"Idiom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the task which I have been bold enough to undertake is well known to scholars, and may explain, though perhaps not excuse, the defects of my work. One who undertakes to express the thoughts of antiquity in modern idiom goes to his task with his eyes open, and has no right at every stumbling-block or pitfall to bemoan his unhappy fate. So also with the particular difficulties presented by the great founder of Latin ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... he could never relate the particulars without shedding tears. He had made himself acquainted with the language of that nation, the words of which, in his younger days, he used to recite, which, as the bishop often had informed me, were very conformable to the Greek idiom. When they asked for water, they said Ydor ydorum, which meant bring water, for Ydor in their language, as well as in the Greek, signifies water, from whence vessels for water are called {Greek text which cannot be reproduced}; and Dur also, in the ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... he been disposed to mysticize and to shroud himself in "impenetrable darkness," he would have found it difficult to indulge that propensity in French. Thanks to the strict rgime and happy limitations of that idiom, the French is not a language in which philosophy can hide itself. It is a tight-fitting coat, which shows the exact form, or want of form, of the thought it clothes, without pad or fold to simulate fulness or to veil defects. It was a Frenchman, we are aware, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... is lost. A Latin idiom (as Keightley points out) male perditur: Prof. Masson, however, would regard it as equivalent to "there ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... peculiar grin wreathed itself around his lips. "I've seen no white man here," he said. "Except myself. They call me a white man." He spoke English without a trace of the red man's clipped idiom. ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... the grand work of home-building, all the noble pains and heroic toils of home-education,—that education where the parents learn more than they teach,—shall be (let us use the expressive Yankee idiom) shirked. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... (Doubleday, Page & Company.) Mr. Ade's new series of thirty fables are a valuable record of the war years in American life. They are written in a unique idiom full of color, if unintelligible to the foreigner. I think one may fairly say that Mr. Ade's work is thoroughly characteristic of a large section of American culture, and this section he has portrayed admirably. Undoubtedly he ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... that French obtained and held over our mother tongue. But although we accepted so many words from our Norman-French visitors and immigrants, we accepted from them no habit of speech whatever. We accepted from them no phrase or idiom: the build and nature of the English language remained the same— unaffected by foreign manners or by foreign habits. It is true that Chaucer has the ridiculous phrase, "I n'am but dead" (for "I am quite dead"[4])— which is a literal translation of the ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... laughed the lazy one, sitting up. "Also, you may make my apologies to Mrs. Blount and tell her I'll be down pronto. There; doesn't that sound as if I were getting back to the good old sage-brush idiom? Great land! I haven't heard anybody say pronto since I was knee-high ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... together as partners in the labors of the harvest. In my fifteenth summer my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her justice in that language, but you know the Scottish idiom. She was a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which in spite of acid disappointment, gin-house prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys here below! How she caught the contagion ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... remained in the possession of the learned, that is, of the few, and among these, with the exception of Colet and More, or of the pedants who revived a Pagan worship in the gardens of the Florentine Academy, their direct influence was purely intellectual. But the language of the Hebrew, the idiom of the Hellenistic Greek, lent themselves with a curious felicity to the purposes of translation. As a mere literary monument the English version of the Bible remains the noblest example of the English tongue, while its perpetual use made ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... no name," Korvin said truthfully. The Tr'en idiom was like the Earthly one; and certainly a planet had no name. People attached names to it, that was all. It had none of ...
— Lost in Translation • Larry M. Harris
... centuries of writing in Japan, the spoken and written language was identical, but with the study of the Chinese literature and the composition of native works almost exclusively in that language, there grew up differences between the colloquial and literary idiom, and the infusion of Chinese words steadily increased. In writing, the Chinese characters occupy the most important place. But all those words which express the wants, feelings, and concerns of everyday ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... white. After having pump-handled Benson's arm for some time, he made an attack on Le Roi, whom he just knew by name, and inquired if he had just come de l'autre cote, meaning the other side of the Atlantic, according to a common New-York idiom; but the Vicomte not unnaturally took it to mean from the other side of the road, and gave a corresponding answer in English as felicitous as Mr. Simpson's French. Then he digressed upon Ashburner, whom ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... it was natural for Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond to ask: "What are we to do with such types as father?" and to fall into an idiom that assumed a joint enterprise. They had agreed by a tacit consent to a common conception of the world they desired as a world scientifically ordered, an immense organization of mature commonsense, healthy and secure, ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... age of thirty the face of a woman is a book written in a foreign tongue, which one may still translate in spite of all the feminisms of the idiom; but on passing her fortieth year a woman becomes an insoluble riddle; and if any one can see through an old woman, it is ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... and a defense, as against the Presbyterians, of the government of the English Church by bishops. No work of equal dignity and scope had yet been published in English prose. It was written in sonorous, stately and somewhat involved periods, in a Latin rather than an English idiom, and it influenced strongly the diction of later writers, such as Milton and Sir Thomas Browne. Had the Ecclesiastical Polity been written one hundred, or perhaps even fifty, {91} years earlier, it would doubtless have been ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... not improbable that the writer caught the infection from his grandfather. With one half the world, in its judgment of literature and of life, vulgarity is the opposite of gentility, and gentility is merely negative, and implies the absence of all character, and, in language, of all idiom, all bone and muscle. I have a notion—only do not whisper such heresy within college walls—that a college tutor must be genteel in his college judgments, that 'The Polite Letter Writer' was the work of an M.A. in the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... foolish pyrotechnical affair of De Beriot, which resembled nothing so much as a joke at a funeral. After that the fate of the concert could not be disputed even by the gallery. At the finish of the evening there was, in the terrible idiom of the theatre, "not ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... me, sending a cutting of an advertisement of a month back of a spiritualist from Abville, which he thinks may be my husband's. I am sure it is, I know the Greek idiom put into English. It decides me on what I had thought of before. I shall offer my services as nurse or physician, or whatever they will let me be in that stress of need. I may find him, or if he have fled, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... anything seen so correct? You are too good a transcriber not to have some little smattering of the grammarian. Now tell me with the freedom of a friend: in writing it over, have you been struck with nothing that grated upon your feelings? Some little careless idiom, or some word used in an improper sense?" "Oh, may it please your Grace," answered I with a modest air, "it is not for me, with my confined education and coarse taste, to aim at making critical remarks. And tho ever so well qualified, I am satisfied that your Grace's works would come out pure from ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... stories for publication, the aim has been to preserve, as much as possible, in vocabulary and idiom, the original folk-lore language, and to retain the conversational style of the teller of tales, in order that the sympathetic young reader may, in greater or less degree, be translated into the atmosphere of the ...
— East O' the Sun and West O' the Moon • Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen
... qualified by the context in such manner as to leave no possible doubt as to the meaning. The first time they occur the words of the passage are, "prope latitudinem quadraginta trium graduum aut eo circa versus septentrionem." The free translation into modern idiom is beyond doubt, "near the forty-third degree of north latitude or thereabout;" and the direction toward the north must be along a meridian line on which latitude is measured, or due north. Messrs. Mudge and Featherstonhaugh, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... the Decline, from 180 to the close of literary activity in the sixth century A.D. This period is characterized by rapid and radical alterations in the language. The features of the conversational idiom of the lower strata of society invade the literature, while in the remote provinces, such as Gaul, Spain, Africa, the language suffers from the incorporation of local peculiarities. Representative writers of ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... fir-trees. A little stream takes its rise from the spring which bubbles up into this basin, and the name "Ojo de Agua," is a general term applied to such fountain-heads. When one looks down from a high hill upon one of these Eyes of Water, one sees how the name came to be given, and indeed, the idiom is thousands of years older than the Spanish tongue, and belongs as well to the Hebrew and Arabic. A Mexican calls a lake atezcatl, Water-Mirror, an expressive word, which reminds ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... Whatever its beauty or expressiveness, it was in worse case than a dead language, for it was marked with the stigma of barbarism. In its palmiest days it had never been what the Germans called a Kultursprache; and now it was the idiom of a few thousand peasants and mountaineers, and was rapidly becoming extinct ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... idiom a long hand or arm means power, a phrase not wholly unused in European languages. Chavis and Cazotte paraphrase "He who keeps his hands crossed upon his breast, shall not see ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... further disadvantage that it lacks wholly or partly several consonants,[43] it will be practically impossible, as the Japanese have already found, to apply the new alphabet to the traditional literary idiom. Neither can it be employed for the needs of education, journalism, of the administration, or for telegraphing. It will, however, be of great value for elementary instruction and for postal correspondence. ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... harvest. In my fifteenth autumn, my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her justice in that language, but you know the Scottish idiom: she was a "bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass." In short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and bookworm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys, our dearest blessing ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... communication between the countries, when they stood in a hostile relation to each other, and even long afterwards, it was not surprising that "the wild Irishman" who expressed himself with difficulty, and often impressed the idiom of his own language upon one with which he was not familiar, should incur, in the opinion of those who were strongly prejudiced against him, the character of making the bulls and blunders attributed to him. Such was the fact, and such the origin of this national slander ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... and he laughed sheepishly. "I get it. It was nuance of idiom that threw me. Calling me a brat and a so-and-so was affectionate misdirection to conceal—" he broke off at their expressions. Helen darted a quick look around and came to ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... of practice. It is evident many, even of the moral precepts, given by our Saviour, cannot be literally obeyed[7]; and were intended rather to cultivate a general feeling, than to be referred to as a precise injunction; and if we allow for the strong imagery of eastern idiom on these occasions, let us do the same for those texts from whence arose the unhappy disputes among Protestants, on what are called the Five Points; which gave great occasion to Popery to exult in the disorder produced by our separation from her. And would to God that ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... everywhere. In a word, this character is not the offspring of untutored nature but of bad habits; it is made up of ignorance and conceit. It has a mixture of slang in it. All slang phrases are for the same reason vulgar; but there is nothing vulgar in the common English idiom. Simplicity is not vulgarity; but the looking to affectation of any sort for distinction is. A cockney is a vulgar character, whose imagination cannot wander beyond the suburbs of the metropolis; so is a fellow who is always thinking of the High Street, Edinburgh. We ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... which deals with things great and small, with everything that concerns men, is the literary expression of this view of life. Its language is the new-Hebrew, a simple, nervous idiom suited to practical life, but lacking the power and poetry of the Biblical Hebrew. It is a more useful but less polished instrument than the older language. The subject-matter of the Mishnah includes both law ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... on the Continent, because we are in want of materials, but rather from an opposite reason, the possibility of showing a very gradual succession of verbal changes that ended in a change of denomination. We should probably experience a similar difficulty, if we knew equally well the current idiom of France or Italy in the seventh and eighth centuries. For when we compare the earliest English of the thirteenth century with the Anglo-Saxon of the twelfth, it seems hard to pronounce why it should ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... and the abuses of the last years of the Athenian democracy. It was then demonstrated that the impoverishing of the rich could not enrich the poor, and that a state without wealth will soon be a state without liberty. In the idiom of the gallery gods, it ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... philologist has much to say on the points of resemblance between the Goidelic and Brythonic branches, and though no one who studies both can fail to be struck by their affinity in vocabulary, in grammar, and even in idiom, the speakers of different branches—a Welshman and a Highlander, for instance—are no more mutually intelligible than an Englishman and a German would be, if as much so. The three sets of Gaels, however, can understand one another with considerable difficulty, and Irish priests have ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... that you are one of the enlightened ones, I will confess to you that I did keep a little establishment a la Pierre Loti. My Japanese teacher thought it would be a good way of improving my knowledge of the local idiom; and this knowledge meant an extra hundred pounds to me for interpreter's allowance, as it is called. I thought, too, that it would be a relief after diplomatic dinner parties to be able to swear for an hour or so, big round oaths in the company of a dear beloved ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... to pursue his purpose, his first business was to provide himself of a good interpreter. For Antonio, the Chinese, whom he had brought from Goa, was wholly ignorant of the language which is spoken at the court, and had almost forgotten the common idiom of the vulgar. He found out another Chinese, who had a perfect knowledge of the language of the Mandarins, and who could also write excellently well, in which consists the principal knowledge of China. For the rest, he was a man well shaped, of a good presence, of great ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... lay, with characteristic Teuton foresight, the names and addresses of a language teacher and of a music teacher who were duly "recommending themselves" to him in the German idiom. Lists of purchasable text books and musical editions from houses which, in the thoroughly informed Teuton manner, had got wind of his coming, also opened ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... Borders was William Scott, the young laird of Harden. His favourite residence was Oakwood Tower, a place of great strength, situated on the banks of the Ettrick. The motto of his family was "Reparabit cornua Phoebe," which being interpreted by his countrymen, in their vernacular idiom, ran thus—"We'll hae moonlight again." Now, the young laird was one who considered it his chief honour to give effect to both the spirit and the letter of his family motto. Permitting us again to refer to honest Falstaff, it implied that they were "gentlemen ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... October 14 and 25, Swift visited or dined with Mrs. Barton at her lodgings. He was also at this time on good terms with Halifax, and dined with him November 28, 1710, and with Mrs. Barton on November 30. According to the idiom of the day, lodgings was a name for every kind of residence, and even for the apartments of a guest in the house of his host. For anything to the contrary in the mere word, the lodgings might have been in the house of Lord Halifax, or of Newton himself. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... fluently, plainly, distinctly, and with a perfect understanding of the meaning, weight, and value of every word, would be greatly mistaken. Not only is his knowledge of English— extending to the most subtle idiom, or the most recondite cant phrase—more extensive than that of many of us who have English for our mother-tongue, but his delivery of Shakespeare's blank verse is remarkably facile, musical, and intelligent. To be in a sort of pain for him, as one sometimes is for ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... and to compose upon several of these as themes, his symphony "From the New World," sometimes called more briefly the "American Symphony." This symphony, two works of chamber music, also composed during his residence in America, and his compositions in his native Bohemian musical idiom usually are ranked higher than his more cosmopolitan efforts. His "Humoreske," Op. 101, No. 5, the "Slavic Dances" and "On the Holy Mount" are among his compositions unmistakably Bohemian ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... as regards the order of the words in the Greek text this latin translation may be treated as an authority. The Greek is rigidly followed without any regard for Latin usage. So also Greek articles are scrupulously reproduced, in violation of Latin idiom. New or unusual Latin words are introduced to correspond as exactly as possible to the original; e.g. ingloriatio [Greek: akanchesia]; multibona ordinatio [Greek: to ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... may be safely applied to the work of Mr. Dakyns. An accomplished Greek scholar, for many years a careful and sympathetic student of Xenophon, and possessing a rare mastery of English idiom, he was unusually well equipped for the work of a translator. And his version will, as I venture to think, be found to satisfy those requirements of an effective translation which Professor Jowett laid down. It is faithful to the tone and spirit ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... attempts a similar feat. Let him try to report the best conversation of a lively evening, following its course, preserving its point, differentiating sharply the traits of the participants, keeping the style, idiom, and exact words of each. Let him reject all parts of it, however diverting, of which the charm and force will evaporate with the occasion, and retain only that which will be as amusing, significant, and lively as ever at the end of one hundred, or, for all that we can see, one thousand years. He ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... students of Jacob Behmen take warning that they will have to learn an absolutely new and an unheard-of language if they would speak with Behmen and have Behmen speak with them. For Behmen's books are written neither in German nor in English of any age or idiom, but in the most original and uncouth Behmenese. Like John Bunyan, but never with John Bunyan's literary grace, Behmen will borrow, now a Latin word or phrase from his reading of learned authors, or, more often, from the conversations of his learned friends; and then he will take ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... of rules [for the acquisition of it]. From this cause, the language of Hindustan has become general throughout the provinces, and has been polished anew; otherwise no one conceives his own turban, language and behaviour, to be improper. If you ask a countryman, he censures the citizen's idiom, and considers his own the best; "well, the learned only ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... well-frizzed ladies spoke French indeed with considerable facility, unshackled by any timid regard to idiom, and were in the habit of conducting conversations in that language in the presence of their less instructed elders; for according to the standard of those backward days, their education had been very lavish, ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... plots of almost incomprehensible absurdity, they combine a style more inflated than any balloon in which Madame Blanchard ever sailed through the regions of air—a language, or rather jargon, composed of the pickings of nearly every idiom that ever did live, or is at present in existence, and sentiments which would be often of a highly mischievous tendency, if they were not rendered ridiculous by the manner in which they are expressed. The singularity of these productions ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... an Englishman, and not a citizen of the great country that gave Lincoln birth. I have, therefore, written as an Englishman, making no attempt to achieve a "local colour" of which I have no experience, or to speak in an idiom to which I have not been bred. To have done otherwise, as I am sure any American friends that this play may have the good fortune to make will allow, would have been to treat a great ...
— Abraham Lincoln • John Drinkwater
... a foreign race planted among English neighbours. In the town of Shields alone there were three dialects—Keelish, Sheelish, and Coblish. The Keelish was spoken by the keelmen, Sheelish by the tradespeople, and Coblish by the pilots; but Keelish was the most remarkable of the three tongues. Its idiom, pitch, and pronunciation were so odd that nobody from south of the Wear could understand it well without long practice, any more than he could understand the social customs of the men who spoke it. The "Keel Row," which is the great ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... especially in the badness of their manners. I also learnt that shrugging the shoulders while exhibiting the palms of the hands, and smiting oneself vehemently on the chest, are indispensable elements of the French idiom. The indiscriminate use of the word 'parfaitement' I also noticed to be essential when at a loss for either language or ideas, and have made valuable use ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... Buddhistic import—is no more, has gone for a stroll, has bid adieu to the world, may all be employed to supply the place of the tabooed verb, which is chiefly used of animals and plants. After a few days' illness he kicked, is a vulgar way of putting it and analogous to the English slang idiom. The Emperor becomes a guest on high, riding up to heaven on the dragon's back, with flowers of rhetoric ad nauseam; Buddhist priests revolve into emptiness, i.e., are annihilated; the soul of the Taoist priest wings its ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... continue. With her sympathy and empathy, and my driving force and so on, the job of licking these young Primes into shape is, as your idiom has it, 'strictly our dish.' It is a ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... don't know how many drops more I shall drink. We get so fierce and reckless about our victuals. Will it be the spirit of the old counterfeiters who used to inhabit this island entering into us?" suggested Eva, using the English-Canadian idiom ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... place, it is to be observed, that there seems to have been a blunder in this transaction; for according to the Hebrew idiom of the passage quoted above, the personage there spoken of, was to ride upon "an ass' colt;" whereas, the apostles, in order to be sure of fulfilling the prophecy, represent Jesus as riding upon an ass, and the colt, too! ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... spoke English with a foreign accent, and something of a foreign idiom; but his ideas and feelings forced their way regardless of grammatical precision, and I thought his foreign accent agreeable. To an Englishman, what accent that conveys the praise of Shakspeare can fail to be agreeable? The most certain method by ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... when he uses such words only as belong to the idiom of the language. The only standard of purity is the practice of the best writers and speakers. A violation of purity is ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... language was the idiom of ancient Media originated with Anquetil du Perron. He looked on Zoroaster as a native of Azerbijan, contemporary with Darius Hystaspis. His opinion was embraced by Kleuker, Herder, and Eask; and again, with certain modifications, by Tychsen and Heeren. These latter writers even gave a more completely ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... by one of the Buonapartes, into English verse. I believe that engagement never was carried into effect, notwithstanding the erudite pains Mr —- took to qualify himself to perform it successfully. No man could have laboured more to make himself master of the niceties of the Gallic idiom, and the right use ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... whether the needle-gun had given him "the needle," if the popular idiom is admissible, or that he scented an enemy of his race, the lion, who had hitherto regarded the Tarasconians with sovereign scorn, and yawned in their faces, was all at once affected by ire. At first he sniffed; then he growled hollowly, stretching out his claws; rising, ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... pipe, and his afternoon tumbler stood on the table beside him, I have heard him give the following account of the ups and downs—the trials, the joys, and sorrows—which he had encountered in his worldly pilgrimage; and, to preserve the interest of the history, I shall give it in David's own idiom, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... to say nothing of other damsels, whose eyes were not quiet, and who struck him still more as a satire on possible consolation. He had been walking for some time, when, directly in front of him, borne back by the summer breeze, he heard a few words uttered in that bright Parisian idiom from which his ears had begun to alienate themselves. The voice in which the words were spoken made them seem even more like a thing with which he had once been familiar, and as he bent his eyes it lent an identity to the commonplace elegance of the back hair and shoulders of ...
— The American • Henry James
... speech is frequency of translation. No book was ever turned from one language into another, without imparting something of its native idiom; this is the most mischievous and comprehensive innovation; single words may enter by thousands, and the fabric of the tongue continue the same; but new phraseology changes much at once; it alters not ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... her voice was gentle, the child had caught the idiom and pronunciation of the fisherman's family; but even in that respect there was a natural refinement in the tone of her voice; and as Adam was a God-fearing man, and had brought up his sons to fear God also, no coarse language or objectionable expressions were ever ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... 843. Rustic Roman, the Romance language, prevailed in Western France; the people of the country of Vaud, of the Valais, of the Engadine valley, and of a few other cantons, still retain to-day manifest vestiges of this idiom. ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... where the honest poor have the advantage of us. You see, we're the dishonest poor. We've been to the same schools and universities and we talk the same idiom and we have the same manners and like the same things as people who spend more in a month or a week than we spend in a year. And we pretend, and they pretend, that they and we are exactly the same. We aren't, you know. We're one vast pretence. Has it occurred to you, ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... fury." He paints the miserable prisoners, who had been forcibly piled upon one another in the Church of the Carmelites by his faction, as presenting themselves as victims to their fury,—as if death was their choice, or (allowing the idiom of his language to make this equivocal) as if they were by some accident presented to the fury of their assassins: whereas he knew that the leaders of the murderers sought these pure and innocent victims in the places ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... these maples?" asked Fasten, abandoning himself to the American idiom. "And where are there handsomer elms than right here in Wisconsin? And what have you against those hills?" He thought of the wide flatness of Essex; what would not Boxton Park give for a foothold on such a shore, a prospect over such a sheet ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... [writes Mikuli], Chopin made great demands on the talent and diligence of the pupil. Consequently, there were often des lecons orageuses, as it was called in the school idiom, and many a beautiful eye left the high altar of the Cite d'Orleans, Rue St. Lazare, bedewed with tears, without, on that account, ever bearing the dearly-beloved master the least grudge. For was not the severity which was not easily satisfied with anything, the feverish vehemence with ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... likewise, of Schiller's History of the Thirty Years' War, diminished the motives thereto. In the translation, I have endeavoured to render my author literally, wherever I was not prevented by absolute differences of idiom; but I am conscious, that in two or three short passages, I have been guilty of dilating the original; and, from anxiety to give the full meaning, have weakened the force. In the metre I have availed ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... yeux rouges et la joue ruisselante: note the absence of a preposition corresponding to the English 'with.' It is a very characteristic French idiom. ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... tremendous form. He began to tell Scotch stories, memories of his old Parliament House days. He told them admirably, with a raciness of idiom which I had thought beyond him. They were long tales, and some were as broad as they were long, but Mr. Cargill disarmed criticism. His audience, rather scandalised at the start, were soon captured, and ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... my pleasure, my privilege, to bring Gunnar before the public as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and to second the author in many a struggle with the strange idiom he had cast the story in. The proofs went back and forth between us till the author had profited by every hint and suggestion of the editor. He was quick to profit by any hint, and he never made the same ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the visitor, changing his idiom, "know enough of English to keep up the conversation. Do not put yourself to the ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Methodist preacher among his people. He uses fairly good English and freely talks in answer to questions. Without giving the questions put to him by this writer, his remarks given in the first person and as near his own idiom are as follows: ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Maryland Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... Spain, nor the bond created by unity of language like Germany. Other European countries, it is true, like Holland or Poland, did not constitute strong geographical units and lacked definite boundaries but their people talked at least the same idiom and belonged, as far as the word may be used in a broad sense, to the same race. Others, like Switzerland, were divided between various languages, but possessed geographical unity. Belgium could not claim any of these distinctive features. Her boundaries remained widely ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... wall. He seemed to have forgotten Crossman's presence, but as he turned, his smouldering eyes lighted on him. He straightened with a jerk. "What did he mean when he say, she have bewitch you?" As always, when excited, his somewhat precise English slipped back into the idiom of the habitant. "By Gar! Boss or no Boss, I pack you out if I catch you. We make no jealousies for any one, not where I am. You come here for your health—hein? Well, better you keep ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... person, and among the rest, for Lord Braxfield, than to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation against his abstract vices. He was the last judge on the Scots bench to employ the pure Scots idiom. His opinions, thus given in Doric, and conceived in a lively, rugged, conversational style, were full of point and authority. Out of the bar, or off the bench, he was a convivial man, a lover of wine, and one who "shone perculiarly" at tavern meetings. He has left behind him an unrivalled ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... literature. Not only their talents, but also their nations and dialects were so various, that our conversation resembled the confusion of tongues at Babel. We had the Irish brogue, the Scotch accent, and foreign idiom, twanged off by the most discordant vociferation; for, as they all spoke together, no man had any chance to be heard, unless he could bawl louder than his fellows. It must be owned, however, there ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... into it, even though Snay said he thought the Jub river drained the N'yanza. All these statements were, when literally translated into English, the reverse of what the speakers, using a peculiar Arab idiom, meant to say; for all the statements made as to the flow of rivers by the negroes—who apparently give the same meaning to "out" and "in" as we do—contradicted the Arabs in their descriptions of the direction of the ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... heart, Be strong I fear not."[1] "Quit yourselves like men; be strong."[2] "O man greatly beloved, fear not! Peace be unto thee! Be strong, yea, be Strong."[3] When, at some occasional test, dismay or self-pity took hold of me I formed a habit of saying to myself, in our expressive American idiom: "This is your special stunt. It's up to you to do this thing just as if you had all the facilities. Go at it boldly, and you'll find unexpected forces closing round you and Coming ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... agreeably portraying the awakening of Swiss consciousness, and the gradual development of the enlightened patriotism that impelled Swiss writers to lay aside mere courtly elegance of diction for their own more terse and vigorous idiom. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... much more frequently purpose is expressed in English by the infinitive, as We eat to live, She stoops to conquer. In Latin prose, on the other hand, /purpose is never expressed by the infinitive. Be on your guard and do not let the English idiom betray you ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... to give such a Translation as might in the general, be capable of being compar'd with the Original, endeavouring to avoid running into a paraphrase: but keeping as close to the original as I could, without Latinizing and deviating from the English Idiom, and so depriving the English reader of that pleasure that Erasmus so plentifully entertains his ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... soars into fancy's fairy regions, must in a degree desert. Considered with this reference, though the picture has faults, Mr. Walpole's satire is surely too severe. It is built upon a comparison with works painted in a language of which Hogarth knew not the idiom,—trying him before a tribunal, whose authority he did not acknowledge, and from the picture having been in many respects altered after the critic saw it, some of the remarks become unfair. To the frequency ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... other, sir, may be both charitably and accurately described in your native idiom as ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... studied by the Semitic priests and scribes. So the fact that the tablet is written in the old Sumerian tongue proves that the story it tells had come down from a very much earlier period. This inference is not affected by certain small differences in idiom which its language presents when compared with that of Sumerian building-inscriptions. Such would naturally occur in the course of transmission, especially in a text which, as we shall see, had been employed for a practical purpose after being subjected to a process of reduction to ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... the voice of Francisco was heard, and all in that wide court started at the sound—deep, full, and melodious as the evening chimes. The ears of those present had, in the profound silence, but just recovered from the harsh, deep-toned, and barbarous idiom of Hawkhurst's address, when the clear, silvery, yet manly voice of Francisco riveted their attention. The jury stretched forth their heads, the counsel and all in court turned anxiously round towards the prisoner, even the judge held up his forefinger to intimate ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... through the preliminary process of instructing his intended confessor. For Mezzofanti's marvellous and almost instinctive power of grasping and systematising the leading characteristics even of the most original language, the names of a few prominent ideas in the new idiom sufficed to open a first means of communication. His prodigious memory retained with iron tenacity every word or phrase once acquired; his power of methodising, by the very exercise, became more ready and more perfect with each new advance ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... "Woe to that man through whom the Son of man has been betrayed! good was it for him, if that man was not {82} born." The translation in the Authorized Version, "it had been good for that man if he had not been born," may be taken to convey, regard being had to difference of idiom, the true sense of the original. Exactly the same passage occurs in Mark xiv. 21, where our translators have given, "good were it for that man if he had never been born." Although this translation, as containing the word "never," deviates still more than the other from the literal rendering, ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... translation is excellent. He understands French, and is able to do it into English elegantly and accurately without any trace of foreign idiom. This is no easy thing; for our general experience has been that translators read French like Englishmen and write English ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... disguise or other, been discovered in Sanskrit. Nor were Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit enough to satisfy the thirst of the new discoverers. The Teutonic languages were soon annexed, the Celtic languages yielded to some gentle pressure, the Slavonic languages clamored for incorporation, the sacred idiom of ancient Persia, the Zend, demanded its place by the side of Sanskrit, the Armenian followed in its wake; and when even the Ossetic from the valleys of Mount Caucasus, and the Albanian from the ancient hills of Epirus, had ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... refusal to go on with his interrogations as to the cause of the enmity made them, they said, suspect that, knowing he had reached the end of Ashtaroth's classical knowledge, he felt it useless to try to continue the dialogue in the Ciceronian idiom. Moreover, it was well known that only a few days before all Urbain's worst enemies had met in conclave in the village of Puidardane; and besides, how stupidly Mignon had shown his hand by mentioning Gaufredi, the priest who had been executed at Aix: lastly, why had not a desire ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... biography, this now very usual episode of the return of the young American from the foreign conditions in which he has learned his professional language, and his position in face of the community that he addresses in a strange idiom. There has to be a prompt adjustment between ear and voice, if the interlocutor is not to seem to himself to be intoning in the void. There is always an inner history in all this, as well as an outer one—such, however, as it would take much space to relate. Mr. Reinhart's more ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... but it is difficult, as the teacher explained to me, for the translator to avail himself of the usual word for "hold," as it conveys more the idea of "take hold," "seize," and the young Kafir missionary thoroughly understood all the nicety of the idiom. There was another class for women and children, but it was a small one. Certainly, the young men seemed much in earnest, and the rapt expression of their faces was most striking, especially during the short prayer which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... German thinkers and workers. Not that I believe it is left to me to interest the children of my old Fatherland, here present, in the new era of truth and freedom, as if these glorious principles were not of yore implanted in their hearts—as if they could not take them up in a strange idiom—but because I am urged from my deepest soul to speak out loud and free, as I have ever felt myself constrained to do, and as I can not do in the language of my beloved adopted land. The consciousness and the holy conviction of our inalienable human rights, which ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... second indicates the order of generation of ideas. All our errors arise from the constant confusion of these two kinds of abstractions. In this particular, languages and philosophies are alike deficient. The less common an idiom is, and the more obscure its terms, the more prolific is it as a source of error: a philosopher is sophistical in proportion to his ignorance of any method of neutralizing this imperfection in language. If the art of ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... had at length finished his letter and dusted it over with sand, he was not at all loath to show it to this master of modern speech. Calabressa was proud of his French; and if he would himself have acknowledged that it was perhaps here and there of doubtful idiom and of phonetic spelling, would he not have claimed for it that it was fluent, incisive, ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... Anges," said Mr. Dolph, with an idiom which he had learned when he was presented at the court of Louis the Sixteenth, "has surely not driven down from New Rochelle this morning? That would tax ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... Milly smiled back. They understood each other at once, far better than either could ever understand the other members of the Star staff. Their clothes, their accents, their manners announced that they came from the same world,—that small "larger world," where they all use the same idiom. ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... impatience, "this is all hailstones and burnt grass" (meaning that the one would melt and the other blow away, or in our English idiom, stuff and rubbish). "Why are you always trying to scare me with your fancies, Allan? Dingaan is our friend, not our enemy. So let us take the gifts that fortune gives us and be ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... introducing to the reading public a writer of unique charm and individuality. His style is notable for its quaint poetic idiom and subtle imaginative flavor. In the present story, he treats with strength and reticence of the relation of the sexes and the problem of marriage. Certain social abuses and false standards of morality are attacked with great vigor, yet the ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... the most amazing escapes is that of a soldier from Bordeaux, told partly in his own racy idiom, and fully vouched for by the author. After relating how he left the railway at Nanteuil and traversed a hamlet pillaged by the Germans ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... laka an 'alayk" lit. either to thee (be the gain) or upon thee (be the loss). This truly Arabic idiom ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... manuscripts had early conformed to a certain rigid type. The painting was marked by lean and wiry outlines, brilliant red and blue and above all by an air of savage ferocity expressed through the idiom of faces shown three-quarter view with the farther eye detached and projecting into space. This style was exercised almost exclusively on Jain subjects and in the year 1400 it was the main style of painting in Western India and ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... that the Chinese pilot's expression, if he wanted the sail shaken, was "Makee sick the mizzen topsail;" but if aback, he added, "Kill him dead." I wonder does that give us an insight into the nautical idiom of the Chinese, who within the limitations of their ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... being almost impossible (considering the Stile of our Author, which is a little more figurative than the present Taste of the English allows in their Writings,) not to retain something of the Idiom of the Original; but where the Sense of the Matter is made plain, the Stile may not be thought so material, in Writings of ...
— Observations on the Florid Song - or Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers • Pier Francesco Tosi
... different dialects, we must calculate that at the above mentioned period, and in the course of the next following centuries, before the Slavic was by degrees supplanted in the German-Slavic provinces by the German idiom, the number of those who called that language their mother tongue was at least the fifth part greater. Schloezer observes, that, with the exception of the Arabians, no nation on the globe had extended themselves so far. In the South, the Adriatic, the range of the Balkan, and ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... him as a foreigner—not by any variation from the idiom and accent of good English, but because he spoke with more caution and accuracy than if perfectly familiar ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Roman people, however, was not a mixture of those of the last-mentioned tribes, but Latin, which, in conformity with Sallust's notion, appears to be a combination of Greek with some early Italian idiom. [45] Temptare, the historical infinitive, about the meaning and construction of which see Zumpt, S 599, note. [46] Auxilia portare is a less common expression than auxilium ferre; for portare is ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... description of a Lama seminary, he remarks that the canonical books of Buddhism being all written in the language of Thibet, the Lamas of Mongolia pass their lives in studying their religion in a foreign idiom, while they scarcely know their own language. Let us see what improvement the introduction of Catholicism would effect, in this state of things. We open a recent work[16] on French missions in Cochin-China and Corea; and in a description of the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... a pleasure indeed, Mr. Bristoll," she smiled when he had been presented. "You see we must be good and informal friends since the—" she shrugged her slim shoulders and quite unconsciously fell into French idiom as she continued—"since the so great impatience of my big brother compels me to meet you like this—all untidy and unprepared." She made a little gesture with both hands and her rippling laugh seemed to envelop ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck |
