"Parlance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lying-to in a gale of wind. As I address myself principally, if not altogether, to persons who have never been to sea, it may be as well to state the exact condition of a vessel under such circumstances. Lying-to, or, in sea-parlance, "laying-to," is a measure resorted to for various purposes, and effected in various manners. In moderate weather it is frequently done with a view of merely bringing the vessel to a stand-still, to wait for another vessel or any similar object. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... difference between the theft of growing crops—of apples on the trees, for instance, or corn on the stalk, or melons in the field—and that of other species of property. The surreptitious appropriation of the former class of chattels is known in common parlance as "hooking," while the graver term "stealing" describes the same process in other cases. The distinction may arise from a feeling that, so long as crops remain rooted to the ground, they are nature's, not man's, and that nature can't ...
— Hooking Watermelons - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... When we speak of 'being edified,' what do we mean? Little more than that we have been instructed, and especially that we have been comforted. And what is the instrument of edification in our ordinary religious parlance? Good words, wise teaching, or pious speech. But the New Testament means vastly more than this by the word, and looks not so much to other people's utterances as to a man's own strenuous efforts, as the means of edification. Much misunderstanding would have been avoided if our translators ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... power over human beings, entirely irrespective of the way in which they exercised it, whether mercifully or cruelly. But the fact, that those who possessed such power, made their subjects their victims, has wrought a total change in the popular meaning of the word. It now signifies, in common parlance, not one who possesses unlimited power over others, but one who exercises the power that he has, whether little or much, cruelly. So despotic, instead of meaning what it once did, something pertaining to the possession of unlimited power, signifies something pertaining to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Argonautic Expedition, or the Seven against Thebes, is to Grecian. Meav was married first to Conor, the celebrated provincial king of Ulster; but the marriage was not a happy one, and was dissolved, in modern parlance, on the ground of incompatibility. In the meanwhile, Meav's three brothers had rebelled against their father; and though his arms were victorious, the victory did not secure peace. The men of Connacht revolted against him, and to retain their allegiance he made his daughter Queen of Connacht, ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... the parlance of such worthy merchants, was now the "unfortunate Roguin." Cesar had become "that wretched Birotteau." The one seemed to them excused by his great passion; the other they considered all the more guilty for ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... religious opinions, stamp a man's individuality as strongly as any natural feature could stamp it. Change in style of dress, gain or loss of money, make a man feel and appear more changed than having his chin shaved or his nails cut. In fact, as soon as we leave common parlance on one side, and try for a scientific definition of personality, we find that there is none possible, any more than there can be a demonstration of the fact that we exist at all—a demonstration for which, ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... came they were snowed up at Chilton. Sport of all kinds had been stopped, and Fareham, who, in his wife's parlance, lived in his boots all the winter, had to amuse himself without the aid of horse and hound; while even walking was made difficult by the snowdrifts that blocked the lanes, and reduced the face of Nature to one muffled and ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... our steps in our journeyings through the wilderness of life; and, so far as in him lies, he helps us to do so, and by the exercise of a very catholic faith, looks for his reward to the value he supposes us to entertain for that virtue which, from time immemorial, has been in popular parlance classed as ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... and the oracle fixed the regeneration of Semiramis for the following Tuesday, in the hours of the sun, Venus, and Mercury, which follow each other in the planetary system of the magicians, as also in Ptolemy's. These hours were in ordinary parlance the ninth, tenth, and eleventh of the day, since the day being a Tuesday, the first hour was sacred to Mars. And as at the beginning of May the hours are sixty-five minutes long, the reader, however little of a magician he may be, will understand ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... two imbecile tyrants (which led, through its consequences, to the terrible operation of trepanning, performed by Monsieur Martener under the advice of Doctor Bianchon),—all this horrible drama reduced to judicial form was left to float in the vile mess called in legal parlance the calendar. The case was made to drag through the delays and the interminable labyrinths of the law, by the shufflings of an unprincipled lawyer; and during all this time the calumniated girl languished in the agony of the worst pain known ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... battle or from fire-tending, who was presented as Wee Jaikie. Last came the picket who had held his pole at Dickson's chest, a sandy-haired warrior with a snub nose and the mouth and jaw of a pug-dog. He was Old Bill, or, in Dougal's parlance, "Auld Bull." ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... shaven, saving as to the projecting chin, which a sandy-coloured billy-goat beard made project all the more, gave him the appearance of a man who had a will of his own, aye, and a temper of his own, too, should anyone attempt to smooth him down the wrong way, or, in sea parlance, ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... is on and all the upland pastures are scorched and brown. A mile away is the empty bed of the great tank. A South Indian tank in our parlance would be an artificial lake. A strong earth wall, planted with palmyras, encircles its lower slope. The upper lies open to receive surface water, as well as the channel for the river that runs full during the monsoon months. During the "rains" the country ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... thing; for he saw leaves and shrubs like men walking. Then the king asked him how far off was the advancing forest; and when he heard that it was near, he added that this prodigy boded his own death. Hence the marsh where the shrubs were cut down was styled in common parlance Deadly Marsh. Therefore, fearing the narrow passages, he left the town, and went to a level spot which was more open, there to meet the enemy in battle. Sigar fought unsuccessfully, and was crushed and slain at the spot that is called in common speech ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... be what in country parlance is called "a brave lump of a boy," and his mother thought he was old enough to do something for himself, she took him one day along with her to the squire's, and waited outside the door, loitering up and down the yard behind the house, among a crowd of beggars and great lazy dogs that were thrusting ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... all its own. The idioms of the game should be learned, as all books on the game are written in tennis parlance. The technical terms and their counterpart in slang need to be understood to thoroughly grasp the idea in any written ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... the theater as if it were a huge game. Like life itself, it was a great adventure. In the parlance of Wall Street, he was a "bull," for he was always raising salaries and royalties. Somebody ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... in mind pruning proper, all efforts in pruning are directed toward two objects: (1) The production of leafy shoots to increase the vigor of the plant. (2) The promotion of the formation of fruit-buds. The first, in common parlance, is pruning for wood; the second, ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... parlance means a Turkoman, a pomade: the settled people call themselves Osmanli or ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... period, was written with all the outspoken coarseness and nakedness of that rank day, when fireside sociabilities were limited only by the range of loosened fancy, vocabulary, and physical performance, and not by any bounds of convention. Howells has spoken of Mark Twain's "Elizabethan breadth of parlance," and how he, Howells, was always hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which Clemens had "loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion." "I could not bear to burn them," he declares, "and I could not, after the first reading, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... was one of those constitutionally stupid people who are nevertheless gifted with sudden flashes of sharpness apt to prove embarrassing to their companions. The Saxons, to use their own expressive parlance, were always "a trifle wary" in dealing with Maud, for what that young lady thought she promptly said, and said without reserve, choosing, as it seemed, out of pure "cussedness" the very moment of all others when they would have ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... fascination that no public building or show-place can have. Goethe, who turned his life-experiences into poetry, has told us something of one such house not far from Coblenz, in the village of Ehrenbreitstein, beneath the fortress, and which in familiar Coblenz parlance goes by the name of "The Valley"—the house of Sophie de Laroche. The village ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... following feudal retainers.—SCOTT. To the poet's explanation Lockhart appends the remark that since Scott thought his note necessary the word has been 'completely adopted into English, and especially into Parliamentary parlance.' ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... understand!" poor Mr. Dosson had said. "I thought you liked the piece—you think it's so queer THEY don't like it." "They," in the parlance of the Dossons, now never meant anything but ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... Fritz, "even admitting that the friendship between the two families continued uninterrupted, and that the father of Cecilia was willing to share his property with the father of Herbert, still the young man, in the parlance of society, was a beggar; and it is always hard for a man to owe his position to a woman, and to become, as it were, the protege of her whom he ought rather ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... or Little Bucharia would, in common parlance, be included in Serica; and therefore silk exported thence to Europe would have been perfectly described as coming from the Seres. Yates, p. ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... of thought should warn us against concluding that because the scientific theory of the world is the best that has yet been formulated, it is necessarily complete and final. We must remember that at bottom the generalisations of science or, in common parlance, the laws of nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the world and the universe. In the last analysis magic, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Madonna. The purity and transparency of the air gave a celestial softness and clearness to the very darkness itself; and one could find one's way without difficulty under such a limpid night. But in a little while we began to pass through a "venella," or, in Neopolitan parlance, a sottoportico, which led under so many archways and so many far- projecting balconies that no gleam of light from the sky could reach us. My young guide had made us take this route as a short cut, she assured us; but I think she did so quite as much simply in order ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... surface of the earth being that stable, fixed thing that it is popularly believed to be, being, in common parlance, the very emblem of fixity itself, it is incessantly moving, and is, in fact, as unstable as the surface of the sea, except that its undulations are infinitely slower and enormously ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... being turned her eyes red with weeping. The Rockerbilt tiara itself was as bogus as our own copy. There wasn't a real stone in the whole outfit, and the worst part of it was that under the circumstances Henriette could not tell anybody over the teacups that Mrs. Rockerbilt was, in vulgar parlance, "putting up ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... about, to air our professional erudition; and we do not understand that to the man who does not know their meaning, the effect is a blackout which makes even the simplest object seem formidable. To illustrate, we can take the word "bivouac," common enough in military parlance, but rare in civilian speech. When green men are told, "We are going into bivouac," and they are not sufficiently grounded in the service to know that this means simply going into camp for the night without shelter, their instinctive first thought ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... view, he is also an artist, and the very qualities that enable him to delight the public disable him from delighting it uninterruptedly. "No rose blooms right along," as the English boys at Oxford made an American collegian say in a theme which they imagined for him in his national parlance; and the man of letters, as an artist, is apt to have times and seasons when he cannot blossom. Very often it shall happen that his mind will lie fallow between novels or stories for weeks and months at a stretch; when the suggestions of the friendly editor ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... evidence those days. He liked you a great deal, because in school-girl parlance you were my "chum." You say,—thanks, no tea, it reminds me that I'm an old maid; you say you know what happiness means—maybe, but I don't think any living soul could experience the joy I felt in those days; it was absolutely painful ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... moon with touching anxiety, and although his finances were very frequently in a precarious condition, he never allowed himself to be without the proverbial penny to turn over under the new moon as a panacea against hidden pecuniary ills! If, in sailor parlance, a star "dogged the moon," that was to him a disturbing omen, and great caution had to be observed that no violation of nautical ethics took place during the transit. It was never regarded as a transit, but as a "sign" from which ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... rather prided himself upon his way of turning a compliment, albeit his action, as they say in stable parlance, was a trifle heavy. When he had gone Dora nodded ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... and "whizz-bangs" now, in army parlance. They throw only an eighteen-pound shell which carries three hundred bullets, but so fast that they chase one another through the air. There has been so much talk about the need of heavy guns, you might think that eighteen-pounders were too small for consideration. Were the German line ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... his wanderings or work in this long interval. And many circumstances go to show that it was at this time that he entered upon the immortal work which was published at Lyons, by the Trechsel Brothers, many years later;—those "Images of Death" which have borrowed the old name in popular parlance, and are generally called Holbein's ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... no parlance with the feeding friar, but going straight up the walk to the door of a lodging, to the which this was the parterre and garden, he laid his hand on the sneck, and opening it, bade ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... steadfastness of purpose, nor has it the enlightened persistence of obstinacy. In view of his earlier account of his purpose he could not avow his errand; it bereft him of naught to disavow it, for Uncle Nehemiah was one of those gifted people who, in common parlance, do not mind what they say. Yet his reluctance to assure Lean-der that he was not the quarry that had led him into these wilds so mastered him, the spurious relinquishment had so the aspect of renunciation, that he hesitated, started ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... man, was this stranger, Mr. Coroner, with a very odd-looking face. I should say an educated man—in common parlance, a gentleman. What drew my special attention to him was that he was talking aloud to himself—in fact, he seemed to be repeating poetry. I give you my word, I had no thought of The Avenger, no thought at all. To tell you the truth, ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... That one must be, and that the other need not be, intentional, she did feel; but she felt also that the less offensive word had come to mean a lie,—the world having been driven so to use it because the world did not dare to talk about lies; and this word, bearing such a meaning in common parlance, she had twice applied to Lord Fawn. And yet, as she was well aware, Lord Fawn had told no lie. He had himself believed every word that he had spoken against Frank Greystock. That he had been guilty of unmanly cruelty in so speaking of her lover in her presence, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... him on one occasion as on the top round of his ladder of friendship. Writing to Sarah Hazlitt, Lamb says:—"Martin Burney is as good, and as odd as ever. We had a dispute about the word 'heir,' which I contended was pronounced like 'air'; he said that might be in common parlance; or that we might so use it, speaking of the 'Heir at Law,' a comedy; but that in the law courts it was necessary to give it a full aspiration, and to say hayer; he thought it might even vitiate a cause, if a counsel pronounced ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... easily compassed by imagining the hoops as floating, one surrounding the other, with the ball in the middle of all, upon the surface of still water. Such a set of objects would be described in astronomical parlance as being in the same plane. Suppose, on the other hand, that some of these floating hoops are tilted with regard to the others, so that one half of a hoop rises out of the water and the other half consequently sinks beneath the surface. This indeed is the actual case ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... Dictionnaire neologique,[147] he has the company of many others, and among them, of his friends La Motte, Fontenelle, de Houtteville, and even Montesquieu. Some of the expressions which were considered reprehensible by Desfontaines have since been received into common parlance, and so do not appear unnatural or unusual: ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... shoulder whereon—gleaming under the level light—lay the Mermaid's Pool. David had sufficiently verified the fact that the tarn did indeed bear this name in the modern guide-book parlance of the district. Young men and women, out on a holiday from the big towns near, and carrying little red or green 'guides,' spoke of the 'Mermaid's Pool' with the accent of romantic interest. But the boy had also discovered that no native-born farmer or shepherd about had ever heard of ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... employ, and in a moment you have shaken off the mob that scours the rutted highway, and are addressing a select audience of ticket-holders with closed doors. A single natural phrase of peasant speech, a direct physical sense given to a word that genteel parlance authorises readily enough in its metaphorical sense, and at a touch you have blown the roof off the drawing-room of the villa, and have set its obscure inhabitants wriggling in the unaccustomed sun. In choosing ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... which they connect with the construction of a harbour at distant Salerno, and though this legend sounds foolish enough, it is scarcely less flimsy than the notions already quoted. A certain enchanter, one Pietro Bajalardo, undertook—in modern parlance, contracted—to build in a single night the much needed breakwater at Salerno on the strange condition that all cocks in the neighbourhood should first be killed; for the wizard, so the story runs, had a special aversion to Chanticleer on account of his having caused the repentance ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... provoked; the forbearance of years gave way; the bottled-up indignation burst forth, and the guardian gave his ward what in boyish parlance ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... of the week, and had another long talk with him. He told me that good conduct meant, in prison parlance, absence of punishment, and Oscar had been punished pretty often. Of course his offenses were minor offenses; nothing serious; childish faults indeed for the most part: he was often talking, and he was often ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... thirty years ago, I became involved in a series of occurrences and conditions of so painful and distressing a character that for over six months I was unable to sleep more than one or two hours out of the twenty-four. In common parlance I was "worrying myself to death," when, mercifully, a total collapse of mind and body came. My physicians used the polite euphemism of "cerebral congestion" to describe my state which, in reality, was one of temporary insanity, and it seemed almost hopeless that I ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... American accent for a play imported from us; but I did not see this play, and I am now very sorry. The American accent, at least, must have been worth hearing, if one might judge from the reproductions of our parlance which I heard in private life by people who had sojourned, or merely travelled, among us. These were so unfailingly delightful, that one could not ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... doubtful language and construction can be, this signifies: "A count's coronet, the escutcheon with two bends sinister and two stars, bearing the letters B. P., which signify Buonaparte, the field of the arms red, the bends and stars blue, the letters and coronet yellow!" In heraldic parlance this would be: Gules, two bends sinister between two estoiles azure charged with B. P. for Buona Parte, or; surmounted by a count's coronet of the last. In 1759 the same sovereign granted further the title of patrician. Charles, the son of Joseph, received a similar ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... a picture by Paul Delaroche, the Archangel Gabriel—the "patron," in Catholic parlance, of our little Gabrielle—hangs between the windows, and over the comfortable sofa is a copy of Liotard's celebrated pastel "la belle Chocolatiere" in the Dresden Gallery. This copy Aunt Mary bought in ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... an organic being, then the skeleton of facts is its body, and the soul is the spiritual bond that unites the facts into a whole, that conveys the meaning, the psychologic essence, of the facts. It becomes our duty, then, to unbare the soul of Jewish history, or, in scientific parlance, to construct, on the basis of the facts, the synthesis of the whole of Jewish national life. To this end, we must pass in review, by periods and epochs, one after another, the most important groups of historical events, the most noteworthy currents in life and thought that tell of the ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... and Erisicthon has no other foundation, in all probability, than the diligent care which she took, as a dutiful daughter, to support her father, when he had ruined himself by his luxury and extravagance. She, probably, was a young woman, who, in the hour of need, could, in common parlance, 'turn her hand' to any useful employment. Some, however, suppose that, by her changes are meant the wages she received from those whom she served in the capacity of a slave, and which she gave to her father; and it must be remembered that, in ancient times, as money was ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... safeguard of a strong light on the cape, in the days when ships were helplessly dragged by the sea when there was no wind to drive them—in the days before a "lee-shore" had ceased to be an actual peril to become a picturesque phrase in nautical parlance—they constituted one of the most notorious disaster-zones of the ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... prefers England. They say that an Englishman has as many lives as a cat. Supposing that chap Dominey did come to life again and she brings him home? You say yourself that you do not mean to make much use of me until after the war has started. In the parlance of this country of idioms, that will rather upset the apple ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Here and there among this cowering, sweating multitude crouched some poor wretch who had felt the pangs of an awakened conscience, but had not yet experienced that complete divestment of reason, that frenzy born of a convulsion of the mind, which, in the parlance of the Free Gospellers, is termed "the Light." On the floor, before the mourners' bench, lay the unconscious figure of a man in whom outraged nature had sought her last resort. This "trance" state is the highest evidence of grace among the Free Gospellers, and ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... following noticed:—1. Music to Goethe's "Jery und Btely,"—which, in theatrical parlance, was shockingly damned;—but then "its author had made many enemies as editor of the 'Musikalische Zeitung,'" and the singers and actors embraced this opportunity of revenge. 2. Music to the melodrama, "Die ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... he said at once, waving the flag, and without more ado plunged into an oration, which, so far as it went, must certainly be ranked among his masterpieces. "Great tidings, Friends! I have planted the grain of mustard seed or, in common parlance, have just come from the meeting which has incepted the League of Nations; and it will be my task this morning briefly to make known to you the principles which in future must dominate the policy of the world. Since it is for the closer brotherhood of man and the reign of perpetual ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... her direction and with her efficient help, Cynthia and Johnny Carruthers in medical parlance had "stripped" the guest room, putting it into the cleared bare order most useful for the purpose needed. If Ellen's heart was heavy as she saw the change made she let nothing show. And when, presently, she called her husband from the couch where he had lain, feverish and beginning to be tortured ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... almost imperceptible start, and opened his long, dark eyes with questioning surprise at Bardo's blind face, as if his words—a mere phrase of common parlance at a time when men were often being ransomed from slavery or imprisonment—had ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... of Washington. It was argued that at least one-third of the class from which he came had Tory and Royalist inclinations, and what guarantee had they that Washington was not one of their number? Washington himself found that those who styled themselves in old country parlance "The Gentry," were loyal to King George rather than to the colonies, and while his own men were inclined, at times, to doubt the sincerity of the Father of his Country, the very men with whom he was suspected of being in sympathy ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... to obtain the more or less complete oxidation, or what is known in mining parlance as a "sweet roast" (because a perfectly roasted ore is nearly odourless) varies considerably, the variation depending of course upon the character of the ore and the cost ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... from the Pip, known in Medical Parlance as the Spooney Infantum, he began to glory in the friendship of an incipient Amazon who wore a Blazer ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... the lake there occurs a deep bay or inlet, to save rounding which travellers usually strike straight across from point to point, making what is called in voyageur parlance a traverse. These traverses are subjects of considerable anxiety and frequently of delay to travellers, being sometimes of considerable extent, varying from four to five, and in such immense seas as Lake Superior, to fourteen miles. With ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... United States Commissioner of Patents in 1858, "probably has ever been so harassed, so trampled upon, so plundered by that sordid and licentious class of infringers known in the parlance of the world, with no exaggeration of phrase as 'pirates.' The spoliation of their incessant guerilla upon his defenseless rights ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... drawing of it. He could not guess at its value. If it had been a pure diamond like the "star of South Africa," it would have been worth many thousands of pounds, but it was not pure. According to digger parlance it was "off-colour," and, therefore, not excessively valuable. Still it was a precious gem, and would doubtless fetch several hundreds of pounds. Of course it was unpolished, but even in that state was very beautiful. It weighed seventy-eight carats. The "star of South Africa," ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... fatty matters. When the milk stands for some time, the globules, being lighter than the other constituents, ascend to the top, and, mixed with a certain proportion of milk, are removed as cream. The curd is termed in scientific parlance casein, and is in fresh milk in a state of solution—that is to say, is dissolved in milk in the same way that we dissolve sugar in water. When milk becomes sour, either naturally or by the addition of rennet, it can no longer hold casein in solution, ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... taken place in the heiress of Huntingdon Hill; and having been eyed, questioned, scrutinized by the best families, and laid in the social scale, it was found a difficult matter to determine her weight as accurately as seemed desirable. In common parlance, "her education was finished,"—she was regularly and unmistakably "out." Having lost her aunt two years before her return, the duties of hostess devolved upon her, and she dispensed the hospitalities of her home with an easy, though stately elegance, surprising ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... from fear, he is said to do under compulsion, especially if the fear be applied to him by some other person in order to gain a purpose. Such compulsory action is distinguished in ordinary parlance from voluntary action. And it is certainly less voluntary, inasmuch as the will is hedged in to make its choice between two evils, and chooses one or other only as being the less evil of the two, not for any liking to the thing in itself. Still, all things considered, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... had taken a lively interest in the fortunes of Hamet Karamanli, the legitimate heir to the throne, who had been driven into exile by Yusuf the pretender. Eaton loved intrigue as Preble gloried in war. Why not assist Hamet to recover his throne? Why not, in frontier parlance, start a back-fire that would make Tripoli too hot for Yusuf? He laid his plans before his superiors at Washington, who, while not altogether convinced of his competence to play the king-maker, were persuaded to make him navy agent, subject to the orders of the commander of the American ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... ordinary parlance of the Hebrews torah always meant first, and chiefly the Priestly Torah. The prophets have notoriously no father (1Samuel x. 12), their importance rests on the individuals; it is characteristic that only names and sketches of their lives have reached ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... life Harut was, in sporting parlance, knocked out. He looked at us, then turning quite pale, lifted his eyes to heaven and rocked upon his feet as though he ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... $1500 a year to live at Oxford, and about $325 in university and college fees from matriculation to graduation, when he gets his degree of B.A., or, if inattentive, fails to pass the examination, and, in Oxford parlance, is ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... slight, almost imperceptible start, and opened his long dark eyes with questioning surprise at Bardo's blind face, as if his words—a mere phrase of common parlance, at a time when men were often being ransomed from slavery or imprisonment—had had some special meaning for him. But the next moment he looked towards Romola, as if her eyes must be her father's interpreters. She, intensely preoccupied with what ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... through Nic's mind he kept his eyes fixed upon the bright dark eyes of the black, every nerve upon the strain, every muscle strung, and ready for action. For in those painful moments Nic had determined to "die game," as he called it in schoolboy parlance, living as he did in days when a brutal sport was popular. At the first movement made by the black Nic meant to spring upon his gun, and have one shot for his life; but he remained motionless, trying to stare ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... unity and Messianism; unity of law throughout the world, and the terrestrial triumph of justice in humanity. These are the two dogmas which at the present time illuminate humanity in its progress, both in the scientific and social order of things, and which are termed in modern parlance unity of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... longer enable vessels to pass, flour in Baltimore fell two dollars a barrel. The blockade being then limited to the Chesapeake and Delaware, the immediate effect was to transfer this lucrative traffic further north, favoring that portion of the country which was considered, in the common parlance of the British official of that day, ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... in an excess of fury and disappointment, calls out, "Ah! sons of dogs! I play no more to you!" and closes the theatre, they quietly and unresentfully disperse. Though, indeed, fioi de cani means no great reproach in Venetian parlance; and parents of the lower classes caressingly address their children in these terms. Whereas to call one Figure of a Pig, is to wreak upon him the deadliest insult which can ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... common parlance Arabs answer a question (like the classics of Europe who rarely used Yes and No, Yea and Nay), by repeating its last words. They have, however, many affirmative particles e.g. Ni'am which answers a negative ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... how her mother would be questioning her about her "admirers," as she would phrase it in her mid-Victorian parlance. There was really only Ray to report upon. He would be the beau ideal "young gentleman,"—to recur again to her mother's phraseology,—the son of a member of a great State Street dry-goods firm, an excellently mannered, ingratiating, traveled ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... be put down and discouraged as much as possible; as if the Creator had endowed us with a power we did not need. So imaginative persons are spoken of with contempt, and here there is more justice; for, in common parlance, to be imaginative means to have the Imagination developed out of all proportion with the other powers. This is, perhaps, quite as bad as to have an insufficiency. What we should desire is a balance of powers. Imagination should not run away with ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... and priests have their heads completely shaven. The proverb signifies that it is better to correct the heart,—to conquer all vain regrets and desires,—than to become a religious. In common parlance the phrase "to shave the head" means to become a monk ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... he said, "is the delightful spot where I was born in sin; the bright air where I breathed poisonous perfumes; the sea of pleasure where I heard the songs of the sirens. There is my cradle, after the flesh; my native land—in the parlance of the men of these days! A rich cradle, an illustrious country, in the judgment of men! It is natural that thy children should reverence thee like a mother, Alexandria, and I was begotten in thy magnificently adorned breast. ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... was one which could only be produced, in ordinary parlance, by the passage of light. No light could come from the tube, because the shield which covered it was impervious to any light known, even ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... parlance, was only Miss Holbrook's garden, but in David's eyes it was fairyland come true. For one whole minute he could only stand like a very ordinary little boy and stare. At the end of the minute he became ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... having accidentally seen a native Devonshire regiment (either volunteers or militia), nine hundred strong, marching past a station at which he had posted himself, he did not observe a dozen men that would not have been described in common parlance as 'good looking.' ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... writes; "just as my ideas present themselves, I heap them together; sometimes they come rushing in a throng, sometimes they straggle single file. I like to be seen at my natural and ordinary pace, all a-hobble though it be; I let myself go, just as it happens. The parlance I like is a simple and natural parlance, the same on paper as in the mouth, a succulent and a nervous parlance, short and compact, not so much refined and finished to a hair as impetuous and brusque, difficult rather than wearisome, devoid ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... lady of a certain age is said in common parlance to be "Forty, save one, the age of Roden's colt." What can Nimrod tell ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... Mr. Heatherbloom sang again; he did more than that. He outdid himself; he employed bombast,—some thought it pathos. He threw a tremolo into his voice; it passed for emotion. He "caught 'em", in Mr. Mackintosh's parlance, and "caught 'em hard". Some more people bought copies. The alert Mr. Mackintosh managed to gather in about a dollar, and saw, in consequence, great fortune "coming his way" at last; the clouds had ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... rightful position by treaty should be weakened or impaired.' When a British minister threatens to burn a palace, Eastern Asiatics know full well that the torch will be preceded by a bombardment and followed by looting, which in Anglo-Indian parlance means plundering. Thirteen ships of war, two of them French, are at Yokahama, within a few hours' sail of the palace which adorns Yedo, the proud metropolis of the 'Land of the Rising Sun,' awaiting an answer ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... chose the time when he was "putting in an upper" (which is miner's parlance for drilling a hole in the upper face of the tunnel). He gritted his teeth when he swung back the single-jack and landed a glancing blow on the knuckles of his left hand instead of the drill end. No man save Casey Ryan or a surgeon could have ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... teaches that the only way in which a country can defend itself successfully against an enemy is to defeat the armed force of that enemy—be it a force of soldiers on the land, or a force of war-ships on the sea. In naval parlance, "our objective is the ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... Sacs and Foxes, they had captured nine out of thirteen military posts, and were secretly planning the downfall of Fort Mackinaw. This was regarded as an impregnable post and vulnerable only through strategy—in Indian parlance another name for duplicity. Fort Mackinaw, as Brock well knew, was the most important trading entrepot west of Montreal. It served a territory extending from the Missouri in the west to the far ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... 11) is practically the withers and that portion of the upper part of the body which is covered by the saddle. Strictly speaking, it is that portion of the spine which is possessed of ribs. In common parlance, the term "back" is often applied to the upper part of the horse, from the withers to the highest point of the croup (Fig. 148, H). This measurement includes the loins (12) as well as the back. The ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... just here that his own personal gifts came to the front. By dint of argument, raillery, and—in one or two particularly bad and obdurate cases— judicious chastisement he finally succeeded in, what is termed in modern parlance, "licking ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... lit. "the two moons." Arab rhetoric prefers it to "Shamsani," or {'two suns," because lighter (akhaff), to pronounce. So, albeit Omar was less worthy than Abu-Bakr the two are called "Al-Omarani," in vulgar parlance, Omarayn. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... appointed his successor. But in this lay the obstacle; for every thing anent the office was, as it were, in his custody, and it was well known that he had an interest in keeping by that which, in vulgar parlance, is called nine points of the law. However, both for the public good and a convenience to myself, I was resolved to get a finger in the dean of guild's fat pie, especially as I foresaw that, in the course of three or four years, some of the best tacks would ...
— The Provost • John Galt |
