"Idiom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other, sir, may be both charitably and accurately described in your native idiom as a daughter ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... also observe, that the stress which Mr. Everett lays upon the phrase "no iniquity," shows either great carelessness, or great ignorance of the idiom of the Hebrew Scriptures; because every man, familiar with those writings, knows that this expression is one of those called Hebreisms, which must be understood in a restrained sense. In proof of which, and a decisive one too, I would refer him to the prophecy of Balaam, recorded, Num. ch. xxii. ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... travels, by the name of Prester John, from a corruption of the Persian word Djehan, which signifies the world, to which has been prefixed the French word prestre or pretre, priest. Thus the priest world, and the god world are in the Persian idiom the same. ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... he cried, using the Haitian idiom with its perpetual recurrence of "Yes" and "No," and went on, "and ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... was his greatest achievement. It is open to criticism in many ways; it is not so exact in scholarship, nor so faithful to its avowed text, as might be expected from his reputation; but it reveals a profound acquaintance with the vocabulary and customs of the Muslims, with their classical idiom as well as their vulgarest "Billingsgate," with their philosophy and modes of thought as well as their most secret and most disgusting habits. Burton's "anthropological notes," embracing a wide field of pornography, apart from questions of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... with a version, whether of an ancient or of a modern classic, which is thoroughly appreciative and satisfactory. The majority are utterly disappointing and deceptive. It is in the transfer of the idiom and costume that the difficulty and consequent failure lie. No one who merely knows at second hand Homer, Herodotus, Plautus, Terence, Horace, Virgil, Montaigne, Le Sage (a metonym for Gil Blas), Cervantes, La Fontaine, Dumas, Maupassant, Balzac, can have had an opportunity of ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... Trumbull's 'Blue Laws, True and False'. Apparently Mark Twain relished it, for as Bernard DeVoto points out, "The book is always Mark Twain. Its parodies of Tudor speech lapse sometimes into a callow satisfaction in that idiom—Mark hugely enjoys his nathlesses and beshrews and marrys." The writing of 1601 foreshadows his fondness ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... Il Signor Marchese Cantini, the learned and illustrious author of "Hi, diddlo-diddlino! Il gutto e'l violino!", has just rendered immense service to the trip-loving natives of these lovely isles, by preparing a "Guide to Conversation," that for utility and correctness of idiom surpasses all previous attempts of the same kind. With it in one hand, and a bagful of Napoleons or Zecchini in the other, the biggest dunce in London—nay, even a schoolmaster—may travel from Boulogne to Naples ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... idiom of this country, Countess," he said, "I raise my hat to you. You preserve your mask of ignorance to the end. So much so, indeed, that I find myself asking do you really believe that Germany intends to ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... purports to be, a commentary on a real German treatise, is the style, which is a sort of Babylonish dialect, not destitute, it is true, of richness, vigour, and at times a sort of singular felicity of expression, but very strongly tinged throughout with the peculiar idiom of the German language. This quality in the style, however, may be a mere result of a great familiarity with German literature, and we cannot, therefore, look upon it as in itself decisive, still less as outweighing so much evidence of an opposite character."—North-American ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... were probably so good themselves as to be justly scandalized at the notion of holding so much communion with guilt, as to sympathize with it in its sufferings. But I believe, after all, it was rather a flow of idiom than an effort ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. 577 - Volume 20, Number 577, Saturday, November 24, 1832 • Various
... Araucanians probably obtained their name from two Quichua words, ari auccan, yes! they fight; an idiom very expressive of their warlike character. They had had long and terrible wars with the Incas ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... conquered race; they till the ground in the country, and in the cities occupy themselves with manual labour. Wales and Cornwall alone, in the isle of Britain, were still places of refuge for independent Celts. The idiom and traditions of the ancient inhabitants were there preserved. In these distant retreats, at the foot of Snowdon, in the valley of St. David's, beneath the trees of Caerleon, popular singers accompany on their harps the old ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... nothing the matter," declared the mother, using an effective German idiom. "Jennie has gone walking with him once or twice. He has called here at the house. What is there now in that for the people to talk about? Can't the girl have any ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... is an Anglicism, which has become an idiom in all languages, so gracefully does it depict the nuptial season which is so fugitive, and during which life is nothing but sweetness and rapture; the expression survives as illusions and errors survive, for it contains the most odious of falsehoods. If this season is presented to us as ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... or written discourse acquired. The discipline of translating accurately is next in value to that obtained from the study of numbers. The difficulty of turning this accurate translation into the idiom of one's own language is ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... 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; ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... now necessary for him."[328] From this passage it seems that these books must have been first written before Caesar's death. Caesar, at the time of Catiline's conspiracy, had endeavored to annul all debts—that is, to establish "new tables" according to the Roman idiom—but had failed by Cicero's efforts. He had since affected it, although he might have held his power without seeking for the assistance of such debtors. Who could that be but Caesar? In the beginning ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... constructions, Master Skimmer, as a school-boy's version of his Virgil. There is an idiom in diplomacy, as well as in language, and one who treats so sensibly should not be ignorant of its phrases. Bless me, Sir; an hypothesis is not a conclusion, any more than a promise is a performance. That which ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... clique which cared only for what was nicely said, or rather what was out of the common. Instead of using an elegant and refined diction, they employed only a pretentious and conceitedly affected style, which became highly ridiculous; instead of improving the national idiom they completely spoilt it. Where formerly D'Urfe, Malherbe, Racan, Balzac, and Voiture reigned, Chapelain, Scudery, Menage, and the Abbe Cotin, "the father of the French Riddle," ruled in their stead. Moreover, every lady in Paris, as well as ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... led to these remarks by the contemplation of Chinese Charley at the ranch. He has been with Mrs. Kitty twenty-five years; he wears American clothes; he speaks English with hardly a trace of either accent or idiom; he has long since dropped the deceiving Oriental stolidity and weeps out his violent Chinese rages unashamed. Yet even now Mrs. Kitty's summing up is that Charley is a "queer ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... near intercourse he thus had with some of the noblest and highest in rank, he again began to possess great influence in the city. The work which he set himself to do was to compose and translate philosophical dialogues and to render logical and physical terms into the Roman idiom. For he it was, as it is said, who first or principally gave Latin names to technical Greek terms, which, either by metaphors or other means of accommodation, he succeeded in making intelligible to the Romans. For his recreation, he exercised ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... same religious order and partly to their constant duplication, Jain 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 Raj ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... 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 ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... not what I might have been: but I feel that I am not. The first right of man, ay and, to talk in your own idiom, the first moral duty too, is to be happy; and he is an idiot that, having a banquet spread before him, forbears to taste because he himself is not the purveyor. What matters it to me how it came there? Why am I to be excluded? Have ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... pretty tough, Hen. But I feel like I must go, you see," said the girl, dropping into the idiom of Sunset Ranch. "Dad wanted ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... blended and formed the ancient speech of the Netherlands, which in the Middle Ages, like the other European languages, passed through the different Germanic, Norman, and French phases, and ended in the present Dutch language, in which there is still a foundation of the primitive idiom and the evidence of a slight Latin influence. Certainly, there is a striking similarity between Dutch and German, and, above all, there are a number of root-words common to the two; but there is, however, a great difference in the grammar, that of the Dutch being much simpler in construction, ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... emotional sympathy for self is as true a part of art as sympathy for others; and a prejudice in favor of the good and bad of one personality against the virtue of many personalities. It may be that when a poet or a whistler becomes conscious that he is in the easy path of any particular idiom,—that he is helplessly prejudiced in favor of any particular means of expression,—that his manner can be catalogued as modern or classic,—that he favors a contrapuntal groove, a sound-coloring one, a sensuous ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... ibiso. Ice glacio. Ice, an glaciajxo. Iceberg glacierego, glacimonto. Icicle pendglacio. Icelander Islandano. Idea ideo. Ideal idealo. Identical identa. Identify identigi. Idiocy idioteco. Idiom (a peculiar expression) idiotismo. Idiom (general sense) idiomo. Idiot idiotulo. Idle senokupa. Idleness senokupeco. Idol idolo. Idolatry idolservado. Idolize amegi, adori. If se. Ignis fatuus erarlumo. Ignite ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... of estates and honours; the untimely death of kindred, and perhaps of his wife, may furnish eternal food for regrets. Welbeck's utterance, though rapid and distinct, partook, as I conceived, in some very slight degree of a foreign idiom. ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... dance,'—which I knew as well as they. Could I have been instructed even in their phrases and speeches, I might have made valuable conjectures. But even their language, on these occasions, seems, by their own admission, beyond the learning of the 'linkisters.' It is a poetical, mystical idiom, varying essentially from that of trading and of familiar intercommunication, and utterly incomprehensible to the literal minds of mere trafficking explainers. Even were it otherwise, the persons hovering upon the frontier most ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... diction is pure 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 ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... 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 ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... natives of Mozambique and Congo belong to the same stock. All the inhabitants of the great empire of Congo speak one language, though it is divided into a number of dialects, including the dialect of Loango in the north, that of Congo in the south, and Banda, or idiom of Cassanga, in the interior, forming, collectively, one nearly allied family of languages, or, ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... manner, casting alert eyes about me, for, to use an expressive idiom, I was not doing this for my health. On the contrary I had two very definite purposes; the first, which I could probably compass, was to save Miss Falconer from further intercourse with Blenheim and to conceal the presence of the wounded, helpless Firefly from his ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... While our English poets have conceived and executed without regard for the opinion of the learned and without obedience to the usages of language—Shakspere, for example, producing tragedies which set Aristotle at defiance, and Milton engrafting Latinisms on the native idiom—the Italian poets thought and wrote with the fear of Academies before their eyes, and studied before all things to maintain the purity of the Tuscan tongue. The consequence is that the Italian and English literatures ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Abbe de Gauvon had taught me to read less eagerly, and with a greater degree of attention, which rendered my studies more serviceable. I accustomed myself to reflect on elocution and the elegance of composition; exercising myself in discerning pure French from my provincial idiom. For example, I corrected an orthographical fault (which I had in common with all Genevese) by these ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... a great pleasure, a very great pleasure, Miss Messiter," he thanked her warmly, his Western idiom sloughed with his villainy for the moment. "It has been a good many months since I have heard any decent music. With your permission I ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... c'est trop fort!" Pemberton laughed in the manner and with the borrowed grace of idiom that marked the best colloquial, the best anecdotic, moments of his friends themselves. "Where in the world do you suppose I should get three louis, ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... with such ashes to-day in Japan. Death takes away all things from man, but not his poems, his songs, the beautiful thoughts which he puts into musical verse. These will always be heard like nightingales. The fourth line in the first stanza contains an idiom which may not be familiar to you. It means only that the two friends talked all day until the sun set in the West, and still talked on after that. Tennyson has used the same Greek thought in a verse of his poem, "A Dream of ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... angle, the relative proportion or disproportion of the extremities, the loose muscular attachment of the ligatures, and the harsh features were exemplified in the notable instance of the late President Lincoln. A like individuality appears in their idiom. It lacks the Doric breadth of the Virginian of the other slope, and is equally removed from the soft vowels and liquid intonation of the southern plain. It has verbal and phraseological peculiarities of its own. Bantering ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... help thee home, and tell thee what I mean, by the way," said Penn, using the idiom of his sect, into which familiar manner of speech he naturally fell when talking ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... Venetians admired him intensely. His bright, clear complexion and rich chestnut hair had the charm of novelty for them. Though without the faintest respect for grammar or idiom, he spoke their language with perfect composure, confidence, and self-satisfaction, and his tones were so well adapted to the slow, soft, languid tongue, that his blunders sounded better than other men's correctness of speech. Mallem mehercule cum Platone errare. ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... 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
... source is—the common people's ballads. Most of these "make no pretence to being true to Ireland, but only being true to the purlieus of Cork and Dublin"; yet now and then one meets a fine burst of passion, and oftener a racy idiom. The "Drimin Dhu," "The Blackbird," "Peggy Bawn," "Irish Molly," "Willy Reilly," and the "Fair of Turloughmore," are the specimens given here. Of these "Willy Reilly" (an old and worthy favourite in Ulster, it seems, but quite unknown elsewhere) is the best; but it is too long ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... the Gul[)i][']sgul[)i]['] or great crested flycatcher (Myiarchus crinitus), the Ts[^u]ts[^u] or martin (Progne subis), and the A[']nig[^a]sta[']ya or chimney swift (Chaetura pelasgia). In the idiom of the formulas it is said that these "have just come and are sticking to them" (the players), the same word (dan[^u]tsg[^u][']lani'ga) being used to express the devoted attention of a lover to ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... whether the phrase "was graduated," applied not to a vernier, but to a student, be legitimate or not; it is certainly so used by the best American writers. Another common American idiom that sounds queer to British ears is, "The minutes were ordered printed" (for "to be printed"). Misquotations and misuse of foreign phrases are terribly rife; and even so spirited and entertaining a writer as Miss F.C. Baylor ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... the Icelandic polity began to break up. The literature of the maturity of Iceland just before the fall of the Commonwealth is a literature belonging wholly and purely to Iceland, in a style unmodified by Latin syntax and derived from the colloquial idiom. The matter is the same in kind as the common matter of heroic poetry. The history represents the lives of adventurers, the rivalries and private wars of men who are not ignorant of right and honour, but who acknowledge little authority over them, ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... that the force of the expression which the Psalmist employs is correctly given in the margin, 'in an image'—or 'in a shadow.' The phrase sounds singular to us, but is an instance of a common enough Hebrew idiom, and is equivalent to saying—he walks in the character or likeness of a shadow, or, as we should say, he walks as a shadow. That is to say, the whole outward life and activity of every man is represented as fleeting and unsubstantial, like the reflection of a cloud which darkens leagues ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of Egypt and Asia, which cultivated the language and manners of the Greeks, had deeply imbibed the venom of the Arian controversy. The familiar study of the Platonic system, a vain and argumentative disposition, a copious and flexible idiom, supplied the clergy and people of the East with an inexhaustible flow of words and distinctions; and, in the midst of their fierce contentions, they easily forgot the doubt which is recommended by philosophy, and the submission which is enjoined ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Still more prodigious to say, that a hound gets a chase on the hip. One would be loth to impute to the only judicious dramatic commentator of the day, a love of contradiction as the motive for quarrelling with Mr. Collier's note on this idiom. To the examples alleged by Mr. Dyce, the three following may be added; whereof the last, after the opinion of Sir John Harington, rightly refers the origin of ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... second person singular in the future tense of a verb derived from the Latin pando, "to open?" I am not aware of the existence of such a word as pander in old French; but I believe that it was by no means an unusual practice among the writers of Chaucer's time to adapt Latin words to their own idiom. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... must be confessed that while he has been the means of attracting others to the study of that interesting tongue, his own command of it was of the slightest. He never mastered 'deep' (or inflected) Romani, and even his broken gypsy is a curious Borrovian variety, distinct from the idiom of the tents. No gypsy ever uses chal or engro as a separate word, or talks of the dukkering dook or of penning a dukkerin. His genders are perversely incorrect, as in the title of the present book; and his 'Romano Lavo-Lil: Word Book of the Romany or English Gypsy Language' ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... remained; there, I suppose, you have an odd case of a transference of something that was happening in the brain to the extremities. My feet were quite warm to the palm of my hand, but to my sense they were frozen. But what a testimony to the fitness of the American idiom, "cold feet," as signifying a depressed and desponding mood! But, somehow or other, the tale was finished and the "notion" was at last out of my head. I have gone into all this detail about "A Fragment of Life" ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... He is clad in his proper mediaeval garb, in strong contrast to the classic robes of the denizens of the valley in Thessaly. Mefistofele suggests to Faust that they now separate; the land of antique fable has no charm for him. Faust is breathing in the idiom of Helen's song like a delicate perfume which inspires him with love; Mefistofele longs for the strong, resinous odors of the Harz Mountains, where dominion over the Northern hags belongs to him. Faust is already gone, and he is about to depart when ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... disgust at its illiteracy and vulgarity. By vulgarity vulgar Jews mean the reproduction of the Hebrew words with which the poor and the old-fashioned interlard their conversation. It is as if English-speaking Scotchmen and Irishmen should object to "dialect" novels reproducing the idiom of their "uncultured" countrymen. I do not possess a copy of my first book, but somehow or other I discovered the MS. when writing Children of the Ghetto. The description of market-day in Jewry was transferred bodily from the ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... rhetorical, St. Paul's preaching not to be logical, and the Greek of the New Testament not to be grammatical. The stern truth, the profound pathos, the impatient period, leaping from point to point and leaving the intervals for the hearer to fill, the comparatively Hebraized and unelaborate idiom, had little in them of attraction for the students of phrase and syllogism; and the chief knowledge of the age became one of the chief stumbling-blocks ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... tiresome and difficult a Piece of Work it is to translate, nor how little valued in the World. My Experience has convinced me, that 'tis more troublesome and teazing than to write and invent at once. The Idiom of the Language out of which one translates, runs so in the Head, that 'tis next to impossible not to fall frequently into it. And the more bald and incorrect the Stile of the Original is, the more shall that of the Translation be so too. Many of the Quotations in this Book ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... 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
... Commentators. Bentley has, however, it appears, come to the most reasonable conclusion; who supposes that Terence means by "bene vertere," a literal translation, word for word, from the Greek, by which a servile adherence to the idiom of that language was preserved to the neglect of the Latin idiom; in consequence of which the Plays of Luscus Lavinius were, as he remarks, "male scriptae," ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... vacancy or void; Bodh-koom, ignorance (literally, knowledge-void). Koom-posh is their name for the government of the many, or the ascendancy of the most ignorant or hollow. Posh is an almost untranslatable idiom, implying, as the reader will see later, contempt. The closest rendering I can give to it is our slang term, "bosh;" and this Koom-Posh may be loosely rendered "Hollow-Bosh." But when Democracy or Koom-Posh degenerates from popular ignorance into that popular passion or ferocity which ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... dark eyes were full of animation, and his countenance, though bronzed, interestingly expressive, remonstrated with the dog in the French language. "The animal does not understand you," exclaimed Tallyho, in the vernacular idiom of the youth, "Speak to him in English." "He must be a clever dog," answered the boy, "to know English so soon, for neither him nor I have been in England above a week, and for the first time in our lives."—"And how is it," asked Tallyho, "that you speak the English language ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... out!" she murmured, lapsing into the Western idiom which a whole week spent in the society of her bosom friend was bound to call up. "But why Lord Chilminster?" She pronounced ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... took great pains, and here Jane helped her. Jane had an excellent and well-cultivated taste, and she was therefore well fitted to judge of style, and she assisted Isabella to re-write and polish her translation, till no foreign idiom could be detected, and till there was no trace of the stiffness or poverty which characterises most versions from the French. When this was done, Jane, who wrote a much better hand than Isabella, transcribed ...
— Principle and Practice - The Orphan Family • Harriet Martineau
... Swanson, heavy, slow-moving, blond as Harold Haarfagar, a veritable Scandinavian colossus; Wyndham, clean-bred, clean-built, an English gentleman to his fingers' tips; old Ike James, whose tongue carried the idiom and soft-slurring drawl of his native South; Eugene Brule, three parts Quebec French and one part Cree; Carter, O'Gara, Bullen, Westwick, and half ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... The idiom of Curly's speech was at times a trifle obscure to the uneducated ear. I gathered that he believed these newcomers to be of proper social rank, and that he was also of the opinion that a certain mending in their material matters might add to the ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... reverence, and an aged mariner was procured from the Sailor's Snug Harbor in San Francisco, on trial. But the unfortunate seaman was more or less diseased, was not always presentable, through a weakness for ardent spirits, and finally, to use the powerful idiom of one of his disappointed foster-children, "up and died in a ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... philological work, a book of the revival, a rhetorical declamation, in which Calvin is evidently aspiring to a place among the humanists, and making his court, in sufficiently fine Latin, to all the Ciceronians of the age: this was bringing himself forward with skill and tact. The Latin language was the idiom of the Church, of the convents, colleges, universities, and parliaments. The Psychopannychia is a religious pamphlet, and now Calvin must expect a rival in the first pamphleteer of Germany, Luther himself. It is certain that Calvin was acquainted with the writings of the Saxon ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... examination of the best English writers, with a view to a comparison of their style and phraseology with those of the best American writers and with our colloquial usage, enables me to affirm, with confidence, that the genuine English idiom is as well preserved by the unmixed English of this country as it is by the best English writers. Examples to prove this fact will be found in the Introduction to this work. It is true that many of our writers have neglected to cultivate taste and the embellishments of style, but even these ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... the idiom of the professionals, he "raised his plant," and the burglar's kit manufactured in the Connecticut State Prison did what Stoneman considered yeoman service. With all his art and cunning, justice would not be cajoled by him, but weighed ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... custom of coupling a man and woman 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! ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... interposed Morris Woolridge, who had been giving the native lessons in English, for he mixed with it the German idiom. ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... their native shires. The language of the extreme south, the descendant of the tongue of the West Saxon court, became the dialect of peasants and artisans. That a continuous life was reserved for the idiom of the north country, was due to its becoming the speech of a free Scotland, the language in which Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, commemorated for the court of the first Stewart king the exploits of Robert Bruce and the Scottish war of independence. The unity of England ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... idiom meaning, "I have not found thy good fortune (Ka'b heel, glory, prosperity) do me ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... their revolutionary period, have distinguished as philosophism, and the philosophers themselves as philosophistes. He would have designated them as literators, but few exotic words will circulate; new words must be the coinage of our own language to blend with the vernacular idiom. Many new words are still wanted. We have no word by which we could translate the otium of the Latins, the dillettante of the Italians, the alembique of the French, as an epithet to describe that sublimated ingenuity which exhausts ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... ten-strike, I hear," he volunteered, in an expressive, if inelegant, idiom of the money game; "there's a story going the rounds that Mills and Severance have been gunning together and that some one else got burned. Anyway, I hear they've lined their pockets. ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... highly creditable house."—Madame Firmiani is metamorphosed into a house! but the house is not a pile of stones architecturally superposed, of course not, the word presents in Lounger's language an indescribable idiom.—Here the Lounger, a spare man with an agreeable smile, a sayer of pretty nothings with more acquired cleverness than native wit, stoops to your ear and adds, with a shrewd glance: "I have never seen Monsieur Firmiani. His social position is that ...
— Madame Firmiani • Honore de Balzac
... to the following anonymous letter, sent to Mr. Walpole by Miss Hannah More, ridiculing the prevailing adoption of French idioms into the English language. There is not in this satirical epistle one French word nor one English idiom:— ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Relatives whom, which, or they at their Mercy whether they may have Admission or not; and will never be decided till we have something like an Academy, that by the best Authorities and Rules drawn from the Analogy of Languages shall settle all Controversies between Grammar and Idiom. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... a large family, found, no doubt, a vast fund of interesting suggestions in Lord M.'s "Dissertations on the Origin of Language;" but to us he communicated only one section of the work. It was a long passage, containing some very useful illustrations of a Greek idiom; useful I call them, because four years afterwards, when I had made great advances in my knowledge of Greek, they so appeared to me. [16] But then, being scarcely seven years old, as soon as our tutor had finished his long extract ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family, if this was the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia." ("Asiatic Researches", I. page ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... Bacon's birthday. "They let off fireworks when he was born," say the French in a slyly witty proverb, which is a circumlocutory way of saying that a man won't set the Thames on fire. For "he has not invented gunpowder" is the French equivalent for this idiom of ours, and it is obvious to the meanest intellect that a man whose birth was celebrated by fireworks could not have been the inventor of gunpowder. And yet there were fireworks of a kind from the earliest times, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... destroying them and repelling the beguilements of evil spirits better than we have, for the contemplative orders were more kindred to those earlier times than to-day. Monasticism of today takes another turn. Love of God is eternal, but we must love God in the idiom and spirit of our time." And Father Daly believed that there was no surer method of escaping from the danger than by active work, by teaching, which, he argued, was not incompatible with contemplation, not carried to excess; and there were also the poor people, and to work for them was always ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... service of the Duke of Orleans, but having lost his hearing gave himself up to literature, writing odes and sonnets; he was of the PLEIADE SCHOOL OF POETS (q. v.), and contributed to introduce important changes in the idiom of the French language, as well as in the rhythm of French ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... saw you pass by infatuated with Jtz-Li-Cama, the cacique's daughter and wife of the murderous scoundrel, El Macho, then I gave you up. Oh, see what is happening now. Amigo, you have broken up the dance. So it seemed. The drum was silent now and we heard the voices of men arguing in the Aztec idiom. Of a sudden the lights were extinguished and the crowd came out with a rush, and silently they stole away ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... nose. Without the least intention of alluding to our hero, the early settlers had affixed the name of St. Anthony, who appears to have been a kind of Dutch deity in this state, and to have monopolized all the natural noses within her boundaries to himself. The vulgar idiom made the pronunciation an-TONY's nose—and all this Charles briefly explained to Miss Emmerson and her niece by way of giving point to his own wit. He had hardly made them comprehend the full brilliancy and beauty of his application ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... time, and the new modes of thinking and living introduced by the invaders; while, strange to say, the language remained unaltered. Even today, in many places in Yucatan the descendants of the Spanish conquerors have forgotten the native tongue of their sires, and only speak Maya, the idiom of the vanquished. Traditions, religious rites, superstitious practices, dances, were handed down from generation to generation. But, as the sciences were of old the privilege of the few, the colleges and temples of learning having been destroyed at the downfall of ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... not know the sonnets and the love-intoxicated letters she is believed to have addressed to him? I would not say that every word of the latter is genuine; through the several translations—from the French original (which is lost) into the Scotch idiom, from this into Latin, and then back into French as we now have them—they may have suffered much alteration: we have no right to lay stress on every expression, and interpret it by the light of later events: ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... generally on the tops of omnibuses, receptive, absorbent, mostly silent. He did try once or twice to talk to the bus drivers—he had been told it was a thing to do if you wanted to get hold of the point of view of a particular class; but the thick London idiom defeated him, and he found they grew surly when he asked them too often to repeat their replies. He felt a little surly himself after a while, when they asked him, as they nearly always did, if he wasn't an American. "Yes," he would say in the end, "but not the United States kind," resenting ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... les 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
... such a difference in education; Mignon's 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 ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could give us their psychological character—their conceptions of life, and their emotions—with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies. But while he can copy Mrs. Plornish's colloquial style with the delicate accuracy of a sun-picture, while there is the ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... permit time and circumstance to bring about its establishment, the subject is as wearisome as it is unprofitable. The logic of the belief that it is possible to achieve a representative nationalism in music by the ingenuous process of adopting the idiom of an alien though neighbouring race is not immediately apparent; and although MacDowell in this suite has admittedly derived his basic material from the North American aborigines, he never, so far as I am aware, claimed that his impressive ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... were, not to!" cried the Arab with the bound of a wild beast, springing up, flashing the blade out, and uttering the taunt, which in his own idiom was but ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... over, the diabolical farce is over, and she is "tied," as their idiom has it, "tied to the stone." Oh, she is tied indeed, tied with ropes Satan twisted in his cruellest hour ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... closely as I possibly could to the original. Indeed, the first draft of the translation was absolutely literal, regardless of style or even idiom. While in that state, it was revised by the Russian friend who assisted me in my translation of Krilofs Fables—M. Alexander Onegine—and to his painstaking kindness I am greatly indebted for the hope I venture to entertain that I have not "traduced" the author ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... uncomprehendingly. Primmie's equipment of Cape Cod slang and idiom, rather full and complete of itself, had of late been amplified and complicated by a growing acquaintance with the new driver of the grocery cart, a young man of the world who had spent two hectic years ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... freshness of his sympathy. The story is at times almost startlingly American, as when the original betrayer of the heroine is excused on the ground that, being English, his morality would naturally not rise to native level (I swear I'm not laughing—see page 168); and so full of the idiom of the Transatlantic stage as to be a perfect vade mecum for visiting mimes from this side. For the rest, vivacious, wildly sentimental and obviously written ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... language which they do not properly understand. In the early periods of 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, ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... 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 ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... that is 'not called upon;' and as mistresses are 'called upon' that their names so invoked may make their lovers throw the dice with success; still, according to the double sense of the word, they may be compared to each other, as they are both, according to the Latin idiom, 'invocati.'"] ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... rather big," said Claudius apologetically, not catching the American idiom. Mr. Barker, however, did not explain himself, for he was thinking of ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... 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
... kata to semaino menon, as a telegram with half the words left out may at the other end of the scale be understood. But they constantly withstand even a generous parser, even one who is to the fullest extent ready to allow for idiom and individuality. They abuse in particular the conjunction to a most enormous extent—coupling by its means propositions which have no logical connection, which start entirely different trains of thought, and which are only united because carelessness and fashion combined made it ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... however, been added to the Book of Leinster version for the purpose of comparison. In the renderings given of these romances the translation of the prose is nearly literal, but no attempt has been made to follow the Irish idiom where this idiom sounds harsh in English; actives have been altered to passive forms and the reverse, adjectives are sometimes replaced by short sentences which give the image better in English, pronouns, in which Irish is very rich, are often replaced by the persons or things ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... me that this must be some Arabic idiom for the Eternal Feminine, but I only looked ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... judge of the thrilling effect of such passages upon a Roman jury, they must be read in the grand periods of the oration itself, to which no translation into a language so different in idiom and rhythm as English is from Latin can possibly do justice. The fruitless appeal made by the unhappy citizen to the outraged majesty of Rome, and the indignant demand for vengeance which the great orator founds upon it—proclaiming the recognised principle that, in every quarter of the ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... gorilla warfare," said Von Baumser, with a proud consciousness of having mastered an English idiom. "For all dat, discipline is a very fine thing—very good indeed. I vell remember in the great krieg—the war with Austria—we had made a mine and were about to fire it. A sentry had been placed just over this, and after the match was lit it was forgotten to withdraw the man. He knew ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... affectionate animal,' said Father Piret, dropping unconsciously into a French idiom to express his meaning. 'The little sprig had been kept as a talisman, and no saintly relic was ever more honored; ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... or Chronicles of Japan was issued. It was prepared by imperial command and appeared in A.D. 720 in the reign of the Empress Gensho. It differs from the older book in being composed in the Chinese idiom, and in being much more tinctured with the ideas of Chinese philosophy. These two works, so nearly contemporaneous, both of them composed in so great a degree of the legendary elements of Japanese history, must be looked upon as ...
— Japan • David Murray
... as when it is laid in Westminster. Terms of art, indeed, are different in different places; but they are generally understood in none. The technical style of an Indian treasury is not one jot more remote than the jargon of our own Exchequer from the train of our ordinary ideas or the idiom of our common language. The difference, therefore, in the two cases is not in the comparative difficulty or facility of the two subjects, but in our attention to the one and our total neglect of the other. Had this attention and neglect been regulated by the value of the several objects, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... although with a foreign accent: in this last respect, he resembled some of those around him, more especially the Duke of Perth, who, having been long abroad, in vain endeavoured to conceal the French idiom and pronunciation by affecting ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... 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
... has been poorly and unintelligibly translated into German eine Gemeinschaft der Heiligen, a communion of saints. If it is to be rendered plainly, it must be expressed quite differently in the German idiom; for the word ecclesia properly means in German eine Versammlung, an assembly. But we are accustomed to the word church, by which the simple do not understand an assembled multitude, but the consecrated house or building, although the house ought not to ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... suppose, one of the supreme lyric expressions in the English language of the passion of love. Furthermore, Whitman's free unmetered swing, the glorious length of his stride, fell in with March's rhythmic idiom as though they had been born under the ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Latin idiom (as Keightley points out) male perditur: Prof. Masson, however, would regard it as equivalent to "there is little ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... studying Latin and Greek stand in especial need of help to enable them to write a long English sentence clearly. The periods of Thucydides and Cicero are not easily rendered into our idiom without some knowledge of the links that ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... imposing figure which he cut in a ballroom, but still he was occasionally to be found there. Miss Mary Todd, who afterward became his wife, was the magnet which drew the tall, awkward young man from his den. One evening Lincoln approached Miss Todd, and said, in his peculiar idiom: ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... a long while together, Brangwen flushing like a girl when the other did not understand his idiom. Then they said good night, and shook hands. Again the foreigner bowed ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... whosoever should suppose that he does not speak English 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. ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... grammatical framework is identical. The small change of language—the adverbs and prepositions,—though sometimes strangely used in America, are not strange to an English ear. And there the precise resemblance ends. Accent, idiom, vocabulary give a new turn to the ancient speech. The traveller feels as though he were confronted with an old friend, tricked out in an odd suit of clothes, and master of a ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... vocational trails—the streets of his livelihood. And as his enemy was likely to find him by following these traces, they became not only the paths of peace but the paths of war. When the red man trespassed upon the peaceful trails of his enemy, he was, in an American idiom, "on ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... there. She had a bugbear; Slang. Could not endure the smart technicalities current; their multitude did not overpower her distaste; she called them "jargon"—"slang" was too coarse a word for her to apply to slang: she excluded many a good "racy idiom" along with the real offenders; and monosyllables in general ran some risk of' having to show their passports. If this was pedantry, it went no further; she was open, free, and youthful with her young pupils; and had the art to put herself on their level: ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... what mixed feelings I descend next morning. On the one 'and, I must keep the sharp look-out for my uncle, for 'im I must avoid till he shall have—what do you say in your idiom? Yes, I have it—simmered down and tucked in his shirt. On the other 'and, I must watch for my lady of the parrot. I count the minutes ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... have a mere coincidence of idiom; in the former a proverbial allusion.[57] An uncritical pursuit of such mere accidents of resemblance has led Mr. Feis to such enormities as the assertion that Shakspere's contemporaries knew Hamlet's use ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... attempt to translate the foregoing idiom into French was interrupted by Madame's retirement into the house, whither she beckoned Cockerell to follow her. In the front room she produced a frayed sheet of paper, which she proffered with an ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... inquire what time it was. I told him, and he said, "Ah, a little sooner than I thought." And why not "sooner" as well as "earlier"? But when, on the same road, two white girls in an ox-cart hailed me with the question, "What time 't is?" I thought the interrogative idiom a little queer; almost as queer, shall we say, as "How do you do?" may have sounded to the first man who heard it,—if the reader is able ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... '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
... Fifth Avenue dialect and conversation with trills and grace notes from France and Italy. He had been slowly recovering from that trouble for a year or so when I met him. Now and then a good, strong, native idiom burst out in ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... rich musical voice, with just enough of foreign accent and idiom to add to the charm of her oratory. As a speaker she was pointed, logical, and impassioned. She not only dealt in abstract principles clearly, but in their application touched the deepest emotions of the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... wildest dismay to our mind. Those understanding the Indian tongue have frequently assured me that the Indian, when interpreting, reproduces with minuteness, if he be granted, of course, a certain latitude for differences of idiom, the speaker's thought and expressions. It is said by one of his own writers that the Indian is much more prone to follow the evil than the moral practices of the white; and there can be no doubt, I think, ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... wise conception, and in accordance with the genius of the Nation. Every session of Parliament England is employed in settling folks, whether at home or at the Antipodes, who ignorantly object to be settled in her way; in short, "I'll settle them," has become a vulgar idiom, tantamount to a threat of uttermost extermination or smash; therefore the Mayor of Gatesboro' harbouring that benignant idea with reference to "Gentleman Waife," all kindly readers will exclaim, "Dii meliora! What will he ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in it a similarity of idiom to the languages of the South Sea islanders and the peculiarity of a dual number common to all. See his ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... depone, 'By George if I could only get that prize I'd be a happy man, and would go back to old h-England.' To this base insinuation a threatening proof was administered by other parties, who replied in genuine Gaelic idiom and said, 'It's yourself that would need to have the face and the conscience, the day you would do that;' and they further signified their readiness to render any assistance to their brave countryman should opportunity offer. Those parties were readily ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... v. 1997 ff. this same idiom occurs, and was noticed in B.'s great article on Beowulf, which appeared about the time I published my reading of 1599 and 2027. Translate 1997 then: Wouldst let the South-Danes themselves decide about their struggle with Grendel. Here 'Sueth-Dene' is accus. of person, and 'guethe' is gen. ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... 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, ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... and slashes which sometimes bridge the creeks. There are still black ash swales and dry beech ridges, but they are not as massive as further south. There are still the haunting deer and the black bear and the ruffed grouse, the "partridge" in the idiom of the country, the "pheasant" of the South and Southwest. There are scores of tiny lakes, deep and pure and tenanted, and babbling streams, and there are the knighted speckled trout, the viking black bass and that ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... and of me, dear Mr. Browning, that we love the darkness and use a sphinxine idiom in our talk; and really you do talk a little like a sphinx in your argument drawn from 'Vivian Grey.' Once I sate up all night to read 'Vivian Grey'; but I never drew such an argument from him. Not that I give it up (nor you up) for a mere mystery. Nor that I can 'see what you have got ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... and not by learning, that Edward Henry fully grasped, as he did, the deep significance of the American idiom employed by Mr. Seven Sachs. He too laughed, as Mr. Sachs had laughed. He was immeasurably flattered. He had not been so flattered since the Countess of Chell had permitted him to offer her China tea, meringues, and Berlin pancakes at the Sub Rosa tea-rooms in Hanbridge—and ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... little bitchie!" said Christian to the horizon. Christian was an apt scholar, and Cottingham's tone and idiom were ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... 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 ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... Kolossal!" said Marko, forgetting our prejudice against Bosch idiom in his wonder at this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... 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 here below! How ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... before the age of five, and very little that happened before seven or eight, and that children of five or six, removed into foreign surroundings, will in a year or so—if special measures are not taken—reconstruct their idiom, and absolutely forget every word of their mother-tongue. This foreign nurse comes into the child's world, bringing with her quite weird errors in the quantities, the accent and idiom of the mother-tongue, and greatly increasing the difficulty and delay on the road to thought and speech. ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... This idiom marks a later stage of the history of the language than the comparatively primitive word "Father." It is needless to discuss whether the term comes from Turkey or some other servile society. In America they say that Father has been fired. But it involves the whole of the ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... consequence, refuse to make a study of it. Through the more vivid and youthful organizations, less enthralled by the chains of habit; through the more ardent spirits, won first by curiosity, then filled with passion for the new idiom, must it penetrate and win the resisting and opposing public, which will finally catch the meaning, the aim, the construction, and at last render justice to its qualities, and acknowledge whatever beauty it may contain. Musicians who do not ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... appear to have the very idiom and genius of the Hebrew. Their words and sentences are expressive, concise, emphatical, sonorous and bold; and often both the letters and signification are synonymous with the Hebrew language." Of these Mr. Adair cites a number ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... M'drob is an idiom in the Arabic language somewhat difficult to render into English; it is well known that the Muhamedans are predestinarians, and that they believe in the existence of spirits, devils, &c.; their idea of the plague is, that it is a good or blessing sent from God to clear the world ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... dark man, in the common Italian idiom, and in a low tone. "Because we are waiting for the Florentines, certain of us of Pistoja, and we want no travellers in the way. And then—because, if you ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... the Coptic, and Congo languages. These words have been found by comparing the whole of the American languages with the whole of those of the Old World; for hitherto we are acquainted with no American idiom which seems to have an exclusive correspondence with any of the Asiatic, African, or European tongues." {293} Humboldt and others considered these words as brought into America by recent immigrants; an idea resting on no proof, ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... 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 ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... sailors, and to Irishmen universally. Fielding is open to the same stern criticism, as a deliberate falsehood-monger; and from the same cause—want of energy to face the difficulty of mastering a real living idiom. This defect in language, however, I cite only as one feature in the complex falsehood which disfigures Fielding's portrait of the English country gentleman. Meantime the question arises, Did he mean his Squire Western for a representative portrait? Possibly not. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... 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 ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... this country. Which of the two is right? And listening merely to the language so admirably spoken by the two men, who shall decide between the correct and learned rhetoric of Venetian speech, and the emphatic, warmly coloured, grandiose incorrectness of the Antwerp idiom? At Venice one leans to Veronese; in Flanders one has ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... room, Calabressa 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
... Junior Colleges the Department will keep this principle steadily in view, and will endeavor to teach a practical knowledge of Greek vocabulary and idiom, and to impart literary and historic culture by means of rapid viva voce translation and interpretation of the simpler masterpieces of the literature.... In the Senior Colleges the chief stress will be laid on reading and exegesis, but the range of authors ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... to those who have not studied dialect as "she is spoke" that the word m'yby is the Seven Dials idiom for maybe, itself more or less an Americanism, signifying "perhaps," while "kikes" is a controvertible term ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... the philosophy of law 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 ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... in the time of Klaproth the interpretation of cuneiform inscriptions had not been accomplished, and too little was known of the language of the Medes for any one to judge of its resemblance to the Ossete idiom. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... 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 ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... things come, with time, to be habitual."—"By which these people come to be either scattered or destroyed."—"Which alone could pretend to contest it with them:" (upon which phrase he remarks, "It refers to nothing here:") and the following graceful idiom in some ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... her head. She was well worth a trip across the alkali wastes to see. The room was packed with men. One unconsciously got the impression that a fire, a fight, or some crowd-collecting casualty had happened. Above the continual clinking of spurs there arose every idiom and peculiarity of speech of which these United States are capable. There is no Western dialect, properly speaking. Men bring their modes of expression with them from Maine or Minnesota, as the case may be, but their figures of speech, which ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... the street canons. Here in the district of wholesale business houses a kind of midsummer gloom reigned. Many stores were vacant, their broad windows plastered with play-bills. Even in the warehouses along the river a strange stillness prevailed. "Nothing was doing," in the idiom of the street. Along the platforms of the railroad company's train house, however, a large crowd of idlers had assembled. They were watching to see whether the trainmen would make up the Overland Limited. Debs had said that this company would not move its ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... was the first name in the literature of the Middle Ages, the creator of his nation's poetry, and the most original of all writers, and the most concise. But he blamed him for obscurity, forced and unnatural turns of expression, and barbarous licenses of idiom. The "Paradise" seemed to him tedious, as a whole, and much of the "Purgatory" heavy. Hallam repeated, if he did not originate that nice bit of discernment, that in his "Paradise" Dante uses only three leading ideas—light, music, and motion. Then came Macaulay's ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... The fact that the English left no mark upon the language in Guyenne is almost a conclusive proof that such of the Anglo-Saxon stock as followed the Norman leaders into Aquitaine, and who remained in the country any length of time, were not sufficiently numerous to impose their idiom upon others. They probably did not preserve it long themselves; but, like the English grooms who find occupation in France today, they quickly adopted the language that was generally spoken around them. Patient investigation ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker |
