"Vernacular" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... intricate, almost defies acquisition. Suppose this difficult vernacular mastered; the would-be student discovers that literary works, even newspapers and ordinary correspondence, are not composed in it, but in another dialect, partly antiquated, partly artificial, differing as ...
— The Invention of a New Religion • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... in the little "corporal's" voluntary desertion, and from the first moment began to agitate. What! punish a hero for his heroism? That, in Four Eyes' vilely profane opinion, expressed with elaborate expletives in the Legion's own choicest vernacular, was what it would amount to if St. George were branded "deserter." Precisely why Max had joined Stanton's caravan instead of returning to Sidi-bel-Abbes, perhaps a few days late, Four Eyes was not certain; but there ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... see the results of this in the life of Prince Henry; at present there is only space to notice the general fact. The other lines of John's home government—his reform of criminal procedure, his sanction of the vernacular in legal and official business in place of Latin, his attempt to publish the first collection of Portuguese laws, his settlement of the Court in the true national capital of Lisbon—are only to be linked ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... villagers from below going up to church at the Roman Catholic mission. We arrived in time for service, and enjoyed the natives' voices raised in the Latin chants as well as in hymns wisely put into the vernacular. It is historically a little curious to find Roman Catholic natives singing praises in their own tongue, and Protestant missions, like those on the Kobuk and Kotzebue Sound, using a language "not understanded of the people." The day was the Feast of the Annunciation as well as Sunday, and there ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... allusion to the resemblance between Vitrarius and Vitrum. The vernacular form of his name is not known. Mr. Lupton conjectures Vitrier; ...
— Selections from Erasmus - Principally from his Epistles • Erasmus Roterodamus
... to trap me, and to prove that I was more fully conversant with the language, as he confidently believed, than I felt disposed to concede. Something was being read over to me by the Clerk upon which my thoughts were concentrated. Suddenly the Chairman roared out a terrifying word in the vernacular. I never moved a hair. I behaved just as if the Chairman had merely sneezed. My imperturbability appeared to convince him that I really did not understand German, because no further reference was made to the fact. Subsequently my interpreter ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... from their travels in France and Italy, full of admiration for everything that was not German. They were delighted to hear that in France, in Holland, and in Italy, it was respectable to write poetry in the modern vernacular, and set to work in good earnest. After the model of the literary academies in Italy, academies were founded at the small courts of Germany. Men like Opitz would hardly have thought it dignified to write verses in their native tongue had it not ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... Purdy. They had not been asked to dance the German since they had made no special friends among the first classmen. Peggy and Polly were to dance it, one with Dick Allyn, the other with his room-mate, Calhoun Byrd, who, in Bancroft's vernacular "spooned on Ralph" and had always considered Polly "a clipper." Juno was to go with Guy Bennett, Nelly, Rosalie, Marjorie and Natalie had, alack! to look on from the ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... logical corollary of the whole ecclesiastical policy was a Protestant League. The defiance of Rome, and the subjection and spoliation of the Church, were accompanied by a measure in which Cranmer was the moving spirit, and to which Henry gave full support—the open admission of the Scriptures in the vernacular—which made it no longer possible for the individual to disclaim responsibility on the score that the priesthood alone held the key to the mysteries of religion. This was in truth the keystone of the Reformation, since it entailed ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... of all our former Wars are transmitted to us in our Vernacular Idiom, to use the Phrase of a great Modern Critick. [4] I do not find in any of our Chronicles, that Edward the Third ever reconnoitred the Enemy, tho' he often discovered the Posture of the French, and as often ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... fool I was; and I told my friend to bet him another dram that he could pick it up. But I said, "Don't touch the one that has the corner turned up;" and he did as I said. That made the cow-boy laugh, who broke out in his peculiar vernacular: "Oh, you old fools with store clothes on can't tell it no how." Then I observed to my friend, "I am going to have some of that money; for that fool will never get back, for some one will win it sure." I began jesting and playing the fellow, till at last I dared him to bet me $100 on ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... so ably executed by Mr. Morton, I may perhaps be allowed to offer a few remarks on the work itself, and on the manuscripts which contain it. Mr. Morton is unquestionably right in his statement that the Latin MS. in Magdalen College, Oxford, No. 67., is only an abridged translation of the original vernacular text. Twenty-three years ago I had access to the same MS. by permission of the Rev. Dr. Routh, the President of Magdalen College, and after reading and making extracts from it[1], I came to the same conclusion as Mr. Morton. It hardly admits, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 219, January 7, 1854 • Various
... the main subject. Oriental books we do not even touch upon, and vernacular books in English or French have to take a secondary place; and we may treat first of the Greek, for it is by far the most compact division. In the case of both Greek and Latin books we shall ask where and when they were chiefly made, when and how they left their ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... and if he is left alone at Heidelberg, in his own unassisted weakness, at such a distance from us all, I should not be surprised to hear that he had constituted himself the lord and master of some blue-eyed fraeulein with whom he could not exchange a dozen words in her own vernacular, and had become a dis-respectable pater familias at nineteen. In the midst of all the worry and anxiety which these considerations occasion, we are living here a most unsettled, flurried life of divided work and pleasure. We have gone out to Heaton every morning ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... intending to establish it, a family vernacular has grown up in the paper which our people understand, but which—like all other family vernaculars—is Greek to those outside ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... the genius and fortune of the first Napoleon; just as the eagle—Prometheus and the eagle in one shape—was fast fettered by sheer force and strength to his rock in the Atlantic, there arose a man in Central Germany, on the old Thuringian soil, to whom it was given to assert the dignity of vernacular literature, to throw off the yoke of classical tyranny, and to claim for all the dialects of Teutonic speech a right of ancient inheritance and perfect freedom before unsuspected and unknown. It is almost needless to mention this honoured name. For the furtherance of ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... to put it in again." The coldness and indifference of the Church, which ministers usually employ the vivid language of the Bible regarding the ways of Zion to portray, he described in the equally vivid, but less dignified New England vernacular. "What did I do at Litchfield but to 'boost'? They all lay on me, and moved very little, except as myself and God moved them. I spent sixteen of the best years of my life at a dead lift in boosting." And we greatly fear that the reverend seigniors in Synod and Presbytery, notwithstanding ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... Leipsic in 1631, and although he ever remained a bachelor and abhorred womankind, nevertheless tried to demonstrate that not only was polygamy lawful, but that it was a blessed estate commanded by God. He first brought out a dialogue written in the vernacular entitled Sinceri Wahrenbergs kurzes Gespraech von der Polygamie; and this little work was followed by a second book, Das Koenigliche Marck aller Laender (Freyburg, 1676, in-4). Then he produced another work, entitled Theophili Aletaei discursus politicus ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... of the season they had prospected up along the river, finding gold all the way, but not in quantities sufficiently large to warrant working. At the place, however, which they subsequently named Chihuahua (pronounced in the vernacular Chee-waw-waw) the perspicacious Jones had given it as his opinion, formed after mature deliberation and a sapient examination of some two or three shovelsful of dirt, that there was a satisfactory "color in that ar bank." Some hard work of about a week demonstrated ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... to flog them all round —thought, upon the whole, he would do so —he ought to —justice demanded it; but for the present, considering their timely surrender, he would let them go with a reprimand, which he accordingly administered in the vernacular. "But as for you, ye carrion rogues," turning to the three men in the rigging —"for you, I mean to mince ye up for the try-pots;" and, seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs of the two traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... handsomely vindicated, when it was learned that Perkins had served in the Confederate army. When Perkins had been in the town three years, the anecdotes illustrating his shiftlessness multiplied, and his name was a synonym for that trait of character known in the vernacular as "no-'count." In the third spring, after a winter's tussle with rheumatism, Perkins died. His funeral was of so little importance that none of the corpulent old ladies in black alpaca, holding their handkerchiefs carefully folded in their hands, ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... beard upon a comparatively diminutive scale, and with the top of his hair very curiously cut in a circular form. He professed his readiness to accompany us immediately into the receptacle of departed imperial grandeur. He spoke Latin with myself, and his vernacular tongue with the valet. I was soon satisfied with the sepulchral spectacle. As a whole, it has a poor and even disagreeable effect: if you except one or two tombs, such as those of Francis I. Emperor of the Romans, and Maria Theresa—which latter ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... three, consecutive lines which he would be willing to see introduced into our own Communion Office. Or, as respects translations from the Latin office-books of the Church of England, let him scrupulously search the pages of the "Sarum Hours," as done into the vernacular by the Recorder of Salisbury, and see how many of the Collects strike him as good enough to be transplanted into the Book of Common Prayer. The result of this latter voyage of discovery will be an increased wonder at the affluence of the mediaeval devotions, combined with amazement at the ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... as he affirmed, had gone to church and preached a sermon an hour and a half long. The sheriff, too, was there in a red coat, and had no doubt got his place by interest. 'Pomp and 'umbug I calls it, and we poor chaps pays for it all.' Fitzjames heartily enjoyed good vernacular embodiments of popular imagination. He admitted that he was not quite insensible to the pleasures of pomp and humbug as represented by javelin men and trumpeters. His work, as my quotation indicates, included some duties that were trivial and ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... makes an interesting mixture. We have had to put them all together, and they get on capitally, exchanging stories and gossip and sympathy like men of the same company. One of them, a Boer,—" she hesitated for the right word; then she adopted the vernacular of the service—"went out, the other day; and, among his mourners, the sincerest ones were the two London Tommies in the two next beds. War isn't all hatred, by any means. Turn nurse for a month and you'll ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... chain, and was, therefore, not available to play the part of interpreter, it became necessary for Butler to secure the services of a man who understood enough English to translate his orders into the vernacular; and because this unfortunate fellow was necessarily always at Butler's elbow, he became the scapegoat upon whose unhappy head the sins and shortcomings of the others were visited in the form of perpetual virulent abuse, until the man's life positively became a burden to him, to such ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... blows out of the clouds and the world stands." They agreed, however, to obey the chiefs whom the Frank monarch should appoint to govern them, according to their own laws. Those laws were collected, and are still extant. The vernacular version of their Asega book contains their ancient customs, together with the Frank additions. The general statutes of Charlemagne were, of course, in vigor also; but that great legislator knew too well the importance attached ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... others, he was deeply depraved. He exhibited a disposition undreamed of by me, unknown before in the brothers and sisters of his numerous family. In brief, he was a sectarian mule; a bigot that held narrow views on the subject of religion; believed Hebrew the vernacular of the devil, and regarded the Passover with malevolent eyes. Confound such a creature, there was no hope for him! Who could expect to free him from his prejudices? He hated Moses for his fate, and Rebekkah for her forms of worship. He was insane on Judaism. He was a monomaniacal Gentile. ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... being Provencal; but in Florence, Milan, or Rome, he claims the honour of being born a native of Italy. The people of condition here speak both languages equally well; or, rather, equally ill; for they use a low, uncouth phraseology; and their pronunciation is extremely vitious. Their vernacular tongue is what they call Patois; though in so calling it, they do it injustice.—Patois, from the Latin word patavinitas, means no more than a provincial accent, or dialect. It takes its name from Patavium, or Padua, which was the birthplace of Livy, who, with all his merit ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... the veneration of ignorance, when the learned, in their craftiness, taught that "Ignorance is the mother of devotion;" and Ignorance was very willing to believe it. At the era of the Reformation, psalms and hymns, in the vernacular tongue, were revived in Germany, England, and elsewhere, among the other means of grace, of which Christendom had been ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... into the lapidary style of ancient Rome, I confess it is often hard to improve on the brevity of the vernacular, though the admonition "to keep your end up" can be condensed from four words to two in "sursum cauda." Again the familiar eulogy, "Stout fellow," can be rendered in a single word by the Virgilian epithet "bellipotens." A distinguished Latinist ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 12, 1917 • Various
... all Buddhist monks without distinction of rank or office. It is the representative of the Sanskrit term Upadhyaya, "explained," says Eitel (p. 155) by "a self-taught teacher," or by "he who knows what is sinful and what is not sinful," with the note, "In India the vernacular of this term is {.} {.} (? munshee (? Bronze)); in Kustana and Kashgar they say {.} {.} (hwa-shay); and from the latter term are derived the Chinese synonyms, {.} {.} (ho-shay) and {.} {.} (ho-shang)." The Indian term was originally a designation for those who teach only a ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... the Chinese language later assumed a monosyllabic, isolating, uninflected form, grammatical relations being indicated by position. From the earliest forms of speech several subordinate vernacular languages arose in various districts, and from these sprang local dialects, etc. Tone-distinctions arose—i.e. the same words pronounced with a different intonation came to mean different things. Development of these distinctions led to carelessness of articulation, and multiplication ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... we are acquainted was Icelandic; the cosmogony of the Odin religion was formulated, and its doctrinal traditions and ritual reduced to a system, by Icelandic archaeologists; and the first historical composition ever written by any European in the vernacular, was the product of Icelandic genius. The title of this important work is "The Heimskringla," or world-circle, [Footnote: So called because Heimskringla (world-circle) is the first word in the opening sentence of the manuscript which catches the eye.] and its ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... about machines was only to impress others with the talkers' motor lore. For familiarity with motor lore means a certain social status. It is part of the smart vernacular of to-day. Any man who can own a car has at least mounted a few steps on the social ladder. The next thing to owning a car is to be able to talk about a car, for if a man can talk well about a machine ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... rush basket for flowers at a stall for the sale of wicker-work made by low-caste Hindus at Panipara, she overheard a conversation in the vernacular between one of the workers and an outsider of evil appearance. Their words were often unintelligible being drowned in the noises prevailing around her, but the drift of their talk held Honor rigid and attentive, with every faculty alert, and fear at her heart. Feeling secure in ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... Church in which the family had a pew, and to attach herself to another sect, he had only a jocular word of surprise to say concerning her odd fancy for "those noisy Methodists." He had a true German fondness for old ways and settled customs, and to the end of his days spoke only his own vernacular. ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... particular class of composition"—and, I may add, the grammatical and syntactical niceties characterizing that composition—"to which any given dialect has been especially devoted, we may trace the direction in which the current of thought is wont to flow amongst the tribe or nations in which it is vernacular, and so investigate the principal psychical peculiarities, if such there be, of that tribe or nation." And again he remarks: "Dr. Krap was unable to find any word expressing the idea of gratitude in the language of all the Suaheli (Wasawahili) ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... preservation of government on the basis of a free constitution. Wherever it exists there will be foolish and violent paragraphs in the newspapers, as there are, I am sorry to say, foolish and violent speeches in both houses of Congress. In truth, Sir, I must say that, in my opinion, the vernacular tongue of the country has become greatly vitiated, depraved, and corrupted by the style of our Congressional debates. And if it were possible for those debates to vitiate the principles of the people as much as they have depraved their tastes, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... who came out, distended with Cesare's explosives, he addressed himself in a vernacular too fluid ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... sixteenth century Teofilo Folengo composed his Zanitonella in macaronic verse. It consists of eclogues and poems in hexameter and elegiac metre ridiculing polite pastoralism through contrast with the crudities of actual rusticity. In the same manner Berni travestied the courtly pastoral of vernacular writers in his realistic pictures of village love. But though the satirist might find ample scope for his wit in anatomizing the foible of the day, fashionable society continued none the less to encourage the exquisite ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... seldom anything that is picturesque about the man-killer of the mountain country. He is lacking sadly in the romantic aspect and the delightfully studied vernacular with which an inspired school of fiction has invested our Western gun-fighter. No alluring jingle of belted accouterment goes with him, no gift of deadly humor adorns his equally deadly gun-play. He does his killing in an unemotional, unattractive kind of way, with ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... a people rude, uncivilized, and separated hundreds of miles from each other, have invented a language. Others who are better informed on the subject, allow that the language brought into Europe with the Gypsies, was really vernacular, of some country; but suppose it is so disguised and corrupted, partly by design, and partly by adventitious events, through length of time, and the continued wandering of these people, that it must be considered a new language, and now ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... regardless of time or melody, the tilbiye they had hideously vocalized in their advance toward the city. For the most part, however, the effort at expression spent itself in a long cry, literally rendered—"Thou hast called me—I am here! I am here!" The deliverance was in the vernacular of the devotee, and low or loud, shrill or hoarse, according to the intensity of the passion ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... the shop; he was not quite ready to do a "rushin' business" and to advertise for it from the corner drug store. As he retreated the clerk looked at him with a cynical smile. In the clerk's vernacular, he wasn't "in the push," ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... had died away Hira Singh rose to reply, for he was the cadet of a royal house, the son of a king's son, and knew what was due on these occasions. Thus he spoke in the vernacular:—'Colonel Sahib and officers of this regiment. Much honour have you done me. This will I remember. We came down from afar to play you. But we were beaten' ('No fault of yours, Ressaidar Sahib. Played on our own ground y' know. Your ponies were cramped from the ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... confession and to have a little chat with me. As the summer progressed I wondered more and more at this strange new acquaintance of mine; this rough looking tramp with the manners of a gentleman and the speech, except for a few lapses in the vernacular of the road, of a man of considerable education. The oddest thing of all was the feeling I had that somewhere, at some time, Jim and I had met before. Little tricks of voice and expression would seem ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... Dr. Reasono, when I understand your system of caudology, or tailology, to render it into the vernacular, to dogmatize on the possibility that the seat of reason in man, which to-day is certainly in his brains, can ever descend into ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... which Dante lived Europe fairly swarmed with poets, many of them of high excellence. Frederick II. of Germany and Richard I. of England were both good poets, and were as proud of their verses as they were of their military exploits. Frederick II. may be said to have founded the vernacular in which Dante wrote; and Longfellow rendered into English a poem of Richard's which he composed during his cruel imprisonment in Austria. A knight who could not compose a song and sing it to the guitar was as rare as a modern gentleman ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... upon the Almighty in the vernacular of Seven Dials, sought gropingly for the members of her progeny who clutched her skirt, and fortunately kept ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... and was now on his way back to his birthplace to spend his life in the sacred fields as a missionary. He was thoroughly equipped for roughing it, with a splendid physique and perfect health, imperturbable spirits, and a rare command of classic and vernacular Arabic. He wanted to go to Beirut with as few impedimenta as possible, and, after some talk, we merged our two parties into one. Our preparations for the journey were of the simplest sort. We agreed to dispense ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... suffering from tetter or other serious skin trouble and was peeling badly. There was a current superstition about the place to the effect that the bathroom and the water supply might on occasion be heated with a device known in the vernacular as ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... as I shall show when I approach this part of my story, the $39,000,000 did not even belong to them—but in the fact that Mr. Rogers and Mr. Rockefeller had given to their associates what, in the vernacular of "the Street," is ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... of translation! then why have there been so few good translators? why is it that there has been such great difficulty in combining the two necessary qualities, fidelity to the original and purity in the adopted vernacular? why is it that the authorized versions of the Church are often so inferior to the original as compositions, except that the Church is bound above all things to see that the version is doctrinally correct, and in a difficult problem ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... the more immediate object of the present note: we shall briefly trace the rise and fortunes of the present, or vernacular Russian literature; confining our attention, as we have proposed, to the Prose Fiction, and contenting ourselves with noting, cursorily, the principal authors in this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... feet two in his stockings (his mother used to say she had the longest Life of any woman in the State o' Maine); his shoulders were broad in proportion, and his lungs just the sort to fill amply his noble chest. Therefore, when he had what was called in the vernacular "turrible bad goin'," and when any other stage-driver in York County would have shrunk into his muffler and snapped and snarled on the slightest provocation, Life Lane opened his great throat when he passed over ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... bananas, and the two became great friends. It was a pretty sight seeing the fearless small boy in his white suit, bare legs, and little sun-helmet, standing in front of the great beast who could have crushed him to a wafer in one second, and ordering him in the vernacular, with his shrill child's voice, to kneel. It was a more curious sight seeing the huge animal at once obey his little mentor, and, struggling with the infirmities and rheumatic joints of old age (to which, alas! others besides elephants are subject), lower himself painfully on to his ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... archiepiscopal; where that university still subsists in which philosophy was formerly taught by Buchanan, whose name has as fair a claim to immortality as can be conferred by modern latinity, and perhaps a fairer than the instability of vernacular languages admits. ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... it we find an account of his labors in Biblical Literature. He did more in laying open the holy mysteries of the gospel to the perusal of the laity, by translating them into the Saxon tongue, than any other before him. He gave them, in a vernacular version, the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Esther, Job, Judith, two Books of Maccabees, and a portion of the Book of Kings, and it is for these labors, above all others, that the bible student will venerate his name, but he will ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... No lover of Protestantism can afford to forget the man who refused the bishopric of Carlisle, and a provostship at Oxford, that he might traverse the hills and dales, and read to the simple "statesmen" and shepherds the unknown Gospels in the vernacular. They gathered round him in joyful wonder, and listened kneeling to the Scriptures. Only the death of Mary prevented his martyrdom; and to-day his memory is as green as are the ivies and sycamores ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... in all the ancient voyages and travels, the names of persons, places, and things, are generally given in an extremely vicious orthography, often almost utterly unintelligible, as taken down orally, according to the vernacular modes of the respective writers, without any intimate knowledge of the native language, or the employment of any fixed general standard. To avoid the multiplication of notes, we have endeavoured to supply this defect, by subjoining those ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... added that of the rock on which stood the villa of Pollius Felix; it is now known as Punta Calcarella, but used to be called Petrapoli; pure Greek: Pollio's rock. There is still a mine of such material to be exploited by all who care to study the vernacular. The giant euphorbia, for instance, common on these hills, is locally known as "totomaglie"; pure Greek ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... that a sentence like this exhibits the writer's entire want of acquaintance with the grammatical system employed by the great poet and the writers of his age. We must not judge Shakspeare's grammar by Cobbett or Murray, but by the vernacular language of his own times. It is perfectly well known that Shakspeare constantly uses the passive for the active participle, in the same manner that he uses the present tense for the passive participle, and commits numerous other offences against correct grammar, judging ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 39. Saturday, July 27, 1850 • Various
... long been the leaders of fashion, and continue still to give the tone to the manners and sentiments of the politer circles, where also their language is, perhaps, more frequently spoken than the vernacular tongue; and as there is something about them—no matter what—which renders them great favourites with a portion of the softer sex, we shall endeavour to point out, for the edification of those who may be disposed to copy them, those peculiarities of person, deportment, and dress, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... marked in his earliest work, and from which at times he quite escapes, Irving's personality shines clearly. He has so employed a conventional medium as to make it serve his original purposes. He possessed, to be sure, a faculty of strong vernacular speech, which is little suggested in his to-be-published writing, or even in his private letters. The Oregon embroilment had led certain British journals into gross speech about America. Irving was much disturbed. What he wrote ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... is not so extensively engaged in as in some reputed fruit growers' paradises we read about, I wish to state that the South and East (to speak in the vernacular) "has nothing on us." I have reliable information that the same freeze that cleaned us out up here in the North did the same trick for growers at Mobile, Alabama. Therefore, I advise members not to yield to discouragement. Plant and care for varieties recommended in the ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... madame. In point of fact, he was a quiet, inoffensive, amiable man, who gave his mind to Sanskrit for work and to entomology for play, and did not trouble himself about his own portrait as drawn in the local vernacular. Nevertheless, for all his reserved habits and quiet ways, he had learnt the whole history of the place and people before he had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... with a big "J," nursing for a while some faint ambitions of statesmanship—even office—but in the end discarding everything that might obstruct my entire freedom, for I came into the world an insurgent, or, as I have sometimes described myself in the Kentucky vernacular, "a free nigger ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... when the elements are at strife. He was immensely satisfied with his diggings, he said, liked the natives, and considered this a splendid chance for improving his Spanish. He was reading "Don Quixote" in the vernacular. In a sense, I looked upon his presence as a perfect godsend to us, as he came in most appropriately as a Deus ex machina to create the character of Barbarossa's invented friend. O'Donovan was in good standing with the Republicans of the town, as he was a staunch ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... population and the rapid development of new conditions. That there was as large a public ready and eager to buy the books that printing from type made possible has been regarded as a disproof of general illiteracy. The books were published in the vernacular: the people read them. It was in 1476 that Caxton set up his press at Westminster. The first printing press established in York ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... (official, regular use limited to literate minority), Mende (principal vernacular in the south), Temne (principal vernacular in the north), Krio (English-based Creole, spoken by the descendants of freed Jamaican slaves who were settled in the Freetown area, a lingua franca and a first language for 10% of the ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... (official) universal Bantu vernacular, French (official), English (official), Kiswahili ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... none! By thee the mystery of life is read; The picture-writing of the world's gray seers, The myths and parables of the primal years, Whose letter kills, by thee interpreted Take healthful meanings fitted to our needs, And in the soul's vernacular express The common law of simple righteousness. Hatred of cant and doubt of human creeds May well be felt: the unpardonable sin Is to deny the Word ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... familiar with their tongue. In reading these Letters one cannot fail to perceive how fittingly Spanish words and phrases are interwoven with her own English. At the time these Letters were written, many Spanish words were a part of the California vernacular, but to Shirley belongs the honor of introducing them into the literature of California; hence, in printing the Letters, such words are not italicized, as they usually are, by ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... technique? Did he for a single instant imagine himself the inspired reformer of public morality? Did he believe that his style was elegant and polished? Indeed, he must have effected an appreciable refinement of the vernacular of his age to produce his lively verse, but without losing the robust vitality of "Volkswitz." Or is it true that nothing further than amusement lay within ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... Raoul Yvard himself, and Ithuel Bolt. Their conversation was in French, the part borne by the last being most execrably pronounced, and paying little or no attention to grammar; but it is necessary that we should render what was said by both into the vernacular, with the peculiarities that belonged ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... grinned encouragingly at me, at the same time jerking his thumb in the direction of the man who paced up and down by the hatchway. Thus I was given to understand that he was the captain, the "Old Man," in the cook's vernacular, the individual whom I must interview and put to the trouble of somehow getting me ashore. I had half started forward, to get over with what I was certain would be a stormy five minutes, when a more violent suffocating ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... other parts of Europe, Protestantism had owed its victory. It is well known that of all the instruments employed by the Reformers of Germany, of England, and of Scotland, for the purpose of moving the public mind, the most powerful was the Bible translated into the vernacular tongues. In Ireland the Protestant Church had been established near half a century before the New Testament was printed in Erse. The whole Bible was not printed in Erse till this Church had existed more than one hundred and twenty years. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of Luther or Erasmus were but an empty sound, if even that. And yet, though helping much the cause of the Reformation by the freedom of his social and clerical criticism, by his unsparing exposure of every form of corruption and injustice, and, not least, by his use of the vernacular for political and religious purposes, he can scarcely be classed in the great army of the Protestant Reformers. He was a reformer from within, a biting, unsparing exposer of every priestly abuse, but a loyal son of the Church, who rebuked the faults of his ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... It has been already observed that Naples was a Greek colony, and consequently Greek appears to have continued the vernacular tongue.] ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... every eye, is rising in heavier clouds than ever. In the market-places, and near the great gates of the city, where Peking carts and camels from beyond the passes—k'ou wai, to use the correct vernacular—jostle one another, the dust has become damnable beyond words, and there can be no health possibly in us. The Peking dust rises, therefore, in clouds and obscures the very sun at times; for the sun always shines here in our Northern ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... of his later vernacular poems, approaches the character of the less-cultured broadside literature. To the critical mind it is somewhat amusing to note the enthusiasm with which the modern Dissenting and Puritan class contemplates the period of which we are writing—an enthusiasm that would probably be effectively ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... away Hira Singh rose to reply, for he was the cadet of a royal house, the son of a king's son, and knew what was due on these occasions. Thus he spoke in the vernacular: - "Colonel Sahib and officers of this regiment. Much honour have you done me. This will I remember. We came down from afar to play you. But we were beaten." (" No fault of yours, Ressaidar Sahib. Played on our own ground, y' know. Your ponies were cramped ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... to speak nothing but German there; make it (to express myself pedantically) your vernacular language; seem to prefer it to any other; call it your favorite language, and study to speak it with purity and elegance, if it has any. This will not only make you perfect in it, but will please, and make ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... but the white contingent had caught the local colour (coffee) and showed great aptitude in imitating the methods of the aborigines. Naturally there were conventions; the chiefs talked fluent English, while the Zulu supers employed their own vernacular, except in certain formal phrases, as when the "praisers" (my programme's name for a sort of universal claque) punctuated the speeches of their king with cries of "Yes, O Lion!" or "Yes, Great Beast!" ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... deeply fraught, as we have seen, with classic stores; and at a time when England possessed as yet no complete translation of Virgil, he might justly regard it as a considerable service to the cause of national taste to transplant into our vernacular poetry some scattered flowers from his rich garden of poetic sweets. Thus he has embellished his legend with an imitation or rather paraphrase of the celebrated description of night in the fourth book of the AEneid. The ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... sentry posts and made friends. He had decided to stay up all night, but at twelve he called Shad Wells and went down to look over his cabin which was a quarter of a mile away from the house near Cedar Creek (or "Crick" in the vernacular). The key was in the cabin door so he unlocked it and went in, and after striking a match found a kerosene lamp which he lighted and then ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... His daughter Gaia.] A lady equally admired for her modesty, the beauty of her person, and the excellency of her talents. Gaia, says Tiraboschi, may perhaps lay claim to the praise of having been the first among the Italian ladies, by whom the vernacular poetry was cultivated. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... had a quite unusual passion for new words. Little Fay would stop short in the midst of the angriest yells if anyone called her conduct in question by some new term of opprobrium. Ayah's vocabulary was limited, even in the vernacular, and nothing would have induced her to return railing for railing to the children, however sorely they abused her. But Jan occasionally freed her mind, and at such times her speech was terse and incisive. Moreover, she quickly perceived her power over her ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... thought; Mr. Tillott's eloquence being, in fact, of a very limited order, chiefly exhibiting itself in little jerky questions about the spiritual and temporal welfare of his humble parishioners—questions which, in the vernacular language of agricultural labourers, "put a chap's back ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... hostelry, one may look down the shaded length of the main street, dignified by many an old-fashioned house, to The Bow, an irregular peninsula extending far into the lake and containing some two hundred acres. This estate is the ancestral home of the Champneys, known as Champ-au-Haut, in the vernacular "Champo." At The Bow the highway turns suddenly, crosses a bridge over the Rothel and curves with the curving pine-fringed shores of the lake along the base of the mountain until it climbs the steep ascent that leads to Googe's Gore, the third division ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... within hail; who rode to dances with a shawl thrown over her skirt; who wore her hair cropped and curling all over her head; who answered indifferently to the name of William or Bill; whose speech was heavy with the flowers of the vernacular; who could act in amateur theatricals, play on the banjo, rule eight servants and two horses, their accounts and their diseases, and look men slowly and deliberately between the eyes—yea, after they had proposed to her ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... Blue Mountain house a guest comes whom it is wished to do honour, the Lady, as in the vernacular the mistress of the house is called, comes herself to meet the guest at the door—or, rather, outside the door—so that she can herself conduct him within. It is a pretty ceremony, and it is said that of old in kingly ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... Boscoli on the night of his execution, and wrote a minute account of their interview. Both of these men were members of the Confraternita de' Neri, who assumed the duty of comforting condemned prisoners with spiritual counsel, prayer, and exhortation. The narrative, dictated in the choicest vernacular Tuscan, by an artist whose charity and beauty of soul transpire in every line in contrast with the fiercer fortitude of Boscoli, is one of the most valuable original documents for this period which we possess.[4] What is most striking is the combination ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... opened his Tahitian Bible, and began to preach from notes. I understood one word—the name of God; but the preacher managed his voice with taste, used rare and expressive gestures, and made a strong impression of sincerity. The plain service, the vernacular Bible, the hymn-tunes mostly on an English pattern—'God save the Queen,' I was informed, a special favourite,—all, save some paper flowers upon the altar, seemed not merely but austerely Protestant. It is ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of foreign simulating a vernacular origin.—These may occur in any mixed language whatever; they occur, however, oftener in the ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... completed we described it "as a tentamen, a careful endeavour, claiming no finality, inviting, rather than desiring to exclude, other attempts of the same kind, calling the attention of the Church to the many and anxious questions involved in rendering the Holy Scriptures into the vernacular language, and offering some help towards the ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott
... could have sustained a policy of political reform, when, in the picturesque vernacular of the time and place, "the bottom had dropped out of the town." A rival newspaper, the LEDGER, in order to retrench, began a war on the Printers' Union, to break wages. Lane repudiated the effort made to "rat" his paper and ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... gingerly opened. The same face appeared, that of a round blue-eyed Dutch girl. She turned her impassive gaze upon the visitor, who, by way of opening the conversation, taxed his limited knowledge of the vernacular so far as to ask for ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... continually met with flat boats, laden with produce, and floating sluggishly down. In the vernacular phrase, these boats are called "Kentucky flats," or "broad-horns." They are curiously constructed. At a distance, they appear like large chests or trunks afloat. They are from 50 to 100 feet long, and generally about 15 or 20 feet wide. The timbers of the bottom are massive beams. ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... black brocade, a diamond brooch, and with many rings and jangling bangles. There were some battered, bearded bushmen who seemed to be friends of Colin's, though he did not introduce them to his wife, and who talked on topical subjects in a vernacular which Lady Bridget thought to herself she would never be able to master. There was a professional horse-breaker whom McKeith hailed as Zack Duppo, and to whom he had a good deal to say also. There were some gangs of shearers or stockmen or ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... which inhered in Butler's stone and in other powerful fermental remedies, van Helmont designated as "drif," which he said means, in the vernacular, virgin sand or earth. This virtue requires a metallic body in which to inhere. The general concept is not unfamiliar, of a virtue or power or ferment which was attached to a material object, and it is this type of explanation which was so preponderant in, for example, Porta's ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... sometimes laboured and pompous; it is often ungrammatical. But the narrative is generally lively, full of neat phrases, and abounding in quaint expressions—many of them still recognizable in the modern Florentine vernacular—while, in such Lives as those of Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelagnolo, Vasari shows how well he can rise to a fine subject. His criticism is generally sound, solid, and direct; and he employs few technical terms, except in connection ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... suddenly halted, and, turning to me, asked if I recognized the country before us. Seeing no familiar objects, I replied in the negative. He put the same question to the other white men of the party, all of whom gave the same answers, whereupon he smiled, and in his quaint vernacular said, "Injun he don't know nothing. Injun big fool. White man mighty smart; he know heap." At the same time he pointed to a tree about two hundred yards from where we were then standing, and informed us that our outward trail ran directly ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... the hour, least of all of such a lion as Sir John Bowring, M.P. Was not Bowring 'Lavengro' as much as Borrow himself? Had he not—for there was no end to his impudence—travelled in Spain, and actually published a pamphlet in the vernacular? Was he not meditating translations from a score of languages he said he knew? Was he not, furthermore, an old Radical and Republican turned genteel? Were not his wife and daughters more than half suspected of being Jacobites, followers ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... in the body of the second edition of the book, when of course it is the son who inserts it. We may say then, that, in all probability, the military technical term was introduced in the third quarter of the sixteenth century. This, I suspect, is too late to allow us to suppose that the vernacular force which Shakspeare takes it to have, could have been gained for it by the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various
... Vulgar vernacular you'll please excuse, Camp-language is not that of a Committee. If folks conceive we muster to amuse Cheap-trippers, or ourselves, it is a pity. 'Tis not for Easter sport we toil—and pay, "Stone-broke to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 12, 1890 • Various
... Christian Theology,' (10) 'Ethics, or Know Thyself,' (11) 'Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian,' (12) 'On the Intellects,' (12) 'On the Hexameron,' with a few short and unimportant fragments and tracts. None of Abelard's numerous poems in the vernacular, in which he celebrated his love for Heloise, which he sang ravishingly (for he was a famous singer), and which at once became widely popular, seem to have come down to us; but we have a somewhat lengthy ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... outgrown, but its vernacular continued to be the speech and to express the thought "of the world and among the vulgar," as the quaint, old novelist puts it, just as to-day the novel intended for the consumption of the unenlightened must deal with peers and millionaires and be ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... I stood on the verge of a ten by twelve hole in the earth, that was almost eight hundred feet deep. We think that a well one hundred feet deep is quite a distance down into the ground, but here was a hole eight times deeper. In the mining vernacular this hole is termed a shaft—the term that will be employed in speaking of it hereafter. There are two of these shafts, about one hundred yards apart. Each shaft is divided by a wooden partition which descends from the top to the bottom. Two elevators, or cages, as they are called, ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... are of this kind: out-births at once of rapture and of charity. Written in the popular Hindi, not in the literary tongue, they were deliberately addressed—like the vernacular poetry of Jacopone da Tod and Richard Rolle—to the people rather than to the professionally religious class; and all must be struck by the constant employment in them of imagery drawn from the common life, the universal ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... quaint vernacular he thus rambled on all the time Kearney was at work, his rude speech being an appropriate symphony to ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... Deorum Boccaccio wrote other treatises in Latin, which need not here be specified, and sixteen Eclogues in the same language, of which he was by no means a master. As for his minor works in the vernacular, the earlier of them shew that he had not as yet wrought himself free from the conventionalism which the polite literature of Italy inherited from the Sicilians. It is therefore inevitable that the twentieth century ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... polished contemporaries of Abolitionists turn over the pages of antique denunciation, and their lymph really quickens in their veins as they read the prophetic vehemence of an Isaiah, the personality of a Nathan, the unmeasured vernacular of Luther, the satire and invective of all good upbraiders of past generations, until they reach their own, which yet waits for a future generation to make scripture and history of its speech and deeds. Time is the genial critic that effaces the contemporary glosses of interested men. It rots ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... groves, and under the shade of the lilac-coloured bungor trees. Therefore the youths and maidens in the palace were having a good time, and were gaily engaged in sowing the whirlwind, with a sublime disregard for the storm, which it would be theirs to reap, when the King returned to punish. As the vernacular proverb has it, the cat and the roast, the tinder and the spark, and a boy and a girl are ill to keep asunder; and consequently my friends about the palace were often in trouble, by reason of their love affairs, even when the King was at hand; and on his return, after he had been absent for ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... patriotic movement of the reign of Edward III, that a new courtly literature in the English language rivalled the French vernacular literature which as yet had by no means ceased to produce fruit. The new type begins with the anonymous poems, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and the "Pearl". While Froissart was the chief literary figure at the English ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... says I, 'if you are bound to get rid of this accumulation of vernacular suppose you go out in town and work it on some indulgent citizen. Me and the boys will take care of the business. Everybody will be through dinner pretty soon, and salt pork and beans makes a man pretty thirsty. We ought to take in $1,500 more ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... in much better spirits than when I began reading. "According to this letter, then," she said, addressing me somewhat excitedly, "we may—" but she let fall her eyes and did not complete her sentence. My sister bestowed upon her one of those glances described in the vernacular of woman as "knowing" and then said to me: "We may expect Mr. Maitland at any time, it seems." "Yes," I replied; "he will lose no time in getting here. He undoubtedly feels much chagrined at his failure and will now ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... emulate the choice examples set before them, with swifter movements and with richer results than they could ever have attained, if not thus encouraged. Proverbial axioms flourish copiously in the idiomatic ground and vernacular climate of unlearned, undisciplined, unreflective minds, as thistles on the highway where every ass may gather them. But precious maxims, those "short sentences drawn from a long experience," as Cervantes calls them, are found mostly in the writings of the greatest geniuses, Solomon, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... ground, nor spread her hidden glories to the sun. He has "no figures nor no fantasies, which busy passion draws in the brains of men:" neither the gorgeous machinery of mythologic lore, nor the splendid colours of poetic diction. His style is vernacular: he delivers household truths. He sees nothing loftier than human hopes; nothing deeper than the human heart. This he probes, this he tampers with, this he poises, with all its incalculable weight of thought and feeling, in his hands, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... current vernacular of the times, so familiar to the world in which she moved, Miss Van Ashton's appearance was decidedly fetching, and strongly suggestive of the things of which poets, in their madness, are continually harping—flower gardens flooded with moonlight and the song of nightingales. Although not ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... of his right hand. Naturally slow of thought when confronted by blank paper, the mechanical limitations put him far behind in his reports and correspondence. Naturally awkward of phrase when deprived of his picturesque vernacular, he stumbled among phrases. The monthly reports were a nightmare to him. When at last they were finished, he breathed a deep sigh, and went out into his sugar ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... sailor being supported in the arms of his companion, who called out that the man was shot, and begged me to look to him. The remainder of the party, hearing this, moved a few paces forward, levelled their rifles, and were on the eve of firing, when we were suddenly saluted, in true British vernacular, with an exclamation of "D—— your eyes, who goes there?" This so startled our party that it saved the lives, very probably, of the whole camp. They halted for a moment, and consulted together as to the ...
— California • J. Tyrwhitt Brooks
... in their rear. "There are here," he reports, "about twenty-five hundred men, five hundred of them sick, the greatest part of them what they call poorly; they bury from five to eight daily, and officers in proportion; extremely indolent, and dirty to a degree." Then, in vernacular English, he describes the infectious condition of the fort, which was full of the sick. "Their camp," he proceeds, "is nastier than anything I could conceive; their——, kitchens, graves, and places for slaughtering ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... frame-up," declared Jane, glad to recall the vernacular. "There are three witnesses here who saw the trouble and we'll find others if you want them. The fact is Officer Jamison is always cross with us students" (she put it mildly), "and he was, perhaps, too willing to listen to our enemies. The proprietor of the beauty shop ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... interesting of the Pleiad, that company of Seven, who attempted to reform French verse, by inspiring it with the enthusiasm of the Renaissance. His book L'Illustration de la langue Francaise is a plea for the study of ancient models and for the improvement of the vernacular. In this effort Du Bellay and Ronsard are the predecessors of Malherbe, and of Andre Chenier, more successful through their frank eagerness than the former, less fortunate in the possession of critical learning and appreciative taste than the latter. There is something in Du Bellay's life, ...
— Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: with other Poems • Andrew Lang
... haven't made yourself quite clear to me. If I understand you, the Holy Ghost will act by an infusion into us. He will transmute us, renovate our souls by a sort of 'passive purgation'—to drop into the theological vernacular." ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... "After the battle he was minus an ear." It is better in serious composition to avoid such alien words as have vernacular equivalents. ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... her nerves like the impact of some bright perfume, some sharp chord of modern music. Dangerously she had filed at her emotions in the service of culture and she was now paying the penalty for her ardent confidence. His ideas, vocal with golden meanings, were never meant to be translated into the vernacular of life, never to be transposed from higher to lower levels; this base betrayal of his ideals she felt Keroulan had committed. Had he not said that love should be like "un baiser sur un miroir"? Was he, after all, what the princess had called him? And was he only a mock sun swimming in a firmament ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... rear guard and, passing through a fat land, abounding with oranges, tangerines, citrons, lemons, tobacco and good water, not to forget porkers, fowls, ducks, and the like, "did ourselves proud," to resort to the vernacular. That night we had a huge veldt fire, and the whole camp had to turn out with blankets to fight it. Fortunately a well-beaten track separated the blazing veldt from us, and the wind blew it beyond, or we could hardly have made a successful stand ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... worthy of notice is the Cavia australis, called cui in the vernacular from its voice: a timid, social, mouse-coloured little creature, with a low gurgling language, like running babbling waters; in habits resembling its domestic pied relation the guinea pig. It loves to run on clean ground, and on the ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... unanimous, undulate, urbanity, usurious, uxorious, vacillate, vacuous, vandalism, variegate velocity, venal, venereal, venial, venous, veracious, verdant, verisimilitude, vernacular, versatile, vestal, vibratory, vicarious, vicissitude, virulence, viscid, viscous, vitiate, vitreous, vituperate, vivacious, volatile, volition, voluminous, voluptuary, voluptuous, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... letters in the high school of journalism. Like his contemporaries, Artemus Ward and Bret Harte, he first found free play for his comic intransigeance in the broad freedom of the journal for the masses. Brilliant as he was, Artemus Ward seemed most effective only when he spoke in weird vernacular through the grotesque mouthpiece of his own invention. Bret Harte sacrificed more and more of the native flavour of his genius in his progressive preoccupation with the more sophisticated refinements of the purely literary. Mark Twain never lost the ruddy glow of his first inspiration, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... but to pause and consider; it does not want to use the present as a point of departure. It wants to bask in the present perfection of color, word, or sound. The practical man is interested in a present situation for what can be done with it; he wants to know, in the vernacular, "What comes next?" "Where do we go from here?" The appreciator wishes to remain in the lovely interlude of perfection which he experiences in ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... work of thorough and painstaking research unequalled in mediaeval literature. His other principal works were the "Konunga-bok," or chronicle of the kings of Norway, and the "Islendinga-bok," or description of Iceland.[247] Ari's books, written not in monkish Latin, but in a good vigorous vernacular, were a mine of information from which all subsequent Icelandic historians were accustomed to draw such treasures as they needed. To his diligence and acumen they were all, from Snorro Sturlason down, very much indebted. ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... unpractical. Plato is to him the 'exhaustive generalizer,' beyond whom it is folly to aspire, and by whose stature he measures the nations. Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, are only brisk young men translating into the vernacular wittily his good things. St. Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg also 'say after him.' Emerson either addresses men whose ignorance he greatly exaggerates, or else the ideal men of some centuries hence. His mission ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... who write in the Scots vernacular, and the modesty of the supply is perhaps determined by the slenderness of the demand, for pure Scots is a tongue which in the changes of the age is not widely understood, even in Scotland. The various accents remain, but ...
— Songs of Angus and More Songs of Angus • Violet Jacob
... the item on his table. Then he wandered into the local editor's room. The newspaper boys all liked Hammerly, and many a good item they got from him. They never gave him away, and he saw that they never got left, as the vernacular is. ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... horse-trough. I thought she was safe then; but Jock, he gave a spring and caught hold of the eend of her tail, and down they both come, kerwumpus, on to the ground, and rolled eend over eend." (It was observable that in the heat of narration Bubble dropped his school English, and reverted to the vernacular of Glenfield.) "But that was more than the old cat could stand, and she turned and went for him. Ha, ha! 't was 'ki, hi!' out of the other side of his mouth then, I tell ye, Miss Hildy! You never see a dog ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... appreciation they received here gave them the impetus to go elsewhere, and thus brought them fame and fortune." Whatever foundation there may be for these jibes, they are in themselves a sufficient evidence that Chicago is alive to her opportunities and responsibilities. She is, in her own vernacular, "making, culture hum." Mr. Fuller, I understand, reproached her with her stockyards—an injustice which even Mr. Bernard Shaw would scarcely have committed. Is it the fault of Chicago that the world is carnivorous? Was not "Nature red in tooth and ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... disdained to try and read a single word of it, but from various sources he had picked up words which he fitted into his speech as best it suited him, with a result which was sometimes effective but more often startling. Maryllia was well accustomed to it, and understood what she called 'Gigue's vernacular'—but the ladies and gentlemen of her house- party were not so well instructed, and Mrs. Bludlip Courtenay, whose knowledge of the French language was really quite extraordinary, immediately essayed the famous singing-master in his ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... first ferment of Jean Paul's sincere and huge imagination. See, for instance, Vol. II. p. 229. And we cannot too much admire the tact which Mr. Brooks has brought to the decanting of these seething passages into tolerable vernacular limits. Sometimes, indeed, he misses a help which he might have procured for the reader, to lift him, with less danger of dislocation, to these pinnacles of passion, by transferring more of the elevated idiom of the style: for, in some of the complicated paragraphs, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... after admission, a new cadet. After the candidates are examined and the proficient ones admitted, these latter are known officially as "new cadets," but in the cant vernacular of the corps they are dubbed "plebes," and they retain this designation till the candidates of the next year report. They are then called "yearlings," a title applied usually to them in camp only. After the encampment they become "furloughmen" until they return ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... least recognize it. The fact is, Mr. Tippengray, I do not believe that your method of Greek pickling will answer to preserve our fiction for the future. It may do for histories and scientific work, but when you come to dialect and vernacular, if you once get it into Greek you can never get it back again as it ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... of it all we have the newspapers. There are three or four in English, one in French, and the rest in the vernacular. The most interesting is "The Peking Gazette," since it represents the pure Chinese point of view. Printed in English, it is owned and edited by the Chinese, and gives their side of the story. The editor is a delightful man, Chinese, an Oxford graduate, fiery, intense, ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... this critical literature that our new development springs. As vernacular languages were used for poetry, problems of Hindi composition began to dwarf those of Sanskrit. It was necessary to discuss how best to treat each nayika and nayaka not only in Sanskrit but in Hindi poetry also, and to ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... Jacks. Their constitution triumphed over everything. If anything could ruffle their serenity, it was the refusal of a tradesman to give credit. But uno avulso non deficit alter, as Jack was accustomed, on such occasions, classically to say to his wife—presently deviating into the corresponding vernacular of—'Well, my dear, if one cock ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... dignity to native tongues by requiring the priests to preach more frequently in the vernacular of the people, and thus helped to make the services of the Church of greater profit to ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... these grounds fair claims to the public favour and attention; he was an illiterate old steward, whose partiality to the family, in which he was bred and born, must be obvious to the reader. He tells the history of the Rackrent family in his vernacular idiom, and in the full confidence that Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, Sir Kit, and Sir Condy Rackrent's affairs will be as interesting to all the world as they were to himself. Those who were acquainted with the manners of a certain class of the gentry of Ireland some years ago, will want no evidence ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... of the century following the Conquest, the chief authors, such as Peter of Blois, John of Salisbury, Joseph of Exeter, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, all wrote in Latin. Layamon, however, a priest of Ernesley- upon-Severn, used the vernacular in a poem which, as we have already hinted, was essentially a translation of Wace's 'Brut d'Angleterre.' The most remarkable thing about Layamon's poem is the language in which it is written-language ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... 'backslidings,' to the use of field preachers. But worse, by a great deal, and not even intelligible in England, is the word thereafter, used as an adverb of time, i.e., as the correlative of hereafter. Thereafter, in pure vernacular English, bears a totally different sense. In 'Paradise Lost,' for instance, having heard the character of a particular angel, you are told that he spoke thereafter, i.e., spoke agreeably to that character. 'How a score of sheep, Master Shallow?' The answer ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... Nilakantha is as unintelligible as the text. Telang also has given a verbal rendering which differs from the above slightly. His foot-notes do not, I think, bring out the meaning at all. As regards the two vernacular versions, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... with poetical composition, and was the intimate friend of some of the most eminent bards of his time. But he was above all devoted to the study of philosophy and history. He made a version of Aristotle's Ethics into the vernacular, which was first printed nearly fifty years after his death, at Saragossa, in 1509. He compiled also a Chronicle of Navarre from the earliest period to his own times, which, although suffered to remain in manuscript, has been liberally used and cited by the Spanish antiquaries, Garibay, Blancas, ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... also are primitive words, and may be considered as a part of our vernacular language. They are of equal antiquity with ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... with the most audacious jokes, even at sacred things. Ghiberti and Cennini do not praise him for piety, but for having "brought Art back to Nature" and "translated it from Greek into Latin,"—that is, from the language of clerks into the vernacular. It is not anything special in the intention that gives Giotto his fame, but the freedom, directness, and variety of the language with which it is expressed. The effort to escape from traditional formulas and conventional ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... corruption of Archytas. Boccaccio's Teseide (the story of Theseus) which was written about 1344, and may have been first issued wholly or in part under the title of Amazonide, is a poem in the vernacular consisting of twelve books and ten thousand ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... and the enormous responsibility they undertake for the books which they sanction by their official examinations for degrees, the name of Paley is their great opprobrium. But, on the other hand, for style, Paley is a master. Homely, racy, vernacular English, the rustic vigor of a style which intentionally foregoes the graces of polish on the one hand, and of scholastic precision on the other—that quality of merit has never been attained in a degree so eminent. This first interchange of thought upon a topic of literature did not tend ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the Cornish original and prove themselves to be no better, no worse, than the average of such performances throughout the kingdom. Old Cornwall, it must be confessed, did very little for literature; and if we regret the extinction of the vernacular, it is not for any literary treasures that remain embodied in it. But an event that took place at Penryn is the theme of something a little better than the Cornish interludes—namely, the "Penryn Tragedy," which inspired Lillo's play The Fatal Curiosity. It is said that a Penryn ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... About a dozen were authors noted but not dated by Phillips, and it is probable that Winstanley was unable to learn more about them. Fifteen others were English poets who apparently did not write in the vernacular. An additional fifteen were poets dated by Phillips but described as inferior or almost forgotten. Still another fifteen were older or early Renaissance poets whose names probably meant nothing to Winstanley. On the other hand, ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... rests upon a table, and the slender bejewelled fingers are listlessly pressing open a lettered scroll of parchment on which can be deciphered the words "A CHI T'HA FIGLIATO" (to her who bare thee)—a legend which the bibliographer, whose acquaintance with the vernacular was not on a level with his classical attainments, conjectured to be some fashionable courtly toast of ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas |
