"Common noun" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to every individual of its class, hence it is a common noun; it is the name of a male being, hence it is a gender noun, masculine; it denotes only one person, therefore singular number; it expresses possession or ownership, and ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... forgotten, their general characteristics effaced, and we no longer think of them at all, but rather of the person in whom they are assimilated; hence, the title of a drama can seldom be anything else than a proper noun. On the other hand, many comedies have a common noun as their title: l'Avare, le Joueur, etc. Were you asked to think of a play capable of being called le Jaloux, for instance, you would find that Sganarelle or George Dandin would occur to your mind, but not Othello: le Jaloux could only be the title of a comedy. ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... as, girl, Sarah. The name girl is held in common by all girls, and hence does not distinguish one girl from another. The name Sarah is not thus held in common; it does distinguish one girl from other girls. Any name which belongs in common to all things of a class we call a Common Noun; and any particular name of an individual, distinguishing this individual from others of its class, we call a Proper Noun. The "proper, or individual, names" which in Rule 1, Lesson 8, you were told to begin with capital letters are ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... speciality of each deity and was very often the only thing known about him. In the course of time as the original name of the deity began to be thought of entirely as a proper name without any meaning, rather than as a common noun explaining the nature of the god to which it was attached, it became necessary to add to the original name some adjective which would adequately describe the god and do the work which the name by itself had originally done. And as the nature of ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... of de-assimilation takes other forms, one of the most common of which is the restoring their foreign plural forms to words borrowed from Greek, Latin, and Italian. No common noun is genuinely assimilated into our language and made available for the use of the whole community until it has an English plural, and thousands of indispensable words have been thus incorporated. We no longer write ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English |
