"Plural" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I'll throw an axe-handle at him." His pessimism extended up, or down, to generally recognized canons of orthography. They were all iniquitous. If k-n-i-f-e spelled knife, then, he contended, k-n-i-f-e-s was the plural. Diverting tags, written by his own hand in conformity with this theory, were always attached to articles in his shop window. He is long since ded, as he himself would have put it, but his phonetic ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... plural of "animalcule"? Ans. Animalcules or animalculae.—Write a sentence containing ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... can care much whether we did or didn't," retorted Vixen, shrouding her personality in a vague plural. "If you had cared you would have been with us. Sultan," meaning the chestnut "must have felt cruelly humiliated by being kept ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... Chapter XXIV, paragraph 65. The word "daughter" was changed to the plural in the sentence: There would be nothing unusual under ordinary circumstances in your DAUGHTERS going to a ball ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... been killed at the annual autumn slaughtering, and then salted down. Stall-fattening not being practised, the autumn was the time for fat cattle. Salsamentum, however, is translated in White and Riddle's Dictionary, "A.Fish-pickle, brine; B.Salted or pickled fish (so usually in plural)."] ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... gastronomically correct were it not for this word "fish." However, we cannot accept Lister's reading lacertis. We prefer the reading, laridis, bacon. The French have another term for this—petits sales. Both this and the Torinus term are in the plural. They are simply small strips of bacon to which Torinus again refers in the above formula, salsum, coctum in media pones—put the bacon, when done, in the center (of the dish). Regarding salsum also see note to ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... Tuhfeh the fool. Hemca is the feminine form of ahmec, fool. If by a change in the (unwritten) vowels, we read Humeca, which is the plural form of ahmec, the title will signify, "Gift (Tuhfeh) of fools" and would thus represent a jesting alteration of the girl's real name (Tuhfet el Culoub, Gift of hearts), in allusion to her (from the slave-merchant's point of view) foolish and vexatious behaviour in ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... I know the people I live among don't know everything. I grant you all that. But Woman Free! Woman Free! Madame Mafflu wants to know what liberty—or what liberties—singular or plural; do you take me?—ha! ha! There ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... clever guess of a critic in the Hamburgischer unpartheyischer Correspondent,[29] who openly named Lessing as the scholar referred to in the first introduction. The addition and prominence of Ebert's name is worthy of note, for in spite of the plural mention[30] in the appendix to the introduction, his first acknowledgment is to one friend only and there is no suggestion of another counselor. Ebert's connection with the Bode translation has been overlooked in the distribution of influence, while ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... The plural, if not sufficiently made plain from the context, is often indicated by the use of such words as baniak, many, ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... 18 districts (dzongkhag, singular and plural); Bumthang, Chhukha, Chirang, Daga, Geylegphug, Ha, Lhuntshi, Mongar, Paro, Pemagatsel, Punakha, Samchi, Samdrup Jongkhar, Shemgang, Tashigang, ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... extremely timid that he never had had the audacity to tell the girl at the glove counter that he preferred bronze-green gloves, nor the boldness to show Maria Gerard his poems composed in her honor, in which he now always put the plural "amours," so as to make it rhyme with "toujours," which was an improvement. He never had dared to reply to the glance of the little maid on the second floor; and he was very wrong to be embarrassed, for one morning, as he passed the butcher's shop, he saw the butcher's ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... (line 143) Euryclea says it was herself that had thrown the cloak over Ulysses—for the plural should not be taken as implying more than one person. The writer is evidently still fluctuating between Euryclea and Eurynome as the name for the old nurse. She probably originally meant to call her Euryclea, ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... and they shall call them, The border of wickedness, and, The people against whom the Lord hath indignation for ever. And your eyes shall see, and ye shall say, The Lord will be magnified from the border of Israel." The plural pronouns used, "we," "us," "ye," "they," and the term "people," prove that the prophet was speaking, not of the man "Jacob," nor of the man "Esau," but of the respective peoples which had descended from them. Look now at the word "loved." It has been taken ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... but, when the time of trial was past, he found himself inebriated with spiritual delights, and received an assurance that his name was written in the Lamb's Book of Life. At the same time, he was forbidden by the Lord to employ the plural pronoun you in addressing a single person, to bid his neighbour good even or good-morrow, or to uncover the head, or scrape with the leg to any mortal being. At length, the Spirit ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... term souls or spirits is as improper as the term gods. Soul or Spirit signifies Deity and nothing else. 466:21 There is no finite soul nor spirit. Soul or Spirit means only one Mind, and cannot be rendered in the plural. Heathen mythology and Jewish 466:24 theology have perpetuated the fallacy that intelligence, soul, and life can be in matter; and idolatry and ritualism are the outcome of all man-made beliefs. The Science ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... would speak to no one,—indeed, she hardly would when she came to our camp. She was almost white, and this officer wished to adopt her, but the mother said, "I would do anything but that for oonah," this being a sort of Indian formation of the second-person-plural, such as they sometimes use. This same officer afterwards saw a reward offered for this family in a ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... word, so that a long word like the Homeric genitive feromenoio could in no circumstances be accented on either of its first two syllables, while if the final syllable was long, as in the accusative plural feromenous, the accent could go back only to the second syllable from the end. As every vowel has its own natural pitch, and a frequent interchange between e ( a high vowel) and o (a low vowel) occurs in the Indo-European languages, it has been suggested ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... authorship set up. It has been asserted that it is very improbable on extrinsic grounds that they were both written by one hand and certain intrinsic evidence, changes in the mode of narration, especially the use of the first personal pronoun in the plural in certain passages, has been pointed to as making against single authorship. This tendency to deny old-time traditions of authorship with regard to many classical writings was a marked characteristic of the early part of the nineteenth century, but the close ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... The sites of ancient towns and villages are usually conspicuous in Palestine, and are recognized in the local nomenclature. They are denoted by the words tall, plural tulul, meaning 'mound', and khirbah, plural khirab meaning 'ruin'. These words are commonly spelt in English tell and khirbet (less correctly khurbet) and we use these more familiar forms here. As a rule, though not invariably, the sense of these terms is distinguished. A tell ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... of Beuvry Station. It was small and crowded. The floor was covered with straw which we could not renew. After the first fortnight the population of this chamber increased rapidly; one or two of us spoke of himself hereafter in the plural. They gave far less trouble than we had expected, and, though always with some of us until the spring, suffered heavy casualties from the use of copious petrol and the baking of washed ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... Those grammarians that attempt to restrict number, case, mode, etc.—what we here call Modifications—to form, find themselves within bounds which they continually overleap. They define number, for instance, as a form, or inflection, and yet speak of nouns "plural in form but singular in sense," or "singular in form but plural in sense;" that is, if you construe them rigorously, plural or singular in form but singular or plural form in sense. They tell you that case is a ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... domestic situation in Byron's house at the time of his wife's expulsion was one so grave as to call for family counsel; for Lady Byron, generally accurate, speaks in the plural number. 'His nearest relatives' certainly includes Mrs. Leigh. 'His family' includes more. That some of Lord Byron's own relatives were cognisant of facts at this time, and that they took Lady Byron's side, is shown by one of his own chance admissions. In vol. vi. p.394, in ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... then, the book was in the main written and lost during the reign of Manasseh (circa 660 B.C.). It has been observed that in some sections the 2nd pers. sing, is used. in others the pl., and that the tone of the plural passages is more aggressive than that of the singular; the contrast, e.g., between xii. 29-31 (thou) and xii. 1-12 (you) is unmistakable. We might, then, limit the conclusion reached above by saying that the passages in which a milder tone prevails probably came from Hezekiah's ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... Latin, like English, has two numbers, singular and plural. In English we usually form the plural by adding -s or -es to the singular. So Latin changes the singular to the plural by changing the ending of ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... the earth where the dead go (gimokud, "spirit;" -an, plural ending); that is, [the place of] ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... habiby!" It was the salutation in the plural—to Habib, and to the angels that walk, one at either shoulder of every son of God. And as he spoke he threw a new white burnoose over Habib's head, so that it hung down straight and covered him like ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... anything new in constructional material interests me, and in this connection I would like to ask you what is or what are Prone? I have only seen it (or them) mentioned once, and from the context I gather that the word "prone" stands for the plural of "prone" (as "grouse" is the plural of "grouse," and as "house" might well stand for the plural of "house" nowadays, considering the shortage of dwellings), and that it (or they) is (or are) used either ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... extraordinary English—turning words in the singular into words in the plural, and banishing from the British vocabulary the copulative conjunction "and"—Herr Grosse announced his readiness to sit down to lunch. He was politely recalled from the Mayonnaise to the patient by his ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... regularly; and denote the cases of the former and the tenses of the latter, not like the English by auxiliary words, but like the Latins by change of termination. Their nouns, whether substantive or adjective, seem to admit of no plural. I have heard Mr. Dawes hint his belief of their using a dual number, similar to the Greeks, but I confess that I never could remark aught to confirm it. The method by which they answer a question that they cannot resolve is similar ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... no time for single sentiment!" he shouted. "Everybody should be perfectly plural to-night—everything should be plural, multiple, diffuse, all embracing, ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... explained, wearily, "I do wish you wouldn't speak of your vital organs in the plural. Anyone would imagine you were a sort of freak, like the two-headed boy at the circus. It's ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Phillips. "He is offering me an excuse to surrender gracefully. We must have a public meeting or two after Christmas, and clear the ground." They had got into the habit of speaking in the plural. ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... arpeggio (plural arpeggi) is a derivation of the Italian word arpa (meaning harp), and from this word arpa and its corresponding verb arpeggiare (to play on the harp) are derived also a number of other terms commonly used in instrumental ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... {.}, "all the thien," or simply "the thien" taken as plural. But in Chinese the character called thien {.} denotes heaven, or Heaven, and is interchanged with Ti and Shang Ti, meaning God. With the Buddhists it denotes the devas or Brahmanic gods, or all the inhabitants of the six devalokas. The usage ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... fondness for substantives ending in -ma and -sis, such as georgema, diapauma, epithumema, zemioma, komodema, omilema; blapsis, loidoresis, paraggelsis, and others; also a use of substantives in the plural, which are commonly found only in the singular, maniai, atheotetes, phthonoi, phoboi, phuseis; also, a peculiar use of prepositions in composition, as in eneirgo, apoblapto, dianomotheteo, dieiretai, dieulabeisthai, and other words; also, a frequent occurrence of the Ionic datives plural in ...
— Laws • Plato
... used as a demonstrative pronoun, both in the singular and plural, for this and these, it maybe observed, as well as of the pronunciation of many other words in the west, that we have no letters or combination of letters which, express exactly the sounds there given to such words. TheeAze is here marked as a dissyllable, ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... the season began I have been looking out for you, everywhere," said John, with a rather fierce emphasis on the pronoun, which, however, as everybody knows, is plural, and means two as much as one, though it was the reverse of this that ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... my head, how singular I act: Cut off my tail, and plural I appear. Cut off my head and tail—most curious fact, Although my middle's left, there's nothing there! What is my head cut off?—a sounding sea! What is my tail cut off?—a flowing river! Amid their mingling deaths I fearless ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... that since the date of said declaration the members and adherents of said church have generally obeyed said laws and have abstained from plural marriages and ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... amid his trunks from the home of his father (genealogical poverty denies us the romantic grandiloquence of the plural), it was his mother's farewell arms and farewell tears, and his farewell promises to her, of which he was mainly conscious. He had promised "to take care of himself," and particularly to beware of damp sheets, and then he ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... section quotes the various aspects under which Life appeared to the wise and foolish teachers of humanity. First comes Hafiz, whose well-known lines are quoted beginning with Shab-i-tarik o bim-i-mauj, etc. Hur is the plural of Ahwar, in full Ahwar el-Ayn, a maid whose eyes are intensely white where they should be white, and black elsewhere: hence our silly "Houries." Follows Umar-i-Khayyam, who spiritualized Tasawwof, or Sooffeism, even as the Soofis (Gnostics) ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... Malacca is a useful philological phenomenon. The verbs have mostly lost their inflections, and one form does for all moods, tenses, numbers, and persons. Eu vai, serves for "I go," "I went," or, "I will go." Adjectives, too, have been deprived of their feminine and plural terminations, so that the language is reduced to a marvellous simplicity, and, with the admixture of a few Malay words, becomes rather puzzling to one who has heard only the ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... to give an account, of the Grammar of this Tongue; I shall only give a few instances of their words, and leave it to the Learned to make their Conjectures. First, I will give you some of their Nouns Plural. ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy. On the whole, the Latin races have leaned more towards the former way of looking upon evil, as made up of ills and sins in the plural, removable in detail; while the Germanic races have tended rather to think of Sin in the singular, and with a capital S, as of something ineradicably ingrained in our natural subjectivity, and never to be removed by any superficial piecemeal operations.[70] These comparisons of races ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... pointless that nobody could be offended by them. For a special instance: The prayer for "our bishops and curates, and all congregations committed to their charge," is, in the Lincoln Service-book, "for our bishop, and all congregations committed to his charge." The change from singular to plural seems a slight one. But it suffices to take the eyes of the people off their own bishop into infinite space; to change a prayer which was intended to be uttered in personal anxiety and affection, into one for the ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... "Plural," said Silvia, softly. I opened my near eye and turned my head. The first thing I saw was a rosy arm, lying on the edge ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... generally admitted that the word Elohim is the name for Deity, as worshipped by the Hebrew patriarchs; Jehovah, the conception of Deity which is at the root of the Mosaic theocracy.(789) El, or the plural Elohim, means literally "the powers," (the plural form being either, as some unreasonably think, a trace of early polytheism, or more probably merely emphatic,(790)) and is connected with the name for God commonly used in the Semitic nations. ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... hand—an attitude absolutely necessary to the situation—and replied: 'One is indicative mood, present tense, third person singular, verb active to say. Other is indicative mood, present tense, third person plural, verb ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Hebrews, the word AUR, in the singular, signified light, but in the plural, AURIM, it denoted the revelation of the divine will; and the aurim and thummim, literally the lights and truths, constituted a part of the breastplate whence the high priest obtained oracular responses to the questions which ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... an odd name for a town, whether we regard it as a genitive singular, or as a nominative plural. The story goes, that the first settlers appointed a committee of one to name the place. The gentleman selected for this duty had been a schoolmaster, and he brought to bear upon the task all the learning appertaining to his former vocation. He desired to express ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... laying aside prejudice as much as we can, we shall succeed in giving a fair account of its method and argument, offering by the way a few suggestions, such as might occur to any naturalist of an inquiring mind. An editorial character for this article must in justice be disclaimed. The plural pronoun is employed not to give editorial weight, but to avoid even the appearance of egotism, and also the circumlocution which attends a rigorous adherence to the ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... proper use of the auxiliaries shall and will, will be found to arise from the fact, that while these particles respectively convey a different idea in the first person singular and plural, from that which they imply in the second and third persons singular and plural, the distinction has been lost sight of in the amalgamation of both; as if they were interchangeable, in one tense, according to the old grammatical formula I shall ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... seem not to have liked a too frequent repetition of this letter, for it is omitted often when a following syllable contains it; as pejero for perjero; and grammarians have noticed that the genitive plural of the future participle is of rare occurrence. In the colloquial and provincial Latin, r is often dulled into l. Thus on one of the walls at Pompeii a part of the first line of the Aeneid was ...
— Latin Pronunciation - A Short Exposition of the Roman Method • Harry Thurston Peck
... litterateur. We unfortunately have no corresponding term in English: a man of letters is our awkward periphrasis in the singular, (too apt, as our jest books remind us, to suggest the postman;) whilst in the plural we resort to the Latin word literati. The school which professes to teach grammatica, professes, therefore, the culture of literature in the widest and most liberal extent, and is opposed generically to schools for teaching mechanic arts; and, within ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... for master. It is a title of courtesy, and conveys reverence and admiration.) "Pollo is one chicken by itself; when there are enough present to constitute a plural, it ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... comforted in Tilly's own peculiar fashion; her most common method of amusement being to reproduce for its entertainment scraps of conversation current in the house, with all the sense left out of them, and all the nouns changed to the plural number, as—"Did its mothers make it up a beds then! And did its hair grow brown and curly when its cap was lifted off, and frighten it, a precious Pets, ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... "Eye—please,—the singular or plural in this case makes all the difference, but I shall have my new one in fairly soon now and then illusion ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... comes from one word and two of its compound or forms and will mean accordingly: (1) The Strong one used 225 times in the Old Testament; (2) The Strong one as an object of worship; (3) The Strong one who is faithful and, therefore, to be trusted and obeyed. This last is a plural term and is used 2300 times in the Old Testament. It is the name used when God said. "Let us make man" and "God created man in his own image," etc., Gen. 1:26-27. It was by this name that God the Trinity covenanted for the good of man before man ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... a taut line. "When they get mad crazy about a man" (the plural pronoun pigeonholed Ethel in a class) "they're like the ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... Burton generally writes Bedawi and Bedawin. Bedawin (Bedouin) is the plural form of Bedawi. Pilgrimage to ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... foreground of rude communal language, something like though greatly superior to that of the animals, preceding or preparing the evolution of Self-consciousness proper, in the forms of "I" and "Thou" and the grammar of personal actions and relations. "They show that the plural and all other forms of number in grammar arise not by multiplication of an original 'I,' but by selection and gradual EXCLUSION from an original collective 'we.'" (3) According to this view the birth of self-consciousness in the human family, ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... Peterson, as if he had waited for the question, answered in a surly tone, and with a kind of disdain, So as we eat, so shall we work. This he spoke aloud, so that he might be sure the captain heard him and the rest of the men also, and it was evident that as he spoke in plural numbers, We, so he spoke their minds as well as his own, and words which ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... saint, Meshe," said Malka, so impressed that she admitted him to the equality of the second person plural. "If everybody knew as much Terah as you, the Messiah would soon be here. Here are five shillings. For five shillings you can get a basket of lemons in the Orange Market in Duke's Place, and if you sell them in the Lane at a halfpenny ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... number of things we would speak: adieu, in the verbs, to all which might explain the active person, how and in what time it acts, if it acts alone or with others: in a word, with the Chinese, the same word is substantive, adjective, verb, singular, plural, masculine, feminine, &c. It is the person who hears who must arrange the circumstances, and guess them. Add to all this, that all the words of this language are reduced to three hundred and a few more; that they are pronounced in so many different ways, that they signify ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... thought Mrs. Wriothesley, as she drove home from Hurlingham. "Yes, Sylla, my dear, you have told me something to-day that I honestly don't believe you knew yourself before. When accidents happen in the plural, and young ladies remark upon them only in the singular number, it is a sign of absorbing interest in somebody concerned. People generally, I think, would have observed, 'They don't get up.'" But Mrs. Wriothesley wisely kept all these reflections ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... returned, "then you need not be more afraid than I, because 'people' is plural. What were you ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... as a title for a business, was a little misleading because of the plural ending of the last word. There was only one consultant, and that was Samson Francis Bending. His speciality was the engineering design of atomic power plants—both the old fashioned heavy-metal kind and the newer, more elegant, ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... than a mere blunder or slip of the pen. The words which follow, viz., 'comfort' and 'stablish,' are in the singular, whilst these two mighty and august names are their nominatives, and would therefore, by all regularity, require a plural to follow them. That this peculiarity is no mere accident, but intentional and deliberate, is made probable by the two instances in our text, and is made certain, as it seems to me, by the fact that the same anomalous and eloquent construction occurs in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... no occasion for the plural. I don't give 'us girls' anything. I am much too busy for that. But I know you think, Miss Marian, and have capacity ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... lives)," Ha[']-no-o-na wi-la-po-na. Not only these gods, but all supernatural beings, men, animals, plants, and many objects in nature, are regarded as personal existences, and are included in the one term a-ha-i, from a, the plural particle signifying "all," and ha-i, being or life,"Life," "the Beings." This again leads us to the important and interesting conclusion that all beings, whether deistic and supernatural, or animistic and mortal, are regarded as belonging to one system; and that they are likewise believed to ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... rare on Gothic buildings, especially on castles. This at Coulyng is remarkable from being in English, at a time when Latin was employed in all charters; it contains that early form of the plural 'beth' instead of 'are.' The inscription measures thirty-two inches by fourteen, and the diameter of the seal is no less than seven and ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... 768-814), for example, found it necessary to order that priests and monks must show themselves capable of changing the wording of the masses for the living and the dead, as circumstances required, from singular to plural, or from masculine ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... apposition with Death, not with Posthumus Leonatus. In a note appended to this censure, referring to another passage from L. L. L., I averred that MR. COLLIER had corrupted it by chancing the singular verb dies into the plural die (this too done, under plea of editorial licence, without warning to the reader), and that such corruption had abstracted the true key to the right construction. To make good this last position, two things I must do first, cite the whole passage, without change of letter or tittle, as it ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... including the quantity when different from the infinitive, is indicated, unless the verb shows further irregularities. Intransitive verbs that take sein contrary to rule are marked with 's'. The prefix of separable verbs is followed by -. Of nouns only the plural is given, unless they belong to the so-called mixed declension. Compound words whose meaning is readily discernible from the component ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... importing the singular number only, may be extended to several persons or things; and words importing the plural number only may be applied to one person, or thing; and words importing the masculine gender only may be extended ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Earth-god was a man. On the fertile soil of Rythar there were one hundred women and thirty men. All the boys had taken mates before they reached seventeen. Seventy girls were left unmarried, with no prospect of ever having husbands. A score or more became second wives in polygamous homes, but plural marriage had no appeal for Mryna. She was firmly determined to possess a man of her own. And why shouldn't ...
— The Guardians • Irving Cox
... everything pointed to his simply having got to—but wouldn't they very quickly dispose? And then what? That lawyer seemed to think all he had to do was to marry them right away; not them, of course,—one; but they were so very plural in his mind. Funny man, thought Mr. Twist; funny man,—yet otherwise so sagacious. It is true he need only propose to one of them, for which he thanked God, but he could imagine what that one, and what the other one too, who would ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... bad grammar now to use a singular verb with a plural noun; but in 1556 it was correct English over the whole south of England, and the use of the singular with the singular, or the plural with the plural, was a peculiarity ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... thou hast had much ado not to smile at my accepting thy courtesies with my hat on my head, and at my calling thee 'thou.' Yet thou must surely know that at the time of Christ no nation was so foolish as to substitute the plural for the singular. It was not until long afterwards that men began to call each other 'you' instead of 'thou,' as if they were double, and to usurp the impudent titles of Majesty, Eminence, Holiness, that some worms of the earth bestow on other worms. It is the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... simple Raveloe theology fell rather unmeaningly on Silas's ears, for there was no word in it that could rouse a memory of what he had known as religion, and his comprehension was quite baffled by the plural pronoun, which was no heresy of Dolly's, but only her way of avoiding a presumptuous familiarity. He remained silent, not feeling inclined to assent to the part of Dolly's speech which he fully understood—her recommendation that ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... xviii:20, where we read, "Thou sayest (but they are but vain words)," the second person being used. (3) In Isaiah xxxvi:5, we read "I say (but they are but vain words) I have counsel and strength for war," and in the twenty-second verse of the chapter in Kings it is written, "But if ye say," the plural number being used, whereas Isaiah gives the singular. (4) The text in Isaiah does not contain the words found in 2 Kings xxxii:32. (5) Thus there are several cases of various readings where it is impossible to ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... Paine reactionary. Those to which he most objected are quoted by him in his speech in the Convention, which is bound up in the same pamphlet, and follows this "Dissertation" in the present volume. In the Constitution as adopted Paine's preference for a plural Executive was established, and though the bicameral organization (the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients) was not such as he desired, his chief objection was based on his principle of manhood suffrage. But in regard to this see Paine's "Dissertations ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... manifesting the irritation which existed, the resolution was amended, by changing the word "treaties" from the plural to the singular number, and by striking out the words "Dey and Regency of Algiers, the King of Great Britain, and certain Indian tribes north-west of the river Ohio," so that only the treaty with the King of ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... her broad embrace, and steamers steer a bee-line course to their landings, the officers might have been able to say at what hour we should reach our destination. As it was, they merely reiterated the characteristic "Ne znaem" (We don't know), which possesses plural powers of irritation when uttered in the conventional half-drawl. Perhaps they really did not know. Owing to a recent decree in the imperial navy, officers who have served a certain number of years without having accomplished ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... unknowable God. And they said: Paul, thou readest our language as badly as thou speakest it; we have inscriptions "to unknown gods" but not to the unknowable God. Didst go to school at Tarsus, yet canst not tell the plural from the singular? To which I answered: then you are so religious-minded that you would not offend any god whose name you might not have heard, and so favour him by the inscription to an unknown God? But some of your philosophers, Athenians, call God unknowable. ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... a paradise on the face of the earth, it is this—it is this—it is this.[28] Anything more unlike paradise than this place now is can hardly be conceived. Here are crowded together twelve hundred kings and queens (for all the descendants of the Emperors assume the title of Salatin, the plural of Sultan) literally eating each ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... of terms in any way disappointed the gentleman from San Juan, my closest observation of his smile and glance failed to detect it. He merely quivered his shoulders—a sort of plural shrug—rolled his cigarette tighter between his thumb and forefinger, remarked that the memoranda were entirely satisfactory, and folding the paper slid it carefully into his pocket; then with a series of salaams that reminded me of a Mohammedan spreading a ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... and life to the skeleton, vary according to the grammatical signification of the word. The relations of grammar are thus expressed for the most part by changes of vocalic sound, just as in English the plural of "man" is denoted by a change in the vowel. The verb is but imperfectly developed; it is, in fact, rather a noun than a verb, expressing relation rather than time. Compound words, moreover, are rare, the compounds of our European languages being replaced ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... carefully this ardent confidence on the part of Catholic France; he recommended to his partisans attention to little pious and popular practices. "I send you some paternosters [meaning, in the plural, the beads of a chaplet, or the chaplet entire]," he wrote to his wife, Catherine of Cleves; "you will have strings made for them and string them together. I don't know whether you dare offer some of them to the queens and to my lady mother. Ask advice of Mesdames ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... trust to his Oath; at least, it is a better Test than any other Verbal Assurance. But what this same Person believes further, concerning the Nature and the Essence of that Power he swears by, the Worship it requires, or whether he conceives it in the singular or plural Number, may be very material to himself, but the Socicty has Nothing to do with it: Because it can make no Alteration in the Security which his Swearing gives us. I don't deny the Usefulness which even the ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... for Peter, and for those who should, in turn, exercise Peter's office and functions, and should speak in his name. Harken to the narrative, as given by St. Luke: "The Lord said: Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you [observe, the plural number] that he may sift you as wheat; but I have prayed [not for all, but] for thee, that thy faith fail not: and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren" (Luke xxii. 32) [observe the singular number, "thee," ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... entered 1 Why do the heathen nations rise, into plots and And in mad tumults join! confederacies against the reign of God Almighty. 2 Confederate kings vain plots (1) devise Against the Almighty's reign: His Royal Title they deny, (2) What word does Whom God appointed Christ; that plural number belong to? 3 Let us reject their (2) laws, they cry, Their ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... therefore the white man's choice of meat was first, and he very leisurely and skillfully cut out the enormous tongue for us and fifty pounds of meat for our following before he would let them as much as touch the carcass with a dagger. [* Plural of machenzie, "man from 'way back,'" ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... the Tuscan Maremma, ora maritime, or Maremme—for the plural form is most generally used—lies upon and near the western coast of Tuscany, and comprises about 1,900 square miles English, of which 500 square miles, or 320,000 acres, are plain and marsh including ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... whole battery, wasn't it?" asked Gordon, "and two huts is plural. I said houses of the people. I couldn't say two houses of the people. Just you send this as you get it. You are not an American consul at the present moment. You are an under-paid agent of a cable company, and you send my stuff as I write ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... blow. In reply to a deputation from the People's Suffrage Federation early in November he announced his intention of introducing during the coming session of 1912 the Electoral Reform Bill which he had foreshadowed in 1908; he said that in this Bill all existing franchises would be swept away, plural voting abolished and the period of residence reduced. The new franchise to be created was, he added, to be based on citizenship and votes were to be given to "citizens of full age and competent understanding," but ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... CILIA (plural of Lat. cilium, eyelash), in biology, the thread-like processes by the vibration of which many lowly organisms, or the male reproductive cells of higher organisms, move ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... see Revelation vii, 1,; Ephesians ii, 2. Even according to modern commentators (e.g., Alford), the word here translated "power" denotes not MIGHT, but GOVERNMENT, COURT, HIERARCHY; and in this sense it was always used by the ecclesiastical writers, whose conception is best rendered by our plural—"powers." See Delrio, Disquisitiones ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... (plural terema) which occurs twice in this story (rendered the second time by "chamber") deserves a special notice. It is defined by Dahl, in its antique sense, as "a raised, lofty habitation, or part of one—a Boyar's castle—a Seigneur's house—the dwelling-place of a ruler within ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... little girl. He gave the elegant Miss Thompson to understand clearly that Miss Adelle Clark was to have every advantage that money could buy, not merely music and art as extras, but horses,—he even put it in the plural,—a groom, and if she wanted it a private maid, which he was told was never permitted. Miss Thompson quickly gathered from his tone and his words that Miss Adelle Clark's expectations were such as to insure her ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... marriages where relatives are deaf have a greater probability of producing deaf offspring, and also a greater probability of producing plural deaf offspring, than ordinary marriages, and two thirds of the congenitally deaf offspring of consanguineous marriages do have deaf relatives, it does not seem necessary to look beyond the law of heredity for an explanation of the high percentage ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... returned he, in an endeavor to turn the talk by means of an epigram which only made matters worse for him, "the girl who is singular runs great risk of never becoming plural." ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... mention is made of only two ages, the present age and the future age, or, in other words, 'this world and the world to come' (Matt. xii. 32). The plural ages (aiones) and 'ages of ages' are expressions to which we can by no mental effort attach a definite signification, and consequently, as I endeavoured to show in my former letter, they admit of various abstract applications. ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... of the plural—"in sins"—may be explained by the custom of the Divine Scriptures in the frequent use of the plural for the singular, e.g. "They are dead that sought the life of the child"; or by the fact that all actual sins virtually ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... principle and calculated to ward off its inconveniences: one of the chief of these remedies being Proportional Representation, on which scarcely any of the Conservatives gave me any support. Some Tory expectations appear to have been founded on the approbation I had expressed of plural voting, under certain conditions: and it has been surmised that the suggestion of this sort made in one of the resolutions which Mr. Disraeli introduced into the House preparatory to his Reform Bill (a suggestion which meeting with no favour, he did not press), may have ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... language, which is the proper name of the Aztecan, a number of derivatives from the same root, na, among them this very word, Nahuatl, all of them containing the idea "to know," or "knowledge." The early missionaries to New Spain often speak of the naualli (plural, nanahualtin), masters of mystic knowledge, dealers in the black art, wizards or sorcerers. They were not always evil-minded persons, though they seem to have been generally feared. The earliest source of information ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... shaking it vehemently, exclaimed, "No, not the Estates, but you,—you,—you!"—No los Estados, ma vos,—vos, —vos!—using, say the original relator and the repeaters of the story, a form of address, the second person plural, which in the Spanish language is expressive of contempt. Now it is true that vos, applied to an equal, would have been a solecism; but it is also true that it was the invariable form employed by the sovereign, even when addressing a grandee or a prince of the Church. (See the Papiers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... endowed us all with a certain amount of brains; but we don't all use them." (Cheers).—Mr. TICKLER in the debate on the Plural ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... of the birth of a man, as "Mizraim begat Pathrusim, and Casluhim out of whom came Philistim,"" Gen. x. 13, 14. This is a very awkward quotation on the part of Mr. Everett, as it says nothing in favour of his views, but directly favours mine: for Philistim is a word in the plural number, and is used in the Hebrew Bible, to express "the Philistines;" and the word translated "come"[fn33] is also in the plural number, see Simon's Hebrew Bible. The passage therefore in Genesis x. 13. 14. imports that the Philistines were derived or descended from Mizraim. ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... his kind; but by Thy direction proveth what is that good, that acceptable, and perfect will of Thine: yea, Thou teachest him, now made capable, to discern the Trinity of the Unity, and the Unity of the Trinity. Wherefore to that said in the plural. Let us make man, is yet subjoined in the singular, And God made man: and to that said in the plural. After our likeness, is subjoined in the singular, After the image of God. Thus is man renewed in the knowledge of God, after the image of Him ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... or Innupits is the singular, Innupin the plural. It may be translated witch, elf, or goblin, with evil tendencies. On the other hand they did not fear a spirit. When on the Kaibab in July with Chuar and several other Indians, Prof. while riding along ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... fact it was the Judaean conception of a Messiah, translated into Roman and worldly ideas; into ideas which a Roman could understand, or with which the world could sympathize, viz., that rerum potiretur. (The plural here indicates only the ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... were as follows: [The joke of this bill consists chiefly in its being written in very bad Russian, with continual mistakes as to plural and singular, ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... is also, and perhaps chiefly, in this case, a pun on the meaning of the plural noun "cenci," "rags," or "old rags." The cry of this, frequent in Rome, was at first mistaken by Shelley for a voice urging him to go on with his play. Mr. Browning has used it to indicate the comparative unimportance of his contribution to the Cenci story. The quoted Italian proverb means something ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... replied Diana quickly, "but she sent Ferruci up to kill my father, and I speak in the plural because I think—in a moral sense—she is as guilty ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... that we have found characteristic of the religion, whereby powerful gods absorb the functions of weaker ones whose attributes resemble their own. But while the god disappears, the name survives. Nun-gal with the plural sign attached becomes a collective designation for a group of powerful demons.[193] In this survival and use of the name we have an interesting example of the manner in which, by a species of differentiation, local gods, unable to maintain ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... prose possesses a fluency and grace that bring it close to the professional quality, and its few faults are far less considerable than might be expected from the pen of a young author. However, we must remark some rather awkward examples of grammatical construction. The correct plural of "eucalyptus" is "eucalypti", without any final "s", the name being treated as a Latin noun of the second declension. "Slowly and dignified—it pursues its way" is hardly a permissible clause; the adjective "dignified" must be exchanged for an adverb. Perhaps Mr. Held sought to employ poetical ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... precipitate publication, and the ridicule to which the author of wretched poetry exposes himself. From the commencement of this partial address, o major juvenum, &c. [v. 366] to the end of the Poem, almost a fourth part of the whole, the second person plural, Pisones!—Vos!—Vos, O Pompilius Sanguis! &c. is discarded, and the second person singular, Tu, Te, Tibi, &c. invariably takes its place. The arguments too are equally relative and personal; not only shewing the necessity ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... of number: not only is the style improved by the use of those words which, though singular in form, are found on inspection to be plural in meaning, as ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... "climate" in the plural when writing of so large a state as California and one so wonderfully endowed with conditions which make health, comfort and beauty in all seasons. Its great length of coast-line and its mountain ranges irregularly paralleling that, offer a wealth of resource in varying temperature, altitudes, ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... curious to observe the forms of the imperative mood plural which occur so frequently throughout the poem in the Oriel copy. The forms ending in -eth are about 31 in number, of which 17 are of French, and 14 of A.S. origin. The words in which the ending -eth is dropped are 42, of which 18 are of French, and 24 of ...
— Caxton's Book of Curtesye • Frederick J. Furnivall
... v[e]'o l[i]). (Plural of alveolus). Air cells. The cells, or cavities, that line the air passages and air sacs at the ends of ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... and the ram at Thebes. That it was the whole species that was sacred, at one place or another, is shown by the penalties for killing any animal of the species, by the wholesale burial and even mummifying of every example, and by the plural form of {21} the names of the gods later connected with the animals, ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... Laetitia, I understand, that we're making up to, eh?" Perhaps it was this sudden conversion to the first person plural that made the young man blush up to the roots ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... as a genus, to which it belongs, the second to be the name of that sort, or species, of animal. The cat, for instance, is Felis catus, the lion Felis leo, the tiger Felis tigris, and so on. Linnaeus then arranged the genera (plural of genus) into families, and these families into orders and so classified the animal and plant world as far as he knew it. In his earlier years Linnaeus thought of each species as being utterly apart ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... there any difference between all (in the plural) and the all (in the singular)? Take the case of number:—When we say one, two, three, four, five, six; or when we say twice three, or three times two, or four and two, or three and two and one, are we speaking of the same or of ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... infuriately searching, at the spots where he had been wounded, especially where he feared the world might have guessed the wound. Did she imply that he had no hand for love-letters? Was it her meaning that women would not have much taste for his epistolary correspondence? She had spoken in the plural, with an accent on "men". Had she heard of Constantia? Had she formed her own judgement about the creature? The supernatural sensitiveness of Sir Willoughby shrieked a peal of affirmatives. He had often meditated on the moral obligation of his unfolding to Clara the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... what they had to do, and the like: When he talk'd with any of the Whig Lords, for there was a Squadron of them left, that had a great sway yet in the Country, then he would talk of him, and Party and Queen, as one Knot, in the plural Number, most haughtily, thus: We are resolved to do so and so, and we must have none but such ...
— Atalantis Major • Daniel Defoe
... families are the best citizens of the Republic. Wife and children are the sources of patriotism, and conjugal and parental affection beget devotion to the country. The man who, undefiled with plural marriage, is surrounded in his single home with his wife and children has a stake in the country which inspires him with respect for its laws and courage ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... a singular then a plural verb, plainly looking to the sense, for although the word "crowd" is called singular, yet ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... Mahomedans, or, in the Punjab, of Sikhs, or, in Madras, of non-Brahmans, or, in the large cities, of Europeans and of Eurasians, besides still more specialised constituencies for the representation of land-holders, universities, commerce, and industries. There was no female suffrage, and no plural vote. No elector could vote both in a "general constituency" and in a "special" one. The qualifications laid down for the franchise were of a very modest character. Illiteracy was no bar, as to have made it so in a country where barely 10 per cent of the adult males attain to the slender ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... of Kind and the Sense of Difference.—Doctor Giddings declares in fine summary "we may conceive of society as any plural number of sentient creatures more or less continuously subjected to common stimuli, to differing stimuli and to inter-stimulation, and responding thereto in like behaviour, concerted activity or cooeperation, as well as in unlike or competitive ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... it is also used as an equivalent for "enchantment." It was originally, therefore, incorrect to speak of "a fairy";[49] the singular term is "a fay," as opposed to "the fairy." Fay is derived, through French, from the Low Latin fata, misunderstood as a feminine singular; it is in fact the plural of Fatum, and ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... accordingly find that it is chiefly in words of these and similar classes that the greatest degree of resemblance is found to exist. With regard to the pronouns this is very remarkable. In the singular, plural, and dual numbers they almost coincide in Western Australia, South Australia, and Sydney. The following table of the pronouns as used in those ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... urthur boys en hit wuz a long thing lak a slip dat kum ter our knees. Our Mistress had a big fier place en w'en we would kum in cole she would say ain't you all cole. (You all was always used in the plural and not singular as some writers have it). W'ile we wuz warmin' she often played de ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Tennessee Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... the plural of corps spelled? Ans. Corps. How pronounced? Ans. Cores.—What is meant by the ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... are expressed abstractly, whether prophecy, (not, whether we are prophets;) whether ministry, (not, whether we are deacons, ministers:) and both prophecy and ministry are put in the accusative case; and both of them have relation, and are joined unto the participle of the plural number having, intimating that divers do share in prophecy, pastor and teacher; divers in ministry, deacon and ruling elder. But all the other are expressed concretely, and in the nominative case, and in the singular number, and to every of ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... And when we put aside Plato and the Platonic communities, the first fact to challenge attention is that the communities which established laws relating to sex relations which were opposed to the monogamic family, whether promiscuity, so-called free love; plural marriage, as in Mormonism, or celibacy, as in Harmonism and Shakerism, were all religious communities. In a word, all these experiments which antagonized the monogamic family relation were the result of various interpretations of the Bible and the efforts of those who accepted those ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... repeatedly altered since it left Dr. Bonar's hands. Besides the change of metaphors, the first personal pronoun singular is changed to the plural. There was strength, ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... am not certain that their deduction is a correct one, I beg to express it in my own words as follows:—There is no such process known to the English language as the formation of a noun-singular out of an adjective by the addition of "s": neither is there any process known by which a noun-plural can be formed from an adjective, without the previous formation of the singular in the same sense; except in such cases as "the rich, the poor, the noble," &c., where the singular form is used in a plural sense. C.B. instances "goods, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 36. Saturday, July 6, 1850 • Various
... 29: Toward your children)—Ver. 151. The plural "liberos" is here used to signify the one son which Menedemus has. So in the Hecyra, l. 217, the same word is used to signify but one daughter. This was a common mode of expression in the times ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... only abstained from all argument upon the "Cory Murder" and the case of Happy Fear, refusing to discuss either in any terms or under any circumstances, but he also declined to speak of Ariel Tabor or of Joseph Louden; or of their affairs, singular or plural, masculine, feminine, or neuter, or in any declension. Not a word, ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... womanhood and the sanctity of home. It is an extraordinarily appealing phrase and Lady Moyne used it for all it was worth. As addressed by her to wives and sisters of the Belfast working-men, it had a further value. The plural possessive pronoun bracketed McConkey with Lord Moyne. McConkey's wife, assuming for the moment that he had not abstained from matrimony as he had from tobacco, shared his joys and sorrows, his hopes and fears, heartened him for his daily toil, would join ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... Jahveh. Cruel god of a horde of nomadic invaders settling in a land of farmers, he had his images, ranging in elaboration from an uncut mazzebah or asherah, to a golden bull. He was plural by place and tribe and function. What did the prophetic movement do with his sacred powers? It identified his taboos ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... been held to be a modification of the same root, but the true root is kilth, seen in Goth. kilthei, womb, an origin which appears in the expressions "child-birth," "to be with child," and the like; the plural in A.S. was cild, and later cildru, which in northern M.E. became childre or childer, a form dialectically extant, and in southern English childeren or children (with the plural termination -en, as in "brethren"). There are several particular ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... plural as well as a singular, but there were exceptions to this rule, such as names of certain plants and animals, the sky, the wind, etc.; not to count things which were generally taken collectively, such as flies—ruque; ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... there in life? A few sonatas, a few operas, a few pictures, a few books, and a love story; we had always to come back to that in the end. He spoke with conviction, his only insincerity being the alteration of a plural into a singular. But no, he did not think he had lied; he had spoken what seemed to him the truth at the present moment. Had he used the singular instead of the plural a fortnight ago, he would have lied, but within the last week his ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... "Guardian" exhibited more than the usual dearth of domestic intelligence, although it was singularly oracular on "The State of Europe," and "Jeffersonian Democracy." A certain cheap assurance, a copy-book dogmatism, a colloquial familiarity, even in the impersonal plural, and a series of inaccuracies and blunders here and there, struck some old chord in my memory. I was mutely wondering where and when I had become personally familiar with rhetoric like that, when the door of the office opened and a man ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... when off Toulon, in anticipation of a possible meeting with the French squadron there, when the disparity of force was less—say, eight to ten. This impression is confirmed by the "Plan of Attack" speaking of the junior "Admirals"—in the plural. There was but one such in the pursuit to the West Indies. It is quite possible, however, that the same order was re-issued upon the later occasion, re-copied without change of words. In any event, it confirms other statements and actions of Nelson's, that an enemy should not be ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... "Dog" should be spelt, properly and precisely, "dog." When it is used in the sense to mean not "a dog" or "one dog" but two or more dogs—in other words what we grammarians are accustomed to call the plural—it is proper to add to it the diphthong, s, pronounced with a hiss like ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... the one occupying the whole of the first chapter of Genesis and the first three verses of the second, at which point the other commences. These two records belong to different periods of Jewish history. The older one is the Elohistic, so called because the creator is designated by the plural term Elohim, which in our version is translated God. The more modern one is the Jehovistic, in which Elohim is combined with the singular term Jehovah, translated in our-version the Lord God. The Elohistic and Jehovistic accounts both relate the creation of ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... features, markings and fashion of the hair of the inhabitants: some have little huts built for them—others are in common houses. The Babemba call them Nkisi ("Sancan" of the Arabs): the people of Rua name one Kalubi; the plural, Tulubi; and they present pombe, flour, bhang, tobacco, and light a fire for them to smoke by. They represent the departed father or mother, and it is supposed that they are pleased with the ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... and hollow pretender to righteousness, he reserved the fiercest of all his lampoons. In "Holy Willie's Prayer," he lays a burning hand on the terrible doctrine of predestination: this is a satire, daring, personal, and profane. Willie claims praise in the singular, acknowledges folly in the plural, and makes heaven accountable for his sins! in a similar strain of undevout satire, he congratulates Goudie, of Kilmarnock, on his Essays on Revealed Religion. These poems, particularly the two latter, are the sharpest lampoons in ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... having regard to the awful appearance of these desolate glens and mountains, none but madmen would enter them! Recurring to the meaning of the word galt, a gentleman in Ireland, a professor of Irish, states that geilt is a mad person, one living in the woods, and that gealt is the genitive plural. It is interesting to find, also, from the same source, that the Irish word for the moon is gealach, indicating ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... of the plural Yushmashu might lead at first sight to take it as standing for the elements. It is plain, however, that it refers to all attributes that are founded on ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... feast, vide Daniel, cf. Hdt. Why plural, "the trenches"? Is Xenophon obscure? His obscurity is mostly this: he expects his ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... 8: Zurita ("Rapport," etc., etc., p. 50): "The chiefs of the second class are yet called calpullec in the singular and chinancallec in the plural." (This is evidently incorrect, since the words 'calpulli' and 'chinancalli' can easily be distinguished from each other.) "'Chinancalli', however after Molina means 'cercado de seto' (Parte IIa, p. 21), or an inclosed area, and if we connect it with the old original 'chinamitl' we are forcibly ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... an organ in the church, or rather, to use the old phrase, a "pair of organs," for the instrument had a plural name like "a pair of bellows." Organs were in use in the church at any rate in the fourth century, and were introduced into England by Archbishop Theodore. In old times there was no official organist; the duty was ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... mode of suffixing one to the noun. For this very reason the declensions are more perfect in Slavic than in German and Greek; for the different cases, as in Latin, are distinguished by suffixed syllables or endings. The Singular has seven cases; the Plural only six, the vocative having always the form of the nominative. As for the Dual, a form which the Slavic languages do not all possess, the nominative and accusative, the genitive and local; the dative and ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... I at the risk of being accused of egotism. Apparently it is more modest to be conceited in the third person, like the child who says "Tommy is a good boy," or in the first person plural, like the leader-writer of "The Times," who bids the Continent tremble at his frown. By a singular fallacy, which ought scarcely to deceive children, it is forgotten that everything that has ever been written since the world began has been written by some one ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... give old-age pensions to 600,000 people. It can thwart a Government in the minute details of its legislation; it cannot touch the whole vast business of finance. It can prevent the abolition of the plural voter; but it could not prevent the abolition of the police. It can refuse a Constitution to Ireland, ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... original word is the adjective aionos (aionios) (Eng. aeonian), coming from the noun aion (aion) (Eng. aeon), an age, an epoch, a long period of time. This noun cannot mean eternity for it is repeatedly used by St. Paul in the plural "aeons" and "aeons of aeons." As we speak of great periods of time, "the Ice Age," "the Stone Age," etc., so the Bible speaks of "this age" (aeon), "the coming age" (aeon), and "the end of the age," etc. These aeons or ages are thought of ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth |
