"Grammatical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... career for a man of any ability. To parody a famous phrase of Hume's, Cambridge virtually said to its pupils, 'Is this a treatise upon geometry or algebra? No. Is it, then, a treatise upon Greek or Latin grammar, or on the grammatical construction of classical authors? No. Then commit it to the flames, for it contains nothing worth your study.' Now, in both these arenas Fitzjames was comparatively feeble. He read classical books, not only at Cambridge ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... at first. Though there had always been negro servants in the house, and though on the streets colored people were more numerous than those of her own race, and though she was so familiar with their dialect that she might almost be said to speak it, barring certain characteristic grammatical inaccuracies, she had never been brought in personal contact with so many of them at once as when she confronted the fifty or sixty faces—of colors ranging from a white almost as clear as her own to the darkest livery of the sun—which were gathered in the schoolroom on the ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... themselves to be uttering cogent truths when they are really giving us the babble of Bedlam. If ladies and gentlemen who rant about freedom would try to emancipate themselves from the dominion of meaningless words, we should all fare better; but we find a large number of public personages using perfectly grammatical series of phrases without dreaming for a moment that their grave sentences are pure gibberish. A few simple questions addressed in the Socratic manner to certain lights of thought might do much good. For instance, we might say, "Do you ever speak of being ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... 27 Then then. All previous editions read 'Then thou' which makes no sense. The emendation, if not what Mrs. Behn wrote, is at least grammatical. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... in the office, which Ehrenthal kept for form's sake, would ultimately be his. This was the goal of his ambition—the paradise of his hopes. He soon saw that he only wanted three things to attain to it—a more grammatical knowledge of German, finer caligraphy, and an initiation into the mysteries of book-keeping, of which he ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... scarcely have been a light trial to the mother to know that contact with her was regarded as her child's greatest danger; but in her humility and her love for Marian she offered no resistance. And so it came to pass that one day the little girl, hearing her mother make some flagrant grammatical error, turned to the other parent and asked gravely: 'Why doesn't mother speak as properly as we do?' Well, that is one of the results of such marriages, one of the myriad miseries that result ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... or Fuyuge people is that of the Ambo people, who are somewhat similar in appearance to the Mafulu, and whose language is also Papuan, and, though differing from the Mafulu language, is, I was told, somewhat similar to it in grammatical construction and as regards a few of its words. The area to the west is that of the Kuni people, whose language is Melanesian, but whose ordinary modes of life are, I was informed, more like those of the Mafulu than are those of the Papuan-speaking Ambo. The areas to the east and south ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... Epigrammata" (one in praise of the Conqueror, vol. ii. p. 149); "Henrici archidiaconi Historiae liber undecimus" (that is, Henry of Huntingdon, fine epigram "in seipsum," vol. ii. p. 163); "Alexandri Neckham De Vita Monachorum" (the same wrote a number of treatises on theological, scientific, and grammatical subjects; see especially his "De Naturis Rerum," ed. Wright, Rolls, 1863); "Alani Liber de Planctu Naturae" (cf. "Opera," Antwerp, 1654, fol., the nationality of Alain de l'Isle is doubtful); "Joannis de Altavilla Architrenius" (that is the arch-weeper; lamentations of ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... irons in the fire for that. Matthew Arnold had criticized General Grant's English, and Clemens immediately put down other things to rush to his hero's defense. He pointed out that in Arnold's criticism there were no less than "two grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and slovenly English," ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... you said 'what,' you would be more grammatical. Norton swears that it was not human, and, indeed, from the scratches on his throat, I should be inclined ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... following the vague language of Columbus, the great discoverer, the New World is called the Indies, slightly distinguished, in grammatical number only, from India ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... husband is a laboring man, and, like herself, in humble circumstances. She has quite a large family, lives in a small tenement, and is obliged to labor daily for a subsistence for herself and family. When she came to this country from Ireland, she could scarcely write a grammatical sentence; and all the information of history and the classics which she has, she has derived from such books as have accidentally fallen in her hands. She is extremely modest and retiring, and does ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Cook's translation of Sievers' Anglo-Saxon Grammar, and to the Grammatical Introduction to Sweet's Reader have been taken out, as Wright's or Wyatt's Old English Grammar will have taken their ...
— A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary - For the Use of Students • John R. Clark Hall
... came out. Mrs Nickleby had, that morning, had a yesterday's newspaper of the very first respectability from the public-house where the porter came from; and in this yesterday's newspaper was an advertisement, couched in the purest and most grammatical English, announcing that a married lady was in want of a genteel young person as companion, and that the married lady's name and address were to be known, on application at a certain library at the west end of the town, ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... remote border. Besides understanding the Cheyenne language as well as his native tongue, he also spoke three other Indian dialects, French, and Spanish, but with many Western expressions that sometimes grated harshly upon the grammatical ear. ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... that industrious bibliographer, Mr. O. Rich, now resident in London. Lastly, I must not omit to mention my obligations, in another way, to my friend Charles Folsom, Esq., the learned librarian of the Boston Athenaeum; whose minute acquaintance with the grammatical structure and the true idiom of our English tongue has enabled me to correct many inaccuracies into which I had fallen in the composition both of this and ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... and began to read ahead, book after book, so as to get the connection, even though understanding but half the words. Without knowing it, he had adopted a modern and really most excellent method of acquiring the language. For Homer became literature to him instead of a mere text for excruciating grammatical gymnastics. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Flaccus, tutor to the grandsons of Augustus (Sueton. Gramm. 17), was the author of Fasti, fragments of which have been discovered near Praeneste, and which were used by Ovid for his poem of that name. Of Verrius' grammatical works, the greatest was that entitled De verborum significatu (Gell. v. 17, 1), arranged alphabetically. It is lost, but we possess part of an abridgment (nine out of sixteen Books) made by Sex. Pompeius Festus before the third century A.D. The ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... way. And smelling out a big story ought to be the same to a reporter that the smoke of battle is to a soldier. That's right—I'll leave it to any fellow here if that ain't right!" he wound up, forgetting in his enthusiasm to be grammatical. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... notice this report on account of its grammatical and entomological mistakes. It is because of the evil effects it may, and probably will, have on amateur silk culturists, that I notice it; for most assuredly, failure will be the result of all attempts to produce ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... herself awkward in the new role, Mrs. Anderson dropped it and resumed her old gait, remarking, as she closed the door, that she was glad to know that Julia was coming to her senses, and "had took the right road." For Mrs. Abigail was more vigorous than grammatical. ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... are the essentials, the presence of which constitutes language, while their absence negatives it altogether, we find that Professor Max Muller restricts them to the use of grammatical articulate words that we can write or speak, and denies that anything can be called language unless it can be written or spoken in articulate words and sentences. He also denies that we can think at all unless we do so in words; that is to say, in sentences with verbs ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... about the affinity of language among the Eskimo—some asserting that it is such as to allow mutual intercourse everywhere—but instances warrant us in concluding that considerable deviations exist in their vocabularies, if not in the grammatical construction. For instance, take two words that one hears oftener than any others: On the Alaska coast they say "na-koo-ruk," a word meaning "good," "all right," etc.; on the Siberian coast "mah-zink-ah," while a vocabulary collected during Lieutenant Schwatka's ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... that her companion was attracting more attention than her bonnet; and twitching her dress bade her sit down. Sal obeyed; but she had no opportunity that morning of deciding whether the sermon were grammatical or not, for she was constantly on the look out, and whenever she saw any one scrutinizing Mary or herself more closely than they ought, a shake of her fist and a horrid face warned them to desist. Twice during church time ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... The variation in the forms of the different parts of speech to show grammatical relation, is called INFLECTION. Though there is some inflection in English, grammatical relation is usually shown by ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... their whole phenomena what their age is, and their structure, and their character. The Higher Criticism is a term pointing not to methods and results transcending ordinary intelligence, but to a study which aims "higher" than grammatical and textual questions considered as final. And thus of course the most earnest defender of the supernatural character of the Scriptures may be, and very often is, as diligent a "higher critic" as ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... from the Sentimental Song Book until I had entirely exhausted the material, and each verse would create a surprise. And yet, in spite of the grammatical distortions, in spite of the sentimentality, there is something pleasing in the absolute unaffectedness of the little book. That Mrs. Moore has been appreciated is borne out by the fact that when she travelled from town ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... stages. Only half the work of the evolution of language is completed. There is, indeed, no tribe so undeveloped as to use the primitive forms of speech. The most savage of the races of mankind have made some progress in the art of combining words, gained some ideas of syntax and grammatical forms. Yet in certain instances the progress has been very slight, and in all we can see the living traces of the earlier method of speech from which ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... grammatical excellence, though occasionally sadly at fault in force of diction. Under the influence of some perverse conceits, he would labor for months to establish a theoretical doctrine, or to elucidate a useless proposition. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... languages, but also the Science of Language, and is there any country in which some of the most important problems of that science, say only the growth and decay of dialects, or the possible mixture of languages, with regard not only to words, but to grammatical elements also, can be studied to greater advantage than among the Aryan, the Dravidian, and the Munda inhabitants of India, when brought in contact with their various invaders and conquerors, the Greeks, the Yue-tchi, the Arabs, the Persians, ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... names is greatly increased by the fact that they come to us in corrupt forms. The same name may be found, in early records, written in a dozen different ways, and some three or four of these may admit of as many different translations. Indian grammatical synthesis was exact. Every consonant and every vowel had its office and its place. Not one could be dropped or transposed, nor could one be added, without change of meaning. Now most of the Indian local ...
— The Composition of Indian Geographical Names - Illustrated from the Algonkin Languages • J. Hammond Trumbull
... born orator and poet, and one who, like Timothy, had known the Scriptures from a child—a long, involved litany of seething malediction, delivered, moreover, with a measured and effortless eloquence and a grammatical exactitude which left St. Ernulphus a bad second. The other fellows pursued their work in awe-stricken silence, till at length Cooper, glancing toward ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... retinue of Mynyddawg, and that a hundred thousand, a large round figure, is chosen to denote the preponderance of the enemy's forces that were arrayed in opposition. This view seems more in unison with reason, as well as with the grammatical construction of the passage, ("emdaflawr" being a middle verb) than the supposition that the "milcant a thrychant" formed the total of ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... selfprolonging tension of the thing proposed to be done and the selfabbreviating relaxation of the thing done; the fallaciously inferred debility of the female: the muscularity of the male: the variations of ethical codes: the natural grammatical transition by inversion involving no alteration of sense of an aorist preterite proposition (parsed as masculine subject, monosyllabic onomatopoeic transitive verb with direct feminine object) from ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... applied himself diligently to his studies, but gave no sign of being a genius. At the University of Erfurt, too, he was studious, but he seems to have made no great impression on the University. "He paid little attention to grammatical details, and never attained to Ciceronian purity and elegance in speech and writing." When he made his A. B:, he ranked thirteenth in a class of fifty-seven. He did a little better in his effort for the title of A. M., when ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... things than bonfires. It was the neighbourhood of Canaan's biggest and best. The doors that had opened had shown glimpses of the finest three-ply carpets in all Tigmore County, and though the women who had come out on the porches had grammatical peculiarities of their own, they were distinctly unapologetic and assured. You could easily imagine them laughing, with a consciousness of advantage, at the other grades of grammar and ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... sure, are multifarious; but the book is we think made of a series of books to be purchased separately. Every page has a coloured cut of a very gay order. Cottages have yellow roofs and pink doors; and shopkeepers are dressed in crimson and orange. Some of the grammatical illustrations are droll: a heavy old fellow, cross-legged, with his hands folded on a stick is myself; Punch is an active verb; a wedding might have illustrated the conjunction; four in hand is a preposition. In punctuation, a child asking what o'clock ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 533, Saturday, February 11, 1832. • Various
... over the window, and the gigantic flowers on the carpet, made Phoebe's soul sick within her. Notwithstanding all her courage, her heart sank. She had expected "a difference," but she had not looked for her grandfather's greasy coat and wisp of neckcloth, or her grandmother's amazing cap, or the grammatical peculiarities in which both indulged. She had a good hot fit of crying, and for the moment felt so discouraged and depressed, that the only impulse in her mind was to run away. But her temperament did not favour panics, and giving in was not in her. ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... and Anat, and Rimmon. Anu, whose name is written Anah in Hebrew, was the god of the sky, and he stood at the head of the Babylonian pantheon. His wife Anat was but a colourless reflection of himself, a grammatical creation of the Semitic languages. But she shared in the honours that were paid to her consort, and the divinity that resided in him was reflected upon her. Anat, like Ashtoreth, became multiplied under many forms, and the Anathoth or "Anat" signified little ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... are given an inferior type of all-round education which is equally useless everywhere. When they leave school they can read, write, add, subtract, divide, and multiply—after a fashion; they can mispronounce a few French words, without being able to construct a single grammatical sentence or understand a syllable that is said to them; they know enough shorthand to write down simple words at one half the speed of ordinary handwriting; and they have acquired by rote a few dry facts from history and geography, ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... Dutch has certain grammatical forms older than those of the old Frisian; e.g., the Dutch infinitives and the Dutch weak substantives, in their oblique cases, end in -en; those of the Old Frisian in -a: the form in ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... and discussions of grammatical niceties, were confounded with the history of biblical literature, and naturally it was the latter that suffered by the lack of differentiation. Orthodoxy assumed a purely divine origin for the Bible, while sceptics treated ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... the great works of the poets odious by their analysis, impositions and laborious comments might learn this simple truth! It is not necessary that one should be able to define every word and give it its principal parts and its grammatical position in the sentence in order to understand and appreciate a fine poem. I know my learned professors have found greater riches in the Iliad than I shall ever find; but I am not avaricious. I am content ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... a very pretty grammatical quibble about 'son' and 'prophet' (apropos of Christ) on a verse in the Gospel, depending on the reduplicative sign [Arabic sign for sheddeh] (sheddeh) over one letter; he was just as put out when I reminded him ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... a means to an end, but rather the infrequency with which misspelled words appear in the composition work, letter writing, and other written work of the pupil. Similarly in language and grammar, it is not sufficient to instruct in rules of syntax. This is but the initial process. Grammatical rules function effectively only when they function automatically. So long as one must think and judge and reflect upon the form of one's expression, the expression ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... has been prepared to meet a twofold need. An adequate presentation of the International Language has become an imperative necessity. Such presentation, including full and accurate grammatical explanations, suitably graded reading lessons, and similarly graded material for translation from English, has not heretofore been accessible within the compass of a single volume, or in fact within the compass of any ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman
... into two parts: one bears the name of "Kan Tsippor" ([Hebrew]), "The bird's nest," and treats of the Massorah of the Psalms, i.e., their divisions, accents, vowels, grammatical forms, and letters necessary for the preservation of the text; and the other, the name of "Gan Perakhim" ([Hebrew]), "The garden of flowers," containing poems, special prayers, family records, ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... least to signify—as soon as she found herself in presence of the real thing, the romantic life itself. That was what she saw in Mildred—what positively made her hand a while tremble too much for the pen. She had had, it seemed to her, a revelation—such as even New England refined and grammatical couldn't give; and, all made up as she was of small neat memories and ingenuities, little industries and ambitions, mixed with something moral, personal, that was still more intensely responsive, she felt her new friend ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... themselves, they felt no shame;" compare also Jer. viii. 9. In all these passages, [Hebrew: hvbiw] signifies the shame forced upon those who have no sense of shame.—2. The signification, "to act disgracefully," does not admit of a regular grammatical derivation. Gesenius refers to analogies such as [Hebrew: hiTib], [Hebrew: hre]; but these would be admissible only if the Kal [Hebrew: bvw] signified, "to be infamous," while it means only "to be ashamed." Being derived from [Hebrew: bvw], the verb ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... the prime requisite of a good sentence is that its grammatical structure shall be evident; in other words, that the reader shall be able at a glance to see the relation of its parts. Involved sentences that require a second perusal before they yield their meaning, are clearly not adapted to the newspaper or magazine. ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... text is published by A. Poebel with transcription, commentary, etc., in Historical Texts, Philadelphia, 1914, and Historical and Grammatical Texts, Philadelphia, 1914. ...
— The Babylonian Story of the Deluge - as Told by Assyrian Tablets from Nineveh • E. A. Wallis Budge
... and so well, at this period: for while he was framing the statutes by which his little community was to be governed, he did not fail to keep the presses of Wynkyn De Worde and Pynson pretty constantly at work, by publishing the grammatical treatises of Grocyn, Linacre, Stanbridge, Lilye, Holte, Whittington, and others—for the benefit, as well of the public, as of his own particular circle. I take it, his library must have been both choice ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... it only in essential variations that these four texts are important, but also in the illustration which their different spelling and their varying grammatical forms afford in regard to the language used by Dante. At the time when these editions appeared, the orthography of the Italian tongue was not yet established, and its grammatical inflections not in all cases definitely settled. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... case of a child who is engaged in learning his letters: when he is asked what letters make up a word, should we say that the question is intended to improve his grammatical knowledge of that particular word, ...
— Statesman • Plato
... to Elizabethan literature. It was not without reason that Ireland chose justified, when making a selection of passages from the work for modern readers, in altering his text to this extent—and this only: he has modernised the spelling, and in the case of entirely obsolete grammatical forms he has substituted modern ones (e.g. "its" for "his"). In the case of an utterly dead word he has followed the course of substituting a word from the same root, when one exists; and when none could be found, he ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... grammatical—the inventor of the language can't talk grammatical; if the dative didn't fetch him the accusative would; but it's German all the same, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... are devoted to Yoga, and they that properly observe excellent vows and they that, with collected mind recite (sacred) histories unto foremost of Brahmanas. They that are conversant with Bhashyas, they also that are devoted to grammatical studies, they that study the Puranas and they that study the Dharmasastras and having studied them (i.e., the Puranas and Dharmasastras) act up to the standard laid down in them, he that has lived (for the stated period) in the abode of his preceptor, he that is truthful ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... a match, held it unlighted in his fingers and watched the commotion from his perch on the bar. In the very midst of the clamor towered the melancholy Alexander P. Dill, and he was endeavoring to explain, in his quiet, grammatical fashion. A lull that must have been an accident carried the words clearly ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... teleological or logical. The unity of a chair is its purpose, which demands just such parts and in just such a mechanical arrangement; the unity of a business conversation is governed by the bargain to be closed, requiring such words and such only, and in the appropriate logical and grammatical order. The unity of an argument is the thesis to be proved; the unity of a diagram is the principle to be illustrated or the information to be imparted. Compare the unity of a sonnet or a painting. In a sonnet, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... names of the tenses of the Spanish verb used in this Vocabulary are in accordance with the recommendations of the Joint Committee on Grammatical Nomenclature. Past Absolute and Past Descriptive are equivalent to the ...
— A First Spanish Reader • Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy
... waters, and there they saw the tip of a great mountain coming up out of the sea, and the great serpents were coiled around the top and were sliding down the sides into the waters, and there was not a cracker there for John. And so, with scarcely a grammatical sentence and with most unfitting words, he went on for an hour with a discourse full of wildness and weirdness, and full of untruth, while the people looked on with amazement at the wonderful knowledge and power of the man. Twenty or thirty years ago you might hear many similar sermons. But ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 1, March, 1898 • Various
... distorted and false, and which, as a whole, resembled a soulless mosaic of words cemented together with international syntax. As to the disgracefully slipshod German with which Edward Devrient solemnised the death of Mendelssohn, I do not even wish to do more than refer to it. A grammatical error—and this is the most extraordinary feature of the case—does not therefore seem an offence in any sense to our Philistine, but a most delightful restorative in the barren wilderness of everyday German. He ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... grammatically, into two grand Subdivisions, as follows: 1. Analysis, The Elements of Language, namely, The Alphabetic and Syllabic distribution of Language, culminating in Word-Building;—The Word in Language being THE INDIVIDUAL in that Domain; and, 2. Synthesis, Construction, the Grammatical Domain proper, including the Parts of Speech and their Syntax, or their putting together in a Structure or ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... little things; as life is made up of little things, he is noting differences all day long, because everything that he sees is different. Speech is different: the manner of enunciating the words is different; it is clearer, slower, more grammatical; among the better sort it is more careful; it is even academical. We English speak thickly, far back in the throat, the voice choked by beard and moustache, and we speak much more carelessly. Then the way of living at the hotels is ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... conceived of the whole world after the analogy of some particular feature of it which has particularly captivated their attention. Thus, the theists take their cue from manufacture, the pantheists from growth. For one man, the world is like a thought or a grammatical sentence in which a thought is expressed. For such a philosopher, the whole must logically be prior to the parts; for letters would never have been invented without syllables to spell, or ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... our libraries already abound;—not a mere philosophical investigation of what is general or universal in grammar, nor yet a minute detail of what forms only a part of our own philology; for either of these plans falls very far short of such a purpose;—not a mere grammatical compend, abstract, or compilation, sorting with other works already before the public; for, in the production of school grammars, the author had early performed his part; and, of small treatises on this subject, we have long had a ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... comedian. He played several times in the old "Richmond Hill" Theatre, and quite successfully in Europe. Mr. Ulett was not well educated, and consequently, labored under considerable inconvenience in reading, frequently making grammatical blunders, as the writer noticed in a private rehearsal, in 1836, in the city of New York. He, however, possessed great intellectual powers, and his success depended more upon that, than his accuracy in reading. Of course, he was a ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... not bid me go farther. However, to proceed—No, my dear Martha, ever since our most felicitous conjugation, I hardly know what the exemplary verb audio means. I could scarcely translate it. Ours is a truly grammatical union. Not the nominative case with verb—not the relative with the antecedent—not the adjective with the substantive—affords a more appropriate illustration of conjugal harmony, than does our matrimonial existence. Peace and quietness, however, are on your tongue—affection ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... the reply would probably be an appeal to experience. Ten thousands, as Homer would say (mala murioi), tell falsehoods and fall into errors. And this is Plato's reply, both in the Cratylus and Sophist. 'Theaetetus is flying,' is a sentence in form quite as grammatical as 'Theaetetus is sitting'; the difference between the two sentences is, that the one is true and the other false. But, before making this appeal to common sense, Plato propounds for our consideration a theory of ...
— Sophist • Plato
... passes what he does not understand, without an attempt to find or to make a meaning, and sometimes hastily makes what a little more attention would have found. He is solicitous to reduce to grammar, what he could not be sure that his authour intended to be grammatical. Shakespeare regarded more the series of ideas, than of words; and his language, not being designed for the reader's desk, was all that he desired it to be, if it conveyed his ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... "The grammatical lapse in these last two lines," says Mr. Austin Dobson, "perhaps calls for correction, but many readers will probably agree with Moore (Diary, November, 1818), 'that it is far prettier as it is.' 'Nothing,' he says truly, ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... Frederic,—x. 276-303.] Surprise, first at Voltaire's official fidelity; his frankness, rigorous strictness in this small duty: then at the kind of correcting, instructing and lessoning, that had been demanded of him by his Royal Pupil. Mere grammatical stylistic skin-deep work: nothing (or, at least, in these Specimens nothing) of attempt upon the interior structure, or the interior harmony even of utterance: solely the Parisian niceties, graces, laws of poetic language, the FAS and the NEFAS in regard to all that: ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... a story of a grammatical difficulty which was to be settled by reference to a book in templo Pacis, in the forum of Vespasian; and again, when a particular book was wanted, "we hunted for it diligently," he says, "and, when we had found it in the temple of Peace, we ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... common speech being so courteous as not to correct, but to adopt the mistakes, in the pronunciation or meaning of words that were made on the Vega. As a fruit of his studies Lieut. Nordquist has drawn up an extensive vocabulary of this little known language, and given a sketch of its grammatical structure.[255] The knowledge of the Chukch language, which the other members of the Expedition acquired, was confined to a larger or smaller number of words; the natives also learned a word or two of our language, ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... Morale Prouerbes of Cristyne, and nine other works printed by Caxton, are to be found on the shelves of the library, as well as a large number of books from the presses of Wynkyn de Worde, Pynson, Julyan Notary, and other early English printers. Among them are many editions of the grammatical treatises of Robert Whitinton and John Stanbridge, printed by Wynkyn de Worde, and unique copies of Fitzherbert's Boke of Husbandrie, the romance of Oliver of Castile, and Fysshynge with an Angle, all by the same printer. The library contains also a fine ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... attention to English grammar. The order ought to be, literature first, and grammar afterward. Perhaps there is no more tiresome trifling in the world for boys and girls than rote recitations and parsing from one of the usual grammatical text-books. ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... wrath which had accumulated in the heart of the earl was fanned to its height, he issued his orders to the factor in the following decree:—"Rackrent—Us"—(a grammatical singularity which his lordship always used, surpassing even the royal or editorial majesty, indicated by the first person plural)—"Us is determined to root out that rebellious fellow Douglas, and to banish him from our grounds. Rackrent, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... grammatical French,' Nesta commented on his achievement. 'He contrives in his walking not to wet his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... tisi charisi, tois ge dunamenois and the like; the pleonastic use of tanun, of os, of os eros eipein, of ekastote; and the periphrastic use of the preposition peri. Lastly, he observes the tendency to hyperbata or transpositions of words, and to rhythmical uniformity as well as grammatical irregularity in ...
— Laws • Plato
... "sophistry," which means fallacious reasoning. And yet, in the words of Schwegler, "It cannot be denied that Protagoras also hit upon many correct principles of rhetoric, and satisfactorily established certain grammatical categories. It may in general be said of the Sophists that they gave the people a great profusion of general knowledge; ... that they called out investigations in the theory of knowledge, in logic, and in language; that they laid the basis for the methodical treatment of many branches of human knowledge, ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... (Priscianus Caesariensis) formed the standard grammatical and philological textbook of the Middle Ages, its importance being fairly indicated by the fact that today there exist about a ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... oppress his powers with superfluous rigour. He seems to have thought, with Boileau, that the practice of writing might be refined till the difficulty should overbalance the advantage. The construction of his language is not always strictly grammatical; with those rhymes, which prescription had conjoined, he contented himself, without regard to Swift's remonstrances, though there was no striking consonance; nor was he very careful to vary his terminations, or to refuse admission, at a small ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... continually cropping up; but as there is a limit to the powers of the memory, single words, like whole languages, gradually become extinct. As Max Muller (69. 'Nature,' January 6th, 1870, p. 257.) has well remarked:—"A struggle for life is constantly going on amongst the words and grammatical forms in each language. The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand, and they owe their success to their own inherent virtue." To these more important causes of the survival of certain words, mere novelty and ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... of formal grammar has little or no place in the grades of the elementary school. The grammatical relations of the language are complicated and beyond the power of the child at an early age. Nor does the study of such relations result in efficiency in the use of language, as is commonly supposed. Children are compelled in many schools ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... round the "expiatory monuments of a pyramidical shape, surmounted by funeral vases," and compelled, by sad duty, to fire into the public who might wish to indulge in the same woe! O "manes of July!" (the phrase is pretty and grammatical) why did you with sharp bullets break those Louvre windows? Why did you bayonet red-coated Swiss behind that fair white facade, and, braving cannon, musket, sabre, perspective guillotine, burst yonder bronze gates, rush through that peaceful ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... prepare boys better for the new political and intellectual life of Hellas than did the older type of training. In the schools of the Sophists boys now spent their time in forming phrases, choosing words, examining grammatical structure, and learning how to secure rhetorical effect. Many of these new teachers made most extravagant claims for their instruction (R. 8) and drew much ridicule from the champions of the older type of education, but within a century they ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... is it that so much removes the language from us? It is removed by the words and grammatical forms that we have lost—by its real antiquity; perhaps more by an accidental semblance of antiquity—the orthography. That last may seem a small ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... kuhkoo or kehkoo, has simply the idea of "mark" or a "sign," which in Algonquian polysynthesis is modified according to its grammatical affixes, and the sense of the passage used, when translated into an alien tongue. But it must be remembered, however, that its primary meaning was never lost to an Indian—a fact well known to ...
— John Eliot's First Indian Teacher and Interpreter Cockenoe-de-Long Island and The Story of His Career from the Early Records • William Wallace Tooker
... conciseness; that is clearly the reason to which this whole species of literary composition owes its existence. This their aim they reach by the rigid exclusion of all words which can possibly be spared, by the careful avoidance of all unnecessary repetitions, and, as in the case of the grammatical Sutras, by the employment of an arbitrarily coined terminology which substitutes single syllables for entire words or combination of words. At the same time the manifest intention of the Sutra writers is to express themselves with ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... the character of his language. Chaucer was then the "God of English poetry;" his was the one name which filled a place apart in the history of English verse. Spenser was a student of Chaucer, and borrowed as he judged fit, not only from his vocabulary, but from his grammatical precedents and analogies, with the object of giving an appropriate colouring to what was to be raised as far as possible above familiar life. Besides this, the language was still in such an unsettled state that from a man with resources like Spenser's, it naturally invited attempts ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... must offer a remark of a grammatical nature. In the present passage Moses terms the earth haadama. In the passage following, "A fugitive and a wanderer shalt thou be in the earth" he uses the term arez. Now adama signifies, according to grammatical interpreters, that part of the earth which is ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... regarded a sentence of Bacon's as a veiled confession that Bacon wrote 'Richard II.,' 'which, though it grew from me, went after about in others' names.' Mr. Spedding averred that Mr. Holmes's opinion rested on a grammatical misinterpretation, and Mr. Holmes accepted the correction. But 'nothing less than a miracle' could shake Mr. Holmes's belief in the common authorship of the masque (possibly Bacon's) and the 'Midsummer Night's Dream'—so he told ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... family, a race that would run their heads into a noose out of pure obstinacy, rather than skulk off. I am of very ancient race myself, though I never take pride in the matter, because I have seen more harm than good of it. I always learned Latin at school so quickly through being a grammatical example of descent. According to our pedigree, Caius Calpurnius Mordax Naso was the Governor of Britain under Pertinax. My name means 'biting'; and bite I can, whether my dinner is before me, or my enemy. In the present case I shall not bite yet, but prepare ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... moment, in the midst of my regrets, the bottle-boy thrust an uncomely head in at the door. His voice was coarse, his accent was hideous, and his grammatical construction beneath contempt; but I forgave him all when I gathered the import ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... but her, borrer but borrow, actially but actually, Fanny," Mr. Huxter replied—not to a fault in her argument, but to grammatical ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... female hand, and probably the original letter; there are, however, no traces of sealing-wax or wax upon it, whence I infer that it was sent open, which, from its being written in a foreign language, would have been perfectly safe. I have purposely left the few grammatical errors it contains, as the smallest alteration of this gem would appear to me in the light of a treason against the character of ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... all comes a letter to the master intimating that he is doing something objectionable to some one of the many Unions that go to make a single implement of hardware. This letter has three features. It is signed with a real name. It is polite. It is grammatical. ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... proprietor how smooth and smiling is thy face, how precise thy dress and snow-white thy linen! thy words (except to the poor,) are well-chosen and marked with strict grammatical propriety.—The world doffs its hat to thee, and calls thee 'respectable,' and 'good.' Thou rotten-hearted villain!—morally thou art not fit to brush the cowhide boots of the MAN that thou callst thy servant! Out ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... more. He read it mechanically and as a piece of news that had brought evil tidings. Then, suddenly, another aspect of it struck him—an aspect to which the shock of its reception had until this tardy moment blinded him. The letter was perfectly grammatical and penned in a hand of copy-book roundness and evenness. The address, the body of the missive, and the signature, were all in one chirography. She would not have intrusted the writing of this letter to ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... we learn language in childhood? Is it not solely on authority and by example? A child who lives in a family where no language is used but that which is logically and grammatically correct, will learn to speak with logical and grammatical correctness long before it is able to give any account of the processes of its own mind in the matter, or indeed to understand those processes when explained by others. In other words, practice in ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... defeated for one Congress, but he was successful at the next election. He was a true frontiersman, with a small dash of civilization and a great deal of shrewdness transplanted in political life. He was neither grammatical nor graceful, but no rudeness of language can disguise strong sense and shrewdness, and a "demonstration," as Bulwer says, "will force its way through all perversions of grammar." Some one undertook to publish his life, but he promptly denied the ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... May 1789'; then a 'Short Reflection of a Philosopher who finds himself thinking of procuring his own death. At Dux, on getting out of bed on 13th October 1793, day dedicated to St. Lucy, memorable in my too long life.' A big budget, containing cryptograms, is headed 'Grammatical Lottery'; and there is the title-page of a treatise on The Duplication of the Hexahedron, demonstrated geometrically to all the Universities and all the Academies of Europe.' [See Charles Henry, Les Connaissances ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the Rowleian dialect was not English of the fifteenth century, nor of any century, but a grotesque jumble of archaic words of very different periods and dialects. The orthography and grammatical forms were such as occurred in no old English poet known to the student of literature. The fact that Rowley used constantly the possessive pronominal form itts, instead of his; or the other fact that he used the termination en in the singular ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... in a similar way. Towards the end of his life he published a similar thesaurus of the witty anecdotes and the striking words or deeds of wisdom of antiquity, the Apophthegmata. In addition to these collections, we find manuals of a more grammatical nature, also piled up treasury-like: 'On the stock of expressions', De copia verborum et rerum, 'On letter-writing', De conscribendis epistolis, not to mention works of less importance. By a number of Latin translations of Greek authors Erasmus had rendered a point ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... sufficiently well to enable them to keep their accounts. Beyond this it was often claimed that an education was of no value—that it only made rascals. I recollect a very zealous old man who preached for the German Baptists; he is now "across the waves." Once, in my presence, he disposed of a grammatical argument that was put against him, by saying, "It is the wisdom of the world, and it is sensual and devilish." It was common forty years ago for preachers to say, "I don't know what I shall say, but just as the Lord gives it to me I will hand it ...
— The Christian Foundation, May, 1880
... awake at my father's call in the morning, and before my mother had breakfast ready I had recited my lesson in Ollendorff to him. To tell the truth, I hated those grammatical studies, and nothing but the love of literature, and the hope of getting at it, could ever have made me go through them. Naturally, I never got any scholarly use of the languages I was worrying at, and though I ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... skilled in building stone walls. But he could not elbow his way in a crowd, could not make farming pay, and was always pushed to the wall. He cared nothing for books, and although he studied grammar when a boy, and could parse, he never could write a grammatical sentence. He died at ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... of a maitresse similarly elevated. At the back of the estrade, and attached to a moveable partition dividing this schoolroom from another beyond, was a large tableau of wood painted black and varnished; a thick crayon of white chalk lay on my desk for the convenience of elucidating any grammatical or verbal obscurity which might occur in my lessons by writing it upon the tableau; a wet sponge appeared beside the chalk, to enable me to efface the marks when they had served ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... that he at once dropped the style of talk which he had adopted when representing Jem Mace, because he found so many in the lodging-houses who had fallen from a good position in society that grammatical language was by no means singular. His size and strength also saved him from much annoyance, for the roughs, who might otherwise have bullied him, felt that it would be wise to leave ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... anything in the navy when I was a youngster, except a little rule-of-thumb mathematics. One picked up a sort of smattering of a language or two knocking about the world, but no grammatical knowledge, nothing scientific. If a boy doesn't get a method, he is beating to windward in a crank craft all his life. He hasn't got any regular place to stow away what he gets into his brains, and so it ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... The other standpoints of paryaya-naya, which represent grammatical and linguistic points of view, are s'abda-naya, samabhiru@dha-naya, and evambhula-naya. See Vis'e@savas'yaka ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... rejection of this bill a fortunate incident. Every State will certainly concede the power; and this will be a national confirmation of the grounds of appeal to them, and will settle for ever the meaning of this phrase, which, by a mere grammatical quibble, has countenanced the General Government in a claim of universal power. For in the phrase, 'to lay taxes, to pay the debts and provide for the general welfare,' it is a mere question of syntax, whether the two last infinitives are governed by the first, or are distinct and ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the result was, the English. At what precise year our language might be said to begin, it is impossible to determine. Throughout the whole of the twelfth century, great changes were taking place in the grammatical construction, as well as in the substance of the Anglo-Saxon. Some new words were imported from the Norman, but, as Dr Johnson remarks, 'the language was still more materially altered by the change of its sounds, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... The term "etymology" as used in grammar must be carefully distinguished from "etymology" in the sense of word-analysis. Grammatical etymology treats solely of the grammatical changes in words, and does not concern itself with their derivation; historical etymology treats of the structure, composition, and history of words. Thus the relation ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton |
