"Slang" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Now, here was St. George turned into his own Dragon. What an unnatural transformation! He, who had said luxury was hurrying the civilized world to destruction, wore a pearl in his scarf-pin worth thousands of dollars if it was worth a cent. He had all the latest slang of a Bond Street Nut. (By the way, over here when one talks of a "nut" it doesn't mean a swell, but a youth who is what they'd call "dotty" or "bunny on the 'umph" in a London music hall.) And though his eyebrows ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... herself, and yet cause a great deal of unchasteness in other people. Here is this Mrs. Harrison, smoking cigarettes—and cigars, too, sometimes, in the open air; drinking grog at night, and sometimes in the morning; letting Tom Edwards and the foolish boys who imitate him talk slang to her without putting them down; always ready for a walk or drive with the last handsome young man who has arrived; and utterly ignoring her husband, except when she makes some slighting mention of him for not sending her money enough: what is the effect of all this upon the men? ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... like Mrs. Percifer than it fitted me; but mistaking my smile of irony for one of encouragement, he babbled on. I wish I could do justice to his "charmin'" accent and his perfectly unstudied manner of speech, a mixture of British and American colloquialisms, not to say slang. ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... good to me," averred Elfreda, relapsing into slang. "But don't rely on the girls to bring this stuff. Assess them fifty cents apiece with the understanding that another tax will be levied ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... there are the Samoan Village, the Maori Village, and the Tehuantepec Village. All these people are genuine and live in primitive style on the Zone, though, to tell the truth, they are quite likely to use college slang and know which fork to use first. Not on the Zone, but proper to be mentioned here, are the Blackfoot Indians brought to the Exposition from Glacier Park by the Great Northern Railroad. Eagle Calf is a real chief of the old days, and his band is a ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... used slang, but just then he was in want of a better expression by means of which to ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... are a liberal man: liberal in the true classical sense, not in the slang sense of modern politicians and education-mongers. Being so, I am sure that you will sympathize with my case. I am an ill-used man, Dr. North—particularly ill used; and, with your permission, I will briefly explain how. A black ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... laugh arose at the detection of the swaggering boatswain; and all that the Baronet had for it was to sneak off, saying, "D—n the old quiz, who the devil thought to have heard so much slang from an old ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... your memory is admirable. Yes, I was hard up. But the curious thing is that soon after you saw me I became harder up. My financial state was described by a friend as 'stone broke.' I don't approve of slang, mind you, but such was my condition. But suppose we go in; there might be other people who would like to dine—it's a ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... will say. True, but then he is too likely to be allured by contrasts. I have seen him attracted by the very girls we recoil from more than we do from those we allow to be frivolous and insipid. I accused him of admiration for a certain young lady whom you call 'odious,' and whom the slang that has come into vogue calls 'fast;' and I was not satisfied with his answer, 'Certainly I admire her; she is not a doll—she has ideas.' I would rather of the two see Graham married to what men call a doll, than to a girl with ideas which ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... you will laugh; but my mother's way is never to let a child in her care use slang, or slam doors, or leave things lying about in wrong places, or speak unkindly of the absent. Half a cent had to be paid every time I did any of these things, and I kept my own account of them, and punished myself. I always knew when I had violated one of mother's golden rules by her grieved ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... combination of the practical and the ideal. He is a student who learns to read to himself a foreign language, but does not attain to its pronunciation. He has no knowledge of the current jargon or society slang. He has unconsciously rejected vulgarisms and shallow conceits; but all the deeper thoughts, the poetry of life, which appeal to the soul, he has ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... used the depreciative tu with the students, like a good friar, but he also addressed them in the slang of the markets, a practise that he had acquired from the professor of canonical law: whether that reverend gentleman wished to humble the students or the sacred decrees of the councils is a question not ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... beat the walls—has a slang meaning: to be so drunk that you can't see, or can't lie down ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... In the slang of the turf, the name of Caligula's celebrated horse might, perhaps, be ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... in the chambers—at Lind's table, in fact. He was a man of about twenty-eight or thirty, slim and dark, with a perfectly pallid face, a small black mustache carefully waxed, and an affectedly courteous smile. He wore a pince-nez; was fond of slang, to show his familiarity with English; and aimed at an English manner, too. He seemed bored. He regarded this man whom Brand introduced to him ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... I hear such slang from the educated tongue of a college boy?" she exclaimed with a ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... chapters of life simply written, an effective word of slang stuck in here and there where it does not seem at all out of place; honest, open-hearted, steady-eyed narratives all, with the breeze of the Western prairies in every line, as well as the brotherhood of man, and his triumphs and his failures impressing ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... Ralph. "Here is a pencil and some copy paper. You had better try at once, as I will have to go to press earlier than usual to allow for 'snags,'" and he smiled to apologize for the newspaper slang. ...
— Dorothy Dale • Margaret Penrose
... I whispered, "this is just what I do want to hear. These slang types are among your city's most distinguishing features. Is this the Bowery variety? I really must hear ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... aqua-fortis,' and swore if anyone abused him he ought to be 'set straddle on an iceberg, and shot through with a streak of lightning.'" Somewhere between the dignified despair of Daniel Webster, and the adulatory slang of these gentry we must look for the actual truth about Jackson's administration. The fears of the statesman were not wholly groundless, for it is always hard to count in advance upon the tendency of high office to make men ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... the kind of thing which is meant by people who talk of Muscular Christianity. It is certainly a noble and excellent thing to make people discern that a good Christian need not be a muff (pardon the slang term: there is no other that would bring out my meaning). It is a fine thing to make it plain that manliness and dash may co-exist with pure morality and sincere piety. It is a fine thing to make young fellows comprehend that there is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... know if you can hear me, but I'll chance it. I want to tell you that it's not my fault about Tishy, and the wedding not coming off. She bolted with Ned Cloherty last night—" he checked himself, and felt he ought to apologise for talking slang, and then thought that if it were the Doctor, himself, he wouldn't mind. "Tishy liked Cloherty best," he hurried on, "and she was probably quite right, but I want you to know that I would have played up all right." Then he said, hesitating, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... with the honesty of this confession, and in the same way I sympathize with those Officers of the Salvation Army who, in racing slang, cannot 'stay the course.' ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... styled 'plew' on board, in the slang of the training-ship; possibly, through some association with the 'sky blue' known in the ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... that had swept my memory back to civilization and drawn me from my Golden Bed. O Lalala had all the slang of poker—the poker of the waterfronts of San Francisco and of Shanghai—and evidently he had already taught his ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... coadjutrix, Mrs. Manley, the delectable author of the New Atlantis, to the facetious productions of Tom Durfey, and Tom Brown, and Ned Ward, writer of the London Spy and several other volumes of ribaldry. The slang of the taverns and ordinaries, the wit of the bagnios, form the strongest part of the farrago of which these libels are composed. In the excellent newspaper collection at the British Museum, you may see, besides the Craftsman and Post Boy, specimens, and queer specimens they ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lay along Deer Creek, passing several plantations; and occasionally, at the bends, it crossed the swamp, where the water came above my hips. The smaller drummer-boys had to carry their drums on their heads, and most of the men slang their cartridge-boxes around their necks. The soldiers generally were glad to have their general and field officers afoot, but we gave them a fair specimen of marching, accomplishing about twenty-one miles by noon. Of course, our speed was accelerated ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... and all the firemen ordered to muster in uniform and bring their machines duly draped in black. Now —let us remark in parenthesis—as all the peoples of the earth had representative adventurers in the Silverland, and as each adventurer had brought the slang of his nation or his locality with him, the combination made the slang of Nevada the richest and the most infinitely varied and copious that had ever existed anywhere in the world, perhaps, except in the mines of California in the "early days." Slang ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... had little eyes and freckles and what Christine called a "turnip nose." He wore a very new school blazer and real cricket trousers, with a flannel shirt and school tie that gave Roy's tussore shirt and soft brown bow almost a girlish air. Something in his manner and the way he aired his school slang, made Roy—who never shone with strangers—feel "miles younger," which did not help to put him ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... use her cross voice?—stupid... "for goodness' sake," not "for goodney." Silly of Eve to talk slang.... ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... aide-de-camp reddened angrily and turned his back. As the two lieutenants were lighting cigarettes together, Harry, thinking Gholson had left us, blurted out, "Oh, that's all very well for you to say, Ned, but, damn him, he's not the sort of man that has the right to 'suspicion' me of anything; slang-whanging, backbiting sneak, I know what he's ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... the peculiar delight of a schoolgirl off duty. She spends so much of her life under the all-pervading eye of authority, she is so drilled, and lectured, and ruled and regulated, that, when the eye of authority is off her, she seems naturally to degenerate into licence. No speech so interwoven with slang as the speech of a schoolgirl—except that ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... distressing thought of all was that I saw my children predestined to the same fate. I saw them growing up in complete destitution of those country sights and sounds which had made my own youth delightful; acquiring the superficial sharpness of the city child and his slang; suffering at times by the anaemia and listlessness bred of vitiated air; high-strung and sensitive as those must needs be whose nerves are in perpetual agitation; and when, in chance excursions to the country, I compared my children with the children of cottagers and ploughmen, I felt that I had ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... McEwan would appear at week-ends or in the evening, tramping down the lane to hail the house in absurd varieties of the latest New York slang, which, never failed to amuse Mary. The shy Jamie was often with her; they were now the most intimate of friends. He would show her primitive tools and mechanical contrivances of his own making, and she would tell him stories of Scotland, ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... have happened in the time of Cleopatra, Antony and Caesar. Thus we saw traffic policemen with their Stop and Go signals in the middle of the Sahara; telephones, check books, motorcycles and automobiles in use, and so on. In addition, the leaders were filled with modern business and other slang; and the spectacle of a huge negro wrapping Cleopatsy in a modern Axminster rug and carrying her in to show her to Antony (instead of, as according to history, Caesar) kept the spectators in a roar of laughter. For an originally-worked-out idea such as this ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... my slang, sister mine, but you ought to read fewer of those romantic stories, and more joke books. Oh, there goes Paul, and with a fish pole, too. ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... There was the lost and hardened female, uttering the wild screams of intoxication, or pouring forth from her dark, filthy place of confinement torrents of polluted mirth; the juvenile pickpocket, ripe in all the ribald wit and traditional slang of his profession; the ruffian burglar, with strong animal frame, dark eyebrows, low forehead, and face full of coarseness and brutality; the open robber, reckless and jocular, indifferent to consequences, and holding his life only in trust for ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... give "freak dinners," when the guests themselves would be dressed up, the men in women's clothes, the women in men's, the male imitating the piping treble of the female voices, and the female the over-vowelled slang of the male, until, tiring of this foolishness, they would end up by flinging the food at the pictures on the walls, the usual pellet being softened bread and the favourite target the noses in the family portraits, which, hit and covered with a sprawling mess, looked ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... a few words with each other, one of them spoke to him in a jargon which he seemed to understand, though we could not. He replied with hesitation. For some time they continued asking him questions, and then talking to each other in a slang which was as incomprehensible to us as was the language they spoke to ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... combatants perished after drinking an extraordinary quantity, may be strictly denominated a duel with deadly weapons. In the south of France, it is said, one person sometimes invites another to partake of absinthe by the slang phrase, "Take a shovelful of earth;" as if an American bar-room lounger, recognizing with grim humor the deadly quality of his liquor, should say, "Come and get measured for your coffin." The French expression has certainly, in view of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... Army slang. Your 'striker' is a private soldier, whom you hire at so many a dollars a month to do the rougher work in your quarters. You make whatever bargain you choose with the soldier. At this post the bachelor officers usually pay a striker ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... elegant with his stick and eyeglass, and his careless, disdainful air; and who had said, like a man accustomed to every magnificence, fatigued with luxury, blase with pleasure, and caring only for what is truly pschutt (to use the latest slang): "Pretty women ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... conversation. It is a just complaint among refined and cultivated people that many, even of the well-educated young women of the present day, talk too loudly and vehemently; are given to exaggeration of statement and slang expressions. The greatest blemish of the conversation and manners of the young people of to-day is obtrusiveness and exaggeration. By obtrusiveness I mean a style of speech and manners that attracts ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... a single word of the thieves' slang they employed. It was only later on that I understood that they were talking about the army of the Yaik, which had only just been reduced to submission after the ...
— The Daughter of the Commandant • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... my eyes twinkle, or my face do that weird thing, "break into a smile"; but Jack Morrison told me that Miss MacDonald had "set her cap at the great Somerled," and torn it off and stamped on it in rage because—this is Jack's slang—Sir S. ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... which would have befitted a grand duchess, leaving her astonished auditors to look at each other a moment in silence, and then to express themselves fully and freely and unreservedly with regard to American effrontery, American manners, and American slang, ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... that, in the endeavor to present the actual life of the University, it has seemed quite inadvisable to edit the conversation of the characters from the standpoint of the English purist. Since, however, those readers who boggle over slang could hardly be much interested in the Undergraduate, it is sufficient merely to call attention to ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... English very imperfectly, and what he did know was spoken with a nasal Yankee twang. It was a habit, as well as being thought an accomplishment in those days, as it is in these, to affect American dialect and adopt their slang and mannerisms in order to convey an impression of importance. Even a brief visit to the country, or a single passage in a Yankee ship was sufficient to turn a hitherto humble fellow into an insufferable ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... boy husband very much for hours at a time. He discovered that he was getting up at unearthly hours in order to have time, later in the morning, to go for a walk with Maisie Maidan. He discovered himself using little slang words that she used and attaching a sentimental value to those words. These, you understand, were discoveries that came so late that he could do nothing but drift. He was losing weight; his eyes were beginning to fall in; he had ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... Caroms! Will you be so good as to spare us your slang speeches," continued Mademoiselle de Corandeuil, who seemed to become more crabbed as the young girl's confusion increased. "What a fine education for a young lady! and one who has just come from the 'Sacred Heart'! One that has taken five prizes not fifteen days ago! I really do not know ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of the strange mingling of the literary trade of writing with the mechanical trade of setting type. For that reason a green reporter has difficulty in understanding the instructions that he receives until he has been in the office long enough to learn the office slang. It would be impossible to list all of the expressions that might be heard in one day, but a knowledge of the commonest words will enable a reporter to get the drift of his ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... man to go out to Belgium and get some good 'stuff.' [Stuff, let me say, is the technical or slang term for film pictures.] How would ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... going to Minook will have to hustle." The slang of everyday energy sounded strangely from dying lips—almost a whisper, and yet like a far-off bugle calling a captive ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... else, I imagine," said Hugh. "If the phrases ever had any meaning, it has long ago vanished into obscurity. I have seen explanations given of many popular terms but never of these. After I am gone, though, Bessie, you had better give up slang. It is all very well with me, and to tell the truth, I have taught you all you know, but it would not do with any ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... why must a minister's wife be supposed to utter only prunes and prisms? I shan't. Everybody on Patterson Street uses slang—that is to say, metaphorical language—and if I didn't they would think me insufferably proud and ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... all right, my dear fellow. I understand that it is the refined slang of the modern boudoir, and only known ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... unfamiliarity with the language. For although two nations use the same words and read the same books, intercourse is not conducted by the dictionary. The business of life is not carried on by words, but in set phrases, each with a special and almost a slang signification. Some international obscurity prevailed between me and the coloured gentleman at Council Bluffs; so that what I was asking, which seemed very natural to me, appeared to him a monstrous exigency. He refused, ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... de Joyeusete.——Lettres Gothiques, fig. et bois et titre MSS. feuilles dorees, en maroquin, Paris, par Ant. Verard, 1475, fol.——No. 1963, Heide Beschryving der nieuevlyks uitgevonden en geoctrojeerde Slang-Brand-Spuiten, en Haare wijze van Brand-Blussen, Tegenwoordig binnen Amsterdam in gebruik zynde. Wyze figuurs Amst. 1690, fol. "Note in this book: Paris, 1736. Paid for this book for his Grace the Duke of Kingston, by ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the Athenaeum said, "They are prose poems, carefully meditated, and exquisitely touched in by a teacher ready to sympathize with every joy and sorrow." The five stories are told in simple and clear language, and without slang, to which she heartily objects. For one so rich in imagination as Miss Ingelow, her prose is singularly free from ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... on the Roman Campagna, and the driver of a "stage" on the Corso, Ruspoli is unrivaled. He breeds racers, and he has an English stud-groom, who has taught him to speak English with a drawl, enlivened by stable-slang. He is slim, fair, and singularly awkward, and of a uniform pale yellow—yellow complexion, yellow hair, and yellow eyebrows. Poole's clothes never fit him, and he walks, as he dances, with his legs far apart, as if a horse were under him. He carries a hunting-whip ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... surrender of the feudal privileges, but these had been bitterly felt quite as near to the time of the Revolution as the Doctor's narrative, which you will remember dates long before the Terror. With the slang of the new philosophy on the one side, it was surely not unreasonable or unallowable, on the other, to suppose a nobleman wedded to the old cruel ideas, and representing the time going out as his nephew represents the time coming in. If there be ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... and designed them to grow sugar, coffee, and spices for their masters, instead of raising pumpkins and yams for themselves; and that, if they will not do this, "the beneficent whip" should be again employed to compel them. He adopts, in speaking of the black class, the lowest slang of vulgar prejudice. "Black Quashee," sneers the gentlemanly philosopher,—"black Quashee, if he will not help in bringing out the spices, will get himself made a slave again (which state will be a little less ugly than his present one), ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... "we use olive oil in our cooking, so we must be dagoes. I never knew what they were before. I thought it was slang." ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... to turn out." Is turn out a slang phrase here, or is it a term commonly used in speaking of the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... renowned for courage and for crime; his vessels were usually secreted in the land-locked bay of Barataria, to the westward of the mouth of the river. They were, however, soon extirpated by the American government. The language of the adjacent States is still adulterated with the slang of those scoundrels, proving how short a period it is since they disappeared, and how they must have mixed up with the reckless population, whose head-quarters were then at the mouth ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... such as slaves talked so long, that their masters ultimately adopted it—a language of which Plautus gives us glimpses and which the graffiti may perhaps help to restore. When Varius was emperor, this phrase of the kitchen was as rife as when Plautus wrote—a proof that occasionally slang has ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... She liked to use a bit of slang when it was perfectly safe—as in very good company, or among those she loved; at other times ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... "Randy Books" has been one continual triumph over the hearts of girls of all ages, for dear little fun-loving sister Prue is almost as much a central figure as Randy, growing toward womanhood with each book. The sterling good sense and simple naturalness of Randy, and the total absence of slang and viciousness, make these books in the highest degree commendable, while abundant life is supplied by the doings of merry friends, and there is rich humor in the ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... these procuresses will write to men of means of their acquaintance, informing them in some cipher or slang phrase that they have a new importation in their house awaiting eligible disposition. Large sums are often paid under such circumstances, and the fresh importation is usually sold in this way five or six times. In other words, she ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... in saying that it is all O.K." He laughed, and stretched out his long legs comfortably. "You've got the idea. That's the way to get the good of traveling and seeing other kinds of folks. You learn my queer slang words, ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... who was regarded in her set as a wit, a reputation acquired by reason of the fact that she possessed a certain knack for adapting slang humorously (for there was no originality to her alleged wit), now bent her head and looked at her brother incredulously. "My word! That's a ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... high-class lecture, and read some of my best poetry—not the newspaper stuff but the magazine things. But say, when I get out in the tall grass, there's nothing will take but a lot of cheesy old stories and slang and junk that if any of us were to indulge in it here, he'd get the gate so fast it ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... small stream of that name in Kentucky, the passage of which is made difficult and laborious, as well by its tortuous course as by numerous shallows and bars. The real application of the phrase is to the unhappy wight who propels the boat, but politically, in slang usage, it means the man ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... us that is usually conscious is dissociated and the submerged part takes the stage. When we forget our surroundings in concentration or absent-mindedness, a part of us is dissociated and our friends say that we are "not all there," or as popular slang has it, "Nobody home." When a mood or system of complexes drives out all other moods, one becomes "a different person." But if this normal dissociation is carried a step farther, we may lose the power to put ourselves together again, and then we may truly be said to be dissociated. ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... himself more with a few young French artists whom he happened to know living here than with anybody else in the city; and yet when he went back to London he sometimes felt that the recollection of it, the chatter of studios, the slang of the critics, even the whole sense and sound of Paris gave him a little the recollection as of a huge cage of monkeys. Like most modern Englishmen, he talked disparagingly about British hypocrisy, Anglo-Saxon humbug, English stiffness and London fog; and yet, after all, he ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... boat, even the lightest, they would certainly have escaped in it." Cabral's pilot also, who had been with him before to that same island, declared that of the two great mountain peaks which he had noticed at the two ends of the island, east and west, only the Eastern was now standing. The slang name of "Azores" or "Hawks" now began to take the place of the old term of "Western" islands, from the swarms of hawks or kites that were found in the new discovered St. Michael, and in the others which came to light soon after. For the Third Group, "Terceira," was sighted between 1444-50, and ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... am not going to bear correction from you," said Hampstead, "though I put up with it from your elders. Miss Fay, when you were at school did they talk slang?" ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... no less than to his pity. The readers of the old drama will recall to mind the shifts and devices of the 'Jovial Beggars;'—how easily a wooden leg was slipped off and turned into a bludgeon; how inscrutable were the disguises, and how copious and expressive the slang, of the mendicant crew. Coleridge has justly described 'The Beggar's Bush' as one of the most pleasant of Fletcher's comedies; and if the Spanish novelists do not greatly belie the roads of their land, the mendicant levied his ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... thus another light came into his eyes. His gaze took account of Alice's lips and the delicate, rounded whiteness of her neck and chin. Her like he had never met before. The girls he had known giggled; this one smiled. His sweetheart used slang and talked of cattle like a herder, but this woman's voice, so sweet and flexible, made delightfully strange music ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... it is disastrous. The old feudal distinctions are still perpetuated; the "man" still speaks his "plain Anglo-Saxon," and the "gentleman" still speaks his refined Latinized speech. In every language, it is true, there are social distinctions in speech, and every language has its slang. But in English these distinctions are perpetuated in the very structure of the language. Elsewhere the working-class speak—with a little difference in the quality—a language needing no substantial transformation to become the language of society, which differs from it in quality rather than ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... wrapping around the barrel of a machine gun to keep the water from leaking out of the barrel casing. Also slang for rations. ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... appears to be very well posted on a number of subjects. She is unusually familiar with the Bible, and quotes scripture freely and correctly. She also uses beautiful language, totally void of slang and Negro jargon, "big" words ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... Riley, and although his parents had called him Thomas, to the boys he had always been "Dennis," and by the time he had reached his senior year in college he was quite ready to admit that his "name was Dennis," with all that slang implied. He had tried for several things, athletics particularly, and had been substitute on the ball nine, one of the immortal second eleven backs of the football squad, and at one time had ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... the closed window to make out what they were saying. Even if she had been actually in the room with them, she would have found much of their conversation incomprehensible, as it was largely made up of the extraordinary slang of the Paris street Arabs and rascals generally. From time to time one or the other of the participants in this orgy seemed to propose a toast, whereupon they would all clink their glasses together before raising them to their lips, drain them at a draught, and ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... it, but I don't believe so, and am willing to risk twenty thousand dollars on the continuance of the vein. If it is there, that sum of money ought to enable us to reach it from your present shaft; and if we do strike it, why, in the slang of the day, the Copper Princess is simply a 'peach.' Are you game to accept my offer and go in for ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... Archie, who was struck by Pat's unusual gentleness, 'I think so too, Jus. You're rather difficult to please, for you're always going on at Pat for not joining in with us, and when he does come you slang him for that.' ...
— Miss Mouse and Her Boys • Mrs. Molesworth
... the outer fields, in quarters whence a relieving force might be expected, were turned into lakes by the same machinery. Farther outside, a system of palisade work of caltrops and man-traps—sometimes in the slang of the day called Turkish ambassadors—made the country for miles around impenetrable or very disagreeable to cavally. In a shorter interval than would have seemed possible, the battlements and fortifications of the besieging army had risen like an exhalation out of the morass. The city of Gertruydenberg ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... now quite "on his own hook," as people who speak slang say. There was no one to consult as to what he should do; and though this freedom was enjoyable in the full daylight, he began to feel lonesome as evening drew on. He found a good supper where he had found his dinner, then crept into a nice, thick rose-bush, ...
— The Story of a Robin • Agnes S. Underwood
... that obtains upon two thirds of the front. At the entrance to this position, in the shadow of a beautiful clump of ash trees, stood the rustic shelters of the regimental cooks. From behind the wall of trees came a terrifying crash. The war-gray, iron field kitchen, which the army slang calls a contre-torpilleur (torpedo-boat destroyer), stood in a little clearing of the wood; there was nothing beautiful to the machine, which was simply an iron box, two feet high and four feet square, mounted ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... Alas! Mr. Barker has again become an absentee; and the class of men to which they both belonged is fast disappearing. Improvement has peered beneath the aprons of our cabs, and penetrated to the very innermost recesses of our omnibuses. Dirt and fustian will vanish before cleanliness and livery. Slang will be forgotten when civility becomes general: and that enlightened, eloquent, sage, and profound body, the Magistracy of London, will be deprived of half their amusement, and half ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... "American slang," he explained penitently. "I am sorry. I meant that it was very pleasant to be here alone with you for a ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mischief and insubordination, and—and—let me whisper it to you, little Nora—vulgarity. Yes, I do love to be vulgar. I like shocking mother; I like shocking father. Since Terence came I have had rare fun shocking him. I have learned a lot of slang, and whenever I see Terence I shout it at him. He has got quite nervous lately, and avoids me. He likes Linda awfully, but he avoids me. But, to go on with my day. I am back from school to early dinner, generally in disgrace. I am not ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... by a series of comic sketches, as many of my admirers no doubt remember,—I soon perceived the unstable character of my reputation. I was at the mercy of the next man who should succeed in inventing a new slang, or a funnier way of spelling. These things, in literature, are like "fancy drinks" among the profane. They tickle the palates of the multitude for a while, but they don't wear like the plain old beverages. I saw very ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... a slang which Hal had never heard, but the meaning was inescapable; he "stuck 'em up." At the same moment his first assailant rushed at him, and dealt him a blow over the eye which sent him sprawling backward ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... handle of the fan. Short curls upon the temples were designated cavaliers; ringlets were garcons; while a hundred other inanities of the same description compelled the great ladies of the period to adopt a slang which was perfectly unintelligible to all save the initiated; and when we add to these details the well-authenticated fact that the royal apartments were fumigated with powdered tobacco (then a recent and costly importation into France), in ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... dollar' is stereotyped in modern slang, and yet the idea could not but have existed under other words in the days of those flush individuals, Midas and Croesus. The first of these moneyed gentlemen found gold too plenty for comfort, while the latter, by his unfortunate ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... precision by exercise in these unexpected juxtapositions. Thus, as with our Pundit's famous countryman Mr. Jaberjee, though they use the purest language, they can instantly express every shade of thought with grace and completeness without resorting to slang:—that ready cloak wherewith puny minds strive to cover their vulgarity ...
— The New Pun Book • Thomas A. Brown and Thomas Joseph Carey
... the greater the immorality. It is the one blot upon the character of the agricultural poor. They are not thieves, they are not drunkards; if they do drink they are harmless, and it evaporates in shouting and slang. They are not riotous; but the immorality cannot be gainsaid. No specific cure for this state of things can be devised: it must slowly work itself out under the gradual pressure of an advancing social state. ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... little round in her face, out of which eyes and mouth looked merrily, while she talked rough slang; the same fun and daring,—nothing worse,—were in this child's face, that might be in another's saying prettier words. How could she help her words, hearing nothing but devil's Dutch around her all the time? Children do not make the language they are born into. And the face that could be simply ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Warren, vainly attempting to divine the meaning of the Yankee slang. But the Kentuckian was impatient: he knew that debates were seldom as productive as labor in a workshop, when ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... face grew red, like a bashful woman's. He thought Blecker had divined his secret, would haul it out roughly in another moment. If this slang-talking Yankee should take little Lizzy's name into his mouth! But the Doctor was silent, even looked away until the heat on the poor old bachelor's face had died out. He knew McKinstry's thought ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... obsolescent."—Dr. Crombie, Etymol. and Syntax, p. 193. Some recent grammarians, however, retain it; among whom are Bullions and M'Culloch. Wells retains it, but marks it as, "Obsolete;" as he does also the preterits bare, clave, drove, gat, slang, spake, span, spat, sware, tare, writ; and the participles hoven, loaden, rid from ride, spitten, stricken, and writ. In this he is not altogether consistent. Forms really obsolete belong not to any modern list of irregular verbs; and even such as are archaic and obsolescent, it is sometimes ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... photoartist makes use of this technical device in an abundance of forms. In his slang any going back to an earlier scene is called a "cut-back." The cut-back may have many variations and serve many purposes. But the one which we face here is psychologically the most interesting. We have really an objectivation of our memory ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... narcotics. Poppy straw concentrate is the alkaloid derived from the mature, dried opium poppy. Qat (kat, khat) is a stimulant from the buds or leaves of Catha edulis that is chewed or drunk as tea. Quaaludes is the North American slang term for methaqualone, a pharmaceutical depressant. Stimulants are drugs that relieve mild depression, increase energy and activity, and include cocaine (coke, snow, crack), amphetamines (Desoxyn, Dexedrine), phenmetrazine (Preludin), methylphenidate (Ritalin), and ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Mr. Hopewell, with much earnestness, "if instead of ornamenting your conversation with cant terms, and miserable slang, picked up from the lowest refuse of our population, both east and west, you had cultivated your mind, and enriched it with quotations from classical writers, you would have been more like an Attache, and less like a peddling ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... affair - for me; and Mr. Wiltshire (the narrator) is a huge lark, though I say it. But there is always the exotic question, and everything, the life, the place, the dialects - trader's talk, which is a strange conglomerate of literary expressions and English and American slang, and Beach de Mar, or native English, - the very trades and hopes and fears of the characters, are all novel, and may be found unwelcome to that great, hulking, ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... chastened literary art as that of Thackeray and George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and John Morley, Lecky and Froude, Maine and Symonds, side by side with a Carlylese tendency to extravagance, slang, and caricature, we find another vein in English prose—the flat, ungainly, nerveless style of mere scientific research. What lumps of raw fact are flung at our heads! What interminable gritty collops of learning ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... local in its nature, requiring some specialized knowledge of some particular locality. It would be quite impossible for an Italian on his native heath to understand that great political satirist, "Mr. Dooley," on the Negro Problem, for example. After reading George Ade's Fables in Slang, Mr. Andrew Lang was driven to the desperate conclusion that humour varies with the parallels of latitude, a joke in Chicago ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... ran away from home, he said. At first he found that a wholly new place and new people took him out of himself ("surprised me," he said, "so that I could not live everything beforehand"). Thus he fled. The slang he used, "chased himself all over the country," seemed peculiarly expressive. He had been in foreign countries; he had herded sheep in Australia (so he said), and certainly from his knowledge of the country he had wandered with the gamboleros of South America; he had gone for gold to ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... quadrupeds which was striking in appearance—not to say stunning. No; we won't say stunning, because that is a slang expression, and many persons object to slang expressions; therefore we will avoid that word; although we confess to being unable to see why, if it is allowable (as every one will admit it is) to assert that men may be mentally "struck," it is not equally proper ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... trial, which appeared after its termination, in the Kennebec Journal, published at Augusta, the Hon. James G. Blaine, the writer, declared epigrammatically that, in the defence of Judge Chase, "Paine furnished the logic, Choate the rhetoric, and Smith the slang." ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... conversation ran easily. The talk was in good, up-to-date English. There was rarely a mispronounced word, or a slip in grammar; and there was just enough well-selected slang to make the dialogue bright and to stamp the chatterers as conversant with the live questions of the day. The topics at all times bespoke clean minds and an ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... English—i.e., an English freer from dialectic peculiarities—than the English themselves. We have but one conventional form of expression from Maine to California, and whatever lies outside of this may be bad grammar or slang, but is certainly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... hand the mystical Chassidim were beginning to perform their witches' dance. The language commonly used was the Judendeutsch (the Jewish German jargon) which, stripped of its former literary dignity, was not much better than thieves' slang. Of such pitiful elements the life of the Jews was made up during the first half of the ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... perfect description of the divided will, when the higher wishes lack just that last acuteness, that touch of explosive intensity, of dynamogenic quality (to use the slang of the psychologists), that enables them to burst their shell, and make irruption efficaciously into life and quell the lower tendencies forever. In a later lecture we shall have much to say about this ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... and awkward, making no reference to his love, or to the engagement which she had almost promised to make when he returned. He began and ended quite formally. George, apparently in the best of spirits, wrote as he always did, in a boyish, inconsequent fashion. His letter was filled with slang and gave no news. There was little to show that it was written from Mombassa, on the verge of a dangerous expedition into the interior, rather than from Oxford on the eve of a football match. But she read them over and ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... interchanged by these creatures was of composite sound—now a word of Spanish, then of German, then of French, then of Gaelic, at times of Basque. It was either a patois or a slang. They appeared to be of all nations, and yet ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... yearning tenderness in his heart toward his old chum. Once in a while he would pat the Gray's neck, smoothing his ragged, half worn mane, addressing him all the while in words of endearment expressed in a slang positively profane and utterly without meaning except to ...
— Tom Grogan • F. Hopkinson Smith |
