"Patois" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... This would be finer in an ode than in actual reality. I disturb myself very little about what the Dutch and English say, the rather as I understand nothing of those dialects (PATOIS) of theirs. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... domestic utensil, and even the number of knives and forks that were got ready for use at dinner. His acquaintance with the Spanish language was marvellous; from the finest works of Calderon to the ballads in the patois of every province, he could quote, to the infinite delight of those with whom he associated. He could assume any character that he pleased: he could be the Castilian, haughty and reserved; the Asturian, stupid and plodding; the ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... glow would blush from it, throwing out considerable heat. Over this fire, they cooked a little soup for me. I remained in the hut until morning, stretching out on the floor for a little rest, while they stood about, speaking their mountain patois which I could not understand. I left them early in the morning, passing through wild mountain scenery and seeing no signs of habitation. No railroad or telegraph lines cross the river until near Lisbon and there was no way for me to get word to my friends. I arrived at Peubla at twelve o'clock ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... did not even know his name—nodded, with a torrent of sullen patois. He had never come for his two dollars, and now the man was gone and he would never get it. But it was not his fault. The first man—the one who had sent him to the Halfway with the horse—had caught him crawling back for the letter, had told him the man who ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... like a sprite, drawing her cap over her face. Ah, the familiar ways and sights, the stores here, the booths shut, for the outdoors trade was mostly over, the mingled French and English, the patois, the shouts to the horses and dogs and to the pedestrians to get out of the way. She glanced up St. Anne's street, she passed the barrack, where some soldiers sat in the sunshine cleaning up their accouterments. Children were playing games, as the space was wider here. The door ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... l'Isle Adam, grand-master of the Knights of Malta. He sent copies of this work to several distinguished personages, and notably to Louisa of Savoy, mother of Francis I. But she not understanding, so thinks Harrisse, the very learned author of the Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima, the kind of patois used by Pigafetta, and which resembles a mixture of Italian, Venetian, and Spanish, employed a certain Jacques Antoine Fabre to translate it into French. Instead of giving a faithful translation, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... did you suspect that I was really attempting to convey anything to you which I was really too damned embarrassed to tell you in the patois of my native city?" ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... together on the margin of Black Brook, each with a fish-pole. Her dark face was bright with interest and excitement as she took her first lesson in the art of angling. She jabbered and chattered in her odd patois, he answered in broadest New England dialect, but the two quite understood each other, and though Jimmy said afterward that it was "dreffle to hear her call the fish pois'n," they were soon great friends and comrades. For weeks he kept and cared ...
— Fishin' Jimmy • Annie Trumbull Slosson
... of a marvel to you if you have read medical philosophy much. It is this: his lost memory returns to him when he is delirious, and goes away again when he is himself-just as old Canada Joe used to talk the French patois of his boyhood in the delirium of typhus fever, though he could not do it when his mind was clear. Now this poor gentleman's memory has always broken down before he reached the explosion of the steamer; he could only remember starting up the river with his wife and child, and he had an ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... of the Greek clerical garb. The priest did not understand Latin any more than the abbot understood Greek, and the situation became awkward, for the pitch of Martin's voice made it evident that he was not a person to be trifled with. The old man therefore tried what the Romance patois, which he had picked up from foreign residents in the city, could do to establish intelligible intercourse with the rough visitor. Fortunately the crusader also knew something of that patois, and made the purpose of his visit sufficiently clear. As soon as the ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... "raises." Thus also he tried to conceal his own mistakes; when a missing letter for which everybody had been anxiously searching was found on his own desk, instead of in the files, he would blare, "Well, why didn't you tell me you put it on my desk, heh?" He was a delayer also and, in poker patois, a passer of the buck. He would feebly hold up a decision for weeks, then make a whole campaign of getting his office to rush through the task in order to catch up; have a form of masculine-commuter hysterics because Una and Bessie didn't do the typing in a miraculously ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... the feast. Hand in hand the runners, followed as before by all their companions, returned to join in the dance now to take place before the house of Dr. Mayor. After a time the festivities were interrupted by a little address in patois from the first musician, who concluded by announcing from his platform a special dance in honor of the family of Dr. Mayor. In this dance the family with some of their friends and neighbors took part,—the young ladies dancing with the peasant lads and the young gentlemen with the girls of the village,—while ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... negroes are descendants of the ones my father brought North with him. There are about two hundred and fifty now. You notice that they've lived so long apart from the world that their original dialect has become an almost indistinguishable patois. We bring a few of them up to speak English—my secretary and two or three ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the soldier, dropping into patois. "There is much noise, but we Turcos are here in Morsbronn, and we have seen nothing ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... amounted to L63,000, which works thus out at a cost of L8 6s. 1d. per head for the Boer children. Dr. Mansveldt, Head of the Education Department of the Transvaal, a Hollander, seems to have but one aim: to enforce the use of the taal, the Boer patois—a language spoken by no one else—the use of which keeps them in isolated ignorance. ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... Suisse, which takes place annually in London, where pretty Helvetian damsels brew the most fragrant coffee and hand round delicious little cakes, arrayed as they are in their killing national costume and chattering in a dozen different patois. I had a notion that tea at Kensal New Town would be very much less eligible, so I stopped away. Perhaps I was prejudiced. The tea might have been different from what I expected. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... nothing but Styrian or Carinthian, or some border dialect, which nothing but barbarism had ever heard of, and which nothing but Austrian organs could have ever pronounced. The French recruits were from provinces which had their own "beloved patois," and which, to the Parisian, held nearly the same rank of civilized respect as the Kingdom of Ashantee. Besides, it was to be remembered, that all round me was a scene of suffering—the dismal epilogue of a field of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... by conveying them in their vessels in pursuit of heads. There is no evidence that they actually do the work of slaughter themselves, though suspicion is strong, but these are the 'kill-kill' vessels in the patois of the Pacific, while the kidnappers are the 'snatch-snatch.' Both together, these causes were working up the islanders to a perilous pitch of suspicion and exasperation during the years 1870, 1871, and thus were destroying many of the best hopes of the fruit of the toils of ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... conversation between Joe and Cecile broke so dismally, and was so bitterly cold, that the old woman with whom the children had spent the night begged of them in her patois not to leave her. Joe, of course, alone could understand a word she said, and even Joe could not make much out of what very little resembled the Bearnais of his native Pyrenees; but the Norman peasant, being both kind and intelligent, managed to ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... put in in his patois, for they had been greatly disturbed by rumors among the country-folk and many soldiers already ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... cantons, more numerous than the French. "Of course," he said, "we have our private sympathies, which incline us one way or the other, and there is the language tie—though here we are greatly attached to our Bernese patois—but I would have you believe the Swiss are essentially just and impartial, they ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... a sullen group back of her. A crowd of dejected, hungry, gaunt men stood to one side, and one very old man had his old woolen cap off his white head, which I could see was bowed in prayer. In a moment I knew from their Flemish patois, which I had heard so often out in the fields of beautiful Belgium during that happy month just before the war, that they were refugees, and my heart went out in a rush to them as I went in a rush to ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... astonished eyes of the crowd of spectators stood Mr. Gustave Brellier, writhing and twisting in the clutch of the firm fingers and spitting forth fury in a Flemish patois that would have struck Cleek dead on the spot—if ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... flaming yellow handkerchiefs about their woolly heads. They were as African as the Congo, and as strange in this setting as Eskimos on Broadway. They felt their importance, for they were of the few good cooks of French dishes here. They spoke a French patois, and guffawed loudly when one dropped her basket of supplies from her head. They were servants of the procureur de la Republique, who had brought them from the French colony ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... saw regiment after regiment entraining—men from the southern provinces speaking the patois of the south, men from the eastern departments whom I had seen a month before, at the beginning of the war, at Chalons, and Epernay and Nancy, and men from the southwest and centre of France in the garrisons ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... by treaty, an official language in the Dominion Parliament and in Quebec, but not now in any other province, though documents, etc., may for convenience be published in it. English is understood almost everywhere except in the rural parts of Quebec, where the habitants speak a patois which has preserved many of the ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... verses are not widely popular, they are at least comparatively fresh and original; and to those readers who can readily grasp the patois, as well as to those who are compelled to struggle painfully through its labyrinths, this ...
— The Norsk Nightingale - Being the Lyrics of a "Lumberyack" • William F. Kirk
... Calvinists.) "Three cheers for the white cockade! Before we are done, it will be red with the blood of the Protestants!" However, on the 5th of May they ceased to wear it, replacing it by a scarlet tuft, which in their patois they called the red pouf, which was immediately adopted as ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... was, is, and ever will be, Napoleon. Speak that name and the native's eye will fire and his patois will rattle forth and tingle the ear like a snare-drum. Though he pays his tithe to France, he is Italian; but unlike the Italian of Italy, his predilection is neither for gardening, nor agriculture, nor horticulture. Nature gave him a few chestnuts, and he considers that ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... Indian wordlessness, handed the net to him. Whereupon, with his flabby mouth wide and his large gray eyes gleaming, he proceeded to miss four easy ones in succession. And with that Josef, in a gibberish which is French-Canadian patois of the inner circles, addressed the Tin Lizzie and took away the net from him, asking no orders from me. The Lizzie, pipe in mouth as always, smiled just as pleasantly under this punishment as in the hour of his opportunities. He would have been a very handsome boy, with ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... being unknown to the people, had escaped mutilation. I entered into conversation, to ascertain whether true German was not possible to them, since they must needs read and write the language; but, although they understood me, they could only partly, and with evident difficulty, lay aside their own patois. I found this to be the case everywhere throughout the Canton. It is a circumstance so unusual, that, in spite of myself, associating a rude dialect with ignorance, I was always astonished when those who spoke it showed culture and knowledge of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... this tale, I could wish for a pen supernally dipped, or for a metaphysician's plating to my vernacular, or for the linguistic patois of that land off somewhere to the west of Life. Or maybe just a neurologist's chart of Hester's nerve history ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... The children have all nice, neat little clasped pray-books, and I have laid out 7s. 8d. in Watts's Hymns for Christmas presents for them. The eldest girl alone holds out; she has been at Boulogne, skirting upon the vast focus of Atheism, and imported bad principles in patois French. But the strongholds are crumbling. N. appears as yet to have but a confused notion of the Atonement. It makes him giddy, he says, to think much about it. But ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... eux un rude patois cvenol auquel je n'entendais rien, ils me harent tout de suite, sans me connatre. J'tais pour eux l'ennemi, le Pion; et du jour o je m'assis dans ma chaire, ce fut la guerre entre nous, une guerre acharne, sans ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... dear, it is not like a nobody dangling after a public singer; that is common enough. We are all run after by idle men; even Signorina Zubetta, who has not much voice, nor appearance, and speaks a Genoese patois when she is not delivering a libretto. But for a gentleman of position, with a heart of gold and the soul of an emperor, that he should waste his time and his feelings so, on a woman who can never be anything to him, it ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... of the Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia, has recently written a paper on "The Creole Patois of Louisiana,"[i21] which is full of interest to those interested in the study of dialects. In the course of his paper, Professor Harrison says: "Many philologists have noted the felicitous [Greek: aithiopizein] of Uncle Remus in ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... Munchausen. "I'm a little rusty in the language, and, besides, you talk like an idiot. You might as well speak of the human language as the Simian language. There are French monkeys who speak monkey French, African monkeys who talk the most barbarous kind of Zulu monkey patois, and Congo monkey slang, and so on. Let Johnson send his little Boswell out to drum up information. If there is anything to be found out he'll get it, and then he can tell it to us. Of course he may get it all wrong, but it will be entertaining, and ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... who was excessively religious, to read his chapter of the Bible (which it is, or was, the custom of the Boers to spell out every morning, should their learning allow them to do so), not in the "taal" or patois Dutch, but in good old French. I have the very book from which he used to read now, for, curiously enough, in after years, when all these events had long been gathered to the past, I chanced to buy it among a parcel of other works at the weekly auction of odds and ends on the market ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... a polite, intelligent fellow as well as our foreman, was privileged to take his meals with us, besides occupying one of our four rooms. In consequence of this we conversed chiefly in the patois French of the country, for the worthy man was not deeply learned in English. Salamander messed with the men in their own house, after preparing and spreading ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... arose whom I knew very well as a district leader, and who was frequently in my office, seeking positions for his constituents and other favors. That night he was in his shirt-sleeves among the boys. With the old volunteer fireman's swagger and the peculiar patois of that part of New York, he said: "Chauncey Depew, you have no business here. You are the president of the New York Central Railroad, ain't you, hey? You are a rich man, ain't you, hey? We are poor boys. You ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... on their journey to the north. They had consulted with Rosalie how they were to proceed, and they thought with her that they might make their way dressed as country lads from some place in the south of France where a patois was spoken scarcely known in the north; that he, Paul, was to act as spokesman, and that O'Grady was to pretend to be deaf and dumb. As a reason for their journey, Paul was to state that their father was ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... mob of things going down to-day,' said one to another, which meant that there would be a heavy cargo in number; we must remember that the Australians have a patois of their own." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... trade, revenue, and other administrative details Smollett shows himself the expert compiler and statistician a London journalist in large practice credits himself with becoming by the mere exercise of his vocation. In dealing with the patois of the country he reveals the curiosity of the trained scholar and linguist. Climate had always been one of his hobbies, and on learning that none of the local practitioners was in a position to exact a larger fee than sixpence from his patients ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... Melchior, my brave man," said old Andregg, in his rough patois; "and I shall be glad to see thee give up this wild mountain life and become a quiet peasant ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... my son Theodore married, I spent a month full of surprises. How everything differed from America, and even from the plain below! The peasants, many of them at least, can neither speak French nor understand it. Their language is a patois, resembling both Spanish and Italian, and they cling to it with astonishing pertinacity. Their agricultural implements are not less quaint than their speech. The plow is a long beam with a most primitive share in the middle, a cow at one end, and a boy at ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... round at Pen, and uttered a few words hurriedly in her Spanish patois. Then, as if recollecting herself, she caught the bread-cake from where she had placed it, broke a piece off, and put it in the young rifleman's hand, speaking again quickly, every word being incomprehensible, though her movements were plain enough as she signed to ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... about twenty miles from Bayou Teche, the stream that keeps green and beautiful the year round that section of Louisiana which was first settled by the exiled Acadians and made famous in Longfellow's "Evangeline," is a thriving village. In the patois of the country the people are called "Cajians," a corruption of Acadians. As a rule, they are non-progressive and ignorant. But the spirit of modern progress, brought in on the railroad, is putting ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 2, June, 1898 • Various
... little surprised at being addressed in the Patois dialect of the Basques in my own country, which is spoken about Bayonne and other parts adjacent to the Pyrenees. To their questions I answered, that I was the only survivor of the crew of a whaler, which had been frozen up in the ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... the most uneducated peasant. A favorite among the Bavarians, judging from the frequency with which it is met with in all parts of Bavaria, represents a peasant in a balcony waving her kerchief to her lover, departing in a little skiff, on an intensely blue sea. Beneath, in patois, is ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... in languages, and occasionally in games, to distinguished people. It was but the other day we were told that Garibaldi spoke ten languages fluently. Now Garibaldi is not really master of two. He speaks French tolerably; and his native language is not Italian, but a patois-Genoese. Cavour was called a linguist with almost as little truth; but people repeat the story, just as they repeat that Napoleon I. was a great chess-player. If his statecraft and his strategy had been on a par with his chess, we should never ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... seeing another human being. At length I met a woman carrying a distaff, and tried to get into conversation with her, but it was impossible; she could not speak a word of French, and I knew nothing of her Limousin patois. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... had the reputation of being the shrewdest business man in Southern India. He was most capital company, rolling out perpetual jokes and calembour, and bubbling over with exuberant joie de vivre. I think M. Bayol took a fancy to me on account of my understanding his Provencale patois, for, as a boy, I had learnt French ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... the sweetness of the patois is irresistible; their lips, incapable of uttering any but the sweetest sounds, reject all consonants they can get quit of; and make their mouths drop honey more completely than it can be said by any eloquence less mellifluous ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... ashore in the small boats that ranged themselves near the steamer. There was a very bedlam of chatter, argument, and recrimination among the black boatmen, mounting at times to furious invective in a patois we failed wholly to understand, for though the majority of the natives speak English on all the islands, whether Dutch, French, or British, they use a language of their own vintage on these undress occasions. I could see Dolly's bright head and laughing eyes peeping through ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the poor Nabob, trying to jest, and resorting to the sabir patois to remind his old chum of all the pleasant reminiscences they had overhauled the day before. "Our visit to Le Merquier still holds. The picture we were going to offer him, you know. What day shall ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... to be. But by-and-by two or three men—rough, uncouth fellows—dropped in to reinforce the landlord, and they, too seemed to have no other business than to sit in silence looking at me, or now and again to exchange a word in a PATOIS of their own. By the time my supper was ready, the knaves numbered six in all; and, as they were armed to a man with huge Spanish knives, and made it clear that they resented my presence in their dull rustic fashion—every rustic ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... He has already 'gone to the Happy Hunting Grounds.' But the Indians had no truer friend, and Kit Carson would wish no prouder epitaph than this. In talking thus he would frequently get his grammar wrong, and his language was only the patois of the Border; but there was an eloquence in his eye, and a pathos in his voice, that would have touched a heart of stone, and a genuine manliness about him at all times, that would have won him hosts of friends anywhere. ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... distance through the trees, till the green meadows blossom with them, and sparkle like a lawn of daisies; we may hear the ringing laughter of the girls to whom market day seems an occasion of great rejoicing, and we may be somewhat distracted with the steady droning patois of the old women; but we come to see rather than to hear, and, returning to the town for the last time, we take our station at the corner of the market-place, and make a sketch of a group of Norman maidens who are well worth ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... Meantime there had been preparation for its renewal. While in Rome and Constantinople, and in the districts under their immediate influence, this Roman art of pure descent was practised in all its refinement, an impure form of it—a patois of Romanesque—was carried by inferior workmen into distant provinces; and still ruder imitations of this patois were executed by the barbarous nations on the skirts of the empire. But these barbarous nations were in the strength of their youth; and while, in the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Gibbon unlearned his native English. Madame D'Arblay had carried a bad style to France. She brought back a style which we are really at a loss to describe. It is a sort of broken Johnsonese, a barbarous patois, bearing the same relation to the language of Rasselas, which the gibberish of the negroes of Jamaica bears to the English of the House of Lords. Sometimes it reminds us of the finest, that is to say, the vilest parts, of Mr. Galt's novels; sometimes of the perorations of Exeter Hall; sometimes of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... mischief, among the crowd. The habitans of en haut and the habitans of en bas commingled, as they rarely did, in a friendly way. Nor was anything to provoke a quarrel said even to the Acadians, whose rude patois was a source of merry jest to the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... at first supposed. Beppo had asked the count's permission to bring with him a brother accustomed to the sea, and who wished to quit England. I might personate that brother. You know that the Italian language, in most of its dialects and varieties of patois—Genoese, Piedmontese, Venetian—is as familiar tome as Addison's English! Alas! rather more so. Presto! the thing was settled. I felt my heart, from that moment, as light as a feather, and my sense as keen as the dart which a feather wings. My plans now were ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Assunta, marveling at the patois that the Signorina spoke, and wondering if it contained ...
— Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral • Margaret Pollock Sherwood
... Dari and so forth. Even in the most barbarous jargons he will find terms which throw light upon the literary Iranian of the lexicons: for instance "Madiyan" a mare presupposes the existence of "Narayan" a stallion, and the latter is preserved by the rude patois of the Baloch mountaineers. This process of general collection would in our day best be effected after the fashion of Professor James A. H. Murray's "New English Dictionary on Historical Principles." It would be compiled by a committee of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Vinje, a peasant from Thelemark, was thirty-two; he had been a village schoolmaster and had only now, in 1850, contrived to reach the University. With Vinje, the founder of the movement for writing exclusively in Norwegian patois, Ibsen had a warm personal sympathy, while he gave no intellectual adherence to his theories. Between the births of Vinje and Bjoernson there stretched a period of fourteen years, yet Bjoernson was a student before either Ibsen or Vinje. That Ibsen ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... friction, and might spoil all. So, in a few well-chosen words, I informed Tom that there was a trifle between Alf and me; and he was sick, just when I wanted to keep him on his feet for a while. Would Tom (and my patois became so hideously homely that, for the reader's sake, I have to paraphrase it)—would Tom, as a personal favour to me, call round at Alf's camp, morning and evening, for a few days, and in the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... came to the hospital every day with the English papers, and looked in to leave me the Mirror, for which he would never accept any payment. He had very few teeth and talked in an indistinct sort of patois and insisted on holding long conversations in consequence! He told me he would be enchante to bring me some novels bien choisis par ma femme (well chosen by my wife) one day, and in due course they ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... as at the South, although in less numbers. Gladys's mother was rather a marvel, inasmuch as she was willing to take in washing, and do it well too, but Gladys had no higher rank for that. She was herself rather a pathetic little soul, dingily pretty, using the patois of her kind, and always at the fag end of her classes. Her education, so far, seemed to meet with no practical results in the child herself. Her brain merely filtered learning like a sieve; but she thought Maria Edgham was a wonder, ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... was only eight and a half when this scheme was carried into practice, it will surprise no one to hear that it was not crowned with success. I disliked extremely this visitation of the poor. I felt shy, I had nothing to say, with difficulty could I understand their soft Devonian patois, and most of all—a signal perhaps of my neurotic condition—I dreaded and loathed the smells of their cottages. One had to run over the whole gamut of odours, some so faint that they embraced the nostril with a fairy kiss, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... rancher's party had to do was plain, i.e. separate, and endeavour, in ones and twos, to pass the rebel lines and enter the Fort. Fortunately they could all speak the curious patois of English, French, and Cree that the enemy used, and therefore they had no need to be at a loss. Moreover, with beaver-skin caps, and long fur coats down to their heels, with the addition of a sash ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... heaven or earth or in the human body, but a woman of this neighbourhood would whip out the name of it, fair and square, by way of conversational adornment. My landlady, who was pretty and young, dressed like a lady and avoided patois like a weakness, commonly addressed her child in the language of a drunken bully. And of all the swearers that I ever heard, commend me to an old lady in Gondet, a village of the Loire. I was making a sketch, and her curse ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... refectory and served her with a dainty breakfast, disposed on exquisite "individual" dishes, and oddly enough, bearing the initial "D." Dolly lifted a cup and stared at it, wondering while Anita glibly explained in her patois of Spanish-English, that yes, indeed, it was the ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... some miles I remember we met two women, dressed in the quaint costume common to that part of the country, each carrying a basket of eggs. I stopped the carriage and endeavored to enter into conversation with the pair, but could not understand a word of their patois. I then took a couple of eggs, handed out a silver franc piece, and drove on, leaving two astonished women standing in the road, gazing alternately at the piece of money and at the back of my carriage. ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... any other area in the world, Babylon included, loves thus to dine linguistically, so to speak. To the Crescent Turkish Restaurant for its Business Men's Lunch comes Fourth Avenue, whose antique-shop patois reads across the page from right to left. Sight-seeing automobiles on mission and commission bent allow Altoona, Iowa City, and Quincy, Illinois, fifteen minutes' stop-in at Ching Ling-Foo's Chinatown Delmonico's. Spaghetti and red wine have set New York racing to reserve its table d'hotes. ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... England, Burton and the Rev. Percy Badger were singled out to act as interpreters. But Burton had quarrelled with Badger about something or other; so when they approached the Sultan, Burton began addressing him, not in Arabic, but in the Zanzibar patois. The Sultan, after some conversation, turned to Badger, who, poor man, not being conversant with the patois, could only stand still in the dunce's cap which Burton, as it were, had clapped on him and look extremely foolish; while the bystanders nodded to each other and said, "Look ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... these creatures was of composite sound—now a word of Spanish, then of German, then of French, then of Gaelic, at times of Basque. It was either a patois or a slang. They appeared to be of all nations, and yet ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... a mug of punch upon him; then he turned for the door, ordering the dog drivers to follow. But the warmth and promise of rest were too tempting, and they objected strenuously. The Kid was conversant with their French patois, and followed ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... has been able to leave a permanent impress. But this impress is not in the valley of the Mississippi. It is true that a number of French still live on the banks of the great river, that many a little village where a French {436} patois is spoken lies hidden in the sequestered bayous of the South, and that no part of the old city of New Orleans possesses so much interest for the European stranger as the French or Creole quarter, with its quaint balconied houses and luxuriant gardens; but despite ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... roof; but when in lieu of a cooking fire Cuthbert set up his little "Juwel" kerosene stove, and in less than ten minutes had water boiling furiously, when he could make a big pot of coffee, the remarks in French patois were almost wholly favorable to the little brass contraption, as both the Americans knew; for these fellows recognized how handy such an affair must prove on a wet day when it was almost impossible ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... attempted; an instance of pertinacious rascality which it is not amiss to mention, and which would have diverted us by its very absurdity, had we not been too tired to find amusement in any thing but supper and beds. In the course of this day and the next, we heard, for the first time, the Provencal patois, which seems a bad compound of French, Spanish, and Italian, with an original gibberish of their own. As far, indeed, as a slight and partial observation enables me to judge, I have been much struck by a similarity which the inhabitants of the Mediterranean coast ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... here," he answered in his patois, "under the forester, all my days; so has my father before me, and so on, as many generations as I can count up. I could show you the very house in the village here, ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... country to Tom, although the excitement and peril made travelling a delight. Moreover, the people were kind and friendly, although they spoke such a barbarous patois that it was difficult to ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... said Mother Carke (I soften her patois), "I mun tell ye there's ill folk watchin' ye. What's auld Farmer Lew about, he doesna get t' sir" (the clergyman) "to baptise thee? If he lets Sunda' next pass, I'm afeared ye'll never be sprinkled nor signed wi' cross, while there's ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... as if you wished your turn was come," said he, in a patois of English and French, which Leonard could easily understand, although he had always turned a deaf ear to Gaston's attempts to instruct him in the latter language. However, a ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pleased with my destination, that he desired to know my name; and this I told him with all the injunction of secrecy I could convey; but he could no more pronounce it than I could speak his name. It occurred to me that perhaps he spoke a French patois, and I asked him; but he only shook his head. He would own neither to German nor Irish. The happy thought came to me of inquiring if he knew English. But he shook ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... relation of the guide's. Paoli was a tall man with a slight cough, and the melancholy look of a consumptive; he showed them their room, a miserable-looking chamber built of stone, but which was handsome for this country, where no refinement is known. He was expressing in his Corsican patois (a mixture of French and Italian) his pleasure at receiving them, when a clear voice interrupted him, and a dark little woman, with big black eyes, a sun-kissed skin, and a slender waist, hurried forward, kissed Jeanne, shook Julien by the hand ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... sing Neapolitan, and when they wanted to say something very particular communicated with each other in an ingenious dialect of their own, an elastic spoken cipher which Pemberton at first took for some patois of one of their countries, but which he "caught on to" as he would not have grasped provincial development of ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... silently but dexterously putting to order the large upper room, which served Pere Francis Xavier as study and dormitory, she paused before his collection of agates and minerals, and stroking the stones, said in her soft French and Indian patois, "Pretty, pretty." Father Xavier was seated at the great open window, looking over the top of his book away across the breezy lake. He heard the words, and knew that she was looking at him from the corner of her eye, but his only reply was a deeper scowl and a lowering of his glance ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... it was a patois, I knew just what he meant. It was equivalent to saying that he couldn't ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... over forty," Hugh told himself, "and her voice is young. So was his always." It was also very natural and moving and not untinged by what Miss Fowler called the Southern patois. ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... agony of sudden terror she pointed to the hallway, and laid her finger upon her lip. And then, in a hoarse whisper, the woman told, in her patois, broken with sobs, of the alternate spells of fainting and exhaustion which had brought Irma Gluyas nigh to ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... now. Old and young, matron and maid, they all sallied forth to lend a hand, and, with such laughing and screaming as is apt to attend feminine efforts, enabled us to launch the boat. In spite of their patois of bad Portuguese, we contrived to establish a mutual understanding. A fine, tall girl, with a complexion of deep olive, clear, large eyes, and teeth beautifully white and even, stood by my side; and, like the Ancient Mariner and his sister's son, ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... Porteous had loaded their muskets, received the unexpected reply, "Ou, juist sic as ane shutes dukes and sic like fules wi'." The answer was considered as a contempt of the House of Lords, and the poor provost would have suffered from misconception of his patois, had not the Duke of Argyle (who must have been exceedingly amused) explained that the worthy magistrate's expression, when rendered into English, did not apply to Peers and Idiots but to ducks and water-fowl. The circumstance is referred to by Sir W. Scott ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... deference and ceremony. Their appearance was altogether horrible, they wore leather aprons, which were sprinkled all over with blood, they had large horse pistols in their belts, and a dirk and sabre by their sides. Their looks were full of ferocity, and they spoke a harsh dissonant patois language. Over their cups, they talked about the bloody business of that day's occupation, in the course of which they drew out their dirks, and wiped from their handles, clots of blood and hair. Madame O—— sat with them, undismayed by their frightful deportment. ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... curious to note how the Englishman makes his progress abroad. He is so insular that instead of learning the language and adopting the customs of the country he is in, he makes the indigenous population adopt his! He does not, for example, know much French, but he has evolved a sort of patois—much nearer English than French—that enables the inhabitants to understand him and comprehend ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... admired and noticed at the railway-stations and in the carriages. You never hear English spoken except among a few officials, and a knowledge of French is the first necessity of life here. Unhappily, there is a patois in use among the creoles and other natives which is very confusing. It is made up of a strange jumble of Eastern languages, grafted on a debased kind of French, and gabbled with the rapidity of lightning and a great deal of gesticulation. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... near rushes, waiting for pickerel to strike, or waded a bog to a trout stream at the other end of the lake, hid in a forest full of windfalls and hoary moss and tropical growths of brake and fern. Gougou had new strong clothes and buckskin shoes. For the patois had not been a week in camp before Brown went to St. Ignace and brought back denim and white and black calico, which he presented ...
— The Cursed Patois - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Confound it! He's illegible enough in French, but if he takes it into his head to go off in Italian, and that Corsican patois to boot! I thought I only ran the risk of going crazy, but then I should become stupid, too. Well, you've got it," and he read the whole sentence consecutively: "'The Nile, from Assouan to a distance of twelve miles north of Cairo, flows ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... holidays; and the place, the people, and the life delighted Fleeming. He worked hard at German, which he had much forgotten since he was a boy; and what is highly characteristic, equally hard at the patois, in which he learned to excel. He won a prize at a Schutzen-fest; and though he hunted chamois without much success, brought down more interesting game in the shape of the Styrian peasants, and in particular of his gillie, Joseph. This Joseph was much of a character; ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of soldiers stood talking and laughing. The greater part of the civilians appeared to be Spaniards, but there was a large sprinkling of Jews in the dress of those of Barbary, and here and there a turbaned Moor. There were gangs of sailors likewise, Genoese, judging from the patois which they were speaking, though I occasionally distinguished the sound of "tou logou sas," by which I knew there were Greeks at hand, and twice or thrice caught a glimpse of the red cap and blue silken petticoats of the mariner from the Romaic isles. On still I hurried, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... where it was most needed—among the operatives and "the common people." One of these latter, a hawker of fish, called Richard Turner, stood, in a very amusing and unexpected way, sponsor for the society. Richard was fluent of speech, and, if his language was the broadest patois, it was, nevertheless, of the most convincing character. He always spoke well, and, if authorized words failed him, readily coined what he needed. One night while making a very fervent speech, he said: "No half-way measures here. Nothing but the te-te ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... saw many strange things. More than once, he spoke of the existence of a glaciere at no great distance, and talked of taking us to see it; but we were sceptical on the subject, imagining that glaciere was his patois for glacier, and knowing that anything of the glacier kind was out of the question. At last, however, on a hot day in August, we set off with him, armed, at his request, with candles; and, after two or three hours of pine forests, and grass glades, and ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... which we mounted on mules. In talking to an old woman who brought us strawberries, I was surprised to hear her pronounce the Italian proverb, "Poco a poco fa lontano nel giorno." I thought she must have been beyond the Alps—no, she had never been out of her own mountains. The patois of these people is very agreeable—a mixture of the Italian fond diminutives and accents on the ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... fellow exile profitably engaged in teaching French, and consulted him what he ought to do to earn a living. The answer was, "Become a professor!" "A professor?" answered the mason—"I, who am only a workman, speaking but a patois! Surely you are jesting?" "On the contrary, I am quite serious," said the other, "and again I advise you—become a professor; place yourself under me, and I will undertake to teach you how to teach others." "No, no!" ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... diverse reincarnations; but sooner or later found again and known as soon as found to both. No wooing is necessary in such a case—they meet, they look, they love, and naturally and immediately take up their old, but unforgotten love patois. They do not need to learn its sweet, broken syllables, its hand clasps and sighs, its glances and kisses; they are more natural to them than was the grammared language they learned ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... that taint the air and brutalize life elsewhere, were in this quaint old settlement unknown. Sweet thought, pure speech, went hand in hand, clad in nervous, pithy old English, or a "patois" of the French, mellowed and enlarged by their constant use of the liquid Indian tongues, flowing like soft-sounding waters about them, their daily talk came ever welcome to ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... him an unintelligible answer in the country patois, and passing between them he entered the cottage. On the table stood a large jug of water, and lifting it he took a long draught. There was a sudden crash, and he fell heavily, struck down from behind with a heavy mallet by one of the women. He was ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... away up on the hill of Wawel, above the river Vistula (Wisla) I prowled about among the crypts with a curious specimen of beadledom who ran off long unintelligible histories in atrocious Viennese patois about every solemn tomb by which we stood. So far as I was concerned it might just as well have been the functionary who herds small droves of visitors in Westminster Abbey. I never listen to these ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... patois French, the woman in her native Cree language. For convenience we translate their conversation as near as may be into the English in which they were wont to converse with the Scotch settlers who, some time before, had been sent out by the Earl of Selkirk to colonise ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... the English is, of course, not any one of its prior states. So first let it be remarked that it is highly probable that what may have been the best of English once may now by some be counted as a weak, inconsequent patois, ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... was a second time awakened by further disputation in the compound. The troopers were squabbling amongst themselves; he was able to make this much out in spite of the fact that the sepoys, recruited exclusively from the native population of Khandawar, spoke a patois of Hindi so corrupt that even an expert in Oriental languages would experience difficulty in trying to interpret it. Amber did not weary himself with the task, but presently lifted up his voice and demanded silence, desiring to be informed if his ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... Lombardy and came to Domo d'Ossola, where a strange German-Italian patois was spoken. It was in the middle of April, and we were warned that it would be very dangerous to cross the Simplon, but we went on all night in a carriage on sleigh-runners, through intervals of snowstorm. Now and then we came to rushing ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... points; he wore a red tie; his thick brown clothes might have been bought ready made in the Edgeware Road; evidently he had honoured the occasion with his Sunday best. While his comrades jabbered together, in patois which flung in a French word now and then, like a sop to Cerberus, he spoke not a word; yet I saw his lips tighten, as he laid his arm over the neck of a small but well-built mule of a colour which matched its master's clothing. The ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... an intimate acquaintance with all the different branches of warfare, as well as a keen memory for slang and patois. He nourished but one fond hope in his bosom—a hope which in moments of expansion he imparts, if he considers you worthy ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... Theatre. I trust it is no heresy to say that I am somewhat sceptical as to the powers of euphoniacal criticism which that audience possesses. If one in ten, even of the box company, can really distinguish the true bocca romana from the patois of the Venetian gondolieri or the Neapolitan lazzaroni, it is, I am persuaded, as much as the truth will justify. In fact it is not the audience that is so critical: it is the associated band of foreign parasites who attach themselves to our aristocracy with the tenacity of leeches, as purveyors ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... hardly conceive (said the Captain, swearing a great oath) how devout and how learned I was in those days; I talked Latin faster than my own beautiful patois of Alsacian French; I could utterly overthrow in argument every Protestant (heretics we called them) parson in the neighborhood, and there was a confounded sprinkling of these unbelievers in our part of the country. I prayed half a dozen ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Corsican patois, stopped Lucien at the moment when he was springing under the portico. He looked at his compatriot, and recognized him. At the first word that Bartolomeo said in his ear, he took the ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... I told him. "He's speaking a sort of patois, you see. He wants to know if you will have the great kindness to drop anchor alongside him until morning, for it is forbidden to pass through the mine-fields in the dark, and he hopes that you will have ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... in this very hotel, but, alas! he is now gone, who sang (from morning to night, as my informant said with a shrug at the recollection) what but 'S IST LANGE HER, the German version of Auld Lang Syne; so you see, madame, the finest lyric ever written will make its way out of whatsoever corner of patois it found its ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... admitting French poems after 1694. At the end of the sixteenth century, Provencal poetry underwent a revival; in our own time, poets such as Jasmin, Aubanel, Roumanille and above all, Mistral, have raised their language from a patois to a literary power. The work of the felibres has been to synthetise the best elements of the various local dialects and to create a literary language by a process not wholly dissimilar to that described at the ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... everything is done by steam. Starting from the engine room at the bottom, the visitor next enters the receiving room, where early in the morning the chattering, patois-speaking natives come to deliver the flowers for the supply of which they have contracted. The next room is occupied with a number of steam-jacketed pans, a mill, and hydraulic presses. Next comes the still room, the stills in which are all heated by steam. In the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... PATOIS.—G. The great impediment to popular instruction in France, is the multiplicity of patois, and the tenacity of the peasantry for them. The same objection exists to the use of so many Indian dialects by such numbers of petty tribes. Pity these were not all abolished. They can never prosper ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... wax, curled up into his ears, two big plaits of hair, braided from his temples, which, escaping from his shako, hung down to his chest, and with all this an air...! An air of rakishness which was increased by his speech, which was rattled out in a sort of Franco-Alsatian patois. This last did not surprise my father, as he knew that the 1st Hussars were the former regiment of Bercheny, which in earlier days recruited only Germans, and where, until 1793, all the orders were given in German, which was the language ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... the most touching thing I ever heard." The melody was Gaelic, slow and plaintive, and though Maggie gave the English words with her own patois, the beauty and simplicity of the song was by no means injured. "Put by the books, David," said Allan. "I have no heart now for dry-as-dust lessons. Let us speak of Maggie. How is she going to live when you go ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... and FELICE BOUDREAUX, sisters, were once slaves on the plantation of Dermat Martine, near Opelousas, Louisiana. As their owners were French, they are more inclined to use a Creole patois than English. ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... him—and you should have seen how the disdainful curve of his nose was accentuated at every glance in his direction—Garrigou the singer, a countryman of Jansoulet, distinguished as a ventriloquist, who sang Figaro in the patois of the South and had not his like for imitating animals. A little farther on, Cabassu, another fellow-countryman, a short, thick-set man, with a bull-neck, a biceps worthy of Michel Angelo, who resembled equally a Marseillais ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... this opinion by the peculiarity of the dialect which Mrs. Baliol used. It was Scottish—decidedly Scottish—often containing phrases and words little used in the present day. But then her tone and mode of pronunciation were as different from the usual accent of the ordinary Scotch PATOIS, as the accent of St. James's is from that of Billingsgate. The vowels were not pronounced much broader than in the Italian language, and there was none of the disagreeable drawl which is so offensive to southern ears. In short, ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... thought we might return to that district of country where my German fashion of speaking French would excite least observation. I thought that Amante herself had something peculiar in her accent, which I had heard M. de la Tourelle sneer at as Norman patois; but I said not a word beyond agreeing to her proposal that we should bend our steps towards Germany. Once there, we should, I thought, be safe. Alas! I forgot the unruly time that was overspreading all Europe, overturning all law, and all the ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... might elect to accompany her to Cavloccio. She would willingly have paid him for loss of time. Her ear was becoming better tuned each moment to his strange patois. Though he often gave a soft Italian inflection to the harsh German syllables, she grasped his meaning quite literally. She had read so much about Switzerland that she knew how Michel Croz was killed while descending the Matterhorn ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... sleeping very heavily, for he awoke at my first call and came to the side of my bunk; but I at once perceived that it was not the man I had before seen; this fellow's voice and manner were surly in the extreme, and as he bent over me he gruffly demanded, in a scarcely comprehensible French patois, what I wanted. I answered, in French, that I should like something to eat and drink; whereupon he produced, from a sort of cupboard in the darkest corner of the forecastle, a bowl and a large can of soup, together with a wooden tray of flinty biscuit ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... admirable skill the plan of a libretto. His own voice was of the harshest and most inharmonious texture; but by his advice and instructions he formed some of the first singers in Italy. His language was a Milanese patois; but he found means to make himself excellently understood by the kings and emperors, with whom he carried on negotiations upon a footing of perfect equality. It was a great treat to see him seated in his box at San ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... good-humour and contentment, and with a general look of affluence over her whole comfortable person. She spoke in a loud voice which made itself heard over the remaining din in the garden and out, and with a patois between Scotch and Irish, which puzzled me, until I found from her discourse that she was the widow of a linen manufacturer, in ...
— Honor O'callaghan • Mary Russell Mitford
... me do, Senor Rufino?" he asks in a patois of Spanish, which many Chaco Indians can speak; himself better than common, from his long and frequent intercourse with ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... were their sweethearts. In those foul little mining towns the British troops had liked their billets, because of the girls there. London boys and Scots "kept company" with pretty slatterns, who stole their badges for keepsakes, and taught them a base patois of French, and had a smudge of tears on their cheeks when the boys went away for a spell in the ditches of death. They were kind-hearted little sluts ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... A dirty little launch full of uniforms was coming alongside. Until the yellow flag—a polite symbol in that port—should be hauled down Simpson would be left alone. The uniforms had climbed to the deck and were chattering in a bastard patois behind him; now and then the smell of the town struck across the smells of the sea and the bush like the flick of a snake's tail. Simpson covered his eyes for a moment, and immediately the vision of the island as he had seen it at dawn swam in his mind. But ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... spoken, and traffic was conducted in a patois of all the dialects. Cloth, powder, lead, knives, and brandy were exchanged for skins and furs. A gentleman who attended one of these fairs told me that the scene was full of interest and abounded in amusing incidents. Of late years the navigation of the Amoor has discontinued the fair of Pul. ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... Jacob, a born Serf, deputed from his native Jura Mountains to thank the National Assembly for enfranchising them. On his bleached worn face are ploughed the furrowings of one hundred and twenty years. He has heard dim patois-talk, of immortal Grand-Monarch victories; of a burnt Palatinate, as he toiled and moiled to make a little speck of this Earth greener; of Cevennes Dragoonings; of Marlborough going to the war. Four generations have bloomed out, and loved and ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle |
