"Obsolete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as they have been so largely altered from the original text that the language in many instances has not been that of Defoe but of his revisers. The present volume has been carefully printed from the original edition, and all obsolete or little-known terms and obscure phrases are explained in brief foot-notes. The "Editing" is not a corruption or pretended ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... drowned. And the old Russian "zoological" nationalism was satisfied by this primitive solution of the problem. But the political wisdom of Czar Ivan's times has long since become obsolete. ...
— The Shield • Various
... Cloaks. Obsolete slang for a cudgel 'carried by one who walked en cuerpo, and thus facetiously assumed to take the place of a cloak'. Fuller (1661), Worthies, 'Devon' (1662), 248, 'A Plimouth Cloak. That is a Cane or a Staffe whereof this the occasion. Many a man of good Extraction ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... culture, as happened strikingly in the case of China. Again we may have inherited "white elephants," which may be of absolutely no use to us, encumbrances of which we cannot easily rid ourselves, influential ideas which are no longer adequate to our present situation, obsolete emotions, methods, or institutions. We may allow our cultural inheritance, through bad education, to fall into disrepair ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... anything but a political antiquary, went back five hundred years to find the model for his new state; for, seeing that the highest office of the Roman commonwealth had remained at all times a kingship restricted by a number of special laws, the idea of the regal office itself had by no means become obsolete. At very various periods and from very different sides— in the decemviral power, in the Sullan regency, and in Caesar's own dictatorship—there had been during the republic a practical recurrence to it; indeed by a certain logical necessity, whenever an exceptional power seemed requisite ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... domestic: obsolete wire system; no longer provides a telephone for every village; in 1992, following the fall of the communist government, peasants cut the wire to about 1,000 villages and ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Here is a poetic version of the future life which completely outclasses the 'Divina Commedia.' It is compounded out of the experiences of forty-three thousand moderate drinkers who became total abstainers, seventy disbanded croquet associations, and 1,125 obsolete euchre clubs. ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... War," a volume in which the curious reader may contemplate deans and canons, divines and church dignitaries, men intelligent and enquiring and religiously disposed, all lying like overladen camels, panting under this load of obsolete theological responsibility, groaning great articles, outside the needle's eye that leads ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... of the mediaeval craftsman had been curtailed. He did not ask history to run backwards, but he felt that the nineteenth century was advancing on the wrong line of progress. To him there seemed to be three types of social framework. The feudal or Tory type was past and obsolete; for the richer classes of to-day had neither the power nor the will to renew it. The Whig or Manchester ideal held the field, the rich employer regarding his workmen as so many hands capable of producing so much work and so much profit, and believing that free bargaining ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... judicial body was, in the seventeenth century, a waning institution, its competence and functions becoming rapidly obsolete; but occasionally it awakened suddenly to life, took on a new aspect, and became of unwonted importance. This occurred when a summons was issued for a new parliament, for the county court was the electing body of the knights of the shire, ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... means either greater demand or deficient supply, and it is probably to this last we must look for an answer to the question. True it is that if we want ivory animals must be killed to get it, for the notion that some people have gained from obsolete works on natural history, to the effect that elephants shed their tusks, is an erroneous one. It is generally supposed that elephants do not shed their tusks at all, not even milk-teeth, but that they grow ab initio, as do the incisors ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... old faith mothered many of the abuses, superstitions, and dogmatisms abominated by the humanists, it had also, at this early stage in the schism, within its close a large body of ripe, cultivated, fairly tolerant opinion. The struggling innovators, on the other hand, though they purged away much obsolete and offensive matter, were forced, partly by their position, partly by the temper of their leaders, to a raw self-assertiveness, a bald concentration on the points at issue, incompatible with winsome wisdom, or with judicial fairness. How the humanists would have ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... enforcement is important to our peace and safety as a nation and is essential to the integrity of our free institutions and the tranquil maintenance of our distinctive form of government. It was intended to apply to every stage of our national life and can not become obsolete while our Republic endures. If the balance of power is justly a cause for jealous anxiety among the Governments of the Old World and a subject for our absolute noninterference, none the less is an observance of the Monroe doctrine of vital concern ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... Her sons must be carefully guarded and the rights of the first-born fully recognized. The man is of more value than the mother in the scale of being whatever her graces and virtues may be. If these Jewish ideas were obsolete they might not be worth our attention, but our creeds and codes are still tinged with the Mosaic laws and customs. The English law of primogeniture has its foundation in the above text. The position of the wife under the old common law has the ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... a courageous man, but his counterpart, a braggart, a bully, or a dandy. In these latter senses it is obsolete.—Ed. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... seen above (Q. 12, A. 12; Q. 56, A. 3; Q. 60, A. 5). This, too, is natural that the mind, in order to understand God, can make use of reason, in which sense we have already said that the image of God abides ever in the soul; "whether this image of God be so obsolete," as it were clouded, "as almost to amount to nothing," as in those who have not the use of reason; "or obscured and disfigured," as in sinners; or "clear and beautiful," as in the just; as Augustine says (De ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... of social transition, professions, like dogs, have their day. A calling honourable in one century, becomes infamous in the next; and vocations grow obsolete, like the fashioning of our garments or figures of speech. In barbarous communities, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... public sees like any lynx; Sometimes, if 'tis not blind, at least it blinks. If it extols the ancient sous of song As though they were unrivalled, it goes wrong: If it allows there's much that's obsolete, Much hasty work, much rough and incomplete, 'Tis just my view; 'tis judging as one ought; And Jove was present when that thought was thought. Not that I'd act the zealot, and desire To fling the works of Livius ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... wide plateau just above Government House, where the best view in the whole island was to be obtained, above which towered the old battery on Richmond Hill, armed with obsolete and worm-eaten thirty-two pounders, once deemed sufficient protection for the Carenage or harbour below, which it commanded. Fort George, another fortification equally powerless nowadays either for attack or defence, lay on the right; and looking beyond, over ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... our day, the love and practice of truth have grown obsolete; dramatic pieces and works of fiction, indeed all kinds of literature, especially biography, and even history, combine to outrage truth with impunity; no compunction is felt in transforming great characters into monsters, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... fought for ideas, indeed, but his distempered imagination quite overlooked the fact that they were ideas long since dead, beyond hope of resurrection. And it is but the statement of palpable truth to declare that whatever ideas the South is fighting for now, are of a like obsolete character. The glory of feudalism, as a system of society, is departed; and its attendant glories of knight-errantry and human slavery are departed with it. Don Quixote thought to reestablish the one, and the South deludes itself ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings and other inconsistencies. The transcriber made the following changes to the text ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... many political injustices in this country and many absurd, oppressive, or obsolete practices. But the main aspirations of the British people are at this present time social rather than political. They see around them on every side, and almost every day, spectacles of confusion and misery which they cannot reconcile with any conception ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... these emendations Gardiner corrects, and out of the abundance of his learning he stops a moment to show how Carlyle has misled the learned Dr. Murray in attributing to Cromwell the use of the word "communicative" in its modern meaning, when it was on the contrary employed in what is now an obsolete sense.[154] ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... leaflets, little leaves. An old botanical term, but obsolete in Keats's time. Coleridge uses it in l. 65 of 'The Nightingale' in Lyrical Ballads. In later editions ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... given, although now almost obsolete. Small tables are arranged for these with parties of four or six at each table. The guests change places at each course, the signal for this being given by the hostess ringing a bell. The ladies remain in their seats. As there will not be a fresh napkin provided at each course, ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... glee; the volume of sound and the articulate melody fall unexpected from the tree-top, whence we anticipate the chattering of fowls. And yet in a sense these songs also are but chatter; the words are ancient, obsolete, and sacred; few comprehend them, perhaps no one perfectly; but it was understood the cutters 'prayed to have good toddy, and sang of their old wars.' The prayer is at least answered; and when the foaming shell is brought to your door, you have a beverage ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... back as Doctor Johnson, punning was regarded as obsolete, it was still prevalent in the United States and so up to a late date. Mr. ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... of a mill-wright. He set up the machinery of saw and grist mills and repaired them when out of order. He had a saw mill and shingle mill of his own, but he was often away from home, especially in winter, and then I ran the saw mill alone. Its machinery was old fashioned and now obsolete, an upright saw, a carriage for the logs somewhat like that now in use, but much heavier and more clumsy. To set the logs to the required width of boards or other lumber we used inch rules, a bar made on purpose for the work and dogs to hold the logs in place. The power was water turned upon the ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... on. But when a girl's faith in the Deluge has been shaken, it's very hard to inspire her with confidence. She makes you feel that, before believing in you, it's her duty as a conscientious agnostic to find out whether you're not obsolete, or whether the text isn't corrupt, or somebody hasn't proved conclusively ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... Paris have never been tried in this warm climate. A few years ago Irish jaunting-cars and a jolting vehicle called a 'jingle' were much used, but they have slipped out of favour of late, and are now almost obsolete. The fares are usually moderate, ranging from a shilling for a quarter of an hour to the same coin for the first mile, and sixpence for every subsequent one. Cabby is fairly civil, but, as at home, always expects more than ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... be utterly unknown; the peasantry were to live rent free, under a visionary scheme of which he had all the absurd particulars; the old sporting maxim reminding farmers that landlord shooting begins on January 1st and ends on December 31st was to become obsolete by reason of a complete extinction of the species—only an odd one being occasionally dug out of the bogs along with trunks of bog-oak and skeletons of the great Irish elk; while the family pig, which, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... not be imagined that Owen did not have other cares besides those of social betterment. Much of the machinery in the mills was worn and becoming obsolete. To replace this he borrowed a hundred thousand dollars. Then he reorganized his business as a stock company and sold shares to several London merchants with whom he dealt. He interested Jeremy Bentham, the great jurist ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... said Walter, in one of his numerous addresses to the public, "lay before me in a confused arrangement. It consisted of about ninety thousand words. This multitudinous mass I reduced to about five thousand, by separating the parcels, and removing the obsolete words, technical ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... was a dance of the classical times that has long been obsolete. Its last exhibition, so far as ascertained, was in the year 1846, on the island of Oahu. In this performance both the olapa and the hoopaa cantillated the mele, while the latter squatted on the floor. Each one was armed with a sharp stick of wood fashioned like a javelin, or a Hawaiian spade, the ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... intermediary institutions—which logically grew out of the Christian idea of mediation, as the oak naturally grows out of the acorn, and which wonderfully reconciled liberty with authority, freedom with order, the finite with the infinite—have become more and more obsolete, and less and less understood. They have crumbled away like the stately columns of a magnificent but neglected cathedral. They have become dead branches that must be lopped off. They are rubbish that must ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... (1/4) was a small copper coin (obsolete) worth four maravedis. Cuarto is also, however, a (fourth) part of a lacerated body—cf. the English draw and quarter. Hacer cuartos may be translated by this phrase and hacer ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... deemed such an expedient high-handed and likely to cause alarm. He therefore decided to call for a special committee to inquire into the high price of corn, and explained his reasons to the House of Commons on 3rd November 1795. He urged the need of modifying the old and nearly obsolete law relating to the assize of bread, and he suggested the advisability of mixing wheat with barley, or other corn, which, while lessening the price of bread, would not render it unpalatable. As to prohibiting the distillation of whiskey, he proposed to discontinue ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... have die, an obsolete form of the fifth declension. Adverso colle evadunt, 'they worked their way up the opposite hill.' The author might have said in adversum collem, 'they ascended it.' [290] The neuter predicate ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... in the future. In this manner we shall meet the arguments of those who regard such institutions as having always been unnecessary and a hinderance; and of those who, while considering them as essential in the past, believe that they are now becoming obsolete, are detrimental to the cause of human progress, and in the future to be ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... modern English literature generally leave the lawyer's work altogether out of their field. But these are among the things that alter with age. Laws become literary matter just as they become old and obsolete. Then the traces they have left in words and phrases and figures of speech, their very contrasts with the laws of the present, makes them material eminently literary. We know what effective literary use Sir Walter Scott has made of the antiquities ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... the 16th century, which has a modern tower. In the prefecture, a building of the 18th century, once the bishop's palace, is a collection of historical portraits. The hotel de ville occupies the former Hotel du Presidial, an obsolete tribunal, and contains the municipal library. Two houses of the 16th century, the Hotel d'Estrades and the Hotel de Vaurs, are used as the museum, which has a rich collection of fossils, prehistoric and Roman remains, and other antiquities and curiosities. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 1628; but in 1629 Charles finally quarrelled with parliament over the question whether in assenting to the petition he had abandoned his right to levy tonnage and poundage. For eleven years he ruled without parliament, raising supplies by various obsolete expedients culminating in ship money, on behalf of which many patriotic arguments about the necessities of naval ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... tragedy in Russia, should throw the time back by a hundred and fifty years, should change the scene to Scotland (the heart of the sorrow would be Mary's exile), and, above all, should compose a ballad in a style long obsolete. This is not the method of the popular poet, and such imitations of the old ballad as Hardyknute show that literary poets of 1719 had not knowledge or skill enough to mimic the ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... of this mansion of rather obsolete luxurious comfort was strikingly singular. She was a woman about sixty years old, tall and large and fat, of what Balzac describes as "un embonpoint flottant," and was habitually dressed in a white linen cambric ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Or, if that limitation was not held to be sufficiently ample, could it not have been added, it is treason to "attempt, intend, or contrive to kill the king?" We are apt to make much too large an allowance for what is considered as the vague and obsolete language of our ancestors. Logic was the element in which the scholars of what are called the dark ages were especially at home. It was at that period that the description of human geniuses, called ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... music is full of noble simplicity, beautiful melody, and strong expression. In the airs dramatic truth is never sacrificed to vocal display, and the concerted pieces are grand, broad, and effective. Taken as a whole, the piece is free from antiquated and obsolete forms; and it wants nothing but an orchestral score of greater fullness and variety to satisfy the modern ear. It is still frequently performed in Germany, though in France and England, and even in its native country, it seems to ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... soil.(2) By these conquests the Roman territory was probably extended to about 190 square miles. Another very early achievement of the Roman arms was preserved, although in a legendary dress, in the memory of posterity with greater vividness than those obsolete struggles: Alba, the ancient sacred metropolis of Latium, was conquered and destroyed by Roman troops. How the collision arose, and how it was decided, tradition does not tell: the battle of the three Roman with the three Alban brothers born at one birth is nothing ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... was your mistake in allowing the wise eclecticism of your ancestress, whose relics now repose in the hard mud of some lacustrian stratum, to become obsolete! How much better would things be for you and yours! Abundance is assured; painful and often fruitless searches are avoided; the larder is crammed without being subject to the accidents of time, place and climate. ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... names, it would be highly injurious to the feelings of many to publish at the present time; the rest are not interesting, except a few which show the spirit of the times; and are mostly long and able constructions of militia laws, now obsolete. About this time he issued a proclamation suspending the acts of assembly, and making paper money* a tender in law, which, although strong, was certainly a ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... thunderbolt looks a most dangerous plaything in the hands of the people. But a solemnly established institution begins to grow old at once in the discussion, abuse, worship, and execration of men. It grows obsolete, odious, and intolerable; it stands fatally condemned to an unhonoured ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... view of things resting upon a patriarchal conception of kingly power, in favour of which analogies might no doubt have been found in the early state of the kingdoms of the West, but which was now becoming more and more obsolete. What had still been possible under Elizabeth, when the sovereign and her Parliament formed one party, was no longer so now; especially as a man who had attracted universal hatred stood at the head of affairs. Besides this a dispute was already going on which we cannot ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... be d——d,' omitted by accident] one would say, Why have anything to do with such a testy person? [Wrong word; no testy person can manage cool and consecutive ridicule. Quaere, what is this word? Is it anything but a corruption of the obsolete word tetchy of the same meaning? Some think touchy is our modern form of tetchy, which I greatly doubt]. My answer is, the poor man is lamentably ignorant; he is not only so, but 'out of the way' [quite true; my readers know me by this time for an out-of-the-way ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... literature, their language seeming to present some great advantages for it. One hundred years before La Fontaine, Corrozet, Guillaume Gueroult, and Philibert Hegemon, had written beautiful fables in verse, which it is supposed La Fontaine must have read and profited by, although they had become nearly obsolete in his time. It is a remarkable fact, that these poetical fables should so soon have been forgotten. It was soon after their appearance that the languages of Europe attained their full development; and, at this epoch, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... a form of vessel now obsolete, and had a very narrow stern. The "Blackmoor" was a sixth-rate of twelve guns, built at Chatham by Captain Tayler ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... catalogue of some six hundred English poets, or, more properly, verse-makers. Ninety-nine in a hundred of them are mere names, most of them no more than shadows of names, some of them mere initials. Nor can it be said of them that their works have perished because they were written in an obsolete dialect; for it is the poem that keeps the language alive, and not the language that buoys up the poem. The revival of letters, as it is called, was at first the revival of ancient letters, which, while it made men ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... burning forward, and thus wasting itself partly in the air after the bullet has left the muzzle. This difficulty, however, has been overcome in recent gunnery, and the needle-gun such as it was in the hands of King William's soldiers at Sadowa, must now be regarded as a clumsy and obsolete weapon. ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... removal; there were still some bones remaining, but no positive vestige of the decapitation. The equestrian statue[374] of which I have made mention in the third act as before that church is not, however, of a Faliero, but of some other now obsolete warrior, although of a later date. There were two other Doges of this family prior to Marino; Ordelafo, who fell in battle at Zara, in 1117 (where his descendant afterwards conquered the Huns), and Vital Faliero, who reigned in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... goldfinch; but their distinctions are clear enough to any but the most superficial glance. In the first place, the yellow warbler is a smaller bird than the goldfinch; it has neither black crown, wings, nor tail, and it does have reddish-brown streaks on its breast that are sufficiently obsolete to make the coloring of that part look simply dull at a little distance. The goldfinch's bill is heavy, in order that it may crack seeds, whereas the yellow warbler's is slender, to enable it to pick minute insects from the foliage. The goldfinch's wavy, curved ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... the Life of his father-in-law, Agricola. Nobody but Fabius Planciades Fulgentius, Bishop of Carthage, supposes that he wrote a book of Facetiae or pleasant tales and anecdotes, as may be seen by reference to the episcopal writer's Treatise on Archaic or Obsolete Words, where explaining "Elogium" to mean "hereditary disease," he continues, "as Cornelius Tacitus says in his book of Facetiae; 'therefore pained in the cutting off of children who had hereditary disease left to them'": "Elogium est haereditas in malo; ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... it difficult to understand what he considers the fault of contemporary renderings. Possibly it is that affectation of an obsolete style to which Caxton refers in the preface to the Eneydos. In any case, he himself rejects "straunge Inglis" for ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... become, for her, since his death, she could not have said, so alien was it to her beliefs, so contrary to her reason, and so antiquated, ridiculous and obsolete did the words which would have expressed her feeling seem to her. But from some remote inherited instinct, or more likely from certain tales which she had heard in her childhood, she derived a confused idea that he was of the number of those dead who in the days of old were wont to torment ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... crux of it. The plutonium bomb, from a military standpoint, was as obsolete as the flintlock musket had been at the time of the Second World War. He reviewed, quickly, the history of weapons-development since the beginning of the Atomic Era. The emphasis, since the end of the Second World ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... many of us, mathematics have their uses. They will always be learned by people who want to learn them; and people will always want to learn them as long as they are of any importance in life: indeed the want will survive their importance: superstition is nowhere stronger than in the field of obsolete acquirements. And they will never be learnt fruitfully by people who do not want to learn them either for their own sake or for use in necessary work. There is no harder schoolmaster than experience; and yet experience fails to teach where there is ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... world he had so long tenanted. By a score of years he had exceeded his due claim upon earth's good offices to man. He was a trespasser and an alien in this strange present—he with his ancient interests, fogy ways of speech and thought, obsolete images and ideals, and mind that could only regard without attempt at comprehension the little and great innovations of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... man, every gun, every rifle and cartridge both at the point of departure and at the point of arrival. The Reservists' leagues were dissolved, and the people, in so far as such a measure is possible, were compelled to give up the firearms, mostly obsolete, in their possession. The foreign Controls, so far as the Hellenic Government was concerned, might be re-established at the Allies' discretion. The Venizelist prisoners were set free, and a mixed Commission was in due course appointed to deal with the question of indemnities. The General ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... threshing some of this corn with a flail. I heard of it with astonishment. "A flail?" "Yes," he said; "my old dad put me to it when I was seventeen, so I had to learn." He seemed to think little of it. But to me threshing by hand was so obsolete and antiquated a thing as to be a novelty; nor yet to me only, for a friend to whom I mentioned the matter laughed, and asked if I had come across ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... at this obsolete kind of wit in one of the following verses in his "Mac Flecknoe;" which an English reader cannot understand, who does not know that there are those little poems above mentioned in the shape of ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... Washington, and describes him as very shy and reserved in manner, but adds, 'I found he was a lover of mine, and we enjoyed our acquaintance very much.' One of the minor results of the great Civil War was the extinguishing of Willis's literary reputation; his frothy trifling suddenly became obsolete when men had sterner things to think about than the cut of a coat, or the etiquette of a morning call. The nation began to demand realities, even in its fiction, the circulation of the Home Journal fell off, and Willis, who had always affected a horror of figures and business matters generally, ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... amongst the pious, even if successful; if frustrated in his daring attempt, what penalties might he not incur for an offence hitherto unheard of—for which no specific law, derived from experience, was prepared; and which, for that very reason, precedents, dragged from the sharpest armoury of obsolete and inapplicable legislation, would probably be distorted to meet! His friends—the sister of his youth—could he expect justice, though he might receive compassion, from them? This brave and heroic act would by their heathen eyes be regarded, perhaps, as a heinous ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... made to imageries, pinnacles, tabernacles, (canopied niches for statuary,) and corbelles. Lydgate, in The Siege of Troy, in his description of the buildings, adverts to those of his own age, and uses several architectural terms now obsolete or little understood, and some which are not so, as gargoiles. In Pierce Ploughman's Creed we have a concise but faithful description of a large monastic edifice of the fourteenth century, comprising the church or minster, cloister, chapter ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... at some of Harrington's other notions:—"The way propounded [Milton's] is plain, easy, and open before us: without intricacies, without the introducement of new or obsolete forms or terms, or exotic models,—ideas that would effect nothing, but with a number of new injunctions to manacle the native liberty of mankind; turning all virtue into prescription, servitude, and necessity, to the great impairing and ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... thus ignore the educational progress of the age, starve our children spiritually, and hamper them in their religious development by this obsolete system of education which has been long since outgrown in the public schools? Why should we not ignore tradition, prejudice, and personal preference, where these are in the way, and let the needs of the child decide? Why should thousands ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... an exceptionally intelligent mechanic, while the very writers and artists who have preserved the memory of the coaching days for us do not appear to have taken coachmen seriously, or to have regarded them as responsible and civilized men. Abuse of the railway from a pastoral point of view is obsolete. There are millions of grown persons in England to whom the far sound of the train is as pleasantly suggestive as the piping of a blackbird. Again—is not that Lord Worthington getting out of the train? Yes, that one, at the third platform from ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... certain others were rearranged into a word order more like that of today. Nothing was omitted, however, and nothing was added except relative pronouns, parts of "to be," and other such neutral connectives. Finally, obsolete words were changed to more familiar equivalents except when they were entirely clear and too good to lose. Thus "wot" became "know" but "gigglot" and "galp up the ghost" were retained. Words that have ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... mystical meaning, created by the peculiar circumstances for one separate and peculiar ear, the daughter meaning, or echo meaning. This mode of augury, through secondary interpretations of chance words, is not, as some readers may fancy, an old, obsolete, or merely Jewish form of seeking the divine pleasure. About a century ago, a man so famous, and by repute so unsuperstitious, as Dr. Doddridge, was guided in a primary act of choice, influencing his whole after ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... line of railroad from the heart of the lumber regions down the south side of the valley of the Pingsquit to Kingston, where the lumber could take to the sea. In short, it was a pernicious revival of an obsolete state of affairs, competition, and if persisted in, involved nothing less than a fight to a finish with the army, the lobby of the Northeastern. Other favoured beings stood aghast when they heard of it, and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... point. The service must be the best you can give. It is considered good manufacturing practice, and not bad ethics, occasionally to change designs so that old models will become obsolete and new ones will have to be bought either because repair parts for the old cannot be had, or because the new model offers a new sales argument which can be used to persuade a consumer to scrap what he has and buy something new. ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... 'obsolete,' like war. The arts were kindled with celestial fire; New poets sang so Homer's fame grew dim; And brush and chisel gave the wondering race Sublimer treasures than old Greece displayed. Men differed still; fierce argument arose, For men are human in this human sphere; But unarmed Arbitration ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the proof of such endurance of intelligible phrases with just the one central necessary word obsolete and changed into a mysterious proper name? The world is full of proper names which have lost their meaning—Athene, Achilles, Artemis, and so on but we need proof that poetical sayings, or riddles, survive and are intelligible except one word, which, being unintelligible, ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... help you get through. You don't know him yet. Some time, perhaps, you will—two hundred and fifty pounds of soul. He'll do all he can to get you the same chance he has, because I asked him; and then he'll try to make The States look obsolete as a newspaper, wherein, of course, he'll fail. But he'll try. If he takes to you, it won't make him try less, but he'd do your stuff and his, if you fell sick. There isn't another Boylan—a great newspaper man, too. The ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... prejudice, arising from the vast diffusion of trade and the higher branches of mechanic art, have gradually caused these functions of the order (even where the law would not permit the extinction of the order) to become obsolete. In my time, I was acquainted with two servitors: but one of them was rapidly pushed forward into a higher station; and the other complained of no degradation, beyond the grievous one of exposing himself to the notice of young women in the streets, with ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... appears from the following, extracted from Zedler's 'Grosses Universal Lexicon,' vol. xxxvi:[8] 'Seemachten, Seepotenzen, Latin. summae potestatesmaripotentes.' 'Seepotenzen' is probably quite obsolete now. It is interesting as showing that German no more abhors Teuto-Latin or Teuto-Romance compounds than English. We may note, as a proof of the indeterminate meaning of the expression until his own epoch-making ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... But the youthful works were still read; high prices were paid for them, or they were smuggled in from America. And when the epoch of "Fors" had passed, he agreed to the reprinting of all that early material. He called it obsolete and trivial; others find ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... pretty woman on the prairie. If further proof were wanted, he goes about in charge of a highly respectable British Croesus, one of the full-crusted elderly models of virtue they raise in Lancashire. The class is not obsolete. We ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... about the baptizing of bells, as if it were a custom nearly or entirely obsolete, I beg to say that I was present at the baptizing of a bell in the south-west of France not very long ago; and have no doubt that the great bell at Bordeaux, which is to have the emperor and empress as its sponsors, will undergo the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... existence of magic at Rome is to be found in the public religion of the Roman State, and that the natural inference from this is that at one time or another there must have been a very powerful influence at work in cutting away these obsolete root-leaves of the plant that was to be, and in making of that plant a neat, ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... known—could overcome the resistance of almost any number of foot-soldiers in light marching gear and armed with the antiquated pike, the affair may be worthy of a moment's attention; and for this improvement—itself now as obsolete as the slings and cataphracts of Roman legions—the world was indebted to Maurice. But the shock of mighty armies, the manoeuvring of vast masses in one magnificent combination, by which the fate of empires, the happiness or the misery of the peoples for ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... consideration, have actually been chosen to a disproportionate extent from States which would have been unrepresented in the foreign service under the system which it is to be hoped is now permanently obsolete. Some legislation for the perpetuation of the present system of examinations and promotions upon merit and efficiency would be of greatest value to ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft
... changed! What then formed but an inconsiderable opinion, had now become the predominant religion of the country. And what was it then, but a subterfuge to limit a newly spreading religion by the terms of obsolete treaties? The Bohemian Protestants appealed to the verbal guarantee of Maximilian, and the religious freedom of the Germans, with whom they argued they ought to be on a footing of equality. It was in vain—their appeal ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... you this drink of my verses, Of learning made lovely with lays, Song bitter and sweet that reheares The deeds of your eminent days; Yea, in these evil days from their reading Some profit a student shall draw, Though some points are of obsolete pleading, And ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... Wangara, variously written Vancara and Vongara, not to mention other ways. Maps place "Wangara"to the north-west of Dahome, where the natives utterly ignore the name. Dupuis ("Ashantee," 1824) suggests that, like "Takrur," it is an obsolete Moslem term for the 660 miles of maritime region between Cape Lahu and the Rio Formoso or the Old Calabar River. This would include the three despotisms, Ashanti, Dahome, and Benin, with the tribes who, from a distance of twenty-five days, ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... to assert, that all verbs are literally derived from nouns in any language; because all languages have in process of time undergone such great variation; many nouns having become obsolete or have perished, and new verbs have been imported from foreign languages, or transplanted from ancient ones; but that this has originally been the construction of all verbs, as well as those to whip and to love above ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... in poor Jocelin and his Convent, where the whole aspect of existence, the whole dialect, of thought, of speech, of activity, is so obsolete, strange, long-vanished, there now superadds itself a mild glow of human interest for Abbot Samson; a real pleasure, as at sight of man's work, especially of governing, which is man's highest work, done well. Abbot Samson had no experience in governing; had served no apprenticeship to ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... there are many White Harts, Red Lions, Silent Women and other incredible things; but when I add that my inn is in a Wiltshire village, the headquarters of certain gentlemen who follow a form of sport which has long been practically obsolete in this country, and indeed throughout the civilised world, some of my readers will have ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... for the non-medical people. The Ideal Book for this mission should be compact in form, but large enough to give the salient facts, and give these in understandable language; it must not be "loaded" with obsolete and useless junk of odds and ends which have long ceased to be even interesting; it must carry with it the stamp of genuine reliability; it should treat all the ordinary and most common forms of ailments and accidents; it must be safe in its teachings; it ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... the extent of her sway. Hers is perhaps the only industry whose statistics of to-day are obsolete to-morrow, so rapid is its growth. In 1895 the value of the few hundred cars produced in the United States was one hundred and fifty thousand dollars; in 1910 the year's output of approximately two hundred thousand machines was worth two hundred and twenty-five millions. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... knows where the enemy may be found and helps to destroy the insects and to avoid the dangers of contact. This is the formula after which those reformers want to work who hold the old-fashioned policy of silence in sexual matters to be obsolete. Of course they aim toward a mild beginning. It may start with beautiful descriptions of blossoms and of fruits, of eggs and of hens, before it comes to the account of sexual intercourse and human embryos, but if the talking is to have any effect superior ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... pictures of it and thought I had an idea of what we were going to see. But the pictures did not give a hint of the horror of the place. The little town, which must have been a gem, nestled at the foot of a huge gray cliff, crowned with the obsolete fort, which was not used or attacked. The town is gone. Part of the church is standing, and the walls of a number of buildings, but for the most part, there is nothing but a mess of scattered bricks to show ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... manner of corruption. This arbitrary standard they were not afraid to hold out to both Houses; while an idle and unoperative act of Parliament, estimating the dignity of the crown at 800,000l. and confining it to that sum, adds to the number of obsolete statutes which load the shelves of libraries, without any sort of advantage ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Lycee. There was only one course of theology in Paris, and that was the official one at the Faculty. The work in the interior of the seminary was confined to repetitions and lectures. It is true that this rule soon became obsolete. I have heard it said by old students of St. Sulpice that towards the end of last century they went very little to the Sorbonne, that the general opinion was that there was little to be learnt there, and that the private lessons in the seminary quite took the place of the official lecture. This organisation ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... admitting the constitutional right of the people to petition. These proceedings evoked a satirical reply from Gourlay, who was arrested for seditious libel, but the prosecutions failed. It was then decided to resort to the provisions of a practically obsolete statute passed in 1804, authorising the arrest of any person who had resided in the province for six months without taking the oath of allegiance, and was suspected to be a seditious character. Such a person could be ordered by ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... condition. The elaborately carved counters and wainscoting had been reduced to fragments; the tiled floors and frescoed walls were plowed up and ruined by exploding shells. In one of the banks I secured a collection of both Continental and Confederate notes, the obsolete currency of two centuries. On one of them I read this curious endorsement: "Payable two years after a treaty of peace between the Confederate and United States Governments." But right before me lay the effective protest of ...
— The Flag Replaced on Sumter - A Personal Narrative • William A. Spicer
... defence that were known at the not very remote epoch of its construction, is now pronounced absolutely incapable of resisting the novel modes of assault which may be brought to bear upon it. It can only be the flexible talent of a young man that will evolve a new efficiency out of its obsolete strength. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... endowments which qualify for leadership in a nation of freemen. The western American is more aggressive and progressive than his eastern cousin. Just as the New Englander retains many of the expressions and some of the ways which have become obsolete in Old England, so the native settler of Kansas, of Iowa, of Nebraska, and even of the nearer States of Ohio and Illinois, is more like the New Englander of half a century ago than those who have remained on the ancestral soil. He has ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... original orthography is necessary and right. Even in the so-called Elizabethan age, where a certain archaism of phrase survives, the appreciation of temporal and local colour may be helped by such an adherence. But Dryden is in every sense a modern. His list of obsolete words is insignificant, of archaic phrases more insignificant still, of obsolete constructions almost a blank. If any journalist or reviewer were to write his to-morrow's leader or his next week's article in a style absolutely modelled on Dryden, no one would ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... was the Roman custom to make the execution of convicts as public as possible, under the mistaken and anti-psychological assumption, that the spectacle of dreadful punishment would be of deterrent effect. This misconception of human nature has not yet become entirely obsolete. ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... reason that I have related to you these ancient and almost obsolete events; but I wished to adduce my instances of men and circumstances from illustrious persons and times, as it is to such events that the rest of ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... remembrance of the old Baronetcy were on the ensanguined plain,—of the matchless loyalty of a father and five valiant sons in the cause of the Royal Charles,—the pondering over tomes, which in language obsolete, but true, spoke of the grandeur—the deserved grandeur of her house; these might be recollections and pursuits, followed with an ardour too enthusiastic, but they stayed not the hand of charity, nor could ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... own acquaintance with the worst part of the sex. I had never felt the passion of love, and, of course, believed it to be something that might have existed in former ages, but that it was in our days quite obsolete, at least, among the knowing part of the world. In my imagination young women were divided into two classes; those who were to be purchased, and those who were to purchase. Between these two classes, though the division was to be marked externally ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... consider intermediate forms as hybrids, on the grounds afforded by their external characters alone, and without any exact knowledge of their real origin and often without knowing anything as to their constancy from seed. All such apparent explanations are now slowly becoming antiquated and obsolete, but the cases adduced by Kerner seem to stand ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... the angriest looks and gestures. Whippings were not frequent; but when they took place, the correction was performed in a private room adjoining, whence we could only hear the plaints, but saw nothing. This heightened the decorum and solemnity." He then describes the ferule—"that almost obsolete weapon now." "To make him look more formidable—if a pedagogue had need of these heightenings—Bird wore one of those flowered Indian gowns formerly in use with schoolmasters, the strange figures upon ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Yes, rendering obsolete popguns, elastic airbladders, games of hazard, catapults. They comprised astronomical kaleidoscopes exhibiting the twelve constellations of the zodiac from Aries to Pisces, miniature mechanical orreries, arithmetical gelatine lozenges, geometrical to correspond with zoological ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... custom spoken of by "PWCCA" (No. 11 p. 173.) was also commonly practised in one or two places in Lancashire some ten or twelve years back, but is now, I believe, obsolete. The horse was played in a similar way, but the performer was then called "Old Balls." It is no doubt a vestige of the old "hobby-horse,"—as the Norwich "Snap," who kept his place in the procession of the mayor of that good city till the days of municipal reform, was the last ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... on they can run on all fours almost as well as on their feet.—Buffon. M. Buffon might also have quoted the example of England, where the senseless and barbarous swaddling clothes have become almost obsolete. Cf. La Longue Voyage de Siam, Le Beau Voyage de ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... by {curly brackets}—to translate most of the French words and expressions which Cooper frequently employs, to define occasional now-obsolete English words, and to identify historical names and other references. Cooper frequently alludes, in the beginning of the work, to events and persons involved in the French Revolution of 1830, which he had witnessed ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... Principle of man speaks through immortal sense. If a material body - in other words, mortal, material sense - were permeated by Spirit, that body would 72:6 disappear to mortal sense, would be deathless. A con- dition precedent to communion with Spirit is the gain of spiritual life. Spirits obsolete ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... point of view he had acquired in England a reputation for originality. Philip had read some of his articles. He had formed a style for himself by a close imitation of Sir Thomas Browne; he used elaborate sentences, carefully balanced, and obsolete, resplendent words: it gave his writing an appearance of individuality. Leonard Upjohn had induced Cronshaw to give him all his poems and found that there were enough to make a volume of reasonable size. He promised to use his influence with publishers. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... from Policeman X,—Bow Street Ballads they were first called,—was required by Punch, and had to be forthcoming, whatever might be the poet's humour, by a certain time. Jacob Omnium's Hoss is excellent. His heart and feeling were all there, on behalf of his friend, and against that obsolete old court of justice. But we can tell well when he was looking through the police reports for a subject, and taking what chance might send him, without any special interest in the matter. The Knight and the Lady of Bath, ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... such persons sometimes inveigh against any and every change from the strict letter of the printed music—ignorant of the possibility, that only in this way can its spirit be respected—the changes in a multitude of cases are essential because due (1) to reverential deciphering of an obsolete musical notation, (2) to improvements in musical instruments, or (3) to the sanction and authority of the ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... is giving way to the new habit of locking them up. And since what we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real, education, as you no doubt observed at Oxford, destroys, by supplantation, every mind that is not strong enough to see through the imposture and to use the great Masters of Arts as what they really are and no more: ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... exact condition of his patient, considers how he best may assist nature or prevent death, and selects suitable drugs. He carefully notes their action and modifies his treatment as required. The use of set prescriptions for set diseases is obsolete; the doctor of to-day treats ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... two of the longitudinal lines running down each side of the front of the leg, and two down each side of the calf, approximately equidistant; the forearm was tatued in the same style. This manner of tatu is obsolete now, but Dr. Nieuwenhuis was fortunate in finding one very old ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... Truly, the verities of time and place sat lightly on the Italian opera composers of a hundred years ago. But the serenade which follows the rising of the curtain preserves a custom more general at the time of Beaumarchais than now, though it is not yet obsolete. Dr. Bartolo, who is guardian of the fascinating Rosina, is in love with her, or at least wishes for reasons not entirely dissociated from her money bags to make her his wife, and therefore keeps her most of the time behind bolts and bars. The Count Almaviva, however, has ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... officers of all ranks dispersed amongst them, and for overawing the growth of insurrectionary movements amongst their neighbors. Acting on this system, the Roman colonies in some measure resembled the English Pale, as existing at one era in Ireland. This mode of service, it is true, became obsolete in process of time, concurrently with the dangers which it was shaped to meet; for the whole of Italy proper, together with that part of Italy called Cisalpine Gaul, was at length reduced to unity and obedience ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey |
