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More "Grammatical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dead, and she had had so much wealth to dispense, for her father was rich beyond counting, and she controlled his household and helped to regulate his charities. She saw that he was not of the laboring classes, that he had known better days; his speech, if abrupt and cheerless, was grammatical. ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... done? you? or he? or I? This can only be inferred, for it is not stated. If a speaker wishes to make his personal allusion blind, he can always do so with the greatest ease and without the slightest degree of grammatical incorrectness. "Caught cold," "better ask," "honorably sorry," "feel hungry," and all the common sentences of daily life are entirely free from that personal definiteness which an Occidental language necessitates. We shall see later that the absence of the personal element from the wording ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... first, in this passage, the prelude, including verses 1, 2, and 3. We need not discuss the grammatical connection of these verses, nor the relation of verses 2 and 3 to the following section. However that be settled, the result, for our present purpose, is the same. Mark considers that John's mission is the beginning of the gospel. Here are two noteworthy ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... stages. Only half the work of the evolution of language is completed. There is, indeed, no tribe so undeveloped as to use the primitive forms of speech. The most savage of the races of mankind have made some progress in the art of combining words, gained some ideas of syntax and grammatical forms. Yet in certain instances the progress has been very slight, and in all we can see the living traces of the earlier method of speech ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... us could eat a morsel of the food they had there—did you ever hear of such a thing as having pie and preserves for breakfast?—and Oliver says it used to make him sick to see me in the midst of all of those people. They came from all over the country, and hardly anybody could speak a grammatical sentence. The man who sat next to me always said "he don't" and "I ain't feeling good to-day" and once even "I done it"—can you imagine such a thing? Every other word was "guess," and yet they had the impertinence to laugh at me when I said "reckon," which, I ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... a corrupt jargon of Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and Hindu words, first used by the Mongols, after the conquest, in their intercourse with the natives. Many of the principal languages of Asia are totally unconnected with the Sanscrit, both in words and grammatical structure; these are mostly of the great Tartar family, at the head of which there is good reason for placing the Chinese ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... a foreign accent, and something of a foreign idiom; but his ideas and feelings forced their way regardless of grammatical precision, and I thought his foreign accent agreeable. To an Englishman, what accent that conveys the praise of Shakspeare can fail to be agreeable? The most certain method by which a foreigner an introduce ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... stern and severe moralist as he was, was not a strict Calvinist. Anyone who takes the trouble to read 'The Manual of Religious Belief in a Dialogue between Father and Son, compiled by William Burness, Farmer, Mount Oliphant, and transcribed with Grammatical Corrections by John Murdoch, Teacher,' will see that the man was of too loving and kindly a nature to be strictly orthodox. What was rigid and unlovely to him in the Calvinism of the Scottish Church of that ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... me. That's not quite grammatical, I believe, but it's usual. Good-morning, Maxwell," he went on, holding out his hand. "I've come round early for two reasons. In the first place I want to be the first to congratulate you, and in the second place I want you to give me ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... illegitimate and licentious disregard of which, as recklessly manifested in "It is Never too Late to Mend," indicated a disposition to entirely subvert the established morals of the language. It is pleasant to see how unreservedly Mr. Reade has abandoned his functions as apostle of grammatical free-love. Of tricks of typography there are also fewer, although these yet remain in an excess which good taste can hardly sanction. We often find whole platoons of admiration-points stretching out in line, to give extraordinary emphasis ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... the contrary, be said that the divine doctrine, as queen and regent of the rest, better keeps her state apart, that she ought to be sovereign throughout, not subsidiary and suffragan, and that, peradventure, grammatical, rhetorical, logical examples may elsewhere be more suitably chosen, as also the material for the stage, games, and public entertainments, than from so sacred a matter; that divine reasons are considered with greater veneration and attention by themselves, and in their own proper style, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... anything after that, and as it really is a splendid opportunity, I made the bargain, and we began. I took four lessons, and then I stuck fast in a grammatical bog. The Professor was very patient with me, but it must have been torment to him, and now and then he'd look at me with such an expression of mild despair that it was a toss-up with me whether to laugh or cry. I tried both ways, and ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... be separate when used in regular grammatical relations and construction unless they are jointly applied in some ...
— Compound Words - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #36 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... these restorers of ancient texts, these disentanglers of grammatical subtleties, these divers among ancient chronicles and forgotten charters—what is it that they do but to multiply and revive useless knowledge, and to make it increasingly difficult for a man to arrive at a broad and philosophical view, or ever attack ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "Min Hakk la-hu Asl an 'and-na huna Rajil," a thoroughly popular phrase. "Min Hakk" and "min Hakkan," where in the adverbial meaning of Hakkan its grammatical form as an accusative is so far forgotten that it allows itself to be governed by the preposition "min," is rendered by Bocthor "tout de bon," "serieusement." "Asl" root has here the meaning of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... character of being dumb, but I found it necessary to pretend to be deaf also, as they were constantly addressing me, and of course I could not understand a word they said. In the meantime, Bigg talked away for both of us; and although I very much doubt if his language was particularly grammatical, he seemed to get on famously with the savages; and acting on an idea which came into his head, he confirmed the notion they had adopted that I was a person ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... began to read Arabic' This seems easy in the telling, but in reality it was a long, a monotonous, an exhausting process. Think of the expenditure of hours and eyesight over barbarous alphabets and horrid grammatical details. One must needs have had a mind of leather to endure such philological and linguistic wear and tear. Priestley's mind not only cheerfully endured it but actually toughened under it. The man was never afraid of work. Take as an illustration his experience ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... of the translator becomes doubly hazardous in case of translating a European language into Japanese, or vice versa. Between any of the European languages and Japanese there is no visible kinship in word-form, significance, grammatical system, rhetorical arrangements. It may be said that the inspiration of the two languages is totally different. A want of similarity of customs, habits, traditions, national sentiments and traits makes the work of translation all the more difficult. A novel ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... whereof had obtained preeminence in grammar, which there had its origin and received its development,—this city, which gave to the world the master of this noble science, whose priority no one contests,—does not now possess a single preacher who pronounces the Sunday sermon according to grammatical rules! ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... than 490 books, but of these only two have come down to us, and one of them in a mutilated form: 1. De Re Rustica, a work on Agriculture, in three books, written when the author was 80 years old; 2. De Lingua Latina, a grammatical treatise which extended to 24 books, but six only have been preserved, and these are in a mutilated condition. The remains of this treatise are particularly valuable. They have preserved many terms and forms which would otherwise have been altogether ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... so to speak, all gloves. He must cover up her coarse speech, as he had covered up her coarse hands. He owed that to the gloves; it was the least he could do for them. So, whenever Mary Ann made a mistake, Lancelot corrected her. He found these grammatical dialogues not uninteresting, and a vent for his ill-humour against publishers to boot. Very often his verbal corrections sounded astonishingly like reprimands. Here, again, Mary Ann was forearmed by her feeling that she deserved them. She would have been proud had ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... his translation of Milton, with a dedication to Queen Victoria. His other works bear witness to the genuineness of his inspiration and piety, and the diligence of his study: they are poems, poetic translations from the Italian, religious essays, and grammatical treatises. ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... unremitting. Few men did so much and so well, at this period: for while he was framing the statutes by which his little community was to be governed, he did not fail to keep the presses of Wynkyn De Worde and Pynson pretty constantly at work, by publishing the grammatical treatises of Grocyn, Linacre, Stanbridge, Lilye, Holte, Whittington, and others—for the benefit, as well of the public, as of his own particular circle. I take it, his library must have been both choice and copious; for books now began to be multiplied ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... yourself," he added, pleadingly. "That word sathan, twice repeated, can it be anything else than Satan? Yehudas, what is that but Jews? And then homox, how very near to the Latin homo! I think, too, that I have even got a notion of some of the grammatical forms of the language. That termination of en, as in deluden, salubren, seems to me the sign of the present tense of the plural form of the verb. That other termination of tar, as in ebuntar, carantar, I suppose to be the sign of the infinitive. Depend upon it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... rub! If you said 'what,' you would be more grammatical. Norton swears that it was not human, and, indeed, from the scratches on his throat, I should be ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... frankness that rejected the idea of any concealment on her own part, so that we talked of ourselves, of our prospects, of the journey, of the weather, of each other—of everything but our host and hostess. It must be confessed that Miggles's conversation was never elegant, rarely grammatical, and that at times she employed expletives the use of which had generally been yielded to our sex. But they were delivered with such a lighting-up of teeth and eyes, and were usually followed by a laugh—a laugh peculiar to Miggles—so frank ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... The variation in the forms of the different parts of speech to show grammatical relation, is called INFLECTION. Though there is some inflection in English, grammatical relation is usually shown by ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... name may be either from the ancient English or the low Dutch; if the one, by tradition, if the other, from the use of it by medical men. Cancrum is an odd grammatical blunder; being, in reality, nothing but the accusative of Cancer, put instead of the nominative. The latter name was, as is well known, frequently applied by the older surgeons, in a vague manner, to any terrific and unmanageable ulcer; and, in particular, ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... trespassing on courtesy when I express a fear that a sentence like this exhibits the writer's entire want of acquaintance with the grammatical system employed by the great poet and the writers of his age. We must not judge Shakspeare's grammar by Cobbett or Murray, but by the vernacular language of his own times. It is perfectly well known that Shakspeare constantly uses the passive for the active participle, in the same ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 39. Saturday, July 27, 1850 • Various
... We are perfectly aware that Thiers has the right to speak thus, and that all combatants are not belligerents. But what! Is it as just as it is legal to argue the point so closely, when the lives of so many men are at stake; and is a small grammatical concession so serious a thing, that sooner than make it one should expose oneself to all the horrible feelings of remorse that the most rightful conqueror experiences at ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... tutor to the grandsons of Augustus (Sueton. Gramm. 17), was the author of Fasti, fragments of which have been discovered near Praeneste, and which were used by Ovid for his poem of that name. Of Verrius' grammatical works, the greatest was that entitled De verborum significatu (Gell. v. 17, 1), arranged alphabetically. It is lost, but we possess part of an abridgment (nine out of sixteen Books) made by Sex. Pompeius Festus before the third century A.D. The ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... too priggishly grammatical Lady Jane; "nowadays those sort of people dress like duchesses, and think themselves as good ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Preston, as curate of St. Paul's, and in 1859 he was appointed incumbent of St. Luke's. Mr. Winlaw is a slender, carefully-organised, cute, sharp-eyed man; is inclined to be fastidious, punctillious, and cold; is a ready speaker; talks with grammatical accuracy and laboured precision; is rather wordy and unctuous; can draw out his sentences to a high pitch of solemnity, and tone them off in syllabic whispers; has an active physiognomical expression—can turn the muscles of his face in all directions; shakes his head considerably in ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... far as these are known, must be considered; no changes made in the text save through critical emendation, nor any translations offered not supported by accepted texts, nor any liberties be taken with grammatical constructions. By such plain tests as these Mrs. Eddy's use of the Scriptures will not bear examination. She violates all recognized canons of Biblical interpretation on ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... Meighen, who owned the rights of Othello and Merry Wives, were allowed to take shares. The editors of the Second Folio made only such alterations in the text of the First Folio as they thought necessary to make it more "correct." The vast majority of the changes are unimportant grammatical corrections, some of them obviously ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... a grammatical education, and been brought up as a peruke-maker from my earliest years—besides having seen a deal of high life, and the world in general, in carrying false curls, bandeaux, and other artificial head-gear paraphernalia, in bandboxes to boarding schools, and so on—a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... spirits being extreme, it was not surprising that they should feign this ignorance in order that they might be less pressed with questions; and that in their answers they had committed various solecisms and other grammatical faults in order to bring contempt upon themselves, so that out of this disdain the holy doctors might leave them in quiet. Their hatred is so inveterate that just before performing one of their miraculous feats, they suspended a rope from ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... a series of books to be purchased separately. Every page has a coloured cut of a very gay order. Cottages have yellow roofs and pink doors; and shopkeepers are dressed in crimson and orange. Some of the grammatical illustrations are droll: a heavy old fellow, cross-legged, with his hands folded on a stick is myself; Punch is an active verb; a wedding might have illustrated the conjunction; four in hand is a preposition. In ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 533, Saturday, February 11, 1832. • Various
... the psalms themselves, were worthy; but the versification was certainly the most villainous of all the many defects, though the sense was so confused that many portions were unintelligible save with the friendly aid of the prose version of the Bible; and the grammatical construction, especially in the use of pronouns, was also far from correct. Such amazing verses as these ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... the first pages of the book, there were grammatical lapses when Old Crow, apparently from earnestness of feeling, fell into colloquial speech. This was always when he got so absorbed in his subject that he lacked the patience to go back and rewrite according to rules he certainly knew but which had ceased ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... grave, and a spirit, bright as the seraphim that surround the throne of Omnipotence, ascended to the bosom of his God." There can be no doubt of the deep sincerity of this tribute, whatever question there may be of its grammatical construction and its rhetoric, and although the date is erroneous. The ratification of the Constitution of the United States by the Virginia Convention was on June 25, not on June 28. It is the misfortune of ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... Coplande; and about 1527 Giles du Guez or du Wes (anglicized Dewes), French teacher to the Lady Mary, afterwards Queen Mary, published his 'Introductorie for to lerne to rede, to pronounce and to speke French trewly.' In addition to grammatical rules and dialogues, it contains a select vocabulary English and French. In 1514, Mary Tudor, younger sister of Henry VIII, became the unwilling bride of Louis XII of France. To initiate the princess in ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray
... of standing by itself as the predicate of a proposition; as when we say, Snow is white; and occasionally even as the subject, for we may say, White is an agreeable color. The adjective is often said to be so used by a grammatical ellipsis: Snow is white, instead of Snow is a white object; White is an agreeable color, instead of, A white color, or, The color white, is agreeable. The Greeks and Romans were allowed, by the rules of their language, to employ this ellipsis universally ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... abominable roads; the romantic aspect of scenery never engages their attention. It is even known that Julius Caesar, when he returned to his legions in Gaul, employed his time while crossing the Alps in writing his grammatical treatise 'De Analogia.'" ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... your Thesis put me in mind of my debt to you Why did you ——[60]. I will punish you for it, by telling you that your Latin wants correction[61]. In the beginning, Spei alterae, not to urge that it should be prima, is not grammatical: alterae should be alteri. In the next line you seem to use genus absolutely, for what we call family, that is, for illustrious extraction, I doubt without authority. Homines nullius originis, for Nullis orti ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... produced Virgil's Eclogues, Cicero's De Senectute and De Officiis, Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae and De disciplina scholarium, Aesop, a poem by Baptista Mantuanus, the 'Christian Virgil', Alan of Lille's Parabolae, Alexander, two grammatical treatises by Synthius and the Epistola mythologica ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... some few remarkable expressions, and an attempt at introducing fine words in their every-day conversation, the lower order of Yankees have a decided advantage over our English peasantry in the use of grammatical language: they speak better English than you will hear from persons of the same class in any part of England, Ireland, or Scotland; a fact that we should be unwilling, I suppose, to ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... the tinkle. I object to the poetic license which performs a Germanic divorce between subject and verb, so that instead of a complete thought which can be mastered before another is set before the brain, there is a twist in the grammatical sequence that requires a conscious effort of will to keep the original thread. The world is too busy to do this; reading must be a relaxation, not a study.... When poetry conforms in its mental tone to the spirit of the times; when it reflects the life and more or less the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Freshman English that turned his hair gray," said Mrs. Bullfinch. "Having so many students come to college without knowing how to write a grammatical sentence was a ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson
... early investigators did not fathom all the niceties of the language, and the work of grammatical investigation has gone on continuously under the auspices of a constantly growing band of workers. Doubtless much still remains to be done; but the essential thing, from the present standpoint, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... boundaries of virtues and talents, vices and defects; and should explain the reason and origin of that distinction. But in order to excuse myself from this undertaking, which would, at last, prove only a grammatical enquiry, I shall subjoin the four following reflections, which shall contain all that I intend to ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... the one to whom it was addressed feel in as bad a humor as an author does when he finds a grammatical error in one of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the excellencies of the ancient fathers and school-men do all concenter in them: For his doctrine carries light, his reproofs are weighty, and his exhortations powerful, and though they are not in such an accurate or grammatical style as some may expect, yet that may be easily accounted for, if we consider, (1.) The great alteration and embellishment in the style of the English language since his time. And (2.) There can be no ground to doubt but they must be far inferior unto what they were when delivered ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... husbandry, even of music and design, so that the bodily activities of boys became relegated to the sphere of mere games and pastimes; but as books usurped more and more of the hours of boyhood, so the instructors of youth fell more and more into the fatally easy path of formal and grammatical treatment. The subject-matter of education was indeed literature, and the very noblest literatures, mainly those of Greece and Rome: but there was little of literary or humane interest about the study of it; its meaning and spirit ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... grammaticae of Priscian (Priscianus Caesariensis) formed the standard grammatical and philological textbook of the Middle Ages, its importance being fairly indicated by the fact that today there exist about a thousand manuscript ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... way, then, he accepted as axioms the social tenets held by his mother, or the business methods practised by his father. He believed that elderly men should speak precisely, and in grammatical, but colourless English. He believed also that people should, in society, conduct themselves according to the fashion-plate pattern designed by Mrs. de Laney. He believed these things, not because he was a fool, or shallow, or lacking in humour, or snobbish, ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... on account of the designation (of the Self as the agent) in actions. If not so, there would be change of grammatical expression. ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... grammar in a direct and simple manner, and within the smallest compass consistent with scholarly standards. While intended primarily for the secondary school, it has not neglected the needs of the college student, and aims to furnish such grammatical information as is ordinarily required in ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... purpose. My task is rather to point out the religious significance of the self-revelation of God contained in the name, and how it becomes the foundation of Israel's deliverance, existence, and prerogatives. Whatever opinions are adopted as to the correct form of the name and other grammatical and philological questions, there is no doubt that it mainly reveals God as self-existent and unchangeable. He draws His being from no external source, nor 'borrows leave to be.' Creatures are what they are made or grow to be; they are what they were not; they are what ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... orthographical? Had Harry found some wonderful instructor, such as exists in the present lucky times, and who would improve his writing in six lessons? My view of the case, after deliberately examining the two notes, is this: No. 1, in which there appears a trifling grammatical slip ("the kind, friends who I found and whom took me in"), must have been re-written from a rough copy which had probably undergone the supervision of a tutor or friend. The more artless composition, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... we tried to put the sheets together in their order, going by the grammatical sequence of the end of one page with the beginning of the next, but rarely could we obtain more than three or four of such consecutive pages. We were confused, too, by at least ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... religion. What we do want is humility, docility, reverence for God, and love for man. These are sown broadcast amongst human hearts. Now, these apply themselves to the sense of Scripture, not to its grammatical niceties. But if so, even that case shows indirectly how little could depend upon the mere verbal attire of the Bible, when the chief masters of verbal science were so ready to go astray—riding on the billows ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... letters have been translated, to the best of my ability, verbatim. In the not infrequent instances where I have been unable to extract any intelligible meaning, on grammatical principles, from the words of my author, I have put in the text the nearest approximation that I could discover to his meaning, and placed the unintelligible words in a note, hoping that my readers may be more fortunate in their interpretation than ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... may be. As Hunt said, "What do I care about the grammar if you've got something to say?" The important thing is to say something, and if you do really say something, and do really completely and precisely express it, as far as a painter is concerned it will be grammatical. If not to-day, the grammar will come round to it to-morrow. Henry Ward Beecher is reported to have answered to a criticism on grammatical slips in the heat of eloquence, "Young man, if the English language gets in the way of the expression of my thought, so much the worse for ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... which had just then taken possession of Mr. Browning's mind, and we have sometimes to struggle through a group of sentences out of which he has so laboured to squeeze every unnecessary word, that their grammatical connection is broken up, and they present a compact mass of meaning which without previous knowledge it is almost impossible to construe. We are also puzzled by an abridged, interjectional, way of carrying on the historical part of the narrative; by the author's habit of ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... prescription: or, if not quite so tragical as this, it is at least to sit voluntarily in the stocks with Sir Hudibras, and dare the world's contempt; while fashionable—or unfashionable idiots, who are scarcely capable of a grammatical answer to a dinner invitation, (those formidably confounded he's and him's!)—think themselves privileged to join some inane laugh against a clever, but not yet famous, author, because, forsooth, one character in ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... infrequency with which misspelled words appear in the composition work, letter writing, and other written work of the pupil. Similarly in language and grammar, it is not sufficient to instruct in rules of syntax. This is but the initial process. Grammatical rules function effectively only when they function automatically. So long as one must think and judge and reflect upon the form of one's expression, the expression is ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... training from physics and chemistry greater than that from geometry, and the training from a year's study of the laws and institutions of the Romans greater than that from equal study of their language. The grammatical studies which have been considered the chief depositories of disciplinary magic would be found in general inferior to scientific treatments of human nature as a whole. The superiority for discipline of pure overapplied science would ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive. If we dramatise its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror, and amusement, so magnificent is that spirit, so prolific, inexorable, grammatical, and dull. Like all animals and plants, the cosmos has its own way of doing things, not wholly rational nor ideally best, but patient, fatal, and fruitful. Great is this organism of mud and fire, terrible this vast, painful, glorious experiment. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... "etymology" as used in grammar must be carefully distinguished from "etymology" in the sense of word-analysis. Grammatical etymology treats solely of the grammatical changes in words, and does not concern itself with their derivation; historical etymology treats of the structure, composition, and history of words. Thus the relation ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... infer from their whole phenomena what their age is, and their structure, and their character. The Higher Criticism is a term pointing not to methods and results transcending ordinary intelligence, but to a study which aims "higher" than grammatical and textual questions considered as final. And thus of course the most earnest defender of the supernatural character of the Scriptures may be, and very often is, as diligent a "higher ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... many times in later years repeated the whole to me again—always in the same order, and with the same expressions and the same unvarying intonation—I will try to render it literally, and without omitting the innumerable grammatical errors into which he always strayed when speaking in Russian. Whether it was really the history of his life, or whether it was the mere product of his imagination—that is to say, some narrative which he had conceived during his lonely residence in our house, and had at last, from ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... personality of the interpreter. "L'art est un coin de Nature vu a travers un temperament." In literature, each writer has his own special style which may easily be recognized; but all follow the same grammatical rules. A correct style in singing consists in the careful observance of the principles of Technique; a perfect Diction; the appropriate Colouring of each sentiment expressed; attention to the musical and poetic Accents; judicious and effective Phrasing ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... ii. p. 931; Bell's Travels, vol. i. p. 247—254; and Gmelin, in the Hist. Generale des Voyages, tom. xviii. 283—329. They all remark the vulgar opinion that the holy sea grows angry and tempestuous if any one presumes to call it a lake. This grammatical nicety often excites a dispute between the absurd superstition of the mariners and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... composed myself to the work as well as I could. The book was one which, on the very face of it, required special attention. It was a folio in Dutch, printed in Amsterdam in 1650. Some one had made a literal translation, writing generally the English word under the Dutch, so that the grammatical differences between the two tongues made even the reading of the translation a difficult matter. One had to dodge backward and forward among the words. This was in addition to the difficulty of deciphering a strange handwriting ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... lack of knowledge is now removed, and with it all uncertainty disappears. The similarity of the two tongues, apparent enough in many of their words, is most strikingly shown, as might be expected, in their grammatical structure, and especially in the affixed pronouns, which in both languages play ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... two parts: one bears the name of "Kan Tsippor" ([Hebrew]), "The bird's nest," and treats of the Massorah of the Psalms, i.e., their divisions, accents, vowels, grammatical forms, and letters necessary for the preservation of the text; and the other, the name of "Gan Perakhim" ([Hebrew]), "The garden of flowers," containing poems, special prayers, family records, and descriptions of ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... that neither the grammatical nor popular sense of the term requires that construction. According to both, necessary often means no more than needful, requisite, incidental, useful, or conducive to. It is a common mode of expression to say that it is necessary for a government ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... tells a story of a grammatical difficulty which was to be settled by reference to a book in templo Pacis, in the forum of Vespasian; and again, when a particular book was wanted, "we hunted for it diligently," he says, "and, when we had found it in the temple of Peace, we ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... 25 for speed (the first row to finish scoring the maximum, and the others proportionately in the order of finishing), 25 for spelling, 25 for writing, and 25 for grammatical construction, capitals, and punctuation. The row wins which scores the highest number ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... or, if I obstinately persist in floundering, and am searching for the word as for a plank, he will jump in and rescue me. Under these circumstances, I am perfectly safe in talking French to him "Mais je ne vous attendais ce matin"—I've got an idea that this is something uncommonly grammatical—"a cause de votre lettre que je viens de recevoir"—this, I'll swear, is idiomatic—"ce matin. La voila!" I pride myself on "La," as representing my knowledge that "lettre," to which it refers, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 22, 1891 • Various
... of that testimony being couched in the vernacular language of the times, affords another point of interest to the English antiquary. Sometimes, indeed, we cannot help suspecting that the poem has undergone some verbal and grammatical alterations in (p. 329) the course of the four centuries which have elapsed since it was penned; but that circumstance does not affect ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... something ACTIVELY,—it is falling—to interfere with the bird, likely—and this indicates MOVEMENT, which has the effect of sliding it into the Accusative case and changing DEM Regen into DEN Regen." Having completed the grammatical horoscope of this matter, I answer up confidently and state in German that the bird is staying in the blacksmith shop "wegen (on account of) DEN Regen." Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word "wegen" drops into a sentence, it ALWAYS throws that subject ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... evidence. We hasten to add that he could be convinced of error. He had regarded a sentence of Bacon's as a veiled confession that Bacon wrote 'Richard II.,' 'which, though it grew from me, went after about in others' names.' Mr. Spedding averred that Mr. Holmes's opinion rested on a grammatical misinterpretation, and Mr. Holmes accepted the correction. But 'nothing less than a miracle' could shake Mr. Holmes's belief in the common authorship of the masque (possibly Bacon's) and the 'Midsummer Night's Dream'—so he told Mr. Spedding. To ourselves nothing ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... Stress. The term accent may best be reserved for grammatical or dictionary accent—the greater emphasis placed according to standard usage upon one syllable of a word as compared with the others. Thus portion has an accent on the first syllable, material on the second, apprehension ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... unintelligible in the authorised translation of Psalm cxxvii. 2., "He giveth His beloved sleep?" It is a literal translation of three very plain words, of the simplest grammatical construction, made in accordance with all the ancient versions. A difficulty there does indeed exist in the passage, viz. in the commencing word [Hebrew: KN]; but this word, though capable of many intelligible meanings, does not enter into ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... the intellect. It should be legibly written, so that it may be read with comfort; but no more than that. Caligraphy betokens caution, and if it be not light in hand it is nothing. That it be fairly grammatical and not ill spelt the writer owes to his schoolmaster; but this should come of habit, not of care. Then let its page be soiled by no business; one touch of utility will ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... neither grammatical nor precise," snapped Judge Halloran. "You mean we must be moving." He linked arms with Tom and fell into step with him; he clung to that rigid arm, moreover, despite Tom's surly displeasure. Not until a friend stopped them ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... never learnt anything in the navy when I was a youngster, except a little rule-of-thumb mathematics. One picked up a sort of smattering of a language or two knocking about the world, but no grammatical knowledge, nothing scientific. If a boy doesn't get a method, he is beating to windward in a crank craft all his life. He hasn't got any regular place to stow away what he gets into his brains, and so it lies tumbling about in the hold, and he loses it, or it gets damaged ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... the most artistic skirts—always ball-room back and ballet front. Her grandchild was sitting on the floor yesterday, reading the Bible, when suddenly she looked up and said: "Grandma, there's a grammatical error in this Bible," and my landlady said: "Well, kill it, child, kill it!" She spends whole hours each day talking to her birds, which, she claims, save the expense of a piano. I told the grandchild to go out into the sunshine this morning and it would do her cold good. ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... language in conversation—is also a matter of importance, and while this can be acquired by a strict attention to grammatical rules, it can be greatly facilitated by the habit of writing down one's thoughts. In writing, strict regard is, or should be, paid to the correct use of language, and when a person, from constant writing, ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... companion was attracting more attention than her bonnet; and twitching her dress bade her sit down. Sal obeyed; but she had no opportunity that morning of deciding whether the sermon were grammatical or not, for she was constantly on the look out, and whenever she saw any one scrutinizing Mary or herself more closely than they ought, a shake of her fist and a horrid face warned them to desist. Twice during church time Mary thought, nay felt sure ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... "I have so far met with the success I hoped for, that I have acquired a great facility in reading the language, and treasured up a very great stock of words. What I have rather neglected is the grammatical construction of them, and especially the many various inflections of the verbs." To repair this defect he wisely resolved to bestow some time every morning on the perusal of the Greek Grammar of Port Royal. Thus we see that ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... are well marked members of the Maya linguistic stock, and differ from that language, as it is spoken in its purity in Yucatan, more in phonetic modifications than in grammatical structure or lexical roots. Such, however, is the fixedness of this linguistic family in its peculiarities, that a most competent student of the Cakchiquel has named the period of two thousand years as the shortest required to explain the difference ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... rejection of this bill a fortunate incident. Every State will certainly concede the power; and this will be a national confirmation of the grounds of appeal to them, and will settle for ever the meaning of this phrase, which, by a mere grammatical quibble, has countenanced the General Government in a claim of universal power. For in the phrase, 'to lay taxes, to pay the debts and provide for the general welfare,' it is a mere question of syntax, whether the two last ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... waters, and there they saw the tip of a great mountain coming up out of the sea, and the great serpents were coiled around the top and were sliding down the sides into the waters, and there was not a cracker there for John. And so, with scarcely a grammatical sentence and with most unfitting words, he went on for an hour with a discourse full of wildness and weirdness, and full of untruth, while the people looked on with amazement at the wonderful knowledge and power of the man. Twenty or thirty years ago you ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 1, March, 1898 • Various
... that language: and be so good to answer me in the same. Not that I am apprehensive of your forgetting to speak French: since it is probable that two-thirds of our daily prattle is in that language; and because, if you leave off writing French, you may perhaps neglect that grammatical purity, and accurate orthography, which, in other languages, you excel in; and really, even in French, it is better to write well than ill. However, as this is a language very proper for sprightly, gay subjects, I shall conform ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... had been classified and named; they had also been arranged according to the number and position of the separate wedges of which they consisted. Dictionaries had been compiled of Sumerian words and expressions, as well as lists of Semitic synonyms. Even grammars had been drawn up, in which the grammatical forms of the old language of Sumer were interpreted in Semitic Babylonian. There were reading-books filled with extracts from the standard literature of the country. Most of this was in Sumerian; but the Sumerian text was provided with a Semitic ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... least, written, in that country, belonged neither to the Aryan nor to the Semitic family, nor even to those African languages among which the ancient idiom of Egypt has sometimes been placed; it was, in an extreme degree, what we now call an agglutinative language. By its grammatical system and by some elements of its vocabulary it suggests a comparison with Finnish, ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... a quiet way, as between man and man; to talk over the past, to ask you how your conduct is and to inquire if I can do you any good in any way whatever. This is no time to speak pieces and ask in a grammatical way, 'To what you are indebted for this call.' My main object in coming up here was to take you by the hand and ask you how your memory is this spring? Judging from what I could hear, I was led to believe that it was a little ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... from my arduous labors to reply. The Colorado has been on the biggest boom I have seen since '39. In the pyrotechnical and not strictly grammatical language of the Statesman—"The cruel, devastating flood swept, on a dreadful holocaust of swollen, turbid waters, surging and dashing in mad fury which have never been equalled in human history. A pitiable sight was seen the morning ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... male or female—if virtues admit of grammatical distinctions, if virtues acknowledge the more worthy gender and the less worthy of the grammar, show me a virtue male or female that can long exist without truth. Even that emphatically termed the virtue of our sex, Helen, on which social happiness rests, society depends, ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... for that. Matthew Arnold had criticized General Grant's English, and Clemens immediately put down other things to rush to his hero's defense. He pointed out that in Arnold's criticism there were no less than "two grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and slovenly ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... a good deal of talk about Mr. Austin's painting, and art in general. There were some half dozen pictures of the modern French school in this inner room, which helped to sustain the conversation. Mr. Granger talked very fair French, of a soundly grammatical order; and Clarissa's tongue ran almost as gaily as in her schoolgirl days at Belforet. She was going to see her brother—to see him shining in good society, and not in the pernicious "set" of which George Fairfax had spoken. The thought was rapture to her. They ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... who—for who the reward," said Philo Gubb, seeking a grammatical form that would sound right, "for information as to which five thousand dollars reward ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... teachers shook their heads. Their considerable experience of the world had never yet offered them a being so constituted. He listened more eagerly to the lowing of a herd of cows and to the twittering of the sparrows than to the best founded principles of grammatical science. Some of them thought him dull, others malicious. He passed from class to class with difficulty and solely by virtue of a marvellous faculty of guessing. At especially critical moments he was saved through the help and ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... really giving us the babble of Bedlam. If ladies and gentlemen who rant about freedom would try to emancipate themselves from the dominion of meaningless words, we should all fare better; but we find a large number of public personages using perfectly grammatical series of phrases without dreaming for a moment that their grave sentences are pure gibberish. A few simple questions addressed in the Socratic manner to certain lights of thought might do much good. For instance, we might ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... at the Crossing by high water, you silly," said the girl. "It was." This grammatical obscurity referred ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... My Class assembled in the chapel to choose theses-collectors, a valedictory orator, and poet. Jackson was chosen to deliver the Latin oration, and Cutler to deliver the poem. Ellis was almost unanimously chosen a collector of the grammatical theses. Prince was chosen metaphysical theses-collector, with considerable opposition. Lowell was chosen mathematical theses-collector, though not unanimously. Chamberlain was ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... eternal torment while gazing at earthly paradise. Janice became convinced that the powers of darkness no longer had singled her out as their particular prey, and in the peaceful isolation of the winter her woes, when she thought of them, underwent a change of grammatical tense which suggested that they had become ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... which I am sure I have your approbation. The learned languages have certainly a great advantage of us, in not being tied to the slavery of any rhyme; and were less constrained in the quantity of every syllable, which they might vary with spondees or dactyls, besides so many other helps of grammatical figures, for the lengthening or abbreviation of them, than the modern are in the close of that one syllable, which often confines, and more often corrupts, the sense of all the rest. But in this necessity of our rhymes, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... This is of course a grammatical irregularity—the verb should be 'is.' It is not the only instance of the same kind in ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... of their large promises in the Idler, by clothing those promises in language as magnificent as his own. It is much less easy to catch the subtle graces of Addison. At the conclusion of the Rambler, he boasts that "he has laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... expressed may seem commonplace and the language hardly grammatical, yet this extract clearly reveals the darling ambition that was now haunting the heart of Burns. It was the same wish which he expressed better in rhyme at a later day in his Epistle to the Gude ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... neighbours do, the man who makes his living by doing what other people cannot do, must always be a marked figure. Look at modern society. It cannot toil nor spin; it can hardly put together ten words in a grammatical sequence. But it can clothe itself. The man of letters can both toil and write good English, but his taste in tailoring frequently leaves much to be desired. If he would put himself in the hands of Poole, ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... which composed the retinue of Mynyddawg, and that a hundred thousand, a large round figure, is chosen to denote the preponderance of the enemy's forces that were arrayed in opposition. This view seems more in unison with reason, as well as with the grammatical construction of the passage, ("emdaflawr" being a middle verb) than the supposition that the "milcant a thrychant" formed the total of ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... about the affinity of language among the Eskimo—some asserting that it is such as to allow mutual intercourse everywhere—but instances warrant us in concluding that considerable deviations exist in their vocabularies, if not in the grammatical construction. For instance, take two words that one hears oftener than any others: On the Alaska coast they say "na-koo-ruk," a word meaning "good," "all right," etc.; on the Siberian coast "mah-zink-ah," while a vocabulary collected during Lieutenant Schwatka's ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... of interest untouched) upon the manner in which Mrs. Fremont has treated her subject. It is novel, but not ineffective. Zagonyi tells much of the story in his own words; and we are sure that it loses nothing of vividness from his terse and vigorous, though not always strictly grammatical language. "Zagonyi's English," says some one who has ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... letter, and read it once more. He read it mechanically and as a piece of news that had brought evil tidings. Then, suddenly, another aspect of it struck him—an aspect to which the shock of its reception had until this tardy moment blinded him. The letter was perfectly grammatical and penned in a hand of copy-book roundness and evenness. The address, the body of the missive, and the signature, were all in one chirography. She would not have intrusted the writing of this letter ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... woman with a kindly face, a cousin of Captain Tiago, received the ladies. She spoke Spanish regardless of all the grammatical rules, and her courtesies consisted in offering to the Spanish ladies cigarettes and betel nut (neither of which they use) and in kissing the hands of the native women after the manner of the friars. Finally the poor old lady was completely exhausted, ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... knowing what she writes. The character is beautifully written, and the separate words are generally correct—such words as 'Christ,' 'God,' 'tears,' 'blood,' 'tempest,' 'sea,' 'thunder,' 'calm,' 'morning,' 'sun,' 'joy.' No grammatical construction hitherto, but a significant sort of grouping of the separate words, as if the meaning were struggling out into coherence. My idea is that she is being exercised in the language, in the character, in order to fuller expression hereafter. Well, you would ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... W. 1906, 277.) But even after his manly retraction Sprecher was not completely cured of the virus of Reformed subjectivism. Sprecher was among the first who, within the General Synod, declared that "inspiration does not make a book free of ... grammatical errors, rhetorical faults, and historical inaccuracies in minor and secondary matters." (L. ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... associates were soft-tongued; but here was something quite different from inoffensiveness of tone and diction. Godwin appreciated the differentiating cause. These young ladies behind him had been trained from the cradle to speak for the delight of fastidious ears; that they should be grammatical was not enough—they must excel in the art of conversational music. Of course there existed a world where only such speech was interchanged, and how inestimably happy those men to whom ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... in the first century after Christ; tutor of Tiberius, first in Rome, afterwards in Rhodes, from which town he called himself a Rhodian, and where Tiberius during his exile diligently attended his instruction. He was the author of various grammatical and other works, but his fame chiefly rested on his abilities as a teacher, in which capacity he seems to have had great influence (Pauly). He was the author of that famous description of Tiberius which is given by Suetonius (Tib. ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... ge, sun tisi charisi, tois ge dunamenois and the like; the pleonastic use of tanun, of os, of os eros eipein, of ekastote; and the periphrastic use of the preposition peri. Lastly, he observes the tendency to hyperbata or transpositions of words, and to rhythmical uniformity as well as grammatical irregularity in the structure of ...
— Laws • Plato
... far more rapid writer, and even grammatical faults are not infrequent in his papers. He explicitly declares that 'Elegance, purity, and correctness were not so much my purpose, as in any intelligible manner as I could to rally all those singularities of human ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... homeliest and simplest of men. On the bench he wore his baggy old alpaca coat as though it were a silken robe. And, as has been heretofore remarked, he had for his official and his private lives two different modes of speech. As His Honor, presiding, his language was invariably grammatical and precise and as carefully accented as might be expected of a man whose people never had very much use anyway for the consonant "r." As William Pitman Priest, Esq., citizen, taxpayer, and Confederate veteran he mishandled ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... my cheek, which I felt myself robbed of at the time by a wise legislator. But on the other hand I am really indebted for a good broad grin to P. . E. . , literary critic of Philadelphia, and sole proprietor of the English language in its grammatical and idiomatical purity; to P. . E. . , with the shiny straight hair and turned-down shirt-collar, who taketh all of us English men of letters to task in print, roundly and uncompromisingly, but told me, at the same time, that ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... present century nothing was known of the works of Fronto, except a grammatical treatise; but in 1815 Cardinal Mai published a number of letters and some short essays of Fronto, which he had discovered in a palimpsest at Milan. Other parts of the same MS. he found later in the ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... growth of a tree is the development of a language, as really and as strictly according to law. In savage lands like those of Africa the missionary finds the living germs of speech, arranges them for the first time in grammatical order, expresses them in written and printed form, using the simplest, most perfect, and most universal character of all—the Roman, and at one bound gives the most degraded of the dark peoples the possibility of the highest ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... Apostle coins an emphatic word which doubly expresses elevation, and in its grammatical form shows that it indicates a historical fact. That elevation was a thing once accomplished on this green earth; that is to say it came to pass in the fact of our Lord's ascension when from some fold ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... sleeves turned above her elbows, deftly handling her pastry—applying her rolling-pin and giving ornamental pinches, while she expounded with grammatical fervor what were the right views about the concord of verbs and pronouns with "nouns of multitude or signifying many," was a sight agreeably amusing. She was of the same curly-haired, square-faced type as Mary, but handsomer, with more delicacy of feature, a pale skin, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Annan, regardless of an unpopular grammatical convention. "I'm here with Ogilvy. May we ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... Bergier, Proudhon adopted the same point of view, that of Moses and of Biblical tradition. Two years later, in February, 1839, being already in possession of the Suard pension, he addressed to the Institute, as a competitor for the Volney prize, a memoir entitled: "Studies in Grammatical Classification and the Derivation of some French words." It was his first work, revised and presented in another form. Four memoirs only were sent to the Institute, none of which gained the prize. Two honorable mentions were granted, one ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Dorset folk is the ancient speech of Wessex. It is not an illiterate corruption but a true dialect with its own grammatical rules. But alas! fifty years of the council school and its immediate predecessor has done more to destroy this ancient form of English than ten centuries of intercourse between the ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... example in sterilizing his vocabulary whenever he crossed that boundary between the masculine and feminine element on the ranch, the bridge. Mrs. Kate did not approve of slang. Ford found himself carefully eliminating from his speech certain grammatical inaccuracies in her presence, and would not so much as split an infinitive if he remembered in time. It was trying, to be sure. Ford thanked God that he still retained a smattering of the rules he had reluctantly memorized in school, and that he was not married (at least, not ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... him with an ardent desire to propagate the knowledge of them; and to be propagated, he felt how necessary it was to render it less difficult. In this view he conceived the project of applying to the study of the idioms of Asia, a part of the grammatical notions we possess concerning the languages of Europe. It only appertains to those conversant with their relations of dissimilitude or conformity to appreciate the possibility of realizing this system. The author has, however, already received ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... original or oldest language upon earth, but that it is not even the oldest form in the Semitic group to which it belongs. To use the words of one of the most eminent modern authorities, "It is now generally recognised that in grammatical structure the Arabic preserves much more of the original forms than ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Evidence is frequently mis-stated and misrepresented in the courts, and this, owing to the great ignorance of numbers who are brought forward as witnesses, is a circumstance of no rare occurrence; the questions being taken down in writing, and, in the attempt to give them some grammatical connection, ideas being frequently perverted, and taken directly opposite to their original meaning, without any intention whatever to enter into a mis-statement. Now it must be sufficiently obvious ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... letter to the master intimating that he is doing something objectionable to some one of the many Unions that go to make a single implement of hardware. This letter has three features. It is signed with a real name. It is polite. It is grammatical. ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... violent effect to everything else. There are occasional detached images of great beauty and delicacy, but these were not beyond the powers of other writers then living. The circumstance which inclines us to reject the external evidence in favour of this play being Shakespeare's is, that the grammatical construction is constantly false and mixed up with vulgar abbreviations, a fault that never occurs in any of his genuine plays. A similar defect, and the halting measure of the verse are the chief objections to PERICLES OF ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... little things, he is noting differences all day long, because everything that he sees is different. Speech is different: the manner of enunciating the words is different; it is clearer, slower, more grammatical; among the better sort it is more careful; it is even academical. We English speak thickly, far back in the throat, the voice choked by beard and moustache, and we speak much more carelessly. Then the way of living at the hotels is different; ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... to enable them to keep their accounts. Beyond this it was often claimed that an education was of no value—that it only made rascals. I recollect a very zealous old man who preached for the German Baptists; he is now "across the waves." Once, in my presence, he disposed of a grammatical argument that was put against him, by saying, "It is the wisdom of the world, and it is sensual and devilish." It was common forty years ago for preachers to say, "I don't know what I shall say, but just as the Lord gives it to me I will hand it to you." As a general thing those men knew ...
— The Christian Foundation, May, 1880
... Quaker Village, with not a Quaker in it. Everywhere they are laying aside their peculiarities of costume, and in many instances, also, their peculiarities of speech, which are barbarous enough as they actually exist, though, if they would but speak with grammatical propriety, their forms of discourse are as commodious as venerable, and I would be content to see them generally adopted. I hope they will be slow to lay aside their better characteristics: their abhorrence of violence, and ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... woman, or widow, may pay taxes, but it would be outrageous for her to have a choice in the men who are to spend the money and then cry out for more. When married, ten years ago, her education was equal to her husband's, now she can not write a grammatical letter: her husband's mind has been enlarged by the influx of new ideas, and by contacts with the electric atmosphere of thought in the great world without; but denied as she has been the right of expressing her will by ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... that the Rowleian dialect was not English of the fifteenth century, nor of any century, but a grotesque jumble of archaic words of very different periods and dialects. The orthography and grammatical forms were such as occurred in no old English poet known to the student of literature. The fact that Rowley used constantly the possessive pronominal form itts, instead of his; or the other fact that he used ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... which descriptions occur; and this is the reason why, in order to understand such propositions, we need acquaintance with the constituents of the description, but do not need acquaintance with its denotation. The first result of analysis, when applied to propositions whose grammatical subject is "the so-and-so," is to substitute a variable as subject; i.e. we obtain a proposition of the form: "There is something which alone is so-and-so, and that something is such-and-such." The further analysis of propositions concerning "the so-and-so" ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... from the religious and legal formulae preserved to us by Varro, Cicero, Livy, and others, from proverbs and popular sayings. It would take us too far afield to analyze these documents here, but it may be observed that we notice in them, among other characteristics, an indifference to strict grammatical structure, not that subordination of clauses to a main clause which comes only from an appreciation of the logical relation of ideas to one another, but a co-ordination of clauses, the heaping up of synonymous words, a tendency to use the analytical rather than the synthetical ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... the ruined village of Shocoh (now made by a grammatical diminutive form of Arabic into Sh'weikeh) after picking, each of us his five smooth stones out of the brook, as memorials for ourselves, and for friends far away, endeavouring at the same time to form a mental picture of the scene that is so vividly narrated ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... most unexceptionable women in the neighborhood occasionally went to see the hounds throw off; but it happened that none of them were present this morning to abstain from following, while Mrs. Gadsby, with her doubtful antecedents, grammatical and otherwise, was not visible to make following seem unbecoming. Thus Gwendolen felt no check on the animal stimulus that came from the stir and tongue of the hounds, the pawing of the horses, the varying voices of men, the movement hither and thither of vivid color on ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... a few sentences from this story, which is commonly bound up with the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' like a woollen lining to a silken mantle, but is full of stately wisdom in processions of paragraphs which sound as if they ought to have a grammatical drum-major to march before their ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... you ain't—are not that sort." An hour back he could have kicked himself for the grammatical blunder; now he was wholly illuded; besides, she didn't seem to notice. "But as a ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... being generally 'unprotected' Englishwomen who may be seen in summer-time at the various railway stations—fighting their way to the front in the battle of the 'bagages,' and speaking French to the officials with a grammatical fervour, and energy, which is wonderful to contemplate[56]—taking their places on the top of a diligence, amongst fowls and cheeses, with the heroic self sacrifice that would be required to mount a barricade; in short, placing themselves continually ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... the host of those who make the great works of the poets odious by their analysis, impositions and laborious comments might learn this simple truth! It is not necessary that one should be able to define every word and give it its principal parts and its grammatical position in the sentence in order to understand and appreciate a fine poem. I know my learned professors have found greater riches in the Iliad than I shall ever find; but I am not avaricious. I am content that others should be wiser than I. But with all their wide ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... or at least domesticity, is certainly prior to war, although war may have noticeably strengthened it. Why, moreover, if such was the origin of the idea as well as of the thing, should they not have said, instead of serv-us, serv-atus, in conformity with grammatical deduction? To me the real etymology is revealed in the opposition of serv-are and serv-ire, the primitive theme of which is ser-o, in-sero, to join, to press,whence ser-ies, joint, continuity, ser-a, lock, sertir, insert, etc. All these words ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... grammatical error for which in your day school-boys used to be whipped. You were not. It's important, because when lawyers get on to the interpretation of the law, loose syntax gives them their opportunity; they make fortunes out of the grammatical errors of ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... wronging has reference, not to the phrase, but to Ophelia; if you go on wronging it thus, that is, if you continue to go on thus wrong. This is a mode of speaking perhaps not very grammatical, but very common, nor have ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... in sterilizing his vocabulary whenever he crossed that boundary between the masculine and feminine element on the ranch, the bridge. Mrs. Kate did not approve of slang. Ford found himself carefully eliminating from his speech certain grammatical inaccuracies in her presence, and would not so much as split an infinitive if he remembered in time. It was trying, to be sure. Ford thanked God that he still retained a smattering of the rules he had reluctantly memorized in ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... from this story, which is commonly bound up with the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' like a woollen lining to a silken mantle, but is full of stately wisdom in processions of paragraphs which sound as if they ought to have a grammatical drum-major to march before ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... attempt to find or to make a meaning, and sometimes hastily makes what a little more attention would have found. He is solicitous to reduce to grammar what he could not be sure that his author intended to be grammatical. Shakespeare regarded more the series of ideas, than of words; and his language, not being designed for the reader's desk, was all that he desired it to be, if it conveyed his meaning to ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... diabolical, mysterious and incessantly exciting business it is, covering the gamut of private emotions and international complications. In such narratives I demand three things: the first, that my author should combine a graphic (and grammatical) style with the professional knack of imparting an air of probability to his tale; the second, that things should go all wrong in the beginning and come all right in the end; the third, that if any German schemers are involved these should be eventually outwitted. Mr. SAVILE has abundantly satisfied ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... century nothing was known of the works of Fronto, except a grammatical treatise; but in 1815 Cardinal Mai published a number of letters and some short essays of Fronto, which he had discovered in a palimpsest at Milan. Other parts of the same MS. he found later in the Vatican, ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... not an ingredient in the single thought: he is rather constituted by relations of the thoughts to each other and to the body. This is a large question, which need not, in its entirety, concern us at present. All that I am concerned with for the moment is that the grammatical forms "I think," "you think," and "Mr. Jones thinks," are misleading if regarded as indicating an analysis of a single thought. It would be better to say "it thinks in me," like "it rains here"; or ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... think it might be possible that he had not seen it. It is the book which first set me a thinking upon these subjects, and I have received more instruction from it than from any other I have yet seen upon them. If Mr. Ward has not seen it, I have it at his service. The grammatical articles, too, in the French Encyclopedie have given me a good deal of entertainment. Very probably Mr. Ward has seen both these works, and as he may have considered the subject more than I have done, ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... to the republic of letters by his numerous translations. He received the rudiments of his education from Mr. Shaw, an excellent grammarian, master of the free school at Ashby De la Zouch in Leicestershire: he finished his grammatical learning under the revd. Mr. Mountford of Christ's Hospital, where having attained the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew tongues, he was designed to be sent to the university of Cambridge, to be trained up ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... the office every morning as much as the printers could set up during the day, and taking it away in the evening, forbidding also any alteration. The foreman, John H. Gilbert, found the manuscript so poorly prepared as regards grammatical construction, spelling, punctuation, etc., that he told them that some corrections must be made, and ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... suggested the character of his language. Chaucer was then the "God of English poetry;" his was the one name which filled a place apart in the history of English verse. Spenser was a student of Chaucer, and borrowed as he judged fit, not only from his vocabulary, but from his grammatical precedents and analogies, with the object of giving an appropriate colouring to what was to be raised as far as possible above familiar life. Besides this, the language was still in such an unsettled state that from a man with resources like Spenser's, it naturally invited ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... of determinatives is not limited to hieroglyphic writing, but is possessed also by alphabetic; the second o in the word too is strictly a determinative, to distinguish the adverb too from the preposition to, both pronounced alike. Tibetan has an elaborate system of silent letters used as grammatical determinatives.) And then Egyptian writing finally ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... but on the other hand he was not one to stampede easily. He had that steadfast courage, perhaps, which could face danger and still maintain his natural calm—just as his mother had corrected grammatical slips in the very sentences which told her of an impending outbreak of Indians long ago Bud saddled Stopper and the horse which Honey was to ride, led them to the house and went inside to wait until the girl was ready. While he waited ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... correcter speaking. The characteristic of girls having a disposition to rise, is to be cravingly mimetic; and they remembered, and crooned over, till by degrees they adopted the phrases and manner of speech of highly grammatical people, such as the rector and his lady, and of people in story-books, especially of the courtly French fairy-books, wherein the princes talk in periods as sweetly rounded as are their silken calves; nothing less than angelically, so as to be ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... bill had all the merit in the world, it would not be effective to attain the ends hoped for by its friends; and apart from that, its provisions were exceedingly dangerous. It gave married women and minors the right to make and enforce contracts. The grammatical structure of a portion of the bill was such as to enable a corrupt, passionate, or prejudiced judge to take advantage of it in order to widen the jurisdiction of the United States courts, and drag into them all the business which had heretofore occupied the State courts. ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... she sometimes wrote to his dictation; and, in this capacity, he calls her "his left hand." (2) In June 1559, at the headiest moment of the Reformation in Scotland, he writes regretting the absence of his helpful colleague, Goodman, "whose presence" (this is the not very grammatical form of his lament) "whose presence I more thirst, than she that is my own flesh." (3) And this, considering the source and the circumstances, may be held as evidence of a very tender sentiment. He tells us himself in his history, on ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... few of the many "don'ts" which it seems necessary to repeat in works of this kind. For a more extended catalogue of social and grammatical sins, the reader is referred to that excellent book The Verbalist, by Alfred Ayres, and the clever little brochure Don't. A careful study of these will assist him much in reviewing elementary ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... began to read ahead, book after book, so as to get the connection, even though understanding but half the words. Without knowing it, he had adopted a modern and really most excellent method of acquiring the language. For Homer became literature to him instead of a mere text for excruciating grammatical gymnastics. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... "precocious" by people who had one set of words for their own use, and another for children. My parents considered, and I think rightly, that the best and most correct forms of speech should be taught to mere infants, that it is as easy to train a child to be grammatical as to let it lapse into all sorts of slovenly inaccuracies that must be unlearned at school, and in society. So, when they talked of "circumstantial evidence" I had a fair inkling of what the phrase conveyed. Preciosa was upon trial for misdemeanor, ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... class with the other is visible even in external characteristics. The old Roman lines are cut with precision and evenness; the letters are well formed, the words are rightly spelt, the construction of the sentences is grammatical. But the Christian inscriptions bear for the most part the marks of ignorance, poverty, and want of skill. Their lines are uneven, the letters of various sizes, the words ill-spelt, the syntax often incorrect. Not seldom a mixture of Greek and Latin in the same sentence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... a joy which may yet be ours—some day. But my writer of romances, who is such a stickler for grammatical accuracy, is surely the younger of a ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... right!" Arethusa was too excited to be quite grammatical. "But I've been running to get here, and I've lost ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... of that exceedingly casual kind which contents itself with contemplating the outside of a book, and disdains to open it. As a matter of (p. 018) fact the changes made hardly extended beyond the correction of some points of punctuation and of some grammatical forms; it was in a few instances only that the construction of the sentences underwent transformation. Not an incident was altered, not ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... and severe moralist as he was, was not a strict Calvinist. Anyone who takes the trouble to read 'The Manual of Religious Belief in a Dialogue between Father and Son, compiled by William Burness, Farmer, Mount Oliphant, and transcribed with Grammatical Corrections by John Murdoch, Teacher,' will see that the man was of too loving and kindly a nature to be strictly orthodox. What was rigid and unlovely to him in the Calvinism of the Scottish Church of that day has been here softened down into something not very far from Arminianism. He ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... domesticity, is certainly prior to war, although war may have noticeably strengthened it. Why, moreover, if such was the origin of the idea as well as of the thing, should they not have said, instead of serv-us, serv-atus, in conformity with grammatical deduction? To me the real etymology is revealed in the opposition of serv-are and serv-ire, the primitive theme of which is ser-o, in-sero, to join, to press,whence ser-ies, joint, continuity, ser-a, lock, sertir, insert, etc. All these words ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... out in longhand twenty-five hundred pages of the manuscript. He brought suit against Mrs. Eddy for payment for "copying the manuscript of the book 'Science and Health,' and aiding in the arrangement of capital letters and some of the grammatical constructions." He produced some of Mrs. Eddy's manuscript in court, and the judge allowed him more than the usual copyist's rate "on account of the difficulty which a portion of the pages presented to the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... pronunciation of the final -e. The slower movement of change in Scotland allowed time for Chaucer to exercise a potent influence on Scottish poetry, but in England this final -e, to which most of the earlier grammatical forms by Chaucer's time had been reduced, itself fell rapidly into disuse during the 15th century, and a serious barrier was thus raised to the appreciation of the artistic value of his verse. His disciples, Hoccleve and Lydgate, who at first had caught ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... in the only convenient place for them, at the bottom of each page, and will be found to be as complete and definite as possible on geographical, biographical, historical, or other points that may not be familiar to the student or the teacher. All grammatical or syntactical matter, unless of a difficult or peculiar character, has been omitted, while the literary citations that abound will, it is hoped, stimulate the student to do further reading and to make literary comparisons of ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... grammar if you've got something to say?" The important thing is to say something, and if you do really say something, and do really completely and precisely express it, as far as a painter is concerned it will be grammatical. If not to-day, the grammar will come round to it to-morrow. Henry Ward Beecher is reported to have answered to a criticism on grammatical slips in the heat of eloquence, "Young man, if the English language gets in the way of the expression of my thought, ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... is no whit behind the man of culture in the purity of his Portuguese. In no country in Europe is the language kept freer from dialect, and this notwithstanding the fact that it is one of involved grammatical forms. In France the use of the imperfect subjunctive is given up by the lower classes and by foreigners, but in Portugal the peasant has still deeper subtleties of speech at the end of his tongue. Add to this that he has a vocabulary of abuse before which the Spaniard or the California ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... upon me, and would have been pursued with more ardour, perhaps with more success, but for the constant interruption of more imperative professional and literary avocations. In itself the Sanscrit is an inexhaustible subject of interest; in its grammatical structure more regular, artificial, and copious than the most perfect of the western languages; in its origin, the parent from which the older Greek, the Latin and the Teutonic tongues seem to branch out and develop themselves upon ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... tendency to divergence of speech, which was inseparable from their social state and the large areas of their occupation. An oral language, although remarkably persistent in its vocables, and still more persistent in its grammatical forms, is incapable of permanence. Separation of the people in area was followed in time by variation in speech; and this, in turn, led to separation in interests and ultimate independence. It was not the work of a brief period, but of centuries of time, aggregating finally ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... was ten years amongst the Maoris. He was an ignorant sailor. He could not write, and the account of his adventures, it is explained, was dictated to a friend while he was on the voyage back to England. Craik says that if allowance is made for some grammatical solecisms, the story, as it appeared in the manuscript, was told with great clearness, and sometimes with considerable spirit. Knight evidently knew him, as it is stated in "The New Zealanders" that "the publisher of this volume ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... biographer, had led a somewhat curious life. In a pamphlet published in Paris, in 1646, addressed 'to all men that loves Truth,'—singularly rich, thanks to the French printers, in blunders, orthographic and grammatical,—Sir Balthazar gives some account of his family and himself. He was born about 1591, at Middelburg in Zeeland, the son of Anthoine Gerbier, a baron of Normandy, and Radegonde, daughter-in-law to the Lord of Blavet in Picardy. 'It pleaseth God,' writes ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... not trespassing on courtesy when I express a fear that a sentence like this exhibits the writer's entire want of acquaintance with the grammatical system employed by the great poet and the writers of his age. We must not judge Shakspeare's grammar by Cobbett or Murray, but by the vernacular language of his own times. It is perfectly well known that Shakspeare constantly uses the passive for the active participle, in the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 39. Saturday, July 27, 1850 • Various
... grammatically, into two grand Subdivisions, as follows: 1. Analysis, The Elements of Language, namely, The Alphabetic and Syllabic distribution of Language, culminating in Word-Building;—The Word in Language being THE INDIVIDUAL in that Domain; and, 2. Synthesis, Construction, the Grammatical Domain proper, including the Parts of Speech and their Syntax, or their putting together in ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... for its peculiar system of heraldry, by the amusing form under which it portrays its patron saint, and by the five Latin words with which the Evangelist is invoked, in which, as I am told, there is a grammatical blunder which has become respectable by its long standing. But is it true that you do not distinguish between the day ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... to be regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or photography has yet been discovered, by which the characters of men can be reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with an unerring precision of truthful description. How often does the novelist feel, ay, and the historian also and the biographer, that he has conceived within his mind and accurately depicted on the tablet of his ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... days." Not one of them has given us a story to equal his best for the other magazines. For instance, Ray Cummings has yet to write a story for you as entertaining as "The Girl in the Golden Atom" or his others. Speaking of Cummings, I wish he would take a course in grammar. His grammatical atrocities—such ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... of that day indicates the unification very clearly. Besides being a tirade against schismatics of all classes, the discourse was often a discussion of grammatical principles, accompanied with a description of the spiritual condition of every hearer. After the singing of the hymn in the middle of its delivery, the people adjusted themselves to hear the application in which their cases ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... scientific work in Latin verse. De Naturis Rerum (c. 1180-94) in 10 books. Other works are De Laudibus Divinae Sapientiae (in Praise of the Divine Wisdom), and De Contemptu Mundi (on Despising the World), and some grammatical treatises. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... is not the effect of quaintness or confusion of construction; so far from it, that we believe foreigners of different nations, especially Germans and Italians, have often borne very remarkable testimony to the grammatical purity and simplicity of his language, and have declared that they generally understood what he said much better than the sustained conversation of any other Englishman whom they had met. It is the uncommonness of the thoughts or the image which ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. A brief history of the grammatical changes of the language and its vocabulary, with exercises on synonyms, prefixes, suffixes, word-analysis, and word-building. A text-book for high schools and colleges. ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... Victoria. His other works bear witness to the genuineness of his inspiration and piety, and the diligence of his study: they are poems, poetic translations from the Italian, religious essays, and grammatical treatises. ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... I shall be very glad to receive this same tripartite Grammar which Mr. Brandram is hunting for, my ideas respecting Mandchou construction being still very vague and wandering, and I should also be happy if you could and would procure for me the original grammatical work of Amyot, printed in the Memoires, etc. Present my kind regards to Mr. Hattersley, and thank him in my name for his kind letter, but at the same time tell him that I was sorry to learn that he was putting himself to ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... Pollux, frequently adopted by Euripides in his tragedies, who so far forgot himself on some of these occasions, that in the Danaidae, for instance, the chorus, which consisted of females, made use of grammatical inflections which belonged only ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... of talk about Mr. Austin's painting, and art in general. There were some half dozen pictures of the modern French school in this inner room, which helped to sustain the conversation. Mr. Granger talked very fair French, of a soundly grammatical order; and Clarissa's tongue ran almost as gaily as in her schoolgirl days at Belforet. She was going to see her brother—to see him shining in good society, and not in the pernicious "set" of which George Fairfax had spoken. The thought was rapture to her. ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... German, but to the English, scholarship of Mr. Curtis. We perceive scarcely any of that peculiar stiffness of style which makes so many otherwise excellent translations painful to read,—the stiffness as of one walking in new boots,—the result of dressing the words of one language in the grammatical construction of another. Mr. Curtis gives us the sentiment and wit and fancy and humor and oddity of the German's stories, but in an English way. Indeed, his is manly and graceful English, such as we hope we are not now by any means ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... probable that three hundred was the number which composed the retinue of Mynyddawg, and that a hundred thousand, a large round figure, is chosen to denote the preponderance of the enemy's forces that were arrayed in opposition. This view seems more in unison with reason, as well as with the grammatical construction of the passage, ("emdaflawr" being a middle verb) than the supposition that the "milcant a thrychant" formed the total of the army ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... anything in the navy when I was a youngster, except a little rule-of-thumb mathematics. One picked up a sort of smattering of a language or two knocking about the world, but no grammatical knowledge, nothing scientific. If a boy doesn't get a method, he is beating to windward in a crank craft all his life. He hasn't got any regular place to stow away what he gets into his brains, and so it lies tumbling about in the hold, and he loses it, or it gets damaged ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... eminent philologist, M. Renouard, writing as a philologist, and not as an historian, remarks that "the dialect of the Vaudois is an idiom intermediate between the decomposition of the language of the Romans and the establishment of a new grammatical system." This philological circumstance shows the extreme earliness of the period at which the Waldenses must have betaken themselves to the Cottian Alps, inasmuch as it proves that they left the Italian plains before the establishment ...
— The Vaudois of Piedmont - A Visit to their Valleys • John Napper Worsfold
... is newspaper work hell—in a way. And smelling out a big story ought to be the same to a reporter that the smoke of battle is to a soldier. That's right—I'll leave it to any fellow here if that ain't right!" he wound up, forgetting in his enthusiasm to be grammatical. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... apprehensive of your forgetting to speak French: since it is probable that two-thirds of our daily prattle is in that language; and because, if you leave off writing French, you may perhaps neglect that grammatical purity, and accurate orthography, which, in other languages, you excel in; and really, even in French, it is better to write well than ill. However, as this is a language very proper for sprightly, gay subjects, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... his to Lupsetus, will have civil law to be the tower of wisdom; another honours physic, the quintessence of nature; a third tumbles them both down, and sets up the flag of his own peculiar science. Your supercilious critics, grammatical triflers, note-makers, curious antiquaries, find out all the ruins of wit, ineptiarum delicias, amongst the rubbish of old writers; [730]Pro stultis habent nisi aliquid sufficiant invenire, quod in aliorum scriptis vertant vitio, all fools ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... can hardly be thought much of, as it is a power over one mute E that we retain in use to this day. The final E, too, he marks for a syllable where he finds one wanted, but evidently without any grammatical reason. Urry was an unfortunate editor. Truly does Tyrwhitt say of him, that "his design of restoring the metre of Chaucer by a collation of MSS., was as laudable as his execution of it has certainly been unsuccessful." The natural causes of this ill success ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... nothing either musical or natural in the ordinary construction of language. It is a thing altogether arbitrary and conventional. Neither in the sounds themselves, which are the voluntary signs of certain ideas, nor in their grammatical arrangements in common speech, is there any principle of natural imitation, or correspondence to the individual ideas, or to the tone of feeling with which they are conveyed to others. The jerks, the breaks, the ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... called spho/t/a which is manifested by the letters of the word, and, if apprehended by the mind, itself manifests the sense of the word. The term spho/t/a may, according as it is viewed in either of these lights, be explained as the manifestor or that which is manifested.—The spho/t/a is a grammatical fiction, the word in so far as it is apprehended by us as a whole. That we cannot identify it with the 'notion' (as Deussen seems inclined to do, p. 80) follows from its being distinctly called va/k/aka or abhidhayaka, and its being represented as that which causes the conception ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... climaxes; it is never stodgy. His marks begin to show upon the writing of the younger Germans of today. They are getting away from the old thunderous manner, with its long sentences and its tedious grammatical complexities. In the course of time, I daresay, they will develop a German almost as clear as French and almost as colourful and ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... receptacle, and read it over and over again. It was very bad Spanish and very absurd, but she thought it delightful, poetical, classical, sentimental, argumentative, convincing, incontrovertible, imaginative, and even grammatical, for if it was not good Spanish, there was no Spanish half so good. Alas! Agnes was, indeed, unsophisticated, to be in such ecstasies with a midshipman's love-letter. Once more she hastened to her room to weep, but it was from excess of joy and delight. ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Ambo people, who are somewhat similar in appearance to the Mafulu, and whose language is also Papuan, and, though differing from the Mafulu language, is, I was told, somewhat similar to it in grammatical construction and as regards a few of its words. The area to the west is that of the Kuni people, whose language is Melanesian, but whose ordinary modes of life are, I was informed, more like those of the Mafulu than are those of the Papuan-speaking Ambo. ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... others [5:4]. I shall not retort this charge of 'falsification,' because I do not think that the cause of truth is served by imputing immoral motives to those from whom we differ; and indeed the context shows that our author is altogether blind to the grammatical necessity. But I would venture to ask whether it would not have been more prudent, as well as more seemly, if he had paused before venturing, under the shelter of an anonymous publication, to throw out this imputation of dishonesty ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... three dialects, the Irish, the speech of the Scottish Highlanders, and the Manx, which last is rapidly becoming extinct. The Cumric and Gaelic have not only a great many thousand words in common, but also a remarkable grammatical feature, the mutation and dropping of certain initial consonants under certain circumstances, which feature is peculiar to the Celtic languages. The number of Sanscritic words which the Cumric and Gaelic possess is considerable. Of the two the Gaelic possesses the most, and those ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... and the least possible taxation of the memory. There were no exceptions or irregularities, and few unnecessary distinctions; while words were so connected and related that the mastery of a few simple grammatical forms and of a certain number of roots enabled me to guess at, and by and by to feel tolerably sure of, the meaning of a new word. The verb has six tenses, formed by the addition of a consonant to the root, and ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... says Max Mueller, "necessitates the admission of different independent beginnings for the material elements" [the vocabulary] "of the Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan branches of speech." The same thing Mueller affirms of "the formal elements" [the grammatical structure] "of these groups of languages." "We can perfectly understand how, either through individual influences or by the wear and tear of speech in its continuous working, the different systems of grammar of Asia and Europe may ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... for who—for who the reward," said Philo Gubb, seeking a grammatical form that would sound right, "for information as to which five thousand ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... throughout a frankness that rejected the idea of any concealment on her own part, so that we talked of ourselves, of our prospects, of the journey, of the weather, of each other,—of everything but our host and hostess. It must be confessed that Miggles's conversation was never elegant, rarely grammatical, and that at times she employed expletives the use of which had generally been yielded to our sex. But they were delivered with such a lighting up of teeth and eyes, and were usually followed by a laugh—a laugh peculiar to Miggles—so ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... De Senectute and De Officiis, Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae and De disciplina scholarium, Aesop, a poem by Baptista Mantuanus, the 'Christian Virgil', Alan of Lille's Parabolae, Alexander, two grammatical treatises by Synthius and the Epistola ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... still in process of growth when it was borrowed and adapted by the new comers, and the Semitic Babylonian language was profoundly influenced by the older language of the country, borrowing its words and even its grammatical usages. Sumerian in its turn borrowed from Semitic Babylonian, and traces of Semitic influence in some of the earliest Sumerian texts indicate that the Semite was already on the Babylonian border. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... his son could write as well as any white man.—Most of the coloured people, when they speak of the education of one among us who can write a neat hand, and who perhaps knows nothing but to scribble and puff pretty fair on a small scrap of paper, immaterial whether his words are grammatical, or spelt correctly, or not; if it only looks beautiful, they say he has as good an education as any white man—he can write as well as any white man, etc. The poor, ignorant creature, hearing this, he is ashamed, forever after, to let any person see him humbling himself ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... Dutch has certain grammatical forms older than those of the old Frisian; e.g., the Dutch infinitives and the Dutch weak substantives, in their oblique cases, end in -en; those of the Old Frisian in -a: the form in ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... a sentence often requires a pause where the grammatical construction authorizes none. This is sometimes called the rhetorical pause. Such pauses occur chiefly before or after an emphatic word or phrase, and sometimes ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... is anything more than an effort of the mind to give unity to infinitely various phenomena. There is no abstract language 'in rerum natura,' any more than there is an abstract tree, but only languages in various stages of growth, maturity, and decay. Nor do other logical distinctions or even grammatical exactly correspond to the facts of language; for they too are attempts to give unity and regularity to a subject ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... the son of William Airay, the favourite servant of Bernard Gilpin, "the apostle of the North,'' whose bounty showed itself in sending Henry and his brother Evan (or Ewan) to his own endowed school, where they were educated "in grammatical learning,'' and were in attendance at Oxford when Gilpin died. From Wood's Athenae we glean the details of Airay's college attendance. "He was sent to St Edmund's hall in 1579, aged nineteen or thereabouts. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... discovered in his study, engaged in the deepest meditation on a grammatical crux; and had received the news of his arrest with a blank horror and amazement very laughable in the eyes of Sir Piers. Master Aristoteles was pounding rhubarb with his sleeves turned up, and required ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... of some parts of this Aryan hypothesis has lately been called in question by Mr. Crawfurd, on the ground that the Hindoos, Persians, Turks, Scandinavians, and other people referred to as having derived not only words but grammatical forms from an Aryan source, belong each of them to a distinct race, and all these races have, it is said, preserved their peculiar characters unaltered from the earliest dawn of history and tradition. If, therefore, no appreciable change has occurred in three or four thousand years, ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... Verrius Flaccus, tutor to the grandsons of Augustus (Sueton. Gramm. 17), was the author of Fasti, fragments of which have been discovered near Praeneste, and which were used by Ovid for his poem of that name. Of Verrius' grammatical works, the greatest was that entitled De verborum significatu (Gell. v. 17, 1), arranged alphabetically. It is lost, but we possess part of an abridgment (nine out of sixteen Books) made by Sex. Pompeius Festus before the third century A.D. The abridgment of Festus was in turn epitomized ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... Many of these tablets containing Neo-Babylonian copies of earlier literary texts are preserved in the British Museum, and have been recently published, and we have thus recovered some of the principal grammatical, religious, and magical compositions of the earlier ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... isn't it?" added the delicate Slim Goodwin, and, partly to hide his grammatical error, but mostly to express his enthusiasm, he gave Joe a one-hundred-and-seventy-pound whack on the back that sent him sliding out of the chair and half way under the ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... in childhood? Is it not solely on authority and by example? A child who lives in a family where no language is used but that which is logically and grammatically correct, will learn to speak with logical and grammatical correctness long before it is able to give any account of the processes of its own mind in the matter, or indeed to understand those processes when explained by others. In other words, practice in ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... Chaldee and Syriac and just began to read Arabic' This seems easy in the telling, but in reality it was a long, a monotonous, an exhausting process. Think of the expenditure of hours and eyesight over barbarous alphabets and horrid grammatical details. One must needs have had a mind of leather to endure such philological and linguistic wear and tear. Priestley's mind not only cheerfully endured it but actually toughened under it. The man was never afraid of work. Take as an illustration ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... The grammatical variations, the syntax, and the genius of the language, must in this, as well as in several other modern European tongues, have been derived from the Celtic; it being well known, that the frequent use of articles, the distinction of cases by prepositions, the application of ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... "You are neither grammatical nor precise," snapped Judge Halloran. "You mean we must be moving." He linked arms with Tom and fell into step with him; he clung to that rigid arm, moreover, despite Tom's surly displeasure. Not until a friend stopped them for a word or two was the distracted ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... allowances for the very great difficulties under which I have laboured, and not blame me for not having done better that which, so far as I can ascertain, would possibly not have been done at all. Within the memory of man the popular Rommany of this country was really grammatical; that which is now spoken, and from which I gathered the material for the following pages, is, as the reader will observe, almost entirely English as to its structure, although it still abounds in Hindu words to a far greater extent than ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... Aid Society, but public opinion is settin' pretty strongly in that direction." Miss Hitty dropped her final g's when she got thoroughly interested in her subject and at times became deeply involved in grammatical complications. ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... next year, 1661, Accidence commenced Grammar; a little book, which has nothing remarkable, but that its author, who had been lately defending the supreme powers of his country, and was then writing Paradise Lost, could descend from his elevation to rescue children from the perplexity of grammatical confusion, and the ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... speech. Style deals only with what is permissible to all, and even revokes, on occasion, the rigid laws of Grammar or countenances offences against them. Yet no one is a better judge of equity for ignorance of the law, and grammatical practice offers a fair field wherein to acquire ease, accuracy and versatility. The formation of sentences, the sequence of verbs, the marshalling of the ranks of auxiliaries are all, in a sense, to be learned. There is a kind of ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... constantly addressing me, and of course I could not understand a word they said. In the meantime, Bigg talked away for both of us; and although I very much doubt if his language was particularly grammatical, he seemed to get on famously with the savages; and acting on an idea which came into his head, he confirmed the notion they had adopted that I was a person of no ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... A grammatical treatise in two books (De Analogia), dedicated to Cicero, to the latter's immense gratification, was written on one of the numerous swift journeys from Italy to headquarters in Gaul. Passages from it are quoted ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... in grammar, which there had its origin and received its development,—this city, which gave to the world the master of this noble science, whose priority no one contests,—does not now possess a single preacher who pronounces the Sunday sermon according to grammatical rules! ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... during the Renaissance period was thrown. They discovered suddenly that the world for ten centuries had been living in an ungrammatical manner, and they made it forthwith the end of human existence to be grammatical. And it mattered thenceforth nothing what was said, or what was done, so only that it was said with scholarship, and done with system. Falsehood in a Ciceronian dialect had no opposers; truth in patois no ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... rules, exceptions, scansion, in short, all that pertains to the external apparatus of the Greek and Latin tongues. Often we spent two hours on eight lines of Homer. The father of literature became a Procrustean, grammatical bed on which we were to be stretched, and it did nearly exterminate every one of us. For my own part, I was possessed with an intemperate haste to read Homer straight through as fast as I could; for I felt, without exactly knowing, that there was ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... such a rhetorical incitement: but alas! the treasures of M. Pluquet were not of a nature quite to make one's fortune. I contrived, with great difficulty, to pick out something of a recherche kind; and expended a napoleon upon some scarce little grammatical tracts, chiefly Greek, printed by Stephen at Paris, and by Hervagius at Basil: among the latter was the Bellum grammaticale of E. Hessus. M. Pluquet wondered at my rejecting the folios, and sticking so closely to the duodecimos; ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of English. But, for all that, every one knows that it is a rare thing to find a boy of the middle or upper classes who can read aloud decently, or who can put his thoughts on paper in clear and grammatical (to say nothing of good or elegant) language. The "ciphering" of the lower schools expands into elementary mathematics in the higher; into arithmetic, with a little algebra, a little Euclid. But I doubt if one boy in five hundred ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... There were grammatical questions, phrases to be explained, and short sentences to be translated into French. These she understood fairly, but the paragraph that filled her with dismay was a short French poem of three verses to be put into English prose. She read it again and again, ...
— Ruth Arnold - or, the Country Cousin • Lucy Byerley
... a kindly face, a cousin of Captain Tiago, received the ladies. She spoke Spanish regardless of all the grammatical rules, and her courtesies consisted in offering to the Spanish ladies cigarettes and betel nut (neither of which they use) and in kissing the hands of the native women after the manner of the friars. Finally the poor old lady was ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... continues, and ten months are devoted to it each year. The school takes and keeps the child three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon; it pours into these little heads all that is possible in such a length of time, all that they can hold and more too,—spelling, syntax, grammatical and logical analysis, rules of composition and of style, history, geography, arithmetic, geometry, drawing, notions of literature, politics, law, and finally a ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... accounts. Beyond this it was often claimed that an education was of no value—that it only made rascals. I recollect a very zealous old man who preached for the German Baptists; he is now "across the waves." Once, in my presence, he disposed of a grammatical argument that was put against him, by saying, "It is the wisdom of the world, and it is sensual and devilish." It was common forty years ago for preachers to say, "I don't know what I shall say, but just as the Lord gives it to me I will hand it to you." ...
— The Christian Foundation, May, 1880
... was regarded as her child's greatest danger; but in her humility and her love for Marian she offered no resistance. And so it came to pass that one day the little girl, hearing her mother make some flagrant grammatical error, turned to the other parent and asked gravely: 'Why doesn't mother speak as properly as we do?' Well, that is one of the results of such marriages, one of the myriad miseries ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... asseveration. See Bello-Cuervo, "Gramtica Castellana," paragraph 463. Other editors are perhaps right in interpreting the passage differently. They suppress the period after maravillas, the exclamation point before Que, and write llegu. This makes equally good sense and is just as grammatical, but the verse is less harmonious. This last point, however, is not a vital objection. The two ways of editing this passage seem to me to ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... the oratory of the writer. Mrs. Moodie! he had a shocking delivery, a drawling, vulgar voice; and he spoke with such a nasal twang that I could not bear to look at him, or listen to him. He made such grammatical blunders, that my sides ached with laughing at him. Oh, I wish you could have seen the wretch! But here is the document, written in the same style in which it was spoken. Read it; you have a rich treat ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... have studied the gipsy language believe that the cradle of the race was in India. It appears, in fact, that many of the roots and grammatical forms of the Romany tongue are to be found in idioms derived from the Sanskrit. As may be imagined, the gipsies, during their long wanderings, have adopted many foreign words. In every Romany dialect a ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... plebeian, French, Provencal, and German, against the brutishness, the cunning, the cruelty, the hideousness, the heresy of the serf, whose name becomes synonymous with every baseness; which, in mock grammatical style, is declined into every epithet of wickedness; whose punishment is prayed for from the God whom he outrages by his very existence; a hideous clamour of indecent jibe, of brutal vituperation, of senseless accusation, of every form of words which furious ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... The correct grammatical construction would be "el cual cliente"; but however much some grammarians disclaim this employment of cuyo, it is in the language and found in the best books ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... wouldn't have known there was a burglar about the place, and if Fairy hadn't kept me from rushing out to the dungeon to see if the money was safe, he would have got away, and—it took the policemen to get him out. Oh, I know that is not very grammatical, father, but it's just as true as if it were! And I honestly can't see that much credit ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... having him defeated for one Congress, but he was successful at the next election. He was a true frontiersman, with a small dash of civilization and a great deal of shrewdness transplanted in political life. He was neither grammatical nor graceful, but no rudeness of language can disguise strong sense and shrewdness, and a "demonstration," as Bulwer says, "will force its way through all perversions of grammar." Some one undertook to publish his life, but he promptly denied the authenticity of the work, and ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Typographical and grammatical errors and misspellings have been corrected, but 19th-century variants have been retained. Question marks have been added ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... as necessary as a knowledge of the name of the god. The next step in the development was one which followed very easily. These important adjectives began to be thought of as having a value and an existence in themselves, apart from the god to which they were attached. The grammatical change which accompanied this psychological movement was the transfer of the adjective into an abstract noun. Both adjectives and abstract nouns express quality, but the adjective is in a condition of dependence on a noun, while the abstract noun is independent and ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... say anything after that, and as it really is a splendid opportunity, I made the bargain, and we began. I took four lessons, and then I stuck fast in a grammatical bog. The Professor was very patient with me, but it must have been torment to him, and now and then he'd look at me with such an expression of mild despair that it was a toss-up with me whether to laugh ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... only in the common arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but in any branch of academical literature. The little regard that is paid to the literary improvement of females, even among people of rank and fortune, and the general inattention to the grammatical purity and elegance of our native language, are faults in the education of youth that more gentlemen have taken pains to censure than correct. Any young gentlemen and ladies, who wish to acquaint themselves with the English ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... last, dated in April, and brought to a neutral port by a shipmaster whom he implicitly trusts, has reached me since the previous chapters were written. It covers six pages of foolscap, and is written in defiance of all grammatical and orthographical principles; but as it conveys important intelligence, in regard to some of the persons mentioned in this narrative, I will transcribe a portion ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... a story of a grammatical difficulty which was to be settled by reference to a book in templo Pacis, in the forum of Vespasian; and again, when a particular book was wanted, "we hunted for it diligently," he says, "and, when we had found it in the temple of ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... thinking of procuring his own death. At Dux, on getting out of bed on 13th October 1793, day dedicated to St. Lucy, memorable in my too long life.' A big budget, containing cryptograms, is headed 'Grammatical Lottery'; and there is the title-page of a treatise on The Duplication of the Hexahedron, demonstrated geometrically to all the Universities and all the Academies of Europe.' [See Charles Henry, Les Connaissances Mathimatiques de Casanova. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... in their natural sequence, and are given, for the most part, in the body of the book as well as in a grammatical appendix. The work on the verb is intensive in character, work in other directions being reduced to a minimum while this is going on. The forms of the subjunctive are studied in ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... words are continually cropping up; but as there is a limit to the powers of the memory, single words, like whole languages, gradually become extinct. As Max Muller (69. 'Nature,' January 6th, 1870, p. 257.) has well remarked:—"A struggle for life is constantly going on amongst the words and grammatical forms in each language. The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand, and they owe their success to their own inherent virtue." To these more important causes of the survival of certain words, mere novelty and fashion may be added; for there is ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... grammarians are forever fighting them; but when we go into the vague realm of poetic style, the logical mind is lost at once. And yet it is more important to use words pregnant with meaning than to be strictly grammatical. We must reduce grammar to an instinct that will guard us against being contradictory or crude in our construction of sentences, and then we shall make that instinct harmonize with all the other instincts which a successful writer ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... it. The circumstance, also, of that testimony being couched in the vernacular language of the times, affords another point of interest to the English antiquary. Sometimes, indeed, we cannot help suspecting that the poem has undergone some verbal and grammatical alterations in (p. 329) the course of the four centuries which have elapsed since it was penned; but that circumstance does not affect ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... it only in essential variations that these four texts are important, but also in the illustration which their different spelling and their varying grammatical forms afford in regard to the language used by Dante. At the time when these editions appeared, the orthography of the Italian tongue was not yet established, and its grammatical inflections not in all cases definitely ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... ardent desire to propagate the knowledge of them; and to be propagated, he felt how necessary it was to render it less difficult. In this view he conceived the project of applying to the study of the idioms of Asia, a part of the grammatical notions we possess concerning the languages of Europe. It only appertains to those conversant with their relations of dissimilitude or conformity to appreciate the possibility of realizing this system. The author has, however, already received the most flattering encouragement and the most ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... was called—was a work on the Twelve Tables, which appended to each sentence of the text an explanation—chiefly, doubtless, of the antiquated and unintelligible expressions—and the corresponding formula of action. While this process of glossing undeniably indicated the influence of Greek grammatical studies, the portion treating of the formulae of action, on the contrary, was based on the older collection of Appius(69) and on the whole system of procedure developed by ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... or widow, may pay taxes, but it would be outrageous for her to have a choice in the men who are to spend the money and then cry out for more. When married, ten years ago, her education was equal to her husband's, now she can not write a grammatical letter: her husband's mind has been enlarged by the influx of new ideas, and by contacts with the electric atmosphere of thought in the great world without; but denied as she has been the right of expressing her will by a direct vote, she has lost ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... a very ancient family, a race that would run their heads into a noose out of pure obstinacy, rather than skulk off. I am of very ancient race myself, though I never take pride in the matter, because I have seen more harm than good of it. I always learned Latin at school so quickly through being a grammatical example of descent. According to our pedigree, Caius Calpurnius Mordax Naso was the Governor of Britain under Pertinax. My name means 'biting'; and bite I can, whether my dinner is before me, or my enemy. In the present case I shall not bite yet, but prepare myself for doing so. I watch the proceedings ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... 160, 173 captions. The original appearance and wording is reproduced in the html version. For the text version, more meaningful and grammatical captions have been provided as the original captions comprised a series of separate breed or species names used to label the ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... difficult to believe that Charley (round-eyed still, and not at all grammatical) is married to a miller in our neighbourhood; yet so it is; and even now, looking up from my desk as I write early in the morning at my summer window, I see the very mill beginning to go round. I hope the ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... such a thing as having pie and preserves for breakfast?—and Oliver says it used to make him sick to see me in the midst of all of those people. They came from all over the country, and hardly anybody could speak a grammatical sentence. The man who sat next to me always said "he don't" and "I ain't feeling good to-day" and once even "I done it"—can you imagine such a thing? Every other word was "guess," and yet they had the impertinence to laugh at me when I said "reckon," ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... been to open all the doors to the innocence of the natives; and many of the advocates are of that same class or are Chinese mestizos. The language which they use is often indecorous, bold, lacking in purity and idiom, and even in grammatical construction. The Audiencia endures it as it is the old style custom, for in times past there were few advocates capable of explaining themselves better. The Filipinos believe that composed and moderate writs can have no effect at court, and they are only contented with those which ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... business wore a halo, and I used to encourage Sorel's calls, partly for this reason and partly for practice in talking French with a common man. I hoped to go to France some day, and I wanted to be able then to talk not only with the grammatical, but with the dear people who say, "I guess likely," and ...
— In Madeira Place - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... archidiaconi Historiae liber undecimus" (that is, Henry of Huntingdon, fine epigram "in seipsum," vol. ii. p. 163); "Alexandri Neckham De Vita Monachorum" (the same wrote a number of treatises on theological, scientific, and grammatical subjects; see especially his "De Naturis Rerum," ed. Wright, Rolls, 1863); "Alani Liber de Planctu Naturae" (cf. "Opera," Antwerp, 1654, fol., the nationality of Alain de l'Isle is doubtful); "Joannis de Altavilla Architrenius" (that is the arch-weeper; lamentations of a young man on his past, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... manifold, at any rate to the outer eye. The mise-en-scene of external life is less rich in colour and in contrast. Magnificence, squalor, oddity, historic survivals, and picturesque personalities grow rarer year by year. Everybody writes a grammatical letter in conventional style, wears the clothes in fashion, and conforms to the courtesies of life. It is right, good, and wise: but a little dull. It is the lady-like age, the epoch of the dress-coat, of the prize lad ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Cook's translation of Sievers' Anglo-Saxon Grammar, and to the Grammatical Introduction to Sweet's Reader have been taken out, as Wright's or Wyatt's Old English Grammar will have taken their place with most ...
— A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary - For the Use of Students • John R. Clark Hall
... correct, but to adopt the mistakes, in the pronunciation or meaning of words that were made on the Vega. As a fruit of his studies Lieut. Nordquist has drawn up an extensive vocabulary of this little known language, and given a sketch of its grammatical structure.[255] The knowledge of the Chukch language, which the other members of the Expedition acquired, was confined to a larger or smaller number of words; the natives also learned a word or two of our language, so that a lingua franca ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... are not easy reading; his German style, though grammatical and idiomatic, is generally very involved and obscure, often turgid. There is a want of self-discipline about the thought, and he is too hasty in committing ill-digested thoughts ill-arranged to print, while ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... perfect marvel of literary slipshod. Nor is there any ground for believing that the slovenliness was invariably intentional. Sterne's truly hideous French—French at which even Stratford-atte-Bowe would have stood aghast—is in itself sufficient evidence of a natural insensibility to grammatical accuracy. Here there can be no suspicion of designed defiance of rules; and more than one solecism of rather a serious kind in his use of English words and phrases affords confirmatory testimony to the same point. ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... my own fault. I was too free with my tongue. I said in a moment of bitterness: "What can a Bishop do with a parish priest? He's independent of him." It was not grammatical, and it was not respectful. But the bad grammar and the impertinence were carried to his Lordship, and he answered: "What can I do? I can send him a curate who will break his heart in ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... that seemed discordant and discrepant in his nature has now become harmonious and inevitable; the strangest and most erratic actions of his life now seem natural and consequential (I use the word in its grammatical sense) contradictions are reconciled, and looking at the man I see the pictures, and looking at the ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... in the "Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society," August, 1858. Reprinted without alteration of the text, except one or two grammatical emendations. ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... may be mentioned, though not with strict grammatical accuracy, two standing characteristics of the Professor's style,—at least as rendered into English: First, the composition of words, such as 'snow-and-rosebloom maiden:' an attractive damsel ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... made. The truth then came out. Mrs Nickleby had, that morning, had a yesterday's newspaper of the very first respectability from the public-house where the porter came from; and in this yesterday's newspaper was an advertisement, couched in the purest and most grammatical English, announcing that a married lady was in want of a genteel young person as companion, and that the married lady's name and address were to be known, on application at a certain library at the west end ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... Gashwiler had added that he did not write a very intelligent hand, or a very grammatical hand, and that his spelling was faulty, he would have been truthful, although the copy and proof before him might not have borne him out. The near fact was that the speech was composed and written by one Expectant ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... (implied meaning, lakshan)!—What objection is there to such a proceeding? we reply. The force of the general purport of a sentence is greater than that of the direct denotative power of the simple terms, and it is generally admitted that the purport of grammatical co-ordination is oneness (of the matter denoted by the terms co-ordinated).—But we never observe that all words of a sentence are to be understood in an implied sense!—Is it then not observed, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... grandfather's tuition at Nancepean. None of his masters had been enough of a scholar or enough of a gentleman (and to teach Latin and Greek well one must be one or the other) to educate his taste. The result was an assortment of grammatical facts to which he was incapable of giving life. If the Rector of Wych-on-the-Wold was not a great scholar, he was at least able to repair the neglect of, more than the neglect of, the positive damage done to Mark's education ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... routine; and no man's aims are so high or his thoughts so generous that he might not be further profited and stimulated by reading it. As a practical treatise it is only valuable for its emphatic denunciation of the folly of teasing youth, whose element is the concrete, with grammatical abstractions, and the advice to proceed to translation as soon as possible, and to keep it up steadily throughout the whole course. Neglect of this precept is the principal reason why so many youths not wanting in capacity, ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... service to him, in particular "this same tripartite Grammar which Mr Brandram is hunting for, my ideas respecting Manchu construction being still very vague and wandering." {100b} There is also a request for "the original grammatical work of Amyot, printed in ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... designed, by his father, for the ministry, and, with that view, instructed by him in grammatical learning, and the first elements of languages; in which he made such a proficiency, that he was, at the age of eleven years, not only master of the rules of grammar, but capable of translating with tolerable accuracy, and not ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... was Archbishop of Seville during forty years, and died in 635. See Mariana, Hist. 1. vi. c. 7. Mosheim, whose critical opinions in general must be taken with some allowance, observes that "his grammatical theological, and historical productions, discover more learning and ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... etymology of grippe, but the word itself seems to tell its own story. It seems to mean restriction, subjection, slavery. It certainly spells lack of freedom. I have seen many boys and girls who seemed afflicted with arithmetical, grammatical, and geographical grippe, and I have sought to free them from its tyranny and lead them forth into the sunlight and pure air of freedom. If I only knew just how to do this effectively I think I'd be quite reconciled to the work ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... fix the meaning of a word or expression, of obscure signification, in the authorised translation of the Bible. In Judges, ix. 53., we read, "A certain woman cast a piece of a millstone upon Abimelech's head, and all tobrake his skull." I have heard some one, in despair at the grammatical construction of the latter clause, suggest that it might be an error for "also brake his skull;" and I have been told, that some printer or editor solved the difficulty by turning it into "and all to break his skull." But in the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 25. Saturday, April 20, 1850 • Various
... is we think made of a series of books to be purchased separately. Every page has a coloured cut of a very gay order. Cottages have yellow roofs and pink doors; and shopkeepers are dressed in crimson and orange. Some of the grammatical illustrations are droll: a heavy old fellow, cross-legged, with his hands folded on a stick is myself; Punch is an active verb; a wedding might have illustrated the conjunction; four in hand is a preposition. In punctuation, a child asking what o'clock ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 533, Saturday, February 11, 1832. • Various
... knowing that the one Helper is more than they all. This catalogue breathes the same spirit as Paul's rapturous list of the foes impotent to separate from the love of God. Mark, too, the long-drawn-out designation of the ark, with its accumulation of nouns, which grammatical purists have found difficult,—'the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth'; where it leads they need not fear to follow. It was the pledge of His presence, it contained the Ten Words on which His covenant was concluded. That covenant ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... "through which language is settled and unsettled combines in one the two opposite elements of necessity and free will. Though the individual seems to be the prime agent in producing new words and new grammatical forms, he is so only after his individuality has been merged in the common action of the family, tribe, or nation to which he belongs. He can do nothing by himself, and the first impulse to a new ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... treated her subject. It is novel, but not ineffective. Zagonyi tells much of the story in his own words; and we are sure that it loses nothing of vividness from his terse and vigorous, though not always strictly grammatical language. "Zagonyi's English," says some one who has heard it, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... for "not following on''), a grammatical term, given to a defectively constructed sentence which does not run on as a continuous whole; this may occur either, in a text, by some corruption, or, in the case of a writer or speaker, simply through his forgetting the way in which he started. In the case of a man who is full of his subject, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... text is published by A. Poebel with transcription, commentary, etc., in Historical Texts, Philadelphia, 1914, and Historical and Grammatical Texts, Philadelphia, 1914. ...
— The Babylonian Story of the Deluge - as Told by Assyrian Tablets from Nineveh • E. A. Wallis Budge
... on the grammatical level as well. Many hackers love to take various words and add the wrong endings to them to make nouns and verbs, often by extending a standard rule to nonuniform cases (or ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
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