"Vocabulary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... steadily on, however, the coach eventually arrives at the brink of a hitherto unnoticed hollow, and the scene that here awaits the traveller is magnificent in the extreme. To describe the view baffles my limited vocabulary. There you are looking down on the roofs of the houses in La Paz, which lies snugly 1,200 feet below you. It just seems that you could drop a stone on to them, so precipitate are the cliffs; but it is the enormous drop that deceives the eye, because, of the route over which ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... the power of a true philosophy, shall not be the law of our being; and it is curious to note the way in which, consciously or unconsciously, that philosophic purpose shapes his treatment, even in minute detail, of education, of art, of daily life, his very vocabulary, in which such pleasant or innocent words, as "manifold," "embroidered," "changeful," become the synonyms of what is evil. He, first, notes something like a fixed cycle of political change; but conceives it (being change) ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... is delightful to every reader, and invaluable as a study to every person who wishes to obtain a wide command over the English language. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people. There is not an expression, if we except a few technical terms of theology, which would puzzle the rudest peasant. We have observed several pages which do not contain a single word of more than two ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... dispute about a pair of diamond ear-rings, left by her grandmother, observed, that her mother might, if she pleased, call jealousy, propriety; but that she must not be surprised if other people used the old vocabulary; that her mamma's pride and vanity were always at war; for that though she was proud enough to see her daughters show well in public, yet she required to have it said that she looked younger than any of them, and that she was ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... the sheet-iron stove; they put on aprons and swept. The rest of the association dropped into the theater every evening, and were literary and superior. They had borrowed Carol's manuals of play-production and had become extremely stagey in vocabulary. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... write in the language their fathers used. They seem to have lost the vocabulary, and to have picked up, in place of it, the jargon of the Yellow Press, which does not tend to clear definition on points of theology. The mass of all this controversial stuff is no more absurd, no more frantic, than it used to be: but in language it has lost its dignity with its homeliness. ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... suggestiveness: that quality or effect which we all feel to be present in romantic and absent from classic work, but which we find it hard to describe by any single term. It is open to any analyst of our critical vocabulary to draw out the fullest meanings that he can, from such pairs of related words as classic and romantic, fancy and imagination, wit and humor, reason and understanding, passion and sentiment. Let us, for ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... entitled Poluglssos was published in Belgium in 1841, which is even more misleading and unintelligible than the Portuguese School Book. The English vocabulary contains some amazing words, such as agridulce, ales of troops, ancientness sign, bivacq fire, breast's pellicule, chimney black money, infatuated compass, iug (vocal), window, umbrella, etc. At the end of ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... Billy. His vocabulary was too limited to express his thoughts fully, but he did fairly well ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... to Gujarat and the Deccan. In adopting the profession of transport agents for the imperial troops they may have been amalgamated into a fresh caste with other Hindus and Muhammadans doing the same work, just as the camp language formed by the superposition of a Persian vocabulary on to a grammatical basis of Hindi became Urdu or Hindustani. The readiness of the Charans to commit suicide rather than give up property committed to their charge was not, however, copied by the Banjaras, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... you," she cried chokingly, "I won't—" she could say no more. There were no words in her meagre vocabulary to voice her bitterness ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... uncomplimentary adjective, the duchess would have felt cheered. As it was, a fixed and settled melancholy lay upon her spirit until she saw in a dealer's list an advertisement of a prize macaw, warranted a grand talker, with a vocabulary of over ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... who hasn't been jerked up astride of the plow-handles or been flung into the furrow by a balky plow has never had his vocabulary tested. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... the vocabulary more bitter, more direful in its import, than all the rest. Reader, if poverty, if disgrace, if bodily pain, even if slighted love be your unhappy fate, kneel and bless Heaven for its beneficent influence, so that you are not ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... impassioned improvisation. It is difficult to imagine that Lucretius wrote slowly. The strange word vociferari, which he uses so often, and which the Romans of the Augustan age almost dropped from their poetic vocabulary, seems exactly made to suit his utterance. Yet at times he tempers the full torrent of resonant utterance with divine tranquillity, and leaves upon our mind that sense of powerful aloofness from his subject, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... knocking about one may discover how limited a vocabulary has been their portion; and observation with a traveler means a widening of the horizon that ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... celebration of certain great themes which are the eternal subjects of all poetry, subjects such as love and nature, and sentiments like enthusiasm and pity. The very language completes the illusion. The choice of words was often far from perfect, as George Sand's vocabulary was often uncertain, and her expression lacked precision and relief. But she had the gift of imagery, and her images were always delightfully fresh. She never lost that rare faculty which she possessed of being ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... country. His great services in reducing the Maori language to written form have hardly been sufficiently recognised. Marsden, like the other settlers, could never adapt himself to the Italian vowel sounds, and at his request Kendall wrote out a new vocabulary on a different system; but he soon found it unsatisfactory, and returned to the principles which he had worked out with Professor Lee. For the rest of his life—in South America and in Australia—he still tried to perfect his Maori Grammar. But the tragedy ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... Dryden confessed that he "understood the nature of the passions," and "made his characters distinct;" so that "his failings were not so much in the passions themselves, as in his manner of expression." Unfortunately, his vocabulary was neither choice nor extensive, and he "often obscured his meaning by his words, and sometimes made ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... among the various phases of Gipsy life, I find the same black array of facts staring me in the face, the same dolorous issues everywhere. The words reason, honour, restraint, and fidelity are words not to be found in their vocabulary. My later inquiries fully confirm my previous statements as to two-thirds living as husband and wife being unmarried. I have not found a Gipsy to contradict this statement. Abraham Smith fully ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... Miss Hescott's vocabulary is filled with choice sayings, expressive if scarcely elegant. Beyond her dislike to Mrs. Bethune, personally—she might have conquered that—Minnie is clever—there is always the fact that Mrs. Bethune is poor, and poor people, as Minnie ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... He called his old uncle all the vile names under the sun for not helping him across the gully. While he swore roundly in all the moods and tenses of the Spanish language, his uncle fished on, now and then congratulating his hopeful nephew on his accomplishment. At the end of his rich vocabulary the urchin sauntered off into the fields, and shortly returned with a bunch of flowers, and with all smiles handed them to me with the innocence of an angel. I remembered having seen the same flower on the banks of the river farther up, some ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... marks in the paradigms and vocabulary lists have been supplied or regularized. Other errors and anomalies are listed at the end of the text. Bracketed text is in the original unless ...
— Sketch of Grammar of the Chippeway Languages - To Which is Added a Vocabulary of some of the Most Common Words • John Summerfield
... reaches them now has almost to begin all over again. It has to undo their thinking about prayer and faith and God's love and human conduct and nearly every other Christian idea. They have a Christian vocabulary, but it means very little. They think they can buy religion, if they want it—any kind they want. And if they can't afford it, or don't want it, they don't quite think they'll be sent to hell for ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... "necessitates the admission of different independent beginnings for the material elements" [the vocabulary] "of the Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan branches of speech." The same thing Mueller affirms of "the formal elements" [the grammatical structure] "of these groups of languages." "We can perfectly understand how, either through individual influences or by the wear and tear of speech ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... subject—they were dry, picturesque, and to the point, and even our bluejackets, who were none too particular about language, looked at Oates with undisguised astonishment at the length and variety of his emergency vocabulary. ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... fancy. Still he strove to analyse the sound. Sonorous as thunder was it, mellow as a golden bell, thin and sweet as a thrummed taut cord of silver—no; it was none of these, nor a blend of these. There were no words nor semblances in his vocabulary and experience with which to describe ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... Correct Speech Courtesy in Conversation The Voice Ease in Speech Local Phrases and Mannerisms Importance of Vocabulary Interrupting the Speech of Others Tact in Conversation Some Important Information What ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... long figure. "I've never lifted my feet save for the purpose of transportation. I'd like to learn how to dance because Deacon Tower thinks it wicked and I've learned that happiness and sin mean the same thing in his vocabulary." ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... REED'S THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. A brief history of the grammatical changes of the language and its vocabulary, with exercises on synonyms, prefixes, suffixes, word-analysis, and word-building. A text-book for high schools and ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... to talk at one year. He early learns to say "mamma" and "papa," and gradually adds nouns to his vocabulary, so that at eighteen months the normal child should have a vocabulary of one hundred to one hundred and fifty words. As he nears the two-year mark, he has acquired a few simple verbs and he can possibly put three words together, such ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... they? What is their worth, and "what is their amount?" When we think or speak of a Judge or a General, we associate with it the ideas of office and character; we think of gravity in one and bravery in the other; but when we use the word merely as a title, no ideas associate with it. Through all the vocabulary of Adam there is not such an animal as a Duke or a Count; neither can we connect any certain ideas with the words. Whether they mean strength or weakness, wisdom or folly, a child or a man, or the rider or the horse, is all equivocal. What respect then can be paid to that which describes nothing, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... to, on the alluvial plains of Grave Creek in Western Virginia, was in one of the types of this ancient character. This type of the alphabet may be called AONIC[6]—a term derived from the aboriginal vocabulary. I visited the locality in 1843—carefully examined the facts, and having satisfied myself of the authenticity of the discovery, took duplicate copies of the inscription in wax, and transmitted them to Europe. The inscription consists ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... that he has done nothing of the kind, but that he has simply reaffirmed the individual's experiences in a more generalized vocabulary. And again, I can be excused from proving technically that the transcendentalist reasonings fail to make religion universal, for I can point to the plain fact that a majority of scholars, even religiously disposed ones, stubbornly refuse to treat them as convincing. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... commerce, administration, and higher education), Arabic (widely spoken in Zanzibar), many local languages note: Kiswahili (Swahili) is the mother tongue of the Bantu people living in Zanzibar and nearby coastal Tanzania; although Kiswahili is Bantu in structure and origin, its vocabulary draws on a variety of sources, including Arabic and English, and it has become the lingua franca of central and eastern Africa; the first language of most people is ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... system of signs for letters was not attached to the caveat, but a careful reading of the text, in which reference is made to the drawing, will prove conclusively that it was. Moreover, in this caveat under section 5, "The Dictionary or Vocabulary," the very first sentence reads: "The dictionary is a complete vocabulary of words alphabetically arranged and regularly numbered, beginning with the letters of the alphabet." The italics are mine. The mistake arose because the drawing was detached from the caveat and ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... No vocabulary of the Servants' Hall could have encompassed the fine phrase grand seigneur, but, when Mrs. Blayne and the rest talked of him in their least resentful and more amiable moods, they unconsciously made efforts to express the quality in ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... confides that every man will do his duty'?" Some one suggested "England" instead of "Nelson," and Nelson at once caught at the improvement. The signal-officer explained that the word "confide" would have to be spelt, and suggested instead the word "expects," as that was in the vocabulary. So the flags on the masthead of the Victory spelt out the historic sentence to the slowly moving fleet. That the signal was "received with cheers" is scarcely accurate. The message was duly acknowledged, ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... super-magic overwhelmed him and his tribe with sleep-magic and storm-magic of the strongest, lay bound hand and foot, sullenly brooding. No one could get a word from Abd el Rahman; not even Rrisa, who exhausted a wonderful vocabulary of imprecation on him, until the Master sternly bade him hold ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... burst out with a mighty oath. "There's no word in devil's or man's vocabulary to call you by. You're to thank for this. Weren't you ordered to keep guard by ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... waiter and asked, "Do they always drink cold coffee in Java?" The waiter, who could only stand passive while this calm robbery was committed—for had not the whole company to wait for a second brew—made reply with the only English of his vocabulary, "yes." X., who had the doubtful advantage of understanding as well as seeing all that was going on, glared fiercely as he saw himself deprived of the only portion of the meal which was at all likely to be good, and could willingly have ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... colony in Wales still retains its ancient words—leaves no room for doubt that at one time a landed highway existed between the two worlds. The Mandans, on the Upper Missouri, have many words of undoubted Armorican origin in their vocabulary,[4] just as the Chiapenec, of Central America, contains its principal words denotive of deity, family relations, and many conditions of life that are identically the same as in the Hebrew,[5] the name of father, son, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... yer somethin'," he said, good-naturedly; "but next time yer shove people, Mr. Gordon, just quit shovin' yer friends. My shoulder feels like—" perhaps it's just as well not to say what his shoulder felt like. The Western vocabulary is expressive, but at times not quite ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... Magdalen would show him to her, and tell her his name. Angela was glad enough to break off poor Susan's questioning, and come forward, with the child still clinging, to incite the bird to display the rose colour under his crest, put up a grey claw to shake hands, and show off his vocabulary, laughing herself and acting merriment as she did so, in hopes ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... a brother who is a real educated gentleman, he tried to dissuade me from publishing my history because I think he is afraid he will be outshone by literary merit. I have no ambition to outshine him, nor William Shakespere nor any other erudite. I have a very limited vocabulary, and since swearing and smoking are not allowed in print, I shall have to loose the biggest half of that. I shall omit foreign language, I could assault you with Mex—or Siwash but I fear you could not survive the battery. So I shall confine myself to simple speech, such as I ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... without the park, enjoying such a prospect! and there is such a mountain on t'other side of the park commanding all prospects, that I wore out my eyes with gazing, my feet with climbing, and my tongue and my vocabulary with commending! The best notion I can give you of the satisfaction I showed, was, that Sir George proposed to carry me to dine with my Lord Foley; and when I showed reluctance, he said, "Why, I thought you did not mind any strangers, if you were to see any thing!" Think ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... of a long flight of stone steps and see the citadel looming above. It is Spain, and my passport is at the hotel. They are said to be very suspicious in Spain; to act first and investigate afterward. My whole vocabulary has already been employed at the custom-house, and consists of "Americano," "caramba," and "Si, Senor." It won the day at Irun. Will it ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... vocabulary amused Barstein. Evidently the dictionary was his fount of inspiration. Without it Niagara was reduced to a trickle. He seemed indeed quite shy of speech, preferring to gaze ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... complicated a complete language must be, with its long and arbitrary vocabulary, its intricate system of sounds; the many forms that single words may take, especially if they are verbs; the rules of grammar, the sentence structure, the idioms, slang and inflections. Heavens, what a genius for tongues these ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... comrade, yet, before the foremost succeeded in laying hands upon me, a newcomer, resplendent in glittering uniform, with an inflamed, almost purple face, leaped madly forth from the opposite side of the mast and began laying about him vigorously with an iron pin, making use meanwhile of a vocabulary of choice Spanish epithets such as ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... scared into submission by dreadful pictures of hell and fear of everlasting torment. After church they would gamble, and they often lost everything, even wives and children. They were low, brutal, unintelligent, with an exceedingly limited vocabulary and an unbounded appetite. A man is as he eats, and, as some one says, "If a man eats peanuts he will ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... law in any true sense. What really exists is the exclusive state—der geschlossene Staat—and in another sense than that of Fichte. This state is rigorously national: it excludes all foreign words from its vocabulary, and it would fain exclude all foreign articles from its shores in order to found a real 'national' economy such as List preached. Further, in the teaching of Treitschke this exclusive state is, 'as Machiavelli first clearly saw', essentially ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... impartially, "although we each think there is but one. I will agree that yours is more entertaining. Jannie was jealous again. The Roman orgies, the young person from the grands boulevards, were more than she could accept; and she tried, in the vocabulary lately so prevalent, a reprisal. But I must acknowledge that I am surprised at the persistent masculine flexibility ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... elegant expressions in the Bible. The peculiarities of the historical writings are carefully avoided, while all modifications of style peculiar to poetry are gathered together to constitute what may fairly be called a vocabulary ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... "National Assembly," the "Tiers," the "Constitution"—these, too, soon to be effaced by more Republican appellations. For on the abolition of the monarchy and the inauguration of the Religion of Nature, the words "royal" and "saint" disappear from the revolutionary vocabulary. A new calendar is promulgated: streets and squares are renamed: Rues des Droits de l'Homme, de la Revolution, des Piques, de la Loi, efface the old landmarks. We must now say Rue Honore, not St. Honore, and Mont Marat for Montmartre. ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... diction and vocabulary of these letters with those employed in my own writing—I am not unknown as a magazine contributor—and I find no points of similarity between the two." There is much further evidence in this case for which I refer the ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... much, are not in my vocabulary," said Sir Tom; "have they a meaning? not certainly that has any connection with a certain charming Contessina. If that lady has a fault, which I doubt, it is that she gives too little of her gracious ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... the observance of the rule that the English present should talk to each other, as well as to the strangers, in French. He had a thorough colloquial knowledge of the French language, marked not so much by any French mannerism, of which there was little, as by a ready command of the vocabulary of special subjects—for ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... very favourable account of the disposition of the native inhabitants on the shores of the channel; and he had frequent communications with them. In person and manner of living, they agree with those described by Marion and Cook; but the vocabulary of their language is somewhat different; and bark canoes, which preceding navigators had thought them not to possess, were found in the channel. The description of the country is, generally, favourable; though somewhat less so than that of captain Cook at Adventure Bay. The climate ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... the trained Michigan rats, captured way up there, and trained to jump and run all around the box at the—at the—at the slightest PRE-text!" He paused, partly to take breath and partly to enjoy his own surprised discovery that this phrase was in his vocabulary. ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... when my teacher told me about a new thing I asked very few questions. My ideas were vague, and my vocabulary was inadequate; but as my knowledge of things grew, and I learned more and more words, my field of inquiry broadened, and I would return again and again to the same subject, eager for further information. Sometimes a new word revived an image ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... would not any longer own or recognise her. Afterwards he exhibited the most contradictory emotions, and first cursed Maria Monk; then reviled the Priests, applying to them all the loathsome epithets in the Canadian vocabulary. Subsequently, he went to make inquiries at the Seminary; and after his return to Mr. Johnson's house he declared, that the persons there had informed him, that Maria Monk had lived in the Nunnery, but not as a Nun; then he offered to assist her in her endeavours ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... with the vocabulary of literary criticism: the first use of a name, because the name was coined by someone who felt the need of it, is often striking and instructive; the impression is fresh and new. Then the freshness wears off it, and the ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... with energy and interest various civic offices, which were freely offered to him. From 1828 to 1832, he was an efficient member of the Territorial Legislature, where he introduced a system of township and county names, formed on the basis of the aboriginal vocabulary, and also procured the incorporation of a historical society, and, besides managing the finances, as chairman of an appropriate committee, he introduced and secured the passage of several laws respecting the ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... and especially Chwangtse as I think, did for the Chinese was to publish the syntax and vocabulary of that ancient language; to make people understand how to take these grand protagonists of Tao; how to communicate familiarly with these selfless avatars of the Most High. Listen to this: the thought is close-packed, but I think ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... here discovers a deep knowledge of human nature. He knew the power of ridicule and of invective. At a later day, a writer of the same stamp, in "The Second Wash, or the Moore Scoured once more," (written against Dr. Henry More, the Platonist), in defence of that vocabulary of names which he has poured on More, asserts it is a practice allowed by the high authority of Christ himself. I transcribe the curious passage:—"It is the practice of Christ himself to character men by those things to which they assimilate. Thus hath he called ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... had plunged garrulously into a confusing description of the Far East. He was clasping the pickets of the fence with his hands, and his eyes were fastened on hers. He lacked neither confidence nor vocabulary, and not for an instant did his tongue hesitate or his eyes wander, and yet in his manner there was nothing at which she could take offence. He appeared only amiably vain that he had seen much of the world, and anxious to impress that fact upon ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... since the early days in Nanking when he had succumbed to the charms of a slant-eyed little Celestial at the tender age of seven. He had always had a girl, just as he had always had a job; but both had varied with time and place. With a vocabulary of a dozen words and the sign language, he had managed to flirt across France and back again. He had frivoled with half a dozen trained nurses in as many different hospitals, and had even had a sentimental round ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... 1881 Gatschet made a collection of linguistic material among the Catawba Indians of South Carolina, and was struck with the resemblance of many of the vocables to Siouan terms of like meaning, and began the preparation of a comparative Catawba-Dakota vocabulary. To this the Tutelo, cegiha, {LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED T}{LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN O}iwere, and Hotcangara (Winnebago) were added by Dorsey, who made a critical examination of all Catawba material extant and compared it with several Dakota dialects, with which he was specially conversant. ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... were checkers. These practical men have a better grip on life than the cynics and dreamers like you. You call them plebeian and bourgeois and Philistine and limited—all the bad names in your select vocabulary. But they know how to feel in the good, old, common-sense way. You've lost that. I like plebeian earnestness and push. I like success at something, and hearty enjoyment, and good dinners, and big men who talk about a million as if it were ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... I was a little doubtful about the proper way to talk to a real author, being purely a Chicagoan myself, and I had an idea that while my usual vocabulary was good enough for business purposes it might be too easy-going to impress a literary person properly, and in trying to talk up to her standard I had to be very careful in my choice of words. No publisher likes to have his authors ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... allowing the other extreme of looseness, weak colloquialism in words, and formless monotony of sentence, with the endless repetition of the connective "and." Language should be fresh, vital, varied. It should have some dignity. Much reading, writing, and speaking are necessary to secure an adequate vocabulary, and a readiness in putting in firm form a variety of sentences. Concreteness of expression and occasional illustration are more needed in speech than in writing, and the brief anecdote or story is welcome and useful if there ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... be a word to conjure with in these days. Popular speech has taken it in its present connotation from the technical vocabulary of engineering, and the term has brought with it a very refreshing sense of accuracy and practicality. It suggests blueprints and T-squares and mathematical formulae. A faint and rather pleasant odor of ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... be understood that my argument applies solely to the English language, I think I might fairly take exception to a string of instances with which A.E.B. endeavours to refute me from a vocabulary of a language very expressive, no doubt, yet commonly called "slang". The words in question are not English: I never use them myself, nor do I recognise the right or necessity for any one else to do so; and I might, indeed, deem this a sufficient answer. But ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 36. Saturday, July 6, 1850 • Various
... be hardened, to give them strong constitutions. Am I and my brother the worse for it?" said Sylvie. "You'll make Pierrette a peakling"; this was a word in the Rogron vocabulary which meant a puny and suffering ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... must succeed!" said the professor, striking an attitude. "In the vocabulary of youth, there's no such word as 'fail'! Away with timid ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... the strings of his profanity and fairly outdid himself. Jacob Kent brought out a stool that he might enjoy it in comfort. Having exhausted all the possible combinations of his vocabulary, the sailor quieted down to hard thinking, his eyes constantly gauging the progress of the sun, which tore up the eastern slope of the heavens with unseemly haste. His dogs, surprised that they had not long ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... the very mystery of human symbols—of the uttermost secret of words in their power to express the soul of a writer—when one attempts to analyse the child-like simplicity of William Blake's style. How is it that he manages with so small, so limited a vocabulary, to capture the very "music of the spheres"? We all have the same words at our command; we all have the same rhymes; where then lies this strange power that can give the simplest syllables so original, so personal, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... holding him by the shoulders. "There isn't a word in your vocabulary to fit my condition. I am an island in a sunlit sea of emotion, Sam, a—an empty place surrounded ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... say their catechism; fasting and praying long, weary hours in their own study,—truly they were "pious and painful preachers," as Colonel Higginson saw recorded on a gravestone in Watertown. Though I suspect "painful" in the Puritan vocabulary meant "painstaking," did it not? Cotton Mather called John Fiske, of Chelmsford, a "plaine but able painful and useful preacher," while President Dunster, of Harvard College, was described by a contemporary divine as "pious painful and fit to teach." Other curious ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... itself the best record of a nation's origin, development, and relation to other races. Each vocabulary and grammar of a dead nation is a Nineveh, rich in pictures, inscriptions, and historical records, uncovering to the patient investigator not merely the external life and actions of the people, but their deepest internal life, and their connection with other peoples and times. The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... scoops, bull lead and five dibbles. Lot 10. Dung rake and dung devil. Lot 11. Four juts and a zinc skip." Farm labourers are men of little speech, and it is often needful that voices should carry far. Hence this crisp and forcible reticence. The vocabulary of the country-side undergoes few changes; and the noises to-day made by the ox-herd who urges his black and smoking team along the hill-side are precisely those that Piers Plowman ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... vocabulary next to Noah Webster, with all the dramatic power of Dan. He composed the piece one evening after his other work. We give a facsimile of the ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... inner Congo basin" (p. 15). Throughout Africa, north of the Bantu border line, the traveller meets with numerous languages widely different and mutually incomprehensible whereas with a knowledge of one Bantu language it is not difficult to understand the structure and even the vocabulary of others. The importance of this language family in Africa is therefore obvious. The author defines clearly the special and peculiar characteristics of Bantu languages. There follows an interesting discussion of the origin and spread of these languages. Probably the parent speech was ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... to an Oxford don through whom, if it were at all possible, he could reach the author. The journey to Oxford was made, and Bok was introduced to the don, who turned out to be no less a person than the original possessor of the highly colored vocabulary of the "White Rabbit" of the ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... impressions of this life, rather than of its details, that I would now write. The first and greatest is the way the average man has surmounted the impossible, has brought, as it were, a power to strike that word from his vocabulary. Living in conditions which in previous years would have caused his death, he has maintained his vitality of mind and body. Healthy amid the pestilence of decaying death, of chill from nights spent sometimes waist deep ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... midst of all the sublime and beautiful I had a happy mixture of the comic, for we had a Welsh postillion who entertained us much by his contracted vocabulary, and still more contracted sphere of ideas. He and my father could never understand one another, because my father said "quarry," and the Welshman said "querry"; and the burthen of all he said was continually asking if we would not like to be ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... that all superiority which manifests itself among a people means cheapness, and tends only to impart force to all other nations. Let us banish, then, from political economy all terms borrowed from the military vocabulary: to fight with equal weapons, to conquer, to crush, to stifle, to be beaten, invasion, tribute, etc. What do such phrases mean? Squeeze them, and you obtain nothing. Yes, you do obtain something; for from such words proceed absurd errors, and fatal and pestilent prejudices. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... they were absolutely without ideas on abstract subjects; but they were exquisitely susceptible to every shade and tone of concrete objects, and the endeavour to convey their innumerable impressions taxed the resources of that French vocabulary on whose relative poverty they so often insist. The reproaches brought against them in the matter of verbal audacities by every prominent critic, from Sainte-Beuve in one camp to Pontmartin in the other, are so many testimonies to the fact that they ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... used in a letter are vehicles for thought, but every word is not a vehicle for thought, because it may not be the kind of word that goes to the place where you want your thought to go; or, to put it another way, there is a wide variation in the understanding of words. The average American vocabulary is quite limited, and where an exactly phrased letter might completely convey an exact thought to a person of education, that same letter might be meaningless to a person who understands but few words. Therefore, it is fatal ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... failure of breath and vocabulary had perforce effected a lull. "I've had about enough of this awful life, and so I'm going to try if I can't do something to set things right again, before it's too late. Now, the Johannesburg 'boom' is the thing to do it, if anything will. It's ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... house, fairly beaten away by superior force of vocabulary, reappeared with these and other exclamations, her face livid, her foolish eyes starting from their sockets. Fanny, a sort of Mother Cary's chicken, revelled in the row, and ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... almost entire nudity". Their filthy habits. Papooses fastened in framework of light wood. Indian modes of fishing. A handsome but shy young buck. Classic gracefulness of folds of white-sheet robe of Indian. Light and airy step of the Indians something superhuman. Miserably brutish and degraded. Their vocabulary of about twenty words. Their love of gambling, and its frightful consequences. Arrival of hundreds of people at Indian Bar. Saloons springing up in every direction. Fluming operations rapidly progressing. A busy, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... what excellent words you have command of. Where in the word did you acquire such a voluminous vocabulary?" ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... deficient in spelling inevitably confines his vocabulary to narrow limits and so lacks facility of expression and nicety of diction. Accordingly, he suffers by comparison with others whose vocabulary is more extensive and whose diction is, therefore, more elegant. The consciousness of his shortcomings ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... choose these, and these alone, is what will give us part in the holy value of life. The choice and the refusal of them is the Yea and the Nay of all that makes life worth living; and is the source, to the positivists, of the solemnity, the terrors, and sweetness of the whole ethical vocabulary. 'What then are the alternative pleasures that life offers me? In how many ways am I capable of feeling my existence a blessing? and in what way shall I feel the blessing of it most keenly?' This is the great life-question; it may be asked indifferently by any ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... day, vocabulary, grammar, logic returned. They still iterated and reiterated their experiences, but with a coherence which gradually grew to consistence. In between, however, came ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... you—and I have already done so, I see—that, since I have been here, I have had daily lessons in English with a cultivated English woman; and in consequence I have been learning to enlarge a very meagre vocabulary, and have begun to appreciate possibilities in my own language of which ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... he exclaimed shrugging his shoulders lightly ... "These words, my young friend, are terms that nowadays belong exclusively to the vocabulary of the uneducated masses; we,—and by WE, I mean scientists, and men of the highest culture,—have long ago rejected them as unmeaning and therefore unnecessary. Phenomenon is a particularly vile expression, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Lindsay I have found is as easily remembered and as much enjoyed as Mother Goose, though it is a pity it is about an unfamiliar animal. As for the Dinkey-bird even a seven-year-old can hardly hear the rhyme even if intellectually he could follow the adult vocabulary and the complicated sentence with its ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... continued effort at description I have exhausted my vocabulary and worn to tatters the oft-repeated phrases with which I have sought with heart full of adoring enthusiasm to announce the wonders of ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... "Excepting the twin sister tongue spoken in the Ryukyu Islands," writes Professor Chamberlain, "the Japanese language has no kindred, and its classification under any of the recognized linguistic families remains doubtful. In structure, though not to any appreciable extent in vocabulary, it closely resembles Korean, and both it and Korean may possibly be related to Mongol and to Manchu, and might therefore lay claim to be included in the so-called 'Altaic group' In any case, Japanese is what philologists call an agglutinative tongue; that is to say, it ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... drab from Washington, and seated her beside him once upon the bench of the court; Stiles as himself a Mormon, so far as the possession of two wives could make him one. From the early days of Joseph Smith, his disciples have never minced their language, and they expended their whole vocabulary now on such themes as have been cited, proving, to the satisfaction of everybody, that, in respect to the judiciary, they had indeed had just cause for complaint. The mission of Smith and Taylor failed, as might have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... and particularly the seats of country-gentlemen, leaving an alias to solve all difficulties in point of law. But I would by no means trust these alterations to the owners themselves; who, as they are generally no great clerks, so they seem to have no large vocabulary about them, nor to be well skilled in prosody. The utmost extent of their genius lies in naming their country habitation by a hill, a mount, a brook, a burrow, a castle, a bawn, a ford, and the like ingenious conceits. Yet these are exceeded by others, whereof some have contrived ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... midnight conversations with Rebecca, although as a bachelor they had never given him any disquiet. He himself was struck with this phenomenon. "Hang it," he would say (or perhaps use a still stronger expression out of his simple vocabulary), "before I was married I didn't care what bills I put my name to, and so long as Moses would wait or Levy would renew for three months, I kept on never minding. But since I'm married, except renewing, of course, I give you my honour I've not ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Words have a terrible power. And Janet's vocabulary might be as primitive as lightning, but unlike lightning it ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... task to perform you will always think that it is easy. Such words as 'difficult,' 'impossible,' 'I cannot' will disappear from your vocabulary. Their place will be taken by this phrase: 'It is easy and I can.' So, considering your work easy, even if it is difficult to others, it will become easy to you. You will do it easily, ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... that school, to study, to become a teacher perhaps—but beyond that the wings of Arul's imagination have not yet learned to soar. The meaning of service for Christ and India, the opportunity of educated womanhood, such ideas have not yet entered Arul's vocabulary. She will learn them in the ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... and intricate. It has seven cases and three genders; and as the latter are dependent upon no definite principle whatever, but are purely arbitrary, it is almost impossible for a foreigner to learn them so as to give nouns and adjectives their proper terminations. Its vocabulary is very copious; and its idioms have a peculiarly racy individuality which can hardly be appreciated without a thorough acquaintance with the colloquial ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... feel that the language of Mamma must be singularly antiquated. So much she did not understand . . . had never heard. . . . What, indeed, was a simp, a boob, a nut? What a poor fish? . . . She held her peace, and listened, confused by the astounding vocabulary and the even more astounding intimacy. What things they said to each ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... question as for a bludgeon. Davidge had some trouble in wielding it. He hated the thought so much that the words were unspeakable, and he hunted for some paraphrase. In the sparse thesaurus of his vocabulary he ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... would make him furious; he would blow me sky-high." "Well," I replied, "suppose he did go into a regular tantrum and use all the most startling expletives in the vocabulary for fifteen minutes! What is that compared with a good stove 365 days in the year? Just put all he could say on one side, and all the advantages you would enjoy on the other, and you must readily see that his wrath would kick the beam." As my logic was irresistible, she said, "Well, if you will go ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... scoffer, an atheist, an imp of Satan; and he calls the Pope the scarlet mother of abominations, Antichrist, Babylon. That age is prodigal in offensive epithets; kings and prelates and doctors alike use hard words. They are like angry children and women and pugilists; their vocabulary of abuse is amusing and inexhaustible. See how prodigal Shakspeare and Ben Jonson are in the language of vituperation. But they were all defiant and fierce, for the age was rough and earnest. The ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... Southern States that meant government by Negroes—or what was even worse, government by a combination of Negroes and the most vicious white elements, including that which was native to the soil and that which had imported itself from the North for this particular purpose. Thus the political vocabulary of Page's formative years consisted chiefly of such words as "scalawag," "carpet bagger," "regulator," "Union League," "Ku Klux Klan," and the like. The resulting confusion, political, social, and economic, did not completely amount to the destruction ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... Belle could not feel assured that the man who proposed to conjugate the verb "to love" in Armenian, was master of his intentions in plain English. It was even so. The man of tongues lacked speech wherewith to make manifest his passion; the vocabulary of the word- master was insufficient to convince the workhouse girl of one of the plainest meanings a man can well have. From the banter of the man of learning the queen of the dingle sought refuge in a precipitate flight. Almost simultaneously the word-master, albeit with ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... demonstration of affection—he growled at Tarzan as he growled at the other bulls who came too close while he was feeding—but he would have died for Tarzan. He knew it and Tarzan knew it; but of such things apes do not speak—their vocabulary, for the finer instincts, consisting more of actions than words. But now Taug was worried, and he fell asleep again still thinking of the strange words of ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... much we have been delayed by the want of money, not to speak of the wetness of the weather: it is impossible." "Impossible!" rejoined Cropper; "I wish I could get Napoleon to thee—he would tell thee there is no such word as 'impossible' in the vocabulary." "Tush!" exclaimed Stephenson, with warmth; "don't speak to me about Napoleon! Give me men, money, and materials, and I will do what Napoleon couldn't do—drive a railway from Liverpool to ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... lord-knew-what zealous chemical upon it he had let it lie unused while he picked up Kiswahili and talked by the hour to a toothless, wrinkled very black man with a touch of Arab in his breeding, and a deal of it in his brimstone vocabulary. ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... subject, to another man, the King, and not the service of an anonymous person, the functionary, to an abstraction, the State, the republic, this was formerly designated by the word faithful, (feal,) which has disappeared from our vocabulary because it is without meaning in our present ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... circumstances, have been excused for experiencing impatience at having so wild a tale foisted in brief confusion upon his credulity; in the mood of his present circumstance the elder Trenholme refolded the letter, using within himself the strongest language in his vocabulary. ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... The vocabulary of the automobile has produced an entirely new "jargon," which is Greek to the multitude, but, oh, so expressive and full of ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... with red thrilling tumult on the crowded plain. One came into the ranks of the regiment, and after the smoke and the wrath of it had faded, leaving motionless figures, everyone stormed according to the limits of his vocabulary, for veterans detest being killed when ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... man may see a fight and be able to describe it truthfully, yet he may be unable to describe it dramatically. He must have the impressibility of the poetical nature to take in all its scenes, and the vocabulary of an artist to reproduce them. But, for some reason or other, poets are not very often found under fire, unless it be that of the critics. The temperament which makes men insensible to danger is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... second Sanskrit reader at one bound, leaving me to learn the declensions as we went on. The advance I had made in Bengali[27] stood me in good stead. My father also encouraged me to try Sanskrit composition from the very outset. With the vocabulary acquired from my Sanskrit reader I built up grandiose compound words with a profuse sprinkling of sonorous 'm's and 'n's making altogether a most diabolical medley of the language of the gods. But my father never scoffed ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... bushes, with fires of wet wood, and small and poor rations. Clouds were lowering and a chilly wind fretted the forests of the Blue Ridge. Around one of the dismal, smoky fires an especially dejected mess found a spokesman with a vocabulary rich in comminations. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... language exists, as a magazine of established meanings, there will be found a repertoire of epithets of praise and blame, at once results and implements of this social process. The simple existence of such a vocabulary acts as a persistent force; but the effect of current ideals is redoubled when a coherent agency, such as public religion, assumes protection of the most searching social maxims and lends to them the weight of all time, all space, all wonder, and all fear. For many centuries religion held within ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... a mental note of the fact that this child seemed to have but two adjectives in her vocabulary. "Peggy will see to that!" she said to herself. "Peggy has improved so wonderfully in her English this last year. She will be quicker than I to notice and ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... have exhausted my small stock of legal words, and must go on in my own language instead of in the lawyer's. The end of the thing was simply this. All the money went back to Mr. Noel Vanstone's estate (another legal word! my vocabulary is richer than I thought), for one plain reason—that it had not been employed as Mr. Noel Vanstone directed. If Mrs. Girdlestone had lived, or if George had married me a few months earlier, results would have been just the other ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... him, then to come round on our side about five or six feet from the ground, just safely out of reach, and there, hanging head downwards, call us every name he could think of. Squirrels have an awful vocabulary, but I never knew one that could talk like Blacky. And every time he thought of something new to say he waved his tail at us in a way that was particularly aggravating. You have no idea how other animals poke ...
— Bear Brownie - The Life of a Bear • H. P. Robinson
... the old days exhausted his vocabulary in praise of the Luneta, the old Spanish city's pleasure ground, which overlooked the bay and Corregidor Island. It was an oval drive, with a bandstand at each end, inclosing a pretty grass plot. Here, as evening came on, all Manila congregated ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... them, had no precedent, and no vocabulary. They had come across death raw and real, uncooked by religion, undeodorised by the sayings of ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... their friendship was, however, very brief. Before many weeks had passed there was no vituperative epithet that Leicester was not in the daily habit of bestowing upon Paul. The Earl's vocabulary of abuse was not a limited one, but he exhausted it on the head of the Advocate. He lacked at last words and breath to utter what was like him. He pronounced his former friend "a very dangerous man, altogether hated of the people ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to designate parts of Gothic architecture, may, perhaps, prove acceptable to some of your readers. Having felt the need of such assistance in the course of my own reading, &c. &c.—I extracted them from an expensive work on the subject, and have only to lament that my vocabulary ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 404, December 12, 1829 • Various
... plentiful meal, after he had fasted for twenty-four hours, and when he and his followers were fainting with fatigue and want, had now the impudence and cruelty to call her by the grossest names in the vocabulary of bilingsgate. Mrs. Bradley! one of the most humane, gentle and affectionate of her sex, who would willingly have offered him bread in his true character. Tarleton even denied her admittance with her supplies to her husband; and she ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... word immortality—Unsterblichkeit—does not occur in the original; nor would it, in its usual application, find a place in Schopenhauer's vocabulary. The word he uses is Unzerstoerbarkeit—indestructibility. But I have preferred immortality, because that word is commonly associated with the subject touched upon in this little debate. If any critic doubts the wisdom of this preference, let me ask him to try his hand at ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... lyrics, she had decided to begin with German. Thyrsis had wasted a great deal of time with German courses in college, and so he was able to tell her everything not to do. He got her a little primer of grammar, just enough to make clear the language-structure; and then he set her to acquiring a vocabulary. He had little books full of words that he had prepared for himself, and these she drilled into her brain, all day and nearly all night. She stopped for nothing but to eat—in the woods when the weather was fair and in her ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... tickets at once, else you became unwelcome. Guests here had foibles at times, and a rapid exit was too easy. Therefore I bought a ticket. It was spring and summer since I had heard anything like the colonel. The Missouri had not yet flowed into New York dialect freely, and his vocabulary met me like the breeze of the plains. So I went in to be fanned by it, and there sat the Virginian at a ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... thinks it becoming to pour forth against the party to which he owes every political privilege that he enjoys. He need not fear that any member of that party will be provoked into a conflict of scurrility. Use makes even sensitive minds callous to invective: and, copious as his vocabulary is, he will not easily find in it any foul name which has not been many times applied to those who sit around me, on account of the zeal and steadiness with which they supported the emancipation of the Roman Catholics. His reproaches are not more stinging ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of the Latine Tongue, by a method of Vocabulary and Grammar; the former comprising the Primitives, whether Noun or Verb, ranked in their several Cases; the latter teaching the forms of Declension and Conjugation, with all possible plainness: To which is added the Hermonicon, viz. A Table of those Latin words, ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... to this point in his "Thoughts on Religion," and regrets that the explanation of matters of doctrine, which St. Paul expressed in the current eastern vocabulary, should have been perpetuated in terms founded on the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... Talmudic commentaries contain 3157 laazim, of which 967 occur in the Biblical commentaries and 2190 in the Talmudic, forming in the two commentaries together a vocabulary of about two thousand different words. In the Biblical commentaries, concerned, as a rule, not so much with the explanation of the meaning of a word as with its grammatical form, the laazim reproduce the person, tense, or gender of the Hebrew word; in the Talmudic commentaries, where the difficulty ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... tribes or families now inhabiting Midian represent the ancient Midianites; and all speak the vulgar half-Fellah Arabic, without any difference of accent or vocabulary ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... intelligence directed it, or at least was associated with it. The noises, whereof I have spoken, were repeated a determinate number of times. They became either strong or feeble, at my request, and came from different places. By a vocabulary of signals previously agreed upon, the power answered questions, and gave messages with more ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... William Hare, the body-snatchers and murderers of Edinburgh, who killed persons to sell their corpses to Knox's school of anatomy. Burke was hanged a week later than this letter, on January 28. Hare turned King's evidence and disappeared. A "shot" was a subject in these men's vocabulary. The author of the Waverley novels—the Great Unknown— had, of course, become known ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... only for their size and continuity of numbers; but that last one should be framed and hung upon the wall at the foot of your bed, though you would not see it often. I consider it a diploma of your qualification as Master Jackanapes." (Dad's vocabulary, when he is angry, contains some rather strengthy words of ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... older friend of mine, his excellent father, terms it, the three times eleven—by the way, not a bad paraphrase, and worthy of a retired school-master like myself. It is turning the multiplication table into a vocabulary and making it perform ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... from one to another. By words we share the common consciousness of the race, which has shaped itself in these symbols. By music we reach those special states of consciousness which, being without form, cannot be shaped with the mosaics of the vocabulary. The language of the eyes runs deeper into the personal nature, but it is purely individual, and perishes ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Monsieur de Rochefide, like all little minds, was terribly afraid of being carotte. The noun has become a verb. From the very start of his passion for Madame Schontz, Arthur was on his guard, and he was, therefore, very rat, to use another word of the same vocabulary. The word rat, when applied to a young girl, means the guest or the one entertained, but applied to a man it signifies the giver of the feast ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Browning sweep the soul upward to spiritual heights, and answer some of the deepest questionings of the soul of man. And hence literature is no longer merely a thing of vocabulary, of phrase, of rhythm, of assonance, of alliteration, or of metrical and philosophical form. It is a revelation of the progress of the soul, of its standards, of its triumphs, its defeats, and its desires. It is the unfolding of one's intellectual helplessness ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... as well be dropped out of your vocabulary. They are words that you have no use for. Replace them by two others—habit and character. Slave as you are of habit, of the character you have woven for yourself out of years of deliberate living—what wild unreason to imagine that love can unmake, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with bulging eyes and clawing fingers muttering incoherently. Sorez could do nothing but administer a small injection of the soothing drug, but this brought instant relief and with it a few moments of sanity. The doctor had picked up a small vocabulary and gathered from what the dying man muttered that he, Sorez, a very much bruised and weary mortal, was being mistaken for one from heaven. A smile lighted the haggard face of the invalid and the bony hands came together in prayer. The girl ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... mornings were spent in giving the thrush an outing and in cleaning his cage. Neither my father nor mother made any pretensions to religion; but they were strict Sabbatarians. My father never consciously swore, but, within even the limitations of his small vocabulary, he was unfortunate in his selection of phrases. I bounced into the alley one Sunday morning, whistling a Moody and ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... because the hope of freedom to the slaves lies chiefly in the dispositions of his master. The abolitionist indeed proposed to convert the slaveholders; and for this end he approached them with vituperation, and exhausted on them the vocabulary of abuse! And he has reaped as he sowed." ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... out into passionate prayer to him not to leave her, then, seeing he was still unmoved, she began to call him every tender name her limited vocabulary contained, though there was little enough need to do that, her ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... translator says, "un Wynkyn de Worde non coupe:" Qu. Would not the Debure Vocabulary have said ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... herself with such natural insight that the experts to whom these translations have been submitted found hardly a word to change. 'After all,' as she herself wrote, 'ballads are simple things, and require, as a rule, but a limited vocabulary, though ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... burst into explosive speech. Those beasts had got hold of Caesar. The Caterpillar stared; he had never heard John let himself go. John's vocabulary ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... who said that speech had been given to man in order to enable him to disguise his thoughts? Indian politicians are no Talleyrands, but they sometimes seem to have framed their vocabulary on purpose to disguise political conceptions which most of them for various reasons shrink from defining at present with decision. We have already seen how elastic is the word Swaraj, self-government, or rather self-rule. In the mouth of the "moderates" of the Indian National Congress it means, ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... yet another caveat. I did not, of course, as a child, use or even know of the vocabulary of the metaphysicians. I did, however, entertain thoughts which I could not then express, but which the words given above most nearly represent. There is one exception. In talking about "a naked soul" I am not interpreting my childish thrill of deep emotion into a later ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... the same grace, the same lightness of elastic strength. Froude, like Newman, can pass from racy, colloquial vernacular, the talk of educated men who understand each other, to heights of genuine eloquence, where the resources of our grand old English tongue are drawn out to the full. His vocabulary was large and various. He was familiar with every device of rhetoric. He could play with every pipe in the language, and sound what stop he pleased. Oxford men used to talk very much in those days, and have talked more or less ever since, about the Oriel style. Perhaps the ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... his mark upon Hull. Mr. Grosart, who lacked nothing but the curb upon a too exuberant vocabulary, a little less enthusiasm and a great deal more discretion, to be a model editor, tells us in his invaluable edition of The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Andrew Marvell, M.P.,[8:1] that he had read a number of the elder Marvell's manuscripts, consisting ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest. Containing the Unaltered Text of the original issue; some suppressed Episodes printed only in the editions issued by Mr. Murray; MS. Variorum, Vocabulary, and Notes by Professor W. ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... and then on discovering the absence of the portmanteau he would launch out into the most vehement denunciation of the carelessness and depravity of the railroad officials, heaping objurgations upon them, their fathers, and their grandfathers. Then after he had exhausted his vocabulary of invective and eased his soul, the humor of the situation would appeal to him and he would begin to laugh, quietly at first, and then in louder and louder strains until his merriment seemed more formidable ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... characters; and Mr. Gayarre has, to a considerable extent, succeeded in this difficult and delicate task. The work evinces a mind full of the subject; and if defective at all, the defect is rather in style than matter. The author evidently had two temptations to hasty composition—a copious vocabulary and complete familiarity with his subject. There is an occasional impetuosity and recklessness in his manner, and a general habit of tossing off his sentences with an air of disdainful indifference, which characterizes a large class ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... scoop the opposition press. I will get a night's sleep if I can, and to-morrow, I know, I shall capitulate. I will hunt out General O'Neill, and interview him on the field of slaughter. I will telegraph pages. I will refurbish my military vocabulary, and speak of deploying and massing and throwing out advance guards, and that sort of thing. I will move detachments and advance brigades, and invent strategy. We will have desperate fighting in the columns of the ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... spot that could be made by any means to answer the purpose was the abode of some spectre or group of spectres. So dexterous was the invention of those who worked upon my apprehensions, that they managed to transform a real into a fictitious being. His name was Palethorp; and Palethorp, in my vocabulary, was synonymous with hobgoblin. The origin of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... condition. His clothes were in rags, and his gold-lace gone. It appeared that "Jim Crow" had outraged his sense of African character so greatly that he could not restrain his passion; but vented it in the choicest billingsgate with which his vocabulary had been furnished in the forecastle of the "Gil Blas." His criticism of the real Jim was by no means agreeable to the patrons of the fictitious one. In a moment there was a row; and the result was, that Lunes after a thorough dilapidation of his finery departed in custody of the police, more, ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer |
