"Provincialism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... younger cultivated men and women, whom it charms by an appearance of liberality, which in their view, contrasts very favourably with the narrowness of us sectarians. I am free to admit that in our zeal about small matters (and in a certain 'provincialism,' so to speak, which characterised the type of English Christianity till within a recent period) we needed, and still need, the lesson, and I will thankfully accept the rebuke that reminds me of what I ever tend to forget, that the golden rod, wherewith the divine ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... picturesque in what seemed commonplace. They have seen the great in the little, and ennobled the humbler ways of existence with spiritual insight. They have set to music the homely service and simple enjoyments of common life. They have touched the chords that speak to the universal heart. The very provincialism of our poets endears them to us. Their work, as some foreign critic said, has been done in a corner. We do not deny it. But, verily we believe, that New England is the corner lot of our national ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... our love of the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature that inspired us. We could not give her over to a lumberman, doubly accursed by wealth and provincialism. We shuddered to think of Milly, with her voice modulated and her elbows covered, pouring tea in the marble teepee of a tree murderer. No! In Cypher's she belonged—in the bacon smoke, the cabbage perfume, the grand, Wagnerian chorus of hurled ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... knows how to read with the ends of his fingers may yet find good meat in the book. An honest provincialism has escaped Mr. Stabler's weeding-hoe here and there, and we get a few glimpses, in spite of him, into log-cabin interiors when the inmates are not in their Sunday-clothes. We learn how much a sound stomach has to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... been few in number, and they have suffered from isolation and provincialism. These defects of the earlier period have now in part passed away, new traditions have been created, a cosmopolitan spirit has been developed, and Unitarianism has become a world movement. This was conspicuously indicated at the seventy-fifth anniversary ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... kings, and none of them more than the Great Elector and Frederick the Great, were incessant travellers, they will reply that their kings had to be so at a time when the Empire was not yet established, when rebellious nobles had to be subdued, and when the spirit of provincialism and particularism had to be counteracted. Hence, they say, former Hohenzollerns had to exercise personal control in all parts of their dominions, see that their military dispositions were carried out, and study social and economic conditions ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... foreign ideas. Her rapid growth of population forced upon her a system of emigration, that drew off her youth to the great centres of the world and established large colonies in every leading city. Israel was never left to settle down again into provincialism, but was stirred by the currents of the great world of thought that poured in upon her from Greece and Egypt, from Rome and the far East. "A cross-fertilization of ideas" was thus carried on by Providence. The result of grafting the richest varieties of thought ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... use the forces and conditions of life as to make them minister to his perfection. The one most cultured may come out of a factory, and the man of least culture may be found in a university. Indeed colleges and universities, not infrequently, are haunts of provincialism and of dread of enthusiasm. The object of culture is the perfection of the spirit to the end that all that hinders, or limits, may disappear and only pure power, clear vision, and full self-realization remain. Those whose growth is most evident are ever eager to use all experiences as means ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... opened fans. And then, too, ennui, a gloomy ennui, the ennui of seeing the same faces always in the same places, with their defects or their poses, that uniformity of fashionable gatherings which ends by establishing in Paris each winter a spiteful and gossiping provincialism more petty than that of ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... by a recess appointment, since there was some reason to fear that the Federalist Senate would not confirm the nomination. The Federalists could never forget that Gallatin was a Swiss by birth—an alien of supposedly radical tendencies. The partisan press never exhibited its crass provincialism more shamefully than when it made fun of Gallatin's imperfect pronunciation of English. He had come to America, indeed, too late to acquire a perfect control of a new tongue, but not too late to become a loyal son of his adopted country. He brought to Jefferson's group of advisers ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... Day was because of the report upon little Lottie Drugg's affliction, she was equally troubled regarding the storekeeper himself. Janice had a deep interest in both Mr. Drugg and 'Rill Scattergood—"that was," to use a provincialism. The girl really felt as though she had helped more than a little to bring the storekeeper and the old-maid school-teacher together after so many years ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... she was twenty-six, and content in provincialism, she had met during an August holiday at Llandudno her old fellow pupil, Albert Barbellion, who was conducting the Pier concerts. Barbellion had asked her to play at a 'soiree musicale' which he gave one night in ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Raven's Nest, makes Mr. Aristobulus Brag use the provincialism "I swanny;" "by which," observes the author, "I suppose he meant—I swear!" Of course, this has nothing to do with swearing by swans, more than sounding like it; argument of sound being very different from sound argument. Mr. Cooper does not seem to have given a thought to the analysis ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various
... house, I related my impressions to a friend. The friend, an inhabitant of the city, began to tell me, not without satisfaction, that this was the most natural phenomenon of town life possible, that I only saw something extraordinary in it because of my provincialism, that it had always been so, and always would be so, and that such must be and is the inevitable condition of civilization. In London it is even worse. Of course there is nothing wrong about it, and it is impossible to be displeased with it. I began to reply to ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... everybody, and claimed the privilege to know and discuss their characters, and where there were few topics of public interest to take off their attention, a very considerable portion of town talk and criticism fell upon him. The old town had a certain provincialism, which is less the characteristic of towns in these days, when society circulates so freely, than then: besides, it was a very rude epoch, just when the country had come through the war of the Revolution, and while the surges of that commotion were still ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... old-fashioned, lean Yankee, rugged, traditional, stage type of American business man, and Babbitt, the plump, smooth, efficient, up-to-the-minute and otherwise perfected modern. Whenever Thompson twanged, "Put your John Hancock on that line," Babbitt was as much amused by the antiquated provincialism as any proper Englishman by any American. He knew himself to be of a breeding altogether more esthetic and sensitive than Thompson's. He was a college graduate, he played golf, he often smoked cigarettes instead of cigars, and when he went to Chicago he took a room with ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... anxiety of man to know the aim and the end is essentially human; it is a kind of infirmity or provincialism of the mind, and has nothing in common with universal reality. Have things an aim? Why should they have; and what aim or end can there be, ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... a complication here. But if the expression means tin cans and old shoes, and if we accept that the direction could not be traced because it never occurred to anyone to look upward—why, we've lost a good deal of our provincialism by this time. ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... began to scribble these haphazard memories I had designed to be very droll concerning the "provincialism" of Lichfield; for, as every inhabitant of it will tell you, it is "quite hopelessly provincial," —and this is odd, seeing that, as investigation will assure you, the city is exclusively inhabited by self-confessed ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... They are not remote abstractions, nor impersonal institutions. Men conduct them; and they do not cease to be men. A man is made up of six parts of human nature and four parts of facts and other things—a little reason, some prejudice, much provincialism, and of the particular fur or skin that suits his habitat. When you wish to win a man to do what you want him to do, you take along a few well-established facts, some reasoning and such-like, but you take along also three or four or five parts of human nature—kindliness, ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... stage in his career that I met GRUBLET. He was pointed out to me as a young man of promise who had a trenchant style, and had lately written an article on "Provincialism in Literature," which had caused some stir by its bitter and uncompromising attacks upon certain well-known authors and journalists. I looked at the man with some interest. I saw a pale-faced, sandy-haired little creature with ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... Latin. corruption, missaying[obs3], malapropism, antiphrasis[obs3]. pun, paranomasia[obs3], play upon words; word play &c. (wit) 842; double-entendre &c. (ambiguity) 520[Fr]; palindrome, paragram[obs3], anagram, clinch; abuse of language, abuse of terms. dialect, brogue, idiom, accent, patois; provincialism, regionalism, localism; broken English, lingua franca; Anglicism, Briticism, Gallicism, Scotticism, Hibernicism; Americanism[obs3]; Gypsy lingo, Romany; pidgin, pidgin English, pigeon English; Volapuk, Chinook, Esperanto, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... geographical expression for a number of petty feudal states, practically independent and almost always at strife. Henceforward there was peace; and throughout the whole of this northern part of his domains it was the constant policy of Philip gradually to abolish provincialism and to establish a centralised government. He was far too wise a statesman to attempt to abolish suddenly or arbitrarily the various rights and privileges, which the Flemings, Brabanters and Hollanders had wrung from their ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... had passed in that hour the day afore. The King had been hard to insense [cause to understand: still a Northern provincialism] at the first. So great was his faith in his mother that he ne could ne would believe any evil of her. As to the Mortimer, he was ready enough, for even now was he a-chafing ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... from New England to the District of Columbia, George Peabody had moved into a comparatively foreign country, and in the process had sloughed most of his provincialism. It is beautiful to be a New Englander, but to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... ratification. The former went so far in the direction of local autonomy that he exalted the state above the nation in the Kentucky resolutions of 1798, declaring the Constitution to be a mere compact and the states competent to interpret and nullify federal law. This was provincialism with a vengeance. "It is jealousy, not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions," wrote Jefferson for the Kentucky legislature. Jealousy of the national government, not confidence in it—this is the ideal that reflected the ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... make a display of provincialism to-night," he said. "America will have to blush for herself. I have copies of the Monitor, and all our London cables show the greatest amazement in Great Britain and on the Continent that we should put up such an outre Western ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... something very pleasant about all this, but what specially strikes me is a curious flavor of city provincialism. There are little centres in the heart of great cities, just as there are small fresh-water ponds in great islands with the salt sea roaring all round them, and bays and creeks penetrating them ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... woodroof, and groundsel. The white-spotted green leaves of "Our Lady's thistle" were caused by some drops of her milk falling upon them, and in Cheshire we find the same idea connected with the pulmonaria or "lady's milk sile," the word "sile" being a provincialism for "soil," or "stain." A German tradition makes the common fern (Polypodium vulgare) to have sprung from the ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... usually of such topics. The millions that never went abroad were plucked from their Main Streets, and herded through great cities to the mingled companionship of the camps. "Main Street," when it came to be written, found an awakened consciousness of provincialism, and a detached view of the home town such as had never before been shared by many. Seeing home from without was so general as to constitute, not a mere experience, but a mass emotion. And upon this new conception, this prejudice against every man's Main Street, the book grasped, and ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... West still keeps the American inheritance of open hearted hospitality and its provincialism. The West has inherited some of the finest virtues of our country, and if it is not bitten by Back Bay, Philadelphia, Virginia, or Charleston, it will grow up ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... with its valleys. It is only necessary, therefore, to remark that as these Idylls are drawn from a once famous valley in the North-east division of the county, the provincialism is peculiar to that valley—indeed, it would be more correct to say, to that section of the ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... aristocrat, such as Colonel Byrd or Governor Thomas Hutchinson, was proud to have it thought that his mind as well as his house was furnished after the best English fashion. Even more than others, those who were condemned to be provincials of the province consciously endeavored, to avoid provincialism of the spirit; to be mistaken in London for an English gentleman of parts was a much-sought compensation for being, at Williamsburg or Boston, no more than the first gentleman of America. In the middle of the eighteenth century, eccentricity was not yet a mark of genius; and the "best people in the ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... printed the interviews—a collection of curiosities in utopianism, cant, ignorant fanaticism, provincialism, hypocrisy. These appeared strictly as news; for the cardinal principle of Howard's theory of a newspaper was that it had no right to intrude its own views into its news-columns. On the editorial page he riddled the interviews. By adroit ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the first time. Provincialism has no SCALE of excellence in man or vegetable; it never knows a first-rate article of either kind when it has it, and is constantly taking second and third rate ones for Nature's best. I have often ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... collected and bound up by one Mr Webster. With the exception of a few words coined for local uses (such as snags and sawyers, on the Mississippi,) I do not recollect a word which I have not traced to be either a provincialism of some English county, or else to be obsolete English. There are a few from the Dutch, such as stoup, for the porch of a door, etcetera. I was once talking with an American about Webster's dictionary, and he observed, "Well now, sir, I understand it's ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... trained and softened; the delicate, refined accent retained no trace of provincialism. Everything about Dora pleased the eye and gratified the taste; the girlish figure had grown matronly and dignified; the sweet face had in it a tinge of sadness one may often see in the face of a mother who has lost a child. Lady Helena, ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... not their hue, but we recognized their cry as that of our countrypeople. We are not madly enamoured of our countryman in foreign climes. There his least adorable qualities—his bumptiousness, his provincialism, his strident tones and "costume de Yank"—are always more strikingly conspicuous than the chivalry toward women and the self-respecting manliness we always recognize so emphatically in him when we return to our own land after a prolonged absence. Hence we ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... Montgolfier, their St. Pierre, their Condorcet, their Parny, their Necker, who had not even the decent feeling to know Italian, and who bowed and smiled and doubtless mixed him up with Metastasio and Goldoni when introduced by the Countess to so odd a piece of provincialism as an Italian poet. "Does Monsieur write comedies or tragedies?" One fancies one can hear the politely indifferent question put with a charming smile by some powdered and embroidered French wit to Mme. d'Albany in Alfieri's hearing; ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... friends with an Austrian Jew representing another nationality and another religion, both of which cut into all his most cherished prejudices, he finds it harder to utilize them a second time and gradually loses them. He thus modifies his provincialism, for if an old enemy working by his side has turned into a friend, almost anything may happen. When, therefore, I became identified with the peace movement both in its International and National Conventions, I hoped that this internationalism engendered in the immigrant quarters of American ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... long in rapt meditation. He marveled at himself for having ever accepted his present position. Its limitations were so narrow and so palpable, its possibilities were so restricted, its complacent provincialism so glaring, that the imaginative glories with which he had once enwrapped it seemed now simply grotesque. As long as he remained, he was an entombed nonentity. Beyond the college walls, out of the reach of the contemptible bigotry of the trustees ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Westmoreland constituted the choicest, best, and most highly civilised part of England. And she was one of those of whom I was thinking, when in a former chapter I spoke of highly educated people whom I had known to affect provincialism of speech. Lady Musgrave always, or perhaps it would be more correct to say generally, called a cow a "coo," and though I suspect she would have left Westmoreland behind if evil fate had called her to London, on her own ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... the lesser world of fashion, and of the theatre, he retailed: how the king walked and looked, of the rivalry between Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Baddeley, of Charles Fox's debts and eloquence, of the vogue of Cecilia Davis, or "L'Inglesina." To Janice, hungry with the true appetite of provincialism, it was all the most delicious of comfits. To talk to a man who could imitate the way the Duke of Gloucester limped at a levee when suffering from the gout, and who was able to introduce a story by saying, "As Lady Rochford ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... social mockeries becomes most thoroughly obvious, it is the situation presented by an attempt to imitate the conventional society life in a woman's college. And yet—she had gone over the whole question so often—what a desert of awkwardness and learned provincialism such a college would be without the attempt! How often she had cordially agreed to the statement that it was precisely because of its insistence upon this connection with the forms and relations of normal life ...
— A Reversion To Type • Josephine Daskam
... half-dozen cigarettes. In some amateur theatricals the winter before, in which I took the part of a young man, I had bravely smoked through half of one, and made my speeches too. What this man had said of Hilton and its provincialism was in my mind now. I meant no wickedness, no harm. I took one of the proffered cigarettes with the grand indifference of having done it many times before. Mr. Sewall watched me closely, and when he produced a match, ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... leisure for reflection, that he began to consider the whole question of Anglicanism and Catholicism. He describes some of the little experiences which turned his mind in this direction. He became aware of the isolation and what he calls the "provincialism" of the Anglican Church. He saw many kinds of churches and varieties of worship. He went on through the Holy Land, and at Jerusalem celebrated the Communion in the Chapel of Abraham; at Damascus he ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... available translations leave much to be desired, but to the student of Latin Livy's style is pure and simple, and possesses that charm which purity and simplicity always give. If there is anything to justify the charge of "Patavinity," or provincialism, made by Asinius Pollio, we, at least, are not learned enough in Latin to detect it; and Pollio, too, appears to have been no gentle critic if we may judge by his equally severe strictures upon Cicero, ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... This business of moving regiments about from one garrison to another is a good cure for provincialism," said ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... continental peoples I think that it can rely on the Frenchman, who only wants to make the most of his own without encroaching on anybody's else property and is disinterested in human incubation for the purpose of overwhelming his neighbors. True internationalism will spring from the provincialism that holds fast to its own home and does not interfere with the worship by ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... colonists had become more prosperous, a little more worldly, and certainly far less afraid of the wrath of God and the judges. As travel to Europe became safer and more common, visitors brought new fashions, and provincialism in manner, style, and costume became much less apparent. Madame Knight, who wrote an account of her journey from Boston to New York in 1704, has left some record of dress in the different colonies. Of the country women in Connecticut ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... better than to be lax in pronunciation and it is absolutely necessary to rise above provincialism. "Maria" is not a rhyming companion for "fire" except in dialect verse, though this pairing sounds ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... Jewry. Representing the common longings of the Jewish people throughout the world, Zionism should serve as a leaven, quickening and stimulating the Jewish activities of this country, and rescue them from the greatest danger of Diaspora Judaism, the danger of provincialism, of falling away from the main body of universal Israel. In the particular situation confronting us Zionism ought to assert the claims of Palestine, in addition to those of the Diaspora. But the Zionists cannot replace the present agencies of American Jewish life, ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... not that he was more provincial than he had to be; for that matter, there is no provincialism so rampant as that of the thronging, striving, self-sufficient city. But isolation in any sort is a thing to be reckoned with. The two pioneering years in the Rockies had done their work,—of narrowing, as well ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... country"—bird-nature and rock scenery being his favourite but by no means his only subjects. For "Scenes of Clerical Life" he stands admittedly alone in France, and has naturally been dealt with most often from this point of view. Of that intense provincialism, in the good sense, which is characteristic of French literature, there have been few better representatives. Wordsworth himself is scarcely more the poet of our Lake and Hill country than Fabre is the novelist of the Cevennes. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... South, whether he served in one army or another or in neither, whether he is a Democrat or a Republican or a Mugwump, what religious denomination he belongs to, but is he a scholar and has he a high character? There is no provincialism in scholarship. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of a broad pronunciation which, at the present time, is said to be a characteristic of the northwestern division of Lancashire, but I think that there is good evidence for asserting that this strong provincialism was not confined, formerly, to the West-Midland dialect, much less to a division of any particular county. We find traces of it in Audelay's Poems (Shropshire), the Romance of William and the Werwolf,[35] and even in the Wickliffite version of ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... that such authoritative utterances as that of Dieterich must have produced a great effect throughout Protestant Christendom; and in due time we see their working in New England. That same tendency to provincialism, which, save at rare intervals, has been the bane of Massachusetts thought from that day to this, appeared; and in 1664 we find Samuel Danforth arguing from the Bible that "comets are portentous signals ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... of Oldport society are formed chiefly by importation, and have the one advantage of a variety of origin which puts provincialism out of the question. The mild winter climate and the supposed cheapness of living draw scattered families from the various Atlantic cities; and, coming from such different sources, these visitors leave some ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... "million hall-room boys who want to be geniuses," the ordinary, unshaved, not over-bathed, ungrammatical young men of any American city, so nearly transcend provincialism as in an enthusiasm over their favorite minor cynic, Elbert Hubbard or John Kendrick Bangs, or, in Walter Babson's case, Mr. Fitzgerald's variations on Omar. Una had read Omar as a pretty poem about roses and murmurous courts, but read him she had; and such was Walter's delight ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... printed permits, with editions that will follow the sun and change into to-morrow's issue as they go, picking up literary criticism here, financial intelligence there, here to-morrow's story, and there to-morrow's scandal, and, like some vast intellectual garden-roller, rolling out local provincialism at every revolution. This, for papers in English, at any rate, is merely a question of how long it will be before the price of the best writing (for journalistic purposes) rises actually or relatively above the falling cost of long distance electrical type setting. Each ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... provincialism, then. I don't care a cent. The old man would have wrecked the Great Buchonian before breakfast for a pipe-opener. My God, I'll do it in dead earnest! I'll show 'em that they can't bulldoze a foreigner ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... enthusiasm than in Norfolk. They appear to have established themselves at Lynn, Yarmouth, and Norwich in 1226. Clergy and laity, rich and poor, united in offering to them a ready homage. To this day a certain grudging provincialism is observable in the East Anglian character. A Norfolk man distrusts the settler from "the Shires," who comes in with new-fangled reforms. To this day the home of wisdom is supposed to be in the East. When it was understood that the virtual leader of this astonishing religious revival was a Norfolk ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... of national feeling Professor Royce would erect dikes in the form of provincialism, the resistance of separate sections each with its own traditions, beliefs and aspirations. "Our national unities have grown so vast, our forces of social consolidation so paramount, the resulting problems, conflicts, evils, ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... humanitarianism, industrial prosperity the inveterate foe of the graces of life. To use Lanier's words, he "failed to perceive the deeper movements underrunning the times." Defeated in a long war and inheriting the provincialism and sensitiveness of a feudal order, he remained proud in his isolation. He went to work with a stubborn and unconquered spirit, with the idea that sometime in the future all the principles for which he had stood ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... the strange lack in Eglantine of any sense of decoration. She dressed charmingly, but with regard to surroundings she was entirely devoid of taste. She had the curious provincialism so often seen in cosmopolitans who have lived most of their lives in hotels, without apparently noticing or caring ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... rebellious writers and cultural bohemians in the group that has since come to be called the "Chicago Renaissance." Anderson soon adopted the posture of a free, liberated spirit, and like many writers of the time, he presented himself as a sardonic critic of American provincialism and materialism. It was in the freedom of the city, in its readiness to put up with deviant styles of life, that Anderson found the strength to settle accounts with—but also to release his affection for—the world of small-town America. ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... the news of the massacre of white women and children by the Sepoys. Thousands of Canadians enlisted in the Northern armies. The Papal Zouaves went from Quebec to the aid of the Pope against Garibaldi. All these were symptoms that Canadians were beginning to outgrow their narrow provincialism and to perceive their relations to the outer world, and especially towards Britain. The country was reaching out towards the role which in our own day she has played in the ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... introduction of competition in any society is to break up all types of isolation and provincialism based upon lack of communication and contact. But as competition continues, natural and social selection comes into play. Successful types emerge in the process of competitive struggle while variant individuals who fail to maintain the pace or conform to standard ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... finding that in old botany the word only meant "dead-nettle," but was still sanguine about my bird, till I found the French form descend, as you have seen, into a mesangel, and finally into mesange, which is a provincialism from [Greek: meion], and means, the smallest of birds—or, specially here,—a titmouse. I have seldom had a less expected or more ignominious ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... persuasiveness, and he had the air of being too prudent to offend even an opponent unnecessarily. His language, though natural and easy, was choice and refined. He was evidently a man who had read, and not a little; and there was no taint of vulgarity, scarcely a provincialism, in his pronunciation. ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... attitude of pity for "la pauvre fille", as he persists in calling her. I think he dwells a shade too much on her small asperities and acidities, and on that "ton de critique mesquine", which he puts down to her provincialism. No doubt there were moments of suffering and of irritation, as well as moments of uncontrollable merriment, when Charlotte lacked urbanity, but M. Dimnet has almost too keen ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... in such a manner that it could hardly be distinguished whether he was passing upon his friend a sort of jocose mockery, or whether it was his own native dialect, for his ordinary discourse had little provincialism. ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... Associated Words: purist, purism, euphuism, euphuist, euphuistic, euphuize, euphemism, euphemistic, euphemize, charism, locution, provincial, provincialism, localism, solecism, solecistical, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... among members of a single community, with closely similar inheritance and environment, we find marked divergence in moral judgment. And when we compare widely different times and places we are apt to wonder if there is any common ground. It is only a very smug provincialism that can attribute the alien standards of other races and nations to a disregard of the light. Mohammedans and Buddhists have believed as firmly in, and fought as passionately for, their moral convictions as Christians have for theirs. When we survey ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... sense of refinement, which had made her appreciate the whole manner of being at the Hall. By her dear old friends the Miss Brownings she was petted and caressed so much that she became ashamed of noticing the coarser and louder tones in which they spoke, the provincialism of their pronunciation, the absence of interest in things, and their greediness of details about persons. They asked her questions which she was puzzled enough to answer about her future stepmother; her loyalty to her father forbidding her to reply fully and truthfully. She ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... himself, "to hang about her. But somehow I can't help it—I can't!" And the truth was, he loved her as much as a boy of his age is capable of loving, and he would have gone on and married her but for the snobbishness smeared on him by the provincialism of the small town and burned in by the toadyism of his fashionable college set. As he looked at her he saw beauty beyond any he had ever seen elsewhere and a sweetness and honesty that made him ashamed before her. "No, I couldn't ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... religious problems of the hour. "The Church cannot remain an isolated factor in the nation. The Catholic Church possesses spiritual and moral resources which are at the command of the nation in every great crisis. The message to the nation to forget local boundaries and provincialism is a message likewise to the Catholic Church. Parochial, diocesan and provincial limits must be forgotten in the face of the greater tasks which burden our collective religious resources." (Card. Gibbons.) Let us give ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... success. Margaret Edes was inwardly writhing. To think that Annie Eustace, little Annie Eustace, who had worshipped at her own shrine, whom she had regarded with a lazy, scarcely concealed contempt, for her incredible lack of wordly knowledge, her provincialism, her ill-fitting attire, should have achieved a triumph which she herself could never achieve. A cold hatred of the girl swept over the woman. She forced her lips into a smile, but ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the contemplation of the pure patriotism of the ancients, and in the second by the discovery of Reason among the heathen. In contrast to formlessness distracted by the want of all ideal of culture of provincialism and dogmatic confusions, we find the power of representation of ancient art. The so-called uselessness of learning dead languages imparted to the mind, it knew not how, an ideal drift. The very fact that it could not find immediate profit in its knowledge gave it the consciousness ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... strictly American affair to society as a world affair. The teaching of our schools has had a distinct tendency to restrict our notion of society to that within our own national boundaries. In this we convict ourselves of provincialism. Society is far larger than America, or China, or Russia, or all the islands of the sea in combination. It may entail some straining at the mental leash to win this concept of society, but it must be won as a condition precedent to a fair and just estimate of what ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... head and assuming an unnecessary air of age, and a provincialism of accent—"Ah! I mind when there warn't none of ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Jefferson and other leading Virginians were filled with the grand project of developing and colonizing the west, and binding it to the union by the indissoluble ties of a common interest. There was nothing of the narrow spirit of provincialism about these men. Their thoughts went beyond the limited confines of a single state or section, and embraced the nation. They entertained none of those jealousies which distinguish the small from the great. On the contrary, ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... please. As Dixon pleases. But, Margaret, don't get to use these horrid Milton words. "Slack of work:" it is a provincialism. What will your aunt Shaw say, if she hears you use it ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... enchantingly pretty, there was no doubt of that, thought Gay as he watched her at dinner. He had rarely seen a face so radiant in expression, and she had lost, he noticed, the touch of provincialism in her voice and manner. To-night, for the first time, he felt that there was a fawn-like shyness about her, as if her soul had flown startled before his approach. Of her meeting with Abel in Applegate he knew nothing, and while he discerned ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... Since provincialism is by no means the exclusive distinction of the landward bred, there was an immediate restirring of the gossip pool when the story of Tom's befriending of Nancy Bryerson and her child got abroad in Gordonia and ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the first time. Provincialism has no scale of excellence in man or vegetable; it never knows a first-rate article of either kind when it has it, and is constantly taking second and third rate ones for Nature's best. I have often fancied the tree was afraid ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... The chapter finished, the tall elder (as I took him to be) prayed,—the congregation standing. The prayer was short and appropriate, and the language tolerably correct; but the tone and pronunciation were queer. I supposed them to indicate some provincialism with which I was not acquainted. Along with that peculiar nasal sound for which nearly all Americans are distinguished, there was in the voice a mixture of coaxing and familiarity which was a little offensive; still, as a "layman's" exercise, it ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... Crabbe's pages. In one sense, they are rather pleasant than otherwise. They are so characteristic and put forward with such absolute simplicity that they have the same effect as a good old provincialism in the mouth of a genuine countryman. It must, however, be admitted that Crabbe's careful study of Pope had not initiated him in some of his master's secrets. The worsted stockings were uncommonly thick. If Pope's brilliance of style savours too much of affectation, Crabbe never manages to hit ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... speaks somewhere of a "divine provincialism," which expresses the sturdy sense of a nation, and is but ill replaced by a cosmopolitanism lacking in virtue and distinction. Perhaps this is England's gift, and insures for her a solidarity which Americans lack. Ignoring ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... puzzled by the provincialism, and attracted at once by the man's intelligent face, and by a keen, misery-stricken, hungry look, which she had truly ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... conditions on which alone freedom was possible in any sense which made it worth having. Dante was intensely Italian, nay, intensely Florentine, but on all great questions he was, by the logical structure of his mind and its philosophic impartiality, incapable of intellectual provincialism.[100] If the circle of his affections, as with persistent natures commonly, was narrow, his thought swept a broad horizon from that tower of absolute self which he had reared for its speculation. Even upon the principles of poetry, mechanical ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... pinnacle, which is also often to be met with rising from the middle of the parapet. Towers similar in general design to those which may be said to prevail in Somersetshire are not unfrequently met with in other counties, but do not exhibit that provincialism which is the case in that ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... was by no means so popular as Tom, I got along fairly well. I had escaped from provincialism, from the obscure purgatory of the wholesale grocery business; new vistas, exciting and stimulating, had been opened up; nor did I offend the sensibilities and prejudices of the new friends I made, but gave a hearty consent to a code ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... unionists was not to be so easily effected. A feeling of true nationality must await years of growth. Confidence in each other had not yet replaced fear and suspicion. That the first attempt to come into a union could have been a success, that a sacrifice to the god Provincialism could have been avoided, ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... plunged into the English Shop to see whether I might buy something warm for Nina. Here, indeed, I could fancy that I was in the High Street in Chester, or Leicester, or Truro, or Canterbury. A demure English provincialism was over everything, and a young man in a high white collar and a shiny black coat, washed his hands as he told me that "they hadn't any in stock at the moment, but they were expecting a delivery of goods at any ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... one side. It was taken for granted that he, who had spoken so many eloquent words, all pointing to the magnificent future of British North America, all tending to inspire its youth with love of country as something far higher than mere provincialism, would now be among the advocates of federation, and the wise and loving critic of the scheme to be submitted to the legislatures. Though his ideal had ever looked beyond to a wider Imperial federation, ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... we strolled about the city. Munich is a fine, handsome, open town, full of noble streets and splendid buildings; but in spite of this and of its hundred and seventy thousand inhabitants, an atmosphere of quiet and provincialism hovers over it. There is but little traffic on ordinary occasions along its broad ways, and customers in its well-stocked shops are few and far between. This day being Sunday, it was busier than usual, and its promenades were thronged with ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... jealousies between the troops from the different States, and so far impair the morale of the army. It excites a smile to-day to read that men from New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland charged New Englanders generally with provincialism and cowardice, and that the charge was resented; but such was the fact. The feeling between them grew to such an extent that Washington was obliged to issue orders condemning its indulgence. The Kip's Bay panic offered a favorable opportunity for emphasizing these charges, ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... provincialism, which impregnates all our culture, is liable to have disastrous consequences politically, as well as for the civilization of mankind. We must make room for Asia in our thoughts, if we are not to rouse Asia to a ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... must correspond to the character and disposition of him who acquires it, or it is a thin disguise of vanity and idleness. To what, then, may we attribute this passion for the lecture hall? Perhaps it is partly due to the provincialism characteristic of America, and partly to an invincible energy, which quickens the popular ambition and urges men to acquire information as they acquire wealth, by the shortest route, and with the ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... imitation. You know I am a natural character, and always was, and act and talk naturally, and as far as I can judge, the little alteration my sojourn in London with the American embassy has made in my pronunciation and provincialism, is by no means an improvement to my Journal. The moment you take away my native dialect, I become the representative of another class, and cease to be your old friend 'Sam Slick, the Clockmaker.' Bear with me this once, Squire, and don't tear your shirt, I beseech you, for in all probability ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the other, and always has been. Even were we rash enough to pronounce progress to be on the whole prevalent within the narrow field of our own experience, surely it were nothing but the inevitable "provincialism" of the human mind to pass per saltum from that, to a generalization for all possible experience. Our optimism, our faith that right, truth, and order will eventually prevail, can find only a delusive ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... sentimental, affectionate, or manly—Mr. Hugh Roger Littlepage, Senior, then, had a system of his own, in the way of aiding the scales to fall from American eyes, by means of seeing more clearly than one does, or can, at home, let him belong where he may, and in clearing the specks of provincialism from off the diamond of republican water. He had already seen enough to ascertain that while "our country," as this blessed nation is very apt on all occasions, appropriate or not, to be called by all who belong to ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... start where the nations become navigable, and begin to affect the world. You can sail your ships up the river Rome to about the beginning of the third century B.C., when she began to ermerge from Italian provincialism and to have relations with foreign peoples: Pyrrhus came over to fight her in 280. What is told of the century before may be true or not; as a general picture it is probably true enough, and only as a general ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... he began to grow inattentive. The long roll of names and of styles of furniture, hitherto unfamiliar, confused him, and the constant reiteration of the local point of view seemed an almost incredible provincialism. When they returned at last to the drawing-room, Mr. Parr, just returned from his ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... time, at least, has always had an active and swift communication with the rest of the world. As a people, we are, beyond a question, decidedly provincial; but our provincialism is not exactly one of external appearance. The men are negligent of dress, for they are much occupied, have few servants, and clothes are expensive; but the women dress remarkably near the Parisian modes. We have not sufficient confidence in ourselves to ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Night' to have made it complete in interest." He did read those poems beautifully; and many of his anecdotes embodied Scotch and Irish nature, and every-day life, which he would relate with all their native simplicity and humor, using the brogue of the one, and the accent and provincialism of the other, ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... only in a limited part of the country is called a provincialism. It must be known and recognized for what it is worth, but not obtruded ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... Astronomer has read us another extract from his manuscript. I ran my eye over it, and so far as I have noticed it is correct enough in its versification. I suppose we are getting gradually over our hemispherical provincialism, which allowed a set of monks to pull their hoods over our eyes and tell us there was no meaning in any religious symbolism but our own. If I am mistaken about this advance I am very glad to print the young man's somewhat outspoken lines to help us ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... this day could possibly write an autobiography or any other kind of book co-ordinate in value with Crockett's "classic in homespun." In his time, Crockett could exercise intelligence and still retain his provincial point of view. Provincialism was in the air over his land. In these changed times, something in the ambient air prevents any active intelligence from being unconscious of lands, peoples, struggles ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... to suppose that, "as there is use in the world for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues," and that, in respect of America, "the huge animals nourish huge parasites, and the rancor of the disease attests the strength of the constitution." He ridicules our unsuspecting provincialism: "Have you seen the dozen great men of New York and Boston? Then you may as well die!" He does not spare our tendency to spread- eagleism and declamation, and having quoted a shrewd foreigner as saying of Americans that, "Whatever they say has a little the air of a speech," ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... merely. It is the mere fact of our physical isolation, which, until the last seventy-five years, quite largely shut off thinkers here from continental and English currents of thought and contributed to the brilliant, if sterile, provincialism ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... of the student body elects this course under present conditions, and because the majority of those who do elect it never have an opportunity to continue the study of government, it is thought that the selection of American government for the beginning subject has the tendency to foster provincialism. When but one course is taken this one, it is contended, should deal with foreign governments, to supply a broader basis for the comparison of political institutions. As the study of government is introduced in the grades and ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... little to stimulate them intellectually or socially. Strong and peculiar individuals and families were often developed at the expense of a friendly community life: neighbourhood feuds were common. Country life was marked with the rigidity of a hard provincialism. All this, however, is rapidly changing. The closer settlement of the land, the rural delivery of mails (the morning newspaper reaches the tin box at the end of my lane at noon), the farmer's telephone, the spreading country trolleys, more schools and churches, ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... often used redundantly with definitions of time. This is still a provincialism. See Abbott, Sect. 114. "Messala writeth, that Cassius having spoken these last words unto him, he bade him farewell, and willed him to come to supper to him the next night following, because it ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare |
