"Adjective" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I have read twenty letters, addressed to newspapers, denouncing the name of a great quarter in London, Mary-le-bone, as ludicrously ungrammatical. The writers had learned (or were learning) French; and they had thus become aware, that neither the article nor the adjective was right. True, not right for the current age, but perfectly right for the age in which the name arose; but, for want of elder French, they did not know that in our Chaucer's time both were right. Le was then the article feminine as well ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... comprehend where the difficulty lay! So wags the world. Tempora mutantur—excuse me for quoting the Etruscan. What would we do without the Atalantic telegraph? (Pundit says Atlantic was the ancient adjective.) We lay to a few minutes to ask the cutter some questions, and learned, among other glorious news, that civil war is raging in Africa, while the plague is doing its good work beautifully both in Yurope and Ayesher. Is it ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... added] Adjunct — N. adjunct; addition, additament^; additum [Lat.], affix, appelidage^, annexe^, annex; augment, augmentation; increment, reinforcement, supernumerary, accessory, item; garnish, sauce; accompaniment &c 88; adjective, addendum; complement, supplement; continuation. rider, offshoot, episode, side issue, corollary; piece [Fr.]; flap, lappet, skirt, embroidery, trappings, cortege; tail, suffix &c (sequel) 65; wing. Adj. additional &c 37. alate^, alated^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... confused as this in which we live. Of course serenity does not always go with genuineness. We must say of Dr. Johnson that he was genuine, and yet we know that the stormy tyrant of the Turk's Head Tavern was not serene. Carlyle was genuine (though that is not quite the first adjective we should choose to describe him), but of serenity he allowed cooks and cocks and every modern and every ancient sham to deprive him. Serenity is a product, no doubt, of two very different things, namely, vision and digestion. Not the eye only, but the courses ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... he's quite swell," said Mrs. Bowen, depriving the adjective of slanginess by the refinement ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... "Amphibious. Adjective, derived from two Greek words, amphi, a fish, and bios, a beast. An animal supposed by our ignorant ancestors to be compounded of a fish and a beast; which therefore, like the hippopotamus, can't live on the land, and ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... pique him with this adjective, she was disarmed by the heartiness of his admission, "As green as grass! But I'd like to help you all the same, ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... of classical constructions are: the ablative absolute, as, which doen (IV, xliii); the relative construction with when, as, which when (I, xvii), that when (VII, xi); the comparative of the adjective in the sense of "too," as, weaker (I, xlv), harder (II, xxxvi); the participial construction after till, as, till further tryall made (I, xii); the superlative of location, as, middest (IV, xv); and the old gerundive, as, wandering ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... pokey old cottage!" she returned, with a shrill rendering of each adjective. "You would have us go and live in that damp, ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... The adjective 'pretty' seemed so ridiculously inappropriate to one of Mr. Holt's dimensions and hairy development of face, that Robert could not forbear a smile. But the Canadian had returned ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... has commonly been looked upon as an adjective; and the passage has been rendered Talis Tirynthius indefessus, which is scarce sense. Callimachus was very knowing in mythology, and is here speaking of the Cyclopian God Acmon, whom he makes the [Greek: theos propulaios], or guardian Deity of the place. It was ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... boarders thought the name facetious, but they conceded it to be quite exact in a descriptive sense, if its brick and mortar were intended to honor monumentally the tales of the host. His first name, August, was not an adjective of limitation as to time, for the proprietor was A. Stuffer every month and day in the year; and his son Emil, a quiet, inoffensive student of birds, a taxidermist, ornithologist and mechanical engineer, and a graduate of the neighboring Stevens Institute, world-famed ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... in the English language more deadly in its vague import than that apparently harmless adjective. As applied to a human being, it generally conveys every kind of odious significance, and curiously enough it is ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... district bear the same name, the name takes two slightly different forms for the city and for the district. Thus we have Bourges and Berry, Angers and Anjou, Perigueux and Perigord, Le Mans and Maine.[26] So Constantia has become Coutances; but the adjective Constantinus has become Cotentin. City and district then bear the same Imperial name as that other Constantia on the Rhine with which Coutances is doomed to get so often confounded. How often ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... course. Used as a noun—you know what a noun is, don't you? It means the name of anything. Wight means a person—any creature. Originally it meant a fairy, a supernatural being. As an adjective it means brave, valiant, strong or powerful. Or, it used to ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... from de Bohun. While, if he holds that kind hearts are more than coronets, he has an alternative descent from some medieval le bon. This adjective, used as a personal name, gave also Bunn and Bunce; for the spelling of the latter name cf. Dance for Dans, and Pearce for Piers, the nominative of Pierre (Alternative Origins, Chapter I), which also survives in Pears and Pearson. Swain may go back to the father of ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... public, many thought that they were subversive of Christianity, so, even now, some whose acquaintance with the problem and its history is of a superficial character, are inclined when they see the word creation, even with the qualifying adjective "special" prefixed to it, used in contradistinction to evolution, to imagine that the theory of creation, and of course of a Creator, must fall to the ground if evolution should be proved to be the true explanation of living things and ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... could have impelled Jack to apply the adjective "wild" to that ill-behaved and disreputable river, which, tipsily bearing its enormous burden of mud from the far North-west, totters, reels, runs its tortuous course for hundreds on hundreds of miles; and which, encountering the lordly and thus ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... Zola actually carried his study of English I could hardly say, but during the last months of his exile he more than once astonished me by his knowledge of an irregular verb or of the correct comparative and superlative of an adjective. And if he seldom attempted to speak English, he at least made considerable progress in reading it. By the time he returned to France he could always understand any Dreyfus news in the English papers. Of course the language in which the news was couched was ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... shop-girls or lady clerks, with a sprinkling of maid-servants and board school teachers. They were pale-faced, hard-working, over-dressed young women who read Marie Corelli, and considered her "deep"; who had one adjective with which to express appreciation of things, this "artistic"; anything they condemned was spoken of as "awful"; one and all liked to be considered what they called "up-to-date." Marriage they desired more than anything ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... Homer himself is of Greek. We must not be torn from our kindly associations with the old Iliad, that once was our most cherished companion, or our most looked-for prize, merely because Buttmann, Loewe, and Liddell have made us so much more accurate as to amphikupellon being an adjective, and not a substantive. Far be it from us to defend the faults of Pope, especially when we think of Chapman's fine, bold, rough old English;—far be it from, us to hold up his translation as what a translation of Homer might be. But we can still dismiss Pope's ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... What is that? Poulderie - Poultry. Poussiren - To court. Pretzel,(Ger.) - A kind of fancy bread, twist or the like. Prezackly - Pre(cisely), exactly. Protocollirt, protocolliren - To register, record. Pully, i.e., Bully - An Americanism, adjective. Fine, capital. A slang word, used in the same manner as the English used the word crack; as, "a bully horse," "a bully picture." Pumpernickel - A heavy, hard sort of rye-bread, made in Westphalia. Put der Konig troo - To put through, ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... be a material noun, it may be regarded as changed to an adjective. The term "gold pen" conveys the same idea as "golden pen," ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... that was from the late premier, I suppose. He merely forgot an adjective—it is cheap bread that the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... heard the querulous monotone of Mrs. Hoopington and the sharp staccato barking of the fox-terrier. Vladimir, who did not understand a tithe of what was being said, sat fondling a cigarette and repeating under his breath from time to time a vigorous English adjective which he had long ago taken affectionately into his vocabulary. His mind strayed back to the youth in the old Russian folk-tale who shot an enchanted bird with dramatic results. Meanwhile, the Major, roaming round the hall like an imprisoned cyclone, had caught ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... adjective for shortness is "Fariki": the place is often mentioned in The Nights as the then capital of Diyar Bakr, thirty parasangs from Nasibin, the classical Nisibis, between ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... directly upon individuals, it obviously became necessary to abandon the articles of confederation, and work out a new constitution in all its details. The plan, as now reported, omitted the obnoxious adjective "national," and spoke of the federal legislature and federal courts. But to the men who were still blindly wedded to the old confederation this soothing change of phraseology did not conceal their defeat. On the very day that the compromise ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... grammatical construction. Still, it has some authority for being considered idiomatic, for does not "Pilgrim's Progress" tell us of the "Palace Beautiful?" And doubtless many other instances might be cited of the substitution of an adjective for a noun. At all events, the worthy owner, who built his house in the most approved style of former New England architecture, spacious, square, and with projecting windows in the roof, made some pretensions ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... about forty years of age, although he looked much older, his long untrimmed brown beard and un-kept hair being thickly streaked with grey. He was quiet in manner and speech, and the latter was entirely free from the Great Australian Adjective. His story, as far as he told it to me, was a simple one, yet with an element of tragedy ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... twenty, thirty, forty, &c., is in the Icelandic expressed by the adjective tvitugr, pritugr, fertugr; a man twenty-five, thirty-five, &c., is half-pritugr, half-fertugr, &c.; the units beyond the tens are expressed by the particle um, a man of twenty-one, thirty-seven, or forty-nine, is said to have einn (i.e., ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... including tourists, writers, European officials and desert dilettanti, have affixed every kind of adjective ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... dwelt with an habitual pride on the daughter's grace of movement and carriage. "She is always so distinguished," she thought, and then checked herself by the remembrance that she was applying to Elizabeth an adjective that Elizabeth particularly disliked. Nevertheless, Mrs. Gaddesden knew very well what she herself meant by it. She meant something—some quality in Elizabeth, which was always provoking in her mother's mind despairing comparisons between what ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... century, as Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt had been in the first. The manner of his criticism is not at all judicial. His prose is as lyrical as his verse, and his praise and blame both in excess—dithyrambic laudation or affluent billingsgate. In particular, he works the adjective "divine" so hard that it loses meaning. Yet stripped of its excited superlatives, and reduced to the cool temperature of ordinary speech, his critical work is found to be full of insight, and his ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Futunan(s), or Wallis and Futuna Islanders adjective: Wallisian, Futunan, or Wallis ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... a champion worth while! He did nothing by halves. He was of the breed of men who grow more intense, more convinced, more thorough, as they talk. One adjective begets another, one warm allusion gives birth to a warmer, one flashing impulse evokes a brighter confidence, till the atmosphere is flaming with conviction. If Jean Jacques started with faint doubt regarding anything, and allowed himself betimes the flush of a declaration ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... earlier part, a series of incidents that is, we believe, the most ingenious yet planned by its author.... The adventure develops and grows, the tension increases with each page, to such an extent that the hackneyed adjective, 'breathless,' finds an appropriate ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... smooth-running pump. This I admit I could never manage to produce. Mr. Curtis's standard of style was solely governed by the question of the repetition of the same word. It was an unforgivable sin to repeat a substantive, adjective, or verb without an intervening space of at least four inches. This, of course, leads to that particular form of "journalese" in which a cricket-ball becomes a "leathern missile" and so forth. Apropos of this I remember ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... the king's divorce from Catherine of Arragon and his marriage with Anne Boleyn. More's philosophy is best reflected in his Utopia, the description of an ideal commonwealth, modeled on Plato's Republic, and printed in 1516. The name signifies "no place" (Outopos), and has furnished an adjective to the language. The Utopia was in Latin, but More's History of Edward V. and Richard III., written in 1513, though not printed till 1557, was in English. It is the first example in the tongue of a history as distinguished from a chronicle; ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Rome, real mischief began. Instead of rhma geniktaton, we now find the erroneous, or, at all events, inaccurate, translation, modus infinitus, and infinitivus by itself. What was originally meant as an adjective belonging to rhma, became a substantive, the infinitive, and though the question arose again and again what this infinitive really was, whether a noun, or a verb, or an adverb; whether a mood or not a mood; the ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... crisp as autumn ice and bitter as gallberries. Colonel Clark had no respect whatever for Hamilton, to whom he had applied the imperishable adjective "hair-buyer General." On the other hand Governor Hamilton, who felt keenly the disgrace of having to equalize himself officially and discuss terms of surrender with a rough backwoodsman, could not conceal ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... "but 'foolish' is an adjective which in this instance should be an adverb and which we will proceed to make so by the suffix 'ly.' Thus instead of saying, I talk 'foolish,' you must say I ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... swearer. He took to it, as a lad does, who wishes to show that he has arrived at man's estate. Every thing with the judge was "damned bad" or "damned good," damned hot or cold, damned stupid, &c. It was his epithet, his adjective, his participle, his sign of positive and superlative, his argument, his judgment. He could not have got on without it. To deprive Thurlow of his "damn" would have been to shave his eyebrows, or to turn his ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... with techspeak 'context-free'] adj. Used of a message that adds nothing to the recipient's knowledge. Though this adjective is sometimes applied to {flamage}, it more usually connotes derision for communication styles that exalt form over substance or are centered on concerns irrelevant to the subject ostensibly at hand. Perhaps most used with reference to speeches by company presidents and other professional ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... its construction, it makes a kind of humming noise when it is drawn along; hence, the origin of the adjective humdrum. ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... words in the English language are divided into nine great classes. These classes are called the Parts of Speech. They are Article, Noun, Adjective, Pronoun, Verb, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction and Interjection. Of these, the Noun is the most important, as all the others are more or less dependent upon it. A Noun signifies the name of any person, ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... luscious and effulgent as a seed catalogue, with rhetorical pictures about as florid and unconvincing. To him the town was a veritable Troy—full of heroes and demigods, and honourables and persons of nobility and quality. He used no adjective of praise milder than superb, and on the other hand, Lige Bemis once complained that the least offensive epithet he saw in the Banner tacked after his name for two years was miscreant. As for John Barclay, he once told General Ward that a man could take five dollars in to Brownwell ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... sing-song voice, and with an air of anxious simplicity, Doddle began, 'Article, noun, adjective, pronoun, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, interjection, outerjection, beginning with ies in the plural—as, baby, babies; lady, ladies; hady, hadies. Please, sir, isn't that last one ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... bowels, a diuretic has the property of exciting the flow of urine, a diaphoretic excites perspiration, and a demulcent protects or soothes irritated tissues, while haemoptysis denotes a peculiar variety of blood-spitting and aphthous is an adjective applied to ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... matters like swearing, the padre is wise and he knows what Tommy's adjective is worth. He knows that Tommy is a simple person and apt to reduce his vocabulary to three wonderful words: three adjectives which are impartially used as substantives, adjectives, verbs, or adverbs. That is all. The earnest young chaplain at first gasps with horror at the flaming words, and ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... I call liberal in that affair,"—half the critics of the day would use the adjective instead of the adverb here, and why should Deacon Prates English be any better than his neighbours?—"and so I've admitted to his friends over on the Vineyard. But, Gar'ner, our great affair still remains to be accounted for. Do you wish to have the room ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... the adjective. "I am one of them," wondering what the effect of this admission would be. "I am not English, but of the brother race. Forgive me if I have imposed on you, but it was your fault. You said that I was English, and I was too lonesome to ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... made by omitting to repeat the article in a sentence. It should always be repeated when a noun or an adjective referring to a distinct thing is introduced; take, for example, the sentence, "He has a black and white horse." If two horses are meant, it is clear that it should be, "He has a black and a white horse." ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... for his return I casually glanced at the other diners. At my table—one of those long marble-topped affairs by the wall—there was an old man reading a paper, and the handsomest girl I had set eyes upon in a month of moons. Sometimes the word handsome seems an inferior adjective. She was beautiful, and her half-lidded eyes told me that she was anywhere but at Mouquin's. What a head of hair! Fine as a spider's web, and the dazzling yellow of a wheat-field in a sun-shower! The irregularity of ...
— Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath
... The adjective 'positive' contains the same fallacy. Apparently Comte meant by the choice of it to convey the sense that he would limit research to phenomena in their orders of resemblance, co-existence and succession. But to call the inquiry into phenomena positive, in the sense that it alone ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... very singular. All clever boys are. He knows already his five declensions, and the four conjugations, active and passive. Come, Master Rattlin, decline for the lady the adjective felix—come, begin, nominative hic et haec et ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... doth us teach, That it hath nine parts of speech;— Article, adjective, and noun, Verb, conjunction, and pronoun, With preposition, and adverb, And interjection, as I've heard. The letters are just twenty-six, These form all words when rightly mix'd. The vowels are a, e, o, i, With u, ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... of Byamee, he is called Boyjerh, which means Father, just as in the Theddora tribe the women speak of Darramulun as PAPANG, 'Father.' [Howitt, Native Tribes of South-East Australia, p. 493.] Among the Euahlayi both women and the uninitiated use byamee, the adjective for 'great,' in ordinary talk, though the more usual adjective answering to 'great' is BOOROOL, which occurs in Kamilaroi as well as in Euahlayi. The verb baia or biai, to make or shape, whence Mr. Ridley derived Baiame, is not known ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... [20] The verbal adjective in [Greek: tos] is almost universally used in a passive sense; [Greek: hypoptos], however, in this place is an exception to the rule, as are also, [Greek: kalyptes], Soph. Antig. ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... 12. meagre, barefoot, wan. Such a compression of a description into three bare epithets is frequent in Keats's poetry. He shows his marvellous power in the unerring choice of adjective; and their enumeration in this way has, from its ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... its political organization. In it there are no sovereign people without States, and no States without union, or that are not united States. The term united is not part of a proper name, but is simply an adjective qualifying States, and has its full and proper sense. Hence while the sovereignty is and must be in the States, it is in the States united, not in the States severally, precisely as we have found the sovereignty of the people is in the people collectively ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... meaning of "I am well," and may be called a substitute for our verb "to be." By incorporating yalu with this expression, it makes it more emphatic, as, Yalu murrung nginyadhu, "Really I am well." Any adjective describing a human attribute may be taken as a predicate, as, good, bad, strong, sleepy, and employed with the ...
— The Wiradyuri and Other Languages of New South Wales • Robert Hamilton Mathews
... 'The adjective is excellent,' she said with a little face, as she put her violin into its case. 'If I remember right, Catherine and I felt it personal. None of us were ever educated, except in arithmetic, sewing, English ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... people greeted each other affectionately, and momentarily blocked the Dover Street Tube exit in doing so. The adjective "old" was misleading. Their united ages would ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... infernalis—hell-fury—in his natural history. It was his way of fighting back. All through his life he never wasted an hour on controversy. He had no time, he said. But once when a rival made a particularly nasty attack upon him, he named a new plant after him, adding the descriptive adjective detestabilis—the detestable so-and-so. On the whole, he had the best of it; for the ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... already completed thirty-seven years from Waterloo, and my remembrances upon this subject go back to a period lying much behind that great era), I used to be annoyed and irritated by the false interpretation given to the Greek word aion, and given necessarily, therefore, to the adjective aionios as its immediate derivative. It was not so much the falsehood of this interpretation, as the narrowness of that falsehood, which disturbed me. There was a glimmer of truth in it; and precisely that glimmer it was which led the way to a general ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... about sixty or seventy of us in all. Khokhriakov presided. His neck is like a bull's, but rougher—and red. He started the meeting by a thunderous "Shut up, you over there!" and "Somebody open the window; who in hell is smoking such ... tobacco (I omit the adjective, though correct and strikingly ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... not pure English, but the Arabic 'Chuaul' with an s prefixed:—the English word, a form of 'squeal,' meaning a child's cry, from Gothic 'Squaela' and Icelandic 'squilla,' would scarcely have been made an adjective by Gerarde),—"and will not yield to any culturing or transplanting: it groweth especially in a field called Cragge Close, and at Crosbie Ravenswaithe, in Westmerland; (West-mere-land you observe, not mor) upon Ingleborough Fells, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... he stated distinctly that the numerals were due to the Hindus.[12] This is as plainly asserted by later Arab {6} writers, even to the present day.[13] Indeed the phrase 'ilm hind[i], "Indian science," is used by them for arithmetic, as also the adjective hind[i] alone.[14] ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... with a soul too large for its body, cannoned a first-class battleship off the Medway, and with a thoughtfulness too often lacking at sea, stood by and lowered a boat, whereupon the captain, who had been worrying about his paint, invented, in his surprise, a brand-new adjective for the use of senior officers ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... proceeded up Unter den Linden, Burroughs and Welcome would be with it as regimental mascots, marching behind the band, bells on their fingers, rings on their toes. He also assured me that if he ever again has to write an essay on the Fert, its characteristics, the adjective "noble" will not ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, March 21, 1917 • Various
... us also the difference of our ideas: for if we observe them, we shall find that OUR SIMPLE IDEAS HAVE ALL ABSTRACT AS WELL AS CONCRETE NAMES: the one whereof is (to speak the language of grammarians) a substantive, the other an adjective; as whiteness, white; sweetness, sweet. The like also holds in our ideas of modes and relations; as justice, just; equality, equal: only with this difference, that some of the concrete names of relations amongst men chiefly are substantives; as, paternitas, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... advantageously in her superior's eyes, had scuttled away, issuing as she went, the order to close all outer doors and guard them, allowing no one to pass through. Guileless souls both hers and Miss Woodhull's, though another adjective might possibly be more apt. The house had a few ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... women would have the courage to remain unmarried were there so euphonious a title awaiting them as that of "bachelor," which, when shorn of its accompanying adjective "old," simply means unmarried. ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... it. Let those officious neighbors keep on talking; and when they have talked themselves blind, you may tell them, for me, that what money we have is safe," said Marcy, with a good deal of emphasis on the adjective. "If you want to see what mother brought back from the city, go and look at the servants. Every one of them is dressed in a new suit. Now go on and tell me the bad news. I'm getting ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... a great deal to answer for. Of course we refer to phrenological bumps, from which, possibly, the powerful adjective "bumptious" is derived, it being applicable to a person whose conflicting bumps keep him continually ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... or adjective beyond what is needed to give the image, is a five-barred gate in the path of the eager ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... and field artillery—furnished special occasions for organized—or disorganized—upheavals of animal spirits. For these exercises we then had scant respect. They were "soldiering;" and from time immemorial soldier had been an adjective to express uselessness, or that which was so easy as to pass no man's ability. A soldier's wind, for example, was a wind fair both ways—to go and to return; no demands on brains there, much less on seamanship. The curious irrelevancy of such applications never strikes persons; unless, indeed, ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... [169] The adjective expers here is joined in the same sentence with two different cases; this is an unusual construction, though expers may be joined with the genit. as well as with the ablat. See Zumpt, S 437, note 1. [170] From what he quotes as the substance of the law, we see that he means the lex Papiria Poetelia, ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... only attributed to sounds and sights, where, and because, they recall what is pleasing, sublime, pathetic, and set our ideas and emotions flowing in one of these channels. But he does not get fairly on the track of either Alison's or any other decisive and marking adjective, with which to qualify his rapports. He wastes some time, moreover, in trying to bring within the four corners of his definition some uses of the terms of beauty, which are really only applied to objects by way of analogy, and are not meant to predicate the beautiful ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Liberals, or old Reformers, who have been taught by experience, and are willing now to adopt the word 'Conservative,' at least in its adjective sense. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... end or design (in the sense of intention) of the act being performed, that is to say, at bottom, the design (in the sense of drawing) of the act supposed accomplished. These three aspects are those of the adjective, substantive and verb, and correspond to the three essential categories of language. After the explanations we have given above, we might, and perhaps we ought to, translate [Greek: eidos] by "view" or rather ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... especially from the waist, and ending in a goat, with the legs and feet of that creature. But Casaubon and his followers, with reason, condemn this derivation, and prove that from Satyrus the word satira, as it signifies a poem, cannot possibly descend. For satira is not properly a substantive, but an adjective; to which the word lanx (in English a "charger" or "large platter") is understood: so that the Greek poem made according to the manners of a Satyr, and expressing his qualities, must properly be called ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... man can not talk and eat at once. It was true that he was hungry, that hunger is a piquant sauce, and that artist was an adjective too mild to apply to the cook. But the other reason was his chief one. Yasmini ate daintily, as if ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... taken leave to coin. The Latins have both substantive and adjective. Purpura—Purpureus. We make purple serve both uses; but it seems a poverty to which we have no need to submit, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... hundred yards—and pursuing a winding route, I at length stopped at the door of the principal hotel—au Grand Coq! I laughed heartily when I heard its name; for with the strictest adherence to truth the adjective ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... country is to my mind perfectly miraculous. Already our presence has been infinitely beneficial in allaying animosities and in pointing out abuses.' If it had been the case that the country was tranquil, his adjective would have been singularly appropriate, but not precisely in the sense ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... England, write the word Kanonsionni. It is usually rendered by interpreters the "Long House," but this is not precisely its meaning. The ordinary word for "long house" is kanonses or kanonsis,—the termination es or is being the adjective suffix which signifies long. Kanonsionni is a compound word, formed of kanonsa, house, and ionni, extended, or drawn out. The confederacy was compared to a dwelling which was extended by additions made to the end, in the manner in which their bark-built houses were ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... daylight at the forge, and even in the summer his leisure minutes were few and far between. But he carried his Greek grammar in his hat, and often found a chance, while he was waiting for a large piece of iron to get hot, to open his book with his black fingers, and go through a pronoun, an adjective, or part of a verb, without being noticed by ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... popular corruption, or rather perversion, of the Dutch Hoogmogend-heiden, 'High Mightinesses', the title of the States-General. In a transferred manner it is used as a humorous or Contemptuous adjective of those affecting grandeur and show; 'high and mighty.' The phrase is common. Needham, Mercurius Pragmaticus, No. 7 (1648), speaks of the 'Hogan Mogan States of Westminster'. Tom Brown (1704), Works (1760), Vol. IV, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... begin to experience a certain feeling of discouragement. Then, the humorous papers have taught you to look upon the Suburban Furnace as part of the machinery or property of a merry jest; and you will be shocked to discover that to the new-comer it is a stern and cold reality. I use the latter adjective deliberately and advisedly. There will surely come an awful night when you will get home from New York with Mrs. Modestus in the midnight train, too tired for anything but a drowsy chat by the lingering embers ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... not ordinary and withal satisfy some theological ears, he took a new way, to wit from the letters, syllables, and the word itself; then from the coherence of the nominative case and the verb, and the adjective and substantive: and while most of the audience wondered, and some of them muttered that of Horace, "What does all this trumpery drive at?" at last he brought the matter to this head, that he would ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... possess. Among other computations, Ptolemy gives the precise formula of the first four notes of the scale as we now have it, but as this occurred only as one among many of a similar character, and is in no way distinguished from any of the others by any adjective implying greater confidence in it, we can only count it as a lucky accident. The eminence that has been awarded to Ptolemy as the original discoverer of the correct ratio of the major scale, therefore, does ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... an offence against national pride and justice! He forthwith called the attention of his chief officer to the indignity that had been thrust upon them. "Look," said he, in wrathful humiliation, "there's God Almighty given that adjective Dutchman a leading wind and allowed His own countryman to be jammed on a lee shore!" It was said that Barley never really forgave this unpatriotic act, though he still adhered to the belief that the God of British seamen was stedfastly on ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... contemplated qualifying the word "missus" with some such adjective as "bonny," but a glance at Margaret's face nipped this poetical flower in the bud. After a moment she sat upright, gazing ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... Kshurupras, i.e., arrows sharp as razors, (2) Vatsadantas, i.e., arrows having heads like the calf-tooth, (3) Vipathas, i.e., long arrows having stout bodies, (4) Narachas, long arrows; Ardhachandrabhais, i.e., looking like shafts furnished with heads of the form of the half-moon; it is an adjective qualifying Narachis, (5) Anjalikas ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... who had never taken his eyes off him, so curious was he to learn the nature and attributes of what he called a "de," and was on the look-out for an opportunity of attracting his attention, so as to come into closer contact with him, caught in its flight the adjective 'blanche' and, his eyes still glued to his plate, snapped out, "Blanche? Blanche of Castile?" then, without moving his head, shot a furtive glance to right and left of him, doubtful, but happy on the whole. While Swann, by the painful and futile ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... detersive properties. I could think of no other reason than this for calling a bath "black." Upon entering the "black bath," however, at Kluchei, I saw my mistake, and acknowledged at once the appropriateness of the adjective. Leaving our clothes in a little rude entry, which answered the purposes without affording any of the conveniences of a dressing-room, we stooped to a low fur-clad door and entered the bath-room proper, which was certainly dark enough and black enough to justify the gloomiest, murkiest ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... the colonel's habits, ways of life, friends and acquaintances, happily restricting her interrogations, in regard to those of her own sex, to "any LITTLE girls that he knew." Saved by this exonerating adjective, the colonel saw here a chance to indulge his postponed monitorial duty, as well as his vivid imagination. He accordingly drew elaborate pictures of impossible children he had known—creatures precise ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... color burned like a flame. And thus, little step after little step, they went from little wonder to little wonder. Dolly liked small things; it was the microscopic aspect of Nature that touched her heart; she had an adjective all her own for such: they were "baby" things—baby flowers, baby brooks, baby stars. This appealed less to Charles-Norton, hungry for big sweeps. And even now, he caught himself yawning once, and casting a look at the crest ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... tribes of American Indians, the word is used with a double signification,—a literal and narrow meaning, and a general and rather undefined application. It signifies not only physical remedies and the art of using them, but second-sight, prophecy, and preternatural power. As an adjective, it embraces the idea of supernatural as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... the word shell implied that the Colonel knew what was what. To the New England inland native, beyond the reach of the east winds, the oyster unconditioned, the oyster absolute, without a qualifying adjective, is the pickled oyster. Mrs. Trecothick, who knew very well that an oyster long out of his shell (as is apt to be the case with the rural bivalve) gets homesick and loses his sprightliness, replied, with the pleasantest smile in the world, that the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... locked. On the second there was also only one door, but when I turned the handle it opened. There came forth to meet me the chill musty air that is characteristic of a long unoccupied room. With it there came an indescribable odour. I use the adjective advisedly. Though very faint, diluted as it were, it was nevertheless an odour that made my gorge rise. I had never smelt anything like it before, and ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... Carrington's "class," but then in all her experience she had never met a gentleman of such fashion and such a superior air, who adapted himself so charmingly to any society. In fact, "charming" was the very adjective for him, ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... mano: observe the usual idiomatic mode of expressing possession of parts of the body, wearing apparel, etc., by the use of the definite article instead of the possessive adjective his, her, etc., the dative pronoun also being often added to indicate the possessor, as: Yo me corte el ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... player with pencil and paper. The first thing to write on the paper is an adjective which applies to a man. The paper is then folded over and passed to the right. This time each one writes the name of a man (either present or absent), folds the paper so the next one can't see what is written, and passes it on to the right. This is done each ...
— Games for Everybody • May C. Hofmann
... young man for whose opinion older men were accustomed to wait. His person more than justified his praenomen, for Mr. Harper Freeman, Jr., was undeniably fat. "Fat, but fine and frisky," was ever his own comment upon the descriptive adjective by which his friends distinguished him. And fine and frisky he was; fine in his appreciation of good eating, fine in his judgment of good cattle and fine in his estimate of men; frisky, too, and utterly irrepressible. "Harp's just ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... and beautiful ideas, these sonatas are not really adapted to the intrinsic nature of the pianoforte, and hence fail to arouse the enthusiasm of those whose taste has been formed by the works of Chopin and Schumann. It was no doubt an instinctive antipathy to Beethoven's unpianistic style (if the adjective be permissible), which prevented Chopin from admiring Beethoven as deeply as he did some other composers, whom he would have admitted to be his inferiors. And Beethoven himself does not seem to have regarded his pianoforte works with the same satisfaction ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... we have this sentence, "To them that are sanctified by God the Father." The word "sanctified" is here used as a predicate adjective, and describes the people addressed. It would not alter the meaning of the text were we to translate it thus: "To them that are made holy by God the Father." The word holy is here used as a predicate adjective, and describes the people addressed. In the sentence, "Sanctify ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... our rule to index every provision under at least three heads, and in many cases there is a sub-classification under the general designation. We avoided an error into which many writers fall—we never indexed under the lead of an adjective, article or participle. ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... on Aristotle, writing in the 4th century A.D., calls certain instruments used for fusion and calcination "chuika organa," that is, instruments for melting and pouring. Hence, probably, came the adjective chyic or chymic, and, at a somewhat later time, the word chemia as the name of that art which deals with calcinations, fusions, meltings, and the like. The writer of a treatise on astrology, in the 5th century, speaking of the influences of the stars on the dispositions of man, says: ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... and bishops in the Church; surely she must be adequate to send her representatives to the lower House. I know the time may not have come for mooting a question of this sort; but I know the time will come, and that woman will be something more than a mere adjective to man in political matters. She will become a ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... in the third line is made to do double duty,—as the adjective, furu[i], "ancient"; and as the verb furu, "to shake." The old term nama-kuhi (lit., "raw head") means a human head, freshly-severed, from which the blood is ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... An adjective is a word used to qualify, limit, or define a noun, or a word or phrase which has the value of a noun. Nouns are ordinarily very general and indefinite in meaning, for example, man conveys only a very general idea. To make that idea definite we need ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... "Eternal Fire," "Unquenchable Fire."—All these expressions are used in describing the fiery judgment upon sin and sinners. The effect of the fire is everlasting and eternal, and by a common usage in language the adjective that describes the effect is applied to the agent by ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... man." I am rather weary of this word "gentlemanly," which seems to me to be often inappropriately used, and often, too, with such exaggerated distortion of meaning, while the full simplicity of the noun "man," and the adjective "manly" are unacknowledged—that I am induced to class it with the cant ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... this phrase, he has constantly come close to it. The Suspiria are full of such passages—there are even some who prefer Savannah la Mar to the Ladies of Sorrow. Beautiful as it is I do not, because the accursed superfluous adjective appears there. The famous passages of the Confessions are in every one's memory; and so I suppose is the Vision of Sudden Death. Many passages in The Caesars, though somewhat less florid, are hardly ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... numeral adjective were joined to Sestertii, and agreed with it in case, it signified just so many Sesterces; as decem Sestertii, 10 Sesterces—thirty-five cents ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... or adjective? If the latter, no edition is rightly stopped; for, of course, there should be a comma after "massy;" and then I somewhat doubt the propriety of "proof" for "proved," unless joined with another word, as ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 40, Saturday, August 3, 1850 - A Medium Of Inter-Communication For Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, • Various
... Bad. "I feel badly." "He looks badly." The former sentence implies defective nerves of sensation, the latter, imperfect vision. Use the adjective. ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... is a common name of women. It means one who has no vala or strength or power. The word is also used as an adjective. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the substantive deliciae, delight, pleasure, enjoyment; and the adjective (derived from the same root, and guiding us to the original meaning of the substantive) delicatus, which amongst other meanings, has that of tender, soft, gentle, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... in fancy, imagination, in the metaphorical faculty, or whatever else we may choose to call it. Nor did he perceive or describe visible things, visible effects, in their own unmetaphorical shapes and colours: not a line of description, not an adjective can be found in his works except such as may be absolutely indispensable for topographical or similar intelligibility; Alfieri obviously cared as little for beautiful sights as for beautiful sound. This being the case, everything that we might call distinctly poetical, all ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... it will be seen that they have imported the idea of unendingness into the word [Greek: aion] and the idea of "eternal" into its adjective, [Greek: aionios]. ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... p. 407.).—The valuable reference to Knox proves the etymology from the Latin. Terrene, as an adjective, occurs in old English. See quotation ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 28. Saturday, May 11, 1850 • Various
... with his spurs. He wished the schoolma'am would not limit herself so rigidly to that one adjective. It became unmeaning with much use, so that it left a fellow completely ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... here, no adjective-work. But no painting or adjectives could better suggest all that the world and the loss of the world mean to an imaginative child than this brief collection of simple things. To read The Stolen Child is to ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... directed against the natives of the adjoining valley. In all these denunciations my companion and I acquiesced, while we extolled the character of the warlike Typees. To be sure our panegyrics were somewhat laconic, consisting in the repetition of that name, united with the potent adjective 'motarkee'. But this was sufficient, and served to conciliate the good will of the natives, with whom our congeniality of sentiment on this point did more towards inspiring a friendly feeling than anything ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... dramatic art. "The skill to leave out"—lo! the master faculty of the dramatist! But, in the first place, I do not believe that, having regard to the relative scope of the play and of the novel, the necessity for leaving out is more acute in the one than in the other. The adjective "photographic" is as absurd applied to the novel as to the play. And, in the second place, other factors being equal, it is less exhausting, and it requires less skill, to refrain from doing than to do. To know when to refrain from doing may be hard, but positively to do is even harder. Sometimes, ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... loud pathos. "It's hell! Say, I can tie a fancy knot in a bridle-rein that can't be beat by any puncher in the country, but darn me if I can see the difference between a adjective and one of these here adverbs! Once I thought I knowed something—me, Smith—but say, I don't know enough to make ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... being a good Philadelphian, I am not sure if the nights that succeeded have yet lost for me their novelty. As a consequence, if, in looking back, my days appear to be wholly monopolized by work, my nights seem consecrated as wholly to amusement. The poet's "hideous" is the last adjective I could apply to the night my busy ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... The mildness of the adjective brought another half-smile to Helbeck's dark face. A stranger watching it might have wondered, indeed, whether it could smile with any ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... being reduced, but perhaps not with the same rapidity as at first when Mr Barelli was at the top of enthusiastic—if the adjective was applicable—vigor. Oftener and oftener and oftener he paused to sharpen his implement and I thought the cropped shocks were becoming smaller and smaller. As the movement of the scythe swept the guillotined ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... go to Italian, and look at the word nicchia. Both from Alberti and from Baretti we find it to bear the meaning of "a charge, a duty, or an employment;" and if before this word we place the adjective piccola, we have piccola nicchia, "a small task, or trifling service to be performed." Now I think no one can fail to see the identity of the meanings of the expressions piccola nicchia and pique-nique; ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... the bland Italian appeared to check some disparaging adjective, and mildly added, "so good, I allow; but you must own that we cannot ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... a sad abuse of the adjective little, I am quite aware of it, but how can I do otherwise? In describing this country, the temptation is great to use it ten times in every written line. Little, finical, affected,—all Japan is contained, both physically and ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... style at greater length in another place; they bear a marked relation to the theory of observation I have just laid down. Whatever the thing we wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it. We must seek till we find this noun, this verb, and this adjective, and never be content with getting very near it, never allow ourselves to play tricks, even happy ones, or have recourse to sleights of language ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... a brief explanation. The original word is the adjective aionos (aionios) (Eng. aeonian), coming from the noun aion (aion) (Eng. aeon), an age, an epoch, a long period of time. This noun cannot mean eternity for it is repeatedly used by St. Paul in the plural ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... none, except those over which the trains thundered to and from New York, and the adjective, except to old inhabitants who had a curious fierce loyalty for the place, did not seemingly apply. Fairbridge could hardly, by an unbiassed person who did not dwell in the little village and view its features through the rosy glamour ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the customs of others from their own standpoint. For three or four centuries they have called their own customs "Christian," and have thus claimed for them a religious authority and sanction which they do not possess by any connection with the principles of Christianity. Now, however, the adjective seems to be losing its force. The Japanese regard nudity with indifference, but they use dress to conceal the contour of the human form while we use it to enhance, in many ways, the attraction. "Christian" ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... commonplace mind of the present day acquainted with his works but has fallen back on "the castled crag" to describe Drachenfels or Marksburg or Rheinfels, because, forsooth, its own English is too limited to supply a better adjective. So it is that conventional and inadequate English is perpetuated and individual force and expression are lost because people accept the ideas of others and will not seek ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... leering or "empty, hence, perhaps, leer horse, a horse without a rider; leer is an adjective meaning uncontrolled, hence 'leer drunkards'" (Halliwell); according to Nares, a leer (empty) horse meant also a ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... and its adjective, "nervous," are used in two totally distinct senses: one, that which is vague and unsubstantial, purely mental or subjective, and, in the realm of disease at least, imaginary; the other, purely anatomical, referring to certain strands of tissue devoted to the purpose ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... Journal, the Lancet, and other medical periodicals, against the terrible cruelties of the practice long before the "early seventies." The Royal Commission of 1875, we are told, "found no material abuse." What is meant by the qualifying adjective "material"? Let us see how the inquiry impressed an impartial observer, the Lord Chief Justice ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... imagination. I would that the writing could be as cold in tone as the criticism of those who consider everything other than polished ice almost amusing—to judge by the way they handle it, dismissing it with an airy grace and a hurting adjective. Would they be quite so cool, we wonder, if the little wronged girl were their own? But we do not write for such as these. The thought of the cold eyes would freeze the thoughts before they formed. We write for the earnest-hearted, who are not ashamed to confess they care. And yet we write ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... for all that. A People's—-Chaste word, it will bring forth no adjective. The plays of A People's Theatre are People's plays. The plays of A People's Theatre are plays ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... tree and eat nuts?" she asked, hoping that the use of the adjective "large" might be ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... Every adjective he uses has its significance. Take "ranch" eggs, how pastoral they sound and fanned by fresh zephyrs. The same with "yard" eggs, such an "out in the open—let the rest of the world go by" impression they confer. ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... is an adjective meaning calm, and little glaring, and is specially attributed to the moon in spring. The line is from an ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... not so charming as her father," replied Lady Laura, with whom that favourite adjective served for everything in the way of praise. To her the Pyramids and Niagara, a tropical thunderstorm, a mazourka by Chopin, and a Parisian bonnet, were all alike charming. "I suppose solidity isn't so nice in a girl," she went on, ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... no doubt that the Arabic name, Usdum, is identical with Sodom, by a well-known custom of the language to invert the consonant and vowel of the first syllable. But even this is brought back to the original state in the adjective form. Thus I heard our guides speak of the Jebel Sid'mi, meaning the Khash'm or Jebel Usdum, or ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... Others had been born and bred in the West, and had never seen a larger town than Santa Fe or a bigger body of water than the Pecos in flood. Some of them went by their own name; some had changed their names; and yet others possessed but half a name, colored by some adjective, like Cherokee Bill, Happy Jack of Arizona, Smoky Moore, the bronco-buster, so named because cowboys often call vicious horses "smoky" horses, and Rattlesnake Pete, who had lived among the Moquis and taken part in the snake-dances. Some were professional ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... everything and much more, went straight to her son's room, and, in a calm rage, woke him up, and poured into his unwilling ears a torrent of mingled fact and fiction, wherein floated side by side with Letty's name every bad adjective she could bring the lips of propriety to utter. Before he quite came to himself the news had well-nigh driven him mad. There stood his mother, dashing her cold hailstorm of contemptuous wrath on the girl he loved, whom he had gone to bed ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... question appropriately answered by the assertion that it "ought to be regarded as settled by M. Renan's practical surrender of the adverse case." I thought I knew M. Renan's works pretty well, but I have contrived to miss this "practical" (I wish Dr. Wace had defined the scope of that useful adjective) surrender. However, as Dr. Wace can find no difficulty in pointing out the passage of M. Renan's writings, by which he feels justified in making his statement, I shall wait for further enlightenment, contenting ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... willow whistle which blew everything into its proper place should have burst with its first note, for there would be such ample opportunity nowadays for the display of its peculiar functions. Why, for instance, should modern novel-writers turn the patient adjective into an overworked little drudge, and compel it to do thrice the labor that it can effectually perform? Fifty years ago it led a life of respected ease, and was only called on when it could be of some real use to the author; now it knows no respite from its ever-increasing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... presence in the world today is the concrete problem to be faced by Liberal Churchmen. To consistent Catholics such as Father Knox it is not, I suppose, a problem at all. He would say that such men deserve every adjective of approbation in the dictionary; but they are not Christian. If Christianity means a fixed set of opinions, "a faith once delivered to the saints," Father Knox is right; such men are not Christians, but, if so, the fact that they are not is the death warrant ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... reputed to be somewhat careless in our discrimination between words in the use of the English language, and yet it is interesting to note that there are some words about which we are very careful. We bestow the adjective "great" somewhat indiscriminately. A man who has made conquest of his fellow-men for his own gain may display such genius in war, such uncommon qualities of organization and leadership that we may call him "great," but there is a word which we reserve for men of another kind and about which we are ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... that England or France has to offer makes any impression on the Californiac because it's different from California. As for the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, he simply never sees it. The Netherlands are dismissed with one adjective—flat. For a country to be flat is, in the opinion of the Californiac, to relinquish its final claim to beauty. A Californiac once made the statement to me that Californians considered themselves a little better than the rest of the country. I considered that the prize Californiacism until ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... have said regarding instinct thus far could equally well be said of reflex action. A reflex is a native reaction, and it is taken care of by a team of neurones in the way just stated. We might speak of a reflex as "instinctive", using this adjective as equivalent to "native"; but we should shrink for some reason from speaking of the pupillary reflex to light as an instinct, or of the "knee jerk instinct", or the "swallowing instinct", or the "flexion instinct". There is some difference between ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... as applied to psychological rather than chemical analysis have already become, among the illuminati, so widely adopted that these denominations now stand in considerable danger of being weakened in significance through a too careless use. The adjective "bromidic" is at present adopted as a general vehicle, a common carrier for the thoughtless damnation of the Philistine. The time has come to formulate, authoritatively, the precise scope of intellect ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... startled and amused by the adjective. But the other two listeners took it quite quietly. It seemed to them apparently to express ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ship out of soundings, Deaf to verbs, and all their compoundings, Adjective, noun, and adverb, and particle, Deaf to even the definite article - No verbal message was worth a pin, Though you hired an earwig ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... It is used as such in legal documents, but it is incorrect to employ it in business letters as other than an adjective. Use instead "they," "them," ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... had just undergone. But I never made a greater mistake. The skipper cursed us all (except the mate, whose sole fault the accident undoubtedly was) with a fluency and vigour that was, to put it mildly, discouraging. Moreover, we were informed that he "wouldn't have no adjective skulking;" we must "turn to" and do something after wasting the ship's time and property in such a blanked manner. There was a limit, however, to our obedience, so although we could not move at all for awhile, his threats were not proceeded with ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... good-night to my sweet, sweet, sweet, godson,' said Miss Tox, with a soft shower of kisses at each repetition of the adjective; 'and Louisa, my dear friend, promise me to take a little something warm before you go to bed, and not to ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... she remarked, in a reserved tone, which, nevertheless, sent the colour mounting slowly up her friend's sensitive cheek. They both understood that no more commendatory adjective than "interesting" was to be ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller |
