"Colloquial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... verse. Its smooth and spacious rhythm, flawless and serene as the distant Greek myth of the hero and the goddess it celebrates, is in striking contrast with the rougher, but brighter and more humanly colloquial blank verse of "Bishop Blougram's Apology," for example, or the stiff carefulness of the "Epistle" of Karshish. It might alone suffice, by comparison with the metrical craftsmanship of the other poems of "Men and ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... had not time to master our language as Blanco White did, or as Chamisso mastered German. To the end of her days, fluent and graceful as she was, she was not entirely conversant with English, especially with the colloquial turns of modern speech. Often a very fine thought is spoiled for hypercritical ears by the queer turn of expression which she has innocently given to it. These faults are found to a much smaller degree in her miscellaneous poems. Her sonnets, ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... laughing going on there, and by this means Mr. McDougall learnt to talk the Malay language, which he only knew from books when he first arrived. The pure Malay of books is very different from the colloquial patois of Kuching. To my sorrow, I learnt this some time after, when I was trying to prepare two women for baptism: they listened to me for some time, and then one said to the other, "She talks like a book," which I fear meant that they only half ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... preach the covenant of free grace, but Master Cotton, and that they have not the seale of the Spirit, and so were not able ministers of the New Testament." [Footnote: Short Story, p. 36.] Or, to use colloquial language, she accused the clergy of being teachers of forms, and said that, of them all, Cotton alone appealed to the animating spirit like ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... assure her that in his humble opinion she was a ——. Hard it is to fill up the hiatus decorously; but, in fact, the word very coarsely expressed that she was no better than she should be. Which reminds us of a parallel misadventure to a German, whose colloquial English had been equally neglected. Having obtained an interview with an English lady, he opened his business (whatever it might be) thus—'High-born madam, since your husband have kicked de bucket'——'Sir!' interrupted the lady, astonished ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... uncommented upon—such as 'Horace Chase'—is apt to have a dreary, unprepossessing air, unless the name is an incisive one that suggests an interesting personality. Fragments of proverbs and poems are always attractive, as well as Biblical phrases and colloquial expressions, but the magic title is the one that excites and baffles curiosity. The publishers of a recent 'Primer of Evolution' received a sudden flood of orders for the book simply on account of a review which had spoken of it under the ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... one person is addressed, even though no word may appear in the sentence indicating how many. This is an idiosyncracy which perhaps would never have been developed, certainly would not be perpetuated, in any except an unwritten language. It is of no effect except in a language always colloquial. The multiple form will be given in this grammar as the first person plural, and, whether indicated or not, the other may be understood as being the same with the change of the first syllable from Ne ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... at him, puzzled, Marakinoff leaned over, translated to Lugur. The red dwarf smiled maliciously, drew near the priestess; whispered to her what was without doubt as near as he could come in the Murian to Larry's own very colloquial phrases. ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... her mother, and went to her boudoir and sat there for hours. Nothing could have put the ugly practical side of her romance so precisely before her as her mother's black and white statement, full of the little colloquial phrases with which an un-ambitious world expresses itself. Even for him, Betty reflected, she could not endure vulgar gossip, and wondered how any high-bred woman could ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... colloquial chapter, as the author's apology for a preface, an imaginary short conference, or letter of introduction, which brings you acquainted with the eccentric writer of this volume; and as in all well regulated ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... and the instinct-doctrines of Bergson have both been pounced upon by every kind of apologist for supernatural religion and categorical morality; while the method of appealing to the optimistic prejudices of shallow minds by the use of colloquial and mystical images has of recent years been introducing into European thought what ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... reduced his adversary to the necessity of encountering him at his own weapons, and did not dismiss him without making him feel his presumption through every joint in his frame. The tyranny of Mr. Tyrrel would not have been so patiently endured, had not his colloquial accomplishments perpetually come in aid of that authority which his rank and ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... being gathered for a new outbreak in the United States. The casual laborers had greatly increased in numbers, especially in the West. These migratory workingmen—the "hobo miners," the "hobo lumberjacks," the "blanket stiffs," of colloquial speech—wander about the country in search of work. They rarely have ties of family and seldom ties of locality. About one-half of these wanderers are American born. They are to be described with precision as "floaters." Their range of operations includes the wheat regions ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... sermon. 'This is owing to a conviction in my mind,' he says, 'that in general, for the ordinary run of hearers, extempore preaching, though accompanied with some peculiar disadvantages, is more likely to be of a colloquial nature, and better adapted, on the whole, to the majority.' His departure from the practice on this occasion, he explains, is due to the request that ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... mother's influence, as an admirer of Junius, but on maturer knowledge had transferred his admiration to Burke. He cautioned me, with entire gravity, to be punctilious in writing English; never to forget that I was a Scotchman, that English was a foreign tongue, and that if I attempted the colloquial, I should certainly, be shamed: the remark was apposite, I suppose, in the days of David Hume. Scott was too new for him; he had known the author - known him, too, for a Tory; and to the genuine classic a contemporary is always something of a trouble. He had ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with as many awkward twists and turns as the winding stairways of her ancient turrets. Nobody in the novels, except the talkative, comic servant, who is meant to be vulgar and ridiculous, ever condescends to use colloquial speech. Even in moments of extreme peril the heroines are very choice in their diction. Dialogue in Mrs. Radcliffe's world is as stilted and unnatural as that of prim, old-fashioned school books. In her earliest novel she uses very little conversation, clearly finding the indirect form of narrative ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... bungalow, the wives of a village doctor and a village dry-goods merchant, a provincial teacher, a colloquial brawl over paying a servant a dollar more a week. Yet this insignificance echoed cellar-plots and cabinet meetings and labor conferences in Persia and Prussia, Rome and Boston, and the orators who deemed themselves international leaders were but the raised voices of a billion Juanitas denouncing ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... The vivid colloquial scenes in prose have much of that pungent semi-satirical humour of which Browning had shown the first glimpse in Sordello. Besides these, there is one intermediate scene in verse, the talk of the "poor girls" on the Duomo steps, which seems to me one of the ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... wholly unknown to his tame, mechanical repetitions of the morning, accompanied the simpler expositions of the afternoon, with this added advantage, that he talked on a level with the people and not over their heads, his colloquial, earnest speech riveting ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... volumes which, being not understood, was altered without any authority from the ancient copies. The former editions read odd mouthing; the text, however, is right; for old, as Mr Steevens observes, was formerly a common augmentative in colloquial language, and as such is often used by Shakespeare and others. See notes on the "Second Part of Henry IV." act ii. sc. 4, and "The Taming of the Shrew," ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... literally, enough. In the University of Cambridge, Eng., the lowest honor in the schools. The manner in which this word is used is explained in the Gradus ad Cantabrigiam, as follows: "Satis disputasti; which is at much as to say, in the colloquial style, 'Bad enough.' Satis et bene disputasti, 'Pretty fair,—tolerable.' Satis et optime disputasti, 'Go thy ways, thou flower and quintessence of Wranglers.' Such are the compliments to be expected from the Moderator, after the act is ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... attack teams?" we asked of Smith, who, now that his cattle were safe, had regained all of his cuteness and colloquial powers. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... there are no letters in the Chinese language, the difficulties in using the Morse code of telegraphy are very great. In some cases the messages are translated into a foreign language before they are transmitted; in others, a thousand or more words in colloquial and commercial use are numbered, and the number is telegraphed ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... Sophists accepted and practiced. He probably might have been acquitted if he had chosen it, but he did not wish to live after his powers of usefulness had passed away. He opened to science new matter and a new method, as a basis for future philosophical systems. He was a "colloquial dialectician," such as this world has never seen, and may never see again. He was a skeptic respecting physics, but as far as man and society are concerned, he thought that every man might and ought to know what justice, temperance, courage, piety, patriotism, etc., were, and unless he did know ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... kept pace with the noise and confusion. At one end of the table Cornelia Graham stood talking to a distinguished foreigner who was spending a few days in the city. He was a handsome man, with fine colloquial powers, and seemed much interested in a discussion which he and Cornelia carried on, relative to the society of American cities as compared with European. A temporary lull in the hum of voices allowed Cornelia to hear a remark made by a gentleman ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... when he was in a hurry, or whether he laughed over the repartees by which he baffled the priests when they tried to trap him into sedition and blasphemy, or even if you tell any part of his story in the vivid terms of modern colloquial slang, you will produce an extraordinary dismay and horror among the iconolaters. You will have made the picture come out of its frame, the statue descend from its pedestal, the story become real, with all the incalculable consequences ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... completely unable to see why the given phrases were used for their particular purpose. Every phrase is technical and legal, to a degree that often defies translation. On the other hand, the letters are often as colloquial in style as the contracts are formal. Hence they swarm with words and phrases for which no parallel can be found. Unless the purpose of the letter is otherwise clear, these words and phrases may be quite unintelligible. Any side issue may be introduced, or even ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... is his really famous "obscurity." This obscurity is variously ascribed to a diction unduly learned, or almost unintelligibly colloquial, or grotesquely inventive; to figures of speech drawn from sources too unfamiliar or elaborated to the point of confusion; to sentences complicated by startling inversions, by double parentheses, by ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... a colloquial way that it almost seemed as if the listeners themselves had asked the question, he said: "What shall we do that we may work ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... machinery which belonged to a paper of that day. It is not unlikely that he wrote letters to himself; it is certain that he wrote a series of essays entitled "The Times," pithy, forcible homilies and comments, expressed generally in a colloquial form, and intended, evidently, to be driven home sharply and positively. I give an extract from one as indicating something of the manner ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... put off our prayer a little bit,' he said, in a colloquial tone, his fixed look studying the crowded benches all the while. 'Perhaps we'll have more to pray about by-and-by.... Well, now, I haven't been long in Clough End, to be sure, but I think I've been long enough to get some ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Glossary of Anglo-Indian Colloquial Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms; etymological, historical, geographical, and discursive. By Col. H. Yule, and the late Arthur Coke Burnell, Ph.D., C.I.E., author of "The Elements of South Indian Palaeography," etc., London, John Murray, 1886. (All rights reserved), ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... did not know one word of French beyond the colloquial phrases with which everybody is familiar; but he would ask his daughter to read the crisp and tinkling tongue to him for hours at a time. He would hammer softly and file gently as she read, so that he might not lose a word of it. He would hear no ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... become the current sense: pronunciation will be varied by levity or ignorance, and the pen must at length comply with the tongue; illiterate writers will at one time or other, by publick infatuation, rise into renown, who, not knowing the original import of words, will use them with colloquial licentiousness, confound distinction, and forget propriety. As politeness increases, some expressions will be considered as too gross and vulgar for the delicate, others as too formal and ceremonious for the gay and airy; new phrases are therefore adopted, ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... each other in the whites of their eyes, if we may use a phrase so colloquial. Sitting back in the vehicle was a third traveller who took no part in the discussion, and preserved a deep silence. The driver and the patriot and even Gudin paid no attention to this mute individual; he was, in truth, one of those ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... the classical languages they sounded harsh, barking, unfitted for eloquence; sometimes because they were believed to impede the metrical flow in poetry; sometimes because, being particularly characteristic of colloquial speech, they were considered low; and often because they were associated with the languages of the Teutonic tribes which had escaped the full refining influence of Roman civilization. Swift followed writers ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob
... days will be recognized as truthful pictures of every-day occurrence. The style is colloquial and pleasant, and therefore well suited to those for whose ...
— Cat and Dog - Memoirs of Puss and the Captain • Julia Charlotte Maitland
... Here I cannot attempt to render the various plays upon words; but the term "omo[:i]" needs explanation. It means "thought" or "thoughts;" but in colloquial phraseology it is often used as a euphemism for a dying person's last desire of vengeance. In various dramas it has been used in the signification of "avenging ghost." Thus the exclamation, "His thought has come ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... Charles. Africanderisms. A glossary of South African colloquial words and phrases and of place and other names. London and ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... masters of the craft. A letter written in this vein annihilates distance; it continues the personal gossip, the intimate communion, that has been interrupted by separation; it preserves one's presence in absence. It cannot be too simple, too commonplace, too colloquial. Its familiarity is not its weakness, but its supreme virtue. If it attempts to be orderly and stately and elaborate, it may be a good essay, but it will certainly be ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... Service is not, however, monopolised by Mr. Satow, for several gentlemen in the consular service, who are passing through the various grades of student interpreters, are distinguishing themselves not alone by their facility in colloquial Japanese, but by their researches in various departments of Japanese history, mythology, archaeology, and literature. Indeed it is to their labours, and to those of a few other Englishmen and Germans, that the Japanese of the rising generation will be indebted for keeping alive not only ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... of this half-philosophical literature will most easily be understood by a few examples. But, before these are given, it will be necessary to emphasize the colloquial and scrappy nature of the teaching. Legend, parable, ritualistic absurdities, belief in gods, denial of gods, belief in heaven, denial of heaven, are all mingled, and for a purpose. For some men are able, and some are unable, to receive the true light ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... passed saluted me with the words, 'Bon soir!' although the hour was eight in the morning. In these parts, however, bon soir is frequently said at all hours. It is a colloquial peculiarity. Another is to address or speak of a gentleman and a lady ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... necessary to explain here that Pesca prided himself on being a perfect Englishman in his language, as well as in his dress, manners, and amusements. Having picked up a few of our most familiar colloquial expressions, he scattered them about over his conversation whenever they happened to occur to him, turning them, in his high relish for their sound and his general ignorance of their sense, into compound words and repetitions of his own, and always running them into each other, ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... very clear instance of this Pro-satyric class of play. It has the regular tragic diction, marked here and there (393, 756, 780, etc.) by slight extravagances and forms of words which are sometimes epic and sometimes over-colloquial; it has a regular saga plot, which had already been treated by the old poet Phrynichus in his Alcestis, a play which is now lost but seems to have been Satyric; and it has one character straight from the Satyr world, the heroic reveller, ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... says just what ought to be said, and that in style colloquial, short, sharp, and memorable. ...
— Publisher's Advertising (1872) • Anonymous
... the histrionic prevails,—by facility of association and colloquial aptitude in the common intercourse of life,—by the inventive element in dress, furniture, and material arrangements, plastic to the caprice of taste and ingenuity,—by the habitudes of out-of-door life, giving greater variety and adaptation to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... her lodgings the next day. But before she left she had a few moments' conversation with the concierge and an exchange of a word or two with some of her fellow lodgers. I have already hinted that the young lady had great precision of statement; she had a pretty turn for handling colloquial French and an incisive knowledge of French character. She left No. 34, Rue de Frivole, working itself into a white rage, but utterly undecided ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... Of this once common augmentative in colloquial language there are various instances in ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... of the happiness and interests of society with pictures of life that touch the heart by their familiarity. He is no disciple of the gaunt and famished school of simplicity. He uses the ornaments which must always distinguish true poetry from prose; and when he adopts colloquial plainness, it is with the utmost skill to avoid a vulgar humility. There is more of this sustained simplicity, of this chaste economy and choice of words, in Goldsmith than in any other modern poet, or, perhaps, than would be attainable ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... himself to a brief out-line of the tragic story, leaving all details to be developed by the witnesses, who were allowed to give their evidence with colloquial freedom and expansiveness. ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... on his mastery of colloquial expressions in English, was speaking of the serious illness of ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... after years, his indolence prompted him to plagiarise freely from sources which, surely, no human being would discover. He steeped himself in the cumbrous learning of those writers of the Renaissance in whom congested Latin is found tottering into colloquial French. He studied Rabelais perhaps more deeply than any other Englishman of his time, and certainly Beroalde de Verville, Bruscambille, and other absurdities of the sixteenth century were familiar to him and ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... 7000 Louis or so this year, it would be impossible for you even to foresee the year in which you could repay it; but,"—here Duplessis paused a minute, and then lowering the tone of his voice, which had been somewhat vehement and enthusiastic, into that of a colloquial good-fellowship, equally rare to the measured reserve of the financier, he asked, with a lively twinkle of his grey eye, "Did you never hear, Marquis, of a little encounter between ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... powers who rule the tongue, if such there are, And make colloquial happiness your care, Preserve me from the thing I dread and hate— A duel in the ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... and remembrances spring forth at the mental utterance of these words! On retiring from the parlour, I was ushered into what was, of old, denominated, in the quaint colloquial language of Scotland, "The Prophet's Cham'er"—that is, the apartment for study, which was to be found thus distinguished in all the old manses of our clergy. It was now a bedroom, the library being established in another apartment; and ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... Colloquial term for a person recovered from a plague which left large patches of blue pigment irregularly distributed over the body. Especially, inhabitants of Dara. The condition is said to be caused by a chronic, ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... very keen edge. Nor was he less impatient of the sallies of egotism and vanity, even when they were in so slight a degree that strict politeness would rather tolerate than ridicule them. Dr. Darwin seldom failed to present their caricature in jocose but wounding irony. If these ingredients of colloquial despotism were discernible in unworn existence, they increased as it advanced, fed by an ever growing reputation within and without the ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... and himself had had together in their youthful days, that I was puzzled to guess who could have addressed him from Germany in that easy and off-hand fashion. I knew most of his old friends who would be likely to call him by his baptismal name in its most colloquial form, and exhausted my stock of guesses unsuccessfully before looking at the signature. I confess that I was surprised, after laughing at the hearty and almost boyish tone of the letter, to read at the bottom of the page the signature of Bismarck. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... temperament. There is something not quite good, something almost sinister, about it—at least, in its more complex forms, though in its simple form, as we find it in outdoor nature, it is innocent enough; and, indeed, is it not used in colloquial metaphor as an adjective for innocence itself? Innocence has but two colours, white or green. But Becky Sharp's eyes also were green, and the green of the aesthete does not suggest innocence. There will always be wearers of the green carnation; ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... Liverpool and Manchester in one assembly with those of London, and those bones will effect the reformation of England in Church and State." After some two or three hours we took our leave, with unlimited admiration of his brave utterance and his colloquial talents. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... things'? Were ever such vague puerilities collected into one short paragraph? This is pure impertinence, and Phil. deserves to be privately reprimanded for quoting such windy chaff without noting and protesting it as colloquial. But what I wish the reader to mark—the [Greek: tho hepimhythion]—is, that suppose the two Scaligers amongst the Christian Fathers engaged in fixing the canon: greater learning you cannot have; neither was there, to a dead certainty, one tenth part ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... another. Chroc, Chrocus, Crocus - An Alemannic leader, who overran Gaul, according to Gregory of Tours. Chunk - A short thick piece of wood, or of anything else; a chump. The word is provincial in England, and colloquial in the United States. Cinder - Suende; sin. Clam - The popular name of a bivalvular shell-fish, the Venus. Clavier,(Ger.) - Piano. Colle belle,(Ital.) - With the beauties. Comedy - Committee. Conradin - The ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... contented themselves with devoting a part of certain courses to exercises designed to show the students that the classical languages were at one time in daily use among living people and were the media of ordinary conversation[74]. Students in such courses commonly memorize certain colloquial phrases and take part in simple conversations in which these phrases can be used. Such methods, skillfully employed, undoubtedly relieve the tedium of the familiar drill in grammar and "prose composition," and may help materially in imparting ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... even awful in his deportment, he possessed uncommon and peculiar powers of wit and humor; he frequently indulged himself in colloquial pleasantry; and the heartiest merriment was often enjoyed in his company, with this great advantage, that as it was entirely free from any poisonous tincture of vice or impiety, it was salutary to those who shared ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... purport; force; drift, tenor, spirit, bearing, coloring; scope. [important part of the meaning] substance; gist, essence, marrow, spirit &c. 5. matter; subject, subject matter; argument, text, sum and substance. general meaning, broad meaning, substantial meaning, colloquial meaning, literal meaning, plain meaning, simple meaning, natural meaning, unstrained meaning, true &c. (exact) 494 meaning, honest &c. 543 meaning, prima facie &c. (manifest) 525 meaning[Lat]; letter of the law. literally; after acceptation. synonym; implication, allusion &c. (latency) 526; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... volume, Home Pictures of English Poets, which thou wast kind enough to send me, and which I hope is having a wide circulation as it deserves. Its analysis of character and estimate of literary merit strike me as in the main correct. Its racy, colloquial style, enlivened by anecdote and citation, makes it anything but a dull book. It seems to me admirably adapted to supply a want in hearth ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... the properties of the parabola, for he never speaks it or hears it spoken, and seldom encounters it in his everyday reading. If he learns to write it, which is not often, it is with a rather depressing sense of its artificiality. He may master it as a Korean, bred in the colloquial Onmun, may master the literary Korean-Chinese, but he never thinks in it or ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... who was furious at my declining to kneel before him, addressed me in words that sounded violent; but, as he spoke classical Tibetan, and I only the colloquial language, I could not understand a word he said. I meekly asked him not to use such fine words, as they ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... old maid. 'What striking sacrifices of sexual honour does this one fact argue!' The French style is remarkable for simplicity—'a strange pretension for anything French;' but on the whole the intellectual merits of their style are small, 'chiefly negative,' and 'founded on the accident of their colloquial necessities.' They are amply compensated, too, by 'the prodigious defects of the French in all the higher qualities of prose composition.' Even their handwriting is the 'very vilest form of scribbling which exists in Europe,' and they and the Germans are 'the two most ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Hebert, Marat, and others of that stamp, one of the most remarkable is, "The Moderate, impartially communicating Martial Affairs to the Kingdom of England;" the monarchical title our commonwealth men had not yet had time enough to obliterate from their colloquial style. This writer called himself, in his barbarous English, The Moderate! It would be hard to conceive the meanness and illiteracy to which the English language was reduced under the pens of the rabble-writers of these days, had we not witnessed in the present time a parallel to their compositions. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... symbols of moral rectitude, which forms such a striking feature of European masonry, finds no place in the ceremonial of the Triad Society, although recognized as such in Chinese literature from the days of Confucius, and still so employed in the every-day colloquial of China. ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... in St Andrews than he resumed the system he had followed with good effect in East Lothian, causing his pupils to give account of their catechism in public to all who chose to come, and opening up in a plain and colloquial manner the Gospel of St John. His great ability and success as a teacher, and his wonderful gift of persuasive speech, thus became generally known. After private but unsuccessful efforts had been made by Balnaves and others ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... silly, I should have agreed heartily; and if any one else denounced it as a breach of good literary manners, I do not know that I should protest. The habit is the more curious in that all authorities agree as to the exceptional combination of scholarliness and courtliness which marked De Quincey's colloquial style and expression. Wilson's daughter, Mrs. Gordon, says that he used to address her father's cook "as if she had been a duchess"; and that the cook, though much flattered, was somewhat aghast at his punctilio. That a man of this kind should think ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... have rested her colloquial fame, as Dr. Johnson would have said, upon a compliment so evidently acceptable, but no one knows where to stop. She thrust her broad, good-natured, delighted countenance forward, and sending her voice from the bottom to the top of the table, like her umquhile husband when ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... it seems to me that an idea stands out better if expressed in lucid language, with sober imagery. A suitable phrase, placed in its correct position and saying without fuss the things we want to say, necessitates a choice, an often laborious choice. There are drab words, the commonplaces of colloquial speech; and there are, so to speak, colored words, which may be compared with the brushstrokes strewing patches of light over the gray background of a painting. How are we to find those picturesque words, those striking features which arrest the attention? How are we to group them into a language ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... man was a contradiction to himself. Tom was a person of few words, and so intensely lazy that it required a strong effort of will to enable him to answer the questions of inquiring friends; and when at length aroused to exercise his colloquial powers, he performed the task in so original a manner that it never failed to upset the gravity of the interrogator. When he raised his large, prominent, leaden-coloured eyes from the ground, and looked the inquirer steadily in the ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... The following colloquial words or phrases occurring in the narrative were largely determined by general usage: To depot to cache or to place a stock of provisions in a depot; drift drift-snow; fifty-mile wind a wind of fifty miles an hour; burberry "Burberry gabardine" or specially ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... eulogies, and all the train of special public gatherings, offer rare opportunities for the display of tact and good sense in handling occasion, theme, and audience. When to be dignified and when colloquial, when to soar and when to ramble arm in arm with your hearers, when to flame and when to soothe, when to instruct and when to amuse—in a word, the whole matter of APPROPRIATENESS must constantly be in mind lest you write your ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... he speaks, is the orator of the day." Mr. Phillips rises, and buttons his frock-coat across his white waistcoat as he moves to the front of the platform. Seen from the theatre, his hair is gray, and his face looks older, but there is the same patrician air; and with the familiar tranquillity and colloquial ease ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... and to leave too little play to the individual writer. In the healthy reaction against this formalism, greater freedom of expression now manifests itself. We note also the introduction of idioms from the colloquial language, along with many poetical words and usages. The following authors ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... many would cast their votes for Old Mortality, The Antiquary or Rob Roy because of the rich humor of those romances. Scott's dialect, although true to nature, is not difficult, as he did not consider it necessary to give all the colloquial terms, like the ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... In colloquial language, a maid (une pucelle) was a girl of humble birth, who earned her livelihood by manual work and was generally a servant. Thus the leaden pumps used in kitchens were usually called pucelles. The term was doubtless vulgar, but it had no evil meaning. In spite of Clopinel's naughty saying: ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... Dr. Johnson exceedingly, who said that so complete a character could scarcely be found in romance. He had been a soldier, it seems, and was no incompetent or mean scholar: the books we found open in his cell, shewed he had not neglected modern or colloquial knowledge; there was a translation of Addison's Spectators, and Rapin's Dissertation on the contending Parties of England called Whig and Tory. He had likewise a violin, and some printed music, for his entertainment. I was glad to hear he was well, ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... cheapest way he knew of spending an evening. At this particular establishment the Schoppen were very tall and the beer was very good; and as the host and most of the guests were German, and their colloquial tongue was unknown to him, he was not drawn into any undue expenditure of speech. He watched his smoke and he thought, thought so hard that at last he appeared to himself to have exhausted the thinkable. When this moment of combined ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... Milnwood, of whom, as of a champion of the Covenant, he augured great things. The second part he applied to the punishments which were about to fall upon the persecuting government. At times he was familiar and colloquial; now he was loud, energetic, and boisterous;—some parts of his discourse might be called sublime, and others sunk below burlesque. Occasionally he vindicated with great animation the right of every freeman ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of going to the tavern kitchen, passed to the next door and entered the dark rear corner of a low grocery, where, the law notwithstanding, liquor was covertly sold to slaves. There, in the quiet company of Baptiste and the grocer, the colloquial powers of Colossus, which were simply prodigious, began very soon ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... in flirting fascination the holiday afternoons beneath their shade. Still do our memories haunt those old walks we loved so well: the avenue shaded and silent like grove of Academe, fit residence of colloquial man of science or genial metaphysician; the old cemetery with its brown ivy-grown wall, its dark, massive evergreens, and moss-grown stones, that, before years had effaced the inscription, told the mortal story of early settler; elm-arched Temple street, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Colloquial language uses the terms Midge and Gnat to describe the tiny insects which we often see dancing in a ray of sunlight. There is something of everything in those aerial ballets. It is possible that the persecutrix ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... moods and subtle sentiments of nature are grasped with imaginative insight and denoted and interpreted with a free, delicate, and luminous touch. He has also addressed the public as an author. He has written an easy, colloquial account of his own life, and that breezy, off-hand, expeditious work,—after passing it as a serial through their Century Magazine,—the Century Company has published in a beautiful volume. It is a ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... by an English alien, from the western dialects of Ayrshire, &c.! And I have heard it said, by Scottish purists in this matter, that even Sir Walter Scott is chargeable with considerable licentiousness in the management of his colloquial Scotch. Yet, generally speaking, it bears the strongest impress of truthfulness. But, on the other hand, how false and powerless does this same Sir Walter become, when the necessities of his tale oblige him at any time to come amongst the English peasantry! His ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Scholz in The Reconciliation, and the solemn reiterations of Michael Kramer. Nor must it be thought that such characterisation has anything in common with the set phrases of Dickens. From the richness and variety of German colloquial speech, from the deep brooding of the German soul over the common things and the enduring emotions of life, Hauptmann has caught the authentic accents that change dramatic dialogue ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... tendency to free and easy manners and colloquial license was rapidly destroying all reverence for womanhood; was levelling the distinction between ladies' parlors and gentlemen's clubrooms; was placing the sexes on a platform of equality which was dangerous to feminine delicacy, that God-built ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... replaced the trochaic tetrameter, which was originally employed when the poetry was of the Satyric order, and had greater affinities with dancing. Once dialogue had come in, Nature herself discovered the appropriate measure. For the iambic is, of all measures, the most colloquial: we see it in the fact that conversational speech runs into iambic lines more frequently than into any other kind of verse; rarely into hexameters, and only when we drop the colloquial intonation. The additions to the number of 'episodes' or acts, and the other accessories of which tradition; ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... acute pitch of emotion, might have been somewhat in the nature of an anticlimax. And then, was it possible that the feeling was on her side only? Could it be that the priceless pearl of her love was cast before—I was tempted to use the colloquial singular and call him an "unappreciative swine!" The thing was almost unthinkable to me, and yet I was tempted to dwell upon it; for when a man is in love—and I could no longer disguise my condition from myself—he is inclined ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... Street Sinclair Lewis, though the author of such promising novels as Our Mr. Wrenn and The Job, had been forced by the neglect of his more serious work to earn a living with the smarter set among American novelists, writing bright, colloquial, amusing chatter for popular magazines. If it seems a notable achievement for a temper like Mr. Masters's to have helped pave the way to popularity for Mr. Lewis, it seems yet more notable to have performed a similar service for Zona Gale, who for something ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... lovely castle in the air roused Sylvia, and sent her down to skirmish with Mark. Before she could say a word, however, Prue began to talk in a steady stream, for the good soul had a habit of jumbling news, gossip, private opinions and public affairs into a colloquial hodge-podge, that was often as trying to the intellects as the risibles of ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... doing for Australia?" After I had finished the Lord Mayor made a few remarks with reference to the subject at issue and concluded by moving a vote of thanks. This was really outside our practice at the institute. I thanked the Lord Mayor for his kind remarks, and in quite a colloquial way said that it was distressing to go round the public parks about Sydney on holidays and Saturday afternoons and see thousands of young men sitting on fences smoking cigarettes, content to loaf and look on while ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... been in Contalmaison, but did not stay. "Too many German machine guns and too much artillery fire and not enough men," to put it with colloquial army brevity. It often happened that a village was entered and parts of it held during a day, then evacuated at night, leaving the British guns full play for the final "softening." These initial efforts had the result of reconnaissances ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... by any other means. This I must beg leave to contradict: the Arabs of Sahara, from their wandering habits, are certainly wild, and they are hostile to all who do not understand their language; but if two or three Europeans capable of holding colloquial intercourse with them, were to go and establish a factory on their coast, and then suggest to them the benefit they would derive, being the carriers of such a trade as is here contemplated, their ferocity would be transferred forthwith into that virtue ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... easy, erect, and noble; the best horseman of his age, and the most graceful figure that could be seen on horseback. Although in the circle of his friends, where he might be unreserved with safety, he took a free share in conversation, his colloquial talents were not above mediocrity, possessing neither copiousness of ideas, nor fluency of words. In public, when called on for a sudden opinion, he was unready, short, and embarrassed. Yet he wrote readily, rather diffusely, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... to join her daughter, Farrel knew that at all events he had earned the approval of the influential member of the Parker family. Mrs. Parker, on her part, was far more excited than her colloquial humor indicated. ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... myself quite on the wrong tack. She screwed up her little mouth, as if tasting some nasty medicine, and then said in excellent colloquial English: ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... how wonderfully quick the Chinese pick up a colloquial foreign tongue; the same tailor for instance experiencing no difficulty in making himself understood in English, French, Russian, or Spanish; English, though, is the language par excellence along all the China seaboard. So universal is it that a foreigner must needs know something of ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... own model, as no two styles could differ more from each other.—'Sir, Addison had his style, and I have mine.'—When I ventured to ask him, whether the difference did not consist in this, that Addison's style was full of idioms, colloquial phrases, and proverbs; and his own more strictly grammatical, and free from such phraseology and modes of speech as can never be literally translated or understood by foreigners; he allowed the discrimination ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... In a colloquial sort of way we talk glibly enough of leaving England, but England is by no means an easy country to leave. If it bids us farewell from the cliffs of Dover, it greets us again on the quay of Calais. It would ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... at his command a style more nervous, more varied, more flexible, or more direct than Mark Twain's. His colloquial ease should not hide from us his mastery of all the devices of rhetoric. He may seem to disobey the letter of the law sometimes, but he is always obedient to the spirit. He never speaks unless he has something to say; and then he says it ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... in the colloquial sense admits of little question. Nor is it surprising; it is rather difficult not to be. Not a few persons are pessimists and won't tell. They preserve a fair exterior, but secretly hold that all flesh is grass. Some people escape the disease by virtue of much philosophy or much religion or much ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... mirth of his hearers. His faults were that he was drunken, dirty, quarrelsome, dissolute, and somewhat of a cheat. I put up with all his deficiences, because he dressed my hair to my taste, and his constant chattering offered me the opportunity of practising the colloquial French which cannot be acquired from books. He has always assured me that he was born in Picardy, the son of a common peasant, and that he had deserted from the French army. He may have deceived me when he said ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... this great and good man. That he had occasional sallies of heat of temper, and that he was sometimes, perhaps, too 'easily provoked[235]' by absurdity and folly, and sometimes too desirous of triumph in colloquial contest, must be allowed. The quickness both of his perception and sensibility disposed him to sudden explosions of satire; to which his extraordinary readiness of wit was a strong and almost irresistible incitement. To adopt one of the finest ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Fitzpatrick's indignant criticism with a patient smile. Mrs. Fitzpatrick, despairing of success in her efforts with Paulina, called in the aid of Anka Kusmuk, who, as domestic in the New West Hotel where Mrs. Fitzpatrick served as charwoman two days in the week, had become more or less expert in the colloquial English of her environment. Together they laboured with Paulina, but with little effect. She was quite unmoved, because quite unconscious, of moral shock. It disturbed Mrs. Fitzpatrick not a little to discover during the progress of her missionary labours that even Anka, ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... and instruct him in the doctrines of esoteric Buddhism. I never should have got to Morro Castle and back with him if I had not been able to draw diagrams in the air with both hands and my head simultaneously, and then explain them to him in colloquial Russian. ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... which ends thus: "Never, so long as there is left of Plymouth Rock a piece large enough to make a gunflint of!" "This," Professor Phelps says, "is purest idiomatic English." He adds, "The old Scotch interrogative, 'What for?' is as pure English in written as in colloquial speech." ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... associate of Sheridan, Erskine, Fox, &c., he affected, in conversation, to be brilliant, and so far succeeded, as to colloquial liveliness, that during their festive intercourse, according to the witty barrister's own admission, 'he fairly kept up at saddle-skirts' even with Curran. Notwithstanding this compliment, his pretensions to wit appear to have been but slender; the best sayings attributed to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various
... colloquial din, Unheard the sullen sleet-winds shout; And though the winter rage without, ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... hourly; his heart is uncommonly pure, his affections delicate, and his benevolence enlivened, but not sicklied, by sensibility. He is assuredly a man of great genius; but it must be in a "tete-a-tete" with one whom he loves and esteems that his colloquial powers open:—and this arises not from reserve or want of simplicity, but from having been placed in situations, where for years together he met with no congenial minds, and where the contrariety of his thoughts and ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... cartoonist of all time. "INDOOR" and "OUTDOOR SPORTS" put "T.A.D." in a class by himself. He has originated more slang phrases which have attained national popularity than any other American. These pungent contributions to the colloquial native language have made "T.A.D." beloved by over two ...
— What's in the New York Evening Journal - America's Greatest Evening Newspaper • New York Evening Journal
... give up his interest and the place afterward closed. It has since been reopened under the name of the Portola-Louvre, where now crowds assemble nightly to listen to music and witness cabaret performances. Here, as well as in a number of other places, one can well appreciate the colloquial definition of "cabaret." That which takes the rest out of restaurant and puts the din in dinner. If one likes noise and distraction while eating such places are good ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... repetition. The whole was reported, better than it deserved, by Mr. Pitman, of the Manchester Courier, and published nearly verbatim. I have here extracted, from the published report, the facts which I wish especially to enforce; and have a little cleared their expression; its loose and colloquial character I cannot now help, unless by re-writing the whole, which it seems not worth ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... he speak it himself with propriety. For the rest of the evening the talk was in Latin. Boscovich had a ready current flow of that flimsy phraseology, with which a priest may travel through Italy, Spain, and Germany. Johnson scorned what he called colloquial barbarisms. It was his pride to speak his best. He went on, after a little practice, with as much facility as if it was his native tongue. One sentence this writer well remembers. Observing that Fontenelle, at first, opposed ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... whom I have been brought into close contact. Search my memory as I will, I cannot recall a case of man or woman who ever occupied any considerable part of my thoughts without contributing largely towards my moral or physical welfare. In other words, and in very colloquial language, I never had useless friends hanging about me. From this crude statement of a signal fact, the thoughtless reader will at once judge me rapacious, egoistical, false, fawning, mendacious. Well, I may be all this and ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... during the remainder of his life rarely found courage for any more sustained effort than a song. And the nature of the songs is itself characteristic of these idle later years; for they are often as polished and elaborate as his earlier works were frank, and headlong, and colloquial; and this sort of verbal elaboration in short flights is, for a man of literary turn, simply the most agreeable of pastimes. The change in manner coincides exactly with the Edinburgh visit. In 1786 he had written the ADDRESS TO A LOUSE, which may ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a shuttlecock, should not be suffered to remain with one person, but ought to pass in turn to all. But as few people think for themselves, so few people talk for themselves, and a colloquial monopoly is as common and as disagreeable as any other. Yet when we observe how much these rattles are caressed, 'tis wonderful there are so few. Talent is by no means indispensable, and is the more valuable in proportion as it is flimsy ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... Captain Wallingford," cut in Jane, at one of Sarah's breathing intervals, that reminded me strongly of the colloquial Frenchman's "s'il crache il est perdu," "You know something of poor Mrs. Bradfort, ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... to support as a partisan, generally with clamour. An Australian football term dating from about 1880. The verb has been ruled unparliamentary by the Speaker in the Victorian Legislative Assembly. It is, however, in very common colloquial use. It is from the aboriginal word borak (q.v.), and the sense of jeering is earlier than that of supporting, but jeering at one side is akin to cheering for the other. Another suggested derivation is from the Irish ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... All colloquial expressions are little foxes that spoil the grapes of perfect diction, but they are very little foxes; it is the false elegance of stupid pretentiousness that is an annihilating blight which destroys root ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... reproduction of the idiomatic and proverbial Latinisms, and generally of the classical phrases and allusions in which Erasmus abounds, in corresponding or analogous English forms. Bailey had acquired, perhaps from his lexicographical studies, a great command of homely and colloquial English; the words and phrases by which he frequently represents rather than construes Erasmus' text have perhaps in many instances not less piquancy than the original. Thus his translation, as a piece of ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... pretense of wanting to see each other; and when they returned home, they would cry out with a glad voice, saying, "We made sixteen calls and found fourteen of them out"—not meaning that they found out anything against the fourteen—no, that was only a colloquial phrase to signify that they were not at home—and their manner of saying it—expressed their lively satisfaction in that fact. Now, their pretense of wanting to see the fourteen—and the other two whom they had ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... rather favored than hindered this bent. I was born in a party camp and grew to manhood on a political battlefield. I have lived through stirring times and in the thick of events. In a vein colloquial and reminiscential, not ambitious, let me recall some impressions which these have left upon the mind of one who long ago reached and turned the corner of the Scriptural limitation; who, approaching fourscore, does not yet feel painfully the frost of age beneath the ravage of time's defacing ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... as they wended their way To chapel, engaged in colloquial fray— An earnest logomachy, bitter as gall, Concerning poor Adam and what made him fall. "'Twas Predestination," cried one—"for the Lord Decreed he should fall of his own accord." "Not so—'twas Free will," the other maintained, ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... rhapsodists, like the jongleurs, had texts, and that these were studied by the makers of the Vulgate, interpolations and errors might creep in by this way. As to changes in language, "a poetical dialect... is liable to be gradually modified by the influence of the ever-changing colloquial speech. And, in the early times, when writing was little used, this influence would be especially operative." [Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang |
