"Ungrammatical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ungrammatical, served its purpose. Mrs. Leslie's voice could be heard inside: 'It's only Rupert, Miss Aleyn. May he come ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... and sentences and what we call style are in literature. Even if a writer has good and beautiful ideas, much of the pleasure we might derive is lost when the words are ill chosen, the sentences are bungling, perhaps even ungrammatical, and the whole ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... taken the tone she had with them—had showed them in "that cowgirl" just what they had expected to find. She would be bluff and rude and ungrammatical and ill-bred. Perhaps the spirit in which Helen did this was not to be commended; but she had begun it on the impulse of the moment and she felt she must keep it up during her stay ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... value, and was prepared to prove that $1200 a year was a proper rent for it even at the inflated rates. He made this statement with excellent brevity, moderation, and good temper, and concluded by moving that the term be two instead of ten years. A robust young man, with a bull neck and of ungrammatical habits, said, in a tone of impatient disdain, that the landlord of the building had 'refused' $1500 a year for it. 'Question!' 'Question!' shouted half a dozen angry voices; the question was instantly put, when a perfect war of ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... was forty or forty-one, a red-faced, clipped-mustached, derby-hatted average citizen. He was ungrammatical and jocose; he panted a good deal and gurgled his soup; his nails were ragged-edged, his stupid brown tie uneven, and there were signs of a growing grossness and fatty unwieldiness about his neck, his shoulders, his waist. But he was affable. He quietly helped Sanford in ordering lunch, to the great ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... see that these rustics had not attained that quaint sententious wisdom proper to the rustics of fiction. In their ungrammatical way they talked much like ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... calculating upon a wider development of the Army's future influence. During the last twenty years we have been pressing forward amongst a very large number of Church and missionary efforts. Our speakers have notoriously been amongst the most unlearned and ungrammatical, and therefore often despised, while so many thousands of university men were preaching and writing of Christ. But no one now disputes the fact that the old-fashioned proclamation of the doctrine of Jesus Christ as a Divine Saviour of the lost has largely gone out of fashion. The influence ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... deals with the whole matter of a life, and yet is rarely wearisome, which condescends to the most fastidious particulars, and yet sweeps all away in the forthright current of the narrative,—such a style may be ungrammatical, it may be inelegant, it may be one tissue of mistakes, but it can never be devoid of merit. The first and the true function of the writer has been thoroughly performed throughout; and though the manner of his utterance may be childishly awkward, the matter has been transformed and assimilated ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... of the Netherlands the executioners were busy. It was of no use for the accused to appeal to the charters and privileges of their provinces. All alike were summoned to Brussels; non curamus privilegios vestros declared Vargas in his ungrammatical Latin. Hand in hand with the wholesale sentences of death went the confiscation of property. Vast sums went into the treasury. The whole land for awhile was terror-stricken. All organised opposition was crushed, and no one dared to ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... divine, became the name with which the monotheistic age was rightly inaugurated,—a plural, conceived and construed as a singular. Jehovah was all the Elohim, and therefore there could be no other God. From this point of view the Semitic name of the Deity, Elohim, which seemed at first not only ungrammatical but irrational, becomes perfectly clear and intelligible, and it proves better than anything else that the true monotheism could not have risen except on the ruins of a polytheistic faith. It is easy to scoff at the gods of the heathen, but a cold-hearted philosophical negation of the gods of ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... they are then weak enough to be used with checks. There is a play of the words used and abused. To abuse is, in our author, very frequently the same as to deceive. This construction is harsh and ungrammatical; Shakespeare perhaps thought it vicious, and chose to throw away the lines rather than correct them, nor would now thank the officiousness of his editors, who restore what they do ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... mutual concessions.' [628] Pax conventa, 'the peace which is agreed upon.' Observe the rare use of the passive participle; for convenire is commonly intransitive—as pax convenit, a 'peace is concluded.' [629] In potestatem habere is ungrammatical for in potestate habere, but is found now and then. See Zumpt, S 316. [630] The expression is somewhat contorted; for the inserted clause non sua ignavia sed ob rem publicam should have a verb of its own, which, however, ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... Ungrammatical expressions are unfortunately too common even amongst those who have not the excuse of ignorance, but who fall into the use of them merely from carelessness, or unconscious imitation of others. "Says she to me," and other vulgarisms of a like type, are also a gross violation of good taste ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... is unknown, unless it is Donatus himself, which is doubtful. It would appear that Luscus Lavinius had lately made a translation of this Play, which, from its servile adherence to the language of the original, had been couched in ungrammatical language, and probably not approved of by the Audience. Donatus thinks that this is the meaning of the passage, and that, content with this slight reference to a well-known fact, the author passes ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... so," Amarinth answered. "People who mean well always do badly. They are like the ladies who wear clothes that don't fit them in order to show their piety. Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical." ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... welcomed Coquelin in a nice little French speech, John Drew did the like for me in English, & then the fun began. Coquelin did some excellent French monologues—one of them an ungrammatical Englishman telling a colorless historiette in French. It nearly killed the fifteen or twenty ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... certainly was a misprint, as certainly 'nor man nor nature satisfy'[50] is ungrammatical. But I am not so sure about ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... struck the blow testified that the prisoner had resisted arrest; a second policeman testified, "I seen the prisoner hit him first, your Honour,"—which caused Comrade Mabel Smith to cry out, "Oh, the ungrammatical prevaricator!" The upshot of the trial was that each of the defendants was fined ten dollars. Comrade Gerrity led off with an indignant refusal to pay the fine; the rest of them followed suit—even Comrade Mabel! This caused evident distress of mind to the judge, for Comrade Mabel ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... partisan an extremely intelligent woman. He hurried away now with an uncomfortable smile. If an opinion is the right opinion, why should it have an air of absurdity thrown upon it by being thus uttered in ungrammatical language by a poulterer's wife? Truth is the same by whomsoever stated; but yet, was not dogmatism on any subject the sign of an inexperienced and uncultivated, or a rude and untutored mind? What did this woman know of the Parsonage, which she supposed she helped to pay ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... sin against decency, or an attempt to poison the minds of the people, for a person to be ungrammatical, it might be wise enough to hire men to protect the well of English from defilement. But a stationary language is a dead one—moving water only is pure—and the well that is not fed by springs is sure to be a breeding-place ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... conscious of the condescension and majesty of his demeanor, but it was there, and his untutored words and ways must make it all too apparent to the girl. The revelation of the moment made her at once triumphant and humiliated. This white man had come to make love to her, that was apparent; but that he, ungrammatical, crude, and rough, should think he had but to put out his hand, and she in whom every subtle emotion and influence had delicate response, whose words and ways were as far removed from his as day from night, would fly to him, brought the flush of indignation to her cheek. ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... occupying herself with him. He looked round almost furtively to detect whether any one else was aware of it, this connection that she was blazoning between them, and then relapsed, staring at his hat, into a sense of ungrammatical iterations beating through a room full of stuffy smells. When Laura spoke again his eye leaped to hers in a rapt effort to tell her that he perceived her intention. That he should be grateful, that he should approve, was neither here nor there; the indispensable thing was that she should know him ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... gospel-ship, as they discoursed pleasantly, now of the homes in Yarmouth or Gorleston, now of the home above; or sang, with stentorian voices, some of the lively hymns that are happily current in the present day, or prayed in the ungrammatical language, and with the intense fervour, of untutored but ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... old-fashioned shouting, hysterical, ungrammatical, gasping sort, took charge of the services, and in his exhortations phrases descriptive of lakes of burning brimstone and ages of endless torment abounded. Some of the figures of speech and violent ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... superseded by "to." Further on we hear the teacher admonishing a youth to wash up some ink, and "wash it good"! Would a teacher thus express herself? "Well" is the adverb here needed. "Too tired to hardly stand" is a seriously ungrammatical phrase, which should read: "almost too tired to stand." We note that one of the pupils' names is given as "Robert Elsmere." While it may not be essentially a fault thus to use the name of a famous character of fiction, we feel that the exercise ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Brown, in slip-shod and often ungrammatical English assails the memory of Old John Brown, charges him with active participation in various bloody crimes, and abuses his biographers and eulogists. Dr. Brown writes as an eye-witness of many of the things which ...
— John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe
... this development of their finer senses they will come to you. There is no need to go into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in. If they do come they won't stay—why should they? They have not got there yet, to use a thoroughly hateful and ungrammatical but absolutely accurate sentence. ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... the allowable uses of prepositions, there may perhaps be some room for choice; so that what to the mind of a critic may not appear the fittest word, may yet be judged not positively ungrammatical. In this light I incline to view the following examples: "Homer's plan is still more defective, upon another account."—Kames, El. of Crit., ii, 299. Say—"on an other account." "It was almost eight of the clock before I could leave that variety of objects."—Spectator, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... day they assembled in a sequestered spot whence they could see the snowy peaks of the Tyrolese Alps. Ellesmere begins by deprecating criticism of his style, declaring that anything inaccurate or ungrammatical is put in on purpose. Then he ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... given a larger liberty in this direction than he had himself enjoyed. He chafed, and naturally enough, under the necessity of reprinting in a "standard" book, evident and acknowledged solecisms and blunders. "We wanted," he says, "to correct one ungrammatical clause in the Consecration Prayer of the Communion Service. It is in the last sentence but one, at its close. It should be, not that he may dwell in them and they in him; but, that he may dwell in us and we in him. The prayer is made up out of two or three others; and anyone who will examine ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... began to puzzle through my sincere but ungrammatical thanks, when there was a sudden mutual recognition —the benefactress and I had met at Allerheiligen. Two weeks had not altered her good face, and plainly her heart was in the right place yet, but there was such a difference between these clothes and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... it may be observed, that the word you has certainly so far lost its meaning, as to be no longer a mark of flattery. The Quakers also are occasionally found in the use of the ungrammatical expressions, that have been brought against them. And unquestionably, except they mean to give up the grammatical part of the defence by Penn and Barclay, these ought to be done away. That you, however, is of the singular ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... sluggards, what is thy Sara doing? Sara is obscure. Am I to understand by her letter, that she sends a kiss to Eliza Buckingham? Pray tell your wife that a note of interrogation on the superscription of a letter is highly ungrammatical—she proposes writing my name Lamb? Lambe is quite enough. I have had the Anthology, and like only one thing in it, Lewti; but of that the last stanza is detestable, the rest most exquisite!—the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... in England and America. The facts are, however, that Quakers differ extensively in their habits, and there grew up in England among the Quakers in certain districts a sense of shame for false grammar which, to say the least, was very childish. To be deliberately and boldly ungrammatical, when you serve both euphony and simplicity, is merely to give archaic charm, not to be guilty of an offence. I have friends in Derbyshire who still say "Thee thinks," etc., and I must confess that the picture of a Quaker rampant over my deliberate use ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Forbes when he told it, which made Miss Lamont blush, and appear what the artist had described her to King—the sweetest thing in life. Mrs. Benson beamed with motherly content, and was quite as tearful as ungrammatical, but her mind was practical and forecasting. "There'll have to be," she confided to Miss Lamont, "more curtains in the parlor, and I don't know but new paper." Mr. Meigs was not present. Mrs. Farquhar noticed this, and Mrs. Benson remembered that he had said something about going down to North ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... American and somewhat ungrammatical colloquialism, I may say that I "got along fine" with Marshal Stalin. He is a man who combines a tremendous, relentless determination with a stalwart good humor. I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... was indulged in must have been interesting, even though the French was halting and ungrammatical. Of all the companies' Messes, this one took the most serious view of the future, and earned for itself the nickname of "Les Miserables." The Senior Subaltern said openly that this calm preceded a storm. The papers they got—Le Petit Parisian and ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... property-holder. Occupying a limited space between two fashionable thoroughfares, it refused to conform to circumstances, but sturdily paraded its unkempt glories, and frequently asserted itself in ungrammatical language. My window—a rear room on the ground floor—in this way derived blended light and shadow from the court. So low was the window-sill that, had I been the least disposed to somnambulism, it would have broken ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... be a false and even ungrammatical rendering of Irenaeus's words. The 'columen et fundamentum fidei', are the Creed, or economy ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... the radiance of rectitude, "who do you take me for?" If Mr. BEZZLE had been less violent he would probably have said, "Whom do you take me for," and so have spared himself the ignominy of sinking to the ungrammatical level of the Common Herd. But the fact is, his proud spirit was chafed and fretted at the spectacle of sordid self-seeking that everywhere met his gaze, and excess of sentiment made him forgetful of syntax. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various
... terse, epigrammatic, felicitous, euphonious, elegant, and lofty. Undesirable qualities are the diffuse, verbose, redundant, inflated, prolix, ambiguous, feeble, monotonous, loose, slip-shod, dry, flowery, pedantic, pompous, rhetorical, grandiloquent, artificial, formal, ornate, halting, ponderous, ungrammatical, vague, and obscure. ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... wouldn't mind his bad grammar now. I've learned one or two valuable little things out yonder, and one is that it doesn't matter if a man's grammar is askew, so long as he doesn't swear at you. By the way, is Peter as ungrammatical as ever?" ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... art uncouth to look upon: thy face is unshaven, thy shirt dirty, and lo! thy overalls smell of paint and grease; thy speech is ungrammatical, and thy manners unpolished—but give us the grasp of thy honest hand, and the warm feelings of thy generous heart, fifty, yes a million times sooner than the mean heart and niggard hand of the selfish cur ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... was seldom ungrammatical, and her intonation was not flagrantly vulgar, but the accent of the London poor, which brands as with hereditary baseness, still clung to her words, rendering futile such propriety of phrase as she owed to years of association with educated people. ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... the masses, and remain so. There is plenty of glamour about the most damnable crimes and hoggish meannesses, special and general, of the feudal and dynastic world over there, with its personnel of lords and queens and courts, so well-dress'd and so handsome. But the People are ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... this speech which grated on my ear as painfully ungrammatical; and I resolved, on the first opportunity, to instruct Holly in the rudiments of grammar. She remained in the kitchen while Aunt Henshaw, after calling "pussy" in an affectionate manner, shut the cat ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... detailed knowledge in his works of imagination; and thirdly, that he possessed a vocabulary of the most wonderful wealth. His style is strong, homely, and vigorous, but the sentences are long, loose, clumsy, and sometimes ungrammatical. Like Sir Walter Scott, he was too eager to produce large and broad effects to take time to balance his clauses or to polish his sentences. Like Sir Walter Scott, again, he possesses in the highest ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... he, and for once at least he dropped his lifelong affectation of ungrammatical speech and reverted to that more stately and proper English which he reserved for his judgments from the bench, "you have indeed made your position so clear by what you have just said that I feel there is nothing whatsoever to ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... and definitions committed to memory, and the judgment exercised upon their application. At the same time every recitation of a child, as well as all his conversation, ought to be made an incidental and unconscious lesson in grammar. Only never allow him to use unchallenged an incorrect or ungrammatical expression, train his ear to detect and revolt at it, as at a discordant note in music, let him if possible hear nothing but sterling, honest English, and he will then learn grammar to some purpose. If, on the contrary, he is allowed to recite and to talk in whatever language ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... Bellini had the advantage of treating a libretto of great power and beauty, the work of the poet Romani, a tragedy which, both in sentiment and diction, contrasts very strongly with the ungrammatical balderdash which composers are so often called upon to set to music. Norma, the high priestess of the Druids, forgetting her faith and the traditions of her race, has secretly wedded Pollio, a Roman general, and borne him two children. ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... boast, and their most distinguished characteristic; and those manners have acquired the authority of laws. Here they are strongly attached to plainness of dress, as well as to that of language; insomuch that though some part of it may be ungrammatical, yet should any person who was born and brought up here, attempt to speak more correctly, he would be looked upon as a fop or an innovator. On the other hand, should a stranger come here and adopt their idiom in all its purity (as they deem it) this accomplishment would ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... not say where I was going, sir," said the parson, dryly, for he was much offended at that vague and ungrammatical remark applicable to his horsemanship, that "he ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... certainly not by Johnson. It contains more than one ungrammatical passage. It is impossible to believe that he wrote such a sentence as the following:—'Another having a cask of wine sealed up at the top, but his servant boring a hole at the bottom stole the greatest part of it away; sometime after, having called a friend to taste his wine, he found the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... formed his idea of American society. Refined and well-bred people there certainly were, but these were precisely the ones who never forced themselves upon his notice, leaving him to be struck and stunned by fast and hoydenish young ladies, ungrammatical and ill-bred old ones, and men of all shades of boorishness and swagger, such as make themselves conspicuous in every crowd. Unluckily, both Koenigin and I have English blood in our veins, and the Jook could not be convinced that we did not eagerly snatch at the chance thus presented of claiming ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... much interested. His masters report," &c. And though Dr. Birch wrote by the same mail a longer, fuller, and official statement, I have no doubt the distant parents preferred the friend's letter, with its artless, possibly ungrammatical, account of their ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the ungrammatical construction of the phrase, you are probably inquiring what it ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... mate. Jasper wished that he knew more of the history back of Pierre and the girl. A man could do little but look out for his own interests, when he worked in the dark. Which would be the better man for Jane?—this Jane so trained, so educated, so far removed superficially from the ungrammatical, bronzed, clumsily dressed, graceful visitor. In every worldly respect, doubtless, Prosper Gael. Only—there were Pierre's eyes and the ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... for us to face at once the counter-statement that the most ignorant and uncultivated men often succeed best in business, and that misspelled, ungrammatical advertisements have brought in millions of dollars. It is an acknowledged fact that our business circulars and letters are far inferior in correctness to those of Great Britain; yet they are more effective in getting business. As far as spelling ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... comprehend the situation; how a girl of her apparent refinement and gentility could ever be attracted by a rough, brutal type such as Ned Beaton so evidently was. Why, the man's lack of taste in dress, the expression of his face, his ungrammatical language, stamped him as belonging to a ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... first, that it was but a copy of a copy, and that too but lamely taken from the Greek original; secondly, that the English language was then unpolished, and far from the perfection which it has since attained; so that the first version is not only ungrammatical and ungraceful, but in many places almost unintelligible." There is another English version, by the Langhornes, which has often been reprinted; there is an edition of it with notes by Wrangham. I have compared my translation carefully ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... if what must be!" Rachel murmured, employing a local phrase which Mrs. Maldon had ever contemned as meaningless and ungrammatical. ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... author. The references to scripture have also been corrected in numerous instances. But beyond this, nothing almost whatever has been done, with the exception of the occasional emendation of what, according to existing rules, would now be considered an ungrammatical expression, or the substitution of a modern word for one that was obsolete or provincial. The text itself, however, will show that very few changes indeed of this description have been ventured upon. It was thought better, for various reasons, that the author should be ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... when the last note had soared up and died, the old man folded his hands and began to pray. It was an old-fashioned prayer, such as the girl had never heard from the Bishop's lips; ungrammatical, inelegant, and long. A quiet talk with God, manly in its straightforward confession of short-comings, childlike in its appeal for guidance, fervent in its gratitude for all good gifts, and the crowning one of loving children. As if close intercourse had made the two familiar, ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... to Chancellor Hoyt. He was suffering fearfully with old-fashioned consumption, but he used to send for me to read to him to distract his thoughts. He would also criticize my conversation, never letting one word pass that was ungrammatical or incorrectly pronounced. If I said, "I am so glad," he would ask, "So glad that what? You don't give the correlative." He warned against reliance on the aid of alliteration. The books read to him were discussed and the ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... a frank pleasure in the death of his contemporaries, and an even franker pleasure in the deaths of his juniors. Then he had one of his long-suffering daughters to write letters for him, and would dictate long, ungrammatical sentences to her; but he would permit of no erasures, and letter after letter would have to be torn up and re-written. He made all the party walk with him before luncheon, and at his pace, the same little walk every day. I ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... could have happened without the concurrence of many causes. The stile of Shakespeare was in itself ungrammatical, perplexed and obscure; his works were transcribed for the players by those who may be supposed to have seldom understood them; they were transmitted by copiers equally unskilful, who still multiplied errours; they were perhaps sometimes mutilated ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... explanation to the inspired Kin Yen, setting forth the reason of his pictures being used, not with the high-minded story of the elegant Tong-king for which they were executed, but accompanying exceedingly base, foolish, and ungrammatical words written by Klan-hi, the Peking remover of gravity—words which will evermore brand the dew-like Tien as a person of light speech and no refinement"; and in his agony this person struck the lacquered table several times ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... followed was so abrupt, exclamatory, interjectional, and occasionally ungrammatical, as well as absurd, that it could not be reduced to writing. We therefore leave it to your imagination. After a time, the uncle and nephew subsided, and ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... letter to Shakespeare imploring him to aid them. Greene himself sent to the dramatist 'a note of inconveniences [to the corporation that] would happen by the enclosure.' But although an ambiguous entry of a later date (September 1615) in the few extant pages of Greene's ungrammatical diary has been unjustifiably tortured into an expression of disgust on Shakespeare's part at Combe's conduct, {271} it is plain that, in the spirit of his agreement with Combe's agent, he continued to lend Combe his countenance. Happily Combe's efforts ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... irregular metre, in which the trochees preponderate over the dactyls: many of the lines, in fact, would not bear a critical scansion. We have not scrupled to imitate this irregularity, as not inconsistent with the plain, ungrammatical speech of the characters introduced, and the homely air of even the most imaginative passages. The opening poem is a charmingly wayward idyl, called "The Meadow," (Die Wiese,) the name of a mountain-stream, which, rising in the Feldberg, the highest ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... beneath him were tenanted by a man who was a widower and had two children. In those days, our young friend found much satisfaction in spending his Sunday evenings on Clerkenwell Green, where fervent, if ungrammatical, oratory was to be heard, and participation in debate was open to all whom the spirit moved. One whom the spirit did very frequently move was Sidney's fellow-lodger; he had no gift of expression whatever, but his brief, ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... (ungrammatical also) of 'seems' in the next line, besides the nonsense of 'but' there, as it now stands. And I request you, as a personal favor to me, to erase the last line of all, which I should never have written from myself. The fact is, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... grammar; slip of the pen, slip of the tongue; lapsus linguae [Lat.]; slipslop^; bull; barbarism, impropriety. V. use bad grammar, faulty grammar; solecize^, commit a solecism; murder the King's English, murder the Queen's English, break Priscian's head. Adj. ungrammatical; incorrect, inaccurate; faulty; improper, incongruous; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... wonderment in Jimmie Dale's tones, and his English lapsed into ungrammatical, reassuring vernacular—"ain't that queer! Say, I'm no detective. Gee, kid, did you think I was? Say, listen to this! I cracked old Isaac's safe half an hour ago—and I guess there won't be any idea going around that you got the money and I pulled a lemon. Say, I ain't superstitious, ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... threatened the small tradesmen in "his" town of Seaham with his most high displeasure if they should continue to give credit to "his" rebellious workers. This "noble" lord made himself the first clown of the turnout in consequence of the ridiculous, pompous, ungrammatical ukases addressed to the workers, which he published from time to time, with no other result than the merriment of the nation. When none of their efforts produced any effect, the mine owners imported, at great expense, hands from Ireland and such remote parts of Wales as have ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... With an unromantic style, With borrowed colour and curl, With fixed mechanical smile, With many a hackneyed wile, With ungrammatical lips, And corns that ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... reappeared and handed me a paper, whereon she had written: 'I am so glad you have kept them so nicely, Your Marie.' (As her skull was shared by Sister Belle, I suppose Marie was strictly logical, if ungrammatical, in referring to it as 'them.') It was enough; in a few minutes after, Marie reappeared wearing the amber ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... was well grounded in my youth by an old gentleman, a friend of my family, and I may say my guardian," said I; "but I have forgotten it since. God forbid I should delude you into thinking me a herald, sir! I am only an ungrammatical amateur." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... than could have happened without the concurrence of many causes. The stile of Shakespeare was in itself ungrammatical, perplexed and obscure; his works were transcribed for the players by those who may be supposed to have seldom understood them; they were transmitted by copiers equally unskilful, who still multiplied ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... Tejano!" given in like ungrammatical phrase, in order that it may be intelligible to the person to whom it ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... Hawkes. (I had no idea the wretch was so ungrammatical.) "You can't put your finger on 'em ever. While I 'aven't seen much of the Countess during my present engagement, I will say this: she has a lot more sense than people give 'er credit for. Now why should she throw the 'ooks ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... bass cough. But it was followed after half a minute by the two high-pitched barks, and Grim held up a hand for silence. At the end of perhaps a minute there came from the veranda a perfect imitation of the lascar's ungrammatical, whining ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... signs of healing. Its recipient had been conscious on the second day, but, finding himself a prisoner in the hands of the enemy, he had been naturally enough inclined to be a little sulky and suspicious. But the bright carelessness of Laurence, who dashed at any speech in idiomatic but ungrammatical outlander's French, gradually won upon him. As also the fact that Laurence was clerk-learned and could sing and play upon the viol with surprising skill for one ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... I had a hunch this would happen. As a matter of fact, I declined to charter to Morrow & Company direct ten days before you came prancing in with your head all swelled up with a brand-new idea for making a lot of easy money in a hurry. Me charter to them—me!" In his superb scorn Cappy waxed ungrammatical. "I should kiss a pig! Why, if sawmills were selling for six bits each I wouldn't trust that concern with a hatful of sawdust—not that they weren't honest and capable, but they haven't got any money to speak ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... accustomed to commence sentences frequently with "I think," "I hear," "I hope," "I wish," and there is a temptation therefore to overload Malay sentences with "Sahaya fikir," "Sahaya dengar khabar," &c. These, though not ungrammatical, should be used sparingly. Rasa-nia, the feeling is, agak-nia, the guess is, rupa-nia, the appearance is (it seems), khabar-nia, the report is, and similar phrases, should often take ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... wrote the letter, which he dictated, finding it better than any I had sent, for, though here and there a little ungrammatical or inelegant, each sentence came to me briefly worded, but most expressive, full of excellent counsel to the boy, tenderly bequeathing "mother and Lizzie" to his care, and bidding him good-by in words the sadder for ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... That's a command Which grips us with an iron hand; And "he who prigs what isn't his'n, When he is cotched shall go to prison!" So runs the Cockney doggerel, clear If ungrammatical, austere, With not a saving clause to qualify Its rigid Spartan rule, or mollify Theft's Nemesis. Thou shalt not steal! At least,—ahem!—well, all must feel That property in thoughts and phrases, The verbal filagree that raises ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 21, 1892 • Various
... deanamh, bualadh, in the phrases adduced, were real Participles, then in all similar instances, it would be not only unnecessary, but ungrammatical, to introduce the preposition ag at all. But this is far from being the case. In all verbs beginning with a vowel, the preposition ag or its unequivocal representative g is indispensable; as, ta iad ag iarruidh, ta mi 'g iarruidh. Shall we ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... the use of good English. It precludes the use of all slang words, vulgar phrases, obsolete terms, foreign idioms, ambiguous expressions or any ungrammatical language whatsoever. Neither does it sanction the use of any newly coined word until such word is adopted by the best writers ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... Blue Ridge in 1748, another of his trip to Barbadoes with his brother Lawrence in 1751-52, another of his trip to Fort Le Boeuf to warn out the French, and yet another of his Fort Necessity campaign. The words are often misspelled, many expressions are ungrammatical, but the handwriting is good and the judgments expressed, even those set down when he was only sixteen, are the ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... took the part and made therein the reputation of his life. But success turned his unsteady head. "He follow'd Bacchus too ardently, insomuch that his credit was often drown'd upon the stage, and, by degrees, almost render'd him useless." Ungrammatical, but to the ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... true poetry that etiquette and polished manners do to truth and nature. To realize the difference between the poetry of the school and the poetry of nature compare the faultless English and elegant sweetness of the Idylls of the King with the vigorous and expressive, but often ungrammatical, prose of Mallory, or compare Virgil with Homer, Horace with Sappho, a chorale by Mendelssohn with a chorale by Bach. Or compare a modern refrain dragged in for no other reason than because the poet has felt that the form requires a refrain of some kind and has tried to find one that is ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... justifiable or not, as other violence is, according to the character of the persons against whom it is exercised, and the divine and eternal laws which it vindicates or violates. We must not burn a man alive for saying that the Athanasian creed is ungrammatical, nor stop a bishop's salary because we are getting the worst of an argument with him; neither must we let drunken men howl in the public streets at night. There is much that is true in the part of Mr. Mill's essay on Liberty which treats ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... obliterated features of too many of his heroes have already wearied two generations of readers. At times his characters will speak with something far beyond propriety with a true heroic note; but on the next page they will he wading wearily forward with an ungrammatical and undramatic rigmarole of words. The man who could conceive and write the character of Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot, as Scott has conceived and written it, had not only splendid romantic, but splendid tragic gifts. ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... horrified or hilarious. At one moment I have a tendency to emulate Marguerite doing the Jewel-Song in Faust. "This isn't me! This isn't me!" I keep protesting to myself. But Marguerite, I know, would never be so ungrammatical. And then I begin to foresee difficulties. The mere thought of leaving Casa Grande tears my heart. When we go away, as that wise man of Paris once said, we die a little. This will always seem my home. I could never forsake it utterly. ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... which Shakespeare was born. It had long been a show-place in private hands. A general feeling declared itself in favour of the purchase of the house for the nation. Public sentiment was in accord with the ungrammatical grandiloquence of the auctioneer, the famous Robins, whose advertisement of the sale included the sentence: "It is trusted the feeling of the country will be so evinced that the structure may be secured, hallowed, and cherished as a national monument almost as imperishable ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... of hearing, and even if he had not been, his mind to-night was proof against all the consolations of philosophy. Mr. Scogan replaced his pipe between his teeth and resumed his meditative pacing. "Under any circumstances," he repeated to himself. It was ungrammatical to begin with; was it true? And is life really its own reward? He wondered. When his pipe had burned itself to its stinking conclusion he took a drink of gin and went to bed. In ten minutes ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... that Shelley intended to speak of that peculiar feeling, or sense, which affects us so much in circumstances which he describes. With the slight alterations indicated by Italics, his meaning I think will be apparent; though in his hurry, or inadvertence, he has left his lines very confused and ungrammatical. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... such a calamity that at the scrutiny Sheriff Oliver struck off over eighty votes, and returned the Upper Cove candidates. The election was protested, but the House of Assembly refused, on a technicality, to upset the election. A strangely ill-worded and ungrammatical petition to have the assembly dissolved was presented to the governor by the Lower Cove people, but Governor Carleton refused to interfere, and the Upper Cove candidates kept their seats. The incident created a great deal of indignation in St John, ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... speech. It is said that one can tell during a conversation that lasts not longer than a summer shower whether or not a man is cultivated. Often it does not take even so long, for a raucous tone of voice and grossly ungrammatical or vulgar expressions brand a man at once as beyond the pale ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... "Don't be ungrammatical, whatever you do. She's a cashier in a restaurant, and she's a fine girl," he added, steadily, as if combating a prejudice. He forgot for the moment that such prejudices ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... church and monastery of Batalha as planned by Dom Joao and added to by his son and grandson, and though it is not possible to say whence Huguet drew his inspiration, it remains, with all the peculiarities of tracery and detail which make it seem strange and ungrammatical—if one may so speak—to eyes accustomed to northern Gothic, one of the most remarkable examples of original planning and daring construction to be found anywhere. Of the later additions which give character ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... Joseph Bullion dropped an H. But he never noticed it. It was a sort of unconscious reverberation of former days; as if his lowly past, especially that portion of it which had been spent with the first and ungrammatical Mrs. Bullion, insisted on revealing itself to the world, to be acknowledged and congratulated on what it ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... near the door an old gray-haired man. His dress was very plain and poor, his manner was uncultured, his language was ungrammatical. There were those who were disposed to think that so illiterate a man as old Mr. Snyder ought not to take up the valuable time. However old Mr. Snyder ...
— Three People • Pansy
... Behmenist movement of this period, was a far too voluminous writer.[64] She was a sincere, pure-minded woman, of intense devotion, but she was a strongly emotional type of person, and lived in a kind of permanent borderland of visions and revelations. Her language, like that also of Pordage, is ungrammatical, of involved style, and full of overwrought and fanciful imagination. Christopher Walton, who in many ways respected her, calls her writings "a huge mass of parabolicalism and idiocratic deformity!"[64] In her Message to the Philadelphian Society she reports ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... clean even brown: the ornament of outdoor men. Seated in a chair, you might have passed him off for a baronet or a military officer; but let him rise, and it was Fo'c's'le Jack that came rolling toward you, crab-like; let him but open his lips, and it was Fo'c's'le Jack that piped and drawled his ungrammatical gibberish. He had sailed (among other places) much among the islands; and after a Cape Horn passage with its snow-squalls and its frozen sheets, he announced his intention of "taking a turn among them Kanakas." I thought I should have lost him soon; but according to the unwritten usage of mariners, ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... happy Hiram for the first time, could have believed that a few short months ago he had been the lank and ungrammatical individual whose gift of a patent rocker struck consternation to the members of the House Committee on that fateful donation night at the Social House when the ninety-nine wooden chairs had been ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... mountains he had but little opportunity to attend school, and his sentences were framed in the quaint construction of his people, and nearly all of them were ungrammatical. There were many who would have regarded him as ignorant. By the standards that hold that education is enlightenment that comes from acquaintance with books and that wisdom is a knowledge of the ways of the world, he was. But he had a training that is rare; ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... in love with her since they were children together, so there could be no possible doubt in the matter. But whether she cared a jot for him and his feelings he could not clearly make out, from the style of the hurried, ungrammatical sentences, crammed with abbreviations and unpermissible elisions. True, she said three times that she hoped he would come to America; but America was a long way off, and she very likely reckoned on his laziness and dislike to foreign traveling. It is so easy for ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... your eyes?"—expressed as if they were in the constant habit of looking the sun full in the face, with the most perfect comfort and entire facility of vision. It is curious after hearing people malign some of Turner's noble passages of light, to pass to some really ungrammatical and false picture of the old masters, in which we have color given without light. Take, for instance, the landscape attributed to Rubens, No. 175, in the Dulwich Gallery. I never have spoken, and I never will speak of Rubens but with the most reverential feeling; and whatever ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... Grattan, he has had a good many years of hard work since then, making strong, serviceable boots and shoes, and serving the Lord in other ways besides. He is ungrammatical still, and queer, and some people smile at him, and pretend to think lightly of him, even when he is most in earnest,—people who, in point of moral worth or heavenly power, are not worthy to tie his shoes. But many a "tempted poor soul" in Littleton and ...
— Stephen Grattan's Faith - A Canadian Story • Margaret M. Robertson
... of the barn-yard to the ash-lane, heard a hearty roll of bassos from the kitchen, and did not doubt but that he was its target. He reined in his horse at the bare flower-beds and glowered back at the door. Then, with a mutter, ungrammatical but eloquent, he spurred on toward the lonely, supperless shack ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... judges, upon the bench beneath the cap of Liberty. "The Blessings of Peace and the Curses of War," with its inscription—"Such Britain was, such Flanders, Spain and Holland now is (sic); from such a sad reverse, O Gracious God, preserve our country!"—is an eloquent, if slightly ungrammatical, appeal (Jan. 17, 1795) to his fellow-countrymen, an appeal to which our artist must have been stirred by the horrible carnage and misery which the French armies were then inflicting upon the continent of Europe; while "John Bull ground down" (June 1, 1795) shows the guineas being ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... rest of which may be understood. The case of this pronoun is determined by its relation to the rest of the unexpressed clause. Sometimes the understood clause calls for the objective: "I like his brother better than [I like] him." Than whom, though ungrammatical, is ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... regret, written in the first person, receives the signature of the writer, but one written in the third person remains unsigned. To sign it would produce a confusion of persons and be ungrammatical to the last degree. Another error to be avoided is that of beginning in this fashion: "I accept with pleasure the kind invitation of Mr. and Mrs. John Jones," this also producing a change of person altogether inadmissible. Neither must one be betrayed into the mistake ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... could never guess,' she cried, and offered him three guesses. 'Out with it!' he shouted; and in one ungrammatical sentence, as long as the ribbons conjurers pull from their mouths, she told of the capture of Wendy ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... understand that the presence of a man,—especially a strange man,—alone in the house with a young woman, was fraught with unpleasant possibilities. But, before he could speak, the child-woman had launched into a vivacious, if ungrammatical, explanation and story of what had occurred. In substantiation she now raised her short skirt and lifted the bandaged foot, with utter freedom from embarrassment, and laughed deliciously until an answering smile crept slowly into the eyes ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... rank. You'll understand his coarseness when I say He would have married MAHRY DAUBIGNY, And dragged the unsophisticated girl Into the whirl of fashionable life, For which her singularly rustic ways, Her breeding (moral, but extremely rude), Her language (chaste, but ungrammatical), Would absolutely have unfitted her. How different to this unreflecting boor ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... takes Austrian money; his skin has got to be the exact colour of Munz. He has the greenish-yellow eyes of those elective, thrice-abhorred vampyres who feed on patriot-blood. He is condemned without trial by his villainous countenance, like an ungrammatical preface to a book. His tongue refuses to confess, but nature is stronger:—observe his knees. Now this is guilt. It is execrable guilt. He is a nasty object. Nature has in her wisdom shortened his stature to indicate that it is left to us to shorten the growth of his offending years. Now, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... astonished at the little woman's indignation. She said just those things which make you feel as if somebody had been calling you names or kicking you—Was I really a doctor? and so on. It did not gain by being put in the ungrammatical tongue of Quakers. However, I never did fancy smallpox, and what could a fellow get by doctoring wretches like these? So I held my tongue and went away. About a week afterwards I met Evans, the dispensary man, a very common fellow, who was said to ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... told him, but his attention had been so concentrated on the ungrammatical form in which she had conveyed the information, that the fact itself had made no impression. Now his anger against Mrs. Leadbatter dwindled. After all, she was wise in not giving Mary Ann the run of the ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... do with refinement that we expect a lady to be educated as a matter of course, at least in some directions, mathematics and science being thus far not included. George Eliot says of Nancy in "Silas Marner," that she often used ungrammatical language, and was not highly educated, but that she was a thorough lady because she had delicate ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... it's perfectly plain," Janet replied consolingly. "You thought she was me while all the time she was she and me was me,"—the hodge-podge of pronouns and their ungrammatical use was too much for poor Chuck. He buried his head in his hands, the ...
— Phyllis - A Twin • Dorothy Whitehill
... his old schoolfellow ungrammatical and bumptious, but he was not prepared to find him peevish. Athletes, he believed, were simple, straightforward people, cruel and brutal if you like, but never petty. They knocked you down and hurt you, and then went on their way rejoicing. For this, Rickie thought, there is something ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... a humorously amorous nature—"Hallo, Hallo, Who's Your Lady Friend?"; "You're my Baby"; and the ungrammatical "Who Were You With Last Night?" Another great favourite is an involved composition which always appears to begin in the middle. It deals severely with the precocity of a youthful lover who has been ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... was always that of one sitting in the background, the men seemed to like him, and, when they said, "See you again," at parting, it was with the convincing manner of real friendliness. Sometimes, even now, his language was ungrammatical, but so, for the matter of that, was theirs.... The great writer smiled with his slow, humorous lighting of the eyes as ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... Farm filled her with amazement, repulsion and disgust. There was nothing in any modern magazine that at all resembled the delicate, pointed and picturesque phraseology of the Sieur Amadis! Strange, coarse slang-words were used,—and the news of the day was slung together in loose ungrammatical sentences and chopped-up paragraphs of clumsy construction, lacking all pith and eloquence. So, repelled by the horror of twentieth-century "style," she had hidden her manuscripts deeper than ever in the old bureau, under little silk sachets of dried rose-leaves ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... beverage. I don't know how much French our friend learned, but, as he himself said, if the attempt did him no good, it could at any rate do him no harm. And it amused him; it gratified that irregularly sociable side of his nature which had always expressed itself in a relish for ungrammatical conversation, and which often, even in his busy and preoccupied days, had made him sit on rail fences in young Western towns, in the twilight, in gossip hardly less than fraternal with humorous loafers and obscure fortune-seekers. He had notions, wherever he went, about ...
— The American • Henry James
... evolving into a reputable poet who was given a prominent position facing advertising matter in the heavy magazines when he met with his regrettably early end. Apart from his poems he left no literary remains, except a few letters too hideously ungrammatical for publication. The sole materials for a biography lay in the memory of Toller, who by a stroke of luck happened to have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... it is conscious idiocy. The man's words are asinine, and he knows they are asinine. His wits have entirely abandoned him: he is an idiot for the time. Have you sat next a man unused to speaking at a public dinner? have you seen him nervously rise and utter an incoherent, ungrammatical, and unintelligible sentence or two, and then sit down with a ghastly smile? Have you heard him say to his friend on the other side, in bitterness, "I have made a fool of myself"? And have you seen him sit moodily through the remainder of the feast, evidently ruminating ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... father detained professionally; Mrs. Cathcart and Georgie; young Bradford carrying his banjo, his wonderful raiment and his air of vast leisure; Welton, the lumberman, red-faced, jolly, popular and ungrammatical. The women guarded baskets. All greeted the Ordes with various degrees of hilarity. When the noise had died down, a massive and impressive lady, heretofore unnamed, stepped forward. She held a jewelled arm straight before her, ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White |
