"Periphrasis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... allow that a person is the same as far back as his remembrance reaches. And indeed they do use the words IDENTITY and SAME PERSON. Nor will language permit these words to be laid aside, since, if they were, there must be I know not what ridiculous periphrasis substituted in the room of them. But they cannot consistently with themselves mean that the person is really the same. For it is self-evident that the personality cannot be really the same, if, as they expressly assert, that in which ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... at the flaming licentiousness of several weekly papers, which for some months past, have been chiefly employed in barefaced scurrilities against those who are in the greatest trust and favour with the Qu[een], with the first and last letters of their names frequently printed; or some periphrasis describing their station, or other innuendoes, contrived too plain to be mistaken. The consequence of which is, (and it is natural it should be so) that their long impunity hath rendered ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... exclaiming, que hielo! estoy emparamado;* though the thermometer exposed to the rain sinks only to 21.5 degrees. (* "What an icy cold! I shiver as if I was on the top of the mountains." The provincial word emparamarse can be translated only by a very long periphrasis. Paramo, in Peruvian puna, is a denomination found on all the maps of Spanish America. In the colonies it signifies neither a desert nor a heath, but a mountainous place covered with stunted trees, exposed to the winds, and in which a damp cold perpetually ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... of the second person plural deserves attention. The word zu-nini is, clearly, composed of the two elements, zu, "thee," and nini, "them"—so that instead of having a word for "you," the Chaldaeans employed for it the periphrasis "thee-them"! There is, I believe, no known language ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... Well! who may he thank for that, I interrogate. Not one Denis O'Donegan!—O no; the said Denis is an ignoramus, and knows nothing of the classics. Well, be it so. All I say is, that I wish I had one classical lick at their provost, I would let him know what the master of a plantation seminary (*—a periphrasis for hedge-school) could do when brought ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton |
