"Colloquial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... explain that the Herr Professor was in London to learn English, and had taken a vow during his residence neither to speak nor listen to his native tongue. It was remarked that his acquaintance with colloquial English slang, for a foreigner, was quite unusual. Occasionally he was too rude, even for a scientist, informing ladies, clamouring to know how he liked English women, that he didn't like them silly; telling ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... infrequent here in the case of our public men, among whom the study of French had been very uncommon; and for many of them the old colonial habit of fitting boys for college by training them to the colloquial use of Latin proved to be a great convenience. Colonel Fontaine's anecdote implies, what is altogether probable, that Patrick Henry's early drill in Latin had included the ordinary colloquial use of it; for he says that in the case of the visitor in question his grandfather was ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... Devil to tempt man astray, and to rejoice in his fall; neither was there any belief that righteous behaviour in this world would lead at death to absorption in the Deity. To God, understood in this sense, the people gave the name Tien, which in the colloquial language was used of the sky; and when, in the first stages of the written character, it became necessary to express the idea of Tien, they did not attempt any vague picture of the heavens, but set down the rude outline of a ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... charming little volume, Home Pictures of English Poets, which thou wast kind enough to send me, and which I hope is having a wide circulation as it deserves. Its analysis of character and estimate of literary merit strike me as in the main correct. Its racy, colloquial style, enlivened by anecdote and citation, makes it anything but a dull book. It seems to me admirably adapted to supply a want in hearth ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... the Tongue, if such there are, And make colloquial happiness your care, Preserve me from the thing I dread and hate, A duel in the form of a debate. Vociferated logic kills me quite. A noisy man is always ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... When Johnson silenced Boswell's chatter with the words, 'Sir, we know our will is free and there's an end on't,' he expressed a great truth in language not the less philosophically accurate on account of its colloquial curtness. The consciousness possessed by an agent about to perform an act, that he is at liberty to perform it or not, is really conclusive evidence that the act is free. For it matters not a jot whether consciousness be 'an independent faculty,' or whether—as, Mr. Buckle reminds ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... Universalists, or of the more numerous sect of the Presbyterians, was accidentally in the neighborhood, he was ordinarily invited to officiate, and was commonly rewarded for his services by a collection in a hat, before the congregation separated. When no such regular minister offered, a kind of colloquial prayer or two was made by some of the more gifted members, and a sermon was usually read, from Sterne, by Mr. ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... Colloquial language uses the terms Midge and Gnat to describe the tiny insects which we often see dancing in a ray of sunlight. There is something of everything in those aerial ballets. It is possible that the persecutrix of the Cabbage-caterpillar is there, along with many another; ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... enlightened Felix, had it not been for two drawbacks to their means of inter-communication. In the first place, the Boupari dialect, though agreeing in all essentials with the Polynesian of Fiji, nevertheless contained a great many words and colloquial expressions unknown to the Fijians; this being particularly the case, as Felix soon remarked, in the whole vocabulary of religious rites and ceremonies. And in the second place, the Shadow was so rigidly bound by his own narrow and insular set of ideas, that he couldn't understand the ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... in that positive state of mind which is expressed by the colloquial phrase of being on her high horse. I—as the male part of creation always must in such cases—became very meek and retiring, and promised to close my eyes and ears, and not dream, or think, or want to know, anything which it was not agreeable to Mary and my mother ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... defended by some authorities as being in perfectly good use, and by others it is denounced as being incorrect. Both good deal and greet deal are somewhat colloquial, and should be used sparingly ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... as I have used all those with whom I have been brought into close contact. Search my memory as I will, I cannot recall a case of man or woman who ever occupied any considerable part of my thoughts without contributing largely towards my moral or physical welfare. In other words, and in very colloquial language, I never had useless friends hanging about me. From this crude statement of a signal fact, the thoughtless reader will at once judge me rapacious, egoistical, false, fawning, mendacious. Well, I ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... when they were in so slight a degree that strict politeness would rather tolerate than ridicule them. Dr. Darwin seldom failed to present their caricature in jocose but wounding irony. If these ingredients of colloquial despotism were discernible in unworn existence, they increased as it advanced, fed by an ever growing reputation within and without the pale ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... adaptation of our verbs to the nominative thou, a modern innovation which substitutes you for thou, in familiar style, has generally been adopted. This innovation contributes greatly to the harmony of our colloquial style. You was formerly restricted to the plural number; but now it is employed to represent either a singular or a plural noun. It ought to be recollected, however, that when used as the representative ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... to his charge, I am not qualified to decide. I knew him only as a pleasant, gentlemanly man in society; and the indecision of his character rather added to the amenity of his conversation. But when translated from the colloquial circle to the great stage of national concerns, and the direction of the extensive operations of war, whether he has been able to seize at one glance the long line of defenceless border presented by our enemy, the masses of strength which we hold on different points of it, the facility this ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... of marsupial species of the genus Wallabia, etc., related to the kangaroo, but smaller; (colloquial) "on the wallaby (track)", on the move, ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... part commences with an apology for his colloquial style; he is, as he has always been, the enemy of rhetoric, and knows of no rhetoric but truth; he will not falsify his character by making a speech. Then he proceeds to divide his accusers into two classes; first, there is the nameless accuser—public opinion. All the world from ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... the University of Cambridge, Eng., the lowest honor in the schools. The manner in which this word is used is explained in the Gradus ad Cantabrigiam, as follows: "Satis disputasti; which is at much as to say, in the colloquial style, 'Bad enough.' Satis et bene disputasti, 'Pretty fair,—tolerable.' Satis et optime disputasti, 'Go thy ways, thou flower and quintessence of Wranglers.' Such are the compliments to be expected from the Moderator, after ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... supreme manifestation of the measure for dramatic purposes. In his plays it modulates and adapts itself to the changing emotions of every speaker, "from merely colloquial dialogue to strains of impassioned soliloquy, from comic repartee to tragic eloquence, from terse epigrams to elaborate descriptions." It is customary to distinguish three 'periods' in Shakespeare's blank verse, ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... one word of French beyond the colloquial phrases with which everybody is familiar; but he would ask his daughter to read the crisp and tinkling tongue to him for hours at a time. He would hammer softly and file gently as she read, so that he might not lose a word of it. He would ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... value to the terms in question—a proceeding in which we have the countenance of nearly every modern historian—we do not detach them from their original acceptation; at most we give them more constancy and precision than the colloquial language of the Greeks and Romans demanded.[12] The expressions Khasdim and Chaldaei were used in the Bible and by classic authors mainly to denote the inhabitants of Babylon and its neighbourhood; and we find Strabo attaching with precision the name Aturia, which is ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... colloquial words or phrases occurring in the narrative were largely determined by general usage: To depot to cache or to place a stock of provisions in a depot; drift drift-snow; fifty-mile wind a wind of fifty miles an hour; burberry "Burberry gabardine" or specially prepared wind-proof ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... courage for any more sustained effort than a song. And the nature of the songs is itself characteristic of these idle later years; for they are often as polished and elaborate as his earlier works were frank, and headlong, and colloquial; and this sort of verbal elaboration in short flights is, for a man of literary turn, simply the most agreeable of pastimes. The change in manner coincides exactly with the Edinburgh visit. In 1786 he had written the ADDRESS TO A LOUSE, which may be taken as an extreme instance ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... disorderly syntax, the colloquial diction, the chatty tone, the run-on lines, the conscious roughness of meter and rhyme, may have derived from Churchill, but they become here more relevant than in any of Churchill's satires. They combine with the intemperate tone and the satirist's concluding confession, his self-identification ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... and results of this half-philosophical literature will most easily be understood by a few examples. But, before these are given, it will be necessary to emphasize the colloquial and scrappy nature of the teaching. Legend, parable, ritualistic absurdities, belief in gods, denial of gods, belief in heaven, denial of heaven, are all mingled, and for a purpose. For some men are able, and some are unable, to receive the true light of knowledge. ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... quite on the wrong tack. She screwed up her little mouth, as if tasting some nasty medicine, and then said in excellent colloquial English: ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... case! Careless himself about examining and quoting authorities with punctilious accuracy, and trusting too frequently to the ipse-dixits of good friends:—with a quick discernment—a sparkling fancy—great store of classical knowledge, and a never ceasing play of colloquial wit, he moved right onwards in his manly course—the delight of the gay, and the admiration of the learned! He wrote much and variously: but in an evil hour the demon Malice caught him abroad—watched ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... containing 'strange things'? Were ever such vague puerilities collected into one short paragraph? This is pure impertinence, and Phil. deserves to be privately reprimanded for quoting such windy chaff without noting and protesting it as colloquial. But what I wish the reader to mark—the [Greek: tho hepimhythion]—is, that suppose the two Scaligers amongst the Christian Fathers engaged in fixing the canon: greater learning you cannot have; neither was there, to a dead certainty, one tenth part as much ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... life, running swift and eager and many-colored; and it seemed to her that back in the house of four-posters and walls of subdued gray, life was smothered in the very best pink cotton-batting. Milt's delight in every picturesque dark corner, and the colloquial eloquence of the street-orators, stirred her. And when she saw a shopgirl caress the hand of a slouching beau in threadbare brown, her own hand slipped into ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... wonderfully quick the Chinese pick up a colloquial foreign tongue; the same tailor for instance experiencing no difficulty in making himself understood in English, French, Russian, or Spanish; English, though, is the language par excellence along all the China seaboard. So universal is it that ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... without affirming his holding the same view at the time of speaking. Madvig, 357, a, Obs. 1. A 341, d, Rem. — ODIOSA: this word is not so strong as our 'hateful', but rather means 'wearisome', 'annoying'. In Plautus the frequent expression odiosus es means, in colloquial English, 'you bore me'. Cf. 47 odiosum et molestum; 65 odiosa offensio. — ONUS AETNA GRAVIUS: a proverbial expression with an allusion to Enceladus, who, after the defeat of the Giants by Juppiter, was said to have been ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... this was only the preliminary to a long dinner that followed and refreshments that apparently continued until two o'clock in the morning. The speeches were really perfectly marvellous and delivered in English quite colloquial and very witty and showing a detailed knowledge of Gilbert's works which no Englishman of my acquaintance possesses. Gilbert made an excellent, in fact, a very eloquent speech in reply, which drew ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... written entirely in the Basque of Larramendi's Dictionary would be intelligible to very few. I have read passages from it to men of Guipuscoa, who assured me that they had no difficulty in understanding it, and that it was written in the colloquial style of ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... a letter should be. It seems, upon the whole, to have been Cicero's opinion—and in this we shall fain agree as well as in his view of the secrecy of letters—that, whether the subject be solemn or familiar, learned or colloquial, general or particular, political or domestic, an easy, vivacious, unaffected diction gives to epistolary writing its proper grace ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... nine cases out of ten we continue to read it simply because it entails no mental effort. We do not have to think of what we are reading; our eyes gallop over sentence after sentence, and so long as the language is colloquial and the facts are bald, all is well, and we can go on and on. It is not only the body that, unchecked, is inclined to be slothful. Unless we have as complete a control over our minds as we have over our limbs, it is ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... of my remarks I happened—maybe a little incautiously—to call the Authorised Version a 'miracle'; using that word in a colloquial sense, in which no doubt you accepted it; meaning no more than that the thing passed my understanding. I have allowed that the famous forty-seven owed an immense deal to earlier translators—to the Bishops, to Tyndale, ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... old doc is a lifesaver, sure enough," said a young subaltern, answering to the name of "Sally," colloquial for Salford, as he stood amid a circle of officers gathered in the smoking room a few minutes later. "A lifesaver," repeated Sally, with emphasis. "He can have me for his laboratory ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... explained to him drolly enough; but the boy rarely condescended to use it himself, though he dealt in colloquial Latin as if he ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... use of language is highly self-conscious, and abounds in marks of elaborateness, as if their mind were more intent on the figure they are making than on what they are talking about: so that the right colloquial tone is lost in a certain ambitious, oratorical, got-up manner of speech; and we feel a want of that plain, native, spontaneous talk wherein heart and tongue keep touch and time together: in short, they speak rather as authors having an audience in ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... at the store in New Salem that Lincoln made the acquaintance of Richard Yates, contemporarily in office with him as war governor of Illinois. So proud were the citizens of the colloquial abilities of their rising young man that they used to show him to visitors as their lion. Yates was introduced and stayed to hear him roar. Later, Lincoln asked him to join him in his noon meal at the cabin where a woman boarded him. The latter was one of ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... rightly, said that by so many more languages as a man knows, by so many more times is he a man—an apophthegm of but a shallow kind if all he meant to convey was that an Englishman who can speak French is also a Frenchman by virtue of his knowledge of the colloquial. The opening up of new fields of thought through the medium of a new literature, is a result more worthy the effort of acquiring a foreign language than sparkling in a salon with the purest imaginable accent; and herein Sir W. Hamilton counted without Chinese. The greater ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... growing, all mixed up with a smell of wood smoke and pine woods and huge precipices and remote gleams of snow-fields and the sound of cascading torrents rushing through deep gorges far below. It is mixed, too, with gossips with waitresses and fellow travellers, with my first essays in colloquial German and Italian, with disputes about the way to take, and other things that I will tell of in another section. But the white passion of human service was our dominant theme. Not simply perhaps nor altogether unselfishly, but ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... not carry the standards of conversation into formal writing. Colloquial usage is more free than literary usage. The colloquial sentence That's the man I talked with becomes in writing That is the man with whom I talked. The colloquial sentence It was a cold day but there wasn't any wind blowing is a loose string of words. Written discourse requires greater ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... pioneers gained an inkling of the organization of the group, it was often compounded with the tribal name as "Santee-Sioux," "Yanktonnai-Sioux," "Sisseton-Sioux," etc. As acquaintance between white men and red increased, the stock name was gradually displaced by tribe names until the colloquial appellation "Sioux" became but a memory or tradition throughout much of the territory formerly dominated by the great Siouan stock. One of the reasons for the abandonment of the name was undoubtedly its inappropriateness ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... More narrowly considered, as 'external style,' it designates the author's use of language. Questions to be asked in regard to external style are such as these: Is it good or bad, careful or careless, clear and easy or confused and difficult; simple or complex; terse and forceful (perhaps colloquial) or involved and stately; eloquent, balanced, rhythmical; vigorous, or musical, languid, delicate and decorative; varied or monotonous; plain or figurative; poor or rich in connotation and poetic suggestiveness; beautiful, or only clear and strong? Are the ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... chaps shove it under our noses." Beetle dropped into a drawling parody of King's most biting colloquial style—the gentle rain after the thunder-storm. "Well, it's all very sufficiently vile and disgraceful, isn't it? I don't know who comes out of it worst: Tulke, who happens to have been caught; or the other fellows who haven't. ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... provoked the mirth of his hearers. His faults were that he was drunken, dirty, quarrelsome, dissolute, and somewhat of a cheat. I put up with all his deficiences, because he dressed my hair to my taste, and his constant chattering offered me the opportunity of practising the colloquial French which cannot be acquired from books. He has always assured me that he was born in Picardy, the son of a common peasant, and that he had deserted from the French army. He may have deceived me when he said that ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... necessary to explain here that Pesca prided himself on being a perfect Englishman in his language, as well as in his dress, manners, and amusements. Having picked up a few of our most familiar colloquial expressions, he scattered them about over his conversation whenever they happened to occur to him, turning them, in his high relish for their sound and his general ignorance of their sense, into compound words and repetitions of his own, and always running them into ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... owed to the Spanish drama, which under Lope and Cervantes sprang suddenly into a grandeur that almost rivalled their own. In the intermixture of tragedy and comedy, in the abandonment of the solemn uniformity of poetic diction for the colloquial language of real life, the use of unexpected incidents, the complication of their plots and intrigues, the dramas of England and Spain are remarkably alike; but the likeness seems rather to have sprung from a ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... and European cities. Inasmuch as there are no letters in the Chinese language, the difficulties in using the Morse code of telegraphy are very great. In some cases the messages are translated into a foreign language before they are transmitted; in others, a thousand or more words in colloquial and commercial use are numbered, and the number is ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... necessity for writing decent dialogue—not mere stage dialect that may be scamped and ranted ad libitum by the "star" to suit his own taste, or want of it, but real dialogue, which, while ideally reflecting the colloquial language of the day, taxes the intelligence and feeling of the actor to ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... old native men and women who still speak the native tongue, from whom I noted down all the information herein reproduced. When the difficulties encountered in obtaining the grammar of any language which is purely colloquial are taken into consideration, I feel sure that all necessary allowances will be made for the imperfections of ...
— The Wiradyuri and Other Languages of New South Wales • Robert Hamilton Mathews
... originally employed when the poetry was of the Satyric order, and had greater affinities with dancing. Once dialogue had come in, Nature herself discovered the appropriate measure. For the iambic is, of all measures, the most colloquial: we see it in the fact that conversational speech runs into iambic lines more frequently than into any other kind of verse; rarely into hexameters, and only when we drop the colloquial intonation. The additions ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... with sober imagery. A suitable phrase, placed in its correct position and saying without fuss the things we want to say, necessitates a choice, an often laborious choice. There are drab words, the commonplaces of colloquial speech; and there are, so to speak, colored words, which may be compared with the brushstrokes strewing patches of light over the gray background of a painting. How are we to find those picturesque words, those striking features ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... in the room for a minute, and after that, for the first time, I heard some plain colloquial German, with no accompaniment of scratching or rustling. 'I must wait for this,' I ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... symbols of moral rectitude, which forms such a striking feature of European masonry, finds no place in the ceremonial of the Triad Society, although recognized as such in Chinese literature from the days of Confucius, and still so employed in the every-day colloquial of China. ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... dog Latin, but Latin ingeniously italianized, or rather Italian, even Mantuan, latinized. The contrast between the modern form of the word and its Roman garb produces the most amusing effect. In the original it is sometimes difficult to read, for Folengo has no objection to using the most colloquial words and phrases. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... women, but they used colloquialisms freely, and had an ingenuous habit of referring to the prices of things. Bettina Vanderpoel, who was the richest and cleverest and most promisingly handsome among them, was colloquial to slanginess, but she had a deep, mellow, child voice and an ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... as himill, heaven, the original sig. of which may have been fire, but afterwards a gem, as in the N. word gimsteinn; whence also our colloquial words, gim, ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... but Mr. T—- himself prefers the easy enjoyments of private life, and has kept himself aloof from politics and parties. Were I to form an estimate of his qualifications to excel in public speaking, by the clearness and beautiful propriety of his colloquial language, I should conclude that he was still destined to perform a distinguished part. But he is content with the liberty of a private station, as a spectator only, and, perhaps, in that he shows his wisdom; for undoubtedly such men are ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... with which he spoke of Freddy. The lady of the house was a little, round, merry-looking woman, chiefly remarkable (as I soon discovered) for a peculiar mental obliquity, leading her always to think of the wrong thing at the wrong time, whereby she was perpetually becoming involved in grievous colloquial entanglements, and meeting with innumerable small personal accidents, at which no one laughed so heartily ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... pretence of wanting to see each other; and when they returned home, they would cry out with a glad voice, saying, "We made sixteen calls and found fourteen of them out" —not meaning that they found out anything important against the fourteen—no, that was only a colloquial phrase to signify that they were not at home—and their manner of saying it expressed their lively satisfaction in that fact. Now their pretence of wanting to see the fourteen—and the other two whom they had been less lucky with—was that commonest and mildest form of lying which is sufficiently ...
— On the Decay of the Art of Lying • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
... Marakinoff leaned over, translated to Lugur. The red dwarf smiled maliciously, drew near the priestess; whispered to her what was without doubt as near as he could come in the Murian to Larry's own very colloquial phrases. ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... same discrepancies in the sequence of events that we observe in the four Gospels, to say nothing about the numerous apocryphal Gospels. This is just what we as historians expected, in fact it could scarcely be otherwise. Christ's message had first to pass through the colloquial process, the leavening process of oral transmission; then followed the reduction to written form, and it is this that we have, apart from the corruptions of copyists. It is difficult to conceive ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... A glossary of South African colloquial words and phrases and of place and other names. London and ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... to learn Latin anyway, why not kill two birds with one stone, and make Latin our universal language? Why not have a colloquial, every-day Latin, such as the Romans used to speak in Italy? In point of fact, Latin was the universal language with travelers and educated people all through the Middle Ages. We need to learn it anyhow, so why not make it our ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... gov'nor," responded Millwaters promptly, dropping into colloquial Cockney speech. He turned to Perkwite and winked. "Well, an' wot abaht this 'ere bit o' business as I've come rahnd abaht, Mister?" he went on, nudging his companion, in ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... train of conversation—to retrace which were utterly impossible—they invariably arrived at old times again. Having in course of the evening pretty well exhausted their powers, both mental and physical, they went to sleep on it, and resumed the colloquial melange ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... thus casually given, she took in full measure. For twenty minutes, by the clock, she aired her views in a stream of vigorous colloquial English, lapsing into ready-made phrases of melodrama, common to the normally inexpressive, in moments ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... later style, with the voice not loud but distinct, the utterance never hurried beyond the point of immediate comprehension, but carrying the attention of the audience with it, eager to the end. Two letters of warning and remonstrance against the habits of lecturing in a colloquial tone, suitable to a knot of students gathered round his table, but not to a large audience—of running his words, especially technical terms, together—of pouring out new and unfamiliar matter at breakneck speed, were addressed ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... exercise in blank verse. Its smooth and spacious rhythm, flawless and serene as the distant Greek myth of the hero and the goddess it celebrates, is in striking contrast with the rougher, but brighter and more humanly colloquial blank verse of "Bishop Blougram's Apology," for example, or the stiff carefulness of the "Epistle" of Karshish. It might alone suffice, by comparison with the metrical craftsmanship of the other poems ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... was not less original in the logical than in the illustrative portions of his discourses. His logic was of that familiar, colloquial kind which shakes hands with common sense like an old friend. Sometimes, too, his great mind and great heart would be poured out on the vast themes of religion, in language which, though homely, produced all the effects of the sublime. He once preached a discourse on the text, "the High and Holy ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... craft. A letter written in this vein annihilates distance; it continues the personal gossip, the intimate communion, that has been interrupted by separation; it preserves one's presence in absence. It cannot be too simple, too commonplace, too colloquial. Its familiarity is not its weakness, but its supreme virtue. If it attempts to be orderly and stately and elaborate, it may be a good essay, but it will certainly be ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... generally with clamour. An Australian football term dating from about 1880. The verb has been ruled unparliamentary by the Speaker in the Victorian Legislative Assembly. It is, however, in very common colloquial use. It is from the aboriginal word borak (q.v.), and the sense of jeering is earlier than that of supporting, but jeering at one side is akin to cheering for the other. Another suggested derivation is from the Irish pronunciation of "Bark," as (according ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... sweet colloquial din, Unheard the sullen sleet-winds shout; And though the winter rage without, The social summer ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... 'What striking sacrifices of sexual honour does this one fact argue!' The French style is remarkable for simplicity—'a strange pretension for anything French;' but on the whole the intellectual merits of their style are small, 'chiefly negative,' and 'founded on the accident of their colloquial necessities.' They are amply compensated, too, by 'the prodigious defects of the French in all the higher qualities of prose composition.' Even their handwriting is the 'very vilest form of scribbling which exists in Europe,' and they and the Germans are 'the two most gormandising ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Mayence and from thence to Metz and Paris. In the diligence from Mayence and indeed all the way to Paris I found a very amusing society. There were two physicians and M. L[emaitre], a most entertaining man and of inexhaustible colloquial talent; for, except when he slept, he never ceased to talk. His conversation was however always interesting and entertaining, for he had figured in the early part of the French Revolution and was well known in the political and litterary ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... ends thus: "Never, so long as there is left of Plymouth Rock a piece large enough to make a gunflint of!" "This," Professor Phelps says, "is purest idiomatic English." He adds, "The old Scotch interrogative, 'What for?' is as pure English in written as in colloquial speech." ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... perfect colloquial English was gently murmured at me with a French accent as the gentle ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... that she began to think it would be rather a luxury to be a little fatigued. She moreover half suspected that Deborah might, and would do better, if not embarrassed with that feeling of hurry and perplexity, which so many of what in colloquial phrase are sometimes termed slow-moulded people, experience when obliged to divide their attention among a ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... three months were passed mainly in this tent. Gilmour used, whenever possible, to return to Kiachta to spend the Sunday at Grant's house; but by enduring the hardships and suffering all the inconveniences of ordinary Mongol life he rapidly acquired the colloquial, and he also made an indelible impression upon the minds and hearts of the natives, who ever afterwards spoke of him as 'Our Gilmour.' He saw Mongol life as it was, free from all the illusion and romance sometimes thrown around it. He became intimately acquainted with the various ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... merit,—pictures in which elusive moods and subtle sentiments of nature are grasped with imaginative insight and denoted and interpreted with a free, delicate, and luminous touch. He has also addressed the public as an author. He has written an easy, colloquial account of his own life, and that breezy, off-hand, expeditious work,—after passing it as a serial through their Century Magazine,—the Century Company has published in a beautiful volume. It is a work that, for the sake of the writer, will be welcomed everywhere, and, for its ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... assented the contractor again, and then he said something in Spanish to the aged Mexican. What it was Tom could not catch, for Delazes spoke rapidly and seemed to use some colloquial, or slang phrases with which our hero was not familiar. The old Mexican assented by a nod, and then he brought out some corn meal which Eradicate took. The woman with the golden image had gone into an ...
— Tom Swift in the City of Gold, or, Marvelous Adventures Underground • Victor Appleton
... as they wended their way To chapel, engaged in colloquial fray— An earnest logomachy, bitter as gall, Concerning poor Adam and what made him fall. "'Twas Predestination," cried one—"for the Lord Decreed he should fall of his own accord." "Not so—'twas Free will," the other maintained, "Which ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... and subjects Euripides often arbitrarily departed from the received legends, and diminished the dignity of tragedy by depriving it of its ideal character, and by bringing it down to the level of every-day life. His dialogue was garrulous and colloquial, wanting in heroic dignity, and frequently frigid through misplaced philosophical disquisitions. Yet in spite of all these faults Euripides has many beauties, and is particularly remarkable for pathos, so that Aristotle calls him ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... marrying man—(where, alas, is that time!) have seen their richly laden gondolas go to pieces there: the flower of the cargo went to the bottom, the ballast of the marriage remained. In short, to make use of a colloquial expression, as you talk over your marriage with yourself you say, as you look at Caroline, "She is not what I took ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... still among the best, and Blackie was a Lowlander, was born, indeed, in the Saltmarket of Glasgow. My frequent visits to the north and west have convinced me that another difficulty in the way of a possible resurgence of Gaelic is the lack of a recognised standard of colloquial speech. The language is split up into many dialects, each possessing its own special idioms and vocabulary. A Glasgow firm of printers not long ago conceived the idea of printing post-cards with Gaelic greetings: they found that every ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... to its style, Dr. Johnson, who was himself greatly distinguished for his colloquial abilities, says that "no style is more extensively acceptable than the narrative, because this does not carry an air of superiority over the rest of the company; and, therefore, is most likely to please them. For this purpose we should store our memory ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... ahead, chuckling, to join her daughter, Farrel knew that at all events he had earned the approval of the influential member of the Parker family. Mrs. Parker, on her part, was far more excited than her colloquial ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... New Orleans later than '62. At any rate, Tims is at least eighty-five, and possibly older. Here again we have a definite conviction of the use of the word Ku Klux before the War. The way he talks of it, the term might have been a colloquial term applied to a jayhawker or a patroller. He doesn't mean Ku Klux Klan when he says ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... matter out clearly, you will see that the answer to the problem of every human being, diverse as these problems are, the gratification of every human desire, the realization of every human ambition, may be summed up in two brief colloquial injunctions, namely: first, have the goods; second, to be able to sell them. Neither one of these is complete without the other. No man can permanently succeed in any truly desirable way unless he has something tangible or intangible, spiritual, intellectual, or material which ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... river-names,—Brahmaputra, "son of Brahma,"—pota, "the young of an animal," etc. Skeat thinks that our word boy, borrowed from Low German and probably related to the Modern High German Bube, whence the familiar "bub" of American colloquial speech, is ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... would be the best criterion of a language. In Latin it is otherwise. The popular speech could never have risen to the complexity of the language of Cicero and Sallust. This was an artificial tongue, based indeed on the colloquial idiom, but admitting many elements borrowed from the Greek. If we compare the language and syntax of Plautus, who was a genuine popular writer, with that of Cicero in his more difficult orations, the difference will at once be felt. And after the natural development of classical ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... diction which is characteristic of his genius. In this form the Lyrical Ballads were published; and were presented by him, as an experiment, whether subjects, which from their nature rejected the usual ornaments and extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might not be so managed in the language of ordinary life as to produce the pleasurable interest which it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. To the second edition he added a preface of considerable length; in which, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... was obliged to trust in order to get his writings printed, and but for that fact Baron d'Holbach would now only be known as a gentleman of great wealth, extensive benevolence, and uncommon liberality, as a man of profound learning and agreeable colloquial powers, as the bountiful friend of men of letters, as the soother of the distressed, as the protector of the miserable, and as the affectionate husband and father. So much of him we should have known; but that he was the author of those books ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... eulogies, and all the train of special public gatherings, offer rare opportunities for the display of tact and good sense in handling occasion, theme, and audience. When to be dignified and when colloquial, when to soar and when to ramble arm in arm with your hearers, when to flame and when to soothe, when to instruct and when to amuse—in a word, the whole matter of APPROPRIATENESS must constantly be in mind lest you write your speech ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... attitude of listener. But the events of these conversational orgies were Honey Smith's adventures and Pete Murphy's romances. Honey's narrative was crisp, clear, quick, straight from the shoulder, colloquial, slangy. He dealt often in the first person and the present tense. He told a plain tale from its simple beginning to its simple end. But Pete—. His language had all Honey's simplicity lined terseness and, in addition, he had the literary touch, both the dramatist's instinct and the fictionist's ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... sometimes frustrate, business by a dilatory, tedious, circuitous, and (what in colloquial language is called) fussy way of conducting the simplest transactions. They have been compared to a dog which cannot lie down till he has made three circuits ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... growing tendency to free and easy manners and colloquial license was rapidly destroying all reverence for womanhood; was levelling the distinction between ladies' parlors and gentlemen's clubrooms; was placing the sexes on a platform of equality which was dangerous to feminine delicacy, that God-built bulwark of feminine ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... I eliminated all but a few gestures, and told the stories sitting down. I also used less colloquial English; and from then on, until the end, when I told the stories from Van Dyke in his own words, there was a steady growth in literary style. I append the programs in the order they ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... I passed saluted me with the words, 'Bon soir!' although the hour was eight in the morning. In these parts, however, bon soir is frequently said at all hours. It is a colloquial peculiarity. Another is to address or speak of a gentleman and ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... N. B.—In colloquial language and ordinary writing Thou, Thine and Thee are seldom used, except by the Society of Friends. The Plural form You is used for both the nominative and objective singular in the second person and Yours is generally used in the possessive ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... behind them passed, looked back, stopped and returned. "Gen'lemen, sirs, to you. Mr. Mahch, escuse me by pyo accident earwhilin' yo' colloquial terms. I know e'zacly what cause yo' sick transit. Yass, seh. Thass the ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... actor: "Kean is original; but he copies from himself. His rapid descent from the hyper-tragic to the infra-colloquial, though sometimes productive of great effect, are often unreasonable. To see him act, is like reading 'Shakespeare' by flashes of lightning. I do not think him thorough-bred gentleman enough to ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... severely flayed Tagore for introducing a new style into Bengali poetry," I began. "He mixed colloquial and classical expressions, ignoring all the prescribed limitations dear to the pundits' hearts. His songs embody deep philosophic truth in emotionally appealing terms, with little regard for ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... a woman say that she had got to begin banting. A nice verb, to bant, though not approved of by the dictionary, which scornfully terms it "humorous and colloquial". The humor, to be sure, is usually for other people, not for the person banting. Do you know, I wonder, the derivation of this word? It means, of course, to induce this too, too solid flesh to melt, by the careful avoidance of farinaceous, saccharine and oily foods, and occasionally its meaning ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... that, as he approached the slender spire of the tree, it would suddenly bend or break and drop him into the water. This was all the more fun, if he could swim. When he reached home he was liable to have his jacket not only dried but "warmed," which was the colloquial for a thrashing. I usually sold grapes enough during the day of the Fall militia training to keep me in pocket money through the winter. This was my first effort at any kind of trading and, I think, ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... both cases I took to that sort of thing in circumstances in which I did not expect, in colloquial phrase, "to come out of it." Neither could I expect the record to outlast me. This shows that it was purely a personal need for intimate relief and not a ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad |
