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Apostrophe   Listen
noun
Apostrophe  n.  
1.
(Rhet.) A figure of speech by which the orator or writer suddenly breaks off from the previous method of his discourse, and addresses, in the second person, some person or thing, absent or present; as, Milton's apostrophe to Light at the beginning of the third book of "Paradise Lost."
2.
(Gram.) The contraction of a word by the omission of a letter or letters, which omission is marked by the character (') placed where the letter or letters would have been; as, call'd for called.
3.
The mark (') used to denote that a word is contracted (as in ne'er for never, can't for can not), and as a sign of the possessive, singular and plural; as, a boy's hat, boys' hats. In the latter use it originally marked the omission of the letter e. Note: The apostrophe is used to mark the plural of figures and letters; as, two 10's and three a's. It is also employed to mark the close of a quotation.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Apostrophe" Quotes from Famous Books



... idea. Only birds fly, reminds the practical person. Max Eastman has pertinently called attention to the fact that it is only to rhetoric, which is a practical activity, that these figures are indirect expressions, or substituted names. Apostrophe is not a turning away in poetic, because in poetic there is no argument to turn away from. Rather in poetic it is a turning toward the essential images of realization, as metaphor in poetic is direct, not indirect, because in poetic a word that suggests the salient parts or qualities ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark

... his eyes "wax foul and sore" as he prepares to tell of its infliction. He compassionates "love's servants" as if he were their own "brother dear;" and into his adaptation of the eventful story of Constance (the "Man of Law's Tale") he introduces apostrophe upon apostrophe, to the defenceless condition of his heroine—to her relentless enemy the Sultana, and to Satan, who ever makes his instrument of women "when he will beguile"—to the drunken messenger who allowed the letter carried by him to be stolen from him,—and to the treacherous Queen-mother ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward

... and strength," in our perils He compasses us about with songs of deliverance, his life is our perfect example, his death is our perfect atonement. Well might the Apostle interrupt the course of his argument with the grateful apostrophe, "Unto you, therefore, which believe, He is precious;" and exhort them "that ye should show forth the praises of Him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light." The text presents us with topics of ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King

... while Jerry played with the child. Then he burst out: "I say, Poll!" And since Polly paid no heed to his apostrophe: ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... all its different cases, or changes of endings. In English we have three cases,—nominative, possessive, and objective; but, in nouns, the nominative and objective have the same form, and only the possessive case shows a change of ending, by adding 's or the apostrophe. The interrogative pronoun, however, has the fuller ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge

... of English performances, lends ear to foreign airs, patronises foreign actors, browses on reports from camps of foreign armies. He drops his head like a smitten ox to all great foreign names, moaning 'Shakespeare!' internally for a sustaining apostrophe. He well-nigh loves his poets, can almost understand what poetry means. If it does not pay, it brings him fame, respectfulness in times of reverse. Brains, he is reduced to apprehend, brains are ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... happily off with the beauteous brides they have won in Venus' Isle of Joy. The return home is safely effected, and our bold sailors are welcomed in Lisbon with delirious joy, for their journey has crowned Portugal with glory. The poem concludes, as it began, with an apostrophe from the ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... to laugh. Her unfortunate position, and the singular apostrophe she had addressed to me, pierced me to the heart. The mother-superior hastened ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... confess they are rather of a general nature at present—belonging to humanity rather than the individual, as you would say—consisting chiefly in washing, dressing, feeding, and apostrophe, varied with lullabying. But our hearts are a better place for our measures than our heads, ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald

... "I remembered that apostrophe and that look very well, when I went to bed about an hour later, nearly drunk, in the large room papered in white and gold, to which I was shown by a tall, broad-shouldered footman, who wished me ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... fall was prepared and inevitable you returned to Paris on the 9th of August. You wanted to go to bed on that evil night.... Hatred, you said, is insupportable to me and (yet) you said to us 'I do not like Marat,' etc." There is an apostrophe of nine consecutive pages against Danton, who ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... himself in an eloquent apostrophe to the primitive Earth, over which he previously ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard

... the handsome Yankee in Richmond that season would have suspected that the young man looked in his mirror night and morning, frowned darkly at the reflected image he saw there, and said, solemnly, "You are a murderer!" It was by no means a tragic accent in which this thrilling apostrophe was spoken. It was very much in the tone that a woman employs when she looks hastily in the mirror and utters a soft "What a fright I am!" apparently receiving comforting contradiction enough from the mirror to make ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... pocket, and the prospect of a slender engagement with Cave of the Gentleman's Magazine. One thing is certain, that however unpromising were Johnson's early days at Lichfield, he ever retained a warm affection for his native city, and which, by a sudden apostrophe, under the word Lich, he introduces with reverence into his immortal work, the ENGLISH DICTIONARY: Salve magna parens. (Boswell.) His last visit was in his 75th year when he writes to Boswell:—"I came to Lichfield, and found every ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various

... glorified in his orthodoxy, which was that of the Nichiren sect. He went into battle with a banneret full of texts, stuck in his back and flying behind him. His example was copied by hundreds of his officers and soldiers. On their flags and guidons was inscribed the famous apostrophe of the Nichiren sect, so often heard in their services and revivals to-day (Namu miy[o] ho ren ge ki[o]), and borrowed from the Saddharma Pundarika: "Glory be to the salvation-bringing ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... delegate, who had disdainfully protected Ursus against the theologian, now turned suddenly from auxiliary into assailant. He placed his closed fist on his bundle of papers, which was large and heavy. Ursus received this apostrophe ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... has intentionally used both the singular and the plural of the second person in Fougas' apostrophe to Clementine, as it seemed to him naturally required by the variations of ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About

... said Basil, in answer to some apostrophe to their bliss from Isabel, "it's the greatest imaginable satisfaction to have lived past certain things. I always knew that I was not a very handsome or otherwise captivating person, but I can remember years—now blessedly remote—when I never ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... into the above apostrophe by the violence of my sympathies; but the lucid and graphic sentences which precede this moralizing ably sum up the situation during the first week of Hartman's visit. A good deal of wisdom was in circulation: I said some things ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol

... Canonical Hours," giving its represented foundation of the various acts of worship in the Romish Church throughout the day, from early in the morning to the last service at night. After every fact concerning our Lord, follows an apostrophe to his mother, which I omit, ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald

... among other things. "And you betray your taste when you make love to a pink-and-white doll, a little fool that has no more wit nor manners than if she were painted on canvas!" Then, with an increase of scorn, she delivered herself of an unpardonable apostrophe: "You, a king, to accept the inheritance ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... blundered in her grand apostrophe, hastily picked up the wrong word to fling at the heads of her brutal tormentors. Had she lived in this year of grace, she would certainly have said: 'Oh, Charity! how much hypocrisy is practised in thy name!' How many grim and ghastly farces are enacted in thy honour! Oh, Charity! heavenly ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... effect of these attributes in the voice. Under this head selections of a warlike nature may be practised, and those which have in them the thoughts of magnitude and importance. Spartacus's "Address to the Gladiators" is excellent; also, Byron's "Apostrophe to the Ocean," "The Rising in '76," and selections of a ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick

... indeed made this sacrifice to prudence with great unwillingness—every day, by confirming Mr. Burke's assertions, or fulfilling his predictions, had so increased my reverence for the work, that I regarded it as a kind of political oracle. I did not, however, destroy it without an apologetic apostrophe to the author's benevolence, which I am sure would suffer, were he to be the occasion, though involuntarily, of conducting a female to a ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady

... a fine apostrophe to Browning as one "who stormed through death, and laid hold of Eternity." Did he indeed do that? I wish I felt it! He had, of course, an unconquerable optimism, which argued promise from failure and perfection from incompleteness. But I cannot ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson

... joy was short, however, and when quiet was restored, in the deeper darkness—for Brother Fleming's torch had gone out—a tall man arose from near the middle of the congregation. He had a bushy brown beard, a little apostrophe nose, childish china-blue eyes, and a thin high voice which gave the impression upon hearing it that he was at the very moment trying hard to squeeze through the eye of his needle, spiritually speaking. I recognized him as Brother John Henry, distinguished for having the most sensitive conscience ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris

... and encourage him; and I suffered no little emotional stress myself from this constant drain on my sympathies. Every evening, sitting beside my cot, he would repeat over and over again the same lamentations and speculations, interjecting at the end of each apostrophe, "It's terrible—terrible!" until at last I felt that I would gladly give up my own "good time" for the sake of seeing him freed without further procrastination. I was convinced, and so told him, that the delay could be due to nothing but neglect, inadvertent or criminal, on the part of LaDow, the ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... with tenfold more speed toward the judgment-day? Oh, I am overborne with the thought; and in the conclusion I cry to one and I cry to the other: "Oh, time! Oh, eternity! Oh, the dead! Oh, the judgment-day! Oh, Jesus! Oh, God!" But, catching at the last apostrophe, I feel that I have something to hold on to: for "in God is thy refuge, and underneath thee are the everlasting arms." And, exhausted with my failure to save myself, I throw my whole weight of body, mind, and ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... the original text has variations between verses in the position of the apostrophe in "Joiners" and "Puddings". These ...
— The Buckle My Shoe Picture Book - One, Two, Buckle My Shoe; A Gaping-Wide-Mouth Waddling Frog; My Mother • Walter Crane

... of it are male—the three first female—the four first a brave man, and the whole word a brave woman. Thus: he, her, hero, heroine. A beggar may address himself, and say, mend I can't!—leave out the apostrophe and he still remains a mendicant. Tartar, papa, murmur, etc. may be noticed as doubling the first syllable, and eye, level, and other words as having the same meaning whether read backwards or forwards. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 401, November 28, 1829 • Various

... touched reverently upon the institutions of religion, and upon the necessity of private purity, if we were to have any public morality. "I trust," he said, "that there are children within the sound of my voice," and after some remarks to them, the Senator closed with an apostrophe to "the genius of American Liberty, walking with the Sunday School in one hand and Temperance in the other up the glorified steps ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... courageous athlete, who have taken as your task that which is expressed in the little apostrophe which our first Meditation addresses to people who have the charge of a wife, what are you going to say about it? We hope that this rapid review of the question does not make you tremble, that you are not one of those men whose nervous fluid congeals at the sight ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... in his articles in the Encyclopaedia, here too Diderot is always ready to turn from his subject for a moral aside. Even the modern reader will forgive the discursive apostrophe addressed to the judges of the unfortunate Calas, the almost lyric denunciation of an atrocity that struck such deep dismay into the hearts of all the brethren of the Encyclopaedia.[44] But Diderot's asides are usually in less tragic matter. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... A fine old fellow. Eh, I hope he's not in want." He shook his fist towards his neighbor. "An' jist go on robbin' widows an' tramplin' on orphans till ye perish in the corruption o' yer own penuriousness. Yes, an' me lady Jarvis too!" he cried, abruptly finishing his apostrophe. "She'll have to answer for old Sandy an' the wee thing, see if she don't." The company smiled in spite of his earnestness, all but Elizabeth. She regarded him with big solemn eyes. "Now yous 'll be over to see mother early, mind," he added as he swung ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith

... dances of Oreads; of flocks descending to the river at dusk, of the homestead, the bare-footed mother, the clinging child, the father, clad in goat-skins, guiding the ox-wagon; and he ends on the very note of Virgil's famous apostrophe ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... arrived, that Swedenborg admitted no conversion for evil spirits! But the divine effort is never relaxed; the carrion in the sun will convert itself to grass and flowers; and man, though in brothels, or jails, or on gibbets, is on his way to all that is good and true. Burns, with the wild humor of his apostrophe to ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... peculiarly unsuitable."—Campbell cor. "They will aim at something higher than a mere dealing-out of harmonious sounds."— Kirkham cor. "This is intelligible and sufficient; and any further account of the matter seems beyond the reach of our faculties."—Bp. Butler cor. "Apostrophe is a turning-off from the regular course of the subject."—Mur. et al. cor. "Even Isabella was finally prevailed upon to assent to the sending-out of a commission to investigate his conduct."—Life of Columbus cor. "For the turning-away of the simple shall ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... was seen, then that of Hymen—a real pyrotechnic masterpiece. After the fireworks the Emperor and Empress went first into the record room, then into the concert hall, where was sung a cantata, with words by Arnault and music by Mhul, which began with this apostrophe to the Empress:— ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand

... office that by your own confession, no one else would stoop to perform? I'll tell you, because from your youth and inexperience, your innocence was deemed a fit victim to the heartless sneers of a cold and unfeeling world." And here Tom broke forth into a very beautiful apostrophe, beginning— ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever

... old flirt!" was the apostrophe I had in mind at the moment, but, of course, having had no practice in speech I was compelled to forego the pleasure of giving audible ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs

... whom, her experience in beans beyond Cicero's. Newspaper, the, wonderful, a strolling theatre, thoughts suggested by tearing wrapper of, a vacant sheet, a sheet in which a vision was let down, wrapper to a bar of soap, a cheap impromptu platter. New World, apostrophe to. New York, letters from, commended. Next life, what. Nicotiana Tabacum, a weed. Niggers, area of abusing, extended, Mr. Sawin's opinions of. Ninepence a day low for murder. No, a monosyllable, hard to utter. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... wonder that the lad felt in a perspiration, and was ready to reproach his mother for not assisting him in what was minute by minute growing a more painful position; but Mrs Strong did not stir; the captain kept up in constant repetition his scolding apostrophe, and the stowaway looked ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn

... Gallery. Oxford has lost another young man of unusual gifts, a scholar and an athlete, as modest as he was brave, and the Gallery has a sense of personal loss. Yet it bids his father say, in the beautiful apostrophe which Rustum puts into the mouth of the ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... of the French Revolution through most of its principal stages, from its commencement to the taking of the Bastille, and its establishment by the Declaration of Rights, I will close the subject with the energetic apostrophe of M. de la Fayette, "May this great monument, raised to Liberty, serve as a lesson to the oppressor, and an ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... no idea of poetry. I've seen him sit stolidly by, mending his old clothes, when Rattler delivered that stirring apostrophe of Byron's to the ocean. He asked Rattler once, quite seriously, if he thought Byron was ever seasick. I don't remember Rattler's reply, but I know we all laughed very much, and I have no doubt it was something ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... Of course our "apostrophe and s" ( 's) comes from the Old English genitive ending -es. The e is preserved in Wednesday ( Old English Wdnes dg). But at a very early period it was thought that John's book, for example, was a shortened form of John his book. Thus Addison ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith

... the derivation a l'arme that the Italian is allarme; some dictionaries even have dare all'arme, with the apostrophe, for to give alarm. It is against it that the German word Laerm is used precisely as the English alarm. Your correspondent CH. thinks the French derivation suspiciously ingenious: here I must differ; I think it suspiciously obvious. I will give ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various

... made this apostrophe to the departed sons of men, but not one of them has ever thought fit to answer the question. "O that some courteous ghost would blab it out!" but it cannot be; you and I, my friend, must make the experiment by ourselves, and for ourselves. However, I am so convinced ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... emotions. Heine has treated many a situation with overwhelming pathos, but none from which he was himself so completely absent as Moerike from the kitchen of The Forsaken Maiden. Goethe's "Hush'd on the hill" is an apostrophe to himself; but peace which the world cannot give and cannot take away is the atmosphere of that poem; whereas Heine's "The shades of the summer evening lie" gets its principal effectiveness from fantastic contributions ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... plunging ship, the wild waste of tumbling billows, everyone apparently racing to where our tossing bark was struggling to maintain herself, all had an entrancing interest for me, and I tried to recall Byron's sublime apostrophe to the ocean: ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... understand one word of this apostrophe. She kept silence, terrified, crushed, in front of the awful ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre

... she must abide by the pledge, for the peace of her soul, And so, by her life, maintain the apostrophe good, If she wished anon to reach the coveted ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy

... affecting scene," said the commissioner, wiping his eyes. "I must keep the impression of it for my 'Columbiad';" and drawing out his tablet, he proceeded to write on the spot an apostrophe to Freedom, which afterwards found a place in ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... is quite logically and suitably wrung from the lips of Vilhelm, the scholar who is still dreaming of uncompromised ideals. But it is not the final word. This comes from Olof, and takes the form of a brief apostrophe to the fleeing Vilhelm, which I think ranks with the finest passages produced by Strindberg. Apologetically, I offer this English version of it as a ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg

... attempted the composition of short popular songs which should stir the English people to a sense of what he felt to be their degradation. But he lacked the directness which alone could make such verses forcible, and the passionate apostrophe to the Men of England in his "Masque of Anarchy" marks the highest point of ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds

... Whittier's early discarded verses are of a rather gruesome sort, but more are inspired by contemplation of sublime themes, like this apostrophe to "Eternity," which was published in the "New ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard

... the original text, Scottish names, such as M'Clelland or M'Kail, sometimes use a regular apostrophe and sometimes a reversed apostrophe. In this transcription, the ASCII apostrophe character (') has been ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie

... lines occur in the apostrophe to Italy (Purg. vi.) where Dante refers to the Empire, idealized by him as ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... Schiller in "Wallenstein" and "Wilhelm Tell." Tegner's poetic creed was exactly that of Schiller, who saw no impropriety in making the peasant lad, Arnold Melchthal, when he hears that his father has been blinded, deliver an enraptured apostrophe to the light: ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... saddening yet softened autobiographical reminiscence, over which is thrown a light veil of literary appreciation and topical comment. Here is a typical cadenza, rising to a swell at one point (suggestive for the moment of Raleigh's famous apostrophe), and then most gently falling, in a manner not wholly unworthy, I venture to think, of Webster and Sir Thomas Browne, of both of which authors there is internal evidence that Gissing made ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... they both asserted, and sent March away from their conference at least half convinced, why the girl's part could not be greatly amplified. There were various expedients;—a preliminary scene between the girl and her brother; an apostrophe to an absent lover; a prayer. Also instead of being frozen into terror-stricken silence by her ravisher's monstrous purpose, she could just as well be represented as making a desperate resistance. She could plead with him, denounce him; attempt to take advantage ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster

... The following is an apostrophe to the relics of St. Martin by Bishop Gregory: "Oh ineffable theriac! ineffable pigment! admirable antidote! celestial purge! superior to all drugs of the faculty! sweeter than aromatics! stronger than unguents together; ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... after having sat helpless a while at a table, was ignominiously withdrawn. Twice was this ghostly Jack-in-the-box obtruded on the stage before his time; twice removed again; and yet he showed so little hurry when he was really wanted, that, after an awkward pause, Macbeth had to begin his apostrophe to empty air. The arrival of the belated spectre in the middle, with a jerk that made him nod all over, was the last accident in the chapter, and worthily topped the whole. It may be imagined how lamely matters ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... snatched convulsively at the handle of the protruded knife; but as soon as he nearly touched it, this end was immediately withdrawn, and the blade end substituted, which made the comic Macbeth instantly draw back again, and recommence his apostrophe. This scene had tickled the audience immensely, and Duncan, amid shouts of laughter, was just drawing the somewhat unwarrantable ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar

... "Herculanum" (for Herculanum) was used consistently. The English city is Peterboro' (with apostrophe) in its first few appearances, and then changes to Peterborough for the remainder of the book. The Italian city was conventionally spelled "Sienna" (with two ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin

... An Apostrophe (') denotes that a letter or letters are left out; as, O'er, for over; 't is, for it is. And is also used to show ownership; as, The man's hat. ...
— McGuffey's Third Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... the same style. Geoffrey teaches how to praise, blame, and ridicule; he gives models of good prosopopoeias; prosopopoeias for times of happiness: an apostrophe to England governed by Richard Coeur-de-Lion (we know how well he governed); prosopopoeia for times of sorrow: an apostrophe to England, whose sovereign (this same Richard) has been ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... apostrophe S had plodded by. Rover cycleshop. Those races are on today. How long ago is that? Year Phil Gilligan died. We were in Lombard street west. Wait: was in Thom's. Got the job in Wisdom Hely's year we married. Six years. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... original text. Inconsistent usage of American versus British spelling has also been retained. In the original text, positive contractions (He'll, I'd, I'll, I'm, they've, etc.) were printed with half spaces before the apostrophe. These spaces have ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White

... worked off his surplus stock of horse-play on his associates, he would vent it upon the compositor in some such apostrophe as the following: ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... Dix," he murmured—an apostrophe which caused the future statesman a paroxysm of amusement—"I am exceedingly glad to see you. I hope you like London. We're great friends, aren't we? And when you grow up, we're going to be greater. I don't want you to have anything to do ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... the heavens—and fancied you would see our poor, unhappy apparitions gliding through the sky; and, perhaps, exclaim, 'Poor Gilbert; he died in the good cause at last. It seems, however, that the necessity is spared of my making so pathetic an apostrophe. You had the good ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson

... general encomium, which leaves nothing behind it. Longinus has shown me that there is a third. He tells me his own feelings upon reading it; and tells them with so much energy, that he communicates them. I almost doubt which is more sublime, Homer's Battle of the Gods, or Longinus's Apostrophe to Terentianus ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... Eugene (he had recovered immediately on embarking), as they bumped heavily against a pile; and then in a lower voice reversed his late apostrophe by remarking ('I wish the boat of my honourable and gallant friend may be endowed with philanthropy enough not to turn bottom-upward and extinguish us!) Steady, steady! Sit close, Mortimer. ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... the editing: Italicized text is delimited with underlines (" "). Punctuation and spelling retained as in the printed text. Shaw intentionally spelled many words according to a non-standard system. For example, "don't" is given as "dont" (without apostrophe), "Dr." is given as "Dr" (without a period at the end), and "Shakespeare" is given as "Shakespear" (no "e" at the end). Where several characters in the play are speaking at once, I have indicated it with vertical bars ("|"). The pound ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw

... our telling her that Manuel was a native of Cordoba, and that I had come from the United States, without a word of warning she raised her hands, turned her eyes upward, and gave vent to a torrent of shrill, impassioned, apostrophe to her absent, artistic sister: "A dios, hermana mia, Anastasia Torres, to think that your art-products should penetrate to those distant lands, to those remote portions of the world, to be the wonder and admiration of foreign eyes. A dios, hermana mia, Anastasia ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr

... apostrophe he changed the conversation, and commenced an harangue on religion, (mistaking Coleridge for "un Philosophe" in the continental sense of the word) he talked of the Deity in a declamatory style very much resembling the devotional rants of that rude blunderer Mr. ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman

... deserves praise for his sinewy and occasionally picturesque verse. "The Bruce" is really a fine poem. The hero is noble, resolute, and wise. Sir James Douglas is a very perfect, gentle knight. The old Churchman had the true poetic fire in him. He rises into eloquence in an apostrophe to Freedom, and he fights the battle of Bannockburn over again with great valour, shouting, and flapping of standards. In England, nature seemed to have exhausted herself in Chaucer, and she lay quiescent till Lord Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt came, the immediate precursors ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... This apostrophe to the memory of our kind good mate was heartily responded to by all. Amongst others who were lost in that fatal night was the old Scotch sailor; but the subject was so painful to us, we never recurred to it, if ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton

... insufferably happy. Clifford is not sane yet, but is rallying. He is rallying considerably; for he spoke of plans for pushing the Herald Addition harder than ever when he gets home. And you know such a thing as business has never entered his mind for six months—unless it was business to write that 'Apostrophe to the Heart,' which he called a poem, and which, I don't mind admitting now, I hired his foreman to pi after ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick

... Paradise as high as the moon; and of others which make it higher than the middle region of the air." The preface and conclusion are noble examples of Elisabethan prose, and the book ends with an oft-quoted apostrophe to Death. "O eloquent, just: and mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou has persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... the Pollard system, and begin where you leave off! Go ahead, why don't you? Whatta you waiting for? Read on! What comes next? Why, croft, of course; anybody ought to know that—c-r-o-f-t, croft, Bancroft! What does that apostrophe mean? I mean, what does that punctuation mark between t and s stand for? You don't know? Take that, then! (whack). What comes after Bancroft? Spell it! Spell it, I tell you, and don't be all night about it! Can't, eh? Well, read it then; if you can't spell it, read it. H-i-s-t-o-r-y-ry, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various

... droll grimace and says, "No—thanks. I want all my nerves, I do, on this bit of road.—Walk along, Lady Barker: I'm ashamed of you, I am, hanging your head like that at a bit of a hill!" It was rather startling to hear this apostrophe all of a sudden, but as my namesake was a very hard-working little brown mare, I could only laugh ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various

... parenthesis—were not pure-minded at all, very much otherwise; but they no more dare betray their natural coarseness in M. Paul's presence, than they dare tread purposely on his corns, laugh in his face during a stormy apostrophe, or speak above their breath while some crisis of irritability was covering his human visage with the mask of an intelligent tiger. M. Paul, then, might dance with whom he would—and woe be to the interference which ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... ocean. The sight of these always affected me powerfully. My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul's complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass

... in this eloquent apostrophe of the difficulty of determining among men who shall be the sun and who the satellite, nor of the fact that the actual arrangements, in Shakespeare's time, at any rate, depended altogether upon that very force which Ulysses deprecates. In another scene in the same play the ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy

... already in the public estimation in the elevated position he aspired to reach. Men became accustomed to identify him with the names he cited; he made a loud noise in order to prepare minds for great commotions; he announced himself proudly to the nation, in that sublime apostrophe in his address to the Marseillais: "When the last of the Gracchi expired, he flung dust toward heaven, and from this dust sprang Marius!—Marius, who was less great for having exterminated the Cimbri than for having prostrated in Rome the aristocracy ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various

... tempestuous times, the unknown writer of the Stuyvesant manuscript breaks out into an apostrophe in praise of the good St. Nicholas, to whose protecting care he ascribes the dissensions which broke out in the council of the league, and the direful witchcraft which filled all Yankee land ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... have just been talking it over with Symonds; and we agreed that whether for its metrical effects, for its brief, plain, stirring words of portraiture, as—he "that never lost an English gun," or—the soldier salute; or for the heroic apostrophe to Nelson; that ode has never been surpassed in any tongue or time. Grant me the Duke, O Weg! I suppose you must not put in yours about the warship; you will have to admit worse ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... (if we, as well as Augustus Tomlinson, may indulge in an apostrophe)—beautiful evening! For thee all poets have had a song, and surrounded thee with rills and waterfalls and dews and flowers and sheep and bats and melancholy and owls; yet we must confess that to us, who in this very sentimental age are a bustling, worldly, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... supposition that the apostrophe 's as a mark of the possessive case is a segment of his, a question which has been lately ...
— Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue - A Treates, noe shorter than necessarie, for the Schooles • Alexander Hume

... passed a very large haystack. It occurred to the provident laird {p.057} that this would be extremely convenient to fodder his new stock of cattle; but as no means of transporting it were obvious, he was fain to take leave of it with the apostrophe, now become proverbial—'By my saul, had ye but four feet, ye should not stand lang there.' In short, as Froissart says of a similar class of feudal robbers, nothing came amiss to them that was not too heavy ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart

... this apostrophe, a long and harmonious note from the head-keeper's horn, vibrating in the distance, came and died away upon our ears; after which, a confused clamour of voices arose, and ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle

... received him with a strange nervousness; was there any crime in my record, I asked fitfully, for which I had been traced to this obscure suburb for condign arrest and decapitation? Ha! ha! it was my heart, not my lips, that laughed. I could have cried out like Enoch Arden in his dying apostrophe:— ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... and yet it is easy to exaggerate the share which romantic feeling had in the Oxford movement. In his famous apostrophe to Oxford, Matthew Arnold personifies the university as a "queen of romance," an "adorable dreamer whose heart has been so romantic," "spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age," ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... This apostrophe Mr. Granger perfectly understood—it meant that, with the advent of Clarissa, happiness had fled away from Sophia's dwelling-place. He did not trouble himself to notice the speech; but it made him ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... boast he lala kamahele no ka laau ku i ka pali is uncertain. I take it to be a punning reference to the Pali family from whom the chief sprang, but it may simply be a way of saying "I am a very high chief." Kamahele is a term applied to a favorite and petted child, as, in later religious apostrophe, to ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous

... associated with it, have left deep marks on Alan Seeger's poetry. The vacation voyages thither speak in this apostrophe from the ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger

... depth of hopeless apathy, from which it may take long years of civil tumult to raise them? May we not find the explanation of this strange phenomenon in the contrast of Catholic unity with Protestant diversity? "Thou that killest the prophets!"—the system to which this apostrophe can be applied is doomed. And it matters little who ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... a poetic license no more significant of polytheism than the flights of fancy of many Christian poets in odes to the moon, to Fate, "to the red planet Mars," to the "wild west wind." Mere impersonation and invocation in apostrophe and paeans are not necessarily worship. Doubtless these spells and charms often arose from a superstitious half-belief, an imaginative freak, such as possesses the civilized visionary who shows a coin to the new moon to propitiate its fancied waxing influence in behalf of a balance ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... write to the king on conjugal affairs!—his majesty having left her majesty only the day before, to show himself to his loving subjects at Palermo. Hem! Campania felix! If we were known to be inditing this unreverential passage, and its disloyal apostrophe, we should, no doubt, be invited to leave "Campania the happy" at a day's notice; whereas our comfort is, that this day three months it is quite possible that it will ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various

... not, [14] I suppose, at a later day, have affected me like that spectacle. I do not certainly know whether I heard the sermon on the occasion by the pastor, the Rev. Ephraim Judson; but at any rate it was so represented to me that it always seems as if I had heard it, especially the apostrophe to the remains that rested beneath that dark pall in the aisle. "General Ashley!" he said, and ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey

... was proud, though faint, which accompanied the apostrophe, addressed either to his country or to his father's personification of it; it was inexpressibly pathetic to Vittoria, who understood his 'Oesterreich,' and saw the weak and helpless bleeding man, with his eyeballs working under the lids, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... a well-known church is generally omitted, although it is frequently a convenience for out-of-town friends to know it. Names of churches ending with "s," as Saint Thomas, are written with an apostrophe "s"—thus, Saint Thomas's. ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke

... During the apostrophe of the Dominie, the boys perceiving that he was no longer wrapped up in his algebra, had partly settled to their desks, and in their apparent attention to their lessons reminded me of the humming of bees before a hive on ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat

... gods, among whom is the person speaking, both classes are well indicated by saying, "they are obedient" and "we are submissive." In another way leaving the person who is spoken of, he changes from one to another. This is called specifically Apostrophe, and affects us by its emotional character and stimulates the hearer, as in the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... plainly from the apostrophe to the great in the third verse, that Tibbald could not be the person, who was never an author in fashion, or caressed by the great; whereas this single characteristic is sufficient to point out the true hero, who, above all other poets of his time, was the peculiar delight ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope

... binds him, Prometheus utters no sound—it is Vulcan, the agent of his punishment, that alone complains. Nor is it till the dread task is done, and the ministers of Jupiter have retired, that "the god, unawed by the wrath of gods," bursts forth with his grand apostrophe...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... interrogation without allowing his deafness to be too apparent. The written charges were to him what the dog is to the blind man. If his deafness did happen to betray him here and there, by some incoherent apostrophe or some unintelligible question, it passed for profundity with some, and for imbecility with others. In neither case did the honor of the magistracy sustain any injury; for it is far better that a judge should be reputed imbecile or profound than deaf. Hence he took great care to conceal ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... Mrs. Temperly herself would never give his displeasure the benefit of dropping the affectionate form. She might shut her door to him altogether, but he would always be her kinsman and her dear. She was much addicted to these little embellishments of human intercourse—the friendly apostrophe and even the caressing hand—and there was something homely and cosy, a rustic, motherly bonhomie, in her use of them. She was as lavish of them as she was really careful in the ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James

... reiterated Crimsworth; and to complete his apostrophe, he cracked the whip straight ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell

... nature, as he followed the appeal of his second. 'Life is sweet;' and, though the compound was nauseous, and a necessity upon him of swallowing it in horrid instalments, spoonful after spoonful, yet, though not without many interruptions, and many a shocking apostrophe, and even some sudden paroxysms of horror, which alarmed Puddock, he did contrive to get through it pretty well, except a little residuum in the bottom, which ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... (8th-bit) characters: [^a] [^e] vowel with circumflex accent ("hat") ['e] ['e] vowel with acute or grave accent / accent mark ("naked" acute accent), shown between or after syllables. This form was adopted to avoid confusion with the ordinary apostrophe in words ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman

... supposed from this apostrophe that when I fell at once to love my master's wife I saw in her more than my lamp and my saint, the gracious presence which should "imparadise," in Dante's phrase, my mind. I was an honest lad, very serious and very simple. ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett

... This apostrophe, briefly responded to in another voice, gave him time quickly to raise the curtain and show himself, passing into the room with a "Go on, go on!" and a gesture earnestly deprecating ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James

... manner of speculation, cast into that sort of imaginative philosophical expression, in which, in effect, the language itself is inseparable from, or essentially a part of, the thought. France, an Ode, begins with a famous apostrophe to Liberty— ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... apostrophe, delivered with mournful intensity, Bell retreated hastily behind a post of the veranda, and even Susan Aurora Bulger giggled faintly, with her ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards

... Miltonic reminiscences in "The Seasons." The moon's "spotted disk" ("Autumn," 1091) is Milton's "spotty globe." The apostrophe to light ("Spring" 90-96) borrows its "efflux divine" from Milton's "bright effluence of bright essence increate" ("Paradise Lost," III. 1-12) ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... to the ramparts. There, at least, thought I to myself, I may range undisturbed, and talk with my old friends the breezes, and address my discourse to the waves, and be as romantic and whimsical as I please; but it happened that I had scarcely begun my apostrophe, before out flaunted a whole rank of officers, with ladies and abbes and puppy dogs, singing, and flirting, and making such a hubbub, that I had not one peaceful moment to observe the bright tints of the western horizon, or enjoy the ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford

... will never be content to write tunes for a text-book of physics, he boldly confounds the arbitrary limits of matter and morals in one splendid apostrophe to Duty:- ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh

... were at first, unless you constitutionally possess certain qualifications, and are at the same time distinguished by a plentiful lack of other gifts and acquirements, for which, notwithstanding, you are fain to take credit. This rather obscure apostrophe is written expressly for the benefit of such imaginative litterateurs and conversational liars as it ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... putting the remains of a crust into his wallet—and this should have been thy portion, said he, hadst thou been alive to have shared it with me.—I thought, by the accent, it had been an apostrophe to his child; but 'twas to his ass, and to the very ass we had seen dead in the road, which had occasioned La Fleur's misadventure. The man seemed to lament it much; and it instantly brought into my mind Sancho's lamentation for his; ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne

... notes are very amusing, and those of recent editors occasionally provoke a smile. If once a blunder has been made it is persisted in. Take, for instance, a glaring one in the 2nd part of Henry IV., where, in the apostrophe to sleep, "clouds" ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.11.17 • Various



Words linked to "Apostrophe" :   punctuation, apostrophize



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