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More "Syntax" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... relatively pure "in grammatical forms, in syntax, and in vocabulary," could be kept thus clean without the aid of written texts, I am unable to imagine. If left merely to human memory and at the mercy of reciters and new poets, they would have become stained with "the defining ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... a long lane that has no turning," as the proverb says, and Parson, after all, was destined to enjoy one brief glimpse of the smiles of fortune that day. The first boy put up to translate stumbled over a somewhat intricate point of syntax. Now Mr Warton, the master—as the manner of many masters is—was writing a little book on Latin Syntax, and this particular passage happened to be a superb example of a certain style of construction ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... upon a faded garment. The predominant thought and feeling of a passage give the richest individual words their penetrating power, just as the weight of the axe-head sinks the blade into the wood. "Futurist" poets like Marinetti have protested against the bonds of syntax, the necessity of logical subject and predicate, and have experimented with nouns alone. "Words delivered from the fetters of punctuation," says Marinetti, "will flash against one another, will interlace their various forms of ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... grammatical error for which in your day school-boys used to be whipped. You were not. It's important, because when lawyers get on to the interpretation of the law, loose syntax gives them their opportunity; they make fortunes out of the grammatical errors of Parliament. And, of course, it was a lawyer who drew up ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... home for four weeks), everyone was obliged with the utmost care to copy a written model, in order to show it to their parents, because this article is most particularly examined, as everybody can tell what is or is not good writing. The boys knew all the rules of syntax ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... Heroic Poem should be both Perspicuous and Sublime. [1] In proportion as either of these two Qualities are wanting, the Language is imperfect. Perspicuity is the first and most necessary Qualification; insomuch that a good-natur'd Reader sometimes overlooks a little Slip even in the Grammar or Syntax, where it is impossible for him to mistake the Poets Sense. Of this Kind is that Passage in Milton, wherein he speaks ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... academy made in a real grip of the French language was miraculous; but the knowledge it gained in French grammar and syntax was deplorable. A certain mid-term examination—the paper being set by a neighbouring vicar—produced awful results. The phrase, "How do you do, dear?" which ought, by all the rules of Stratford-atte-Bowe, to be translated by Comment vous portez-vous, ma chere? was rendered by most of ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... There are no good places to be got in Drury Lane for the next fortnight, but Henry means to secure some for Saturday fortnight, when you are reckoned upon. Give my love to little Cass. I hope she found my bed comfortable last night. I have seen nobody in London yet with such a long chin as Dr. Syntax, nor anybody ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... have all his writing done by Lush. We know that there are persons who will forego their own obvious interest rather than do anything so disagreeable as to write letters; and it is not probable that these imperfect utilitarians would rush into manuscript and syntax on a difficult subject in order to save another's feelings. To Grandcourt it did not even occur that he should, would, or could write to Gwendolen the information in question; and the only medium of communication he could use was Lush, who, to his mind, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... becoming a horror to me,—as all speech without meaning more and more is. I said to Richard Milnes, "Now in honesty what is the use of putting your accusative before the verb, and otherwise entangling the syntax; if there really is an image of any object, thought, or thing within you, for God's sake let me have it the shortest way, and I will so cheerfully excuse the omission of the jingle at the end: cannot I do without that!"—Milnes answered, "Ah, my dear fellow, it is because we have ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... on every page!" Percival Pollard has dubbed him a "prose paranoiac," and Elbert Hubbard says, "He writes so well that he grows enamoured of his own style and is subdued like the dyer's hand; he becomes intoxicated on the lure of lines and the roll of phrases. He is woozy on words—locoed by syntax and prosody. The libation he pours is flavoured with euphues. It is all like a cherry in a morning Martini." A phrase which Remy de Gourmont uses to describe Villiers de l'Isle Adam might be applied with equal success to the ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... were to their eyes, as to our own, no more than minute and unmeaning marks, in prose superfluous and troublesome in verse. The art of grammar they truly possessed; the valuable fragments of Apollonius and Herodian were transfused into their lessons; and their treatises of syntax and etymology, though devoid of philosophic spirit, are still useful to the Greek student. In the shipwreck of the Byzantine libraries, each fugitive seized a fragment of treasure, a copy of some author, who without his industry might have perished: the transcripts ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... some things—rhapsodic prose-poems, weak in syntax but strong in the quality miscalled imagination. Her pen name was George Bishop: following the example of the three Georges so dear to the believer in sexless literature—George Sand, George Eliot and George Egerton. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... of the finest in our language, and more in Milton's style than has been reached by any other poet, is occasionally obscure from imitation of the condensed Latin syntax. The meaning of st. 5 is "rivalry or hostility are the same to a lofty spirit, and limitation more hateful than opposition." The allusion in st. 11 is to the old physical doctrines of the non-existence of a vacuum and the impenetrability ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... itself to objects below its level, contracts and shrinks itself to the size of the object about which it is conversant. In the faculty of speaking well, ladies have such a happy promptitude of turning their slender advantages to account, that though never taught a rule of syntax, they hardly ever violate one, and often possess an elegant arrangement of style without having studied any of the laws of composition, And yet they are too ready to produce not only pedantic expressions, but crude notions and hackneyed remarks ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... a show of education; but I was disinclined to be overdone in syntax by a mere Indian, a member of a race to which we owe nothing except the land on which the United ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... hands, but to decline all the nouns, conjugate the verbs regular, and most of ye irregular; learn'd out "Puerilis," got by heart almost ye entire vocabularie of Latine and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turne English into Latine, and vice versa, construe and prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, elipses, and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comenius's Janua; began himselfe to write legibly, and had a stronge passion ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... is used in the singular, both by Mir Amman and the original author, Amir Khusru according to a well-known rule in Persian syntax, viz., "a substantive accompanied by a numerical adjective dispenses with the plural termination," as "haft roz," "seven days," not "haft rozha. The Persian term darwesh, in a general sense, denotes a person who has adopted what by extreme courtesy is called a religious life, closely akin ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... Rossetti, who painted poems and made poetry that is pictorial. Sculpture was the only art that had resisted this universal disintegration, this imbroglio of the arts. No sculptor before Rodin had dared to break the line, dared to shiver the syntax of stone. For sculpture is a static, not a dynamic art—is it not? Let us observe the rules, though we preserve the chill spirit of the cemetery. What Mallarme attempted to do with French poetry Rodin accomplished in clay. His marbles do not represent but present emotion, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Prose and Historical English Syntax. Investigation of special questions and writing of essays. Professor Price. Not given in 1898-9. To be ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... until the present moment—I could not for the life of me 'analyse' the simplest sentence, in the rather odd scholastic sense of that word. Inherited instinct and long practice make me aware, I believe, of an error in syntax, when I chance upon one. But I could only tell you that it was wrong, and never how or why. I know something of literature, but less of mathematics than I assume to be known by the modern ten-year-old schoolboy; something ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... literature which is properest for the sex. That species of knowledge, which appears to be the result of reflection rather than of science, sits peculiarly well on women. It is not uncommon to find a lady, who, though she does not know a rule of Syntax, scarcely ever violates one; and who constructs every sentence she utters, with more propriety than many a learned dunce, who has every rule of Aristotle by heart, and who can lace his own thread-bare discourse with the golden ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... two or three of them preoccupied with charges in bad French of yards of cottonade, "mouslin a dames," "jaconad," dozens of soap, pounds of tobacco, pairs of stockings, lace, etc.; but to our great pleasure each page corresponding closely, save in orthography and syntax, with a page of the new manuscript, and the page numbers of the old running higher than those of the new! Here was evidence which one could lay before a skeptical world that the transcriber had not expanded the work of the original memoirist. ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... traits of character may be observed and recognized." This was a very scientific and well drawn scheme; and it was, on the whole, most faithfully and even brilliantly carried out. But with infinite art Boz emancipated himself from the formal hide-bound trammels of Syntax tours and the like, when it was reckoned that the hero and his friends would be exhibited like "Bob Logic" and "Tom and Jerry" in a regular series of public places. "Mr. Pickwick has an Adventure at Vauxhall," "Mr. ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... mentioned, or any other of the fraternity, to be not only astrologers, but conjurers too, if I do not produce a hundred instances in all their almanacks, to convince any reasonable man, that they do not so much as understand common grammar and syntax; that they are not able to spell any word out of the usual road, nor even in their prefaces write common sense or intelligible English. Then for their observations and predictions, they are such as will equally suit any age or country in the world. "This month a certain great person will ...
— The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers • Jonathan Swift
... contains nineteen lessons, and is concerned primarily with the study of syntax and of subjunctive and irregular verb forms. The last three of these lessons constitute a review of all the constructions presented in the book. There is abundant easy reading matter; and, in order to secure proper concentration of effort upon syntax and translation, ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... informed us that he taught geometry in the same way, and had even extended it to grammar, logic, rhetoric, and the art of composition. The rules of syntax were discovered by pieces of wood, interlocking with each other in squares, dovetails, &c., after the manner of geographical cards; and as they chanced to fit together, so was the concordance between the several parts of speech ascertained. The machine ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... author, was able to read any part of the first book of the AEneid—to read it tolerably in measure, and to enjoy the poetry of it—and this not without a knowledge of the declensions and conjugations. As to the syntax, I made the sentences themselves teach him that. Now I know that, as an end, all this was of no great value; but as a beginning, it was invaluable, for it made and KEPT him hungry for more; whereas, in most modes of teaching, the beginnings ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... they have, so to say, a grammar of their own, whose rules and syntax are more general than our own; if you attend carefully you will be surprised to find how exactly they follow certain analogies, very much mistaken if you like, but very regular; these forms are only objectionable because of their harshness or because they are not recognised ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... sought to innovate with discretion; but they unquestionably aimed at the formation of a poetic diction distinct from that of prose; they turned away from simplicity of speech to ingenious periphrasis; they desired a select, aristocratic idiom for the service of verse; they recommended a special syntax in imitation of the Latin; for the elder forms of French poetry they would substitute reproductions or re-creations of classical forms. Rondeaux, ballades, virelais, chants royaux, chansons are to be cast aside as ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... drink propitiation to you as a profissional gintle-man! No man uses more indepindent language than you do. You are under no earthly obligation to Messrs. Syntax and Prosody. Grammar, my worthy friend, is banished as an intruder from your elocution, just as you would exclude a ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... deal of unreality in those sentiments to which the charm of his verses lent an appearance of truth and depth; in fact, his poetical feelings will sometimes stand the test of sober reflection quite as little as his grammar will that of a severe application of the rules of syntax. He has written immensely for mere effect, but all young people read him, and young people are not apt to analyze closely what they feel strongly, and, judging by my own experience, I should think Byron ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... coarse, indeed, but they showed a keen mother-wit, a great command of the homely mother-tongue, an intimate knowledge of the English Bible, and a vast and dearly bought spiritual experience. They, therefore, when the corrector of the press had improved the syntax and the spelling, were well received by the humbler ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... she passed from infancy to adolescence. The contrast between the styles of these prayers impressed Zulma very strongly. The former were such as she herself knew, complete, appropriate and pathetic in their very phraseology. The latter were fragmentary, rude, and sometimes incongruous in syntax, but they spoke the poetry of the heart, and their yearning fervour and indubiety made Zulma understand, as she listened to them through her tears, how it is that wayside statues of stone, and wooden figures of the Madonna in lofty niches, are said to hear and answer ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... proud they are of talking such hard gibberish, and stammering out such blundering distinctions, as the auditors perhaps may sometimes gape at, but seldom apprehend: and they take such a liberty in their speaking of Latin, that they scorn to stick at the exactness of syntax or concord; pretending it is below the majesty of a divine to talk like a pedagogue, and be tied to the slavish observance of ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... opportunity to say:[367] "We should think the writer could not possibly read the manuscript after he has once written it, or overlook the press."[368] His habit of carrying two trains of thought on together was also responsible for slips in diction and syntax. An amanuensis working for him noticed this peculiarity, and Scott said in his Journal: "There must be two currents of ideas going on in my mind at the same time.... I always laugh when I hear people say, Do one thing at once. I have done a dozen ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... Armenian come to be almost a dialect of Persian; Latin growing up through English; Greek almost totally submerged under Latin, Slavonic, and Turkish, and now with a tendency to grow back into Greek; Celtic preserving in itself an older than Aryan syntax, and conveying that in its turn to the English spoken by Celts. Language is, to say the truth, a shifting kaleidoscopic thing: a momentary aspect of racial expression. In a thousand years it becomes ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... unbalanced, unachieved genius of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Finally, it is in Stephane Mallarme that he finds the incarnation of 'the decadence of a literature, irreparably affected in its organism, weakened in its ideas by age, exhausted by the excesses of syntax, sensitive only to the curiosity which fevers sick people, and yet hastening to say everything, now at the end, torn by the wish to atone for all its omissions of enjoyment, to bequeath its subtlest memories of sorrow on ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Learners, and especially for Self-instruction. Containing the Elements of the SPANISH Language, and the Rules of Etymology and Syntax Exemplified; with NOTES and APPENDIX, consisting of Dialogues, Select ...
— The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition • Anonymous
... fraternity, to be not only Astrologers, but Conjurers too, if I do not produce a hundred instances in all their Almanacks, to convince any reasonable man that they do not so much as understand Grammar and Syntax; that they are not able to spell any word out of the usual road, nor even, in their Prefaces, to write common sense, or ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... literary godfather, who had held me at the Font of the Muses, and was answerable to the company for my moral principles and my syntax, always made "the speech"; my father used most often to answer for me in few words, but with wet eyes: (there was a general understanding that any good or sorrow that might come to me in literary life ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... politely laughed in their sleeves. Yes, Anderson was a fine fellow, but they wearied of his dismal forebodings that came to naught. Some said it was because German had been hard for him to learn. He had taken it up when more than fifty and had become tangled in its snarling roots—its beer-drunken syntax. "He had got mad at the language." It was natural that he should get ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... merchant's two daughters, and of the gymnasiarch, [Footnote: Superintendent of a gymnasium or secondary school.] all at the same time. Finally, in this jumble of ideas, professional instinct got the upper hand. He sat down at the table, put the three heavy volumes of Gazis's Dictionary, the Syntax of Asopios, and his other handbooks of study in their usual order, then set out his ink and paper, and found in his "Iliad" the page marked for the next day. He began his work by noting the etymology of each word, the syntax ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... The literature in our ancestral tongue is not to me English until it sloughs off the Germanic sentence-structure of Anglo-Saxon. Here lies, I think, the greatest difficulty in translating Old English literature. And it will not be successfully translated, I think, without the use of the syntax of some dialect that preserves an ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... talk about the law, and school-masters talk about the latin tongue, in a way to make their hearers think they mean entities pre-existent to the decisions or to the words and syntax, determining them unequivocally and requiring them to obey. But the slightest exercise of reflexion makes us see that, instead of being principles of this kind, both law and latin are results. Distinctions between the lawful and the unlawful in conduct, or between the correct and incorrect in speech, ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... attention and interest. There are four kinds of figures, viz.: (1) Figures of Orthography which change the spelling of a word; (2) Figures of Etymology which change the form of words; (3) Figures of Syntax which change the construction of sentences; (4) Figures of Rhetoric or the art of speaking and writing effectively which change the mode ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... become obscure. The complete philological examination of any work consisted, according to them, of the following processes:—-diorthosis, arrangement of the text; anagnosis, settlement of accents; tenn??, theory of forms, syntax; lxegnsis, explanation either of words or things; and finally, krisis, judgment on the author and his work, including all questions as to authenticity and integrity. To perform their task adequately required from the critics a wide circle of knowledge; and from this requirement sprang the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... a greater equality of culture than there was in the last generation," said Kenelm. "People of all ranks utter the same commonplace ideas in very much the same arrangements of syntax. And in proportion as the democracy of intelligence extends—a friend of mine, who is a doctor, tells me that complaints formerly reserved to what is called aristocracy (though what that word means in plain English I don't know) are equally shared by the commonalty—tic-douloureux ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Off like bird, avi similis—(you observed The dative? Pretty i' the Mantuan!)—Anglice Off in three flea skips. Hactenus, so far, So good, tam bene. Bene, satis, male -, Where was I with my trope 'bout one in a quag? I did once hitch the syntax into verse: Verbum personale, a verb personal, Concordat—ay, "agrees," old Fatchaps—cum Nominativo, with its nominative, Genere, i' point o' gender, numero, O' number, et persona, and person. Ut, Instance: Sol ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... each motive. But both here, and in Ex. 10, the student is advised to adhere to the two-measure standard; he will avoid much needless confusion by so doing,—at least until he shall have so developed and sharpened his sense of melodic syntax that he can apprehend the finer shades of distinction in the "motion and repose" of a melody. Adopting the lower line of brackets, we discover successive members of unequal length, the first one containing two, the next one ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... lingers In this old brain of mine that's but ill able To give you even this poor version Of the speech I spoil, as it were, with stammering —More fault of those who had the hammering Of prosody into me and syntax 700 And did it, not with hobnails ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... ignorant misconstruction. Instead, therefore, of giving an exact transcript of the original poems, he set himself to soften down their harshness, to clear away their obscurity, to amplify, transpose, and mutilate according to his own ideas of syntax, taste, and rhetoric. On the Dantesque ruggedness of Michael Angelo he engrafted the prettiness of the seventeenth Petrarchisti; and where he thought the morality of the poems was questionable, especially in the case of those addressed ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... edu. Va. Outlines of Psychology, Chart of Comparative Syntax of Greek, Latin, French, ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... and fearful insinuations about my grammar and my erudition. Now, as regards grammar, I hold that, in prose at any rate, correctness should always be subordinate to artistic effect and musical cadence; and any peculiarities of syntax that may occur in Dorian Gray are deliberately intended, and are introduced to show the value of the artistic theory in question. Your writer gives no instance of any such peculiarity. This I regret, because I do not think that any such ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... an item interesting to our friends who revel in syntax and prosody. Any machine or apparatus for lifting has been called a "jack" since the days of Shakespeare. The jack was the bearer of bundles, a lifter, a puller, a worker. Any coarse bit of mechanism was called a jack, and is yet. In most factories there are testing-jacks, gearing-jacks, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... cyclic poems, which have already been candidates for bestowing immortality upon, at the same time that they receive it from, his character and adventures. In this point of view I have violated no rule of syntax in beginning my composition with a conjunction; the full stop which closes the poem continued by me being, like the full stops at the end of the Iliad and Odyssey, a full stop of a very ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... considered as belonging to the isolated languages, as philologists have thus far failed to classify it. It is agglutinative in its syntax, each word consisting of an unchangeable root and one or several suffixes. Before the art of writing was known, poems, odes to the gods, and other fragments which still exist had been composed in this tongue, and it is probable that a much larger literature existed. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... doctrine, in order to give effect to the series of miracles, by which all the nominal composers of the Hebrew nation before the time of Ezra, of whom there are any remains, were successively transformed into AUTOMATON compositors—so that the original text should be in sentiment, image, word, syntax, and composition an exact impression of the divine copy! In common consistency the theologians, who impose this belief on their fellow Christians, ought to insist equally on the superhuman origin and authority ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... called cases of "bad grammar" or "false syntax": as, "She invited Mrs. Roe and I to go driving with her." "Solecism" is derived from Soli, the name of a Greek tribe who lived in Cilicia and spoke ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... stroke by declaring that there never had been, and never could be positive orthography. They concluded that syntax is a whim and ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... until people realised that it was poetry. But his importance in the history of the Russian Novel is of another kind. It is firstly in his deliberate effort to "deliteralize" Russian prose, to give it the accent, the intonation, and the syntax of the spoken language. He has fully achieved his ends; he has created a prose which is entirely devoid of all bookishness and even on the printed page gives the illusion of being ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... to be a steady demand for "bedbooks" in England. There are readers who find in Gibbon a sedative for tired nerves; there are others who enjoy Trollope's quiet humour. Some people find in Henry James's tangled syntax the restful diversion they seek, and others enjoy Mr. Howells's unexciting ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... Whom it may Concern" was not his only attempt at influential composition. He sometimes persuaded himself that he had literary ability; but his orthography and pronunciation were worse than his syntax. The paper deposited with J. S. Clarke was useful as showing his power to entertain a deliberate purpose. It has one or two smart passages in ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... class has been wasted. It is a fact that most of us have forgotten the greater part of what we learned at school. The dates which made up so large a part of our historical lessons, the rules we slavishly committed as we struggled to master the difficulties of syntax and prosody, our latinity, our grounding in the tongue of ancient Greece so hardly won—who amongst us, having grey hairs in abundance, could face to-day the examination room where once we triumphed in these things? Yet in a sense they are all still with us. We reproduce them ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... and the amiable Tatanemance in a green bonnet; not far off were the Counsellor Niklausse and his family, not forgetting the amorous Frantz. The families of Custos the doctor, of Schut the advocate, of Honore Syntax the chief judge, of Norbet Sontman the insurance director, of the banker Collaert, gone mad on German music, and himself somewhat of an amateur, and the teacher Rupp, and the master of the academy, Jerome Resh, and the civil commissary, and so many other notabilities ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... in that era which professors still persist in calling the Great Age, hardly stimulated Des Esseintes. With its carefully premeditated style, its sameness, its stripping of supple syntax, its poverty of color and nuance, this language, pruned of all the rugged and often rich expressions of the preceding ages, was confined to the enunciation of the majestic banalities, the empty commonplaces ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... formed. Whittier in fact had not arrived at the clear splendor of his later work without some earlier turbidity; he was still from time to time capable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn. As for the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' her syntax was such a snare to her that it sometimes needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the assistant editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction of solecisms, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... chairs. Marie Louise caught an angry look also in the eye of Nicholas Easton, though he, too, had been incisive in his comments on the theme of the dinner. His English had been uncannily correct, his phrases formal with the exactitude of a book on syntax or the dialogue of a gentleman in a novel. But he also was drinking too much, and as his lips fuddled he had trouble with a very formal "without which." It resulted first as "veetowit veech," then as "whidthout witch." He made it on the ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... consists in this:—"The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ." The English supplement,—"the kingdoms," is justified and required, equally by the sense and the laws of syntax: and he is a deceiver, if a scholar, who insists upon any other, to supply the ellipsis. Indeed, the omission of similar supplements, has occasioned needless obscurity to the unlearned in other parts of this book. (See chs. xix. 10; xxii. 9.) The greatest of all revolutions consists in restoring ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... boys, who crowded about him, and shouted with great exultation at the novelty of the sight), venting bitter imprecations against the lieutenant, and reproaching his scholars with treachery and rebellion; when the usher was admitted, whom my uncle accosted in this manner: "Harkee, Mr. Syntax, I believe you are an honest man, d'ye see—and I have a respect for you—but for all that, we must, for our own security, d'ye see, belay you for a short time." With these words, he pulled out some fathoms of cord, which the honest man no sooner saw than he ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... quasi-artistic accomplishments and a knowledge of processes and incidents which do not conduce directly to the furtherance of human life. So, for instance, in our time there is the knowledge of the dead languages and the occult sciences; of correct spelling; of syntax and prosody; of the various forms of domestic music and other household art; of the latest properties of dress, furniture, and equipage; of games, sports, and fancy-bred animals, such as dogs and race-horses. In all these branches of knowledge the initial motive from which their acquisition proceeded ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... attempts to excise interpolations from the Gospels), but as devoid of the higher critical wisdom as was Bentley, whom he congenially criticised. To a reader of to-day, his arguments from Shakspere's diction and syntax are peculiarly unconvincing. ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... similar hit. A volume of "Poems" was also well received. But in 1831 he met with his first literary reverse. A second collection of verses, entitled "Phantasies and Sketches," was pitilessly ridiculed by Henrik Hertz, in his "Letters from the Dead." Andersen's lack of style and violations of syntax were rather maliciously commented upon. If Gabriel's trump had sounded from the top of the Round Tower, it would not have startled Andersen more. He was in despair. Like the great child he was, he went about craving sympathy, and weeping when ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... and there never can be wanting some who distinguish desert, who will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since, while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding and some falling away; that a whole life can not be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he whose design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not understand; that a writer will sometimes be hurried by eagerness to the end, and sometimes faint with weariness ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... say that if I had been them, I should have burst out laughing and said what a couple of young asses we were!" The Hon. Percival was very colloquial, but syntax was not of the essence of ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... preserved by memory amongst the Gitanos, its grammatical peculiarities have disappeared, the entire language having been modified and subjected to the rules of Spanish grammar, with which it now coincides in syntax, in the conjugation of verbs, and in the declension of its nouns. Were it possible or necessary to collect all the relics of this speech, they would probably amount to four or five thousand words; but to effect ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... probably have meant, not to turn from one language into another, but to explain the construction, or what is called by the Greek name syntax, much like what in regard to a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... except that instead of perambulate, the Rev. Amos wrote preambulate, and instead of 'if haply', 'if happily', the contingency indicated being the reverse of happy. Mr. Barton had not the gift of perfect accuracy in English orthography and syntax, which was unfortunate, as he was known not to be a Hebrew scholar, and not in the least suspected of being an accomplished Grecian. These lapses, in a man who had gone through the Eleusinian mysteries of a university education, surprised the young ladies of his parish extremely; ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... scholar, and to acquire the elements of a good English style; but it is certain he never did. He never had time, or rather he never took time, preferring invariably quantity to quality. What work of his has survived till to-day is read, not for its style, but in spite of its style. His syntax is loose and unscholarly; his vocabulary is copious, but often inaccurate; many of his sentences ramble on interminably, lacking unity, precision, and balance. Figures of speech he seldom abuses because he seldom uses; his imagination, as ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... be a low man, or what marks can remain of the ordinary language of conversation in the inferior orders of society. If there be any phrases that are not used in good society, they will appear as blemishes in the composition, no less palpably, than errors in syntax or quality; and, if there be no such phrases, the style cannot be characteristic of that condition of life, the language of which it professes to have adopted. All approximation to that language, in the same manner, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... particular occasion for the rein of an old bridle (the truants of that busy day could have anticipated its application), walked down the Lawnmarket with Mr. Saddletree, each talking as he could get a word thrust in, the one on the laws of Scotland, the other on those of syntax, and neither listening to a word ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... other words, this one volume affords as complete a knowledge of Esperanto as several years' study of a grammar and various readers will accomplish for any national language. Inflection, word-formation and syntax are presented clearly and concisely, yet with a degree of completeness and in a systematic order that constitute a new feature. Other points worthy ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman
... evidently mistaken the signification of the word "syntax," and, catching the last syllable, concluded that R. referred to the system universally adopted to supply the pecuniary wants of a government; and therefore the solemnity ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... spelling is the sign-language, or the basis of that language, but to the profession there is no relation between the two methods of communication. Dactylology has the advantage of putting language before the eye in conformity with English syntax, and it has always held its place as one of the elements of the American or eclectic method. This advantage, however, is not of so great importance as to outweigh the disadvantages when, as has honestly been attempted, it asserts its independence of other methods. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... until she was overheard threatening the life of the child Maria. Upon interrogation, the murderess confessed her guilt, and was condemned to imprisonment for life. Other children were subsequently born to the Hatfields. Charlotte, who lived to become the unhappy wife of Coombe, the author of Dr. Syntax, and a son, afterwards known as an artist of some promise. Maria Hatfield was educated in a convent, where she learnt music and drawing. Subsequently she studied painting at Rome, and there made the ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... but I am"; and, with superb disregard for doctors and syntax alike, Quin put a firm arm around that slender yielding figure and swept ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... under a shower of brickbats, and it is the effort of dodging these which perhaps distracts the mind from his message. (Is he a Marinettist, I wonder?) There are not enough words in the language for him, so he invents fresh ones at will; while as for grammar and syntax he passionately throttled them in Chapter I.; nor did they recover. I will own that notwithstanding all this the author has a way of making you read on to find out what it is all about. You don't find out; but there, life's like that, isn't it? The author's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... the predominance des sensations visuelles. Disconnected by his constant abuse of the dash—he must have studied Poe not too wisely—infinitesimal strokes of colour supplying the place of a large-moulded syntax, this prose has not unity, precision, speed, euphony. Its rhythms are choppy, the dabs of paint, the shadings within shadings, the return upon itself of the theme, the reticent, inverted sentences, the absence of architectonic ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... flame," or of the pedantic school-boyism of calling a housekeeper "nymph." In fact, it is by the merest accident that I am now enabled to give them in their genuine shape. An old school-fellow, whom I have not seen since the days of syntax, and whose name I had utterly forgotten, enclosed them to ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Babylonian-Assyrian language has been clearly set forth in all its essential particulars: the substantive and verb formation is as definitely known as that of any other Semitic language, the general principles of the syntax, as well as many detailed points, have been carefully investigated, and as for the reading of the cuneiform texts, thanks to the various helps at our disposal, and the further elucidation of the various principles that the Babylonians themselves adopted ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... sea-fowl beating in his face, to land a big conger eel without receiving a shock, to rescue a partridge from a falcon, to shoot a rabbit at fifty paces, to break a wild pony, or even to scan a complicated line in his syntax—these were achievements, small perhaps, but typical of his desire. His young soul was stirred; the blood coursed in his veins as the sap courses in the trees of the forest in spring; his mind, susceptible ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... as he could read; frequently he had not read the Bible or studied the rudiments of grammar. The Gaon insisted that every one should first master the twenty-four books of the Bible, their etymology, prosody, and syntax, then the six divisions of the Mishnah with the important commentaries and the suggested emendations, and finally the Talmud in general, without wasting much time on pilpul, which brings no practical result. "These few lines," says a writer, "contain ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... Happy letter! Tell him — Tell him the page I didn't write; Tell him I only said the syntax, And left the verb and the pronoun out. Tell him just how the fingers hurried, Then how they waded, slow, slow, slow; And then you wished you had eyes in your pages, So you could see what ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... abandonment of that intensely stupid custom, the teaching of grammar to children. As M. Marcel says:—"It may without hesitation be affirmed that grammar is not the stepping-stone, but the finishing instrument." As Mr. Wyse argues:—"Grammar and Syntax are a collection of laws and rules. Rules are gathered from practice; they are the results of induction to which we come by long observation and comparison of facts. It is, in fine, the science, the philosophy of language. In following ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... has taken place in the language of these islands during the latter half of the eighteenth century; insomuch that the language of the Indian inhabitants consists entirely of Spanish words, but all the inflexions, the syntax, and the idiomatic manner of expression are Chilese, that is to say exactly corresponding to the Moluchese ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... time. The boy ceased not to increase in beauty and loveliness with increase of years, till he attained the age of fifteen and was unique in his perfection and symmetry. He learnt writing and Koran reading; history, syntax and lexicography; archery, spearplay and horsemanship and what not else behoveth the sons of Kings; nor was there one of the children of the folk of the city, men or women, but would talk of the youth's charms, for he was of surpassing beauty and perfection, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... him, and when he married a second time, a Miss Barbara Something, they even ventured to make a logical joke on him, and say that he had been fascinated by Barbara's perfect figure. I know that many pupils of our public schools, in love with football more than syntax, often regretted that Bain ever composed his English Grammar. No book (unless perhaps Morell's Analysis) has ever been more cordially execrated, and no book ever more richly deserved it, for though, like Aberdeen granite, it is stately and impressive, it is also ruthless, cold, and implacable. ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... type.... The penmanship of the copy furnished was good, but the grammar, spelling and punctuation were done by John H. Gilbert, who was chief compositor in the office. I have heard him swear many a time at the syntax and orthography of Cowdery, and declare that he would not set another line of the type. There were no paragraphs, no punctuation and no capitals. All that was done in the printing office, and what a time there used to be in straightening sentences out, too. ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... the good woman should tread down the heel of the hip-gut pangs, by virtue of a solemn protestation put in by the little testiculated or codsted fishes, which, to tell the truth, were at that time very necessary for understanding the syntax and construction of old boots. Therefore John Calf, her cousin gervais once removed with a log from the woodstack, very seriously advised her not to put herself into the hazard of quagswagging in the ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... frivolous talk. I sent for thee only to shave my head, but thou comest and pesterest me with this sorry prattle." "What more wouldst thou have?" replied he. "Allah hath bounteously bestowed on thee a Barber who is an astrologer, one learned in alchemy and white magic;[FN612] syntax, grammar, and lexicology; the arts of logic, rhetoric and elocution; mathematics, arithmetic and algebra; astronomy, astromancy and geometry; theology, the Traditions of the Apostle and the Commentaries on the Koran. Furthermore, I have read books galore and digested ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... dealt in negatives; not thus and thus was the social millennium to be brought about, it was open to his hearers to conceive the practical course. For the rest, the heresiarch had a mighty flow of vituperative speech. Aspirates troubled him, so that for the most part he cast them away, and the syntax of his periods was often anacoluthic; but these matters ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... concerning the syntax and disposition of studies; that men may know in what order or pursuit ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... may be made also a study of Comparative Philology. There are several points, such as the nature of irregular verbs, of indeclinable parts of speech, the influence of euphony, the decay or loss of inflections, the elements of syntax, which may be examined as well in the history of our own language as of any other. A few well-selected questions may lead the student at once into the heart of the mystery: such as, Why are the pronouns and the verb of existence generally more irregular than any other parts of speech? ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... derived from Paul's Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik, second edition, Halle, 1884, and Weinhold's Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik, second edition, Paderborn, 1883. The former work, besides containing by far the most complete syntax, is also the only Middle High German Grammar which is based on the present state of German Philology.... I believe that the day is not far distant when English students will take a much more lively interest in the study of their own and the other Germanic languages (especially ...
— A Middle High German Primer - Third Edition • Joseph Wright
... they went slowly through fields and woods together, were very pleasant matters to David. Even the Latin Grammar, over whose tedious pages so many boys have yawned and trifled from generation to generation, even declensions and conjugations, and rules of Syntax, and other matters which, as a general thing, are such hopeless mysteries to boys of nine or ten, were made matters of interest to David when his father took ...
— The Inglises - How the Way Opened • Margaret Murray Robertson
... residence of the most excellent and illustrious bishop, to whose authority and vigilance are submitted all matters relating to the spiritual part—has about eighteen or twenty pupils, counting seminarists and collegiates. In that institution are taught grammatical studies [minimos], syntax, philosophy, and moral theology, whose respective chairs are in charge of learned and industrious professors. The territory of the civil provinces which form this bishopric is divided into twenty-four outside districts for its better ecclesiastical administration, eighteen of which ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... professors, who drilled me in syntax and scansion, ye would deem me ungrateful indeed were I to give utterance to the contempt and indignation which I then felt for ye—then, when I looked back upon ten years of wasted existence spent under your tutelage—then, when, after believing myself an educated man, the illusion vanished, and ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... Great Britain, and every measure which she was supposed to approve. In the hurly-burly of wind and dust that was blown up under that passing cloud, it is not to be wondered that Dickens and copyright were as completely forgotten as orthography, etymology, syntax and prosody, and whatever else goes to the art of using language correctly. A strip of land that would not purchase the copyright of an almanac, became the subject of the fiercest congressional interest; and the rights of authors, and with them the noblest relations of the republic ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... to a breach, the brave Subaltern dreads Awkward breaches of syntax a hundred times more; And tho' often condemned to see breaking of heads, He had ne'er seen such breaking ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... and Beethoven where there are only beauties, and beauties which even an ignorant listener—if he is naturally musical—will see without trouble. He did not understand the vast difference between the unlettered person who commits a solecism and Pascal, the inventor of a new syntax. ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... of the finest, and some would say the finest, works of classical music by an American. It reflects the musical innovations of its creator, featuring revolutionary atmospheric effects, unprecedented atonal musical syntax, and surprising technical approaches to playing the piano, such as pressing down on over 10 notes simultaneously using a ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... if one is reading an interesting book, can one not see all that is happening there as clearly with one's inner eyes as if it was all taking place before one, and viewed with one's outer ones?" This passage is not only wanting in coherence and correctness of syntax, but is exceedingly clumsy through redundancy of statement, and repetition of the word one. This word, though essential to colloquial diction, becomes very tiresome when used to excess; and should be avoided ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... department of physical science the manuals in use seventy-five years ago are so utterly inferior to those of the present day as are, for instance, the remarks of Viger, and his commentators before Hermann, on the syntax of the Greek verb, to the philosophical treatment of the same ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... parent ancestral speech of the German tribes about four to five thousand years ago was probably closely approximated in syntax, and in the form and pronunciation of words, to the other progenitors of European Aryan languages, especially the Lithuanian, Slav, Greek, and Italic dialects. Keltic speech was perhaps a little more different owing to its absorption of non-Aryan elements; but if we can judge ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... I was not so sure of the correctness of my words— either of the pronunciation or the syntax—but I had the gratification to perceive that I was understood. Perhaps my gestures helped the savages to comprehend me—the meaning of these ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... her work, never giving it up. Some things she liked. Her subjects were English, Latin, French, mathematics and history. Once she knew how to read French and Latin, the syntax bored her. Most tedious was the close study of English literature. Why should one remember the things one read? Something in mathematics, their cold absoluteness, fascinated her, but the actual practice was tedious. Some people in history ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... Exercises in All Parts of French Syntax, methodically arranged after Poitevin's "Syntaxe Francaise"; to which are added Ten Appendices. Designed for the Use of Academies, Colleges, and Private Learners. By Frederick T. Winkelmann, A.M., Ph.D., Professor of Latin, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... disturbances have still the very same differences, though now and then called by new names. For names depend on custom, but the passions on Nature; and these being constant and those variable, this error has arisen. As, in the parts of a speech and the syntax of the words, some new sort of barbarism or solecism can suddenly arise; so the temperature of the body hath certain deviations and corruptions into which it may fall, those things which are against and hurtful to Nature being in some sort existent in Nature herself. The mythographers are in this ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... literature. The reading public was content to go to Denmark, and the growing Landsmaal literature was concerned with other matters—first of all, with the task of establishing itself and the even more complicated problem of finding a form—orthography, syntax, and inflexions which should command general acceptance. For the Landsmaal of Ivar Aasen was frankly based on "the best dialects," and by this he meant, of course, the dialects that best preserved the forms of the Old Norse. These were ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... but you can't help me at Logic, as you used at Syntax. Why, all the world knows a ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... ink. We wonder that such a fact was noticed by a man of Mr. Hamilton's knowledge; for it can be easily set aside; or rather, it need not be regarded, because there is nothing suspicious about it. For the spelling of the seventeenth century, like its syntax and its pronunciation, was irregular; and the fatal error of those who attempt to imitate it is that they always use double consonants, superfluous final e-s, and ie for y. And even supposing that these pencilled ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... commercial interests. Sick of 'sheep and cattle dressings', he grew tired of chemistry altogether, and presently of physical science in general. His evenings were given to poetry and history; he took up the classical schoolbooks again, and found a charm in Latin syntax hitherto unperceived. It was plain to him now how he had been wronged by the necessity of leaving school when his education had but ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... well for you to say 'shut up,' but why the syntax didn't you save some of the stuff for our watch: that's what I want to know?" said the injured mariner, with an intoxicated air of Christian virtue. Jimmy's friend, anticipating trouble, came to the rescue ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... Middleton by name, a steady friend and counselor for years. Yet at this time Coleridge was considered by the lower-master, under whom he was, "a dull and inept scholar who could not be made to repeat a single rule of syntax, although he would give a rule in his own way." The life, however, of this great school, with all its injudicious liberties and confinements, must have been anything but a healthy one. Starved and solitary, careless of play as play, and already full of ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... negroes, as a whole, guilty of these charges? In the first place, the negro race of America is not ignorant. In the year 1833 John C. Calhoun, senator from South Carolina, is reported to have said that if he could find a single negro who understood the Greek syntax, he would believe the negro was human and would treat him as such. At that time it was a very safe test. God accepted the challenge in behalf of the negro race, and inspired his white sons and daughters both in the North and South to teach their brothers in black; and ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton
... it. Being provincial-minded may make him a typical provincial; it will prevent him from being a representative or skilful interpreter. Horace Greeley said that when the rules of the English language got in his way, they did not stand a chance. We may be sure that if by violating the rules of syntax Horace Greeley sometimes added forcefulness to his editorials, he violated them deliberately and not in ignorance. Luminosity is not stumbled into. The richly savored and deliciously unlettered speech of Thomas Hardy's rustics was the creation of a master architect ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... saith of his lady and mistress: read but superstitious Coster and Gretser's Tract de Cruce, Laur. Arcturus Fanteus de Invoc. Sanct. Bellarmine, Delrio dis. mag. tom. 3. l. 6. quaest. 2. sect. 3. Greg. Tolosanus tom. 2. lib. 8. cap. 24. Syntax. Strozius Cicogna lib. 4. cap. 9. Tyreus, Hieronymus Mengus, and you shall find infinite examples of cures done in this kind, by holy waters, relics, crosses, exorcisms, amulets, images, consecrated beads, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... 'Distinction' was defined to be 'a diction which avoided homeliness.' Over against these there were two comprehensive vices, barbarism and solecism, the one being an offence against accidence, the other against syntax. ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... batteries. As soon as the British had made themselves secure Vaudreuil thought it time to turn them out. But he sent only 1,500 men; and so many of these were boys and youths at school and college that the French troops dubbed them 'The Royal Syntax.' These precious 1,500 went up the north shore, crossed over after dark, and started to march, in two separate columns, down the south shore towards Levis. Presently the first column heard a noise in the woods ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... punctuation inconsistencies appear in the original of this text. Punctuation has been changed when required for correct syntax. Inconsistent spelling has been retained in direct speech for pronunciation purposes and in quoted written material, but has been ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... hanging out of myriad windows, grouped on steps, chasing one another in twisting spirals over the lawns. Ahead, a massive brownstone chapel with pointed tower rose up, and to its right, in mathematical bulk, was the abode of Greek and Latin roots, syntax and dates, of blackboards, hard seats and the despotism of the Faculty. To the right, close at hand, was a large three-storied building with wonderful dormer windows tucked under the slanted slate roof, ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... been scanning back into the wrapper in which they had come, without, however, raising his eyes from his desk. "Out of a hundred stories I read, not three are fit to build a fire with! This thing is written by a girl who ought to take a term in a grammar school. She has no more idea of syntax than a lapdog. Her father writes that he is willing to pay a reasonable sum to have it brought out. Why, Cutt & Slashem couldn't afford to put their imprint on that rot for fifty ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... his intellectual delight, and indeed his daily bread; for out of that tremendous horn-book he taught me to stammer the divine Italian language, and illustrated every lesson, from the simplest rule of its syntax to its exceedingly complex and artificially constructed prosody, out of the pages of that sublime, grotesque, and altogether wonderful poem. My mother has told me that she attributed her incapacity for relishing Milton to the ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... consider that no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since, while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he, whose design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not understand; that a writer will sometimes be hurried by ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... prevailing impression that novel-writing must be tremendous fun; and this is so cheering that it is really impossible to be angry with her. Otherwise I might have some very sharp things to say about her light-hearted disregard of syntax and punctuation. Her pronouns, for example, are so elusive that not only am I frequently in doubt as to whom the heroine will marry in the end but as to which of the characters is speaking at any given moment. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... there any in which one may not at every step verify the connection or incoherence of the parts.[3221]—The procedure used in arranging a simple sentence also governs that of the period, the paragraph and the series of paragraphs; it forms the style as it forms the syntax. Each small edifice occupies a distinct position, and but one, in the great total edifice. As the discourse advances, each section must in turn file in, never before, never after, no parasitic member being allowed to intrude, and no regular member being allowed to encroach ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... obtain estimates for printing the New Testament, of which he had reported to Mr. Fuller:—"It has undergone one correction, but must undergo several more. I employ a pundit merely for this purpose, with whom I go through the whole in as exact a manner as I can. He judges of the style and syntax, and I of the faithfulness of the translation. I have, however, translated several chapters together, which have not required any alteration in the syntax whatever: yet I always submit this article entirely to his judgment. I can also, by hearing him read, judge whether he understands his subject ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... Thy syntax conjures forth a morn Of spring, when blossoms rare Conspired the solemn earth to adorn, And spread themselves on bank and thorn, And ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... language than that of music would it be tolerated that the theoretical rules of grammar and syntax should be so completely separated from the actual literature from which they are derived, that the pupil should never have perceived that there was any relation ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... to the grammars, but syntax has been given such treatment as seemed needed to supplement its treatment in the beginner's book. Teachers will therefore be able to postpone the use of a formal manual of grammar, if they so desire. Those who wish their classes to begin the reading of Latin at the earliest possible ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... youth of an inaccurate mind delights. He rejoices to profess all the classics, and to learn none of them. On the other hand, by "Grammar" is now more commonly meant, as Johnson defines it, "the art of using words properly," and it "comprises four parts—Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody." Grammar, in this sense, is the scientific analysis of language, and to be conversant with it, as regards a particular language, is to be able to understand the meaning and force of that language when ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... clever clerkly fingers, All I've forgotten as well as what lingers 695 In this old brain of mine that's but ill able To give you even this poor version Of the speech I spoil, as it were, with stammering —More fault of those who had the hammering Of prosody into me and syntax, 700 And did it, not with hobnails but tin-tacks! But to return from this excursion— Just, do you mark, when the song was sweetest, The peace most deep and the charm completest, There came, shall I say, a snap— 705 And the charm ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... dependent upon the people than ourselves. The Chinese language, the most primitive in the world, is, for this very reason perhaps, the hardest to learn. Its poverty of words reduces its grammar almost to a question of syntax and intonation. Many a time our expressions, by a wrong inflection, would convey a meaning different from the one intended. Even when told the difference, our ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... B. translates: Who for a long time, ready at the coast, had looked out into the distance eagerly for the dear men. This changes the syntax ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... Books relatively pure "in grammatical forms, in syntax, and in vocabulary," could be kept thus clean without the aid of written texts, I am unable to imagine. If left merely to human memory and at the mercy of reciters and new poets, they would have become stained with "the defining ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... brackets, assigning a single measure to each motive. But both here, and in Ex. 10, the student is advised to adhere to the two-measure standard; he will avoid much needless confusion by so doing,—at least until he shall have so developed and sharpened his sense of melodic syntax that he can apprehend the finer shades of distinction in the "motion and repose" of a melody. Adopting the lower line of brackets, we discover successive members of unequal length, the first one containing two, the next one ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... lingered there with some tenderness for Alpine piety. While he was near the high-altar some people came in at the west door; but he did not notice them, and was presently engaged in deciphering a curious old German epitaph on one of the mural tablets. At last he turned away, wondering whether its syntax or its theology was the more uncomfortable, and, to this infinite surprise, found himself confronted with ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... said, "If I could find a Negro who could master the Greek syntax, I would believe in his possibilities of development." A comparatively few years have passed away, and a Negro not only masters the Greek syntax, but writes a Greek grammar accepted as authority by some of the ablest scholars of the States. But Abbe Gregori of France ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... first simple stages. Only half the work of the evolution of language is completed. There is, indeed, no tribe so undeveloped as to use the primitive forms of speech. The most savage of the races of mankind have made some progress in the art of combining words, gained some ideas of syntax and grammatical forms. Yet in certain instances the progress has been very slight, and in all we can see the living traces of the earlier method of speech ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... Lush. We know that there are persons who will forego their own obvious interest rather than do anything so disagreeable as to write letters; and it is not probable that these imperfect utilitarians would rush into manuscript and syntax on a difficult subject in order to save another's feelings. To Grandcourt it did not even occur that he should, would, or could write to Gwendolen the information in question; and the only medium of communication he could use was Lush, who, to his mind, was ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... distinguished part in our illustrated literature. Rowlandson, one of the earliest, was a caricaturist of inexhaustible facility, and an artist who scarcely did justice to his own powers. He illustrated several books, but he is chiefly remembered in this way by his plates to Combe's "Three Tours of Dr. Syntax." Gillray, his contemporary, whose bias was political rather than social, is said to have illustrated "The Deserted Village" in his youth; but he is not famous as a book-illustrator. Another of the early men was Bunbury, whom "quality"-loving Mr. Walpole calls "the second ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... and Historical English Syntax. Investigation of special questions and writing of essays. Professor Price. Not given in 1898-9. To be given ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... laughter greeted this infraction of one of the most elementary rules of syntax, and several of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Miss Trewthen's betrothed conveyed little more matter than details of their future housekeeping, and his preparations for the same, with innumerable 'my dears' sprinkled in disconnectedly, to show the depth of his affection without the inconveniences of syntax. ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... there never can be wanting some who distinguish desert; who will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he, whose design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not understand; that a writer will sometimes ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... worthy pedagogues of that day found no readier way of leading the most studious of boys to a love of science than corporal punishment. "At the expense of many tears and some blood I purchased the knowledge of the Latin syntax." Whether all love of study would have been flogged out of him if he had remained at school, it is difficult to say, but it is not an improbable supposition that this would have happened. The risk was removed by his complete failure of health. ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... little analogy in the sounds of the lexicography, so far as known, it is in this quarter of the globe, that we perceive resemblances in some words of the Shemitic group of languages, positive coincidences in the features of its syntax, and in its unwieldy personal and polysyllabical and aggregated forms; and the inquiry is one, which may be expected to produce auspicious results. On the assumption of their Asiatic origin, therefore, it is evident that the Indian tribes are of far ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... annoyance of wearying myself with the rudiments, when I would fain have commented upon the various peculiarities of style in the ancient Greek and Latin authors; but now, all that has passed away. The eternal round of concord, prosody, and syntax has charms for me from habit: the rule of three is preferable to the problems of Euclid, and even the Latin grammar has its delights. In short, I have a hujus pleasure in hic, haec, hoc; [cluck cluck;] and even the flourishing of the twigs ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... progress. Ingenious speculations about the possible organisation of the working classes and grandiose views of the future of humanity are so much more interesting and agreeable than the rules of Latin syntax and the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... another well-meaning young lady who wrote me the other day from America that her epistle was prompted "neither by love nor admiration." If I hint that popular lady novelists do not invariably produce masterpieces of style and syntax, I am accused of inflicting the "tarantulous bites of envious detractors." I am driven—most reluctantly—to a suspicion that has long been faintly glimmering in my bosom, a suspicion that ladies ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... Klopstock often used; the substance a rhetorical denunciation of military ambition. The most awful curses are imprecated upon the head of the ruthless 'conqueror', whose badness is portrayed in lurid images and wild syntax that fairly rack the German language.[9] No wonder that editor Haug cautioned the young poet against ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... lest we be accused of | on historical and such a subject. | dishonesty in | mythological allusions. | preparation. The rest | Every "pony" user is | of the time is spent on| soon caught, because | questions of syntax, | he is asked so many | references, footnotes, | questions on each | and the identification | sentence. There is a | of the of the real and | distinct relief when | mythological characters| the hour is over because | ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... the declaration of war, and on the following day a courier started for Washington with a letter from Jackson tendering the services of twenty-five hundred Tennesseeans and assuring the President, with better patriotism than syntax, that wherever it might please him to find a place of duty for these men he could depend upon them to stay "till they or the last armed ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... desert, who will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since, while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding and some falling away; that a whole life can not be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he whose design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not understand; that a writer will sometimes be hurried by eagerness to the end, and sometimes faint ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... Stevenson's style cannot be exhausted in a description of his use of individual words or his memory of individual phrases. His mastery of syntax, the orderly and emphatic arrangement of words in sentences, a branch of art so seldom mastered, was even greater. And here he could owe no great debt to his romantic predecessors in prose. Dumas, it is true, is a master of narrative, but he wrote in French, and a style will hardly bear expatriation. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... by general admission is now the richest and most liberal in the world of living speech. English is a tongue less sonorous than Italian, less fine than French, less homely than German, but more expressive, more flexible, than these and all others. Its syntax imposes no burdens, its traditions are weighty only upon the vulgar and the bizarre. Without its literary history, American literature in general, and usually in particular, is not to be understood. That we have ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... long lane that has no turning," as the proverb says, and Parson, after all, was destined to enjoy one brief glimpse of the smiles of fortune that day. The first boy put up to translate stumbled over a somewhat intricate point of syntax. Now Mr Warton, the master—as the manner of many masters is—was writing a little book on Latin Syntax, and this particular passage happened to be a superb example of a certain style of construction which till this ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... manipulated by the author that it advances the business in hand without becoming artificial. I must add, however, that Miss MADGE MEARS occasionally displays the defects of her qualities, to the extent of sacrificing syntax to ease, even in passages of pure narrative, with results that might offend the precisionist. But after all it is what she has to say that matters most; and the story of The Candid Courtship will hold ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... language, now gradually yielding to methodical and persevering study, the peculiar bent of the Chinese mind, with all its prejudices and superstitions, is quite as much an obstacle in the way of eliciting truth as any offered by the fantastic, but still amenable, varieties of Chinese syntax. We believe that native officials have the power, though it does not always harmonise with their interests to exercise it, of arriving at as just and equitable decisions in the majority of cases brought before them, as any English magistrate who knows "Taylor's Law of ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... criticize the syntax of the President's message, and the style. It reads uneasy, forced, tortuous, and it declares that it is impossible to subdue the rebels by force of arms. Of course it is impossible with Lincoln for President, and first McClellan and then Halleck ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... old Daddy Gilpin? Slowest of men, even of English men; yet delicious in his slowness, as is the light of a sleepy eye in woman. I always supposed "Dr. Syntax" was written to make fun of him. I have a whole set of his works, and am very proud of it, with its gray paper, and open type, and long ff, and orange-juice landscapes. The Pere Gilpin had the kind of science I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... 'Miltonic', and it is easy to see what he meant. Not only does the treatment of the subject recall that of Paradise Lost, the council of the fallen gods bearing special resemblance to that of the fallen angels in Book II of Milton's epic, but in its style and syntax the influence of Milton is everywhere apparent. It is to be seen in the restraint and concentration of the language, which is in marked contrast to the wordiness of Keats's early work, as well as in the constant use of classical constructions,[247:1] Miltonic inversions[247:2] ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... classics, and to learn none of them. On the other hand, by "Grammar" is now more commonly meant, as Johnson defines it, "the art of using words properly," and it "comprises four parts—Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody." Grammar, in this sense, is the scientific analysis of language, and to be conversant with it, as regards a particular language, is to be able to understand the meaning and force of that language when ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... back into the wrapper in which they had come, without, however, raising his eyes from his desk. "Out of a hundred stories I read, not three are fit to build a fire with! This thing is written by a girl who ought to take a term in a grammar school. She has no more idea of syntax than a lapdog. Her father writes that he is willing to pay a reasonable sum to have it brought out. Why, Cutt & Slashem couldn't afford to put their imprint on that rot for fifty ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... that time head master, a quick discerning man, but hasty and severe, sent for the master of the grammar school, and inquired about Coleridge; from him he learnt that he was a dull and inapt scholar, and that he could not be made to repeat a single rule of syntax, although he would give a rule in ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... the book, and at odd times set some type.... The penmanship of the copy furnished was good, but the grammar, spelling and punctuation were done by John H. Gilbert, who was chief compositor in the office. I have heard him swear many a time at the syntax and orthography of Cowdery, and declare that he would not set another line of the type. There were no paragraphs, no punctuation and no capitals. All that was done in the printing office, and what a time there used to be in straightening sentences out, too. During the ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... Did you observe what a mean scrubby tail he has?" "What a fool you are, brother," said Mr. Petulengro; "that very tail of his shows his breeding. No good bred horse ever yet carried a fine tail—'tis your scrubby-tailed horses that are your out-and-outers. Did you ever hear of Syntax, brother? That tail of his puts me in mind of Syntax. Well, I say nothing more, have your own way—all I wonder at is, that a horse like him was ever brought to such a fair of dog cattle ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... had a very "informal" approach to grammar and syntax; so apparently did his editor. I corrected several obvious errors in the book and listed them at the end of the text. Many more doubtful spellings and countless abbreviations remain as they appear in ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... therefore, that, by the end of three months, my pupil, without knowing any other Latin author, was able to read any part of the first book of the AEneid—to read it tolerably in measure, and to enjoy the poetry of it—and this not without a knowledge of the declensions and conjugations. As to the syntax, I made the sentences themselves teach him that. Now I know that, as an end, all this was of no great value; but as a beginning, it was invaluable, for it made and KEPT him hungry for more; whereas, in ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... in front of us on his "Rosinante," to encourage the mules. His back view reminds one in a ludicrous manner of the pictures of Dr Syntax. ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... — N. grammar, accidence, syntax, praxis, punctuation; parts of speech; jussive^; syllabication; inflection, case, declension, conjugation; us et norma loquendi [Lat.]; Lindley Murray &c (schoolbook) 542; correct style, philology &c (language) 560. V. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... but adds Betty Martin!' Thus cried the God with high imperial tone: In robe of stiffest state, that scoff'd at beauty, A pronoun-verb imperative he shone— Then substantive and plural-singular grown, He thus spake on:—'Behold in I alone (For Ethics boast a syntax of their own) Or if in ye, yet as I doth depute ye, In O! I, you, the vocative of duty! I of the world's whole Lexicon the root! Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight, The genitive and ablative to boot: The accusative of wrong, the nom'native of right, And in all cases the case absolute! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... every Class of Learners, and especially for Self-instruction. Containing the Elements of the SPANISH Language, and the Rules of Etymology and Syntax Exemplified; with NOTES and APPENDIX, consisting of Dialogues, ...
— The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition • Anonymous
... of the fraternity, to be not only Astrologers, but Conjurers too, if I do not produce a hundred instances in all their Almanacks, to convince any reasonable man that they do not so much as understand Grammar and Syntax; that they are not able to spell any word out of the usual road, nor even, in their Prefaces, to write common sense, or ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... Anderson employs in telling these stories may seem at first glance to be simple: short sentences, a sparse vocabulary, uncomplicated syntax. In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style in which, following Mark Twain and preceding Ernest Hemingway, he tried to use American speech as the base of a tensed rhythmic prose that has an economy and a shapeliness seldom found in ordinary speech or even oral ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... old method was one of repetition: it dealt immensely in committing Latin to memory. Ridiculous as was the system of giving to boys a Latin syntax in the Latin language, it at any rate did accustom them to the reiteration of a small number of words expressed in very simple sentences, and conveying knowledge of immediate utility.... While I nevertheless believe that at most schools ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... defined to be 'a diction which avoided homeliness.' Over against these there were two comprehensive vices, barbarism and solecism, the one being an offence against accidence, the other against syntax. ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... Mr. Clarke, beginning at the same time to translate out of the introduction, that by this means they may learn the syntax. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... he had reported to Mr. Fuller:—"It has undergone one correction, but must undergo several more. I employ a pundit merely for this purpose, with whom I go through the whole in as exact a manner as I can. He judges of the style and syntax, and I of the faithfulness of the translation. I have, however, translated several chapters together, which have not required any alteration in the syntax whatever: yet I always submit this article entirely to his judgment. I can also, by hearing him read, judge whether he understands ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... beyond doubt one of the finest in our language, and more in Milton's style than has been reached by any other poet, is occasionally obscure from imitation of the condensed Latin syntax. The meaning of st. 5 is "rivalry or hostility are the same to a lofty spirit, and limitation more hateful than opposition." The allusion in st. 11 is to the old physical doctrines of the non-existence of a vacuum and the impenetrability of matter:—in st. 17 to the ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... individual in its applicability, and less drawn from the depths of human nature as exhibited by types and classes. And often they would cap each other with a mutual relationship similar to that between a rule of syntax and its example, sometimes the one coming ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... with his first literary reverse. A second collection of verses, entitled "Phantasies and Sketches," was pitilessly ridiculed by Henrik Hertz, in his "Letters from the Dead." Andersen's lack of style and violations of syntax were rather maliciously commented upon. If Gabriel's trump had sounded from the top of the Round Tower, it would not have startled Andersen more. He was in despair. Like the great child he was, he went about craving sympathy, and weeping when ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... So much misery—so slow and hideous a growth of hatred and sin, may be compressed into a sentence! And men judge of each other's lives through this summary medium. They epitomize the experience of their fellow-mortal, and pronounce judgment on him in neat syntax, and feel themselves wise and virtuous—conquerors over the temptations they define in well-selected predicates. Seven years of wretchedness glide glibly over the lips of the man who has never counted them out in moments of chill disappointment, of head and ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... prodigal of frivolous talk. I sent for thee only to shave my head, but thou comest and pesterest me with this sorry prattle." "What more wouldst thou have?" replied he. "Allah hath bounteously bestowed on thee a Barber who is an astrologer, one learned in alchemy and white magic;[FN612] syntax, grammar, and lexicology; the arts of logic, rhetoric and elocution; mathematics, arithmetic and algebra; astronomy, astromancy and geometry; theology, the Traditions of the Apostle and the Commentaries on the Koran. Furthermore, I have read books galore ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... lived precisely five years, all he did was done at that little age, and it comprised this: "He got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and vice versa, construe and prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses, and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comenius's 'Janua,' and had ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... first, for fear of further Accidence, and, secondly, because we are no fonder than boys are of repetitions, which, were we to follow the Eton Grammar in the Concords, we should be obliged to make in the Syntax. ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... plainest." It was, we may remember, his first considerable English dictation for the press since his blindness, and what one chiefly notices in the style is the strong grasp he still retains of his old characteristic syntax.[1] The following are a few of the more interesting ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... blundering distinctions, as the auditors perhaps may sometimes gape at, but seldom apprehend: and they take such a liberty in their speaking of Latin, that they scorn to stick at the exactness of syntax or concord; pretending it is below the majesty of a divine to talk like a pedagogue, and be tied to the slavish observance ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... nightfall, A girl within each arm, And kisses quick and light fall On lips that take no harm. Lip language serves them better Who have no parts of speech: No syntax there to fetter The ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... item interesting to our friends who revel in syntax and prosody. Any machine or apparatus for lifting has been called a "jack" since the days of Shakespeare. The jack was the bearer of bundles, a lifter, a puller, a worker. Any coarse bit of mechanism was called a jack, and is yet. In most factories there are testing-jacks, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... sketch was raised on a farm, literally in the woods, and experienced the usual privations and vicissitudes attendant on pioneer life. The new country and poverty of his parents prevented his receiving a common English education, and it was not until after he was of age that he mastered Murray's syntax ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... effect to the series of miracles, by which all the nominal composers of the Hebrew nation before the time of Ezra, of whom there are any remains, were successively transformed into AUTOMATON compositors—so that the original text should be in sentiment, image, word, syntax, and composition an exact impression of the divine copy! In common consistency the theologians, who impose this belief on their fellow Christians, ought to insist equally on the superhuman origin and authority of the ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... makes vague and fearful insinuations about my grammar and my erudition. Now, as regards grammar, I hold that, in prose at any rate, correctness should always be subordinate to artistic effect and musical cadence; and any peculiarities of syntax that may occur in Dorian Gray are deliberately intended, and are introduced to show the value of the artistic theory in question. Your writer gives no instance of any such peculiarity. This I regret, because I do not think that ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... must make use of a sign-language that excludes them by not using the same sign for different symbols and by not using in a superficially similar way signs that have different modes of signification: that is to say, a sign-language that is governed by logical grammar—by logical syntax. (The conceptual notation of Frege and Russell is such a language, though, it is true, it fails to ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... Bessie's sentiment and Bessie's syntax. "There is the railway, and Oxford is on the road. I intend always to travel first-class," ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... ancillae suae" to a touchingly appropriate soprano solo accompanied by his favourite oboe d'amore. With the next sentence "ecce enim beatam me dicent" the tone brightens to a quiet joy, but Bach takes advantage of the syntax of the Latin in a way that defies translation, and the sentence is finished by the chorus. "Omnes generationes" seem indeed to pass before us in the crowded fugue which rises in perpetual stretto, the incessant entries of its subject ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... world, in the astonishing, unbalanced, unachieved genius of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Finally, it is in Stephane Mallarme that he finds the incarnation of 'the decadence of a literature, irreparably affected in its organism, weakened in its ideas by age, exhausted by the excesses of syntax, sensitive only to the curiosity which fevers sick people, and yet hastening to say everything, now at the end, torn by the wish to atone for all its omissions of enjoyment, to bequeath its subtlest memories of sorrow on ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... rewrote his prose, and the result gave Hazlitt opportunity to say:[367] "We should think the writer could not possibly read the manuscript after he has once written it, or overlook the press."[368] His habit of carrying two trains of thought on together was also responsible for slips in diction and syntax. An amanuensis working for him noticed this peculiarity, and Scott said in his Journal: "There must be two currents of ideas going on in my mind at the same time.... I always laugh when I hear people say, ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... the grammars, but syntax has been given such treatment as seemed needed to supplement its treatment in the beginner's book. Teachers will therefore be able to postpone the use of a formal manual of grammar, if they so desire. Those who wish their classes to begin the reading of Latin at the earliest possible moment ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... yards of cottonade, "mouslin a dames," "jaconad," dozens of soap, pounds of tobacco, pairs of stockings, lace, etc.; but to our great pleasure each page corresponding closely, save in orthography and syntax, with a page of the new manuscript, and the page numbers of the old running higher than those of the new! Here was evidence which one could lay before a skeptical world that the transcriber had not expanded the work of the original ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... some degree changed. But nothing can shake the truth of the statement that the Indo-Germanic languages constitute in themselves a family sprung from the same source, marked by the same characteristics, and differentiated from all other languages by formation, by vocabulary, and by syntax. The historical method was applied to language long before it reached biology. Nearly a quarter of a century before Charles Darwin was born, Sir William Jones had made the first suggestion of a comparative study of languages. Bopp's ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... grammar, then, so far as it deals with the classification of separate words, may well be given up as a bad job. But there still remains the art of syntax, the due arrangement of words to form sentences according to certain established rules. Here, at any rate, we are on somewhat firmer ground; and for many years the dictum that "the whole of Chinese grammar depends upon position" was regarded as a golden key to the written ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... again. There they stumbled upon a little bookseller's shop blinking in a quiet corner, and bought three or four guides and small histories of Ansbach, which they carried home, and studied between drowsing and waking. The wonderful German syntax seems at its most enigmatical in this sort of literature, and sometimes they lost themselves in its labyrinths completely, and only made their way perilously out with the help of cumulative declensions, past articles and adjectives blindly ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that novel-writing must be tremendous fun; and this is so cheering that it is really impossible to be angry with her. Otherwise I might have some very sharp things to say about her light-hearted disregard of syntax and punctuation. Her pronouns, for example, are so elusive that not only am I frequently in doubt as to whom the heroine will marry in the end but as to which of the characters is speaking at any given moment. And not infrequently what can only be careless proofreading leaves sentences ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... series of cyclic poems, which have already been candidates for bestowing immortality upon, at the same time that they receive it from, his character and adventures. In this point of view I have violated no rule of syntax in beginning my composition with a conjunction; the full stop which closes the poem continued by me being, like the full stops at the end of the Iliad and Odyssey, a full stop of a ...
— Peter Bell the Third • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... there are only beauties, and beauties which even an ignorant listener—if he is naturally musical—will see without trouble. He did not understand the vast difference between the unlettered person who commits a solecism and Pascal, the inventor of a new syntax. ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... of the Babylonian-Assyrian language has been clearly set forth in all its essential particulars: the substantive and verb formation is as definitely known as that of any other Semitic language, the general principles of the syntax, as well as many detailed points, have been carefully investigated, and as for the reading of the cuneiform texts, thanks to the various helps at our disposal, and the further elucidation of the various principles ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... typical provincial; it will prevent him from being a representative or skilful interpreter. Horace Greeley said that when the rules of the English language got in his way, they did not stand a chance. We may be sure that if by violating the rules of syntax Horace Greeley sometimes added forcefulness to his editorials, he violated them deliberately and not in ignorance. Luminosity is not stumbled into. The richly savored and deliciously unlettered speech ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... to thank you very cordially for this new proof of your obligingness and of your sympathy—in French, as this language becomes more and more familiar and easy to me, whereas I am obliged to make an effort to patch up more or less unskillfully my very halting German syntax. ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... that in verses written about three hundred years ago there should be found some crudities in style, some lapses in syntax, and not a few words strange to us or having a meaning somewhat different from their present significance. Among such lapses in syntax we find the slight confusion of tenses in the first stanza, caused in the poet's ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... [100] Hazlitt's syntax is often abbreviated, elliptical, and unregardful of book rules. Constructions like the following are not uncommon in his prose: "As a novelist, his Vicar of Wakefield has charmed all Europe.... As a comic writer, his Tony Lumpkin draws forth ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... noticed by a man of Mr. Hamilton's knowledge; for it can be easily set aside; or rather, it need not be regarded, because there is nothing suspicious about it. For the spelling of the seventeenth century, like its syntax and its pronunciation, was irregular; and the fatal error of those who attempt to imitate it is that they always use double consonants, superfluous final e-s, and ie for y. And even supposing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... the sphere of syntax one may point to certain French and Latin influences, but it is doubtful if they ever reached deeper than the written language. Much of this type of influence belongs rather to literary style than ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... is concerning the syntax and disposition of studies; that men may know in what order or pursuit ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... particularly in bold attempts to excise interpolations from the Gospels), but as devoid of the higher critical wisdom as was Bentley, whom he congenially criticised. To a reader of to-day, his arguments from Shakspere's diction and syntax are peculiarly unconvincing. ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... of the Anatolian peninsula, the Orthodox Greek population, submerged beneath the Turkish flood more than eight centuries ago, has retained little individuality except in its religion, and nothing of its native speech but a garbled vocabulary embedded in a Turkified syntax. Yet even this dwindling rear-guard has been overtaken just in time by the returning current of national life, bringing with it the Greek school, and with the school a community of outlook with Hellenism the world over. Whatever the fate of eastern ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... adjuring interjections which imply that admiration is too strong for syntax; and Naumann said in a tone of ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... poetry. We can make the finished article for ourselves, given enough matter; and indeed the poetry which is imagined in contemplation is apt to be much finer than that which has passed through the claws of prosody and syntax. The fact, to be short with it, is that literature has an eye upon the consumer. Whether it is marketable or not, it is intended for the public. Now no man will undress in public with design. It may be a pity, but so it is. Undesignedly, ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... either of the two I have mentioned, or any other of the fraternity, to be not only astrologers, but conjurers too, if I do not produce a hundred instances in all their almanacks to convince any reasonable man that they do not so much as understand common grammar and syntax; that they are not able to spell any word out of the usual road, nor even in their prefaces write common sense or intelligible English. Then for their observations and predictions, they are such as will equally suit any age or country in the world. "This month a certain great person will be threatened ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... command, That you your birch do take in hand, Read concord and syntax on; The bays, your own, are only mine, Do you then still your nouns decline, Since you've declined ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... three consecutive verses of the Apocalypse. The book, after all allowance made for solecisms, shows a very considerable command of the Greek vocabulary, and (what is more important) a familiarity with the intricacies of the very intricate syntax ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... the chairs. Marie Louise caught an angry look also in the eye of Nicholas Easton, though he, too, had been incisive in his comments on the theme of the dinner. His English had been uncannily correct, his phrases formal with the exactitude of a book on syntax or the dialogue of a gentleman in a novel. But he also was drinking too much, and as his lips fuddled he had trouble with a very formal "without which." It resulted first as "veetowit veech," then as "whidthout witch." He made it ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... one may not at every step verify the connection or incoherence of the parts.[3221]—The procedure used in arranging a simple sentence also governs that of the period, the paragraph and the series of paragraphs; it forms the style as it forms the syntax. Each small edifice occupies a distinct position, and but one, in the great total edifice. As the discourse advances, each section must in turn file in, never before, never after, no parasitic member being allowed to intrude, and no regular member being allowed to encroach on its ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... development of the Latin language, which it is hoped will prove interesting and instructive to the more ambitious pupil. At the end of the book will be found an Index to the Sources of the Illustrative Examples cited in the Syntax. ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... in fact had not arrived at the clear splendor of his later work without some earlier turbidity; he was still from time to time capable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn. As for the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' her syntax was such a snare to her that it sometimes needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the assistant editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction of solecisms, in transposition of phrases, the text was largely ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the Bible, he has recourse to Talmudic Hebrew or to the Aramaic. He pays careful attention to the precise meaning of words and to distinctions among synonyms, and he had perception for delicate shading in syntax and vocabulary. Owing to this thorough knowledge of Hebrew he readily obtained insight into the true sense of the text. By subjecting the thought of the Holy Scriptures to a simple and entirely rational examination, he not seldom succeeds ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... quite soothing after her mathematical mortification; for she delighted in new words, and quickly found that there was an English Key at the end, which would make her very wise about Latin, at slight expense. She presently made up her mind to skip the rules in the Syntax, the examples became so absorbing. These mysterious sentences, snatched from an unknown context,—like strange horns of beasts, and leaves of unknown plants, brought from some far-off region,—gave boundless scope to her imagination, and were all the more fascinating ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... the written. Latin is a troublesome speech on account of its complicated inflections and grammatical rules, which can be mastered only after a great deal of study. The people of the Roman provinces and the incoming barbarians naturally paid very little attention to the niceties of syntax and found easy ways of saying what they wished.[160] Yet several centuries elapsed after the German invasions before there was anything written in the language of conversation. So long as the uneducated could understand the correct Latin of the ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... show of education; but I was disinclined to be overdone in syntax by a mere Indian, a member of a race to which we owe nothing except the land on which the ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... of old, (ch. x. 7.) The great, the universal change consists in this:—"The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ." The English supplement,—"the kingdoms," is justified and required, equally by the sense and the laws of syntax: and he is a deceiver, if a scholar, who insists upon any other, to supply the ellipsis. Indeed, the omission of similar supplements, has occasioned needless obscurity to the unlearned in other parts of this book. (See chs. xix. 10; xxii. 9.) ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... same circumstances, except that instead of perambulate, the Rev. Amos wrote preambulate, and instead of 'if haply', 'if happily', the contingency indicated being the reverse of happy. Mr. Barton had not the gift of perfect accuracy in English orthography and syntax, which was unfortunate, as he was known not to be a Hebrew scholar, and not in the least suspected of being an accomplished Grecian. These lapses, in a man who had gone through the Eleusinian mysteries of a university education, surprised the young ladies of his parish extremely; ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... British empire, with its vast possessions in every clime, on which the sun never sets, peopled by races numerous and diverse of origin as of interests, multifarious, complicated, often conflicting. "L'etat," said Louis le Grand, "c'est moi." "The British empire"—bellows Syntax Cobden—"'tis me and printed calicoes." "The British government and legislature"—exclaims Friend Bright—"'tis I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... the common people in the provinces did not differ materially from that spoken in Italy. It was the language of the Roman soldier, colonist, and trader, with common characteristics in the way of diction, form, phraseology, and syntax, dropping into some slight local peculiarities, but kept essentially a unit by the desire which each community felt to imitate its officials and ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... be brought about, it was open to his hearers to conceive the practical course. For the rest, the heresiarch had a mighty flow of vituperative speech. Aspirates troubled him, so that for the most part he cast them away, and the syntax of his periods was often anacoluthic; but these matters ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... man. He composed at Nohant, and she has told us all about it; how he groaned, wrote and re-wrote and tore to pieces draft after draft of his work. This brings to memory another martyr to style, Gustave Flaubert, who for forty years in a room at Croisset, near Rouen, wrestled with the devils of syntax and epithet. Chopin was of an impatient, nervous disposition. All the more remarkable then his capacity for taking infinite pains. Like Balzac he was never pleased with the final "revise" of his work, he must needs aim at finishing touches. His letters at this period are interesting for the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... Miscellany. The greater part of the Uncertain Authors are less ambitious, but also less irregular than Wyatt, while they fall far short of Surrey in every respect. Sometimes, as in the famous "I loath that I did love," both syntax and prosody hardly show the reform at all; they recall the ruder snatches of an earlier time. But, on the whole, the characteristics of these poets, both in matter and form, are sufficiently uniform and sufficiently interesting. Metrically, they show, on the one side, a desire to use a rejuvenated ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Master discuss these knotty points of honor and expediency together, do you, as a recreation from the Greek syntax? I should like ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... intervals with a rag, he was regarded by most of us as absolute scum. The German master, a tall, good-looking man, was treated as utterly incompetent because, when he asked a question in grammar or syntax, he walked up and down with the book in front of him, and quite plainly compared the answer with the book. We boys thought that anyone could be a master, with a book in his hand. History and Geography were taught by an old man, overflowing ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... nineteen lessons, and is concerned primarily with the study of syntax and of subjunctive and irregular verb forms. The last three of these lessons constitute a review of all the constructions presented in the book. There is abundant easy reading matter; and, in order to secure proper concentration of effort upon syntax and ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... opinion that if Tacitus wrote incorrectly, it must be upon the principle alleged by Quintilian that "one kind of expression is grammatical, another kind Latin," "aliud esse grammatice, aliud Latine loqui" (I. 16) after the accommodating fashion of that kind gentleman of etymology and syntax, Valerius Probus, who in Aulus Gellius (XIII. 20. 1), said "has urbes" or "has urbis" was the more correct according to metrical convenience when writing verses, or sonorous utterance when delivering a set oration, which (without being Romans), we can easily understand, when some of our poets ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... with, they have, so to say, a grammar of their own, whose rules and syntax are more general than our own; if you attend carefully you will be surprised to find how exactly they follow certain analogies, very much mistaken if you like, but very regular; these forms are only objectionable because of their harshness or because they are not recognised by ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... fine text-hand at last. So though I at first commence With the humble accidence, And my study's course affords Little else as yet but words, I shall venture in a while At construction, grammar, style, Learn my syntax, and proceed Classic authors next to read, Such as wiser, better, make us, Sallust, Phaedrus, Ovid, Flaccus: All the poets (with their wit), All the grave historians writ, Who the lives and actions show Of men famous long ago; Ev'n their very sayings giving ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... literature irreparably attacked in its organism, weakened by the age of ideas, overworn by the excess of syntax, sensible only of the curiosity which fevers sick people, but nevertheless hastening to explain everything in its decline, desirous of repairing all the omissions of its youth, to bequeath all the most subtle souvenirs of its suffering on its deathbed, is incarnate in Mallarmé ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... in the sermonising class has been wasted. It is a fact that most of us have forgotten the greater part of what we learned at school. The dates which made up so large a part of our historical lessons, the rules we slavishly committed as we struggled to master the difficulties of syntax and prosody, our latinity, our grounding in the tongue of ancient Greece so hardly won—who amongst us, having grey hairs in abundance, could face to-day the examination room where once we triumphed in these things? Yet in a sense ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... this story in its own language—the simple easy- flowing Old-French, with its infantile syntax, and naive but effective efforts at distinction and what we now call style. There are various editions of the old French text; but the two easiest to get and also to read are that of Professor Suchier, and my own. Those in search of learning will always turn ...
— Aucassin and Nicolette - translated from the Old French • Anonymous
... in syntax, and his unreasoning loyalty to Billings is an established fact of such standing that ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... affixes to the epithet adopted by Doctor Cooper the idea of dishonour. It has been publicly applied to me under the sanction of your name. The question is not whether he has understood the meaning of the word, or has used it according to syntax and with grammatical accuracy, but whether you have authorized this application, either directly or by uttering expressions or opinions derogatory to my honour. The time "when" is in your own knowledge, ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... to stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which connects the epithets "deaf and silent," with the apostrophized eye: or (if we are to refer it to the preceding word, "Philosopher"), the faulty and equivocal syntax of the passage; and without examining the propriety of making a "Master brood o'er a Slave," or "the Day" brood at all; we will merely ask, what does all this mean? In what sense is a child of that age a Philosopher? In what ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... got out of his bounds"—Warburton—Bravo! old Hurlo-thumbo! got out of his depth, Warburton, you mean. Extra-vagant certainly may be construed out of bounds; we need no ghost with a mouthful of Syntax to tell us that; but Shakspeare had too much taste to adopt such an absurd Latinism. I have no doubt that the late king was a man of expensive habits, and is here compared to a prisoner within the rules of the king's bench, who must return to quod at a given moment or ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... syntax of the possessive case is sufficiently plain and easy, there is, perhaps, among all the puzzling and disputable points of grammar, nothing more difficult of decision than are some questions that occur ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... to say how we are to find him out to be a low man, or what marks can remain of the ordinary language of conversation in the inferior orders of society. If there be any phrases that are not used in good society, they will appear as blemishes in the composition, no less palpably, than errors in syntax or quality; and, if there be no such phrases, the style cannot be characteristic of that condition of life, the language of which it professes to have adopted. All approximation to that language, in the same manner, implies a deviation ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... previously stated, the language or dialect of the German settlers in Brazil underwent an almost immediate change, not in its syntax, but in its vocabulary. Had the immigrants and their descendants only adopted such words as had no equivalent in their mother-tongue, our case would be much simpler. They went, however, much further, and, as a result ...
— The German Element in Brazil - Colonies and Dialect • Benjamin Franklin Schappelle
... techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the name derives from their initials). It is characterized by C-like syntax, a declaration-free approach to variable typing and declarations, associative arrays, and field-oriented text processing. See also {Perl}. 2. n. Editing term for an expression awkward to manipulate through normal {regexp} facilities (for example, one containing a {newline}). 3. /vt./ ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... This is the more remarkable, as a most extraordinary change has taken place in the language of these islands during the latter half of the eighteenth century; insomuch that the language of the Indian inhabitants consists entirely of Spanish words, but all the inflexions, the syntax, and the idiomatic manner of expression are Chilese, that is to say exactly corresponding to the Moluchese dialect of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... an influence on the new age greater than yours, more largely prepared the way of the newest music. You are indeed the good friend of all who dream of a new musical language, a new musical syntax and balance and structure, and set out to explore the vast, vague regions, the terra incognita of tone. For you are their ancestor. If, in its general, homophonic nature, your work belongs primarily to the romantic period, your conviction that the content conditions ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... when the old gender system decayed, and the form its gradually came into use, until, by the end of the seventeenth century, it was in general use. Milton, however, scarcely recognised it, its place in his involved syntax being taken by the relative pronouns and other connectives, or by his, ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... are less frequent than those of syntax, yet such occur. In the Folios verbs ending in d and t are constantly found making their second persons singular in ds and ts instead of d'st and t'st. This was a corruption coming into vogue about the time ...
— The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] - Introduction and Publisher's Advertising • William Shakespeare
... for the rein of an old bridle (the truants of that busy day could have anticipated its application), walked down the Lawnmarket with Mr. Saddletree, each talking as he could get a word thrust in, the one on the laws of Scotland, the other on those of syntax, and neither listening to a ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... that is pictorial. Sculpture was the only art that had resisted this universal disintegration, this imbroglio of the arts. No sculptor before Rodin had dared to break the line, dared to shiver the syntax of stone. For sculpture is a static, not a dynamic art—is it not? Let us observe the rules, though we preserve the chill spirit of the cemetery. What Mallarme attempted to do with French poetry Rodin accomplished in clay. His marbles do not represent but present emotion, are the evocation ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... boy; Off like bird, avi similis—(you observed The dative? Pretty i' the Mantuan!)—Anglice Off in three flea skips. Hactenus, so far, So good, tam bene. Bene, satis, male -, Where was I with my trope 'bout one in a quag? I did once hitch the syntax into verse: Verbum personale, a verb personal, Concordat—ay, "agrees," old Fatchaps—cum Nominativo, with its nominative, Genere, i' point o' gender, numero, O' number, et persona, and person. Ut, Instance: Sol ruit, down flops sun, et and, ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... time were proud to place him with Homer and with Virgil on the roll of the poets. Ronsard's peculiarity in style was the free use of words and constructions not properly French. Boileau indicated whence he enriched his vocabulary and his syntax, by satirically saying that Ronsard spoke Greek and Latin in French. At his death, Ronsard was almost literally buried under praises. Sainte-Beuve strikingly says that he seemed to go forward into ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... am very guilty; I should have written to you long ago; and now, though it must be done, I am so stupid that I can only boldly recapitulate. A phrase of three members is the outside of my syntax. ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
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