"Jargon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Then he remembered that he had stayed to be by himself and to think something out. There was a change somewhere, and he was trying to locate it. He had come to retouch his memory of Agnes, and he had seen her alone and with others; they had talked the conventional jargon of the dinner-table, their fingers had brushed emotion as they discussed her missing brother, and for half an hour they had marched up and down the terrace arm-in-arm, discussing and arguing on an unwritten book, ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... Catechism, have only served to perplex some, puff others up with spiritual pride and exalt them in the kingdom of spiritual wickedness in high places, to drive some to despair, and to disgust reason and common sense in others. There is not a word of all the above jargon in the sacred scriptures, which give us a most rational account of the great object of the gospel ministry. This object is the redemption of mankind from moral darkness, which is the whole occasion of moral evil, and to produce that improvement in the religious world ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... in his jargon the six figures which are of each kind.[150] If this be rhetoric, perhaps there was justification for John Smith's The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvailed (1657), which continued the fallacious tradition by dividing ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... able to say no to Ray, but even he looked dubious at the small gray fellow's voluble outpouring of pseudo-scientific jargon. Ray, made sensitive by years of open skepticism on the part of many listeners, caught the look and insisted on a demonstration of his ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... talk in some foreign tongue, Spanish or Portuguese or a Levantine jargon, perhaps, and searched assiduously along the edges of the forest. Robert, lurking in the undergrowth, caught the word "aqua" or "agua," which he knew meant water, and so he was right in his surmise about their errand. There was a fine ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... strength to rally. She was weeks dying, but her life was steadily ebbing all that time. It was a kind of slow fever. She was delirious when I first saw her, and delirious or unconscious, with few lucid intervals, until she died. And the jargon of her wandering mind was in reality the outpouring of a tortured soul. It was the title and the family name—always that, and nothing else. She wasn't well-born enough or sufficiently educated to bear the title as his wife—it seemed that that fact had been impressed on her ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... subjects of reflection; among which the first that presents itself is the superior elegance of the language; for till we arrive here, all is dialect; though by this word I would not have any one mistake me, or understand it as meant in the limited sense of a provincial jargon, such as Yorkshire, Derbyshire, or Cornwall, present us with; where every sound is corruption, ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... but oh how rare in others! I wonder if you will understand it. It is a gift more honorable than.... Bah! where is my brain rambling to? You will mutilate it horribly. You will knock out the gems you call Latin quotations, you Philistine, and you will butcher the style to carve into your own jerky jargon; but you cannot destroy the whole of it. I bequeath it to you. Ethel.... My brain again! ... Mrs. McIntosh, bear witness that I give the Sahib all these papers. They would be of no use to you, Heart of my Heart; and I lay it upon you," he turned to me here, "that you do not let my book die ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... Academician and that; laughed at Mr. Haydon, or sneered at Mr. Eastlake, or the contrary; deified Mr. Turner on one side of the table, and on the other scorned him as a madman—nor could Newcome comprehend a word of their jargon. Some sense there must be in their conversation: Clive joined eagerly in it and took one side or another. But what was all this rapture about a snuffy brown picture called Titian, this delight in three flabby nymphs by Rubens, and so forth? As for the vaunted Antique, and the Elgin Marbles—it ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... laid the blame of the transformation on the debased parents, whom he knew to be capable of any deed, no matter how shameful or cruel, if thereby they could obtain the means to procure liquor. Tony and Matty gathered, from the jargon which he sputtered forth, that this was his idea; and they were quite satisfied to have it so, for no sentiments of filial affection ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... seventeen years, coarsely and poorly clad. He held in his hand a letter, which he presented to the citizen; but to all questions as to who he was, whence he came, and what he wanted, he replied only in an unintelligible jargon. The letter was addressed to the captain of a cavalry company then stationed at Nuremberg, to whom he was taken. It stated substantially, that a boy had been left at the writer's door on the 7th of October, 1812, that the writer was a poor laborer with a large family, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... the matter?" exclaimed Tonty, unable to understand their rapid jargon. The Frenchmen drew together with the instinct of uniting in peril, and, led by old men, the Indian ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... assailed at Marseilles. His placidity and stolid indifference are rudely shaken by the sharpers, who differ only from the boatmen of Beirut in that they wear pantaloons and intersperse their Arabic with a jargon of French. These brokers, like rapacious bats, hover around the emigrant and before his purse is opened for the fourth time, the trick is done. And with what ceremony, you shall see. From the steamer the emigrant is led to a dealer in frippery, where he is required to doff his baggy trousers and ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... wretch was still at large. He had to be found and I had to find him since the police could not. But how? That detective had completely upset my plans and, for a time, I could think of no other. Then came the dirty rascal who had tried to murder me in the chalk-pit; and from his mongrel jargon, half cockney, half foreign, I had gathered a vague hint. If I could not entice the criminal population into my domain, how would it be to reconnoiter theirs? The alien area of London was well known to me, for it had always seemed interesting since my ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... was not agreeable to any of the senses. The ears were annoyed with the jargon of many dialects; the harsh voices of the natives, the loud exclamations of the dealers, and the whining cries of the beggars for backsheesh. The eyes were offended by the sight of the crowds of dirty beggars, who stretched out hands in appeal and tried to clutch ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... was surprised, asked himself where Mathilde could have picked up that jargon. In some article of Jory's, perhaps. Besides, he had remarked that women talk music very well, even without knowing a note of it. And he, whom the bitterness of the others had only grieved, became exasperated at sight of Mathilde's languishing attitude. ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... with a man like Thornton Daverill. But she may do so in such a way as to excite suspicion of the reality, and it is hard on motherless girls that they should not have this slender chance. A father can do nothing, and old fulminations of well-worn Scriptural jargon—hers was an adept in texts—had not even the force of their brutal plain speech. For to these girls the speech was not plain—it was only what Parson read in Church. That described and ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... him; and he was no longer able to fill the figures of his creation with the old intellectual sublimity. His heroes and his heroines became mere mouthing puppets, pouring out an endless stream of elaborate, high-flown sentiments, wrapped up in a complicated jargon of argumentative verse. His later plays are miserable failures. Not only do they illustrate the inherent weaknesses of Corneille's dramatic method, but they are also full of the characteristic ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... it himself, that Wharton was none other than one Robert Butler, whose career as a criminal and natural wickedness may well rank him with Charles Peace in the hierarchy of scoundrels. Like Peace, Butler was, in the jargon of crime, a "hatter," a "lone hand," a solitary who conceived and executed his nefarious designs alone; like Peace, he supplemented an insignificant physique by a liberal employment of the revolver; like Peace, he was something of a musician, the day before ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... and oh; what a doleful thing it is to stand by a dying bed, and talk to a man about his soul, and feel, from what you see of the motion of his head, and the glare of his eye, and from what you hear of the jargon of his lips, that he does not understand what you are saying to him. I have stood beside the death-bed of a man who had lived a sinful life, and was as unprepared for eternity as it is possible for a man to be, and I tried to make him understand my pastoral errand; but ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... idioms and seafaring phrases into the Italian ground-work of its diction, long ago convinced me that it never was a translation from anything in heaven or earth or the waters under the earth. Nobody would ever have translated a document into such an extremely peculiar and individual jargon. It is most assuredly an original text, and its author was either Vespucius or the Old Nick. It was by starting from this text as primitive that Varnhagen started correctly in his interpretation of the statements in the letter, and it was for that reason that he was able to dispose of so many ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... to the blaze, listening to the songs of some wandering fiddler or to the stories of a ruddy-nosed Capuchin monk who was being regaled, by the steward's orders, on a supper of tripe and mulled wine. The Capuchin's tales, told in the Piedmontese jargon, and seasoned with strange allusions and boisterous laughter, were of little interest to Odo, who would creep into the ingle beside Bruno and beg for some story of his ancestors. The old man was never weary of rehearsing ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... the trees on the bottom. The rattle of the cars grew more distant, and she heard the hum and laughter of voices and the jargon of a phonograph. At the bottom of the slope she stepped aside to allow a team and wagon to pass. The wagon was loaded with boxes that rattled and crashed about as the wheels bumped over stones and roots. The driver of the team did not look at her. He was holding back with his whole weight; ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... destruction of his pipe and the rough collaring that followed in good part, protesting, in an extraordinary jargon, which is styled Pidgin-English, that he had only meant to have a "Very littee smokee," not being able, just then, to ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... the poet he had absolutely none. And his conversation corresponded to his appearance. It abounded in vigour, in fire, in vivacity. It was genuinely interesting, and often strikingly eloquent, yet all the time it was entirely free from mystery, vagueness, and jargon. It was the crisp, emphatic, and powerful discourse of a man of the world who was incomparably better informed than the mass of his congeners. Mr. Browning was the readiest, the blithest, and the most forcible of talkers, and when he dealt in criticism the edge of his sword was mercilessly whetted ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... speakers, and ultimately take their place as accepted English. A vulgarism is an expression decidedly incorrect, and the use of which is a mark of ignorance or low breeding. Cant, as used in this connection, denotes the barbarous jargon used as a secret language by thieves, tramps, etc. Compare ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... a cup of painted earthenware containing sediments of coffee. I saw her crafty white eyes look up to mine as she muttered some jargon, and pretended to read the ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... Distrust and dislike would have protected me, in some degree at least, from feeling her influence as I certainly did feel it. How that influence was exerted—whether it was through her eyes, or through her manner, or, to speak the jargon of these latter days, through some "magnetic emanation" from her, which invisibly overpowered me—is more than I can possibly say. I can only report that she contrived by slow degrees to subject the action of my will more and more completely ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... his breath, lifted the child from the cradle, and felt its back, a passionate fear in his heart: it was straight as a die. He drew a long breath, and was silent, embarrassed for words before this mite, searching his mind in vain for the sweet jargon used by women. ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... C. G., editors. A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon, and Cant. Embracing English, American, and Anglo-Indian slang, pidgin English, gypsies' jargon, and other irregular ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... with Charles Lamb, kept boring him to death with questions in the jargon of agriculturists about crops. At length he put a poser—"And pray, sir, how are turnips t'year?"—"Why that, sir," stammered out Lamb, "will depend upon the ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... arrived at the point at which it will be plain that the condition produced in these cases, and known under a varied jargon invented either to conceal ignorance, to express hypotheses, or to mask the design of impressing the imagination and possibly prey upon the pockets of a credulous and wonder-loving public—such names as mesmeric condition, magnetic ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... Jean, who was quick to fall back into his own reveries, her voice died away into incomprehensible jargon. Once he glanced at the sketch still on the wall and thought of her purring over her work like a satisfied cat, then the next instant again forgot her. Now and then she bestowed a keen glance on him or a passing word, but left him no time to ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... stature, in cases in which the party was either unusually tall or unusually short. A middle-sized man was perfectly safe from recognition, so long as he did not speak and could keep his equipments. Those who did speak altered their voices, as we soon found, using a jargon that was intended to imitate the imperfect English of the native owners of the soil. Although neither of us had ever seen one of the gang before, we knew these disturbers of the public peace to be what in truth they ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... on gypsies; an account of the first and family names and personal characteristics of English and American Romanys, prepared for me by a very famous old gypsy; and finally a chapter on the "Shelta Thari," or Tinkers' Language, a very curious jargon or language, never mentioned before by any writer except Shakespeare. What this tongue may be, beyond the fact that it is purely Celtic, and that it does not seem to be identical with any other Celtic dialect, is unknown to me. I class it with ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... which her fictions are calculated to excite. With plots of almost incomprehensible absurdity, they combine a style more inflated than any balloon in which Madame Blanchard ever sailed through the regions of air—a language, or rather jargon, composed of the pickings of nearly every idiom that ever did live, or is at present in existence, and sentiments which would be often of a highly mischievous tendency, if they were not rendered ridiculous by the manner in which they are expressed. The singularity ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... And you may listen to their thoughts without being disturbed by the magpie chatterings of vain and shallow pretenders. You are attracted by the pretentious forms and manners of that life; you think that because a certain class of people, who have nothing else to do, talk a certain jargon, and profess to follow certain teachers—who, nine times out of ten, are charlatans or fools—that they are the intellectual and spiritual leaders of the race. You are mistaking the very things that prevent ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... she has obeyed her orders. The day before they left she waylaid that pretty maid of Miss Marmion's on the Common, and told her fortune. Of course, she talked the usual jargon about lovers and letters and going on a journey, and the maid quite innocently let out that she was going with her master and mistress by steamer to Denmark and up the coast of Norway, and then over to Iceland by the ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... swelled proudly as she heard this jargon. It was quite unintelligible to her, but she felt sure it conveyed extreme approval. She turned to look at Truesdale just as he turned to ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... I had not realised that ignorance of the Past meant ignorance of the Future. I asked where we were going. The laughter and conversation increased. I was answered, but in a jargon I found ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... she recognized that. The women could not befriend her even if they would. So she allowed herself to be helped into the canoe, and the men pushed off amid the rather vociferous jargon of the women. She was made much more comfortable than before, though so seated that either brave could reach out his long arm and snatch her from any ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Capt Guillam was Commander, who was father, as I understood afterwards, unto him that Comanded the New England shipp that I had discover'd the day before. Seeing the shallopp come towards me, I spake a kinde of jargon like that of the salvages, which signify'd nothing, only to amuse those in the boat or to make them speake, the better to observe them, & to see if there might bee any that had frequented the Indians & that spak their Languadge. All were silent; & the boat coming a ground 10 ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... cold shoulder, one retracts, capitulates, acknowledges that the conventions are in the right of it. Well; but Molly's world was not the suburban circle of the Dicketts and her world applauded her; she stood high in it; her interview with the unspeakable one was "a great hit," in their jargon. Molly, in short, applied different standards, was in another class—was it, could it be, a Lower Class? And yet, ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... quarter speak a jargon of Cree and Sauteux, which sounds very harshly. They all understand English, and some of them speak it fluently. Many of them are constantly employed as voyageurs between Norway House and York Factory; and none perform the trip more expeditiously, ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... foreign to the tongue of the general practitioner who is so awed by them that he withdraws from them and remains humbly reticent in a state of enomatophobia; or, if he be more tough-minded, he may be amused by, or contemptuous of, what he refers to as "psychiatric jargon" or "pseudoscientific gibberish." There is, furthermore, a dearth of concise, authoritative, well-written text-books on psychiatry, and the general medical journals rarely print psychiatric papers designed to interest the average practitioner. The most widely diffused psychiatric reports of ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... and again at the vast humor of this situation as it lay before him, exulting in the mystification his thieves' jargon would create. His ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... men did not confine themselves to sifting the ashes through their fingers, and comparing notes in a jargon which the boys could not understand, but which they imagined must be ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... called according to the name engraved on her card—was a little meanly-dressed woman of about forty, with bright eyes and a hooked nose, a restless shuffling manner, and an ill-pitched voice. Her jargon was a mixture of bad ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... farther, from some little lake nameless and undiscovered in the black depths of the forest to the south, a great northern loon sent out its cowardly cry of defiance to all night things, and then plunged deep under water, as though frightened into the depths by its own mad jargon. The fire died lower. Philip moved a little nearer to the girl, ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... suits of velvet and a thousand dinars, and if I beat thee, I ask nothing but that thou write me an acknowledgment thereof.' 'To it, then,' replied she, 'and do thy best.' So they played, and he lost and went away, jabbering in the Frank jargon and saying, 'By the bounty of the Commander of the Faithful, there is not her like in all the world!' Then the Khalif summoned players on instruments of music and said to her, 'Dost thou know aught of music?' 'Yes,' answered she. So he bade bring a peeled and polished lute, whose owner [or ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... footholds. When they do not climb, they fill libraries with descriptions of their achievements, dull and unintelligible to the uninitiated, bloodstirring and excellent to the members of the brotherhood. They write in a jargon of their own of chimneys and buttresses and basins and ribs, of boulders and saddles and moraine-hopping. They become rampant at the thought of the stout, unworthy people who are now dragged to the tops by the help of rope-chains and railings. They sarcastically remark that they may have ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... many of the phrases and expressions used by Shakspeare. Their vocabulary has been preserved nearly in its pristine purity since that time, because they have not had intercourse with those counties in England which have made for themselves a jargon unlike to any language under heaven. The Irish brogue is a great and shameful defect, but it does not render the English language absolutely unintelligible. There are but a few variations of the brogue, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... Pushing the wizard aside, this Indian faced the audience. It was Le Borgne, his foxy eye yellow as flame, teeth snapping, and a tongue running at such a pace that we could scarce make out a word of his jargon. ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... Caitiff, canker, and carrion came to us from the Norman dialect of French; and from their present appearance no one but a linguistic expert would suspect their exotic ancestry, Jury, larceny, lease, embezzle, distress, and improve have descended from the jargon of the lawyers who went on thinking in French after they were supposed to be speaking and writing in English. Of equal historical significance are the two series of words which English acquired from the military vocabulary of the French,—the first containing company, regiment, ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... crowded with desks, tables, cabinets, benches, files, typewriters; lighted by a smoke-darkened sun and the dim glow of electric bulbs—were already launched upon the nervous routine of their day. An excited jargon filled the place which, with the air of physical disorder as if the workers were haphazardly improvising their activities,—gave the room a vivid though ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... is a good honest fellow. I like him much. But the silly dear's harping so continually upon one string, dying, dying, dying, is what I have no patience with. I hope all this melancholy jargon is owing entirely to the way I would have her to be in. And it being as new to her, as the Bible beauties to thee,* no wonder she knows not what to make of herself; and so fancies she is breeding death, when the event will ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... trees, drawn by the scent of a fresh kill, some coyote family scattered swiftly and left the feast. Cripp was as apt to howl in broad daylight as at night, and the sounds were meaningless, the unintelligible jargon of an idiot. Every coyote within hearing bristled with fear whenever Cripp's jabbering reached ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... of the French pale-faces. Neither the Legs nor the Sailor cared for the gayety and the crowd of cities; the stout mariner's home was in the puttock-shrouds of the old "Repudiator." The stern and simple trapper loved the sound of the waters better than the jargon of the French of the old country. "I can follow the talk of a Pawnee," he said, "or wag my jaw, if so be necessity bids me to speak, by a Sioux's council-fire and I can patter Canadian French with the hunters who come for peltries to Nachitoches or Thichimuchimachy; but from the tongue of ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that your ladyship, in case you should wish to rise, may have an arm to lean on," Captain Westbury said. "Your woman will show me where I am to look;" and Madame Victoire, chattering in her half-French and half-English jargon, opened while the captain examined one drawer after another; but, as Harry Esmond thought, rather carelessly, with a smile on his face, as if he was only conducting the ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... coats with hoods, and with bright sashes of coloured wool round their waists; women also, with hard features and bronzed complexions, in large straw hats, high white caps, and noisy sabots. On all sides a jargon of Irish, English, and French is to be heard, the latter generally ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... when he was upbraided by the commodore (to whom he afterwards came begging) with his folly in risking all he had suffered for fifty dollars (the present intended for the mandarine.) he had no other excuse to make than the strong bias of his nation to dishonesty, replying, in his broken jargon, "Chinese man very great rogue truly, but have ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... attracted attention in England, but he exerted some influence in France and Spain, and especially in Belgium, notwithstanding the grotesque jargon in which he obscured his thoughts. See Flint, Philosophy of History, pp. 474-5. Flint's account of his speculations is indulgent. The main ideas of his philosophy of history will be found in the Introduction ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... thought he was talking Greek; but Agathe signed to them behind his back, as if to say that she was accustomed to such jargon. ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... parley between them—in which it was charming to hear how my friend Samuel WOULD speak, what he called French, to a lady who could not understand one syllable of his jargon—the mutual hackney-coaches drew up; Madame la Baronne waved to the Captain a graceful French curtsy. "Adyou!" said Samuel, and waved ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... has the advantage of the easier language and the freshest, and I daresay the brightest intellect, but probably for all that we shall begin with some delightful jargon of both languages, and leave them to sort themselves out as we go on. Still, as you say, it will be more interesting than talking ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... At the same time one drums and the other rattles, which is all the artificial music of their own making I ever saw amongst them. To these two instruments they sing, which carries no air with it, but is a sort of unsavory jargon; yet their cadences and raising of their voices are formed with that equality and exactness that, to us Europeans, it seems admirable how they should continue these songs without once missing to agree, each with the others ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... the new-comer had never heard of King George. Like most juniors here, the youth knew French, or rather Gaboon-French; it was somewhat startling to hear clearly and tolerably pronounced, "M'sieur, veux-tu des macacques?" But the jargon is not our S'a Leone and West-coast "English;" the superior facility of pronouncing the neo-Latin tongues became at once apparent. It is evident that European languages have been a mistake in Africa: the natives learn a smattering sufficient ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... every walk of life regarded themselves as authorized to supply at their own discretion, in any manner and from any sources most accessible to them, whether pure or corrupt, ancient or modern. The pedants of the universities, and the travelled coxcombs of the court, had each a neological jargon of their own, unintelligible to each other and to the people at large; on the other hand, there were a few persons of grave professions and austere characters, who, like Cato the Censor during a similar period of accelerated ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... the air, and—so I suppose it must be called—her vanity. He was very fond of showing off, and, provided he could attract attention, cared little from whom it came, nor what it was for. He caught up, parrot-like, whatever jargon he heard from his elders, which he thought was the correct thing, and aired it in season and out of season, as ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... the first place, Masin came from some outlandish part of Italy where an abominable dialect was spoken, and though he could speak school Italian when he pleased, he chose to talk to the porter in his native jargon, when he talked at all. He might just as well have spoken Greek. Secondly, he refused the porter's repeated offers of a litre at the wine shop, always saying something which sounded like a reference to his delicate health. As he was evidently as strong as an ox, and as healthy as a savage ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... heavy, very grave, very angular, this Hotel Rambouillet, but it was devised for and consecrated to conversation, considered a new form of privilege! The precieuses in their later jargon called chairs "the indispensables ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... What a Babel-jargon it would make of the Bible to take it for granted that the sense in which words are now used is the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... calling itself an INDENTURE, in fourteenth century capitals. So much I saw as I held it up for the prisoner to read over. The illegally legal instrument is still in existence, with its unpunctuated jargon about "hereditaments" and "fee simple," its "and whereas the said Daniel Levy" in every other line, and its eventual plain provision for "the said sum of L15,000 to remain charged upon the security of the hereditaments in the said recited Indenture ... until ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... however, by Sam Slick's graphic descriptions, literal reports, and racy pen-and-ink sketches, gentlemen who sit at home at ease, are able to realize with tolerable accuracy the more remarkable species of this lively family, to comprehend their amusing jargon, to take an interest in their peculiarities of person and speech, and to enter into the spirit of their very characteristic humours. No man has done more than the facetious Judge Haliburton through the mouth of the inimitable 'Sam,' to make the old parent ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... wish the devil had old Coke, for I am sure I never was so tired of an old dull scoundrel in my life. The old fellows say we must read to gain knowledge, and gain knowledge to make us happy and be admired. Mere jargon! Is there any such thing as happiness in this world? No. And as for admiration, I am sure the man who powders most, perfumes most, embroiders most, and talks ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... What book? That volume of poems so unintelligibly obscure to all but the dreaming young, who are so unintelligibly obscure to themselves. But to the merit of those poems, I doubt if even George did justice. It is not true, I believe, that they are not durable. Some day or other, when all the jargon so feelingly denounced by Colonel Morley about "esthetics," and "objective," and "subjective," has gone to its long home, some critic who can write English will probably bring that poor little volume ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... world, and straight you fill my house with fiddlers. Tri. I am clear out of that scrape now, sir. Old F. Then from a fiddler you are metamorphosed into a philosopher; and for the noise of drums, trumpets, and hautboys, you substitute a vile jargon, more unintelligible than was ever heard at the tower of Babel. Tri. You are right, sir, I have found out that philosophy is folly; so, I have cut the philosophers of all sects, from Plato and Aristotle down to the puzzlers of modern date. Old F. How much had I ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... dinned in their ears, and in those of their forefathers, from time immemorial: their hearing is thick with the same old saws, the same unmeaning form of words, everlastingly repeated: the others pique themselves on a jargon of their own, a Babylonish dialect, crude, unconcocted, harsh, discordant, to which it is impossible for any one else to attach either meaning or respect. These last turn away at the mention of all usages, creeds, institutions of more than a day's standing as a mass ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... jargon o' your schools— Your Latin names for horns an' stools? If honest Nature made you fools, What sairs your grammars? Ye'd better taen up spades and shools, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... been maintained, that when they turned to revive their expiring language and literature, the first question asked was, "What is it you would revive? Was there ever a literature in Irish or merely a collection of ridiculous rhodomontade? Is there a language, or does there survive merely a debased jargon, employed by ignorant peasants among themselves, and chiefly useful, like a thieves' ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... not tell her that he was sick and tired of the jargon of art for art's sake, literature for literature's sake. He did not tell that—practical man of the world that he was—he had no faith in literary art; that he believed the power of writing to be a gift and nothing else; that the chief art in literature is that which ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... The others are Mr. Robert Grell and the woman you know as the Princess Petrovska, who in our police jargon would be described as alias Lola Rachael, alias Lola Goldenburg." He smiled down at her as she turned her bewildered face towards him. "So you see, there is no great need to alarm yourself. The mystery is all but cleared up. If you will permit me, ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... eyes have deceived me in taking yon towers for a hold of great might. Secondly, because that same wild-cat of a king must have a court rare to visit. And the only reflection that withholds my pressing the offer as a personal suit is, that though I have some words of the Breton jargon at my tongue's need, I cannot pretend to be a Tully in Welch; howbeit, since it seems that one, at least, among them knows something of Latin, I doubt not but what I shall get out ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the acute disciples of Leibnitz, who dug for gold in the ordure of the schools, and to other German wits. Let them darken by tedious definitions what is too plain to need any; or let them employ their vocabulary of barbarous terms to propagate an unintelligible jargon, which is supposed to express such abstractions as they cannot make, and according to which, however, they presume often to control the particular and most evident truths of experimental knowledge. Such reputed science deserves no rank in philosophy, ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... against him, and dragged him into a court of law. He employed counsel, and from term to term, was compelled to dance attendance at court. Here the old hunter listened to the quibbles—the subtleties, and to him, inexplicable jargon of the lawyers. His suits were finally decided against him, and he was cast out of the possession of all, or nearly all the lands which he had looked upon as being indubitably his own. The indignation of the old pioneer can well be imagined, as he saw himself thus ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... That laurel was not all his own; The plant by Socrates was sown; To Aristotle's greater name The Macedonian[10] owed his fame. 100 The Athenian bird, with pride replete, Their talents equalled in conceit; And, copying the Socratic rule, Set up for master of a school. Dogmatic jargon learnt by heart, Trite sentences, hard terms of art, To vulgar ears seemed so profound, They fancied learning in the sound. The school had fame: the crowded place With pupils swarmed of every race. 110 With these the swan's maternal care Had ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... to draw threads from the handkerchiefs she was making for Christmas. Claire played very well and, at five cents a point, he had to watch the game. On a specially big hand she piqued and repiqued. "That," she declared, "will pay you for caputting me." The jargon of their preoccupation, "A point of six; yes, to the ace; paid; and a quatorze, kings," was the only sound until Fanny rose, decidedly. "I am going to bed." She hesitated at the door. "I hope you'll be comfortable, Claire: I had some club soda ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Link's heart. Chum, most assuredly, was not black and white. So the advertisement could not possibly refer to him. The reverend gentleman, not being a dog fancier, of course had no means of knowing that "sable", in collie jargon, means practically every shade of color except black or ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... bust And storied arch, to glut the coward rage Of regal envy, strew the public way With hallow'd ruins; when the Muse's haunt, The marble porch where Wisdom wont to talk With Socrates or Tully, hears no more, 740 Save the hoarse jargon of contentious monks, Or female Superstition's midnight prayer; When ruthless Rapine from the hand of Time Tears the destroying scythe, with surer blow To sweep the works of glory from their base; Till ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... singing about me, no doubt," said Fanchon to herself. "I do not care what people say, they cannot be Christians who speak such a heathenish jargon as that: it is enough to sink the canoe; but I will repeat my paternosters and my Ave Marias, seeing they will not converse with me, and I will pray good St. Anne to give me a safe passage to St. Valier." In which ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... innovation, almost barbarised the pure French of the Augustan age of their literature, as they did many things which never before occurred; and sometimes experienced feelings as transitory as they were strange. Their nomenclature was copious; but the revolutionary jargon often shows the danger and the necessity of neologisms. They form an appendix to the Academy Dictionary. Our plain English has served to enrich this odd mixture of philology and politics: Club, clubiste, comite, jure, juge de paix, blend with their terrorisme, lanterner, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... de ses compagnes, dignes de foi, qui virent jouer ce mystere' (OEuvres de Brantome, iii. 507). The tune to which this fair lady chose to make her final exit was composed on the defeat of the Swiss of Marignano. The burden is quoted by Panurge in Rabelais, and consists of these words, imitating the jargon of the Swiss, which is a mixture of ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... spite in his grin when he pulled out that horrid old parchment, with the lines a yard long, and read us out the abominable old crabbed writing, all about the houses, messuages, and tenements thereupon, and a lot of lawyer's jargon. I'm sure I thought it was left to Peter Pettilove himself. And when I came to understand it, one would have thought it took my father to be the worst enemy we had in the world, bent ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... he smiled, "piercing to my thought at once, You see myself? Balaustion's fixed regard Can strip the proper Aristophanes Of what our sophists, in their jargon, style His accidents?" ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... you had very little occasion to be, for you had inherited it. The deeds of others, not your own, had won it for you. If you had realized it, it gave you a great vantage, but that was all. If you had been content to have remained a conceited, commonplace man, versed only in the fashionable jargon and follies of the hour, and basing your claims on the wealth which you had shown neither the ability nor industry to win, you would ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... himself a peer of France. When one thinks of that little Popinot,—ah, mon Dieu! I forgot to tell you that Monsieur Popinot was named minister of commerce yesterday. Why shouldn't I be ambitious too? Ha! ha! I could easily pick up the jargon of those fellows who talk in the chamber, and bluster with the rest of them. Now, ...
— The Illustrious Gaudissart • Honore de Balzac
... be initiated and you will be mentioning with an easy grace to some one else that there are on board so many passengers and so many missionaries. It becomes a part of the jargon of Pacific crossing." ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... maidens who would beg him for new dances in the coming week. His footsteps were surrounded with white fluttering skirts, veils that waved like colored clouds, laughter and trills, Spanish chatter that appeared set to music:—all the frolicsome jargon of a ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and this industry brings many together during the long bright days. The light work leaves their tongues free, and families and neighbors pick together with a ceaseless chatter, a running fire of rude, broad pleasantry, intermingled occasionally with a windy war of words in a jargon that becomes all the more uncouth from anger, but which rarely ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... which all these together would fail to disguise or compensate. Certainly there are pages of writing in this Introduction which contain such an amount of extravagant assertion, uttered in such fantastic jargon, as we think could nowhere be paralleled. Dulness could never have attained to any thing so extraordinary; and surely genius never before ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... another, and combinative to the whole design of the form or machine of whatever species this may be, whether organic or inorganic. The descriptive anatomist of the human body aims at no higher walk in science than this, and hence his nomenclature is, as it is, a barbarous jargon of words, barren of all truthful signification, inconsonant with nature, and blindly irrespective of the cognitio ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... humdrum scene I never saw. Truly, both your breath and your words show that you have been drinking too much. But you need not expect me to share in your tipsy sentiment over Miss Burton. Did Mr. Van Berg ask you to show me this matter-of-fact group which, in his artistic jargon, you call a picture?" ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... still more than the abominable jargon of the postilion, made me aware that I was about to enter the dominions of King Frederick William. As I had a corner of the coach, the tyranny of his Prussian majesty was tolerably endurable, and I soon fell fast asleep. About three in the morning, just as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... could, on young Rowlatt, the architect, on whom he occasionally called to report progress. He bought such neckties and collars as Rowlatt wore and submitted them for Jane's approval. She thought them vastly genteel. He also entertained her with whatever jargon of art talk he managed to pick up. Thus, though the urchin gave himself airs and invested himself with affectations, which rendered him intolerable to all of his own social status, except the placid Mrs. Seddon and the adoring Jane, he was under the continuous influence of a high ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... the works of the great Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... nor mother were able to soothe the poor young woman. The very presence of an attorney was awful to her; and all the jargon which Daly had used, of juries, judges, trials, and notices, had sounded terribly in her ears. The very names of such things were to her terrible realities, and she couldn't bring herself to believe that her brother would threaten to make use of such horrible ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... and evil, and the capacity of understanding those expressions and definitions of good and evil which have been elaborated through the whole foregoing life of mankind; and the more and more do they appropriate to themselves the special scientific jargon of conventional expressions, which possesses no universally human significance; and the deeper and deeper do they plunge into the debris of utterly unilluminated investigations; the more and more do they lose the power, not only of independent ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi |
