"Colloquial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Colloquial language uses the terms Midge and Gnat to describe the tiny insects which we often see dancing in a ray of sunlight. There is something of everything in those aerial ballets. It is possible that the persecutrix of the Cabbage-caterpillar is there, along ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... knowledge of German, which they insisted upon airing. We had to explain that the Herr Professor was in London to learn English, and had taken a vow during his residence neither to speak nor listen to his native tongue. It was remarked that his acquaintance with colloquial English slang, for a foreigner, was quite unusual. Occasionally he was too rude, even for a scientist, informing ladies, clamouring to know how he liked English women, that he didn't like them silly; telling ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... to be still much missionary activity, though printing presses had been brought from Europe for the proper diffusion of Christian literature in the Romanized colloquial,[8] though there were yet to be built more church edifices and monasteries, and Christian schools to be established, a sad change was nigh. Much seed which was yet to grow in secret had been planted,—like the exotic flowers which even yet blossom and ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... The vivid colloquial scenes in prose have much of that pungent semi-satirical humour of which Browning had shown the first glimpse in Sordello. Besides these, there is one intermediate scene in verse, the talk of the "poor ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... said, (colloquial ways,—the vast, broad-hatted man,) "Come dine with us on Thursday next,—you must, you know you can; We're going to have a roaring time, with lots of fun and noise, Distinguished guests, et cetera, the ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the previous day, were now close up. The 19th Brigade, becoming aware of the situation, eagerly put their services at our disposal. After the action the official explanation of the loss of the guns was that the Leicestershires got out of hand and went too far; so I was told in the colloquial language which I have set down. A nearer explanation is that they went because of over-confidence somewhere back. Night was falling, and the guns already gone, when reinforcements from the 19th Brigade came past my aid-post and asked me the direction. Had the guns been kept, I verily ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... and What are Australians doing for Australia?" After I had finished the Lord Mayor made a few remarks with reference to the subject at issue and concluded by moving a vote of thanks. This was really outside our practice at the institute. I thanked the Lord Mayor for his kind remarks, and in quite a colloquial way said that it was distressing to go round the public parks about Sydney on holidays and Saturday afternoons and see thousands of young men sitting on fences smoking cigarettes, content to loaf and look on ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... material was being gathered for a new outbreak in the United States. The casual laborers had greatly increased in numbers, especially in the West. These migratory workingmen—the "hobo miners," the "hobo lumberjacks," the "blanket stiffs," of colloquial speech—wander about the country in search of work. They rarely have ties of family and seldom ties of locality. About one-half of these wanderers are American born. They are to be described with precision as "floaters." Their range of operations includes the wheat regions west ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... gradually departing from the form [95] and rule of literary language, a language always and increasingly artificial. While the learned dialect was yearly becoming more and more barbarously pedantic, the colloquial idiom, on the other hand, offered a thousand chance-tost gems of racy or picturesque expression, rejected or at least ungathered by what claimed to be classical Latin. The time was coming when neither the pedants nor the ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... from his Benvenuto Cellini, while Berlioz sang to them in his peculiarly monotonous style. I also met the journalist, Jules Janin, who was quite a celebrity in Paris, although it took me a long time to realise this; the only thing that impressed me about him was his colloquial Parisian French, which ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... though the author of such promising novels as Our Mr. Wrenn and The Job, had been forced by the neglect of his more serious work to earn a living with the smarter set among American novelists, writing bright, colloquial, amusing chatter for popular magazines. If it seems a notable achievement for a temper like Mr. Masters's to have helped pave the way to popularity for Mr. Lewis, it seems yet more notable to have performed a similar service for Zona Gale, who for something like a decade before Spoon ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... to join her daughter, Farrel knew that at all events he had earned the approval of the influential member of the Parker family. Mrs. Parker, on her part, was far more excited than her colloquial humor indicated. ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... years, his indolence prompted him to plagiarise freely from sources which, surely, no human being would discover. He steeped himself in the cumbrous learning of those writers of the Renaissance in whom congested Latin is found tottering into colloquial French. He studied Rabelais perhaps more deeply than any other Englishman of his time, and certainly Beroalde de Verville, Bruscambille, and other absurdities of the sixteenth century were familiar to him and ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... into a flutter by the visit of Madame de Stael, now on her famous tour of inspection. It was of course fitting that Schiller, as a local lion, should take his part in entertaining her; but the voluble lady was an Erscheinung new to his experience, and with his imperfect command of colloquial French he was hard put to it to bear up against the torrent of her conversation. He measured her very correctly at their first meeting, when they fell into an argument on the merits of the French drama. 'For ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... very clear instance of this Pro-satyric class of play. It has the regular tragic diction, marked here and there (393, 756, 780, etc.) by slight extravagances and forms of words which are sometimes epic and sometimes over-colloquial; it has a regular saga plot, which had already been treated by the old poet Phrynichus in his Alcestis, a play which is now lost but seems to have been Satyric; and it has one character straight from the Satyr world, the heroic reveller, Heracles. ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... his rubicund, round visage with a handkerchief as brilliant. Coming straight from the glare out of doors, he was not aware of the stranger in the salon till his eyes were used to the gloom. Then madame and Bessie effected Harry's introduction, and as Harry, with a rare wisdom, had practised colloquial French, he and the canon were soon acquainted. Once only had the old man visited England, a visit for ever memorable on account of the guinea he had paid for his first ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... considerable absorption of English—perhaps also of French and German words—into Japanese: indeed this absorption is already marked in the changing speech of the educated classes, not less than in the colloquial of the ports which is mixed with curious modifications of foreign commercial words. Furthermore, the grammatical structure of Japanese is being influenced; and though I cannot agree with a clergyman who lately declared that the use of the passive voice by Tokyo street-urchins announcing the fall ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... his proceedings, and his conversation as a rule, was not in the plainest of English, so it is more convenient to give it in ordinary colloquial form; but he was very earnest, and tried hard to make ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... altogether painful duty to pass upon him the sentence of the law. Having in due form and with suitable solemnity commended his soul to the divine mercy, he, after a brief pause, assumed his ordinary colloquial tone of voice, and nodding humorously to his old friend, observed—"And noo, Jammie, I think ye'll alloo that I ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... Junius,[38] but on maturer knowledge had transferred his admiration to Burke. He cautioned me, with entire gravity, to be punctilious in writing English; never to forget that I was a Scotchman, that English was a foreign tongue, and that if I attempted the colloquial, I should certainly be shamed: the remark was apposite, I suppose, in the days of David Hume.[39] Scott was too new for him; he had known the author—known him, too, for a Tory; and to the genuine classic a contemporary is always something of a trouble. He had the old, serious ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an associate of Sheridan, Erskine, Fox, &c., he affected, in conversation, to be brilliant, and so far succeeded, as to colloquial liveliness, that during their festive intercourse, according to the witty barrister's own admission, 'he fairly kept up at saddle-skirts' even with Curran. Notwithstanding this compliment, his pretensions to wit appear to have been but slender; the best sayings ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various
... sweet colloquial din, Unheard the sullen sleet-winds shout; And though the winter rage without, The social ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... Mr. Randall and Mr. Kelley, both of Pennsylvania, in a colloquial discussion of the history and present position of their State upon the subject of negro suffrage, Mr. Thomas, of Maryland, addressed the House. After setting forth the injustice the passage of the bill would work toward the people of ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... to explain here that Pesca prided himself on being a perfect Englishman in his language, as well as in his dress, manners, and amusements. Having picked up a few of our most familiar colloquial expressions, he scattered them about over his conversation whenever they happened to occur to him, turning them, in his high relish for their sound and his general ignorance of their sense, into compound words ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... said that by so many more languages as a man knows, by so many more times is he a man—an apophthegm of but a shallow kind if all he meant to convey was that an Englishman who can speak French is also a Frenchman by virtue of his knowledge of the colloquial. The opening up of new fields of thought through the medium of a new literature, is a result more worthy the effort of acquiring a foreign language than sparkling in a salon with the purest imaginable accent; and herein Sir W. Hamilton counted without Chinese. The greater portion ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... did not know one word of French beyond the colloquial phrases with which everybody is familiar; but he would ask his daughter to read the crisp and tinkling tongue to him for hours at a time. He would hammer softly and file gently as she read, so that he might not lose a word of it. He would hear no news but that which she translated from ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... artistically right. Once or twice he seemed to me to spoil his last line by walking through it. The part of Harry Percy is one full of climaxes which must not be let slip. But still there was always a freedom and spirit in his style which was very pleasing, and his delivery of the colloquial passages I thought excellent, notably of that in the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... every Wednesday, the diplomatic reception day, to the Quai d'Orsay to talk business. As long as a secretary or a huissier was in the room, they spoke to each other most correctly in French; as soon as they were alone, relapsed into easy and colloquial English. We were very fond of Adams—saw a great deal of him not only in Paris, but when we first lived in London at the embassy. He died suddenly in Switzerland, and W. missed him very much. He was ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... had chosen it, but he did not wish to live after his powers of usefulness had passed away. He opened to science new matter and a new method, as a basis for future philosophical systems. He was a "colloquial dialectician," such as this world has never seen, and may never see again. He was a skeptic respecting physics, but as far as man and society are concerned, he thought that every man might and ought to know ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... attributed the establishment of our present refinement, and it is with truth he observes of his "Rambler," "That he had laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations, and that he has added to the elegance of its construction and to the harmony of its cadence." In this description of his own refinement in style and grammatical accuracy, Johnson probably alluded to the happy carelessness ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... like a college teacher. Before the term was out he hated Kane with an intensity that astonished him, and he looked forward to his Latin classes with an eagerness of which he was almost ashamed. Plautus in the Alling free and colloquial translations ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... already been in Contalmaison, but did not stay. "Too many German machine guns and too much artillery fire and not enough men," to put it with colloquial army brevity. It often happened that a village was entered and parts of it held during a day, then evacuated at night, leaving the British guns full play for the final "softening." These initial efforts had the ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... your motives, Lady Alice, and I see that your conduct may be of service to my brother." Then she relapsed into a more colloquial tone. "But how on earth you mean to live in this part of London, I'm sure I can't imagine. No doubt it seems rather smoky and grimy to ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... at each other in the whites of their eyes, if we may use a phrase so colloquial. Sitting back in the vehicle was a third traveller who took no part in the discussion, and preserved a deep silence. The driver and the patriot and even Gudin paid no attention to this mute individual; he was, in truth, one of those uncomfortable, unsocial ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... drift, tenor, spirit, bearing, coloring; scope. [important part of the meaning] substance; gist, essence, marrow, spirit &c. 5. matter; subject, subject matter; argument, text, sum and substance. general meaning, broad meaning, substantial meaning, colloquial meaning, literal meaning, plain meaning, simple meaning, natural meaning, unstrained meaning, true &c. (exact) 494 meaning, honest &c. 543 meaning, prima facie &c. (manifest) 525 meaning[Lat]; letter of the law. literally; after acceptation. synonym; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... depository was then (it has since been converted into a picture palace) generally accepted as being one of the strongest places in London. The front of the building was constructed to represent a gigantic safe door, and under the colloquial designation of "The Safe" the place had passed into a synonym for all that was secure and impregnable. Half of the marketable securities in the west of London were popularly reported to have seen the inside of its coffers at ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... chief delight, and she could hardly be detached from him. She refreshed her colloquial German (or rather Austrian) with his nurse, who had much to say of the goodness of die Gnadigen Frauen. Poor thing, she was the youthful widow of a guide, and the efforts of the two Frauen had been in vain ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Singh," continued the Doctor, "you have a colloquial term for the form of castle used in India, have ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... the term for particular and general average (see below) in marine insurance. The essential of equitable distribution, involved in this sense, was transferred to give the word "average" its more colloquial meaning of an equalization of amount, or medium among various quantities, or nearest common rate or figure. (For a discussion of the etymology, see the New English Dictionary, especially the concluding ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... of a mountain than the changing appearance of a face; and truth in human relations is of this more intangible and dubious order: hard to seize, harder to communicate. Veracity to facts in a loose, colloquial sense—not to say that I have been in Malabar when as a matter of fact I was never out of England, not to say that I have read Cervantes in the original when, as a matter of fact, I know not one syllable of Spanish—this, indeed, is easy and to the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... No man was ever yet a complete orator, and, I affirm, never can be, unless, like the soldier marching to the field of battle, he enters the forum armed at all points with the sciences and the liberal arts. Is that the case in these our modern times? The style which we hear every day, abounds with colloquial barbarisms, and vulgar phraseology: no knowledge of the laws is heard; our municipal policy is wholly neglected, and even the decrees of the senate are treated with contempt and derision. Moral philosophy is discarded, and the maxims of ancient wisdom are ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... Mayence and from thence to Metz and Paris. In the diligence from Mayence and indeed all the way to Paris I found a very amusing society. There were two physicians and M. L[emaitre], a most entertaining man and of inexhaustible colloquial talent; for, except when he slept, he never ceased to talk. His conversation was however always interesting and entertaining, for he had figured in the early part of the French Revolution and was well known in the political and litterary world as the editor of a famous journal ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... lofty, and sustained diction which is characteristic of his genius. In this form the Lyrical Ballads were published; and were presented by him, as an experiment, whether subjects, which from their nature rejected the usual ornaments and extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might not be so managed in the language of ordinary life as to produce the pleasurable interest which it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. To the second edition he added a preface ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... and he was not personally characterized by them. As Launcelot Godolphin he was simpler than he would have been with a simpler name, and it was his ideal to be modest in everything that personally belonged to him. He studied an unprofessional walk, and a very colloquial tone in speaking. He was of course clean-shaven, but during the summer he let his mustache grow, though he was aware that he looked better without it. He was tall, and he carried himself with the vigor of his perfect health; but on ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... and the pen must at length comply with the tongue; illiterate writers will, at one time or other, by public infatuation, rise into renown, who, not knowing the original import of words, will use them with colloquial licentiousness, confound distinction, and forget propriety. As politeness increases, some expressions will be considered as too gross and vulgar for the delicate, others as too formal and ceremonious for the gay and airy; new phrases are ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... T—- himself prefers the easy enjoyments of private life, and has kept himself aloof from politics and parties. Were I to form an estimate of his qualifications to excel in public speaking, by the clearness and beautiful propriety of his colloquial language, I should conclude that he was still destined to perform a distinguished part. But he is content with the liberty of a private station, as a spectator only, and, perhaps, in that he shows his wisdom; for undoubtedly such men ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... interfered in the dispute, which was beyond the French colloquial powers of Edward Dorrit, Esquire, and scarcely within the province of the ladies. Miss Fanny, however, now supported her father with great bitterness; declaring, in her native tongue, that it was quite clear there was something ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... shuttlecock, should not be suffered to remain with one person, but ought to pass in turn to all. But as few people think for themselves, so few people talk for themselves, and a colloquial monopoly is as common and as disagreeable as any other. Yet when we observe how much these rattles are caressed, 'tis wonderful there are so few. Talent is by no means indispensable, and is the more valuable in proportion as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... a nail in the carpenter's shop, or could not button his robe when he was in a hurry, or whether he laughed over the repartees by which he baffled the priests when they tried to trap him into sedition and blasphemy, or even if you tell any part of his story in the vivid terms of modern colloquial slang, you will produce an extraordinary dismay and horror among the iconolaters. You will have made the picture come out of its frame, the statue descend from its pedestal, the story become real, with all the incalculable consequences that may flow from this terrifying ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... whom I passed saluted me with the words, 'Bon soir!' although the hour was eight in the morning. In these parts, however, bon soir is frequently said at all hours. It is a colloquial peculiarity. Another is to address or speak of a gentleman and ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... many-colored; and it seemed to her that back in the house of four-posters and walls of subdued gray, life was smothered in the very best pink cotton-batting. Milt's delight in every picturesque dark corner, and the colloquial eloquence of the street-orators, stirred her. And when she saw a shopgirl caress the hand of a slouching beau in threadbare brown, her own hand slipped into ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... the latter class are chiefly written in Pali. Treatises on astronomy, mathematics, and physics are almost exclusively in Sanskrit, whilst those on general literature, being comparatively recent, are composed in Elu, a dialect which differs from the colloquial Singhalese rather in style than in structure, having been liberally enriched by incorporation from Sanskrit and Pali.[1] But of the works which have come down to us, ancient as well as modern, so great is the preponderance of those in Pali and Sanskrit, that the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... was cultivated with splendid success. There probably were never four talkers more admirable in four different ways than Johnson, Burke, Beauclerk, and Garrick; and Goldsmith was on terms of intimacy with all the four. He aspired to share in their colloquial renown; but never was ambition more unfortunate. It may seem strange that a man who wrote with so much perspicuity, vivacity, and grace, should have been, whenever he took a part in conversation, an empty, noisy, blundering rattle. But on this point the evidence is overwhelming. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... standpoint we have to be careful or we may be entrapped into the same fallacy as threatens us when we propose to judge the United States by its newspapers. In the first place the right of any people to invent new forms of verbal currency to meet the requirements of its colloquial exchange must be conceded. There was a time when an Americanism in speech was condemned in England because it was American. When so many of the Americanisms of ten years ago are incorporated in the daily ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... striking confirmation of the old legends," he was saying through a big yawn, as Smith made connection. He used a colloquial type of language, quite different from the lofty, dignified speech of the Sanusians. "That is, of course, if the woman ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... dash my hopes (of becoming his "pup!" Query, isn't the word infra dig.—or merely "pleasantly colloquial?") to the ground. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 26, 1891 • Various
... The scholarship connected with the British Civil Service is not, however, monopolised by Mr. Satow, for several gentlemen in the consular service, who are passing through the various grades of student interpreters, are distinguishing themselves not alone by their facility in colloquial Japanese, but by their researches in various departments of Japanese history, mythology, archaeology, and literature. Indeed it is to their labours, and to those of a few other Englishmen and Germans, that the Japanese of the rising generation will be indebted for keeping alive not only the knowledge ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... a great feature of the so-called mechanical piano-player lies in what it allows you to do yourself. It provides you with technique, but, to use a colloquial phrase, "you can still call your soul your own." The technique, the substitute for that finger facility which only years of practice will give, is the pianola's; but the interpretation is yours! The instrument ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... makers of the Vulgate, interpolations and errors might creep in by this way. As to changes in language, "a poetical dialect... is liable to be gradually modified by the influence of the ever-changing colloquial speech. And, in the early times, when writing was little used, this influence would be especially operative." [Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... one fact argue!' The French style is remarkable for simplicity—'a strange pretension for anything French;' but on the whole the intellectual merits of their style are small, 'chiefly negative,' and 'founded on the accident of their colloquial necessities.' They are amply compensated, too, by 'the prodigious defects of the French in all the higher qualities of prose composition.' Even their handwriting is the 'very vilest form of scribbling ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... order of merit,—pictures in which elusive moods and subtle sentiments of nature are grasped with imaginative insight and denoted and interpreted with a free, delicate, and luminous touch. He has also addressed the public as an author. He has written an easy, colloquial account of his own life, and that breezy, off-hand, expeditious work,—after passing it as a serial through their Century Magazine,—the Century Company has published in a beautiful volume. It is a work that, for the sake of ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... and intelligible, that scarcely any one could be aware of such a deficiency in his presence. His talk, too, though overflowing with information, had no resemblance to lecturing or solemn discoursing, but, on the contrary, was full of colloquial spirit and pleasantry. He had a certain quiet and grave humour, which ran through most of his conversation, and a vein of temperate jocularity, which gave infinite zest and effect to the condensed and inexhaustible information which formed ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... their feet at this unexpected display of my colloquial powers; down went backgammon-board, men, dice, prayer-book, and ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... in vitality, the playwright begins to feel the absolute necessity for writing decent dialogue—not mere stage dialect that may be scamped and ranted ad libitum by the "star" to suit his own taste, or want of it, but real dialogue, which, while ideally reflecting the colloquial language of the day, taxes the intelligence and feeling of ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... of the committee kept appearing. The room resounded with talk and laughter. Denzil had a higher colour than usual, but he seemed perfectly self-possessed; his appearance and colloquial abilities made a very favourable impression. "Distinct improvement on friend Toby," whispered one committee-man to another; and this was the general opinion. Yet there was some anxiety regarding the address ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... McKenzie. Boston: D. Lothrop & Co. This neatly and strongly got up volume consists of sixteen fresh, vigorous, chatty, colloquial sermons. The author has the solidity of the Scotch teacher, and the polish and beauty of the English preacher combined with the freedom, the raciness, interest, and the freshness of the American pulpit orator. These discourses ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... home that night she briefly recounted the interview with the new lodger, and her discovery of his curiosity. She did this with a possible increase of her usual shyness and abstraction, and apparently more as a duty than a colloquial recreation. But it pleased Mr. Nott also to give it more than his usual misconception. "Looking round the ship, was he—eh, Rosey?" he said with infinite archness. "In course, kinder sweepin' round the galley, ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... report grave conversations and light colloquial passages of arms among the members of the circle. I expected to hear, perhaps to read, a paper now and then. I expected to have, from time to time, a poem from some one of The Teacups, for I felt sure there must be among them one or more poets,—Teacups of the finer and rarer translucent kind ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the Dialogus of Tacitus, a work which, whatever the date of its actual composition, certainly refers to a period less than ten years after the death of T. Petronius; there is the style of the work itself; wherever the writer abandons the colloquial Latin, in which so much of the work is written, we find a finished diction, whether in prose or verse, which no unprejudiced judge could place later than the accession of Trajan, and which has nothing ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... easy!... Did you say how? Foolish man!—can't you see that if I hadn't loved you one scrap, or only half across your lips as we used to say when we were children, it would have been quite a let-off to be met with offers of a brother's love ... and that sort of thing.... Isn't that them?" This was colloquial. No doubt Gwen was exceptional, and all the other young ladies in the Red Book would ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... consciousness of his personal situation. It was the cheapest way he knew of spending an evening. At this particular establishment the Schoppen were very tall and the beer was very good; and as the host and most of the guests were German, and their colloquial tongue was unknown to him, he was not drawn into any undue expenditure of speech. He watched his smoke and he thought, thought so hard that at last he appeared to himself to have exhausted the thinkable. When this moment of combined relief and dismay arrived (on the last of the ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... inferences can be drawn, which, therefore, it is most important to establish, if true; and they are also the easiest to disprove, if false; since a single negative instance suffices to establish the contradictory. It follows that, in re-casting a literary or colloquial sentence for logical purposes, we should try to obtain a form in which the subject is distributed—is either a singular term or a general term predesignate as 'All' or 'No.' Seeing, then, that most adjectives connote a single attribute, whilst most substantives connote more than ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... you weren't so slipshod and colloquial in your English, Barty—Guardsman's English, I suppose—which I have to use, as it's yours; your French is much more educated and correct. You remember dear M. Durosier at the Pension Brossard? he taught you well. You must read, and cultivate ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... the Basque of Larramendi's Dictionary would be intelligible to very few. I have read passages from it to the men of Guipuscoa, who assured me that they had no difficulty in understanding it, and that it was written in the colloquial style of their province. ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... secreted there. He nodded to me brightly, and then for the first time it occurred to me that if he came from his nameplace he might know a little French. I knew remarkably little myself; I could read it with difficulty. My colloquial French was then, as now, intensely and intolerably English. ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... during the last few years of his life and addressed to Mr. Symington. Most of these letters were written in poor health from the Isle of Wight or Jersey, to which places he was sent by the doctors. They are not of the brilliant or gossipy order, but they are admirable in their good colloquial English and cheerful, unaffected style. Lover was a man of great activity of mind, combined with warm affections. His life-story was not very romantic, but it was a wholesome and pleasant one. When young he was deeply attached to an English girl, with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... characterized; and we might have added, that a change equally complete, though diametrically opposite in its tendency, has been silently introduced into our prose. In this we have oscillated from freedom to restraint;—from the easy, natural, and colloquial style of Swift, Addison and Steele, to the perpetually strained, ambitious, and overwrought stiffness, of which the author we are now considering affords a striking exemplification. "He's knight o' the shire, and represents ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... another. A good example, in which the new rhetoric is not oppressive, is the account of the sea fight at the end of Act III. Even when Harris followed his original most closely, we seem to hear the actor, speaking in a new tongue, in a more relaxed and colloquial rhythm. The reader will find it both amusing and instructive to compare the two versions of Act II, scene ii. The new cadences do more than merely prove that Harris had no ear for ...
— The City Bride (1696) - Or The Merry Cuckold • Joseph Harris
... attack teams?" we asked of Smith, who, now that his cattle were safe, had regained all of his cuteness and colloquial powers. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... and Blackie was a Lowlander, was born, indeed, in the Saltmarket of Glasgow. My frequent visits to the north and west have convinced me that another difficulty in the way of a possible resurgence of Gaelic is the lack of a recognised standard of colloquial speech. The language is split up into many dialects, each possessing its own special idioms and vocabulary. A Glasgow firm of printers not long ago conceived the idea of printing post-cards with Gaelic greetings: they ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... mine in the figurative and colloquial sense, not as the investor knows it," he answered. "That is, the plant on which it grew is priceless. Where ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... to apologize for the constant use of the word English in speaking of the British Expedition to France. At the beginning of the war this was a colloquial error into which we all fell over here, even the French press. Everything in khaki was spoken of as "English," even though we knew perfectly well that Scotch, Irish, and Welsh were equally well represented in the ranks, and the colors ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... Galilean and doubt. It is a relief and an escape; and the sense of the stage has been put wholly on one side in both of these plays, of which the second reads almost like a parody of the first: the first so heated, so needlessly colloquial, the second so full of argumentative rhetoric. Ibsen has turned against his hero in the space between writing the one and the other; and the Julian of the second is more harshly satirised from within than ever Peer Gynt ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... In colloquial language, a maid (une pucelle) was a girl of humble birth, who earned her livelihood by manual work and was generally a servant. Thus the leaden pumps used in kitchens were usually called pucelles. ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... suffix in river-names,—Brahmaputra, "son of Brahma,"—pota, "the young of an animal," etc. Skeat thinks that our word boy, borrowed from Low German and probably related to the Modern High German Bube, whence the familiar "bub" of American colloquial speech, is cognate ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... pessimist in the colloquial sense admits of little question. Nor is it surprising; it is rather difficult not to be. Not a few persons are pessimists and won't tell. They preserve a fair exterior, but secretly hold that all flesh ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... author's use of language. Questions to be asked in regard to external style are such as these: Is it good or bad, careful or careless, clear and easy or confused and difficult; simple or complex; terse and forceful (perhaps colloquial) or involved and stately; eloquent, balanced, rhythmical; vigorous, or musical, languid, delicate and decorative; varied or monotonous; plain or figurative; poor or rich in connotation and poetic ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... I'll trust you, as I trust your sister. Between you I'm safe. And now, you lay low! That's my advice." He dropped from his mystery and his mastery to a level of colloquial teasing. "I'm going to rest under your humble roof to-night, and to-morrow I'm going to the mansion of Peter Hingston. His gates will be set wide for me, and all the double log-cabin palaces and frame houses of this royal city of Leatherwood ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... previous night, I was recalling dazedly, there had been only three men wearing the horizon blue. Who was this fourth figure, who knew my name and spoke such colloquial English? I raised my candle as high as possible and scanned him. ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... to leave the Lodge when we were getting it to our mind; but we 'll have a jolly little home somewhere, and I 'll get a chance of earning something. Dancing now—I think that I might be able to teach some girls how to waltz. Then my French is really intelligible, and most colloquial; besides revolver shooting. Dad, we are on our way to a fortune, and at the worst you 'll have your curry and cheroots, and I 'll have a well-fitting ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... Johnson silenced Boswell's chatter with the words, 'Sir, we know our will is free and there's an end on't,' he expressed a great truth in language not the less philosophically accurate on account of its colloquial curtness. The consciousness possessed by an agent about to perform an act, that he is at liberty to perform it or not, is really conclusive evidence that the act is free. For it matters not a jot whether consciousness be 'an independent faculty,' or whether—as, Mr. Buckle ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... the state of political parties in Mexico, and the habits and affairs of the different classes of society, than I could have learned from almost any one else. He took great pains in correcting my Spanish, and supplying me with colloquial phrases, and common terms and exclamations, in speaking. He lent me a file of late newspapers from the city of Mexico, which were full of the triumphal reception of Santa Ana, who had just returned ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... its branch form, the character sketch, both found in the Spectator Papers, were contributory to the Novel's development, is sure. The essay set a new model for easy, colloquial speech: just the manner for fiction which was to report the accent of contemporary society in its average of utterance. And the sketch, seen in its delightful efflorescence in the Sir Roger De Coverly ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... random, in nine cases out of ten we continue to read it simply because it entails no mental effort. We do not have to think of what we are reading; our eyes gallop over sentence after sentence, and so long as the language is colloquial and the facts are bald, all is well, and we can go on and on. It is not only the body that, unchecked, is inclined to be slothful. Unless we have as complete a control over our minds as we have over our limbs, it is quite impossible ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... unblemished and incorruptible integrity of M. Roland, his simplicity of manners and acknowledged ability, invested him immediately with much authority among his associates. The brilliance of his wife, and her most fascinating colloquial powers, also reflected much luster upon his name. Madame Roland, with her glowing zeal, had just written a pamphlet upon the new order of things, in language so powerful and impressive that more than sixty thousand copies had been sold—an ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... made by congenital and uninstructed deaf-mutes to be now considered are either strictly natural signs, invented by themselves, or those of a colloquial character used by such mutes where associated. The accidental or merely suggestive signs peculiar to families, one member of which happens to be a mute, are too much affected by the other members of the family to be of certain value. Those, again, which are taught in institutions have become ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... talk the matter over. The word of my text rendered 'assuredly gathering' is a picturesque one. It literally means 'laying things together.' They set various facts side by side, or as we say in our colloquial idiom, 'They put this and that together,' and so they came to understand what ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... each Japanese word came to have two pronunciations: first, its own original sound for colloquial purposes; and second, its borrowed sound for purposes of writing. At the outset the spoken and the written languages were doubtless kept tolerably distinct. But by degrees, as respect for Chinese literature developed, it became a learned accomplishment to pronounce Japanese ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... wished her to be, and lacking the faculties to become so, she tried to seem it. The desire was partly sincere, partly an affectation, as we discern in such little trifles as her suddenly using the word "thou" in a letter to Hookham where she had previously been using the ordinary colloquial "you." That she was not quite ingenuous we also detect in the fast-and-loose conduct which enabled her, while affecting to become what Shelley deemed her to be, also to play into the hands of very inferior people, who must sometimes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... italianized, or rather Italian, even Mantuan, latinized. The contrast between the modern form of the word and its Roman garb produces the most amusing effect. In the original it is sometimes difficult to read, for Folengo has no objection to using the most colloquial words and phrases. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... with the voice not loud but distinct, the utterance never hurried beyond the point of immediate comprehension, but carrying the attention of the audience with it, eager to the end. Two letters of warning and remonstrance against the habits of lecturing in a colloquial tone, suitable to a knot of students gathered round his table, but not to a large audience—of running his words, especially technical terms, together—of pouring out new and unfamiliar matter at breakneck speed, were addressed to him—one by ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... growing tendency to free and easy manners and colloquial license was rapidly destroying all reverence for womanhood; was levelling the distinction between ladies' parlors and gentlemen's clubrooms; was placing the sexes on a platform of equality which was dangerous to feminine delicacy, that God-built bulwark of feminine ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... that the Indian would not understand the uncomplimentary remarks, Holden swam towards the side of the pool, being quickly followed by his chum. But the Indian had understood. He was as familiar with colloquial English as he was with his own tongue. Nevertheless, he did not alter the grin on his face, though there was something very different from a grin at his heart—a something which (if the rash speaker had only known it) had suddenly determined him to carry ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... given, she took in full measure. For twenty minutes, by the clock, she aired her views in a stream of vigorous colloquial English, lapsing into ready-made phrases of melodrama, common to the normally inexpressive, in moments ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... and remembrances spring forth at the mental utterance of these words! On retiring from the parlour, I was ushered into what was, of old, denominated, in the quaint colloquial language of Scotland, "The Prophet's Cham'er"—that is, the apartment for study, which was to be found thus distinguished in all the old manses of our clergy. It was now a bedroom, the library being established in another apartment; and I laid ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... men knew little of each other in early life, and none of them were in any way remarkable during their academic career. In 1753 Burke arrived in London, and occupied himself in legal studies and the pursuit of literature. His colloquial gifts and his attractive manner won all hearts, while his mental superiority commanded the respect of the learned. Even Johnson, who was too proud to praise others, much as he loved flattery himself, was fain to give his most earnest word of commendation to the young Irishman, and even ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... had led to doubt his fidelity. Whether the Head of the war department is equal to his charge, I am not qualified to decide. I knew him only as a pleasant, gentlemanly man in society; and the indecision of his character rather added to the amenity of his conversation. But when translated from the colloquial circle to the great stage of national concerns, and the direction of the extensive operations of war, whether he has been able to seize at one glance the long line of defenceless border presented by our enemy, the masses of strength which we hold on different points of it, the facility ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... leader, trusting implicitly to his guidance. They never uttered a word, but Bob's impatience and nervousness would have kept his tongue in constant motion had it not been for George, who gave him an energetic prod in the ribs whenever he showed a disposition to become colloquial. He felt that he must do something pretty soon or sink under his burden of responsibility, which seemed to grow heavier the longer he walked; consequently, when George stopped all of a sudden and silently ...
— George at the Fort - Life Among the Soldiers • Harry Castlemon
... be remembered that French is a language far more familiar to well-educated people in England, than Spanish ever was to the French, and that Smollett had lived much in France; whereas Le Sage knew from books alone the language which he has employed with so much colloquial elegance and facility. We now turn to the phrases and expressions in French which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... you. I watch your interests; I wish for your love and to be informed what you are doing and what is being done" (Fam. vi. 15). When writing to Atticus he eschews all ornamentation, uses short sentences, colloquial idioms, rare diminutives and continually quotes Greek. This use of Greek tags and quotations is also found in letters to other intimate friends, e.g. Paetus and Caelius; also in letters written by other ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... a textbook of geometry written in accordance with the most modern Education Board circular or University syllabus, we shall find that the phraseology used (except where made more colloquial and less scientific) is almost all pure Greek. The Greek tongue was extraordinarily well adapted as a vehicle of scientific thought. One of the characteristics of Euclid's language which his commentator Proclus is most fond of emphasizing is its marvellous exactness ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... more than once your desires—those of a young marrying man—(where, alas, is that time!) have seen their richly laden gondolas go to pieces there: the flower of the cargo went to the bottom, the ballast of the marriage remained. In short, to make use of a colloquial expression, as you talk over your marriage with yourself you say, as you look at Caroline, "She is not what I ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... if taken as it fell from his lips. But the exact course of his remarks has been followed, and as far as possible his expressions have been retained. Though given in the form of a discourse, it must be remembered that this was a conversation, much more fragmentary and colloquial than ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... enjoy the distinction of having added words or expressions to colloquial English. The name 'Collins' is almost established as the description of a letter of thanks after a visit; and we have heard of a highly intelligent family among whom a guinea is always alluded to as 'something considerable' ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... there are no letters in the Chinese language, the difficulties in using the Morse code of telegraphy are very great. In some cases the messages are translated into a foreign language before they are transmitted; in others, a thousand or more words in colloquial and commercial use are numbered, and the number is telegraphed instead of ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... every peculiarity of mind or character are reflected in the style. It may be gay, humorous, serious, sad, melancholy, according to the state of the writer's feelings. It may be colloquial or stately, concise or diffuse, plain or florid, flowing or abrupt, feeble or energetic, natural or affected, commonplace or epigrammatic,—as varied, in fact, as the character and mental constitution of the writers. But every writer has a prevailing style; and it is an interesting study to determine ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... no mere academic and abnormal life. Her letters are filled with all the little inquiries and interests of household affection and sweetness of sympathy with the personal matters of relatives and friends, and if those are not here represented, it is simply that they are in their nature colloquial, and to be taken for granted rather than repeated for reading, when so long separated by time from the conditions and circumstances that called them forth. She was glad to return from Torquay to her family again. "Papa's ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... his life rarely found courage for any more sustained effort than a song. And the nature of the songs is itself characteristic of these idle later years; for they are often as polished and elaborate as his earlier works were frank, and headlong, and colloquial; and this sort of verbal elaboration in short flights is, for a man of literary turn, simply the most agreeable of pastimes. The change in manner coincides exactly with the Edinburgh visit. In 1786 he had written the ADDRESS TO A LOUSE, which may be taken as an extreme instance ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pleased. She had drawn him out, and she thought that in speaking he had kept a fair balance between too crude a mode of colloquial expression and poetic elaboration. There was, she knew, a vein of poetic conception in him, and the struggle he had hinted at could be described fittingly only in heroic language. It was in one sense a pity that those who had the gift of it and cultivated imagination ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... than any connected with German—a difficulty connected with the language of the publisher—the language which the great man employed in his writings was very hard to understand; I say in his writings, for his colloquial English was plain enough. Though not professing to be a scholar, he was much addicted, when writing, to the use of Greek and Latin terms, not as other people used them, but in a manner of his own, which set the authority of dictionaries at defiance; the consequence was, that ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... exercises designed to show the students that the classical languages were at one time in daily use among living people and were the media of ordinary conversation[74]. Students in such courses commonly memorize certain colloquial phrases and take part in simple conversations in which these phrases can be used. Such methods, skillfully employed, undoubtedly relieve the tedium of the familiar drill in grammar and "prose composition," and may help materially in imparting both a knowledge of the ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... preposition "for," to support as a partisan, generally with clamour. An Australian football term dating from about 1880. The verb has been ruled unparliamentary by the Speaker in the Victorian Legislative Assembly. It is, however, in very common colloquial use. It is from the aboriginal word borak (q.v.), and the sense of jeering is earlier than that of supporting, but jeering at one side is akin to cheering for the other. Another suggested derivation is from the Irish pronunciation of "Bark," as (according to the usually accepted ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... generally of the classical phrases and allusions in which Erasmus abounds, in corresponding or analogous English forms. Bailey had acquired, perhaps from his lexicographical studies, a great command of homely and colloquial English; the words and phrases by which he frequently represents rather than construes Erasmus' text have perhaps in many instances not less piquancy than the original. Thus his translation, as ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... former case is downwards and inwards; in the latter it is outwards, the compass sweeping a wider circle. Perjury, a false oath, was all that had been forbidden. He forbids all. We may note that the forms of colloquial swearing, which our Lord specifies, are not to be taken as an exhaustive enumeration of what is forbidden. They are in the nature of a parenthesis, and the sentence runs on continuously without them—'Swear not at ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... moment's judicious pause for a certain chaste preliminary inspection necessary before reading aloud to a girl. To-night he omitted that modest precaution, and in a pleasant voice, which in reading was singularly free from colloquial infelicities of ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... being not understood, was altered without any authority from the ancient copies. The former editions read odd mouthing; the text, however, is right; for old, as Mr Steevens observes, was formerly a common augmentative in colloquial language, and as such is often used by Shakespeare and others. See notes on the "Second Part of Henry IV." act ii. sc. 4, and "The Taming of the Shrew," act iii. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... results of this half-philosophical literature will most easily be understood by a few examples. But, before these are given, it will be necessary to emphasize the colloquial and scrappy nature of the teaching. Legend, parable, ritualistic absurdities, belief in gods, denial of gods, belief in heaven, denial of heaven, are all mingled, and for a purpose. For some men are able, and some are unable, to receive the true light of knowledge. But man's fate depends ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... mate!' she had felt with deep aggrievement that she no longer desired the appellative. She had not yet realised that while the word 'mate' in Australese, like the verb AIMER in French, may be used as a mere colloquial term, it implies in the deeper sense a sanctity of relation upon which hangs the ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... as its title imports, a medley of jest and earnest, allows a metrical licence, of which we are often tempted to wish that its author had not availed himself; yet the most unmetrical and apparently careless passages flow with a grace, a lightness, a colloquial ease and frolic, which perhaps only heighten the effect of the serious parts, and serve as a foil to set off the unrivalled finish and melody of these latter. In these come out all Mr. Tennyson's instinctive choice of tone, his mastery ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Midlothian has the widest appeal, although many would cast their votes for Old Mortality, The Antiquary or Rob Roy because of the rich humor of those romances. Scott's dialect, although true to nature, is not difficult, as he did not consider it necessary to give all the colloquial terms, like the modern ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... Here I cannot attempt to render the various plays upon words; but the term "omo[:i]" needs explanation. It means "thought" or "thoughts;" but in colloquial phraseology it is often used as a euphemism for a dying person's last desire of vengeance. In various dramas it has been used in the signification of "avenging ghost." Thus the exclamation, "His thought has come back!"—in reference to ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... lollipops wrapped in fringed tissue paper of gay colors, the sugar hearts, the plaited baskets, the inlaid boxes, the mosaic brooches, the beads, and the hundred and one cheap trifles spread forth on stalls or in windows fascinated her, and drew many lire from her purse. She only knew a few words of colloquial Italian, but she used these to the best advantage, and made up the rest with nods and smiles, a language well understood by the kindly people of Capri, to whom a gesture is as eloquent as a whole sentence. Vincent, whose talents ran more towards prowess at football than a gift ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil |
