"Vocabulary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a Christian's vocabulary is indifference. By-and-by many a one would doubtless gladly forfeit ten thousand years of heavenly bliss just to recall the wasted ...
— Rosa's Quest - The Way to the Beautiful Land • Anna Potter Wright
... certain words (for instance) were tapu on the quarter-deck of a man-of-war; and he begged in consequence that we should watch and correct him on the point. We were able to assure him that he was beyond correction. His vocabulary is apt and ample to an extraordinary degree. God knows where he collected it, but by some instinct or some accident he has avoided all profane or gross expressions. "Obliged," "stabbed," "gnaw," "lodge," ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Presidency was ever less of a time-server than Cleveland. "Expediency" was a word scarcely known to his vocabulary. Recognizing alike the dignity and responsibility of the great office, he was in the highest degree self-reliant. None the less he at all times availed himself of the wise counsel of his official advisers. In matters falling within their ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... republic of letters. The men who debated the Stamp Act were, with a few striking exceptions, men trained in Latin and Greek, familiar with the great outlines of human history, accustomed to the discipline of academic disputation. They knew the ideas and the vocabulary of cultivated Europe and were conscious of no provincial inferiority. In the study of the physical sciences, likewise, the colonials were but little behind the mother country. The Royal Society had ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... characters. It would be an excellent thing if at last, through the dramatization and the handwork, the children should come into sufficient understanding and enthusiasm to turn skalds and compose songs in the Norse manner. This requires only a small vocabulary and a rough feeling for simple rhythm, but an intensity of emotion and a great ...
— Viking Tales • Jennie Hall
... the sergeant, with cane held horizontally across and behind his thighs, his face upturned with the rest, and "Irishman" on every feature of it. And so the vision fleeted, and Byfield's language claimed attention. The man took the whole vocabulary of British profanity at a rush, and swore himself to a standstill. As he paused for second wind I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Vocabulary which I propose shall follow this work is many times over more extensive than any ever before published, and it will also be found interesting to all philologists by its establishing the very curious fact that this last wave of the primitive Aryan-Indian ocean which spread over Europe, though it ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... should perhaps interpolate yet another caveat. I did not, of course, as a child, use or even know of the vocabulary of the metaphysicians. I did, however, entertain thoughts which I could not then express, but which the words given above most nearly represent. There is one exception. In talking about "a naked soul" I am not interpreting my childish thrill of deep emotion ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... coins words at will, for she writes from her heart and is no purist; but we feel them to be appropriate, and requisite to express the shade of thought in question: we may laugh at them at first, but so natural and naive are they that we soon find them stealing into our own vocabulary. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... lord-knew-what zealous chemical upon it he had let it lie unused while he picked up Kiswahili and talked by the hour to a toothless, wrinkled very black man with a touch of Arab in his breeding, and a deal of it in his brimstone vocabulary. ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... on our recent excursion;—models of their canoes, bows and arrows, spears of different kinds, &c. and also a complete dress worn by that people. Their mode of kindling fire is not only original, but as far as we at present know, is peculiar to the tribe. These articles, together with a short vocabulary of their language consisting of 200 to 300 words, which I have been enabled to collect, prove the Boeothicks to be a distinct tribe from any hitherto discovered in North America. One remarkable characteristic of their language, and in which it resembles those ...
— Report of Mr. W. E. Cormack's journey in search of the Red Indians - in Newfoundland • W. E. Cormack
... interesting connecting-link between the early enterprises and modern usage and practice. In the words of a writer[29] fully conversant with the present conditions of the island: "Because of its early 'plantations,' the word 'planter' is still current in the insular vocabulary, and the 'supplying system' still prevails, the solitary links which connect with these bygone days. A 'planter' in Newfoundland parlance is a fish trader on a moderate scale, the middleman between the merchant, who ships the cod to market ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... The vocabulary of criticism is preceded by an Introduction, which gives a philosophical discussion of critical terms under three heads: (1) What is a Critical term? (2) General Historical Movements and Tendencies in Critical Terms. (3) Method of Dealing ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... Shakspeare. He is rude, but not vulgar; he never falls into the prosaic and low familiarity of his drunken associates, for he is, in his way, a poetical being; he always speaks in verse. He has picked up every thing dissonant and thorny in language to compose out of it a vocabulary of his own; and of the whole variety of nature, the hateful, repulsive, and pettily deformed, have alone been impressed on his imagination. The magical world of spirits, which the staff of Prospero has ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... to regain his breath, and it was at least five minutes more before his vocabulary became exhausted. Then he sat down in a chair and mopped his brow, while Morris hastened off to the cutting-room from whence he was recalled a minute later by a shout ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... the ignorant sort (for it must be remembered that not all are ignorant) are, indeed, well practised in abuse, and have long learned to call mathematicians and astronomers cheats and charlatans. They freely used their vocabulary for the benefit of De Morgan, whom they denounced as a scurrilous scribbler, a defamatory, dishonest, abusive, ungentlemanly, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... ambient sunsets, when gilded oceans, ghostly ships, and the dull, dark city vanish for the night. Of course, such things never happen except in books, but the practise of writing about them is a fine drill, in that it enables the writer to get a grasp on his vocabulary. Poetry is for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... kinds of writing. Twenty words make a good average sentence length. It is necessary to remember that one's stories are read not only by the literati, but by the uneducated as well. One must make one's style, therefore, so fluent, so easy, that a man with a speaking vocabulary of five hundred words can read ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... entirely admitted the propositions that "it is a blessing and a benefit to a man to be a worker," and that "a lazy do-nothing is a pestilent evil," that "work is good and idleness a curse," the question arises, whom did he mean by workers? In his vocabulary only those were good workmen (31) who were engaged on good work; dicers and gamblers and others engaged on any other base and ruinous business he stigmatised as the "idle drones"; and from this point of view the quotation from Hesiod ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... No vocabulary of the Servants' Hall could have encompassed the fine phrase grand seigneur, but, when Mrs. Blayne and the rest talked of him in their least resentful and more amiable moods, they unconsciously made efforts to ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... himself. Anyone would have been cold there that evening; but, for that reason, no one else was there. How Jo came to be there himself, he could not for the flickering little life of him have told, even if gifted with a vocabulary exceeding a hundred words. From the way he stared about him one could have seen that he had not the faintest notion of where (nor ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... is attained by such caprices? In three sentences the sum of the philosophy may be stated. It has been computed (see Duclos) that the Italian opera has not above six hundred words in its whole vocabulary: so narrow is the range of its emotions, and so little are these emotions disposed to expand themselves into any variety of thinking. The same remark applies to that class of simple, household, homely passion, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the sea, infinite oysters attached to the branches of the trees which enter into the sea, the mouths open to receive the dew which drops from the leaves and which engenders the pearls, as Pliny says and as is alleged in the vocabulary which is called Catholicon.[353-5] ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... frauds—antique dealers, charities, professional poor relations, social workers, and others of that ilk—which proved tremendously diverting to her amanuensis, especially when it transpired that Mrs. Gosnold had a mind and temper of her own, together with a vocabulary amply adequate to her powers of ironic observation. This last gift came out strongly in her diary, a daily record of her various interests and activities which she dictated, interspersing dry details with many an ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... these individuals in the gilded drawing-room at home, the more do they crave after the unshackled enjoyment of their animal vulgarity abroad. Their principal characteristics are a love of large plaids, and a choice vocabulary of popular idiomatic forms of speech; and these will sufficiently define them in the saloons of the theatres and in the cigar divans. But they are not ever thus. By no means. At home (which does not naturally indicate their own house), having donned their "other waistcoat" and their pin (emblematic ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... although they had never attempted anything of the kind before; and they generally completed their task to the satisfaction of the parties furnishing the contract. "I cannot do it" is a phrase not to be found in the Yankee vocabulary, I guess. ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... satisfactory. The gipsy, or Romany, language (Romani chiv, or 'tongue') certainly is closely related to, though not derived from, the existing languages of Northern India. Some of the forms are very archaic. A valuable English-Gipsy vocabulary compiled by Mr. (Sir George) and Mrs. Grierson was published in Ind. Ant., vols. xv, xvi (1886,1887). The author's theory does not tally with the facts. Gipsies existed in Persia and Europe long before Timur's time. It is practically certain that they did not come through Egypt. The article ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... doing very good work with Mom on those ideographs," Meillard said. "Keep it up till you've taught her the Lingua Terra Basic vocabulary, and with her help we can train a few more. They can be our interpreters; we can write what we want them to say to the others. It'll be clumsy, but it will work, and it's about the only thing I can think of ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... was written is not enough. A man with no aesthetic sense might as well expect to appreciate the Sistine Madonna, because he is not colour blind, as a man who is not filled with the Spirit to understand the Bible, simply because he understands the vocabulary and the laws of grammar of the languages in which the Bible was written. We might as well think of setting a man to teach art because he understood paints as to set a man to teach the Bible because he has a thorough ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... that the Hebrew writers often used a vivid form of warning and invective is not a reason why we should keep on doing it. The Hebrew writer was a primitive speaking to primitives. Meaning what we mean, he required a stronger, fiercer vocabulary than we ever need. In saying this I am not dodging the issue; I am stating a fact which rules in all historical interpretation. To make the phraseology of two thousand years before Christ the literal expression of the thought of two thousand ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... of tens of thousands of other people, in whose circumstances there was nothing special, distinctive, or picturesque; to teach her to forget all the experiences of her ancestors; to drown the local ballads by songs purchased at the Budmouth fashionable music-sellers', and the local vocabulary by a governess-tongue of no country at all. She lived in a house that would have been the fortune of an artist, and learnt to draw London suburban villas ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... commerce, administration, and higher education), Arabic (widely spoken in Zanzibar), many local languages note : Kiswahili (Swahili) is the mother tongue of Bantu people living in Zanzibar and nearby coastal Tanzania; although Kiswahili is Bantu in structure and origin, its vocabulary draws on a variety of sources, including Arabic and English, and it has become the lingua franca of central and eastern Africa; the first language of most people is one ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... his appearance at once; and when he came, and the son had said a few kindly words of presentation, he seemed so evidently in pain that I managed, in a French which must have been distinguished by a pure New York accent and a vocabulary more than limited, to express a fear that he was suffering, and suggested that my visit had ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... meshes when the spokesman happens to be an improvised politician or a philosophic tyro like the ordinary deputies of the Assembly and the speakers of the clubs. It is a pedantic scholasticism set forth with fanatical rant. Its entire vocabulary consists of about a hundred words, while all ideas are reduced to one, that of man in himself: human units, all alike equal and independent, contracting together for the first time. This is their concept of society. None could be briefer, for, to arrive at it, man had to be reduced to a ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... which, afterwards, passed into the vocabulary of the Ochori as the equivalent of ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... His vocabulary was too limited to express his thoughts fully, but he did fairly well with ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... dupe. Monsieur de Rochefide, like all little minds, was terribly afraid of being carotte. The noun has become a verb. From the very start of his passion for Madame Schontz, Arthur was on his guard, and he was, therefore, very rat, to use another word of the same vocabulary. The word rat, when applied to a young girl, means the guest or the one entertained, but applied to a man it signifies the giver of the feast who ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... easily accounted for by a few centuries of separation. None of the Siberian languages with which I am acquainted are written, and, lacking a fixed standard of reference, they change with great rapidity. This is shown by a comparison of a modern Chukchi vocabulary with the one compiled by M. de Lesseps in 1788. Many words have altered so materially as to be hardly recognisable. Others, on the contrary, such as "tin tin," ice, "oottoot," wood, "weengay," no, "ay," yes, and ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... there was a "waugee" (white) woman in the neighborhood. The Indian shook his head in surprise. There was no "waugee" nearer than the remote mountain-ridge to which he pointed. Pomfrey was obliged to be content with this. Even had his vocabulary been larger, he would as soon have thought of revealing the embarrassing secret of this woman, whom he believed to be of his own race, to a mere barbarian as he would of asking him to verify his own impressions by allowing him to look at her that morning. The next day, however, ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... "expression" and "tone" in wretched, dingy, moth-eaten pictures. He hated with the heartiest detestation such people—whose sole ambition seemed to be to make a fine show of knowledge of art by means of an easily acquired vocabulary of inexpressive technical ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... Madison drily. "And don't run away with the idea that I'm joking about this—that goes. I don't expect to make a silver-tongued orator out of you, Flopper, and perhaps not even a purist—but I hope to eradicate a few minor touches of Bad Land vernacular from your vocabulary." ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... could not think the things she thought, and had no vocabulary or phrases or imagery whereby to express their own thinkings. God does not hurry such: have we enough of hope for them, or patience with them? I suspect their teachers must arise among themselves. They too must have an elect of their own kind, of like passions ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... of his daily gossip with neighbors and with the customers, rustic and urban, who were attracted by his fame, he soon learned that "Good Queen Bess" ruled the land, and his speech gradually took on a tinge of the Elizabethan manner and vocabulary which, mingling with his native New England idioms, produced a ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... wonderful in this gentleman was his economy of words. There was not one useless expression in his vocabulary, and not the slightest redundancy; whatever partook of merit, prestige, or nobility was condensed, for him, to the idea of value; whatever partook of arrangement, cleanliness, order, was condensed to the word "comfort"; ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... 9-13, He is called by a different name—God (Hebrew, Elohim)—and we cannot but notice that this section adds nothing to the last; vv. 9, 10 are an interruption, and vv. 11-13 but a repetition of vv. 5-8. Corresponding to the change in the divine name is a further change in the vocabulary, the word for destroy being different in vv. 7 and 13. Verses 14-22 continue the previous section with precise and minute instructions for the building of the ark, and in the later verses (cf. 18, 20) the precision tends to become diffuseness. The last verse speaks of the divine Being as God ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... nouns, verbs, &c., make my English pupils construct sentences; then give them a vocabulary and genuine native stories, not translations at all, least of all of religious books, which contain very few native ideas, but stories of sharks, cocoa- nuts, canoes, fights, &c. This is the apparatus. This gives but little idea ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... from the semblance of self-deception as they would from a rearing cobra when the hood is up, and the murderous head flattened ready to strike. Thackeray worked on the same theme in his story of little Stubbs. Lyndon is the Lucifer of rascals; Stubbs—well, Stubbs beggars the English vocabulary; he is too low, too mean for adjectives to describe him, and I could almost find it in my heart to wish that his portraiture had never been placed before the horrified eyes of men. Yet this Stubbs—a being who ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... and, walking forward, raised his clenched fists to heaven and availed himself of the permission to the fullest extent of a somewhat extensive vocabulary. ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... his name. Angela was glad enough to break off poor Susan's questioning, and come forward, with the child still clinging, to incite the bird to display the rose colour under his crest, put up a grey claw to shake hands, and show off his vocabulary, laughing herself and acting merriment as she did so, in ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... philologist, M. Paul Ackermann, has shown, using the French language as an illustration, that, since every word in a language has its opposite, or, as the author calls it, its antonym, the entire vocabulary might be arranged in couples, forming a vast dualistic system. (See Dictionary of Antonyms. By Paul Ackermann. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... enforces these lessons. It is hard to bring the Melanesians within any theory. Dr. Codrington has made them the subject of a careful study, and reports that while the European inquirer can communicate pretty freely on common subjects 'the vocabulary of ordinary life in almost useless when the region of mysteries and superstitions is approached.'[12] The Banks Islanders are most free from an Asiatic element of population on one side, and a ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... she cried chokingly, "I won't—" she could say no more. There were no words in her meagre vocabulary to ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... a respectable family of the middle class. He was independent, blunt, bold, coarse, with an underground village vocabulary acquired in his childhood that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... "Constitution"—these, too, soon to be effaced by more Republican appellations. For on the abolition of the monarchy and the inauguration of the Religion of Nature, the words "royal" and "saint" disappear from the revolutionary vocabulary. A new calendar is promulgated: streets and squares are renamed: Rues des Droits de l'Homme, de la Revolution, des Piques, de la Loi, efface the old landmarks. We must now say Rue Honore, not St. Honore, and Mont Marat for Montmartre. Naturalists had written ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... improving. The unexampled progress of the sciences and arts for the last thirty years has enriched it with a great number of new words, which are now become as necessary to the writer as his ancient mother tongue. The same progress which leads to farther extensions of ideas will still extend the vocabulary; and our neology must and will keep pace with the advancement of our knowledge. Hence will follow a closer definition and more accurate use of words, with a stricter ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... southern end of the earth, Joshua Higgins ceased washing. His grimy face usually robbed George Dorety of what little appetite he managed to accumulate. Ordinarily this lavatorial dereliction would have caught Captain Cullen's eye and vocabulary, but in the present his mind was filled with making westing, to the exclusion of all other things not contributory thereto. Whether the mate's face was clean or dirty had no bearing upon westing. Later on, when 50 deg. south in the Pacific had been reached, Joshua Higgins would wash ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... inherited from his mother, of which he was sufficiently careful; but he loved races, and read sporting papers; he was addicted to hunting and billiards; he shot pigeons, and,—so Mr. Wharton had declared calumniously more than once to an intimate friend,—had not an H in his vocabulary. The poor man did drop an aspirate now and again; but he knew his defect and strove hard, and with fair average success, to overcome it. But Mr. Wharton did not love him, and they were not friends. Perhaps ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... ter'ble affliction is dis," continued she. Her vocabulary was derived from mission churches. "Me poor Mary, how I feel fer yehs! Ah, what a ter'ble affliction is ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... church that had got off the track. Any religious work that reaches them now has almost to begin all over again. It has to undo their thinking about prayer and faith and God's love and human conduct and nearly every other Christian idea. They have a Christian vocabulary, but it means very little. They think they can buy religion, if they want it—any kind they want. And if they can't afford it, or don't want it, they don't quite think they'll be sent to hell for that, in spite of what the priest says. They think enough ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... was the highest in Guentz's vocabulary. The opposite to it, until his marriage, had been woman. After marriage ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... remarkable characteristics of the Semitic family of speech is its conservatism and resistance to change. As compared with the other languages of the world, its grammar and vocabulary have alike undergone but little alteration in the course of the centuries during which we can trace its existence. The very words which were used by the Babylonians four or five thousand years ago, can still be heard, with the same meaning attached to them, in the streets of Cairo. Kelb ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... this characteristic and others no less important, she belongs to the order of Hymenoptera. (This order includes the Ichneumon-flies, of whom the Microgaster is one.—Translator's Note.) No matter: as our language possesses no more precise term outside the scientific vocabulary, let us use the expression Midge, which pretty well conveys the general idea. Our Midge, the Microgaster, is the size of an average Gnat. She measures 3 or 4 millimetres. (.117 to .156 inch.—Translator's Note.) The two sexes are equally numerous and wear the same costume, a black uniform, ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... have been aimed at him. If there are spirits so base that they cannot discover and reverence his greatness and his goodness, they have at least shrunk from encountering the certain indignation of mankind. This day—disfranchised by stupid power as he was; branded, as he was, in the perverted vocabulary of usurpers as rebel and traitor—his death has even in distant lands moved more tongues and stirred more hearts than the siege of a mighty city and the triumphs of a ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... to check the contemptuous note that crept into his voice, he certainly ought not to have uttered those two concluding words. Had he ransacked his ample vocabulary of the French language he could scarcely have hit upon another set of syllables offering similar difficulties to the foreigner. It was quite evident that his accurate pronunciation startled the accomplices. Each arrived at the same conclusion, though by different channels; this ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... drawing-room, he had been found times without number curled up under Ulick's desk. Mr. Goldsmith growled hints about hanging him, and old Mr. Johns, who really was fond of his bright young fellow clerk, gave grave counsel; but Ulick only loved his protege the better, and after having exhausted an Irish vocabulary of expostulation, succeeded in prevailing on him to come no farther than the street; except on very wet days, when he would sometimes be found on the mat in the entry, looking deplorably beseeching, and bringing on his master an irate, 'Here's ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... quite uncommunicative, so that directions had to be given at the hotel of our intended route, and if we changed our driver we managed to return by pointing the way, right or left. All this might have been obviated by the use of a few Russian words, but our time seemed too short to look into the vocabulary. ...
— A Journey in Russia in 1858 • Robert Heywood
... fancy. Still he strove to analyse the sound. Sonorous as thunder was it, mellow as a golden bell, thin and sweet as a thrummed taut cord of silver—no; it was none of these, nor a blend of these. There were no words nor semblances in his vocabulary and experience with which to describe the totality of ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... no better in the face of this invasion, and the written character soon became as corrupt as the language; words foreign to the Egyptian vocabulary, incorrect expressions, and barbarous errors in syntax were multiplied without stint. The taste for art decayed, and technical ability began to deteriorate, the moral and intellectual standard declined, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... impossible, and a contradiction in terms, seeing that all superiority which manifests itself among a people means cheapness, and tends only to impart force to all other nations. Let us banish, then, from political economy all terms borrowed from the military vocabulary: to fight with equal weapons, to conquer, to crush, to stifle, to be beaten, invasion, tribute, etc. What do such phrases mean? Squeeze them, and you obtain nothing. Yes, you do obtain something; for from such words ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... rose abruptly, put on his hat, and approached the young lady. He placed himself before her picture and looked at it for some moments, during which she pretended to be quite unconscious of his inspection. Then, addressing her with the single word which constituted the strength of his French vocabulary, and holding up one finger in a manner which appeared to him to illuminate his ...
— The American • Henry James
... grown so—so—" neither her thoughts nor her vocabulary were very extensive. "I do not think I like men until they are quite old and have beautiful white beards and voices that are like the water when it flows softly. Or the boys who can run and climb trees with you and laugh over everything. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... shutter which met her gaze was the duplicate of the creature who had startled her first. As they saw her dismay, their chuckle broke into a roar, then split into vocabulary. Magdalena ran faster than she had ever run in her life before. Suddenly she saw Colonel Belmont sauntering down California Street, debonair as ever. His long moustaches swept his shoulders. His soft hat was on the ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... a robust appearance, and a free-and-easy way with him. His free-and-easy way shows itself chiefly in his habit of smiling upon and waving his hand to all those whom he encounters on his daily walks. He is talkative at times, but his vocabulary is limited. In my opinion it is limited to one word, though his mother can distinguish several words, or says so. She must have a very much keener ear than I have—or a less rigid regard ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 31, 1917 • Various
... but their language is said to resemble the Turkish or modern Osmanli so closely that a Constantinopolitan of the lower class could converse fairly well with a Yakut from the Lena. I regret that I was not enough interested in comparative philology while in Siberia to compile a vocabulary and grammar of the Yakut language. I had excellent opportunities for doing so, but was not aware at that time of its close resemblance to the Turkish, and looked upon it only as an unintelligible jargon which proved nothing but the active participation of the ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... Town. From the summit another rivulet trickles away to the south, and finds its way through a frightful tamarack swamp, and through woods scarred by ruthless lumbering, to Mud Pond, a quiet body of water, with a ghastly fringe of dead trees, upon which people of grand intentions and weak vocabulary are trying to fix the name of Elk Lake. The descent of the pass on that side is precipitous and exciting. The way is in the stream itself; and a considerable portion of the distance we swung ourselves down the faces of considerable falls, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... towns, and some counties; and particularly the seats of country-gentlemen, leaving an alias to solve all difficulties in point of law. But I would by no means trust these alterations to the owners themselves; who, as they are generally no great clerks, so they seem to have no large vocabulary about them, nor to be well skilled in prosody. The utmost extent of their genius lies in naming their country habitation by a hill, a mount, a brook, a burrow, a castle, a bawn, a ford, and the like ingenious conceits. Yet these are exceeded by others, whereof some ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... and Concretes, Quantities of Materials in given Sizes and Dimensions of Wood, Brick and Stone; and full and complete Bills of Prices for Carpenter's Work and Painting; also, Rules for Computing and Valuing Brick and Brick Work, Stone Work, Painting, Plastering, with a Vocabulary of Technical Terms, etc. By FRANK W. VOGDES, Architect, Indianapolis, Ind. Enlarged, revised, and corrected. In one volume, 368 pages, full-bound, pocket-book ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... drought that leaves the salmon- stream dry, the floods that fill it with turbid, impossible waters! Alas for the knot that breaks, and for the iron that bends; for the lost landing-net, and the gillie with the gaff that scrapes the fish! Izaak believed that fish could hear; if they can, their vocabulary must be full of strange oaths, for all anglers are not patient men. A malison on the trout that 'bulge' and 'tail,' on the salmon that 'jiggers,' or sulks, or lightly gambols over and under the line. These things, and many more, we anglers endure meekly, being ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... easily moved; but, notwithstanding his habitual inflexibility, I cannot help thinking that, when he heard his Roman Catholic countrymen (for we are his countrymen) designated by a phrase as offensive as the abundant vocabulary of his eloquent confederate could supply,—I cannot help thinking that he ought to have recollected the many fields of fight in which we have been contributors to his renown. "The battles, sieges, fortunes, that he has passed," to have come back upon him. He ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... the nearer the period of judgment. One morning when they were in bed—for even yet, while they concealed their thoughts from each other, and the name of Jenny Dodds was a condemned word in their vocabulary, even as the sacred name among the Romans, they had evinced no spoken enmity to each other—they heard a tirl at the door. The hour was early, and the douce genius of the grey dawn was deliberating with herself whether it was time to give ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... clear to him, a melange of impressions. The mock-American fought like a devil unchained, cursing Duchemin fluently in the purest and foulest argot of Belleville—which is not in the French vocabulary of the doughboy. The animals at the pole caught fire of this madness and ran away in good earnest, that wretched barouche rolled and pitched like a rudderless shell in a crazy sea, the two men floundered in its well ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... triumph too delicious for immediate translation into words. The room was furnished as a study, and most artistically furnished, if you consider outlandish shapes in fumed oak artistic. There was nothing of the traditional prize-fighter about Barney Maguire, except his vocabulary and his lower jaw. I had seen over his house already, and it was fitted and decorated throughout by a high-art firm which exhibits just such a room as that which was the scene of our tragedietta. The person in the sequins ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... thy Louisa. Thou must have no companion but love; leave behind all thy hopes, all thy tumultuous wishes—thou wilt need nothing on this journey but thy heart. Darest thou come; then set out as the bell tolls twelve from the Carmelite Tower. Dost thou fear; then erase from the vocabulary of thy sex's virtues the word courage, for a maiden will have put thee to shame." (MILLER lays down the letter and fixes his eyes upon the ground in deep sorrow. At length he turns to LOUISA, and says, in a low, broken voice) Daughter, where ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... original speech; far more so indeed than one or two others of high name and celebrity, which up to that time I had been in the habit of regarding with respect and veneration. Indeed, many obscure points connected with the vocabulary of these languages, and to which neither classic nor modern lore afforded any clue, I thought I could now clear up by means of this strange broken tongue, spoken by people who dwelt amongst thickets and furze bushes, in tents as tawny as their faces, and whom the generality ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... taste for horrors, his early reading left traces on the imagery and diction of his poetry. There is an unusual profusion in his vocabulary of such words as ghosts, shades, charnel, tomb, torture, agony, etc., and supernatural similes occur readily to his mind. In Alastor he ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... observation, and a knowledge of books unusual in rustics of that day, and even of the present time. At twelve he made his first acquaintance with a language other than his own, when he mastered the short grammar in Dyche's Latine Vocabulary, and committed nearly the whole book to memory. When urging him to take the preaching at Barton, Mr. Sutcliff of Olney gave him Ruddiman's Latin Grammar. The one alleviation of his lot under the coarse but upright Nichols was found in his master's small library. There ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... after the incorrigible habit of years, and the infant Damocles grew and developed into a remarkably sturdy, healthy, intelligent boy, as cheerful, fearless, impudent, and irrepressible as the heart of the Major could desire—and with a much larger vocabulary than any one could ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... the decoration of the human form, he scattered around, profusely as bright autumnal leaves in a forest. Adam looks at a few of the articles, but throws them carelessly aside with whatever exclamation may correspond to "Pish!" or "Pshaw!" in the new vocabulary of nature. Eve, however,—be it said without offence to her native modesty,—examines these treasures of her sex with somewhat livelier interest. A pair of corsets chance to be upon the counter; she inspects them ...
— The New Adam and Eve (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of the De La Salle Series the plan of the preceding numbers has been continued. The pupil has now mastered the mechanical difficulties of learning to read, and has acquired a fairly good working vocabulary. Hence he is prepared to read intelligently and with some degree of fluency and pleasure. Now is the time to lead him to acquire a taste for good reading. The selections have been drawn mainly from authors whose writings are distinguished for their moral and literary value, ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... thing you can't help from feeling sorry for her—nobody could." He hesitated a moment as though seeking for words of explanation and extenuation that were not in his regular vocabulary. "I got kids of my own, commissioner," he said suddenly, and stopped dead short for a moment. "I'm no Italian, but I got kids of my own!" he repeated, as though the fact ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... who really knew their mother-tongue—Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and himself. That his conversancy with French extended from Froissart downwards, through Rabelais' succulent jargon as well as Moliere's racy idiom, is patent in nearly all he wrote; and that he was capable of using this vocabulary aptly is sufficiently shown in the best and simplest of his works. But it is not so clear that he added anything to the original stock. Such words as he coined under the impetus of his exuberance ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... "Hard a-lee," and "All right," comprised Tehei's English vocabulary and led me to suspect that at some time he had been one of a Kanaka crew under an American captain. Between the puffs I made signs to him and repeatedly and interrogatively uttered the word SAILOR. Then I tried it in atrocious French. MARIN conveyed ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... made in most cases to give the etymology, so far at least as to shew the immediate source of the Middle-English word. Especial pains have been taken with the words of French origin, which form so large a portion of the vocabulary of the Middle-English period. In many cases the AF (Anglo-French) forms are cited, from my list of English Words found in Anglo-French, as published for the Philological ...
— A Concise Dictionary of Middle English - From A.D. 1150 To 1580 • A. L. Mayhew and Walter W. Skeat
... with them, we found their language was nearly the same spoken at Otaheite and the Society Isles. The difference not being greater than what we find betwixt the most northern and western parts of England, as will more fully appear by the vocabulary. ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... the fifth year, or in that year, not only skill to read most written hands, but to decline all the nouns, conjugate the verbs regular, and most of the irregular; learned out Puerilis, got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and vice versa, construe and prove what he read and did the government, and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... of Medical Jurisprudence at Dartmouth and various other colleges and medical schools, was another erudite scholar, who made a permanent impression on all he met. While yet at college, his words were so unusual and his vocabulary so full that a wag once advertised on the bulletin board on the door of Dartmouth Hall, "Five hundred new ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... the great word-painter, and even the poet feels this when, like Browning, he seems so to suffer from their weakness as to be troubled into audacious employment of the words that will not obey his will, torment them as he may. Yet, as my pupil goes on, she will find her vocabulary growing, and will become more and more accurate in her use and more ingenious in her combination of words to give her meaning. As she learns to feel strongly—for she will in time—her love will give her increasing power both to see and to state what she sees, because this ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... consistent with the most just philosophy. He used, as every writer must do, the scientific language of his own time. I only assert that, to those who are unacquainted with ancient systems, his philosophical vocabulary is obsolete ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... Montebello Isles. Description of them. Barrow's Island. Tryal Rocks. New kangaroo. Abundance of turtle. New wallaby. Sail for Swan River. Find Ritchie's Reef. Islands between Barrow's and North-West Cape. Table of soundings. Swan River Native. Anchor under Rottnest. Vocabulary. Erect beacons. Bad weather. Habits of a native dog. Geological observations. Sail from Swan River. Error in position of Cape Naturaliste. King George's Sound. Appearance of Bald Head. Princess Royal Harbour. Origin of settlement. Town of Albany. Salubrity of climate. Excursion ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... him what everybody called him. I called him 'Succelency.'" And "Succelency" for ever after the Governor General was called in the West. Jim's phonetic mouthful gave the West a roar of laughter and a new word to the language. On another occasion Jim gave the West a new phrase to its vocabulary which remains to this day. Having to take the wife of a high personage of the neighbouring Republic over the line in the private car, he had astounded his master by presenting a bill for finger-bowls before ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of course, be at once determined. Anyhow, the word, whatever its precise meaning might be, had now been added to our vocabulary, although as yet our organs of speech proved unable to reproduce it in ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... indeed—for the cow." When you find yourself standing in the way of dramatic truth, my young friends—clear the track! If you don't, the truth can stand it; you can't. Even if you feel sometimes that your genius—that's always the word in the secret vocabulary of our own minds—even if your genius seems to be hampered by these dramatic laws, resign yourself to them at once, with that simple form of Christian resignation so beautifully illustrated by the poor German woman on her deathbed. Her husband being asked, afterward, if she were resigned to ...
— The Autobiography of a Play - Papers on Play-Making, II • Bronson Howard
... nor bad, but tabby. Moreover, the leisurely reading of many sentences had given him some understanding of the elements of style. He perceived that some combinations of words were illogical, and that others were unlovely to the ear; and at the same time he acquired a vocabulary and a knowledge of grammar and punctuation that his earlier education had failed to give him. He read new novels at his writing-table, and took pleasure in correcting the mistakes of their authors in ink. ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... Daffy's Elixir therein, which was her sovereign recipe against the effects of a soaking. There was no event in life, from a christening to a marriage, but had some appropriate food or drink in my mother's vocabulary, and no ailment for which she had not some pleasant cure ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... read; and tore, As if the living passion symbol'd there Were living nerves to feel the rent; and burnt, Now chafing at his own great self defied, Now striking on huge stumbling-blocks of scorn In babyisms, and dear diminutives Scatter'd all over the vocabulary Of such a love as like a chidden babe, After much wailing, hush'd itself at last Hopeless of answer: then tho' Averill wrote And bad him with good heart sustain himself— All would be well—the lover heeded not, But passionately ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... large vocabulary to make oneself understood, and in an indescribably short time Bob had picked up enough Indian to converse brokenly, and one day, shortly after the arrival at Petitsikapau he found he was able to explain to Sishetakushin where he came from and his desire to return to the Big Hill trail ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... adopted and inculcated as bonds of union and platforms of communion in all the parties which have sprung from the Lutheran reformation. The effect of these synodical covenants, conventional articles of belief, and rules of ecclesiastical polity, has been the introduction of a new nomenclature,—a human vocabulary of religious words, phrases, and technicalities, which has displaced the style of the living oracles, and affixed to the sacred diction ideas wholly unknown to the ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... of them in my head, though," he added. "And I'm going to grind them out as soon as I get time. I wish I had a bigger vocabulary and knew more about the technical end of the writing game. I am going to learn, though—going to take some night work at the University next fall. Maybe I'll catch up a little yet if I ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... last degree at seeing "Mr. Quelconque" chosen over the illustrious statesman who was his favorite candidate. But all his indignation cannot repress a sense of humor which was one of his marked characteristics. After fatiguing his vocabulary with hard usage, after his unsparing denunciation of "the very dirty politics" which he finds mixed up with our popular institutions, he says,—it must be remembered that this was an offhand letter to one nearly connected ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... proprietor is head cook and everybody speaks French. I know my accent is improving, and Landry has learned any quantity of phrases already. We are reading George Sand out loud, and are making up the longest vocabulary. To-night we are going to a concert, and I've found out that there's a really fine course of lectures to be given soon on "Literary Tendencies," or something like that. Quel chance. Landry is intensely interested. You've no idea what a deep mind he ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... his Tzental Vocabulary, Father Lara does not give this exact form; but in the neighboring dialect of the Cakchiquel Father Ximenes has quikeho, to agree together, to enter into an arrangement; the prefix zme is the ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... Courtine says: 'I shall be ere long as greasy as an Alsatian bully,' comes third; and Mrs. Behn's reference to Alsatia in this play, which is often ignored, claims fourth place. We then have Shadwell's famous comedy, The Squire of Alsatia (1688), with its well-known vocabulary of Alsatian jargon and slang, its scenes in Whitefriars, the locus classicus, a veritable mine of information. The particular portions of Whitefriars forming Alsatia were Ram-Alley, Mitre Court, and a lane called in the local ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... might "go and live among the Indians," and even offered to facilitate the orator's self-expatriation among the savages: "I know of several nations that live very happily; and I can furnish him with a vocabulary ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... look after itself that he might have an unhampered course in the asserting of himself. He invaded immediately all the dances, carnivals, dinners and parties. He was both Liberal and Conservative in politics. He was the "guy" with the "big mitt" and the vociferous vocabulary at all the local functions. He even joined the church. He tumbled into popularity as quickly as the Kaiser tumbled into the European war; and he elbowed his way into the run-way for all offices. Previously bright stars were dimmed by the brilliancy of his superior luminosity. He became a parasite ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... to give it life, form, or color. Hence the necessity of employing the sensuous or concrete words of the language, and hence the exclusion of long words, which in English are nearly all purely and austerely abstract, from the poetic vocabulary." ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... has recently become one of the most overworked words in the vocabulary of journalism. It constantly appears, not only in the text of the picturesque reporter, but in head-lines and on bulletin-boards. When, on July 20, 1911, Mr. Asquith wrote to Mr. Balfour to inform him that the King had guaranteed the creation of peers, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... condition of the roadways, the vocabulary of blame had been exhausted long before I arrived. Two things, however, struck me in New York which I had not heard of by report: the greasiness of the streets, transforming every automobile into a skidding death-trap at the least sign of moisture, and ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... was under the yoke of this Catherine II. of commerce. Short and fat, harnessed with spectacles and a shirt-collar worn above his ears, he was chiefly distinguished for his bass voice and the richness of his vocabulary. He never said Corneille, but "the sublime Corneille"; Racine was "the gentle Racine"; Voltaire, "Oh! Voltaire, second in everything, with more wit than genius, but nevertheless a man of genius"; Rousseau, "a gloomy mind, a man full of pride, who hanged ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... certain things, such as the different foods; and it did not take long to learn what "Yes" and "No" meant, and when handed anything particularly appetizing it was finally associated in his mind with "good." Thus step by step he acquired a small vocabulary of words. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... the rest of the day they could lie on their backs and smoke Canteen-plug and swear at the punkah-coolies. They enjoyed a fine, full flesh meal in the middle of the day, and then threw themselves down on their cots and sweated and slept till it was cool enough to go out with their "towny," whose vocabulary contained less than six hundred words, and the Adjective, and whose views on every conceivable question they had heard many ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Boehme (1575-1624), known as "the German theosophist," was founder of the sect of Boehmists, a cult allied to the Swedenborgians. He was given to the study of alchemy, and brought the vocabulary of the science into his mystic writings. His sect was revived in England in the eighteenth century through the efforts of William Law. Saint-Martin translated into French two of his Latin works under the titles L'Aurore naissante, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... musket was an unwieldy matchlock fired from a rest, and without a bayonet, so that in the infantry regiments it was necessary to combine pikemen with the musketeers. Cannon there were of all calibres and with a whole vocabulary of fantastic names, but none capable of advancing and manoeuvring with troops in battle. The Imperial troops were formed in heavy masses. Gustavus, taking his lesson from the Roman legion, had introduced a more open order—he ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... vocabulary in exclamations and in questions, she stood silent, watching the sun as it sank beneath the waters, thinking that life is well worth living if it can give us such glorious spectacles, notwithstanding all the difficulties that may have to be passed through. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... effect. He acquired a vocabulary. That is to say, instead of the few hundred words which were all the other boys knew by which to express their thoughts, he soon had twice as many; besides that, he soon got a reputation as a wit and story-teller, and his command of words made him fond of speechmaking. He resembled most boys in ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... liberated him from the bonds of the Calvinistic theology in which his youth was trammelled, but it had secured him against the conscious ethicism of the prevailing Unitarian doctrine which supremely worshipped Conduct; and it had colored his vocabulary to such strange effects that he spoke of moral men with abhorrence; as more hopelessly lost than sinners. Any one whose sphere tempted him to recognition of the foibles of others, he called the Devil; but in spite of his perception of such diabolism, he was rather fond ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... appeared objects which Urg would name, to have his sibilant uttering repeated by Garin. As the American later learned, the ray treatment he had undergone had quickened his mental powers, and in an incredibly short time he had a working vocabulary. ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... in the vocabulary more bitter, more direful in its import, than all the rest. Reader, if poverty, if disgrace, if bodily pain, even if slighted love be your unhappy fate, kneel and bless Heaven for its beneficent influence, so that you are not tortured with ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... flashed a look of gratitude upon her friend. Dic might not be able to understand the language of those eyes, but Billy knew their vocabulary from the smallest to ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... subtile serpent the most "amiable" of beasts, and ignoring gender, person, and number in an astonishing manner. He says "Lamb books of life," and calls the real old Southern aristocracy the gentiles! His vocabulary is an extensive one—I wish his knowledge of the art of cooking were ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... stolid committee a rushing torrent of insult and invective. The veneer of dignity that had come to him with wealth and position slipped from him, as the old skin slips from a snake, and he went back to the vocabulary of his youth for terms sufficiently blasphemous and obscene to express his opinion of the strike, the strikers, the committee and its sponsors. He did not stop until his breath failed and ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... Emperor's conceptions as to the influence of his name—strike the advancing Allies, both the Austrian and the Prussian, with terror, and paralyse their movements. Were they likely to persist in their Hurrah on Paris (at this period the Cossack vocabulary was in vogue), when they knew Napoleon to be posting himself between them and their own resources, and at the same time relieving and rallying around him all the garrisons of the great fortresses of the Rhine? Would not ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... phase of life, when a little girl's vocabulary was, somewhat at random, growing larger, belong a few brave phrases hazarded to express a meaning well realized—a personal matter. Questioned as to the eating of an uncertain number of buns just before lunch, the child averred, "I took them just to appetize my hunger." As ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... comfortingly, as she eyed Meeteetse, sprawled on his back with his eyes closed. "He's afraid he'll learn something. He used to be a sheep-herder, and I don't reckon he's got more'n two hundred and fifty words in his whole vocabulary. Why, I'll bet he never heard a word of more'n three syllables before. Get up, Meeteetse. Go out in the fresh air and build yourself a couple of them sheep-herder's monuments. It'll make ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... forward a plea for Huchowne as its author, to whom he would also assign the Morte Arthure (ed. Perry) and the Pistel of Sweet Susan.[8] But Mr. Donaldson seems to have been misled by the similarity of vocabulary, which is not at all a safe criterion in judging of works written in a Northumbrian, West or East Midland speech. The dialect, I venture to think, is a far safer test. A careful examination of the Troy Book compels me to differ in toto from Mr. Donaldson, and, instead ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... The vocabulary, while registering all the words in the text, except such as are nearly or quite identical, does not aim at giving, without any labor of adaptation on the part of the student, the ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... language in the sense that man has; their vocabulary is probably limited to a dozen howls, barks, and grunts expressing the simplest emotions; but they have several other modes of conveying ideas, and one very special method of spreading information—the Wolf-telephone. Scattered over their range are a number of recognized "centrals." Sometimes ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... attract the attention of any stroller who might pass in that direction. Though we have frequently held our hero up as a model of modesty, we are compelled to acknowledge that he felt exceedingly well satisfied with himself on the present occasion. He felt that he had done what, in the homely vocabulary of the boys of Pinchbrook, might well be called "a ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... will then take the place of short-sighted, suicidal, penny-wise pound-foolish cunning; and that barricade of hypocrisy, duty, that most fallible of all guides, conscience, and 'virtue' and 'vice,' those most unscientific and mischievous expressions that have ever crept into the vocabulary of human ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... standard for the most serious and abstract subjects. When compared with such philosophic writing as Hume's, Diderot's, Berkeley's, then Comte's manner is heavy, laboured, monotonous, without relief and without light. There is now and then an energetic phrase, but as a whole the vocabulary is jejune; the sentences are overloaded; the pitch is flat. A scrupulous insistence on making his meaning clear led to an iteration of certain adjectives and adverbs, which at length deaden the effect beyond the endurance of all but ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... communing with my own thoughts; sometimes in the stable, attending to, and not unfrequently conversing with, my horse; and at meal- time—for I seldom saw him at any other—discoursing with the old gentleman, sometimes on the Chinese vocabulary, sometimes on Chinese syntax, and once or twice on English horseflesh; though on this latter subject, notwithstanding his descent from a race of horse-traders, he did not enter into with much alacrity. As a small requital for his kindness, I gave him one ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... the house; but he was doubtful about her social standing. Therefore he took her to the nearest drawing-room, said that he would inform his grace, and betook himself to his master in the smoking-room, wearing a perturbed air, for the duke had as complete a vocabulary as any nobleman in England, and he might easily take it ill that this formidable red Deeping had not been ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... officer's name was regularly incorporated into the Cherokee vocabulary as a synonym of disaster, he seemed to revolt at the unhappy plight of the people whom in the discharge of his duty he had succeeded in reducing to so abject a condition of despair and woe, and has left on record expressions of compassion incongruous with his deeds and his position as ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... a remark like that would have had me snookered. But long association with Jeeves has developed the Wooster vocabulary considerably. Jeeves has always been a whale for the psychology of the individual, and I now follow him like a bloodhound when he snaps it out of ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... lost a half of its old words, and had filled their places with French equivalents. The Norman lawyers had introduced legal terms; the ladies and courtiers, words of dress and courtesy. The knight had imported the vocabulary of war and of the chase. The master-builders of the Norman castles and cathedrals contributed technical expressions proper to the architect and the mason. The art of cooking was French. The naming of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... despatched from Sydney, and letters from the 'post-office' on Booby Island. In his capacity as naturalist and ethnologist, Mr Macgillivray made frequent excursions, collecting plants and animals, and words for a vocabulary. The natives are described as inordinately fond of smoking whenever they can get choka, as they call tobacco. 'The pipe—which is a piece of bamboo as thick as the arm, and two or three feet long—is first filled with tobacco-smoke, and then handed round the company, seated on the ground in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... the uttermost secret of words in their power to express the soul of a writer—when one attempts to analyse the child-like simplicity of William Blake's style. How is it that he manages with so small, so limited a vocabulary, to capture the very "music of the spheres"? We all have the same words at our command; we all have the same rhymes; where then lies this strange power that can give the simplest syllables so original, so personal, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... return. Wilton, elbows on the table, stared straight in front of him, giving no sign of knowledge of the other's presence. Sloane fidgeted with the smelling-salts, emitting now and then long-drawn, tremulous sighs that were his own special vocabulary of dissatisfaction. ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... Breadalbane Terrace, and a plan of the hall and staircase, on my dinner-card. He was distinctly ungrateful; in fact, he remarked that he had been born in this very house, but would not trust himself to find his way upstairs with my plan as a guide. He also said the American vocabulary was vastly amusing, so picturesque, unstudied, ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... cars, occupying first one territory with their flocks, but not cultivating the land, then leaving it to nature and taking up another resting-place. It is certain that the Russians have many Asiatic words in their vocabulary, which must necessarily have occurred from their being for more than two centuries sometimes under Tatar, and sometimes under Mongol domination; and the origin of this word tsar or car may leave to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... On comparing a vocabulary of the language spoken by the natives on the Darling with other vocabularies obtained by various persons on different parts of the coast I found a striking similarity in eight words, and it appears singular ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... first of a series of stories depicting the picturesque life of the early days which made California known the world over and gave it a romantic interest enjoyed by no other community. They were fresh and virile, original in treatment, with real men and women using a new vocabulary, with humor and pathos delightfully blended. They moved on a stage beautifully set, with a background of heroic grandeur. No wonder that California and Bret Harte became familiar household words. When one reflects on the fact that the exposure to the life depicted had occurred more than ten years ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... Primers and "easy books" have a use for children who are learning to read but too free a use of them may be one of the influences responsible for that lack of power of sustained attention and limitation in vocabulary which is frequently shown by boys and girls from ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... closer analogy between the Palestinian group of languages—Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite, and the Assyro-Babylonian, than between either of these and the Aramaic. The Aramaic is scanty both in variety of grammatical forms and in vocabulary; the Phoenician and Assyro-Babylonian are comparatively copious.[36] The Aramaic has the character of a degraded language; the Assyro-Babylonian and the Phoenician are modelled on a primitive type.[37] In some respects ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... and I visited him often. To get to his cabinets, it was necessary to go through his garden where thorn-apples and cacti grew abundantly, and where they kept a gray parrot, brought from Gaboon, whose vocabulary consisted of words ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... to gurgle "Ikh! Ikh!" till the camel kneels. Hence the space called "Barr al-Manakhah" in Al-Medinah (Pilgrimage i. 222, ii. 91). There is a regular camel vocabulary amongst the Arabs, made up like our "Gee" (go ye!), etc. of significant words ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... softly and stood up, ticking off the items on her fingers. "I did have a good time, I did remember to take my tonic, and this heavenly coat has kept me as warm as pie—Nina Atherton taught me that. That nice family considerably enlarged my vocabulary," she added with enjoyment, slipping out of a heavy fur coat and coming back to perch on the ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... mental note of the fact that this child seemed to have but two adjectives in her vocabulary. "Peggy will see to that!" she said to herself. "Peggy has improved so wonderfully in her English this last year. She will be quicker than I to notice and take up the ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... was Hank's choice. Hank knew him and swore by him. He also swore at him, "jest as a pal might," and since he had a vocabulary of picturesque, if utterly meaningless, oaths, the conversation between the two stalwart and hardy woodsmen was often of a rather lively description. This river of expletives, however, Hank agreed to dam a little out of respect for his old "hunting boss," ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... become still further limited by the application to them of precise rules of structure. Hand in hand with this restricting process in meter, had gone a similar tendency in diction. The simple, concrete phrases of daily speech had given way to stately periphrases; the rich and riotous vocabulary of earlier poetry had been replaced by one more decorous, measured, and high-sounding. A corresponding process of selection and exclusion was applied to the subject matter of poetry. Passion, lyric exaltation, ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... are actual quotations. "Estimony" for "opinion" was a characteristic in Gus' vocabulary; "race" for the original "wretch" in the song may have been a general error ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... natural taste in dress, curbing, on her emergence from mourning, a fierce desire for apparel in primary colours, and leading her onwards to an appreciation of suaver harmonies. Again she had run her tactful hand over Liosha's stockyard vocabulary, erasing words and expressions that might offend Queen's Gate and substituting others that might charm; and she had done it with a touch of humour not lost on Liosha, who had retained the sense of values in which no child born and bred in ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... was interpreted by each of us in accord with his previous personal experience. And these divergent experiences exchanged that evening brought home to me as never before the inherent and inevitable inadequacy of the vocabulary of every language, since there must always be two partners in any communication by means of words, and the verbal currency passing from one to the other has no fixed value necessarily the same to both of them." [Footnote: Brander Matthews, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... ability to use any human language was limited. He picked up vocabulary and grammatical rules very rapidly, but he seemed completely unable to use a language beyond discussion of concrete actions and objects. His mind was simply too alien to enable him to do more than touch the edges ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... in Mount Mark's affections. And in spite of her odd curt speeches, and her openly-vaunted vanity, Mount Mark insisted she was "good." Certainly she was willing! "Get Carol Starr,—she'll do it," was the commonest phrase in Mount Mark's vocabulary. Whatever was wanted, whatever the sacrifice involved, Carol stood ready to fill the bill. Not for kindness,—oh, dear no,—Carol staunchly disclaimed any such niceness as that. She did it for fun, pure and simple. She said she liked to show off. She insisted that she ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... high but mournful recitative, extemporized, under the excitement of the moment, into sentiments that were highly figurative and impressive. In this she was aided very much by the genius of the language, which possesses the finest and most copious vocabulary in the world for the expression of either ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... of thankless kindness, he assures us that "fond is foolish," "but, except," "content, contentment," and vice versa, "period [Transcriber's note: 'peroid' in original], end," "demur, delay," "ever, always," "sudden, quickly," "quick, suddenly," and so on through a long vocabulary of words of which a girl of six years old would blush ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... of the peasantry hereabouts is that same Walloon tongue in which old Froissart wrote his Chronicles. It is little more comprehensible to the average Frenchman than to the average Englishman, but its vocabulary is restricted, and the people who talk it have enriched (or corrupted) it with many words of French. When the loungers in the cafe began to talk, as they did presently, it amused me to listen to this unknown tongue; and whenever I heard 'la procession' named, ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... a riddle?" he returned, lazily. "I give it up." Then he contemplated his small daughter with much satisfaction. "I wonder none of you advanced women have ever turned your attention to baby-language," he observed presently; "we are studying the ape-vocabulary, you know. Dot has got quite a little language of her own. As far as I can make out each sentence is finished off with a 'gurgle-doe.' Something between the 'gobble, gobble' of a turkey and the coo of the ring-dove. I suppose it ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey |
