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More "Vocabulary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... write in the language their fathers used. They seem to have lost the vocabulary, and to have picked up, in place of it, the jargon of the Yellow Press, which does not tend to clear definition on points of theology. The mass of all this controversial stuff is no more absurd, no more frantic, than it used to be: but in language it has lost its dignity with its homeliness. ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... suggestiveness: that quality or effect which we all feel to be present in romantic and absent from classic work, but which we find it hard to describe by any single term. It is open to any analyst of our critical vocabulary to draw out the fullest meanings that he can, from such pairs of related words as classic and romantic, fancy and imagination, wit and humor, reason and understanding, passion and sentiment. Let us, for ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... entitled Poluglssos was published in Belgium in 1841, which is even more misleading and unintelligible than the Portuguese School Book. The English vocabulary contains some amazing words, such as agridulce, ales of troops, ancientness sign, bivacq fire, breast's pellicule, chimney black money, infatuated compass, iug (vocal), window, umbrella, etc. At the end of ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... Billy. His vocabulary was too limited to express his thoughts fully, but he did fairly well ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... to Gujarat and the Deccan. In adopting the profession of transport agents for the imperial troops they may have been amalgamated into a fresh caste with other Hindus and Muhammadans doing the same work, just as the camp language formed by the superposition of a Persian vocabulary on to a grammatical basis of Hindi became Urdu or Hindustani. The readiness of the Charans to commit suicide rather than give up property committed to their charge was not, however, copied by the Banjaras, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... you," she cried chokingly, "I won't—" she could say no more. There were no words in her meagre vocabulary to voice her bitterness ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... uncomplimentary adjective, the duchess would have felt cheered. As it was, a fixed and settled melancholy lay upon her spirit until she saw in a dealer's list an advertisement of a prize macaw, warranted a grand talker, with a vocabulary of over ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... who hasn't been jerked up astride of the plow-handles or been flung into the furrow by a balky plow has never had his vocabulary tested. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... the vocabulary more bitter, more direful in its import, than all the rest. Reader, if poverty, if disgrace, if bodily pain, even if slighted love be your unhappy fate, kneel and bless Heaven for its beneficent influence, so that you are not ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... impassioned improvisation. It is difficult to imagine that Lucretius wrote slowly. The strange word vociferari, which he uses so often, and which the Romans of the Augustan age almost dropped from their poetic vocabulary, seems exactly made to suit his utterance. Yet at times he tempers the full torrent of resonant utterance with divine tranquillity, and leaves upon our mind that sense of powerful aloofness from his subject, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... knocking about one may discover how limited a vocabulary has been their portion; and observation with a traveler means a widening of the horizon that ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... celebration of certain great themes which are the eternal subjects of all poetry, subjects such as love and nature, and sentiments like enthusiasm and pity. The very language completes the illusion. The choice of words was often far from perfect, as George Sand's vocabulary was often uncertain, and her expression lacked precision and relief. But she had the gift of imagery, and her images were always delightfully fresh. She never lost that rare faculty which she possessed of being ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... country. His great services in reducing the Maori language to written form have hardly been sufficiently recognised. Marsden, like the other settlers, could never adapt himself to the Italian vowel sounds, and at his request Kendall wrote out a new vocabulary on a different system; but he soon found it unsatisfactory, and returned to the principles which he had worked out with Professor Lee. For the rest of his life—in South America and in Australia—he still tried to perfect his Maori Grammar. But the tragedy ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... Dryden confessed that he "understood the nature of the passions," and "made his characters distinct;" so that "his failings were not so much in the passions themselves, as in his manner of expression." Unfortunately, his vocabulary was neither choice nor extensive, and he "often obscured his meaning by his words, and sometimes made ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... among the various phases of Gipsy life, I find the same black array of facts staring me in the face, the same dolorous issues everywhere. The words reason, honour, restraint, and fidelity are words not to be found in their vocabulary. My later inquiries fully confirm my previous statements as to two-thirds living as husband and wife being unmarried. I have not found a Gipsy to contradict this statement. Abraham Smith fully ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... Miss Hescott's vocabulary is filled with choice sayings, expressive if scarcely elegant. Beyond her dislike to Mrs. Bethune, personally—she might have conquered that—Minnie is clever—there is always the fact that Mrs. Bethune is poor, and poor people, as Minnie ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... He called his old uncle all the vile names under the sun for not helping him across the gully. While he swore roundly in all the moods and tenses of the Spanish language, his uncle fished on, now and then congratulating his hopeful nephew on his accomplishment. At the end of his rich vocabulary the urchin sauntered off into the fields, and shortly returned with a bunch of flowers, and with all smiles handed them to me with the innocence of an angel. I remembered having seen the same flower on the banks of the river farther up, some ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... marks in the paradigms and vocabulary lists have been supplied or regularized. Other errors and anomalies are listed at the end of the text. Bracketed text is in the original unless ...
— Sketch of Grammar of the Chippeway Languages - To Which is Added a Vocabulary of some of the Most Common Words • John Summerfield
... reaches them now has almost to begin all over again. It has to undo their thinking about prayer and faith and God's love and human conduct and nearly every other Christian idea. They have a Christian vocabulary, but it means very little. They think they can buy religion, if they want it—any kind they want. And if they can't afford it, or don't want it, they don't quite think they'll be sent to hell for ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... "necessitates the admission of different independent beginnings for the material elements" [the vocabulary] "of the Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan branches of speech." The same thing Mueller affirms of "the formal elements" [the grammatical structure] "of these groups of languages." "We can perfectly understand how, either through individual influences or by the wear and tear of speech ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... subject—they were dry, picturesque, and to the point, and even our bluejackets, who were none too particular about language, looked at Oates with undisguised astonishment at the length and variety of his emergency vocabulary. ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... fancy. Still he strove to analyse the sound. Sonorous as thunder was it, mellow as a golden bell, thin and sweet as a thrummed taut cord of silver—no; it was none of these, nor a blend of these. There were no words nor semblances in his vocabulary and experience with which to describe ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... Correct Speech Courtesy in Conversation The Voice Ease in Speech Local Phrases and Mannerisms Importance of Vocabulary Interrupting the Speech of Others Tact in Conversation Some Important Information What ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... long figure. "I've never lifted my feet save for the purpose of transportation. I'd like to learn how to dance because Deacon Tower thinks it wicked and I've learned that happiness and sin mean the same thing in his vocabulary." ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... REED'S THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. A brief history of the grammatical changes of the language and its vocabulary, with exercises on synonyms, prefixes, suffixes, word-analysis, and word-building. A text-book for high schools and ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... to talk at one year. He early learns to say "mamma" and "papa," and gradually adds nouns to his vocabulary, so that at eighteen months the normal child should have a vocabulary of one hundred to one hundred and fifty words. As he nears the two-year mark, he has acquired a few simple verbs and he can possibly put three words together, such ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... they? What is their worth, and "what is their amount?" When we think or speak of a Judge or a General, we associate with it the ideas of office and character; we think of gravity in one and bravery in the other; but when we use the word merely as a title, no ideas associate with it. Through all the vocabulary of Adam there is not such an animal as a Duke or a Count; neither can we connect any certain ideas with the words. Whether they mean strength or weakness, wisdom or folly, a child or a man, or the rider or the horse, is all equivocal. What respect then can be paid to that which describes nothing, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... to, on the alluvial plains of Grave Creek in Western Virginia, was in one of the types of this ancient character. This type of the alphabet may be called AONIC[6]—a term derived from the aboriginal vocabulary. I visited the locality in 1843—carefully examined the facts, and having satisfied myself of the authenticity of the discovery, took duplicate copies of the inscription in wax, and transmitted them to Europe. The inscription consists ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... that he has done nothing of the kind, but that he has simply reaffirmed the individual's experiences in a more generalized vocabulary. And again, I can be excused from proving technically that the transcendentalist reasonings fail to make religion universal, for I can point to the plain fact that a majority of scholars, even religiously disposed ones, stubbornly refuse to treat them as convincing. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... commerce, administration, and higher education), Arabic (widely spoken in Zanzibar), many local languages note: Kiswahili (Swahili) is the mother tongue of the Bantu people living in Zanzibar and nearby coastal Tanzania; although Kiswahili is Bantu in structure and origin, its vocabulary draws on a variety of sources, including Arabic and English, and it has become the lingua franca of central and eastern Africa; the first language of most people is ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... system of signs for letters was not attached to the caveat, but a careful reading of the text, in which reference is made to the drawing, will prove conclusively that it was. Moreover, in this caveat under section 5, "The Dictionary or Vocabulary," the very first sentence reads: "The dictionary is a complete vocabulary of words alphabetically arranged and regularly numbered, beginning with the letters of the alphabet." The italics are mine. The mistake arose because the drawing was detached from the caveat and ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... No vocabulary of the Servants' Hall could have encompassed the fine phrase grand seigneur, but, when Mrs. Blayne and the rest talked of him in their least resentful and more amiable moods, they unconsciously made efforts to express the quality in ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... confides that every man will do his duty'?" Some one suggested "England" instead of "Nelson," and Nelson at once caught at the improvement. The signal-officer explained that the word "confide" would have to be spelt, and suggested instead the word "expects," as that was in the vocabulary. So the flags on the masthead of the Victory spelt out the historic sentence to the slowly moving fleet. That the signal was "received with cheers" is scarcely accurate. The message was duly acknowledged, ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... super-magic overwhelmed him and his tribe with sleep-magic and storm-magic of the strongest, lay bound hand and foot, sullenly brooding. No one could get a word from Abd el Rahman; not even Rrisa, who exhausted a wonderful vocabulary of imprecation on him, until the Master sternly bade him hold ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... burst out with a mighty oath. "There's no word in devil's or man's vocabulary to call you by. You're to thank for this. Weren't you ordered to keep guard by ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... waiter and asked, "Do they always drink cold coffee in Java?" The waiter, who could only stand passive while this calm robbery was committed—for had not the whole company to wait for a second brew—made reply with the only English of his vocabulary, "yes." X., who had the doubtful advantage of understanding as well as seeing all that was going on, glared fiercely as he saw himself deprived of the only portion of the meal which was at all likely to be good, and could willingly have ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... colony in Wales still retains its ancient words—leaves no room for doubt that at one time a landed highway existed between the two worlds. The Mandans, on the Upper Missouri, have many words of undoubted Armorican origin in their vocabulary,[4] just as the Chiapenec, of Central America, contains its principal words denotive of deity, family relations, and many conditions of life that are identically the same as in the Hebrew,[5] the name of father, son, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... yer somethin'," he said, good-naturedly; "but next time yer shove people, Mr. Gordon, just quit shovin' yer friends. My shoulder feels like—" perhaps it's just as well not to say what his shoulder felt like. The Western vocabulary is expressive, but at times not quite ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... Magdalen would show him to her, and tell her his name. Angela was glad enough to break off poor Susan's questioning, and come forward, with the child still clinging, to incite the bird to display the rose colour under his crest, put up a grey claw to shake hands, and show off his vocabulary, laughing herself and acting merriment as she did so, in hopes ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... a brother who is a real educated gentleman, he tried to dissuade me from publishing my history because I think he is afraid he will be outshone by literary merit. I have no ambition to outshine him, nor William Shakespere nor any other erudite. I have a very limited vocabulary, and since swearing and smoking are not allowed in print, I shall have to loose the biggest half of that. I shall omit foreign language, I could assault you with Mex—or Siwash but I fear you could not survive the battery. So I shall confine myself to simple speech, such as I ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... without the park, enjoying such a prospect! and there is such a mountain on t'other side of the park commanding all prospects, that I wore out my eyes with gazing, my feet with climbing, and my tongue and my vocabulary with commending! The best notion I can give you of the satisfaction I showed, was, that Sir George proposed to carry me to dine with my Lord Foley; and when I showed reluctance, he said, "Why, I thought you did not mind any strangers, if you were to see any thing!" Think ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... of a long flight of stone steps and see the citadel looming above. It is Spain, and my passport is at the hotel. They are said to be very suspicious in Spain; to act first and investigate afterward. My whole vocabulary has already been employed at the custom-house, and consists of "Americano," "caramba," and "Si, Senor." It won the day at Irun. Will it ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... vocabulary amused Barstein. Evidently the dictionary was his fount of inspiration. Without it Niagara was reduced to a trickle. He seemed indeed quite shy of speech, preferring to gaze ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... complicated a complete language must be, with its long and arbitrary vocabulary, its intricate system of sounds; the many forms that single words may take, especially if they are verbs; the rules of grammar, the sentence structure, the idioms, slang and inflections. Heavens, what a genius for tongues these ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... comrade, yet, before the foremost succeeded in laying hands upon me, a newcomer, resplendent in glittering uniform, with an inflamed, almost purple face, leaped madly forth from the opposite side of the mast and began laying about him vigorously with an iron pin, making use meanwhile of a vocabulary of choice Spanish epithets such as ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... scared into submission by dreadful pictures of hell and fear of everlasting torment. After church they would gamble, and they often lost everything, even wives and children. They were low, brutal, unintelligent, with an exceedingly limited vocabulary and an unbounded appetite. A man is as he eats, and, as some one says, "If a man eats peanuts he will ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... law in any true sense. What really exists is the exclusive state—der geschlossene Staat—and in another sense than that of Fichte. This state is rigorously national: it excludes all foreign words from its vocabulary, and it would fain exclude all foreign articles from its shores in order to found a real 'national' economy such as List preached. Further, in the teaching of Treitschke this exclusive state is, 'as Machiavelli first clearly saw', essentially ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... impartially, "although we each think there is but one. I will agree that yours is more entertaining. Jannie was jealous again. The Roman orgies, the young person from the grands boulevards, were more than she could accept; and she tried, in the vocabulary lately so prevalent, a reprisal. But I must acknowledge that I am surprised at the persistent masculine flexibility ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... elegant expressions in the Bible. The peculiarities of the historical writings are carefully avoided, while all modifications of style peculiar to poetry are gathered together to constitute what may fairly be called a vocabulary ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... "National Assembly," the "Tiers," the "Constitution"—these, too, soon to be effaced by more Republican appellations. For on the abolition of the monarchy and the inauguration of the Religion of Nature, the words "royal" and "saint" disappear from the revolutionary vocabulary. A new calendar is promulgated: streets and squares are renamed: Rues des Droits de l'Homme, de la Revolution, des Piques, de la Loi, efface the old landmarks. We must now say Rue Honore, not St. Honore, and Mont Marat for Montmartre. ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... diction and vocabulary of these letters with those employed in my own writing—I am not unknown as a magazine contributor—and I find no points of similarity between the two." There is much further evidence in this case for which I refer the ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... much, are not in my vocabulary," said Sir Tom; "have they a meaning? not certainly that has any connection with a certain charming Contessina. If that lady has a fault, which I doubt, it is that she gives too little of her gracious ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... the observance of the rule that the English present should talk to each other, as well as to the strangers, in French. He had a thorough colloquial knowledge of the French language, marked not so much by any French mannerism, of which there was little, as by a ready command of the vocabulary of special subjects—for ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... very favourable account of the disposition of the native inhabitants on the shores of the channel; and he had frequent communications with them. In person and manner of living, they agree with those described by Marion and Cook; but the vocabulary of their language is somewhat different; and bark canoes, which preceding navigators had thought them not to possess, were found in the channel. The description of the country is, generally, favourable; though somewhat less so than that of captain Cook at Adventure Bay. The climate ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... the trained Michigan rats, captured way up there, and trained to jump and run all around the box at the—at the—at the slightest PRE-text!" He paused, partly to take breath and partly to enjoy his own surprised discovery that this phrase was in his vocabulary. ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... when my teacher told me about a new thing I asked very few questions. My ideas were vague, and my vocabulary was inadequate; but as my knowledge of things grew, and I learned more and more words, my field of inquiry broadened, and I would return again and again to the same subject, eager for further information. Sometimes a new word revived an image ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... would not any longer own or recognise her. Afterwards he exhibited the most contradictory emotions, and first cursed Maria Monk; then reviled the Priests, applying to them all the loathsome epithets in the Canadian vocabulary. Subsequently, he went to make inquiries at the Seminary; and after his return to Mr. Johnson's house he declared, that the persons there had informed him, that Maria Monk had lived in the Nunnery, but not as a Nun; then he offered to assist her in her endeavours ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... with the vocabulary of literary criticism: the first use of a name, because the name was coined by someone who felt the need of it, is often striking and instructive; the impression is fresh and new. Then the freshness wears off it, and the ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... with energy and interest various civic offices, which were freely offered to him. From 1828 to 1832, he was an efficient member of the Territorial Legislature, where he introduced a system of township and county names, formed on the basis of the aboriginal vocabulary, and also procured the incorporation of a historical society, and, besides managing the finances, as chairman of an appropriate committee, he introduced and secured the passage of several laws respecting the ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... and especially Chwangtse as I think, did for the Chinese was to publish the syntax and vocabulary of that ancient language; to make people understand how to take these grand protagonists of Tao; how to communicate familiarly with these selfless avatars of the Most High. Listen to this: the thought is close-packed, but I think ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... here discovers a deep knowledge of human nature. He knew the power of ridicule and of invective. At a later day, a writer of the same stamp, in "The Second Wash, or the Moore Scoured once more," (written against Dr. Henry More, the Platonist), in defence of that vocabulary of names which he has poured on More, asserts it is a practice allowed by the high authority of Christ himself. I transcribe the curious passage:—"It is the practice of Christ himself to character men by those things to which they assimilate. Thus hath he called ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... had plunged garrulously into a confusing description of the Far East. He was clasping the pickets of the fence with his hands, and his eyes were fastened on hers. He lacked neither confidence nor vocabulary, and not for an instant did his tongue hesitate or his eyes wander, and yet in his manner there was nothing at which she could take offence. He appeared only amiably vain that he had seen much of the world, and anxious to impress that fact upon ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... since the early days in Nanking when he had succumbed to the charms of a slant-eyed little Celestial at the tender age of seven. He had always had a girl, just as he had always had a job; but both had varied with time and place. With a vocabulary of a dozen words and the sign language, he had managed to flirt across France and back again. He had frivoled with half a dozen trained nurses in as many different hospitals, and had even had a sentimental round ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... 1881 Gatschet made a collection of linguistic material among the Catawba Indians of South Carolina, and was struck with the resemblance of many of the vocables to Siouan terms of like meaning, and began the preparation of a comparative Catawba-Dakota vocabulary. To this the Tutelo, cegiha, {LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED T}{LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN O}iwere, and Hotcangara (Winnebago) were added by Dorsey, who made a critical examination of all Catawba material extant and compared it with several Dakota dialects, with which he was specially conversant. ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... were checkers. These practical men have a better grip on life than the cynics and dreamers like you. You call them plebeian and bourgeois and Philistine and limited—all the bad names in your select vocabulary. But they know how to feel in the good, old, common-sense way. You've lost that. I like plebeian earnestness and push. I like success at something, and hearty enjoyment, and good dinners, and big men who talk about a million as if it were ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... I was a little doubtful about the proper way to talk to a real author, being purely a Chicagoan myself, and I had an idea that while my usual vocabulary was good enough for business purposes it might be too easy-going to impress a literary person properly, and in trying to talk up to her standard I had to be very careful in my choice of words. No publisher likes to have his authors ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... allowing the other extreme of looseness, weak colloquialism in words, and formless monotony of sentence, with the endless repetition of the connective "and." Language should be fresh, vital, varied. It should have some dignity. Much reading, writing, and speaking are necessary to secure an adequate vocabulary, and a readiness in putting in firm form a variety of sentences. Concreteness of expression and occasional illustration are more needed in speech than in writing, and the brief anecdote or story is welcome and useful if there ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... be a word to conjure with in these days. Popular speech has taken it in its present connotation from the technical vocabulary of engineering, and the term has brought with it a very refreshing sense of accuracy and practicality. It suggests blueprints and T-squares and mathematical formulae. A faint and rather pleasant odor of ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... be understood that my argument applies solely to the English language, I think I might fairly take exception to a string of instances with which A.E.B. endeavours to refute me from a vocabulary of a language very expressive, no doubt, yet commonly called "slang". The words in question are not English: I never use them myself, nor do I recognise the right or necessity for any one else to do so; and I might, indeed, deem this a sufficient answer. But ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 36. Saturday, July 6, 1850 • Various
... be hardened, to give them strong constitutions. Am I and my brother the worse for it?" said Sylvie. "You'll make Pierrette a peakling"; this was a word in the Rogron vocabulary which meant a puny and suffering ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... must succeed!" said the professor, striking an attitude. "In the vocabulary of youth, there's no such word as 'fail'! Away with timid ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... the strings of his profanity and fairly outdid himself. Jacob Kent brought out a stool that he might enjoy it in comfort. Having exhausted all the possible combinations of his vocabulary, the sailor quieted down to hard thinking, his eyes constantly gauging the progress of the sun, which tore up the eastern slope of the heavens with unseemly haste. His dogs, surprised that they had not long ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... the very mystery of human symbols—of the uttermost secret of words in their power to express the soul of a writer—when one attempts to analyse the child-like simplicity of William Blake's style. How is it that he manages with so small, so limited a vocabulary, to capture the very "music of the spheres"? We all have the same words at our command; we all have the same rhymes; where then lies this strange power that can give the simplest syllables so original, so personal, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... holding him by the shoulders. "There isn't a word in your vocabulary to fit my condition. I am an island in a sunlit sea of emotion, Sam, a—an empty place surrounded ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... say their catechism; fasting and praying long, weary hours in their own study,—truly they were "pious and painful preachers," as Colonel Higginson saw recorded on a gravestone in Watertown. Though I suspect "painful" in the Puritan vocabulary meant "painstaking," did it not? Cotton Mather called John Fiske, of Chelmsford, a "plaine but able painful and useful preacher," while President Dunster, of Harvard College, was described by a contemporary divine as "pious painful and fit to teach." Other curious ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... itself the best record of a nation's origin, development, and relation to other races. Each vocabulary and grammar of a dead nation is a Nineveh, rich in pictures, inscriptions, and historical records, uncovering to the patient investigator not merely the external life and actions of the people, but their deepest internal life, and their connection with other peoples and times. The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... scoops, bull lead and five dibbles. Lot 10. Dung rake and dung devil. Lot 11. Four juts and a zinc skip." Farm labourers are men of little speech, and it is often needful that voices should carry far. Hence this crisp and forcible reticence. The vocabulary of the country-side undergoes few changes; and the noises to-day made by the ox-herd who urges his black and smoking team along the hill-side are precisely those that Piers Plowman ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... inner Congo basin" (p. 15). Throughout Africa, north of the Bantu border line, the traveller meets with numerous languages widely different and mutually incomprehensible whereas with a knowledge of one Bantu language it is not difficult to understand the structure and even the vocabulary of others. The importance of this language family in Africa is therefore obvious. The author defines clearly the special and peculiar characteristics of Bantu languages. There follows an interesting discussion of the origin and spread of these languages. Probably the parent speech was ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... to an Oxford don through whom, if it were at all possible, he could reach the author. The journey to Oxford was made, and Bok was introduced to the don, who turned out to be no less a person than the original possessor of the highly colored vocabulary of the "White Rabbit" of the ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... impressions of this life, rather than of its details, that I would now write. The first and greatest is the way the average man has surmounted the impossible, has brought, as it were, a power to strike that word from his vocabulary. Living in conditions which in previous years would have caused his death, he has maintained his vitality of mind and body. Healthy amid the pestilence of decaying death, of chill from nights spent sometimes waist deep ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... midst of all the sublime and beautiful I had a happy mixture of the comic, for we had a Welsh postillion who entertained us much by his contracted vocabulary, and still more contracted sphere of ideas. He and my father could never understand one another, because my father said "quarry," and the Welshman said "querry"; and the burthen of all he said was continually asking if we would not like to be ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... that all superiority which manifests itself among a people means cheapness, and tends only to impart force to all other nations. Let us banish, then, from political economy all terms borrowed from the military vocabulary: to fight with equal weapons, to conquer, to crush, to stifle, to be beaten, invasion, tribute, etc. What do such phrases mean? Squeeze them, and you obtain nothing. Yes, you do obtain something; for from such words proceed absurd errors, and fatal and pestilent prejudices. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... they were absolutely without ideas on abstract subjects; but they were exquisitely susceptible to every shade and tone of concrete objects, and the endeavour to convey their innumerable impressions taxed the resources of that French vocabulary on whose relative poverty they so often insist. The reproaches brought against them in the matter of verbal audacities by every prominent critic, from Sainte-Beuve in one camp to Pontmartin in the other, are so many testimonies to the fact that they ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... used in a letter are vehicles for thought, but every word is not a vehicle for thought, because it may not be the kind of word that goes to the place where you want your thought to go; or, to put it another way, there is a wide variation in the understanding of words. The average American vocabulary is quite limited, and where an exactly phrased letter might completely convey an exact thought to a person of education, that same letter might be meaningless to a person who understands but few words. Therefore, it is fatal ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... failure of breath and vocabulary had perforce effected a lull. "I've had about enough of this awful life, and so I'm going to try if I can't do something to set things right again, before it's too late. Now, the Johannesburg 'boom' is the thing to do it, if anything will. It's ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... house, fairly beaten away by superior force of vocabulary, reappeared with these and other exclamations, her face livid, her foolish eyes starting from their sockets. Fanny, a sort of Mother Cary's chicken, revelled in the row, and ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... almost entire nudity". Their filthy habits. Papooses fastened in framework of light wood. Indian modes of fishing. A handsome but shy young buck. Classic gracefulness of folds of white-sheet robe of Indian. Light and airy step of the Indians something superhuman. Miserably brutish and degraded. Their vocabulary of about twenty words. Their love of gambling, and its frightful consequences. Arrival of hundreds of people at Indian Bar. Saloons springing up in every direction. Fluming operations rapidly progressing. A busy, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... what excellent words you have command of. Where in the word did you acquire such a voluminous vocabulary?" ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... deficient in spelling inevitably confines his vocabulary to narrow limits and so lacks facility of expression and nicety of diction. Accordingly, he suffers by comparison with others whose vocabulary is more extensive and whose diction is, therefore, more elegant. The consciousness of his shortcomings ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... choose these, and these alone, is what will give us part in the holy value of life. The choice and the refusal of them is the Yea and the Nay of all that makes life worth living; and is the source, to the positivists, of the solemnity, the terrors, and sweetness of the whole ethical vocabulary. 'What then are the alternative pleasures that life offers me? In how many ways am I capable of feeling my existence a blessing? and in what way shall I feel the blessing of it most keenly?' This is the great life-question; it may be asked indifferently by any ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... day, vocabulary, grammar, logic returned. They still iterated and reiterated their experiences, but with a coherence which gradually grew to consistence. In between, however, came ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... you—and I have already done so, I see—that, since I have been here, I have had daily lessons in English with a cultivated English woman; and in consequence I have been learning to enlarge a very meagre vocabulary, and have begun to appreciate possibilities in my own language of which ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... he exclaimed shrugging his shoulders lightly ... "These words, my young friend, are terms that nowadays belong exclusively to the vocabulary of the uneducated masses; we,—and by WE, I mean scientists, and men of the highest culture,—have long ago rejected them as unmeaning and therefore unnecessary. Phenomenon is a particularly vile expression, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Lindsay I have found is as easily remembered and as much enjoyed as Mother Goose, though it is a pity it is about an unfamiliar animal. As for the Dinkey-bird even a seven-year-old can hardly hear the rhyme even if intellectually he could follow the adult vocabulary and the complicated sentence with its ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... continued effort at description I have exhausted my vocabulary and worn to tatters the oft-repeated phrases with which I have sought with heart full of adoring enthusiasm to announce the wonders of ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... "Excepting the twin sister tongue spoken in the Ryukyu Islands," writes Professor Chamberlain, "the Japanese language has no kindred, and its classification under any of the recognized linguistic families remains doubtful. In structure, though not to any appreciable extent in vocabulary, it closely resembles Korean, and both it and Korean may possibly be related to Mongol and to Manchu, and might therefore lay claim to be included in the so-called 'Altaic group' In any case, Japanese is what philologists call an agglutinative tongue; that is to say, it ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... drab from Washington, and seated her beside him once upon the bench of the court; Stiles as himself a Mormon, so far as the possession of two wives could make him one. From the early days of Joseph Smith, his disciples have never minced their language, and they expended their whole vocabulary now on such themes as have been cited, proving, to the satisfaction of everybody, that, in respect to the judiciary, they had indeed had just cause for complaint. The mission of Smith and Taylor failed, as might have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... and particularly the seats of country-gentlemen, leaving an alias to solve all difficulties in point of law. But I would by no means trust these alterations to the owners themselves; who, as they are generally no great clerks, so they seem to have no large vocabulary about them, nor to be well skilled in prosody. The utmost extent of their genius lies in naming their country habitation by a hill, a mount, a brook, a burrow, a castle, a bawn, a ford, and the like ingenious conceits. Yet these are exceeded by others, whereof some have contrived ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... midnight conversations with Rebecca, although as a bachelor they had never given him any disquiet. He himself was struck with this phenomenon. "Hang it," he would say (or perhaps use a still stronger expression out of his simple vocabulary), "before I was married I didn't care what bills I put my name to, and so long as Moses would wait or Levy would renew for three months, I kept on never minding. But since I'm married, except renewing, of course, I give you my honour I've not ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Words have a terrible power. And Janet's vocabulary might be as primitive as lightning, but unlike lightning it ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... task to perform you will always think that it is easy. Such words as 'difficult,' 'impossible,' 'I cannot' will disappear from your vocabulary. Their place will be taken by this phrase: 'It is easy and I can.' So, considering your work easy, even if it is difficult to others, it will become easy to you. You will do it easily, ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... that school, to study, to become a teacher perhaps—but beyond that the wings of Arul's imagination have not yet learned to soar. The meaning of service for Christ and India, the opportunity of educated womanhood, such ideas have not yet entered Arul's vocabulary. She will learn them in the ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... and intricate. It has seven cases and three genders; and as the latter are dependent upon no definite principle whatever, but are purely arbitrary, it is almost impossible for a foreigner to learn them so as to give nouns and adjectives their proper terminations. Its vocabulary is very copious; and its idioms have a peculiarly racy individuality which can hardly be appreciated without a thorough acquaintance with the colloquial ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... feel that the language of Mamma must be singularly antiquated. So much she did not understand . . . had never heard. . . . What, indeed, was a simp, a boob, a nut? What a poor fish? . . . She held her peace, and listened, confused by the astounding vocabulary and the even more astounding intimacy. What things they said to each ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... question as for a bludgeon. Davidge had some trouble in wielding it. He hated the thought so much that the words were unspeakable, and he hunted for some paraphrase. In the sparse thesaurus of his vocabulary he ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... would make him furious; he would blow me sky-high." "Well," I replied, "suppose he did go into a regular tantrum and use all the most startling expletives in the vocabulary for fifteen minutes! What is that compared with a good stove 365 days in the year? Just put all he could say on one side, and all the advantages you would enjoy on the other, and you must readily see that his wrath would kick the beam." As my logic was irresistible, she said, "Well, if you will go ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... scoffer, an atheist, an imp of Satan; and he calls the Pope the scarlet mother of abominations, Antichrist, Babylon. That age is prodigal in offensive epithets; kings and prelates and doctors alike use hard words. They are like angry children and women and pugilists; their vocabulary of abuse is amusing and inexhaustible. See how prodigal Shakspeare and Ben Jonson are in the language of vituperation. But they were all defiant and fierce, for the age was rough and earnest. The ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... Southern States that meant government by Negroes—or what was even worse, government by a combination of Negroes and the most vicious white elements, including that which was native to the soil and that which had imported itself from the North for this particular purpose. Thus the political vocabulary of Page's formative years consisted chiefly of such words as "scalawag," "carpet bagger," "regulator," "Union League," "Ku Klux Klan," and the like. The resulting confusion, political, social, and economic, did not completely amount to the destruction ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... Belle could not feel assured that the man who proposed to conjugate the verb "to love" in Armenian, was master of his intentions in plain English. It was even so. The man of tongues lacked speech wherewith to make manifest his passion; the vocabulary of the word- master was insufficient to convince the workhouse girl of one of the plainest meanings a man can well have. From the banter of the man of learning the queen of the dingle sought refuge in a precipitate flight. Almost simultaneously the word-master, albeit with ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... demonstration of affection—he growled at Tarzan as he growled at the other bulls who came too close while he was feeding—but he would have died for Tarzan. He knew it and Tarzan knew it; but of such things apes do not speak—their vocabulary, for the finer instincts, consisting more of actions than words. But now Taug was worried, and he fell asleep again still thinking of the strange words of ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... much we have been delayed by the want of money, not to speak of the wetness of the weather: it is impossible." "Impossible!" rejoined Cropper; "I wish I could get Napoleon to thee—he would tell thee there is no such word as 'impossible' in the vocabulary." "Tush!" exclaimed Stephenson, with warmth; "don't speak to me about Napoleon! Give me men, money, and materials, and I will do what Napoleon couldn't do—drive a railway from Liverpool to ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... lord-knew-what zealous chemical upon it he had let it lie unused while he picked up Kiswahili and talked by the hour to a toothless, wrinkled very black man with a touch of Arab in his breeding, and a deal of it in his brimstone vocabulary. ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... subject, to another man, the King, and not the service of an anonymous person, the functionary, to an abstraction, the State, the republic, this was formerly designated by the word faithful, (feal,) which has disappeared from our vocabulary because it is without meaning in our present ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... circumstances, have been excused for experiencing impatience at having so wild a tale foisted in brief confusion upon his credulity; in the mood of his present circumstance the elder Trenholme refolded the letter, using within himself the strongest language in his vocabulary. ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... The vocabulary of the automobile has produced an entirely new "jargon," which is Greek to the multitude, but, oh, so expressive and full of ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... with red thrilling tumult on the crowded plain. One came into the ranks of the regiment, and after the smoke and the wrath of it had faded, leaving motionless figures, everyone stormed according to the limits of his vocabulary, for veterans detest being killed when ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... man may see a fight and be able to describe it truthfully, yet he may be unable to describe it dramatically. He must have the impressibility of the poetical nature to take in all its scenes, and the vocabulary of an artist to reproduce them. But, for some reason or other, poets are not very often found under fire, unless it be that of the critics. The temperament which makes men insensible to danger is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... second Sanskrit reader at one bound, leaving me to learn the declensions as we went on. The advance I had made in Bengali[27] stood me in good stead. My father also encouraged me to try Sanskrit composition from the very outset. With the vocabulary acquired from my Sanskrit reader I built up grandiose compound words with a profuse sprinkling of sonorous 'm's and 'n's making altogether a most diabolical medley of the language of the gods. But my father never scoffed ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... bushes, with fires of wet wood, and small and poor rations. Clouds were lowering and a chilly wind fretted the forests of the Blue Ridge. Around one of the dismal, smoky fires an especially dejected mess found a spokesman with a vocabulary rich in comminations. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... language exists, as a magazine of established meanings, there will be found a repertoire of epithets of praise and blame, at once results and implements of this social process. The simple existence of such a vocabulary acts as a persistent force; but the effect of current ideals is redoubled when a coherent agency, such as public religion, assumes protection of the most searching social maxims and lends to them the weight of all time, all space, all wonder, and all fear. For many centuries religion held within ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... a mental note of the fact that this child seemed to have but two adjectives in her vocabulary. "Peggy will see to that!" she said to herself. "Peggy has improved so wonderfully in her English this last year. She will be quicker than I to notice and ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... have exhausted my small stock of legal words, and must go on in my own language instead of in the lawyer's. The end of the thing was simply this. All the money went back to Mr. Noel Vanstone's estate (another legal word! my vocabulary is richer than I thought), for one plain reason—that it had not been employed as Mr. Noel Vanstone directed. If Mrs. Girdlestone had lived, or if George had married me a few months earlier, results would have been just the other ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... him, then to come round on our side about five or six feet from the ground, just safely out of reach, and there, hanging head downwards, call us every name he could think of. Squirrels have an awful vocabulary, but I never knew one that could talk like Blacky. And every time he thought of something new to say he waved his tail at us in a way that was particularly aggravating. You have no idea how other animals poke ...
— Bear Brownie - The Life of a Bear • H. P. Robinson
... the old days exhausted his vocabulary in praise of the Luneta, the old Spanish city's pleasure ground, which overlooked the bay and Corregidor Island. It was an oval drive, with a bandstand at each end, inclosing a pretty grass plot. Here, as evening came on, all Manila congregated ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... them, had no precedent, and no vocabulary. They had come across death raw and real, uncooked by religion, undeodorised by the sayings of ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... their friendship was, however, very brief. Before many weeks had passed there was no vituperative epithet that Leicester was not in the daily habit of bestowing upon Paul. The Earl's vocabulary of abuse was not a limited one, but he exhausted it on the head of the Advocate. He lacked at last words and breath to utter what was like him. He pronounced his former friend "a very dangerous man, altogether hated of the people ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to designate parts of Gothic architecture, may, perhaps, prove acceptable to some of your readers. Having felt the need of such assistance in the course of my own reading, &c. &c.—I extracted them from an expensive work on the subject, and have only to lament that my vocabulary ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 404, December 12, 1829 • Various
... plentiful meal, after he had fasted for twenty-four hours, and when he and his followers were fainting with fatigue and want, had now the impudence and cruelty to call her by the grossest names in the vocabulary of bilingsgate. Mrs. Bradley! one of the most humane, gentle and affectionate of her sex, who would willingly have offered him bread in his true character. Tarleton even denied her admittance with her supplies to her husband; and she ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... word immortality—Unsterblichkeit—does not occur in the original; nor would it, in its usual application, find a place in Schopenhauer's vocabulary. The word he uses is Unzerstoerbarkeit—indestructibility. But I have preferred immortality, because that word is commonly associated with the subject touched upon in this little debate. If any critic doubts the wisdom of this preference, let me ask him to try his hand at ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... lyrics, she had decided to begin with German. Thyrsis had wasted a great deal of time with German courses in college, and so he was able to tell her everything not to do. He got her a little primer of grammar, just enough to make clear the language-structure; and then he set her to acquiring a vocabulary. He had little books full of words that he had prepared for himself, and these she drilled into her brain, all day and nearly all night. She stopped for nothing but to eat—in the woods when the weather was fair and in her ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... tickets at once, else you became unwelcome. Guests here had foibles at times, and a rapid exit was too easy. Therefore I bought a ticket. It was spring and summer since I had heard anything like the colonel. The Missouri had not yet flowed into New York dialect freely, and his vocabulary met me like the breeze of the plains. So I went in to be fanned by it, and there sat the Virginian at a ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... thinks it becoming to pour forth against the party to which he owes every political privilege that he enjoys. He need not fear that any member of that party will be provoked into a conflict of scurrility. Use makes even sensitive minds callous to invective: and, copious as his vocabulary is, he will not easily find in it any foul name which has not been many times applied to those who sit around me, on account of the zeal and steadiness with which they supported the emancipation of the Roman Catholics. His reproaches are not more stinging ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of the Latine Tongue, by a method of Vocabulary and Grammar; the former comprising the Primitives, whether Noun or Verb, ranked in their several Cases; the latter teaching the forms of Declension and Conjugation, with all possible plainness: To which is added the Hermonicon, viz. A Table of those Latin words, ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... to this point in his "Thoughts on Religion," and regrets that the explanation of matters of doctrine, which St. Paul expressed in the current eastern vocabulary, should have been perpetuated in terms founded on the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... Talmudic commentaries contain 3157 laazim, of which 967 occur in the Biblical commentaries and 2190 in the Talmudic, forming in the two commentaries together a vocabulary of about two thousand different words. In the Biblical commentaries, concerned, as a rule, not so much with the explanation of the meaning of a word as with its grammatical form, the laazim reproduce the person, tense, or gender of the Hebrew word; in the Talmudic commentaries, where the difficulty ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... tribes or families now inhabiting Midian represent the ancient Midianites; and all speak the vulgar half-Fellah Arabic, without any difference of accent or vocabulary ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... intelligence directed it, or at least was associated with it. The noises, whereof I have spoken, were repeated a determinate number of times. They became either strong or feeble, at my request, and came from different places. By a vocabulary of signals previously agreed upon, the power answered questions, and gave messages with more ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... William Hare, the body-snatchers and murderers of Edinburgh, who killed persons to sell their corpses to Knox's school of anatomy. Burke was hanged a week later than this letter, on January 28. Hare turned King's evidence and disappeared. A "shot" was a subject in these men's vocabulary. The author of the Waverley novels—the Great Unknown— had, of course, become known ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... only for their size and continuity of numbers; but that last one should be framed and hung upon the wall at the foot of your bed, though you would not see it often. I consider it a diploma of your qualification as Master Jackanapes." (Dad's vocabulary, when he is angry, contains some rather strengthy words of ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... older friend of mine, his excellent father, terms it, the three times eleven—by the way, not a bad paraphrase, and worthy of a retired school-master like myself. It is turning the multiplication table into a vocabulary and making it perform ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... from one to another. By words we share the common consciousness of the race, which has shaped itself in these symbols. By music we reach those special states of consciousness which, being without form, cannot be shaped with the mosaics of the vocabulary. The language of the eyes runs deeper into the personal nature, but it is purely individual, and perishes ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Monsieur de Rochefide, like all little minds, was terribly afraid of being carotte. The noun has become a verb. From the very start of his passion for Madame Schontz, Arthur was on his guard, and he was, therefore, very rat, to use another word of the same vocabulary. The word rat, when applied to a young girl, means the guest or the one entertained, but applied to a man it signifies the giver of the feast ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Browning sweep the soul upward to spiritual heights, and answer some of the deepest questionings of the soul of man. And hence literature is no longer merely a thing of vocabulary, of phrase, of rhythm, of assonance, of alliteration, or of metrical and philosophical form. It is a revelation of the progress of the soul, of its standards, of its triumphs, its defeats, and its desires. It is the unfolding of one's intellectual helplessness ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... as well be dropped out of your vocabulary. They are words that you have no use for. Replace them by two others—habit and character. Slave as you are of habit, of the character you have woven for yourself out of years of deliberate living—what wild unreason to imagine that love can unmake, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with bulging eyes and clawing fingers muttering incoherently. Sorez could do nothing but administer a small injection of the soothing drug, but this brought instant relief and with it a few moments of sanity. The doctor had picked up a small vocabulary and gathered from what the dying man muttered that he, Sorez, a very much bruised and weary mortal, was being mistaken for one from heaven. A smile lighted the haggard face of the invalid and the bony hands came together in prayer. The girl ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... mornings were spent in giving the thrush an outing and in cleaning his cage. Neither my father nor mother made any pretensions to religion; but they were strict Sabbatarians. My father never consciously swore, but, within even the limitations of his small vocabulary, he was unfortunate in his selection of phrases. I bounced into the alley one Sunday morning, whistling a Moody and ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... because the hope of freedom to the slaves lies chiefly in the dispositions of his master. The abolitionist indeed proposed to convert the slaveholders; and for this end he approached them with vituperation, and exhausted on them the vocabulary of abuse! And he has reaped as he sowed." ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... out into passionate prayer to him not to leave her, then, seeing he was still unmoved, she began to call him every tender name her limited vocabulary contained, though there was little enough need to do that, her ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... translator says, "un Wynkyn de Worde non coupe:" Qu. Would not the Debure Vocabulary have said ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... herself with such natural insight that the experts to whom these translations have been submitted found hardly a word to change. 'After all,' as she herself wrote, 'ballads are simple things, and require, as a rule, but a limited vocabulary, though ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... burst into explosive speech. Those beasts had got hold of Caesar. The Caterpillar stared; he had never heard John let himself go. John's vocabulary ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... who said that speech had been given to man in order to enable him to disguise his thoughts? Indian politicians are no Talleyrands, but they sometimes seem to have framed their vocabulary on purpose to disguise political conceptions which most of them for various reasons shrink from defining at present with decision. We have already seen how elastic is the word Swaraj, self-government, or rather self-rule. In the mouth of the "moderates" of the Indian National Congress it means, ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... yet another caveat. I did not, of course, as a child, use or even know of the vocabulary of the metaphysicians. I did, however, entertain thoughts which I could not then express, but which the words given above most nearly represent. There is one exception. In talking about "a naked soul" I am not interpreting my childish thrill of deep emotion into a later ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... the same grace, the same lightness of elastic strength. Froude, like Newman, can pass from racy, colloquial vernacular, the talk of educated men who understand each other, to heights of genuine eloquence, where the resources of our grand old English tongue are drawn out to the full. His vocabulary was large and various. He was familiar with every device of rhetoric. He could play with every pipe in the language, and sound what stop he pleased. Oxford men used to talk very much in those days, and have talked more or less ever since, about the Oriel style. Perhaps the ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... his mark upon Hull. Mr. Grosart, who lacked nothing but the curb upon a too exuberant vocabulary, a little less enthusiasm and a great deal more discretion, to be a model editor, tells us in his invaluable edition of The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Andrew Marvell, M.P.,[8:1] that he had read a number of the elder Marvell's manuscripts, consisting ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest. Containing the Unaltered Text of the original issue; some suppressed Episodes printed only in the editions issued by Mr. Murray; MS. Variorum, Vocabulary, and Notes by Professor W. ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... and then on discovering the absence of the portmanteau he would launch out into the most vehement denunciation of the carelessness and depravity of the railroad officials, heaping objurgations upon them, their fathers, and their grandfathers. Then after he had exhausted his vocabulary of invective and eased his soul, the humor of the situation would appeal to him and he would begin to laugh, quietly at first, and then in louder and louder strains until his merriment seemed more formidable ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... characters; and Mr. Gayarre has, to a considerable extent, succeeded in this difficult and delicate task. The work evinces a mind full of the subject; and if defective at all, the defect is rather in style than matter. The author evidently had two temptations to hasty composition—a copious vocabulary and complete familiarity with his subject. There is an occasional impetuosity and recklessness in his manner, and a general habit of tossing off his sentences with an air of disdainful indifference, which characterizes a large class ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... scoop the opposition press. I will get a night's sleep if I can, and to-morrow, I know, I shall capitulate. I will hunt out General O'Neill, and interview him on the field of slaughter. I will telegraph pages. I will refurbish my military vocabulary, and speak of deploying and massing and throwing out advance guards, and that sort of thing. I will move detachments and advance brigades, and invent strategy. We will have desperate fighting in the columns of the ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... spot that could be made by any means to answer the purpose was the abode of some spectre or group of spectres. So dexterous was the invention of those who worked upon my apprehensions, that they managed to transform a real into a fictitious being. His name was Palethorp; and Palethorp, in my vocabulary, was synonymous with hobgoblin. The origin of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... condition. His clothes were in rags, and his gold-lace gone. It appeared that "Jim Crow" had outraged his sense of African character so greatly that he could not restrain his passion; but vented it in the choicest billingsgate with which his vocabulary had been furnished in the forecastle of the "Gil Blas." His criticism of the real Jim was by no means agreeable to the patrons of the fictitious one. In a moment there was a row; and the result was, that Lunes after a thorough dilapidation of his finery departed in custody of the police, more, ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... workshop and stripped the weapon, calling each part by name until he found, in a slovenly fitted ejector, reason and excuse for exercising his limitless vocabulary upon that faithless part. He also said many things about the ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... words by any means have the same value. Children in the third year of school who are reading Whittier's Barefoot Boy ought to be able to recognize and spell the word robin; perhaps, also, woodchuck and tortoise; but eschewing is not a part of their vocabulary and will not soon be, and probably the less said about that word by the teacher ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... the knife becomes itself a pigment, as on the hone. Modern science has much enlarged the colour list. There is thus the greater temptation offered to make endless varieties. It has been remarked in language, that the best writers have the most brief vocabulary—so it may be, that the best colourists will have the fewest colours. The rule has been verified in the old masters of the best time. Cennino Cennini, who always begins from the beginning, recommends drawing with the pen—his pen, for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... of logic and of science. If it be granted that a concept used in a scientific sense by a given writer is expressed with a definite term, it is natural that other words formed by that writer as used to signify the same concept, or incidentally made use of by him, become, in respect to the vocabulary fixed upon by him as true, metaphors, synecdoches, synonyms, elliptic forms, and the like. We, too, in the course of this treatise, have several times made use of, and intend again to make use of such terms, in order to make clear the sense of the words we employ, or ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... misunderstanding?" He laughed mirthlessly. "Women have their own vocabulary. Listen, my good sir. There is infamy between us. When a wife betrays a man like me—kind, indulgent, trustful, who has worshipped the ground she treads on—it is not a question of misunderstanding. It is infamy. If she had anywhere to lay her head, I would turn her out of doors ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... all the sublime and beautiful I had a happy mixture of the comic, for we had a Welsh postillion who entertained us much by his contracted vocabulary, and still more contracted sphere of ideas. He and my father could never understand one another, because my father said "quarry," and the Welshman said "querry"; and the burthen of all he said was continually asking if we would not like ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... She was more than gracious to him. "It's a wonder to me, Peter, you never thought of writing. You have such a beautiful vocabulary." But even that did not daunt him, for he knew as soon as he had looked on her again, that loving Eunice Goodward was enough of ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... Taine found as inflexible and inert as a pudding-mold is now seen to be charged with life and movement, vibrant with light and shadow and color. More particularly, Wimsatt has shown how intimately connected is the vocabulary of The Rambler with Johnson's reading for the Dictionary, and how, having mastered the words of the experimental scientists of the previous century, Johnson proceeded to put them to original uses, generating with them new stylistic overtones in contexts now humorously precise, now philosophically ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... bad as a thankless child, and that is a thankless parent—an irate, irascible parent who possesses an underground vocabulary and ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... beyond me to say what he is. A good man at the ropes, but a da—a Dutchman for company. 'Twixt he and the bog-trotters we shipped at Cork Harbour 't was the dev—'t was the scuttiest lot I ever took aboard ship." The rum was getting into the captain's tongue, and making his usual vocabulary ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... charitable disposition that we make the acquaintance of two weird sisters, who live not far from us in Calle Falier, and whom we know to this day merely as the Creatures— creatura being in the vocabulary of Venetian pity the term for a fellow-being somewhat more pitiable than a poveretta. Our Creatures are both well stricken in years, and one of them has some incurable disorder which frequently confines ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... at General Soult's, he observed the countenances of his soldiers rather inclined to laughter than to wrath; and he heard some jests, significant enough in the vocabulary of encampments, and which informed him that contempt was not the sentiment with which your navy had inspired his troops. The occurrences of these two days hastened his departure from the coast for Aix-la-Chapelle, where the cringing of his courtiers consoled ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... numbers and strengthen their hands. Orangeism, which had at first only been known in Ireland, began to spread widely throughout Great Britain. Orange Lodges were everywhere formed; Orange Grand Masters were appointed; a whole vocabulary of Orange titles, passwords, and phrases was invented; a complete hierarchy of Orange officialism was created, and an invisible network of Orangeism held the members of the organization together. The Orange conspiracy, if {276} we may call it so, had been ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of from one to three millions of dollars. It was the first crime of "rehypothecation." It was not a Wall Street theft; it was a new use for an almost unknown word in Noah Webster's dictionary. It was a new word in the rogue's vocabulary. It was one of the first attempts made, in my knowledge, to soften the aspect of crime by baptising it in that way. Crime in this country will always be excused in proportion to how great it is. But even in the face of Wall Street tricksters there were signs ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... there is but one. I will agree that yours is more entertaining. Jannie was jealous again. The Roman orgies, the young person from the grands boulevards, were more than she could accept; and she tried, in the vocabulary lately so prevalent, a reprisal. But I must acknowledge that I am surprised at the persistent ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... ashamed of the term 'shell-shock.' It was a bad word, and should be wiped out of the vocabulary of every scientific man. It was really molecular abnormality of the nervous system, characterised by abnormal reactions to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... rational nature the name [Greek: hupostasis] while we through want of appropriate words have kept a borrowed term, calling that persona which they call [Greek: hupostasis]; but Greece with its richer vocabulary gives the name [Greek: hupostasis] to the individual subsistence. And, if I may use Greek in dealing with matters which were first mooted by Greeks before they came to be interpreted in Latin: [Greek: hai ousiai en men tois katholou einai dunantai. ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... they gathered about her, kissed her hand and clasped her little ones in their arms, fondling them and calling them by every endearing name known to the negro vocabulary. ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... English Pronunciation and Spelling: containing a Full Alphabetical Vocabulary of the Language, with a Preliminary Exposition of English Orthoepy and Orthography; and designed as a Work of Reference for General Use, and as a Text-Book in Schools. By Richard Soule, Jr., A.M., and William A. Wheeler, A.M. Boston. Soule & ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... discoveries arose all those discordant cries of "extortion," "rebate," "competition," "long haul and short haul," "regulation," and "government ownership," which have given railroad literature a vocabulary all its own and have written new chapters in the science of economics. The storm center of all this agitation concerned primarily one thing—the amount which the railroad might fairly charge for transporting passengers and freight. The battle of the people ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... the naturalists of to-day.—The study of animals, plants, rocks, and of natural objects generally, was formerly called "natural history"; but this term is tending to disappear from our vocabulary and to give place to the term "natural sciences." What is the reason of this change, and to what does it correspond? for it is rare for a word to be modified in so short a time if the thing designated ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... prairie were evolved naturally enough, and came thus early to be applied in France to that portion of the pleasure garden set out as a grassy lawn. The word is very ancient, and has come down to us through the monkish vocabulary ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... friend of ours who had been held up beyond Crawley for a "technical offence." Nothing was said against a drunken drayman who backed his wagon up against our friend's mudguard ten miles back, and smashed it beyond repair. Justice, thy name is not in the vocabulary of the English policeman sent out by his sergeant to keep ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... balance, and Mr. May and Janey—one philosophical, wise and mistaken; the other sharp-sighted and seeing everything—as spectators, was very pleasant to the close little coterie themselves, and nobody else got within the charmed circle. They grew more and more intimate daily, and had a whole vocabulary of domestic jokes and allusions which no one else could understand. It must be allowed, however, that the outside world was not pleased with this arrangement on either side of the question. The Church people were shocked with the Mays ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... country, I induced the oxen to move with alacrity, and the wagon and contents were speedily carried to the summit. The whole trouble was at once revealed: the oxen had been broken and trained by a man who, when they were in a pinch, had encouraged them by his frontier vocabulary, and they could not realize what was expected of them under extraordinary conditions until they heard familiar and possibly profanely urgent phrases. I took the wagon to its destination, but as it was not brought back, even in all the time I was stationed ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... 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 ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... where the men were at haycart. The cart-horses wore glittering brazen ornaments, crescent-shaped, in front of the neck, and one upon the forehead. Have these ornaments a history?[2] The carters and ploughmen have an old-world vocabulary of their own, saying 'toward' for anything near or leaning towards you, and 'vrammards' for the reverse. 'Heeld' or 'yeeld,' again, is ploughman's language; when the newly sown corn does not 'heeld' or 'yeeld' it requires the harrow. ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... utechire we find the Tamanac verb to go, uteri, of which ute is also the radical, and ri the termination of the Infinitive. In order to show that in Chayma chere or ere indicates the adverb also, I shall cite from the fragment of a vocabulary in my possession, u-chere, I also; nacaramayre, he said so also; guarzazere, I carried also; charechere, to carry also. In the Tamanac, as in the Chayma, chareri signifies to carry.) Among the Caribbees, whose ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... has since time immemorial been an established part of the synagogue service, thus educating the people to know their law, the very phrases of which by constant reference and repetition became part of their daily vocabulary. The origin of this custom of reading the law in the synagogue may probably be found in the Biblical references to the great convocations when King and scribe read the ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... last night to enquire after Ann Eliza's foot, and you ought to have seen Peterkin when I told him the news. At first he could not find any word in his vocabulary big enough to swear by, but after a little one came to him, and what ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... was a jolly Irish mule-skinner with a picturesque vocabulary and an inimitable brogue. The second wore the black suit and low-crowned hat of a clergyman, and yellow goggles to protect his eyes from the sun. He carried a roll of Scriptural charts such as are used in Sunday-Schools. ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... habit,—I said to our company a day or two afterwards,—worse than that of punning. It is the gradual substitution of cant or flash terms for words which truly characterize their objects. I have known several very genteel idiots whose whole vocabulary had deliquesced into some half dozen expressions. All things fell into one of two great categories,—fast or slow. Man's chief end was to be a brick. When the great calamities of life overtook their friends, these last were spoken ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... showed one of the most striking of his traits. It was a method of speech that was little short of extraordinary. It grew out of the fact that his vocabulary could not express his enormous imagination. Instead of words he made motions. It was, as Augustus Thomas expressed it, "an exalted pantomime." Those who worked with him interpreted these gestures, for between him and his stars existed the ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... grouses. If you hit him, he grouses; if you pat his neck gently, he grouses; if you offer him something to eat, he grouses; and if you twist his tail, he makes the same extraordinary noise. The camel evidently has not a large vocabulary, and he is compelled to express all his various sensations in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... "that's where I belong. I don't," she continued hesitatingly, in her child's manner of explaining herself from her inadequate vocabulary, "I guess I don't think about them things much, not same as men-folks think. But there's one or two things I've got to look out for." Here she gave that quick significant glance at the little mound on the couch. "An' there ain't no way ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... keeper, with a very limited vocabulary of articulate sounds, serves almost alone to guide the elephant in his domestic occupations.[1] Sir EVERARD HOME, from an examination of the muscular fibres in the drum of an elephant's ear, came to the conclusion, that notwithstanding the distinctness and power ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... of Perry's calibre made the contrast between school and office wider. He recalled examination-days when he had sat before a long paper with a feeling of power and security. His pen could not travel fast enough, so familiar was he with French and Latin vocabulary and construction, Ancient History, Modern Literature, English Grammar, and other subjects. But here in the bank he stumbled over a sight draft for $4.17 drawn by a grocery firm and accepted by ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... knew that no single word he had used against them, out of a vocabulary both extensive and horrible, was to them so degraded as that single one ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... made of prefixes and suffixes, every one of which has a clear, fixed meaning. Great economy of vocabulary is thus effected, one root-word in Esperanto sufficing, when modified by suitable affixes, to translate many English words. Many of the affixes are often met with as single words. In such cases the English translation ...
— Esperanto Self-Taught with Phonetic Pronunciation • William W. Mann
... to as the methods of attack and defence in the chase and on the war path. By some, not strange, personal argument, he concluded to appropriate the six valuable horses above mentioned, in the law wordy vocabulary of civilization, "to his own, use, benefit and behoof, without asking the consent, good-will, approbation, permission and personal, directions of the said owner, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... just a suspicion of satire, of humor, of possible malice in the answer, yet every one familiar with the traditions and the vocabulary—the nomenclature—of the old army of the old days, knew well the sergeant was well within his rights. Respect and regret intermingled were in tone and word as in his answer, all unwittingly, Malloy furnished the missing motive for ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... talk with an ambitious reporter unless you have a baseball mask over the face and a mosquito netting over the vocabulary; because if you only say to him, "How's the health?" you will find in the morning paper a column interview, in which you have decided to run for Mikado on the ...
— Get Next! • Hugh McHugh
... author, whoever he may have been, was not an eye witness of the events in the Life of Christ. Some of the best authorities hold that he was a Gentile (non-Hebrew), probably a Greek, for his Greek literary style is far above the average, his vocabulary being very rich and his diction admirable. It is also generally believed that the same hand wrote the Book of Acts. Tradition holds that the author was one Luke, a Christian convert after the death of Jesus, who was one of Paul's missionary ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... which was to serve for their food on shore, the other had a skin of water upon his shoulder; they were both half naked, and both approaching to seventy years of age. One of them was deaf, but so intelligent that it was easy to talk with him by signs; he had established a vocabulary of gestures with his companion, who had been his fishing partner for ten years, and who was one of the shrewdest and hardiest Bedouins I had ever seen; in his younger days he had been a ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... your vocabulary all warmed up," observed Little Joe, so-called because of two hundred pounds of iron-hard sinew and muscle. Slim was wandering towards the door to execute his mission, but he kept his head cocked towards his prostrated friend to learn as much as possible before he left. "Which ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... a scrubwoman who had fallen down a flight of back stairs and wanted to make the landlord pay for her broken head with a grace truly Chesterfieldian. This was all very fine until he had taken a drop too much, when his vocabulary would swell to such dimensions that the confused and embarrassed client would flee in self-protection unless fortunate enough to be rescued by Gottlieb or myself. Poor Kelly! He was a fine old type. And many a client ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... restraining the different sounds, and always representing the same simple ones by the same character; and this is no less necessary in the English than any other language, as this variety of powers is very frequent, and without being taken notice of in the following Vocabulary, might render it entirely unintelligible. As the vowels are the regulations of all sounds, it is these only that need be noticed, and the powers allotted to each of these in ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... my teacher told me about a new thing I asked very few questions. My ideas were vague, and my vocabulary was inadequate; but as my knowledge of things grew, and I learned more and more words, my field of inquiry broadened, and I would return again and again to the same subject, eager for further information. Sometimes a new word revived an ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... conceived of, we had words derived from similar combinations of Anglo-Saxon or German Roots; if, for instance, for Protoxide of Nitrogen, we had the First-sour-stuffness, or the First-sharp-thingness of Salt-petreness, and so throughout the immense vocabulary of chemistry, what an essentially different aspect would the whole English Language now wear! Had Lavoisier, therefore, chosen the Anglo-Saxon or the German as the basis of the chemical nomenclature now in use, we can readily perceive how the intellectual device of a single savant, would, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... over it for your vocabulary. See that you use no word in a different meaning than it was used 100 years ago and will be used 100 years hence. You wish to use only the permanent words—words, too, that will be understood to carry the same meaning to English readers in every part of ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... in the last years of his life, the poem found him with his vocabulary fully developed and his versification perfected; and these are points eminently essential in narrative verse. When Dryden began his literary career, he had but just left the university, and his speech smacked somewhat of the pedantry of the ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, embodying a critical view which caused considerable stir in the English theological world; he also wrote St Thomas of Canterbury, his Death and Miracles (1898), Johannine Vocabulary (1905), Johannine ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... word in any of them. Where on earth did he dig up his fearful vocabulary? Yet it is the plain duty of both of us to read these articles: you as one of his employers, I as the shrewd landlady's agent who keeps a watchful eye upon the earning ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Latine Tongue, by a method of Vocabulary and Grammar; the former comprising the Primitives, whether Noun or Verb, ranked in their several Cases; the latter teaching the forms of Declension and Conjugation, with all possible plainness: To which is added the Hermonicon, viz. A Table of those Latin words, which their sound and signification ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... stranger would detect nothing to excite suspicion. An extreme curiosity, says Horace Walpole,[2232] or a great familiarity with things, is necessary to detect the slightest intimacy between the two sexes. No familiarity is allowed except under the guise of friendship, while the vocabulary of love is as much prohibited as its rites apparently are. Even with Crebillon fils, even with Laclos, at the most exciting moments, the terms their characters employ are circumspect and irreproachable. Whatever indecency there may be, it ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... for the moment I am baffled. She refused flatly last night to go out of mourning, and I was really thankful for it after reflection; we can at least keep her in the background now, until I have succeeded in eliminating some of those frightful gambling expressions from her vocabulary. She seems to have been passionately fond of the impossible person who brought her up. I shudder to think of the impression she would make now on our circle of friends. She doesn't seem in the least ashamed of her past environment, ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... company, a joint stock association, in which, for a certain premium paid, an equivalent may be demanded. No Mason, or no lodge, is bound to give pecuniary or other aid to a Brother, unless he really needs. The word " benefit," as usually used in the modern friendly societies, has no place in the vocabulary of Freemasonry. If a wealthy Brother is afflicted with sorrow or sickness, we are to strive to comfort him with our sympathy, our kindness, and our attention, but we are to bestow our eleemosynary aid only on the ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... thirty-two words used only in this Epistle, but there are also eighteen which are found in Pauline Epistles and not elsewhere in the New Testament. The assumption of some sceptical writers that an apostle must have been too unintelligent to enrich his vocabulary, scarcely deserves serious examination. No one would think of applying the same rule to a Greek classical writer, and if he attempted to do so, he would find that Xenophon varies his language as much ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... not a particularly evil rascal, and women found him charming. Possessed of a merry face, a horsey manner and a vocabulary which would have delighted a maker of slang dictionaries, he pushed his my everywhere, not hoping for something to turn up, but determined that his own cleverness should contrive that desirable arrival. When he met Anna Gessner at Ascot a year ago, the propitious moment seemed at hand. "The girl ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... Zanzibar), many local languages note: Kiswahili (Swahili) is the mother tongue of Bantu people living in Zanzibar and nearby coastal Tanzania; although Kiswahili is Bantu in structure and origin, its vocabulary draws on a variety of sources, including Arabic and English, and it has become the lingua franca of central and eastern Africa; the first language of most people is one ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... pour forth against the party to which he owes every political privilege that he enjoys. He need not fear that any member of that party will be provoked into a conflict of scurrility. Use makes even sensitive minds callous to invective: and, copious as his vocabulary is, he will not easily find in it any foul name which has not been many times applied to those who sit around me, on account of the zeal and steadiness with which they supported the emancipation of the Roman Catholics. His reproaches are not more stinging than the reproaches which, in times ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... fly for help. Of all the kings, Ashurnasirbal seems to have been especially devoted to the service of Nin-ib. The annals of this king, instead of beginning, as is customary, with an invocation of all or many of the gods, starts out with an address to Nin-ib, in which the king fairly exhausts the vocabulary of the language in his desire to secure the favor of this powerful deity. Almost all the attributes he assigns to him have reference to the god's powers in war. Dwelling in the capital Calah, he is 'the strong, the mighty, the supreme one,' the perfect hero, who is invincible ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... schedule, calendar, docket. [computer-generated list] listing, printout, output. [written list used as an aid to memory] checklist. table, chart, database; index, inverted file, word list, concordance. dictionary, lexicon; vocabulary, glossary; thesaurus. file, card index, card file, rolodex, address book. Red book, Blue book, Domesday book; cadastre[Fr]; directory, gazetter[obs3]. almanac; army list, clergy list, civil service list, navy list; Almanach de Gotha[obs3], cadaster; Lloyd's register, nautical almanac; who's who; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... adventurous otter in search of a variation of diet were viewed in their proper light. Amanda's normally placid temperament reasserted itself. Even a hurricane of shouted curses, coming from her husband's dressing-room, in her husband's voice, but hardly in his usual vocabulary, failed to disturb her serenity as she made a leisurely toilet one evening ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... protection of the restraining rules and the humanizing usages of civilized warfare? [Cheers.] We think we cannot. [Cheers.] The enemy, borrowing what I may, perhaps, for this purpose call a neutral flag from the vocabulary of diplomacy, describe these newly adopted measures by a grotesque and puerile perversion of language as a "blockade." [Laughter.] What is a blockade? A blockade consists in sealing up the war ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... names of the tenses of the Spanish verb used in this Vocabulary are in accordance with the recommendations of the Joint Committee on Grammatical Nomenclature. Past Absolute and Past Descriptive are equivalent to the Preterit ...
— A First Spanish Reader • Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy
... voices of Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Browning sweep the soul upward to spiritual heights, and answer some of the deepest questionings of the soul of man. And hence literature is no longer merely a thing of vocabulary, of phrase, of rhythm, of assonance, of alliteration, or of metrical and philosophical form. It is a revelation of the progress of the soul, of its standards, of its triumphs, its defeats, and its desires. It is the unfolding of one's intellectual helplessness before the unmoved, calm passing ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... been so long meditated, the approaches to its final consummation have been so steadily made, and the schemes of the principal traitors have been so well planned and carefully matured, that they have almost succeeded in making the vocabulary of treason a part of the vernacular of the country. We all talk of the States which have seceded or are going to secede,—of a fratricidal war,—of the measures which this or the other State is determined or likely to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... events in the history of the English language, as of the English people, are the Saxon and the Norman conquests. To the former it owes its grammatical frame-work, or skeleton; to the latter much of its vocabulary, or the flesh that fills out ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... boy! Ask him what questions I might, the resources of his vocabulary remained invariably the same. Still this youthful Oracle answered always ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... clever workman will do with very modest tools, or again how far a thrifty housewife will make a very small sum of money go, or again in like manner how many ideas an intelligent brute can receive and convey with its very limited vocabulary; but no one will pretend that a dog's intelligence can ever reach the level of a man's. What we do maintain is that, within its own limited range, it is of the same essential character as our own, and that though a dog's ideas in respect of ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... that inexhaustible fund, not merely of words, but of the right words. Orators and writers there are a many who never fail to find a word, and a good word, for the rounding of their sentences. But Shakespeare's words are not merely good words; they are the best words. Even the bare vocabulary of Burke or Macaulay would seem second-rate beside the vocabulary of Shakespeare. It is a commonplace to dilate upon the fact that Shakespeare has used 15,000 words, while Milton, our poet of widest reading and erudition, has but 8,000. I do not attach so much ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... a larger edition of his songs. For a half century Scotland kept him to herself, [Footnote: Up to 1850 Burns was rarely mentioned in treatises on English literature. One reason for his late recognition was that the Lowland vocabulary employed in most of his poems was only half intelligible to the ordinary English reader] then his work went wide in the world, to be read again by plain men and women, by sailors on the sea, by ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... assembled in the neatly furnished parlour. Frank wrote his letters of advice to his fruit merchants. Then he took a German book, "Hauff's stories," and proceeded to read the diverting history of "Little Mudj," making frequent use of the vocabulary. ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... be one Thomas Metford. He owned half a dozen teams and was engaged in the cartage business, specializing on coal. He was a man of big frame, big head, and a vocabulary appropriate to the purposes to which he applied it. Among his other possessions were a wife, numerous children, and a house and barn, in which he boarded his beasts of burden, including in the term his horses, his men, ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... of thing comes easy to me; and would have been quite true, as far as it went. Then I went back to him, and fearing that after all I might be addressing but the parrot which had already exhausted its vocabulary, I tried it on him: "Shall I take my boots off here, father, or may I sit ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... in their common language the pleasures of their companionship grew correspondingly, for now they could converse and aided by the mental powers of their human heritage they amplified the restricted vocabulary of the apes until talking was transformed from a task into an enjoyable pastime. When Korak hunted, Meriem usually accompanied him, for she had learned the fine art of silence, when silence was desirable. She could pass through the branches of ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... In the Travels of Francis Moore the reader will find a pretty copious vocabulary of the Mandingo language, which in general ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... the words of the reading lessons are taught. Such phonograms as "ound" from "found", "un" from "run", "ight" from "bright", "est" from "nest", "ark" from "lark", etc., may be taught as soon as these sight words are made a part of the child's reading vocabulary. ...
— How to Teach Phonics • Lida M. Williams
... person, and your fate is forever sealed if you refuse to listen!" wailed the babu. "The blood of your men lies in street calling aloud for vengeance!" A university education works wonders for babu vocabulary. "I tell you it is a riot, and ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... He would talk nothing but French, protesting that he had almost forgotten his native tongue, and his French was the language of Larchey's Dictionary of Argot, in which nothing is called by its right name. Mary was enchanted with this new vocabulary, and wanted to have every word explained to her; but Maulevrier confessed that there was a good deal that ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... is that I have nothing plann'd, Unless it were to be a moment merry— A novel word in my vocabulary. ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... mind and harden the heart, to take away the knowledge of God alike in His holiness and in His love. Hence it is only through a revelation of God, and especially of what God is in relation to sin, that repentance can be evoked in the soul. Of all terms in the vocabulary of religion, repentance is probably the one which is most frequently misused. It is habitually applied to experiences which are not even remotely akin to true penitence. The self-centred regret which a man feels when his sin has found him out—the wish, compounded ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... will live in the eternal world seems to have no meaning at all. In philosophy as in religion, we had better follow the advice of the Theologia Germanica and banish, as far as possible, the words 'me and mine' from our vocabulary. For personality is not something given to start with. It does not belong to the world of claims and counter-claims in which we chiefly live. We must be willing to lose our soul on this level of experience, before we can find it unto life eternal. Personality is a teleological fact; it ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... discovery Maurice was inclined to declaim in that vigorous vocabulary which is taboo. He had been tricked. He was no longer needed at the Red Chateau. Four millions in a gun barrel; hoax was written all over the face of it, and yet he had been as unsuspicious as a Highland gillie. ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... read Heine together when my vocabulary had to be dug almost word by word out of the dictionary, for the bookbinder's English was rather scanty at the best, and was not literary. As for the grammar, I was getting that up as fast as I could from Ollendorff, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... light as by any description in my power to give. The length of time that we remained at Otaheite, with the advantage of having been there before, gave me opportunities of making perhaps a more perfect vocabulary of the language than has yet appeared; but I have chosen to defer it for the present as there is a probability that I may hereafter be better qualified for such ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... Christ, the words of the Athenian democracy became a sort of common law in Hellenic language; many of these terms, on account of their having been used in the Greek confraternities, entered into the Christian vocabulary. It was, in reality, the popular life, which, restrained for centuries, resumed its power under forms altogether different. The primitive Church was, in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... ("kinsman, comrade, or fellow"), also panggal ("pillow"), and panggan ("bedstead"); see Ling Roth's Natives of Sarawak, ii, p. xxvii. See Porter's Primer and Vocabulary of Moro Dialect (Washington, 1903) p. 65, where the Moro phrase for "sweetheart" is given as babay ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... long, lazy youth through the seminary. He could still speak enough Swedish to exhort and to bury the members of his country church out at Copper Hole, and he wielded in his Moonstone pulpit a somewhat pompous English vocabulary he had learned out of books at college. He always spoke of "the infant Saviour," "our Heavenly Father," etc. The poor man had no natural, spontaneous human speech. If he had his sincere moments, they were perforce inarticulate. ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... part neither good nor bad, but tabby. Moreover, the leisurely reading of many sentences had given him some understanding of the elements of style. He perceived that some combinations of words were illogical, and that others were unlovely to the ear; and at the same time he acquired a vocabulary and a knowledge of grammar and punctuation that his earlier education had failed to give him. He read new novels at his writing-table, and took pleasure in correcting the mistakes of their authors in ink. When he had done this, he would hand them ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... not confined to the cultivation of greater powers of expression, for there is a direct gain in the child's vocabulary consequent upon his kindergarten experience. He absorbs many new words from his teachers, but many others he learns through his daily work and play, and these are his absolute possession,—the thing and the word together. ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... course they became the best of friends with the Chukchis. The language was the difficulty at first, but somehow or other they learned enough of it to make themselves understood. Even the sailors struggled with the Chukchi vocabulary, and tried to teach their savage friends Swedish. One of the officers learned to speak Chukchi fluently, and compiled a dictionary of this ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... adopted Negrito customs entirely. Their social state is about the same as that of the Negritos of Zambales, though some of their habits—for instance, betel chewing—approach more nearly those of lower-class Filipinos. A short vocabulary of their dialect is given in ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... and though conscious of the presence of formidable competitors, was about to make the best of an officer's vocabulary, when a kilted figure loomed out of ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... too, although they had never attempted anything of the kind before; and they generally completed their task to the satisfaction of the parties furnishing the contract. "I cannot do it" is a phrase not to be found in the Yankee vocabulary, I guess. ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
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