"Vocabulary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... horrour, in quiverings of delight, or convulsions of disgust. His emotions are too violent for many words; his thoughts are always discovered by exclamations. Vile, odious, horrid, detestable, and sweet, charming, delightful, astonishing, compose almost his whole vocabulary, which he utters with various contortions and gesticulations, not ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... comes to you, and says, 'Come and do this thing, just for once. You can leave off when you like, you know. There is no need to do it a second time.' And when you have done it, he changes his note, and says, 'Ah! you are in, and you cannot get out. You have done it once; and in my vocabulary once means twice, and once ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... know better, never let a false epithet pass unchallenged, for I do not see why a refined, but correct, mode of expression should not be as vigorously upheld in this fine art as in speaking of any of its sisters. For surely vulgarity has no right of place in its vocabulary, yet much language that is certainly not elegant, and not of any particular force of expression, finds repose therein; and a really beautiful and great work is neither made more lovely nor more exalted through contact with that which has neither the status of the one nor ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... King of Prussia, wages a victorious war against everything that is not German. He has just put to the sword the French terms in the Prussian military vocabulary. In vain these poor words pleaded the authority of the great Frederick, who introduced them into Prussia. In spite of his fondness for imitating Frederick the Great, William II has slaughtered the ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... now from the Hebrew of the Old Testament to the Greek of the New, we have a language very different in its structure; elaborate in its inflections and syntax, delicate and subtle in its distinctions, rich in its vocabulary, highly cultivated in every department of writing, and flexible in an eminent degree; being thus equally adapted to every variety of style—plain unadorned narrative, impassioned oratory, poetry of every form, philosophical discussion, and severe logical ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... or families now inhabiting Midian represent the ancient Midianites; and all speak the vulgar half-Fellah Arabic, without any difference of accent or vocabulary from ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... coles (or colis) from caulis, a stalk, and virga, a rod. The only serious English literary term, yard (exactly equivalent to virga), as used by Chaucer—almost the last great English writer whose vocabulary was adequate to the central facts of life—has now fallen out of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... 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" ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... hoping to see is the rise of a man of genius, with a rich poetical vocabulary and a deep instinct for poetical material, who will throw aside resolutely all the canons of verse, and construct prose lyrics with a perfect ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... 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 one of ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... entered the meadows, 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. In the next field, which the ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... interesting and exciting. We dealt in millions as if they 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 a ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... all his emotions by oaths. Are they angry? They swear. Surprised? They swear. Delighted? They swear. Every conception of the mind, every impulse of the blood, is expressed in the narrow and base vocabulary of profanity. So that the first thing an oath indicates is that he who uses it has limited intellectual resources, otherwise he would not employ so commonplace a method of ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... the ludicrous final scene in which, after a device borrowed from the "Lexiphanes" of Lucian, the offending poetaster, Marston-Crispinus, is made to throw up the difficult words with which he had overburdened his stomach as well as overlarded his vocabulary. In the end Crispinus with his fellow, Dekker-Demetrius, is bound over to keep the peace and never thenceforward "malign, traduce, or detract the person or writings of Quintus Horatius Flaccus [Jonson] or any other ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... and of Death, the Masters of Time and Space, were two tangible concrete old men—two venerable wise old men—the ultimate strained extended conception of two powerful, honored, high-placed old men. And they talked as men would talk—not in the human vocabulary, but conveying to each other, somehow, human ideas—about ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... my own child? And then to go and write filthy, rascally, Radical ballads on me and mine! This comes of your Methodism, you canting, sneaking hypocrite!—you viper—you adder—you snake—you—!' And the squire, whose vocabulary was not large, at a loss for another synonym, rounded off his oration by a torrent of oaths; at which Argemone, taking Honoria's hand, walked proudly out of the room, with one glance at Lancelot of mingled shame and ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... may be scientific Rip Van Winkles about, who still hold by vital force; but among those biologists who have not been asleep for the last quarter of a century "vital force" no longer figures in the vocabulary of science. It is a patent survival of realism; the generalisation from experience that all living bodies exhibit certain activities of a definite character is made the basis of the notion that every living body ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... dignity, &c. &c. &c.: We are not masters of the whole vocabulary. See any novel by ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... girdle. Under it a second tunic or vest was sometimes worn in cold weather. Drawers were seldom used, though in the time of the second Assyrian empire the cavalry and heavy-armed bowmen wore tightly fitting drawers of plaited leather, but the custom was probably introduced from the north. A bilingual vocabulary, however, gives a Sumerian word for this article of dress, which may therefore have been ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... is just what our Lord Jesus Christ brought with him. If all the race of mankind had continued righteous, as man was when first brought into being, the word GRACE would never have had a place in heaven's vocabulary. But since man has fallen, fallen into sin, into death both corporeal and spiritual, into sickness and sorrow, into labor for his bread, into hunger and thirst, and anxieties and cares, God has ever pitied him. Instead of our Lord's saying, "God so loved the world," ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... the ground in front of the testing shed and the wanderers leaped out, to be greeted by the half-hysterical Jap. Shiro's ready vocabulary of peculiar but sonorous words failed him completely, and he bent himself double in a bow, his yellow face wreathed in the widest possible smile. Crane, one arm around his wife, seized Shiro's hand and wrung it in silence. Seaton swept Dorothy off her ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... parchment, in which books are not unfrequently bound. When we consider that vellum was at one time in much greater request for bookbinding purposes than it is just now, we shall be at no great loss to reconcile this eccentricity in the vocabulary of our west ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853 • Various
... Alaskan traveller, has taken some pains to compile a vocabulary of the various dialects of the Pacific races with whom he has sojourned, which, when published, will form another link in the chain by which the scholar may trace the spread of the Asiatic tribes along the northern seaboard of America. With the publication ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... voice was painfully audible to Emmeline, who just then passed through the hall. Miss Derrick gave as good as she received; a battle raged for some minutes, differing from many a former conflict only in the moderation of pitch and vocabulary due to their being in ...
— The Paying Guest • George Gissing
... screen appeared objects which Urg would name, to have his sibilant uttering repeated by Garin. As the American later learned, the ray treatment he had undergone had quickened his mental powers, and in an incredibly short time he had a working vocabulary. ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... was beginning to discover that beyond his expressive eyes he had really very little of importance to express, that his prolonged silences covered poverty of ideas rather than abundance of feeling, that his limited vocabulary was due less to reticence than to the simple inarticulateness of the primitive mind. Through the golden glamour of her honeymoon there had loomed suddenly the discovery that George was not clever—but cleverness ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... as 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
... shown at the Tower for sixpence or a shilling." Dropping the crown, he turned upon the aristocracy and the Church, and tore them. He begged Lafayette's pardon for addressing him as Marquis. Titles are but nicknames. Nobility and no ability are synonymous. "In all the vocabulary of Adam, you will find no such thing as a duke or a count." The French had established universal liberty of conscience, which gave rise to the following Painean statement: "With respect to what are called denominations of religion,—if every one is left to judge of his own religion, there ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... degree, and that's what these men don't understand. Besides, I spell badly; it's a disease with me, and when you have got it, you may be able to think of a word, but you would be a precious fool to use it when another man has to read what you have written. So my vocabulary gets limited, and I'm going to stick to facts, and I shouldn't wonder if the examiners don't like them. ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... translated into English. The great excellence of Plautus was the masterly handling of the language, and the adjusting the parts for dramatic effect. His humor, broad and fresh, produced irresistible comic effects. No one ever surpassed him in his vocabulary of nicknames, and his happy jokes. Hence he maintained his popularity in spite of his vulgarity. [Footnote: Mommsen, vol. ii. b. iii. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... was neither pleased nor displeased at seeing me there; every day he went to pasture his flock on the slopes of the opposite Jebel Guetter, returning at nightfall; he tried to be civil but failed, for want of vocabulary. I gave him the salutation, and passed ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... but he seems to have been born about the first decade of the last century. He was employed as a catechist by the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, under whose auspices he afterwards published a vocabulary, for the use of Gaelic schools. This work, which was the first of the kind in the language, was published at Edinburgh in 1741. Macdonald was subsequently elected schoolmaster of his native parish of Ardnamurchan, and was ordained an elder ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... Reub's unusual vocabulary was largely the result of his intimate relations with his master, Judge Marshall, whose body-servant he had been for a number of years. The judge had long been dead now, and the plantation had descended to ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... not vulgar; he never falls into the prosaic and low familiarity of his drunken associates, for he is, in his way, a poetical being; he always speaks in verse. He has picked up every thing dissonant and thorny in language to compose out of it a vocabulary of his own; and of the whole variety of nature, the hateful, repulsive, and pettily deformed, have alone been impressed on his imagination. The magical world of spirits, which the staff of Prospero has assembled on the island, casts merely a faint ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... addressed to a male friend. The extremely lover-like use of language by which they are characterized was a common trait of the age; and here again we see the necessity of thoroughly understanding the atmosphere that Shakespeare breathed. To us, with our frigid vocabulary of friendship, such a style sounds unnatural, and undignified perhaps: with the Elizabethans it was an every-day habit. Lilly, the author of Euphues, says in his Endymion, "The love of men to women is a thing common and of course; the friendship of man to man, infinite and immortal." And indeed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... 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
... vocabulary of jay-ribaldry, screeched one last outrageous bit of billingsgate into Flint's ears, shut up his tail like a fan, and darted off, a streak of blue and gray. The Butterfly Man's eyes followed him smilelessly; then they came back and dwelt for a moment upon the ruined nest and the fluttering mother-bird, ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... speeches were steeped in the sentiments of liberty, and were full of references to the "rights of man." They gave to young Douglass a larger idea of liberty than was included in his mere dream of freedom for himself, and in addition they increased his vocabulary of words and phrases. The reading of this book unfitted him longer for restraint. He became all ears and all eyes. Everything he saw and read suggested to him a larger world lying just beyond his reach. The meaning ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... entirely admitted the propositions that "it is a blessing and a benefit to a man to be a worker," and that "a lazy do-nothing is a pestilent evil," that "work is good and idleness a curse," the question arises, whom did he mean by workers? In his vocabulary only those were good workmen (31) who were engaged on good work; dicers and gamblers and others engaged on any other base and ruinous business he stigmatised as the "idle drones"; and from this point of view the ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... on the outskirts of the betting ring, searching a limited vocabulary for language with which to garnish his emotions, felt a nudge at his elbow. It ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... the bank. Wright, Delbridge, and the clerks and stenographers seemed unreal creatures, with flaccid, vacuous faces, as he shook hands with them and answered their conventional queries about his vacation. "Vacation!" The word was not in his vocabulary. "Business! "That, too, was a corpse of a word floating on the still waters of past usage. "Money, stocks, bonds, market-reports!" They seemed like forgotten enemies rising to stop him. How could Delbridge smile in his smug way, as he chewed his cigar and ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... was there with the Pep and with the Vocabulary. Otherwise she was a Naughty-Naughty. The costume was a plain Burial Shroud, the only Ornament being a 4-carat Wen just ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... hope, your Honour, but the full Assurance that to-day, as yesterday, Savonarola will let loose his thunder Against the vices of the idle rich And from the brimming cornucopia Of his immense vocabulary pour Scorn on the lamentable heresies Of the New Learning and on all the ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... without much relationship to one another. Of course it is possible that the brain activity is far greater than one would surmise, and that it only seems sluggish because of the insufficiency of our village speech as a means of expression, for certainly the people's vocabulary is extremely limited, while they have no habit of talking in sentences of any complexity. Yet where a language has neither abundant names for ideas, nor flexible forms of construction to exhibit variations of thought, it is hard to believe that the brain-life ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... who spoke villanous French and worse English; his vocabulary being largely interspersed with "enfant de garce," "sacre," "sacre enfant," and "damn" until it was a difficult matter to tell what he ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... this island was about two acres in area. The main force of Shere Singh was posted on the right bank of the river, but a strong brigade of four thousand men occupied the island, and erected batteries. These batteries commanded the only available ford, or "nullah," as it is called in the vocabulary of the country. The opposite town of Rumnugger was favourably situated for defence; it was flanked by a grove, and by the bend in the river. This position Shere Singh had skilfully fortified. On the 22nd, at two o'clock in the morning, Lord Gough approached ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... we confine ourselves to the coo vocabulary, or advertise any continuous turtle-dove act. Gettin' married ain't jellied our brains, I hope. Besides, we're busy. I've got a new gilt-edged job to fill, you know; and Vee, she has one ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... of vocabulary do we wish to acquire? A facile, readily used one? An accurate one? Or one as nearly as may be comprehensive? The three kinds do not necessarily coexist. The possession of one may even hinder and retard the acquisition of another. Thus if we seek a ready vocabulary, an accurate vocabulary may cause ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... brow, one foot advanced, knee bent, scanning the horizon for the treasure island from the vantage point of the woodshed roof, while the crew, gone mad with thirst, snarled and shrieked all about him, and the dirt yard below became a hungry, roaring sea. His twelve-year-old vocabulary boasted such compound difficulties as mizzentopsail-yard and main-topgallantmast. He knew the intricate parts of a full-rigged ship from the mainsail to the deck, from the jib-boom to the chart-house. All this from pictures and books. ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... of course, write any language whatever. Two words of French he knew: they were fromage and chapeau. The former he pronounced "grumidge." In English his vocabulary was even more simple, consisting of the single word "po-lees-man." Neither B. nor myself understood a syllable of Polish (tho' we subsequently learned Jin-dobri, nima-Zatz, zampni-pisk and shimay pisk, and used to delight The Zulu hugely by ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... before him on their knees, their elbows resting on the ground." There is a special language devoted to his sacred person and attributes, and it must be used by all who speak to or of him. Even the natives have difficulty in mastering this peculiar vocabulary. The hairs of the monarch's head, the soles of his feet, the breath of his body, indeed every single detail of his person, both outward and inward, have particular names. When he eats or drinks, sleeps or walks, a special word ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... 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 ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... temperament. His mind is of a cast too martial to be easily moved; but, notwithstanding his habitual inflexibility, I cannot help thinking that, when he heard his Roman Catholic countrymen (for we are his countrymen) designated by a phrase as offensive as the abundant vocabulary of his eloquent confederate could supply,—I cannot help thinking that he ought to have recollected the many fields of fight in which we have been contributors to his renown. "The battles, sieges, fortunes, that he has passed," to have come back upon him. He ought ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... word in the whole vocabulary of a white man that gets nearer than ten miles of describing it," he exclaimed. "And the neches, here, figger to scrap to hold it. Well, it certainly needs attractions we ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... critics always groaning over the shrinkage of the national vocabulary? Of course we all use ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... is made use of for laying emphasis upon the infinitely superior glory of the Christian order. Thus an a fortiori argument pervades the whole —if the shadow was divine, how much more must the substance be! "The language of the Epistle, both in vocabulary and style, is purer and more vigorous than that of any other book of the ...
— Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, Preface and Introductions - Third Edition 1913 • R F Weymouth
... Jacob Behmen's sanity and sanctity; and I will continue to believe that if I had only had the scholarship, and the intellect, and the patience, and the enterprise, to have mastered, through all their intricacies, the Behmenite grammar and the Behmenite vocabulary, I also would have found in Behmen all that Freher and Pordage and Law and Walton found. Even in the short way into this great man that I have gone, I have come upon such rare and rich mines of divine and ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... scurrilous language and great brutality. This man, who had been treated by Mrs. Bradley to a 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 sought and ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... would. The big, stupid ape had been in a vicious mood, reeking of whisky and roaring insults at everyone. His cursing was neither inventive nor colorful, consisting of only four unlovely words used over and over again in various combinations with ordinary ones, a total vocabulary ...
— Nor Iron Bars a Cage.... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... well defined, and sufficiently illustrated by examples; a table of contents and a complete index are also added, rendering reference to any word as easy as looking for it in a dictionary. The table of contents, indeed, will be found to serve most of the purposes of a vocabulary of synonyms: a glance at it will frequently give you all the words of similar signification to the particular one for which you may happen to require an equivalent. From the part of the book relating to verbs, we take the following; the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... Annie's vocabulary was emphatic, rather than choice. Entirely without education, she made no pretense at being what she was not and therein perhaps lay her chief charm. As Howard stooped to kiss her, she ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... explain, but his vocabulary of white man's words was too small. He broke off at last and said: "White boy, they ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... conscientiously to use the familiar means by which the earlier simpler meanings were appropriated and developed, following the beaten tracks of the mind's native and spontaneous movement. Much more rarely than the sciences has it recourse to a technical vocabulary, being content to express itself in ordinary words though using them and their collocations with a careful delicacy and painstaking adroitness. To follow it in these uses demands an effort, for nothing is perhaps more difficult than to ...
— Progress and History • Various
... some few moments. Then she gave us a simple but completely lucid description of a gentleman differing from myself in all outward characteristics, and in all such inward traits as Elsa's experience and vocabulary enabled her to touch upon. I learned later that she took hints from a tall grenadier who sometimes stood sentry at the castle. At the moment it seemed as though her ideal were well enough delineated by the ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... scene not merely of hardship, but of cruel suffering and degradation to the younger and weaker boys, has been proved by the researches of the Public Schools Commission. There was an established system and a regular vocabulary of bullying. Yet Cowper seems not to have been so unhappy there as at the private school; he speaks of himself as having excelled at cricket and football; and excellence in cricket and football at a public school generally carries ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... nothing of intellectual suffering. His intellect, unexhausted by speculation or casuistry, was wholly at the service of hand and eye, and whatever he pleased he did with an unheard of ease and simplicity, and if style and vocabulary were at times monotonous, he could not have made them otherwise without ceasing to be himself. Instead of the language of Chaucer and Shakespeare, its warp fresh from field and market, if the woof were learned, his age offered him a speech, exhausted ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... comic we ever saw," said the "Somerset County Gazette," "which was not vulgar. It will provoke many a hearty laugh, but never call a blush to the most delicate cheek." They vied with each other in their vocabulary of praise; and as to Punch's quips and sallies, his puns, his propriety, his "pencillings," and his cuts—they simply defied description; you just cracked your sides with laughter at the jokes, and that ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... in Moslem lands from Mauritania to Mesopotamia. It freely uses Turkish words like "Khatun" and Persian terms as "Shahbandar," thus requiring for translation not only a somewhat archaic touch, but also a vocabulary borrowed from various sources: otherwise the effect would not be reproduced. In places, however, the style rises to the highly ornate approaching the pompous; e. g. the Wazirial addresses in the tale of King Jali'ad. The battle-scenes, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... landing. Then from her and the child arose a most terrific uproar of commination; both together yelled such foulness and blasphemy as can only be conceived by those who have made a special study of this vocabulary, and the vituperation of the child was, if anything, richer in quality than the mother's. The former, moreover, did not confine herself to words, but all at once sent her clenched fist through every pain of glass in the window, heedless of the fearful cuts she inflicted upon ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... occasional 'Prologue' to 'The Rivals'. It must already have passed into the vocabulary of the learned. Todd gives examples from Shenstone and Langhorne. Warton has it more than once in his 'History of English Poetry'; and it figures in the 'Essays' of Vicesimus Knox. Thus academically launched, we need no longer follow ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... existence. They cannot be counted technical terms: QRBN used in Hebrew for sacrifice and offering is simply as if an English writer should say priere instead of worship. In such comparisons of the vocabulary we have, however, to consider first the working up and revision which has been at work in every part of the books of the Bible, and secondly the caprice of the writers in apparent trifles, such as )NKY and )NY, especially ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... pronounced "a great success." Katherine's production contributed the element of comedy, while the vocabulary of adjectives was insufficient to express appreciation of ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... dosed others with orvietan, the famous panacea of his time, of which he had brought with him a good supply. With respect to his missionary functions, he seems to have given himself little trouble, unless his attempt to make a Sioux vocabulary is to be regarded as preparatory to a future apostleship. "I could gain nothing over them," he says, "in the way of their salvation, by reason of their natural stupidity." Nevertheless, on one occasion ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... says; but in his, as in all the books which touch upon the subject, the language tests vary considerably. In Chao-t'ong and the surrounding districts, for instance, the traveler would be unable to make any progress with the vocabulary which the Major has compiled. I was unable to make it tally with the spoken language of the people, and append a table showing the differences in the phonetic—and I do it with all respect to Major Davies. I ought to add ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... a special vocabulary of my own; I "pass away time," when it is ill and uneasy, but when 'tis good I do not pass it away: "I taste it over again and adhere to it"; one must run over the ill and settle upon the good. This ordinary phrase of pastime, and passing away the time, represents the usage ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... 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 ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... saddest word in a Christian's vocabulary is indifference. By-and-by many a one would doubtless gladly forfeit ten thousand years of heavenly bliss just to recall the wasted opportunities of ...
— Rosa's Quest - The Way to the Beautiful Land • Anna Potter Wright
... confessed Cartwright 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 ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... eminent for the elegance of her taste, and of whom one of the best judges, the celebrated Miss Edgeworth, observed to me, that she spoke the purest and most idiomatic English she had ever heard, threw out an observation which might be extended to a great deal of our present fashionable vocabulary. She is now old enough, she said, to have lived to hear the vulgarisms of her youth adopted in drawing-room circles.[25] To lunch, now so familiar from the fairest lips, in her youth was only known in the servants' hall. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... identified, and the fourteenth century treatise which summarises the principles of grammar and metre bore the title Leys d'Amors, the Laws of Love. The pathology of the emotion was studied; it was treated from a psychological standpoint and a technical vocabulary came into use, for which it is often impossible to find English equivalents. The first effect of love is to produce a mental exaltation, a desire to live [17] a life worthy of the beloved lady and redounding to ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... Villeneuve-Loubet was superb? Perhaps we were artists? So many artists came here to paint and sketch the old houses. What was our impression of her country? We knew that she meant by "country" not France but Villeneuve-Loubet, and mustered our best vocabulary to admire the town, the solid foundations, the houses, the protecting castle, and above all, the unique ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... he were thinking. Whence exactly does he get his stolidity—from climate, self-consciousness, or his competitive spirit? All the same, thought does go on in him, shrewd and "near-the-bone"; life-made rather than book-made thought. Its range is limited by its vocabulary; it starts from different premises, reaches different conclusions from those of the "pundit," and so is liable to seem to the latter non-existent. But let a worker and an educated man sit opposite each other in a railway ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... F.E.I.S.) The Advanced Prose and Poetical Reader; being a collection of select specimens in English, with Explanatory Notes and Questions on each lesson; to which are appended Lists of Prefixes and Affixes, with an Etymological Vocabulary. 12mo, cloth, price 3s. ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... respectability of still another generation, was her ideal of a Christian gentleman. She wore a full white muslin gown with a blue sash, her hair primly parted in the middle, her right hand laid flat over her left in her lap. Her vocabulary was choice. For a second, when she referred to winter sports at Lake Placid, she forgot herself and tucked one smooth, silk-clad, un-mid-Victorian leg under her, but instantly she recovered her poise of a vicarage, remarking, "I have ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... some natural wit; he talked good grammar; he conversed, which is a rare thing in a village; and the other peasants said of him: "He talks almost like a gentleman with a hat." Fauchelevent belonged, in fact, to that species, which the impertinent and flippant vocabulary of the last century qualified as demi-bourgeois, demi-lout, and which the metaphors showered by the chateau upon the thatched cottage ticketed in the pigeon-hole of the plebeian: rather rustic, rather ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... if he is a healthy child, say everything he knows but that. He will go through his limited vocabulary in a pathetically obliging manner, making the most beautiful "moo-moos" and "quack-quacks," but he will not say, "Ta-ta." Why should he? On persuasion, and more especially if the interview should take place at a street-corner on a windy ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... Jupiter credit for exercising a large amount of common sense. In many ways they are more practical than we, and this is quite as noticeable in their language as in any other respect. They have one simple language for the whole globe and in its use they are all agreed. Their vocabulary is small because they have not yet branched out into the infinite varieties ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... adjustment of Professor Young's powers one could but observe a union of quick perception with almost perfect self-control. Whatever the deficiencies of the student, a hasty or unguarded or inappropriate or even an unscientific word was seldom found in Professor Young's vocabulary. His ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... decrepit words. For Edwin, it was a whole series of fresh formulae, brutal and shameless beyond his experience, full of images and similes of the most startling candour, and drawing its inspiration always from the sickening bases of life. Darius had remembered with ease the vocabulary to which he was hourly accustomed when he began life as a man of seven. For more than fifty years he had carried within himself these vestiges of a barbarism which his children had never even conceived, and now he threw them out in all their crudity at his daughter. And ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... in marked contrast with the strength and somberness of Anglo-Saxon poetry. During the three centuries following Hastings, Normans and Saxons gradually united. The Anglo-Saxon speech simplified itself by dropping most of its Teutonic inflections, absorbed eventually a large part of the French vocabulary, and became our English language. English literature is also a combination of French and Saxon elements. The three chief effects of the conquest were (1) the bringing of Roman civilization to England; (2) the growth ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... roaring camp-fires, long stories of adventure in trapping and hunting, of wondrous fishes that grow longer and heavier every season, although captured and broiled many and many a year ago—trout and pickerel literally pickled in fiction, served and re-served in the piquant sauce of mountain vocabulary. In brief, I have kept my imagination and enthusiasm under strict control. But, after all, the Adirondacks are a wonderland, and we, who dwell in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys, are happy in having this great park of Nature's ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... on the river, in all his voyages. By way of giving me a specimen of its intelligence and feeling, its master set to and rated it soundly, calling it scamp, heathen, thief, and so forth, all through the copious Portuguese vocabulary of vituperation. The poor monkey, quietly seated on the ground, seemed to be in sore trouble at this display of anger. It began by looking earnestly at him, then it whined, and lastly rocked its body to and ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... she heard them, whose footsteps were on the other side of the door, she held in readiness her Italian. She counted on understanding Giovanna's answer to her question, for she had, as she boasted, "quite a vocabulary." But much more than to this she trusted to the talent which Italians have for making their meaning clear ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... in his Court who could read or write a letter in Babylonian, for letters to him were written in his own tongue. The scribe of the Hittite king produced only a species of dog Latin, while the scribe of the king of Alashia trots out his whole vocabulary unhampered by grammar. On the other hand, the letters of the king of Mitani are drawn up in the characters known as Assyrian; and it is probable that the Assyrian system of cuneiform may have originated in Mitani. If so, for the ...
— The Tell El Amarna Period • Carl Niebuhr
... admitted 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
... we may follow with philosophic curiosity, step by step, the progress of mental anguish, but when that point is passed, analysis loses its interest; the vocabulary of pain has exhausted itself, the phenomena already noted do but repeat themselves with more rapidity, with more intensity—detail is lost in the mere sense of throes. Perchance the mind is capable of suffering worse than the fiercest pangs ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... were told that, if they would not retreat any further, they had better send a flag of truce to the enemy and surrender. It was proposed to decide the matter by a vote, when the men unanimously voted that they would rather die than surrender. The word 'surrender' does not belong to the vocabulary of the brave men of our mountains. They are as heroic as Spartans. They are willing to die, if needs be; but surrender, never! Though the enemy were constantly firing Minie muskets at them, they were not at all alarmed, and, being true republicans, they were resolved to take ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... not involved any diminution in the vocabulary; in fact, many new words such as copec, fascist, insulin, rodeo, etc., are here registered for the first time. Large ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... Revolution he emigrated to America; but finally settled down to literary work in England. His first publication (1797) was Miscellaneous Writings consisting of Poems; Lucretia, a Tragedy; and Moral Essays, with a Vocabulary of the Passions. He translated a number of French books bearing on the French Revolution, by Bertrand de Moleville, Mallet du Pan, Hue, and Joseph Weber; also a work on Volcanoes by the Abbe Ordinaire, and an historical novel by Madame de Genlis, The ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... 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, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... boy 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 ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... distinction to be kept in view. In the tongues of existing inferior races, only concrete objects and acts are expressible. The Australians have a name for each kind of tree, but no name for tree irrespective of kind. And though some witnesses allege that their vocabulary is not absolutely destitute of generic names, its extreme poverty in such is unquestionable. Similarly with the Tasmanians. Dr. Milligan says they "had acquired very limited powers of abstraction or generalization. They ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... modern mystic to whom I submitted the original; which was to the effect that it contains a little nonsense, a good deal of truth, and a not intolerable admixture of superstition. He added further that Sir John must not be judged hardly; for he was limited by an inadequate vocabulary and an ignorance of many of the terms that his scanty reading enabled him ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... fall a phrase about the progress of the race, but it hardly had a place in Pattison's own vocabulary. 'While the advances,' he said, 'made by objective science and its industrial applications are palpable and undeniable everywhere around us, it is a matter of doubt and dispute if our social and moral ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... 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, ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... seldom used, and his hands were those of an artist. I made some casual remark, complimentary to Warburton's, and we began to talk. He seemed glad to do so, but he spoke with hesitation, not as one who has overcome an impediment in his speech, but as one who had forgotten part of his vocabulary. The reason leaked ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... found an epitome of all the information which has reached Europe concerning them, derived principally from Dr. Sherwood's treatise upon the subject, published in 1816, and the still more valuable and more recent work of Mr. Sleeman, entitled the "Ramaseeana; or, Vocabulary of the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?—Do let me sell you something!"—varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... rampage, giving away the choicest secrets on himself. And I was his spokesman. There moved the multitudes of memories of my past life, all orderly arranged like soldiers in some vast review. It was mine to pick and choose. I was a lord of thought, the master of my vocabulary and of the totality of my experience, unerringly capable of selecting my data and building my exposition. For so John Barleycorn tricks and lures, setting the maggots of intelligence gnawing, whispering his fatal intuitions of truth, flinging purple ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... remember those silly little things it's like wanting to sneeze and not being able to, isn't it? But we must turn back, or I shall be late for dinner, and I daren't think of the names my hostess will call me then. She has a vocabulary, you know." She named a name and Vernon thought it was he who kept the talk busy among acquaintances till the moment for parting. Lady St. Craye knew that ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... delicious for immediate translation into words. The room was furnished as a study, and most artistically furnished, if you consider outlandish shapes in fumed oak artistic. There was nothing of the traditional prize-fighter about Barney Maguire, except his vocabulary and his lower jaw. I had seen over his house already, and it was fitted and decorated throughout by a high-art firm which exhibits just such a room as that which was the scene of our tragedietta. The person in the sequins lay glistening ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... walking forward, raised his clenched fists to heaven and availed himself of the permission to the fullest extent of a somewhat extensive vocabulary. ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... And in our eagerness to restore this confidence we are content deliberately to ignore the fact that the result would have been exactly the same had the cause of our excess or imprudence been—to use the terms of our infantine vocabulary—heroic or innocent. If on an intensely cold day I throw myself into the water to save a fellow-creature from drowning, or if, seeking to drown him, I chance to fall in, the consequences of the chill ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... moral lessons, are interdicted, at the theatre. There is something in the word Playhouse, which seems so closely connected, in the minds of these people, with sin, and Satan,— that it stands in their vocabulary for every species of abomination. And yet why? Where is every feeling more roused in favour of virtue, than at a good play? Where is goodness so feelingly, so enthusiastically learnt? What so solemn as to see the excellent passions of the human heart ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... better foundation for Christianity and no better content therein than for and in the false and imperfect faiths. Many of these were defended by men who had had an English education and had come into contact with Christian vocabulary and civilization. They did not hesitate to read into these religions ideas wholly Christian and wholly foreign to the ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... library waited a long time for his return. Wilton, elbows on the table, stared straight in front of him, giving no sign of knowledge of the other's presence. Sloane fidgeted with the smelling-salts, emitting now and then long-drawn, tremulous sighs that were his own special vocabulary of dissatisfaction. He ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... [The vocabulary Hwei Hwei (Mahomedan) of the College of Interpreters at Peking transcribes King chao from the Persian Kin-chang, a name it gives to the Shen-si province. King chao was called Ngan-si fu in 1277. (Deveria, Epigraphie, p. 9.) Ken-jan comes from Kin-chang King-chao ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Abbe de Bernis; write me word, I beg of you, as I shall see him on Sunday." Like Voltaire, Madame de Pompadour had the mania of nicknaming her friends and acquaintances; even the king himself figured more than once in her grotesque vocabulary.[B] ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... the Lamb cheerfully - 'me grow big boy, have guns an' mouses - an' - an' ...' Imagination or vocabulary gave out here. But anyway it was the longest speech the Lamb had ever made, and it charmed everyone, even Cyril, who tumbled the Lamb over and rolled him in the moss to the music ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... walks cannot write very much, but he may, if he chooses, write very well. He may turn over the rubbish of his vocabulary until he finds some exquisite and perfect word with which to bring out his meaning. This word need not be unusual; and if it is 'exquisite' then exquisite only in the sense of being fitted with rare exactness to the idea. Stevenson wrote so ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... which must be stricken from the vocabulary of parents, teachers and friends, who hope to awaken the indifferent girl. It is the word hopelessly. Hopelessly dull, hopelessly bad, hopelessly indifferent! Experience teaches that these ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... medical questions. Leonardo possibly points here to a printed edition: Avicennae canonum libri V, latine 1476 Patavis. Other editions are, Padua 1479, and Venice 1490.] the books of Avicenna Italian and Latin vocabulary; Messer Ottaviano Palavicino or his Vitruvius [Footnote 3: Vitruvius. See Vol. I, No. 343 note.]. bohemian knives; Vitruvius[Footnote 6: Vitruvius. See Vol. I, No. 343 note.]; go every Saturday to the hot bath where you will see ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... collected specimens of the plants and minerals of Wales for the museum (existing or to be) of his native town, studied the statistics of their great iron works or their little home-weaving; nor, if he has had the sense and spirit to take a Welsh and an Irish vocabulary, without some observations on the disputed analogy of the two languages, and how far it exists in general terms, as it certainly does in names of places. By the way, we warn him that he will know little of the peasantry, and come home ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... of the Government; and for this end Jackson, says Mr. Parton, "displayed an energy and pugnacity seldom exhibited before or since, by a politician in his seventy-seventh year." But "failure" was a word not in Jackson's vocabulary; he annexed Texas, and dying as the measure was accomplished, talked only in his last moments of Texas ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... 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 ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... to him that nothing he could say would make any difference. He would have liked to tell of his own experience in the court room and how he had suddenly known that all his efforts to right his wrong had been failures, that there was only One who could do it, but there were no words in a boy's vocabulary to say a thing like that. It sounded unreal. It had to be felt, and he found his heart kept saying over and over as he lay there waiting with closed eyes for Mark to speak: "Oh, God! Why'n'tchoo show him Yerself? Why'n'tchoo show him Yerself?" He wondered ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... the vocabulary of human speech no other word rings with truer eloquence, or speaks with greater triumph, than that one word,—opportunity. Born in the primeval forest of man's first dwelling-place, it has marked the central path of civilization and hewn its ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... and the officer and his men murderers. At a third, when a great railway centre was found in the hands of the strikers and the troops were ordered to clear the platform, one surly specimen not only refused to budge, but lavished on the captain commanding the foulest epithets in a blackguard's vocabulary. The crowd outnumbered the troops by twenty to one. The faintest irresolution or hesitancy would have been fatal. One whack with the sword knocked the fight out of the bully, and, while he was led off to be plastered in hospital, the maddened rioters held their indignation ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... prepared for Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench, Truebner & Co. an elementary work on the Egyptian language, entitled "First Steps in Egyptian," and two years later the companion volume, "An Egyptian Reading Book," with transliterations of all the texts printed in it, and a full vocabulary. The success of these works proved that they had helped to satisfy a want long felt by students of the Egyptian language, and as a similar want existed among students of the languages written in the cuneiform character, Mr. L.W. King, of the British Museum, prepared, on the same lines ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... dark eyes on his companion. They were hot with feeling. "Say, Doc, I'm crazy to find that boy, and find him cursing the skitters with a wholesome vocabulary, same as you and me. But I'd hand over my Commission in the force with pleasure to my biggest enemy rather than pass him the dope you and ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... specimen of ancient domestic architecture. The Great House is a most sumptuous mansion, evidently of the age of Francis I.; but I could gain no account of its former occupants or history. I must again borrow from my friend's vocabulary, and say, that it is built in the 'Burgundian style.' In its general outline and character, it resembles the house in the Place de la Pucelle, at Rouen. Its walls, indeed, are not covered with the same profusion ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... wish to do something reasonable, or when you have a duty to perform, always think that it is easy, and make the words difficult, impossible, I cannot, it is stronger than I, I cannot prevent myself from. . . , disappear from your vocabulary; they are not English. What is English is: "It is easy and I can ". By considering the thing easy it becomes so for you, although it might seem difficult to others. You will do it quickly and well, and without fatigue, because you do it without effort, whereas if you had ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... accent might be. For a time he would be the grim Protestant Flagellant, pursuing the idea of self-castigation. That he was immolating Ruth on the altar of his conscience never broke in upon his thought for consideration. The fanatic has no such word in his vocabulary. ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... tiny streaks of red, yellow, and green. A dish of them came to table now, with a bottle, at the right moment, from the darkest corner of the cellar. And then, in nasal voice, well-trained to Latin intonation, giving a quite medieval amplitude to the poet's sonorities of rhythm and vocabulary, the Sub-prior was bidden to sing, after the notation of Goudimel, the "Elegy of the Rose"; the author girding cheerily at the clerkly man's ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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 ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... been secured in the laboratory of an English scientist in Sierra Leone, and long association with that learned man had endowed him with a vocabulary ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... conservatives had begun to lay aside. The newspaper (p. 173) press he had assailed with a pungency and vigor which it in vain sought to rival. He was spattered by it, however, with almost every opprobrious term that belongs to the vocabulary of wrath and abuse. Invention was tasked to furnish discreditable reasons for all that he said and did. That inexhaustible capacity of devising base motives for conduct, which is an especial attribute of mean minds, had now opportunity to put forth its full powers in the way ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... sentence of court-martial rendered in time of war should be regarded as res adjudicata, produced in my mind the painful impression that a very great man did not find the word "justice" anywhere in his vocabulary; and I watched for many years the conversation and writings and public speeches of that man without finding that he ever made use of that word, or ever gave as a reason for doing or not doing anything that it would be just or unjust. In his mind, whatever ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... readers with any further attempt at unraveling the opinions, illustrations, and rhetoric of Mr. John Harrington, Democrat and orator. The possession of an abundant vocabulary without any especial use for it in the shape of an idea will not revolutionize modern government, whatever may be the opinion of the individual so richly gifted; nor will any accomplished Democrat find ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... 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 tortured with ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... had kept him involved in affairs of the heart 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 with a pretty young stewardess on ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... My dear sir, my entire vocabulary is at your service in an affair of the heart." The Judge beamed on Delaven and bowed to Madame Caron as though including her in the circle where Love's sceptre is ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... from behind, where we could not see 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 fun at us because we have no tails, and how sensitive we ...
— Bear Brownie - The Life of a Bear • H. P. Robinson
... comes across an expression which is in the vocabulary of everybody to-day, and one realises how very ancient some of these popular aphorisms must be. 'It is not alle golde that glareth,' wrote Chaucer, and the same theme was sung in Provencal by Amanieu des Escas near a hundred years before. But, like 'A bird in the hand,' it is so ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... quickness of ear and the facility with which he picked up English were marvelous to observe. Evidently, he had been somewhat accustomed to the sound of it before, for there dropped out of his vocabulary, after he began to speak, phrases which would seem to betoken a longer familiarity with its idioms than could be equally accounted for by his present experience. Though the English evidently was not his native language, there had yet apparently been ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... meaning escapes them, or appears to be obscure when in reality perfectly plain. Innumerable historical errors owe their origin to false or inexact interpretations of quite straightforward texts, perpetrated by men who were insufficiently acquainted with the grammar, the vocabulary, or the niceties of ancient languages. Solid philological study ought logically to precede historical research in every instance where the documents to be employed are not to be had in a modern language, and in a form in which they can ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... for the visitor to offer some condolence to this bereaved husband. But how could he, where the widower himself so decidedly ignored the subject of his own sorrow? To have said one word about his recent loss would have been, in the world's opinion and vocabulary, ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Maya dictionary printed was issued in the City of Mexico in 1571. It was published as that of Father Luis de Villalpando, but as he had then been dead nearly twenty years, it was probably merely based upon his vocabulary. It was in large 4to, of the same size as the second edition of Molina's Vocabulario de la Lengua Mexicana. At least one copy of it is known to ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various
... means to come very close, to touch, that poor harsh word—there he must find what comfort he can. We, too, in aviation use that word—it is the signal that says—'Now, you can fly!' You do not know our vocabulary, perhaps?" ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... world, and her chick, chick, chick, uttered quickly, selects for them the dainty which she has found, or teaches them what is proper for their diet. A good listener will detect enough intonations in her voice to constitute a considerable vocabulary, ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... it need not be premised that I mean infinitely more than Cassocks and Surplices; and do not at all mean the mere haberdasher Sunday Clothes that men go to Church in. Far from it! Church-Clothes are, in our vocabulary, the Forms, the Vestures, under which men have at various periods embodied and represented for themselves the Religious Principle; that is to say, invested the Divine Idea of the World with a sensible and practically active ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 in that country, I think ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... of Composition and Rhetoric. Revised 1.20 An inductive course with abundant application of principles. Kellow's Practical Training in English .80 Helpful in its study of vocabulary, grammar, and structure. Spalding's Principles of Rhetoric 1.08 A supremely interesting presentation of the essentials. Strang's Exercises in English. Revised .56 Examples in syntax, accidence and style, ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... the professor, striking an attitude. "In the vocabulary of youth, there's no such word as 'fail'! Away with timid caution! Our watchword ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... 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 ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler |
