ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... Savage[450] I am ready to go upon; and in Great Primer, and Pica notes, I reckon on sending in half a sheet a day; but the money for that shall likewise lye by in your hands till it is done. With the debates, shall not I have business enough? if I had ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... when only heard their voices came as though earth and air were speaking. "Sponge out.—All right. Fire! Hot while it lasts, but it won't last long. I have every confidence in Old Jack and Old Dick. Drat that primer! All right!—Three seconds! Jerusalem! that created a sensation. The Louisianians are coming up that cleft between the hills. All the Stonewall regiments in the centre. Ewell to flank their left. Did you ever hear Ewell swear? Look out! wheel's cut through. Lanyard's ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... of course, quite well known to her. Her own classmates had passed out in the preceding year but the rest had all gone to school with her, excepting the primer class and ten newcomers to Avonlea. Anne secretly felt more interest in these ten than in those whose possibilities were already fairly well mapped out to her. To be sure, they might be just as commonplace as the rest; but on the other hand there ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... dreamy yet very oft-recurring memories of my life in childhood, as, for instance, that just before I was quite three years old I had given to me a copy of the old New England Primer, which I could not then read, yet learned from others the rhymes with ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... song y-made in reverence Of Christe's mother?" said this innocent; Now certes I will do my diligence To conne* it all, ere Christemas be went; *learn; con Though that I for my primer shall be shent,* *disgraced And shall be beaten thries in an hour, I will it conne, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer

... but I will. Maybe I'll find something like the picture-books Sachiko was talking about. A child's primer, maybe; surely they had things like that. And if I don't. I'll find something else. We've only been here six months. I can wait the rest of my life, if I have to, but ...
— Omnilingual • H. Beam Piper

... Man's first primer was near at hand. When he wished to write, he made a picture with a stick, a stone, on a leaf, or traced his idea in the mud. When he wanted to count, he kept tally on his fingers, or with pebbles from the ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... of this play, the death of Agamemnon, at the hand of Clytemnes'tra, is a scene that the poet paints with terrible effect. Says MR. EUGENE LAWRENCE, [Footnote: "A Primer of Greek Literature," by Eugene Lawrence, p.55.] "Mr. E. C. Stedman's version of the death of Agamemnon is an excellent one. A horror rests upon the palace at Mycenae; there is a scent of blood, the exhalations ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... of one's reading, and going beyond that, using it as a spring-board, advance in the work of creation from realising to begetting. So it was with me. The Faerie Queen was as familiar as the Latin Primer ought to have been. I had much of Mallory by heart—a book full of magic. Forth of his pages stepped men-at-arms and damsels the moment I was alone, and held me company for as long as I would. The persons of Homer's music came next to them. I was Hector and held ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett

... death they reverted to the lord again. The services to be performed for the lord were uncertain and unlimited. The copyhold was also subject to a variety of grievous taxes, which the lord had the privilege, upon many occasions, of imposing—such as aids, reliefs, primer seisin, wardship, escheats for felony and want of heirs, and many more, altogether so exorbitant and oppressive as often totally to ruin the tenant and rob him of almost all interest in his property. {56} The difference of the circumstances under which ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge

... the cove, Lahoma dreamed new dreams, peopling the grassy solitude with the figures she had encountered on her travels, likening the rocks to various houses that had caught her fancy. She turned with absorbed interest to the primer and elementary arithmetic with which Brick had supplied himself as the first tools ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis

... read decently and without comment, the young zealots of the party prided themselves on shouting it out to a circle of excited hearers during the service of mass, and accompanied their reading with violent expositions. Protestant maidens took the new English primer to church with them and studied it ostentatiously during matins. Insult passed into open violence when the bishops' courts were invaded and broken up by Protestant mobs; and law and public opinion were outraged at once when priests who favored ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... financially. I found out that the cottage could not be sold or mortgaged, nor let either, according to law, though the executor tried it on hard, and came again and again about it, especially after she left it. So I found out everything about the girl. That primer donner took a fancy to her, and adopted her right out of hand because of her voice, and to-morrow night you can both of you see her, for I mean to have a box up among the British arrestocracy that night, and I invite you ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens

... the more diligence on this book to-be of mine, that you inform me again and again that my penny tracts are still extant; nay, that, beside friendly men, learned and poetic men read and even review them. I am like Scholasticus of the Greek Primer, who was ashamed to bring out so small a dead child before such grand people. Pygmalion shall try if he cannot fashion a better, certainly a bigger.—I am sad to hear that Sterling sails again for his health. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... matter too hastily. There was no thought that ye should part till you had some purpose in view. Nay, we should be fain for Ambrose to bide on here, so he would leave his portion for me to deal with, and teach little Will his primer and accidence. You are a quiet lad, Ambrose, and can rule your ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge

... of proper age, his father sent him over to the road-side school at Long Benton, kept by Rutter, the parish clerk. But the education which Rutter could give was of a very limited kind, scarcely extending beyond the primer and pothooks. While working as a brakesman on the pit-head at Killingworth, the father had often bethought him of the obstructions he had himself encountered in life through his want of schooling; and he formed the noble determination that no labour, nor pains, nor self-denial ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles

... appointment. His hand fell upon a small volume bearing the name of G. K. Chesterton, and opening it at random he read those lines descriptive of the illuminated breviary from which Alfred the Great, as a boy, learned his spiritual primer ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck

... a Lawrence teacher, writes verse and songs. In addition, she has issued a primer, the Kansas text-book and a primary reading chart for which she has a United States patent. Margaret Lynn, one of the faculty of Kansas University, is a writer of short stories and "A Step-Daughter ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker

... can't say that he came as far back into the west as these parts; but he was a most faithful shepherd. There was a book of his sermons printed for the benefit of his widow and children. He died, like that blessed man, John Rogers, that we see in the primer-books, leaving a wife with eleven children and one at the breast. His sermons are very precious reading. One of them in particular, on the Grace of God, is a very falling of manna in the wilderness. It freshens the soul, and throws light upon the dark places in the wilderness. Ah! if only ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... information. The Histoire elementaire de la Litterature francaise, by M. Jean Fleury, has been popular; it tells much of the contents of great books, and makes no assumption that the reader is already acquainted with them. Dr. Warren's A Primer of French Literature (Heath, Boston, U.S.A.) is well proportioned and well arranged, but it has room for little more than names, dates, and the briefest characterisations. Dr. Wells's Modern French Literature (Roberts, Boston, U.S.A.) sketches French literature to Chateaubriand, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... years later Brant translated into the Mohawk tongue the Liturgy of the Anglican Church as well as a doctrinal primer. Copies of these were sent to Harvard University, and its corporation replied with a cordial vote of thanks to the War Chief for his gift. Brant also planned to write a comprehensive history of the Six Nations, ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood

... truths which the human spirit, at whatever stage of immaturity, imbibes with such eager interest. Pearl, therefore, so large were the attainments of her three years' lifetime, could have borne a fair examination in the New England Primer, or the first column of the Westminster Catechisms, although unacquainted with the outward form of either of those celebrated works. But that perversity which all children have more or less of, and of which little Pearl had a tenfold portion, now, at the most inopportune ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... never dared bring it into the schoolroom. There were ways, however, of evading inexorable law and circumventing base injustice. He hid the precious thing under a thistle just outside the window. The teacher had sometimes a brief season of apathy on hot afternoons, when she was hearing the primer class read, "I see a pig. The pig is big. The big pig can dig;" which stirring in phrases were always punctuated by the snores of the Hanks baby, who kept sinking down on his fat little legs ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin

... as well befitted a candidate for the highest honour of his profession, the crown of martyrdom. It was actually fancied, at that period, that New England might have a John Rogers of her own to take the place of that worthy in the Primer. ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... post.... Your son at the present writing is mighty well employed in tumbling on the floor of the room and sweeping the sand with a feather. He grows a most delightful child, and very full of play and spirit. He is also a very great scholar: he can read his primer; and I have brought down my Virgil. He makes most shrewd remarks about the pictures. We are very intimate friends and playfellows. He begins to be very ragged; and I hope I shall be pardoned if I equip him with new clothes and frocks, or what Mrs. Evans and ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... edition of these grotesque and quaint conceptions, some alterations were made and a primer was included. It then appeared as "A Book for Boys and Girls; or Temporal Things Spiritualized;" and by the time the ninth edition was reached, in seventeen hundred and twenty-four, the book was hardly recognizable as "Divine ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey

... betrayal, but so standing a little to one side of the passing crowds on the sidewalk, looking into that upturned face, seeing those eyes so sad and prayerful above the smiling mouth, I betrayed my wife for the first time, and Lucy read me like a primer, and she knew that I loved her—either still or once more. Of her own emotions ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris

... on her the impossible habit of consistency. She was reported as calling a hat a "hot," a rat a "rot," of teaching her little sister to read from the primer, "Is the cot on the mot?" Pronunciation became a test of character. The soft "r" and the hard "a" were taken ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes

... and a sigh he took up the primer, and began heavily to con over the task which had been assigned him. As if banished from the society of the two others, he sat sad and solitary in one of the deep window-recesses, and after in vain struggling with the difficulties of his task, and his disinclination to learn ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... Swift of St. Patricks, Dublin, edited some curious poetry for "A Royal Primer," sqr. 32mo, published in the Seven Dials, of Dublin ...
— Banbury Chap Books - And Nursery Toy Book Literature • Edwin Pearson

... in my bones that he would meet me there; and when Cousin Emily Elizabeth sent me word that she had got a loge—which means a little square pen in the gallery, cushioned off like a first-class pew—and wanted me to go with her to hear the great primer-donner, I just got that dress out again, and set the frizzing-pins to work, and did myself up so scrumptiously that I don't believe that a creature on Sprucehill would have known me. Don't say this is extravagant, and flying in the face of Providence. If He don't want silk dresses ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens

... The "Primer of Mayan Hieroglyphics" (39) was intended as a summary of what had been achieved up to that time (1895) by students in this branch. It endeavored, moreover, to render to each student the credit of his independent work; and as, unfortunately, some, ...
— A Record of Study in Aboriginal American Languages • Daniel G. Brinton

... once the predominating spirit of that little group. The interest of all the children, from the shy little beginners in the Primer class to the tall ones in the A class, ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers

... of Commons, seldom speaking more than four times on any bill. Kept climbing until he became under secretary of something, order keeper of the Board of Trade, and finally occupied a prominent position in the Exchequer. Assisted the Primer to grasp the Irish home rule millstone, and hung on without a gurgle. Ambition: A dynamite-proof house, a tax on air. Recreation: (see Asquith). Address: Front row House of Commons. ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous

... shipload of panic-stricken foreign emigrants, and (to help point the moral) within the year, in an almost similar case, another shipload had been drowned through that same blind, helpless, hopeless panic. The pride of race bubbled through the British Daily Press in prosaic long primer and double-leaded bourgeois. There was no saying aloud, "We rejoice that an Englishman has done this thing, after having it proved to us that it was above the foreigner's strength." The newspaper man does not rhapsodize. But the sentiment was there all ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

... trick, is it? You just put the yearlings through the yard, and then tackle the two-year-olds." he commented, finding that after a run through the Alphabet we had settled down to the first pages of Bett-Bett's discarded Primer. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn

... study in England. The Icelandic Reader, edited by Messrs. Vigfusson and Powell, in the Clarendon Press Series, is a most valuable book, which ought to be in the hands of every student; but it still leaves room for an elementary primer. As the engagements of the editors of the Reader would have made it impossible for them to undertake such a work for some years to come, they raised no objections to my proposal to undertake it myself. Meanwhile, I found the task was a more formidable one than I had anticipated, ...
— An Icelandic Primer - With Grammar, Notes, and Glossary • Henry Sweet

... and his wife Katharine had founded a chantry in Netteswell, Essex, and a chapel in the parish of Latton, Essex, where they resided. He left to these and many other charitable purposes handsome legacies; and to his wife, Dame Katharine, he left his "daily Primer," much plate and furniture, a crucifix, the furniture of a chapel, his "book of legends in English, and his English translation of 'Bonaventura de vita et passione Christi.'" To his "son, John Bohun," armour, and his book in English of "Boys de Consolacione ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes

... embowered lane, Whistling I wade the knee-deep leaves again, While eager Argus, who has missed all day The sharer of his condescending play, Comes leaping onward with a bark elate And boisterous tail to greet me at the gate; That I was true in absence to our love Let the thick dog's-ears in my primer prove.' ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... fifty years gone by, exhibited some of the most recondite specimens of ornamental needlework. A school for little children had been often in her thoughts; and, at one time, she had begun a review of her early studies in the New England Primer, with a view to prepare herself for the office of instructress. But the love of children had never been quickened in Hepzibah's heart, and was now torpid, if not extinct; she watched the little people of the neighborhood from her chamber-window, and doubted whether she could tolerate ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... west side of which, at the Gregory River, we watered our horses and started again at 11.15; at 12.8 made two miles and a half north-east by east half east to west side of a range; at 12.35 made one mile and a half north-east to Heales Creek and gap in Primer Range; at 12.55 made three-quarters of a mile north-east down the creek to the last hill coming down and the first going up the river (I have named it Mount Heales after the premier of Victoria). It was about ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough

... discovered for us our august mother's marriage lines; and if the most of that bright assurance came out of an old political skit, the "Germania" of Tacitus, who recked at the time? For along followed Mr Stopford Brooke with an admirable little Primer published at one shilling, to instruct the meanest of us in our common ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... important and pregnant principle of all, viz., that Art is one, is not partial, but includes all times and forms and sorts—is not exclusively aristocratic or democratic, or oriental or occidental. My favorite symbol would be a good font of type, where the impeccable long-primer rejects nothing. Or the old Dutch flour-miller who said, "I never bother myself what road the folks come—I only want ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... am glad to say that all of the Bobbsey twins were promoted, and Freddie and Flossie came home very proud to tell that when they went back again, after the Thanksgiving holidays, they would be in the primer ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at School • Laura Lee Hope

... simple. The few stores are all plainly labeled, the streets run at right angles, and the houses are set well apart, like big letters in a primer. A small town looks like a story without a plot, like: "See the cat. Does the can see me? The cat sees the dog;" beside which a city is as unfathomable as a Henry James paragraph. To the stranger each man and woman he meets is a complete individual, each standing alone, like letters ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler

... prime, old man," said he, "and won't it be primer still when the real time comes? I never guessed it would be so easy. Not a thing's ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed

... the great exposition at New Orleans this winter, and would be willing to yield you a few words of editorial opinion, set in long primer type next to pure reading ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... writing "poems" to the half-witted children at the Idiot Asylum. The trick of rhyming cannot be more usefully employed than in furnishing a pleasant amusement to the poor feeble-minded children. I should feel that I was well employed in getting up a Primer for the pupils of the Asylum, and other young persons who are incapable of serious thought and connected expression. I would start in the ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... primer!" ordered the chief of the life savers. One of the men inserted a percussion fuse in the touchhole of the mortar. The captain grasped a lanyard. The men all stood at attention, waiting to see the effect of ...
— Larry Dexter's Great Search - or, The Hunt for the Missing Millionaire • Howard R. Garis

... times three canisters were fired. Billy White, "No. 2," had only to reach down for them, and he would have loaded the guns to the muzzle if "No. 1" had given him time. The gun got so hot that, once, in jumping in to put in the friction primer, the back of my left hand touched it, and the skin was nearly taken off. The sponge was entirely worn off the rammer, so "No. 1" stopped sponging out the gun, and only rammed shot home. We fired so fast that ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame

... write, after a very uncertain fashion. As to spelling, nobody knew how to spell in those days.... But they did know the four simple rules of arithmetic, and could say the epigrammatic rhymes of the old New England Primer and the sibyllic formulas of the Assembly's Catechism as glibly as the child of to-day repeats "The ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various

... early trial was connected with a visit to a school. I was getting proud of my ability to spell small words. A primer-maker had attempted to help the association of letters with objects by placing them in juxtaposition, but through a mistake he led me to my undoing. I knew my letters and I knew some things. I plainly distinguished the letters P-A-N. Against them I was puzzled by a picture of a spoon, ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock

... the sides of the road. The artillerymen had turned the gun and loaded it with a solid shot. Instantly a wide lane opened through our ranks; the man with the lanyard drew the fatal cord, fire burst from the primer and the muzzle, the long gun sprang up and recoiled, and there seemed to be a demoniac yell in its ear-splitting crash, as the heavy ball left the mouth, and tore its bloody way through the bodies of the struggling mass of men ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... hither by those daring voyagers of long ago. The coffee habit was one of the signs of her progress in the white man's civilization, also had she emerged from the tepee into a log hut, another achievement. She had learned to read the primer and to write her name. Little Blue-Star attended school unhindered by a fond mother's fears that a foreign teacher might not spare the rod with ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa

... At this moment I am doing THE USEFUL at the risk of your anathemas. I am trying to simplify a child's approach to culture, being persuaded that the first study makes its impression on all the others and that pedagogy teaches us to look for knots in bulrushes. In short, I am working over A PRIMER, do not EAT ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... who will be eager and able to go farther, and to begin the study of sonata form. For such children, and certainly for all teachers of music, there can be no better text-book than Hadow's Sonata Form, published in the Novello Primer Series. This book is often described as 'more exciting than a novel'! Somervell's Charts for Harmony and Counterpoint are also most valuable, and will save the necessity of a text-book in these subjects—at any rate for the ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home

... school, school; school of art; kindergarten, nursery, creche, reformatory. pulpit, lectern, soap box desk, reading desk, ambo^, lecture room, theater, auditorium, amphitheater, forum, state, rostrum, platform, hustings, tribune. school book, horn book, text book; grammar, primer, abecedary^, rudiments, manual, vade mecum; encyclopedia, cyclopedia; Lindley Murray, Cocker; dictionary, lexicon. professorship, lectureship, readership, fellowship, tutorship; chair. School Board Council of Education; Board of Education; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... was an unusual hour for him to appear and one glance at his face showed trouble of a personal nature had drawn heavy lines in his mask of calmness. I had known Kishimoto San for twenty years. Part of him I could read like a primer; the other part was a sealed volume to which I doubt if even Buddha had the key. Sometimes when he was calling I wished Gabriel would appear in my doorway and announce the end of the world to see, if without omitting a syllable, Kishimoto would keep on to the end of the ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay

... "little" in relation to? If in relation to what there is to know, then all human knowledge is little. If in relation to what actually is known by somebody, then we must condemn as "dangerous" the knowledge which Archimedes possessed of mechanics, or Copernicus of astronomy; for a shilling primer and a few weeks' study will enable any student to outstrip in mere information some of the greatest teachers of the past. No doubt, that little knowledge which thinks itself to be great may possibly be a dangerous, as it certainly is a most ridiculous ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... inspired Big Business that shall be, to be found in the books over which Una labored—the flat, maroon-covered, dusty, commercial geography, the arid book of phrases and rules-of-the-thumb called "Fish's Commercial English," the manual of touch-typewriting, or the shorthand primer that, with its grotesque symbols and numbered exercises and yellow pages dog-eared by many owners, looked like an old-fashioned Arabic grammar headachily ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... punctum qui miscuit utile dulci was not only an irrefragable axiom because a Latin poet had said it, but it exactly met the case in point. He would convince the scorners that poetry might be seriously useful, and show Master Bull his new way of making fine words butter parsnips, in a rhymed moral primer. Allegory, as then practised, was imagination adapted for beginners, in words of one syllable and illustrated with cuts, and would thus serve both his ethical and pictorial purpose. Such a primer, or a first instalment of it, he proceeded to put ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... district schools in New England, where difference of age implies a corresponding difference in attainments. 'What are your most advanced classes studying?' is very often asked of the teachers, when a moment's reflection would convince the inquirer, that the Primer and First Reader are the only books which we expect to see in the hands of children who have but just learned their letters. Viewing the rapid progress which these colored children have made in learning to read during the past year—many of them being obliged to leave ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... corrugated bosom of a washboard. We now have poetry, so-called, everywhere—in books and magazine innumerable, even sandwiched in between reports of camp-meetings, political pow-wows and newspaper ads. for patent liver pills. O, that the featherless jaybirds now trying to twitter in long-primer type would apply the soft pedal unto themselves, would add no more to life's dissonance and despair! Most of our modern poets are bowed down with more than Werterean woe. Their sweethearts are cruel or fate unkind; they've got cirrhosis of the liver or palpitation of the heart, and needs ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... in this grade anyhow!" declared one of them. "A girl ought to be in the primer that turns ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice

... remarques que je fais tous les jours, et je n'en suis pas surprise. Du caractere dont elle est, celui du Marquis doit etre de son gout. La Comtesse est une femme brusque, qui aime a primer, a gouverner, a etre la maitresse. Le Marquis est un homme doux, paisible, aise a conduire; et voila ce qu'il faut a la Comtesse. Aussi ne parle-t-elle de lui qu'avec eloge. Son air de naivete lui plait: c'est, dit-elle, le meilleur homme, le plus complaisant, le plus sociable. D'ailleurs, ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux

... Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine had come a strange company, earnest, patient, determined, unschooled in even the primer of refinement, hungry for something the significance of which, when they had it, they could not even guess, anxious to be called great, determined so to be without ever knowing how. Here came the dreamy gentleman of the ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... imaginative Gruithuisen believed that in some instances they represent roads cut through interminable forests, and in others the dried-up beds of once mighty rivers. His description of the Triesnecker rill-system reads like a page from a geographical primer. A portion of it is compared to the river Po, and he traces its course mile by mile up to the "delta" at its place of disemboguement into the Mare Vaporum. From the position of some rills with respect to the contour of the surrounding ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger

... ornament is also found in it. After this we find no other dated book by Richard Faques until 1523, when he printed Skelton's Goodly Garland in quarto, in three founts of black letter, and a fount of Roman, and a great primer for titles. Amongst his undated works is a copy of the Liber Festivalis, believed to have been printed in 1510, and an Horœ ad usum Sarum printed for him in Paris by J. Bignon. During the interval he had moved from the ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer

... instructed and amused; and thus, with nature for his hornbook, and art for his primer, did the little parlour of Edward Forster ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat

... gives her something to do, and keeps her quiet, which I think is desirable while this enervating weather lasts. She has a perfect mania for counting. She has counted everything in the house, and is now busy counting the words in her primer. I hope it will not occur to her to count the hairs of her head. If she could see and hear, I suppose she would get rid of her superfluous energy in ways which would not, perhaps, tax her brain so much, although I suspect that the ordinary child takes his play ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... day when Columbus discovered the new world, Martin, a boy of very nearly nine, was sitting at his desk in the school at Mansfeld. Though both diligent and quick, he found the crabbed Latin primer, itself written in abstract Latin, very difficult, and was flogged fourteen times in one morning by {63} brutal masters for faltering in a declension. When he returned home he found his mother bending under a load of wood she had gathered in the forest. Both she and his father were severe ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... the afternoon, and the room had its usual pretty order at that hour. Fred and Minnie were seated by Mrs. Jocelyn, who was giving them their daily lesson from an illustrated primer; and they, with their mother, turned questioning eyes on the unexpected guest, who won their good-will almost instantly by a sunshiny smile. Then turning to Mildred she began, with a quiet, well-bred ease which made her visit seem perfectly natural, "We are now strangers, ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe

... primer pueblo en donde se encendera esta guerra patriotica que solo puede libertar a Europa.—Hemos oido esto en Inglaterra a varios de los que estaban alli presentes. Muchas veces ha oido lo mismo al duque de Wellington el general ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... Mr. Osborn, handing a book out of the pulpit. "It's a larger character—'long primer,' as I believe the printers call it. We'll have the lamps directly; but we are all of us rather partial to blind man's holiday—not to mention that oil is oil, and that Brother Spiers doesn't give it away. We know he couldn't afford to do that. ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... Primer, for children, combining a series of progressive spelling lessons, commencing with the alphabet, and interspersed with simple rhymes and easy sentences in prose, accompanied with many pictures. The Primer contains Dr. Watts' celebrated Cradle Hymn, the verses entitled "Mary and her Lamb," ...
— A Narrative of The Life of Rev. Noah Davis, A Colored Man. - Written by Himself, At The Age of Fifty-Four • Noah Davis

... "I'll make it long primer," says I. "How do I stand here in the Corrugated? You know, maybe, and sometimes I give a guess myself; but on the books, and as far as outsiders go, I'm just plain office boy, ain't I, like 'steen thousand other four-dollar-a-week kids that's old enough to have work papers? I've been ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford

... was to enforce upon him the laws I had put on the statute books against just such emergencies. And it had never entered their swollen heads that I might have taken these precautions that are in the primer of ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips

... table and neatly-folded mattress. On the table is a Bible and Prayer-book, and sometimes a third book for amusement or instruction. In some of the cells, where the inmates are learning to read and write, there is a spelling primer and a copybook for pothooks. The female prisoners are not in their cells, but we shortly after find them assembled in a large room above, seated and at work. They all rose at our entrance, and I had a good look at their ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles

... sang her the Salve Regina, and when it was ended she bade him go, for she would fain spend some time in prayer upon her primer. ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless

... empowered the selectmen "to call and settell a gramer scoll according to ye best of yower judgement and for ye advantag [Keais is obviously dead now] of ye youth of ower town to learn them to read from ye primer, to wright and sypher and to learne ym the tongues and good-manners." On this occasion it was Mr. William Allen, of Salisbury, who engaged "dilligently to attend ye school for ye present yeare, and tech all childern yt can read in thaire psallters and ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... his voice and was unlikely to find it in conversation, the Prophet was greatly impressed by the astronomer's enormous brick-red face, round body, turned legs, eyes like marbles, and capacity for drinking port-wine—so much so, in fact that, on leaving the club, he hastened to buy a science primer on astronomy, and devoted himself for several days to a minute investigation ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens

... central figures there surged the terrified crying small children of the just-dismissed primer class, and in the half moment that Margaret watched, Mrs. Porter, white and shaking, and another teacher, Ethel Elliot, an always excitable girl, who was now sobbing and chattering hysterically, ran out from the school, each followed by her own class ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris

... up very simply in the old gambrel-roofed house, half parsonage and half farm house. He read the "New England Primer," "Pilgrim's Progress" and such poems as were to be found in the early school books. Later he was a student at Harvard, a member of the class of 1829, which, while not to be compared for literary genius ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck

... keep on the jump. I always buy shirts two degrees heavier'n I need, 'cause I know she'll have 'em scrubbed thin in a fortni't. When it comes to real Domestic Science, Caroline, Abbie ain't in the back row of the primer ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln

... (already mentioned), who lived from 1626-1681, and was the first learned man to become tutor to a Tzarevitch. The spirit of the times no longer permitted the heir to the throne to be taught merely to read and write from the primer, the Psalter, and the "Book of Hours"; and Alexei Mikhailovitch appointed Simeon Polotzky instructor to the ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood

... Wetmore Carryl, whose "Fables for the Frivolous" are published by Messrs. Harper & Brothers; to Mr. Charles E. Carryl, whose verses appeared originally in St. Nicholas; to Mr. Oliver Herford, whose "Child's Primer of Natural History" is published by Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons; to the same author for the selection from "Alphabet of Celebrities," published by Messrs. Small, Maynard & Co.; and Messrs. Harper & Brothers, the publishers of du Maurier's "A Legend ...
— The Best Nonsense Verses • Various

... by rheumatism, and the kindly clergyman taught him his letters, and put him through the primer and into the Bible. On his return after a vacation, the clergyman met ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous

... display. Do you think, if a great and honoured statesman dies, sub-editors care two pins about his public services? Not they. All they worry about is whether he is worth double-column headings, a long primer intro., and ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick

... writing-master, with a special renown for cutting inscriptions in stone, began experimenting about 1750 with punch-cutting and making typographical material. It was not until 1757 that he published his first work, a Virgil in royal quarto, with great-primer letters. This was followed by his famous editions of Milton, the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and several Latin classic authors. His types, at first criticized as unnecessarily slender, delicate, and feminine, in time were recognized as both distinct and ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day

... chapel with all alacrity, and in a perfect spirit of recollection, in order to prepare their souls for prayer. No Sister must be absent from the chapel without leave, and all must recite the offices. You see how well our time is divided," continued the lady; "we rise at three a.m.; there are primer, meditation, etcetera, until seven, when we enjoy the Holy Communion. After this we have prayers and self-examination until nine, and from that hour till ten we work. At ten we dine, which is the first meal we partake of in the day. We then take an hour for recreation, ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston

... not!" replied Eliza. "Napoleon is such an odd boy! He will have no one but Uncle Joey Fesch come into his grotto, and that is only when he wishes Uncle Joey to teach him the primer. Brother Joseph tried to come in here one day, and Napoleon beat him and bit him, until Joseph was glad to run out, and has never since gone ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa

... Meseems that my Lady Countess hath seen reason to be heedful on that score. My young lady hath come back with a grave gouvernante, who makes her read her primer and sew her seam, and save that she sat next my Lady at the wedding feast there is little difference made between her ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Classics. Prices range from .50 to .25 About 100 volumes covering literature for high school reading. Send for list. Hooker's Study Book in English Literature 1.00 A handbook to accompany the appreciative study of the greater writers. Howes's Primer of American Literature .52 A brief, satisfactory account of the facts of American literary history. Howes's Primer of English Literature .52 The essentials concerning great writers and important periods. Meiklejohn's History of the ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various

... directly, among such a number as was amazing: in that drawer was nothing but little pieces of split sticks, like laths, with chalk-marks on them, all as unintelligible as the signs of the zodiac are to an old school-mistress that teaches the horn-book and primer, or as Arabic or Greek is to a ploughman. Every stick had notches on one side for single pounds, on the other side for tens of pounds, and so higher; and the length and breadth also had its signification, and the colour too; ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe

... the best primer. No matter if the rhymes be nonsense verses; many a poet might learn the lesson of good versification from them, and the child in repeating them is acquiring the accent of emphasis and of ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold

... is perfectly safe to manufacture, handle and transport. There is no more danger of its exploding accidentally than there would be of an explosion of shavings or sawdust; for, unless well confined and set off with a strong primer, it will not explode at all. In the open its combustion is so slow as to in no way resemble or partake of the nature ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various

... mine own Long-tongue! why, call'st thou me fool! Though now in the kitchen I waste the day, Yet in times past I went to school, And of my Latin primer ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley

... Simulachres de la Mort, Icones Mortis: that is, in French and Latin, "Images of Death,"—for the title "Dance of Death" is of recent origin. The leaves on which the cuts are printed make but part of a little book not so large as a child's primer; but a copy of it is now worth ten times its weight in gold. It was copied and republished in numberless editions, as a popular book, merely for the sake of the subject, and the great lesson taught by it,—each print being accompanied ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various

... scholar entered, walked the length of the room, knelt before the cross or picture, recited a prayer, then tremblingly approached the master, saying, "Your hand, Senor Maestro," when with a grunt the hand would be extended to him to be kissed. Little was taught besides the reading of the primer and the catechism. ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini

... several different systems of breech mechanism generally named after their respective inventors. The Vickers-Maxim and the Nordenfeldt are the best known in America. A new type of the Vickers-Maxim was introduced in 1897 in which a quick working breech mechanism automatically ejects the primer and draws up the loading tray into position as the breech is opened. This type was quickly adopted by the United States Navy and materially increased the speed ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing

... stories and poems as may aid in making and keeping the impressions of their country vivid and lasting. There has been a rising wave of production of primers and first reading books during the past five years. Some libraries have experienced a primer craze and it becomes exceedingly difficult to decide which ones to buy and bow freely to duplicate them. Primers and "easy books" have a use for children who are learning to read but too free a use of them may be one of the influences responsible ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine

... in 1677; and in 1713 the lives of Dr. Faustus, Friar Bacon, Conjurors Bungay and Vanderwart were printed conjointly in a volume "with cuts"—perhaps the earliest illustrated New England book, unless we except the New England Primer. "The Prodigal Daughter, or the Disobedient Lady Reclaimed" had "curious cuts;" so also did the "Parents Gift" in 1741, and "A Present for a Servant Maid." "Pilgrim's Progress" was printed in Boston in an illustrated edition in 1744. But for any handsomely illustrated ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle

... of God's word, we detail, among many others, the following occurrence. One William Maldon, living at Greenwich in servitude, was instructing himself profitably in reading an English primer one winter's evening. A serving man, named John Powell, sat by, and ridiculed all that Maldon said, who cautioned him not to make a jest of the word of God. Powell nevertheless continued, till Maldon ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... the women of his congregation, he must have found it well to resign his place to his successor, also a Nathaniel, Nathaniel Rogers, one of the row of "nine small children," still to be seen in the New England Primer, gazing upon the martyr, John Rogers, the famous preacher of Dedham, whose gifts of mind and soul made him a shining mark for persecution, and whose name is ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... cosmography written in the present day. The fourth form school boy of our age is acquainted with truths to know which Archimedes would have laid down his life. What would we not give to be able to get a glimpse of some book which will be used as a school-primer a hundred ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan

... books, much worn and decayed, which had been preserved, more by accident than by care, from the libraries of the ancients. One was an abridged history of Rome, the other a similar account of English history, the third a primer of science or knowledge; all three, indeed, being books which, among the ancients, were used for teaching children, and which, by the men of those days, would have been cast aside ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies

... a cricket by the kitchen fire. He has a primer open before him at the alphabet. His round eyes are fixed upon the page as long as Frank is looking at him, but he requires constant watching. His teacher sits near-by, with a Latin dictionary resting upon a light ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... lightning and knows the speling book right through but has no thoughts of any kind. She is in the Third Reader but does not like stories in books. I am in the Sixth Reader but just because I cannot say the seven multiplication Table Miss Dearborn threttens to put me in the baby primer class with Elijah ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... her uneasy, or, at least, ready to be uneasy. But this poorly dressed obscurity, with not a charm that could attract even a man of her own lowly class—It was such a good joke that he would have teased Josephine about it but for his knowledge of the world—a knowledge in whose primer it was taught that teasing is both bad taste and bad judgment. Also, it was beneath his dignity, it was offense to his vanity, to couple his name with the name of one so beneath him that even the matter of sex did not make the coupling ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips

... the intellectual relaxation afforded by the Sunday school, with its various forms of religious exercise, its thousand modes of interesting and useful information. Our whole stock in this line was the Bible and Primer, and these were our main dependence for whiling away the tedious hours between our early breakfast and the signal for meeting. How often was our invention stretched to find wherewithal to keep up our stock of excitement in a line with the duties of the day! For the first half hour, perhaps, ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... raise a corn crop and that's the way us do. Us raises our own victuals. I has 17 chillen through the year and they done scatter to the four winds. Some of them is dead. I ain't what I used to be for workin'. I jus' set 'round. I done plenty work in my primer days. ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration

... an idea," said Robert, "that it would be a good thing to put some pictures in the primer; just enough ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Conquest of the Savages • Roger Thompson Finlay

... tough; flowing freely, yet hardening quickly." Body type, that is, those classes ever seen in ordinary print, aside from display and fancy styles, is in thirteen classes, the smallest technically called brilliant and the largest great primer. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various

... freeze Allegeance in them; their curses now Liue where their prayers did: and it's come to passe, This tractable obedience is a Slaue To each incensed Will: I would your Highnesse Would giue it quicke consideration; for There is no primer basenesse ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... the city gate with him sitting in it a raving maniac. That yarn had been going the rounds of print since 1746. The Old Man was an absent-minded old child, and I knew it, so I turned my fancy loose and enlarged the paragraph to a full galley of long primer, composing the awful details as I set the type and made it a thriller. The Old Man never "held copy" reading proof, so he passed it all right and I saw myself an author in print for the first time. The smell of printer's ink has never since been out ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock

... word to Mrs. Fischer that if she cared to have her son learn to read she must supply him with a primer. Before doing as the teacher had told her, Mrs. Fischer took up a primer belonging to one of the other children, turned to a lesson well over in the book, and commanded Edwin to read the paragraph to which she was pointing. Seeing that ...
— The Poorhouse Waif and His Divine Teacher • Isabel C. Byrum

... an old adage that some of us may have read in the primer (or was it the hymn-book?) that "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do." Josephine's late life had been sufficiently exciting to make her undeniably restless; and it was while ruminating upon the misery of being too quietly happy, that ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford



Words linked to "Primer" :   lighter, light, priming, flat coat, priming coat, text, igniter, school text, detonating fuse, speller, fuze, time-fuse, prime, textbook, couch, ignitor, text edition, coat of paint, schoolbook, safety fuse, hornbook



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