"Grammatical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are not easy reading; his German style, though grammatical and idiomatic, is generally very involved and obscure, often turgid. There is a want of self-discipline about the thought, and he is too hasty in committing ill-digested thoughts ill-arranged to print, while his style ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... for three thousand miles further over the mighty waters, and there they saw the tip of a great mountain coming up out of the sea, and the great serpents were coiled around the top and were sliding down the sides into the waters, and there was not a cracker there for John. And so, with scarcely a grammatical sentence and with most unfitting words, he went on for an hour with a discourse full of wildness and weirdness, and full of untruth, while the people looked on with amazement at the wonderful knowledge and power of the man. Twenty or thirty years ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 1, March, 1898 • Various
... recovering from her embarrassment. "I'll tell my mother." She hesitated a moment. "And that's us," she added, laughing rather nervously and pointing out one of the cards. "How grammatical we are, aren't we?" she laughed, while he stooped and read the name which chanced to be at the bottom ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... when the nations of Europe shall be better acquainted with Africa and its languages, will be discovered to be a corruption of Bahar Kulla, or an unintelligible and ungrammatical term: Deaar Kulla is grammatical, and implies a country covered with houses! Dar Kulla 480 is an ungrammatical and an incorrect term, which being literally translated into English, signifies many house. This being premised, we may reasonably suppose, that Bahar ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... large promises in the Idler, by clothing those promises in language as magnificent as his own. It is much less easy to catch the subtle graces of Addison. At the conclusion of the Rambler, he boasts that "he has laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... wonderful things for them, until they are all ready to worship you. It is all very well for you, I say; but what would you do if you were me?' cried Jill, in her shrill treble, and quite oblivious of grammatical niceties; 'how would you like to be poor me, shut up here with that ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... said that the university improves the situation only in a very small degree, but it may be understood from his words. "The pupils who pass from our grammar-schools to exact studies have two defects; 1. A certain laxity in the application of universally valid laws. The grammatical rules with which they have been trained, are as a matter of fact, buried under series of exceptions; the pupils hence are unaccustomed to trust unconditionally to the certainty of a legitimate consequence of some ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... he accepted as axioms the social tenets held by his mother, or the business methods practised by his father. He believed that elderly men should speak precisely, and in grammatical, but colourless English. He believed also that people should, in society, conduct themselves according to the fashion-plate pattern designed by Mrs. de Laney. He believed these things, not because he ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... how quickly the savages of the various nations, which each have their own, to all appearance, widely different language, learn Tupi on their arrival at Ega, where it is the common idiom. This perhaps may be attributed chiefly to the grammatical forms of all the Indian tongues being the same, although the words are different. As far as I could learn, the feature is common to all, of placing the preposition after the noun, making it, in fact, ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... tongue no very complex, rules of grammar. This being so, the Indian, pursuing the study of oratory, needs not to undertake the mastery of unelastic and difficult rules, like those which our own language comprehends; or to acquire correct models of grammatical construction for his guidance; and, being fairly secure against his accuracy in these regards being impeached by carping critics, even among his own brethren, can better and more readily uphold a ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... word for word. His verbal memory was not trustworthy, and he had to confide in his extemporizing faculty, which was very good, and which became in course of time quite reliable, giving out sentences clear, grammatical, and fit to print. "I have to produce a sermon for next Sunday," he once wrote to a friend. "For me a sermon is always a spontaneous production; I cannot get one up. The idea must arise and grow up in my own mind. It is usually hard labor for me to produce ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... III. Both words and grammatical forms unknown to the tongue of daily life occur. These may be archaic, or manufactured capriciously ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... is our glory, our pride, the theme of all our memories, the golden book of our traditions. Proud and free in its accent, noble and learned in its picturesque and sonorous expressions, its formation and grammatical form are both simple and sublime; add to which, the people preserve it with a ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... that bring it close to the professional quality, and its few faults are far less considerable than might be expected from the pen of a young author. However, we must remark some rather awkward examples of grammatical construction. The correct plural of "eucalyptus" is "eucalypti", without any final "s", the name being treated as a Latin noun of the second declension. "Slowly and dignified—it pursues its way" is hardly a permissible clause; the adjective "dignified" must be exchanged for an adverb. Perhaps ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... domesticity, is certainly prior to war, although war may have noticeably strengthened it. Why, moreover, if such was the origin of the idea as well as of the thing, should they not have said, instead of serv-us, serv-atus, in conformity with grammatical deduction? To me the real etymology is revealed in the opposition of serv-are and serv-ire, the primitive theme of which is ser-o, in-sero, to join, to press,whence ser-ies, joint, continuity, ser-a, lock, sertir, insert, etc. All these words imply ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... scholars and read good books. So whenever they thought fit they could use as good language as anybody; but their speech with one another was in the racy, pithy Yankee dialect, which Lowell has made immortal in the "Biglow Papers." It was not always grammatical, but as well adapted for conveying wit and humor and shrewd sense as the ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... books a wise man will choose to fix his thoughts on the sense and apply it to use, rather than lay them out in grammatical remarks on the language; so, in perusing the volume of nature, it seems beneath the dignity of the mind to affect an exactness in reducing each particular phenomenon to general rules, or showing how it follows from them. We should propose to ourselves nobler views, namely, to recreate and ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... Hebrew—Exodus xiii. 2. The Lord commands Moses and Israel to "Sanctify to him every male that openeth the womb, both of man and beast," from the time of the death of the first-born of the Egyptians. The impropriety of ex post facto legislation, the reason assigned for this law, and the grammatical meaning of the language in the present tense, all combine to show that the law is prospective; and the number of the first-born, twenty-two thousand two hundred and seventy-five, afterward given in Numbers, shows plainly that this is the meaning, being about ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... that, sir. I have my duty to perform. Anybody can do those childish history and grammatical questions; it is the classical and mathematical lessons in which I wish you to excel. Now, once more. No, no, you must not refer to the book. 'In any right-angled triangle, the square of the side—' Now, ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... names of the tenses of the Spanish verb used in this Vocabulary are in accordance with the recommendations of the Joint Committee on Grammatical Nomenclature. Past Absolute and Past Descriptive are equivalent to the Preterit ...
— A First Spanish Reader • Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy
... intended for beginners in high-schools as well as colleges. Since every instructor has his own views and methods in the matter of making the reading yield grammatical instruction, no remarks on grammar, or references to grammars, have been attempted. In order to accustom the student to the use of a dictionary, to obviate the necessity of his looking in two places for information, and to save space, ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... trial to the mother to know that contact with her was regarded as her child's greatest danger; but in her humility and her love for Marian she offered no resistance. And so it came to pass that one day the little girl, hearing her mother make some flagrant grammatical error, turned to the other parent and asked gravely: 'Why doesn't mother speak as properly as we do?' Well, that is one of the results of such marriages, one of the myriad miseries that result ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... much; slender in figure, with a handsome face, and rather profuse brown beard and whiskers; active and alert; about thirty-two. A daguerreotype sketch of any conversation of his would do him no justice, for its slang, its grammatical mistakes, its mistaken words (as "portable" for "portly"), would represent a vulgar man, whereas the impression he leaves is by no means that of vulgarity; but he is a character quite perfect within itself, fit for the deck ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... style of a sailor, not always even grammatical yet splendidly clear and bold and natural, blundering along as he used to do when he was a boy at school and could not learn his lessons, but with his blue eyes ablaze, he told of his ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... "precocious" by people who had one set of words for their own use, and another for children. My parents considered, and I think rightly, that the best and most correct forms of speech should be taught to mere infants, that it is as easy to train a child to be grammatical as to let it lapse into all sorts of slovenly inaccuracies that must be unlearned at school, and in society. So, when they talked of "circumstantial evidence" I had a fair inkling of what the phrase conveyed. Preciosa was upon trial ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... interest him and abridge the task. The best method is of course not to 'hammer in' the sentences, by mere reiteration, but to analyze them, and think. For example, if the pupil should have to learn this last sentence, let him first strip out its grammatical core, and learn, "The best method is not to hammer in, but to analyze," and then add the amplificative and restrictive clauses, bit by bit, thus: "The best method is of course not to hammer in the sentences, but to analyze ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... instinctively that her companion was attracting more attention than her bonnet; and twitching her dress bade her sit down. Sal obeyed; but she had no opportunity that morning of deciding whether the sermon were grammatical or not, for she was constantly on the look out, and whenever she saw any one scrutinizing Mary or herself more closely than they ought, a shake of her fist and a horrid face warned them to desist. ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... the words of others [5:4]. I shall not retort this charge of 'falsification,' because I do not think that the cause of truth is served by imputing immoral motives to those from whom we differ; and indeed the context shows that our author is altogether blind to the grammatical necessity. But I would venture to ask whether it would not have been more prudent, as well as more seemly, if he had paused before venturing, under the shelter of an anonymous publication, to throw out this imputation of dishonesty against a writer of singular candour and moderation, who has at ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... English Tongue, chiefly for the Use of such Boys and Men as have never learn'd Latin perfectly, and for the Benefit of the Female Sex: Also for the Welch, Scotch, Irish, and Foreigners, being a Grammatical Essay upon our Language, considering the true Manner of Reading, Writing, and Talking proper English. By Hugh Jones, A.M. lately Mathematical Professor at the College of William and Mary at Williamsburgh in Virginia, and Chaplain ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... or makes a noise when performing any little job that requires skill. It would seem as if his good parents were inspired in bestowing a name upon him. They called him Lifter. We have slightly varied the name, took a small grammatical liberty with it, so to speak. We call him The Lifter. Let me, Mr. Gray, introduce you to The Lifter.' Roland bowed with the same air of haughtiness and disgust. But now that he was among the unholy crew he felt that he must make the best of the situation, conformably, ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... you ever hear of such a thing as having pie and preserves for breakfast?—and Oliver says it used to make him sick to see me in the midst of all of those people. They came from all over the country, and hardly anybody could speak a grammatical sentence. The man who sat next to me always said "he don't" and "I ain't feeling good to-day" and once even "I done it"—can you imagine such a thing? Every other word was "guess," and yet they had the ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... came out from Boston. She lunched three times a week with her and Mrs. Lander, and spoke the language with Clementina, whose accent she praised for its purity; purity of accent was characteristic of all this lady's pupils; but what was really extraordinary in Mademoiselle Claxon was her sense of grammatical structure; she wrote the language even more perfectly than she spoke it; but beautifully, but wonderfully; her exercises were ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Priscian (Priscianus Caesariensis) formed the standard grammatical and philological textbook of the Middle Ages, its importance being fairly indicated by the fact that today there exist about a thousand manuscript copies ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... "Min Hakk la-hu Asl an 'and-na huna Rajil," a thoroughly popular phrase. "Min Hakk" and "min Hakkan," where in the adverbial meaning of Hakkan its grammatical form as an accusative is so far forgotten that it allows itself to be governed by the preposition "min," is rendered by Bocthor "tout de bon," "serieusement." "Asl" root has here the meaning of foundation in fact. The literal translation of the passage would therefore be: "Forsooth, is ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... problems were interesting to them, just as the solution of puzzles interests the boy in civilization. Just as the boy in civilization will work for hours upon the solution of a mechanical puzzle, they worked upon problems in arithmetic and geometry, and with the same gusto. They studied grammatical construction much as they studied the tracks and the habits of wild animals. They read the books in Skipper Ed's library with the feelings and sensations of explorers. In the first reading they were going through an unknown forest, and with each successive reading they were retracing their steps ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... determinately, indicating their most immediate need, just as one in physical want would be able to state distinctly whether he were hungry, thirsty, or sleepy. A child, in like manner, asks for reading, or grammatical exercises, or means for observing Nature. His sensibility manifests itself in a lucid and intense desire, to which the teacher ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... not in his later verse become more prosaic, but he becomes considerably less intelligible. There is a passage in "The Old Bachelor," too long to quote but worth referring to, which, though it may be easy enough to understand it with a little goodwill, I defy anybody to understand in its literal and grammatical meaning. Such welters of words are very common in Crabbe, and Johnson saved him from one of them in the very first lines of "The Village." Yet Johnson could never have written the passages which earned Crabbe his fame. The great lexicographer knew man in general much ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... The variation in the forms of the different parts of speech to show grammatical relation, is called INFLECTION. Though there is some inflection in English, grammatical relation is usually shown by position rather ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... borrer but borrow, actially but actually, Fanny," Mr. Huxter replied—not to a fault in her argument, but to grammatical errors in her statement. ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... delicacy, but these were not beyond the powers of other writers then living. The circumstance which inclines us to reject the external evidence in favour of this play being Shakespeare's is, that the grammatical construction is constantly false and mixed up with vulgar abbreviations, a fault that never occurs in any of his genuine plays. A similar defect, and the halting measure of the verse are the chief objections to PERICLES OF TYRE, if we except the far-fetched and complicated absurdity ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... language: and be so good to answer me in the same. Not that I am apprehensive of your forgetting to speak French: since it is probable that two-thirds of our daily prattle is in that language; and because, if you leave off writing French, you may perhaps neglect that grammatical purity, and accurate orthography, which, in other languages, you excel in; and really, even in French, it is better to write well than ill. However, as this is a language very proper for sprightly, gay subjects, I shall conform to that, and reserve those which are serious for English. ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... stages. Only half the work of the evolution of language is completed. There is, indeed, no tribe so undeveloped as to use the primitive forms of speech. The most savage of the races of mankind have made some progress in the art of combining words, gained some ideas of syntax and grammatical forms. Yet in certain instances the progress has been very slight, and in all we can see the living traces of the earlier method of speech from which ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... tense and participle in ED, which, however, can hardly be thought much of, as it is a power over one mute E that we retain in use to this day. The final E, too, he marks for a syllable where he finds one wanted, but evidently without any grammatical reason. Urry was an unfortunate editor. Truly does Tyrwhitt say of him, that "his design of restoring the metre of Chaucer by a collation of MSS., was as laudable as his execution of it has certainly been unsuccessful." The natural causes of this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... printing at Deventer in 1486, produced Virgil's Eclogues, Cicero's De Senectute and De Officiis, Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae and De disciplina scholarium, Aesop, a poem by Baptista Mantuanus, the 'Christian Virgil', Alan of Lille's Parabolae, Alexander, two grammatical treatises by Synthius and the Epistola ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... a tongue so foreign to judges and barons and Courtiers that authors or transcribers could not copy half a dozen English lines without a mistake. The serfs and traders who spoke it were too far removed from the upper court circle to take into their speech foreign words or foreign grammatical forms; the songs which their minstrels sang from fair to fair only lived on the lips of the poor, and left ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... he was baffling; reticent, but self-assured, authoritative even, and, in a quiet way, watchful. He smoked a good cigar, mixed a good drink, seemed used to travel, but produced a coarse-grained effect, made grammatical errors, and on the whole was a person from whom, once ashore, ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... the child three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon; it pours into these little heads all that is possible in such a length of time, all that they can hold and more too,—spelling, syntax, grammatical and logical analysis, rules of composition and of style, history, geography, arithmetic, geometry, drawing, notions of literature, politics, law, and finally a complete ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... negatives did not seem to enter Count Ericson's head—his grammatical education having probably been neglected. He stood gaping at his prey as a tiger may be supposed to cast insinuating looks upon a lamb, and made every now and then an attempt to conceal either his awkwardness, or satisfaction, or both, in immense fits of laughter, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... especially on the due pronunciation of the final -e. The slower movement of change in Scotland allowed time for Chaucer to exercise a potent influence on Scottish poetry, but in England this final -e, to which most of the earlier grammatical forms by Chaucer's time had been reduced, itself fell rapidly into disuse during the 15th century, and a serious barrier was thus raised to the appreciation of the artistic value of his verse. His ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... with an ardent desire to propagate the knowledge of them; and to be propagated, he felt how necessary it was to render it less difficult. In this view he conceived the project of applying to the study of the idioms of Asia, a part of the grammatical notions we possess concerning the languages of Europe. It only appertains to those conversant with their relations of dissimilitude or conformity to appreciate the possibility of realizing this system. The author has, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... with fixed bayonets, sobbing round the "expiatory monuments of a pyramidical shape, surmounted by funeral vases," and compelled, by sad duty, to fire into the public who might wish to indulge in the same woe! O "manes of July!" (the phrase is pretty and grammatical) why did you with sharp bullets break those Louvre windows? Why did you bayonet red-coated Swiss behind that fair white facade, and, braving cannon, musket, sabre, perspective guillotine, burst yonder bronze gates, rush through that ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... trespassing on courtesy when I express a fear that a sentence like this exhibits the writer's entire want of acquaintance with the grammatical system employed by the great poet and the writers of his age. We must not judge Shakspeare's grammar by Cobbett or Murray, but by the vernacular language of his own times. It is perfectly well known that Shakspeare constantly uses the passive for the active participle, in the same manner that ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 39. Saturday, July 27, 1850 • Various
... fifteenth century, was stated in a note by a former possessor to be of the age of Richard Coeur de Lion. One of the most unaccountable blunders in an auctioneer's catalogue which we can call to mind was the description of a Sarum service book as a grammatical treatise. But solecisms of various kinds are periodical. A German book is said to be printed at Gedruckt, and a copy of Sir John Mandeville in Italian is entered as Questo, that being its compiler's frugal method of giving the title (Questo ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... obliged to learn something about this. But education cultivated a system of verbal etiquette so multiform that only the training of years could enable any one to master it. Among the [171] higher classes this etiquette developed almost inconceivable complexity. Grammatical modifications of language, which, by implication, exalted the person addressed or humbly depreciated the person addressing, must have come into general use at some very early period; but under subsequent Chinese influence these forms ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... triple Editory of the Edin. Annual Register [4]), my Hints, I say, stand still, and why?—I have not a friend in the world (but you and Drury) who can construe Horace's Latin or my English well enough to adjust them for the press, or to correct the proofs in a grammatical way. So that, unless you have bowels when you return to town (I am too far off to do it for myself), this ineffable work will be lost to the world for—I don't ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... commonly neutral, but in conversation is often used actively, and why not in the works of a writer negligent beyond all others of grammatical niceties? ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... in Marischal College, Aberdeen—a post which he held for eleven years. To this new labour he gave himself with all his heart, and was eminently successful. The Aberdeen students were remarkable for their accurate knowledge of the grammatical forms and syntax of Latin, acquired under the careful training of Dr Melvin; but their reading, both classical and general, was restricted, and they were wanting in literary impulses. Professor Blackie ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... proceed to adopt an Address which exhibits more of the ingenuity of philologists than of the policy of statesmen—before they found a censure of the Government for its conduct in negotiations of transcendent practical importance, upon refinements of grammatical nicety—I beg that they will at least except from the proposed censure, the transactions at Verona, where I think I have shown that a tone of reproach and invective was unnecessary, and, ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... of it, the basis. All its joints, its whole articulation, its sinews and its ligaments, the great body of articles, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, numerals, auxiliary verbs, all smaller words which serve to knit together and bind the larger into sentences, these, not to speak of the grammatical structure of the language, are exclusively Saxon. The Latin may contribute its tale of bricks, yea, of goodly and polished hewn stones, to the spiritual building; but the mortar, with all that holds and binds the different parts of it together, and constitutes ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... many irons in the fire for that. Matthew Arnold had criticized General Grant's English, and Clemens immediately put down other things to rush to his hero's defense. He pointed out that in Arnold's criticism there were no less than "two grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... would run their heads into a noose out of pure obstinacy, rather than skulk off. I am of very ancient race myself, though I never take pride in the matter, because I have seen more harm than good of it. I always learned Latin at school so quickly through being a grammatical example of descent. According to our pedigree, Caius Calpurnius Mordax Naso was the Governor of Britain under Pertinax. My name means 'biting'; and bite I can, whether my dinner is before me, or my enemy. In the present case I shall not bite yet, but prepare myself ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... represent in an intelligible form the Cornish of the later period, and since it is addressed to the general Cornish public rather than to the skilled philologist, much has been left unsaid that might have been of interest to the latter, old-fashioned phonological and grammatical terms have been used, a uniform system of spelling has been adopted, little notice has been taken of casual variations, and the arguments upon which the choice of forms has been based ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... peculiar stiffness of style which makes so many otherwise excellent translations painful to read,—the stiffness as of one walking in new boots,—the result of dressing the words of one language in the grammatical construction of another. Mr. Curtis gives us the sentiment and wit and fancy and humor and oddity of the German's stories, but in an English way. Indeed, his is manly and graceful English, such as we hope we are not now by any means ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... to verify all the qualities in him which gave rise to emotions in her; and persuaded herself that she accounted reasonably for them all. Then she looked back again at her manuscript, and decided that to write grammatical English prose is the hardest thing in the world. But she thought about herself a great deal more than she thought about grammatical English prose or about Ralph Denham, and it may therefore be disputed whether she was in love, or, if so, to ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... which, as recklessly manifested in "It is Never too Late to Mend," indicated a disposition to entirely subvert the established morals of the language. It is pleasant to see how unreservedly Mr. Reade has abandoned his functions as apostle of grammatical free-love. Of tricks of typography there are also fewer, although these yet remain in an excess which good taste can hardly sanction. We often find whole platoons of admiration-points stretching out in line, to give extraordinary emphasis to sentences already sufficiently ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... single woman, or widow, may pay taxes, but it would be outrageous for her to have a choice in the men who are to spend the money and then cry out for more. When married, ten years ago, her education was equal to her husband's, now she can not write a grammatical letter: her husband's mind has been enlarged by the influx of new ideas, and by contacts with the electric atmosphere of thought in the great world without; but denied as she has been the right of expressing her will by a direct vote, she has lost all interest in passing events; the globe ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... up in his place; but was summoned to take his station near the master's table, where the voice of no prompter could reach him; and, in this defenceless condition, he was so harassed, that he at last gathered up some grammatical rules, and prepared himself for his lessons. While this tormenting process was inflicted upon him, I now and then upbraided him. But you will take notice that he did not incur any corporal punishment for his idleness: ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... she had had so much wealth to dispense, for her father was rich beyond counting, and she controlled his household, and helped to regulate his charities. She saw that he was not of the labouring classes, that he had known better days; his speech, if abrupt and cheerless, was grammatical. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the midst of my regrets, the bottle-boy thrust an uncomely head in at the door. His voice was coarse, his accent was hideous, and his grammatical construction beneath contempt; but I forgave him all when I gathered the import of ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... first time" is here the preferable translation of [Greek: to proteron], and yet, rather inconsistently, adds, that "no historical conclusions can safely be drawn from this expression alone." See his "Critical and Grammatical Commentary on Galatians," ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... a few moments from my arduous labors to reply. The Colorado has been on the biggest boom I have seen since '39. In the pyrotechnical and not strictly grammatical language of the Statesman—"The cruel, devastating flood swept, on a dreadful holocaust of swollen, turbid waters, surging and dashing in mad fury which have never been equalled in human history. A pitiable ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... a very pretty grammatical quibble about 'son' and 'prophet' (apropos of Christ) on a verse in the Gospel, depending on the reduplicative sign [Arabic sign for sheddeh] (sheddeh) over one letter; he was just as put out when I reminded him that it was written in Greek, as our amateur theologians ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... arising from this lack of knowledge is now removed, and with it all uncertainty disappears. The similarity of the two tongues, apparent enough in many of their words, is most strikingly shown, as might be expected, in their grammatical structure, and especially in the affixed pronouns, which in both languages ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... &c. The preposition represented as a mean of transmitting the influence of the word which precedes it to that which follows it; the articles serving, as in the English language, to determine the extent of a common noun. Such is a summary of the grammatical system of the Institutor of the deaf ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... "go-hunting-kill-bear") without reference to individual personalities and relationships; and that it was only at a later stage that words like "I" and "Thou" came into use, and the holophrases broke up into "parts of speech" and took on a definite grammatical structure. (2) If true, these facts point clearly to a long foreground of rude communal language, something like though greatly superior to that of the animals, preceding or preparing the evolution of Self-consciousness ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... Englewood, CO. Like many plays, there is no authoritative version and it evolved over the course of time, indeed in multiple directions. The 1869 printing upon which this etext is primarily based was poorly printed and we have corrected outright punctuation and grammatical errors while maintaining its original, whimisical use of capitalization and punctuation. This version contains very few "Dundrearyisms" such as "birds of a feather gather no moss" for which the play gained ...
— Our American Cousin • Tom Taylor
... bold, say my old grammatical exercises," answered her brother; "and I must trust her, were she as changeable as a weathercock.—And yet—if she should jilt me!—What will you do—what will you say, Clara, if I am unable, contrary to my hope, trust, and expectation, to repay ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... is often more eloquent than words." The common pauses necessary to be made, according to the rules of punctuation, are too well known to require any particular notice here, they serve principally for grammatical distinctions, but in public reading or speaking other and somewhat different ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... Grammatical studies and critical writings also afforded employment for many intelligent Romans; and every part of the empire seems to have been filled with cultivated men, who, possessing wealth and leisure, gave ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... postage-stamps, in the development of a frog than in the longer or the shorter catechism, in the study of things than in the study of abstractions. There is doubtless a law underlying abstractions and conventionalities, a law of catechisms, or postage-stamps, or grammatical solecisms, but it does not appear to the student. Its consideration does not strengthen his impression of inevitable truth. There is the greatest moral value, as well as intellectual value, in the independence that comes from knowing, and knowing that ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... The correct grammatical construction would be "el cual cliente"; but however much some grammarians disclaim this employment of cuyo, it is in the language and found in the best books ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... of interest, without neglecting business. This ingenious invention, remarkable, like many great discoveries, for its simplicity, consisted in varying the first vowel in the word "paper," and substituting, in its stead, at different periods of the day, all the other vowels in grammatical succession. Thus, before daylight in the winter-time, he went to and fro, in his little oilskin cap and cape, and his big comforter, piercing the heavy air with his cry of "Morn-ing Pa-per!" which, about an hour before noon, changed ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. A brief history of the grammatical changes of the language and its vocabulary, with exercises on synonyms, prefixes, suffixes, word-analysis, and word-building. A text-book for high schools and colleges. ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... If you said 'what,' you would be more grammatical. Norton swears that it was not human, and, indeed, from the scratches on his throat, I should be inclined to ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a town is different," said Norah, striving after patience. "We like to look after everyone here—and I think it's grand when everyone's nice to everyone!" She paused; it was hard to be patient and grammatical, too. ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... plain that a stool in the office, which Ehrenthal kept for form's sake, would ultimately be his. This was the goal of his ambition—the paradise of his hopes. He soon saw that he only wanted three things to attain to it—a more grammatical knowledge of German, finer caligraphy, and an initiation into the mysteries of book-keeping, of which he as ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... sacrifice in Mr. White that he has given up the whatsomeres of the Folio. He does retain puisny as the old form, but why not spell it puisne and so indicate its meaning? Mr. White informs us that "the grammatical form in use in Shakspeare's day" was to have the verb govern a nominative case! Accordingly, he perpetuates the following oversight of the poet or blunder of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... all the merit in the world, it would not be effective to attain the ends hoped for by its friends; and apart from that, its provisions were exceedingly dangerous. It gave married women and minors the right to make and enforce contracts. The grammatical structure of a portion of the bill was such as to enable a corrupt, passionate, or prejudiced judge to take advantage of it in order to widen the jurisdiction of the United States courts, and drag into them all the business which had heretofore ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... lecture. His fellow-students there were too dull, as in mathematics they were too learned for him. Mr. Buck, the tutor, was no better a scholar than many a fifth-form boy at Grey Friars; might have some stupid humdrum notions about the metre and grammatical construction of a passage of Aeschylus or Aristophanes, but had no more notion of the poetry than Mrs. Binge, his bed-maker; and Pen grew weary of hearing the dull students and tutor blunder through a few lines of a play, which he could read ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... difficulty which an ordinary youth experiences in grasping and assimilating the facts of grammar, and create a distaste for the study. It is therefore the leading object of this book to be both as scholarly and as practical as possible. In it there is an attempt to present grammatical facts as simply, and to lead the student to assimilate them as thoroughly, as possible, and at the same time to do away with confusing difficulties as far as ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... The text is corrupt at the beginning of the paragraph, but the meaning will appear if the second [Greek: logikon] is changed into [Greek: holon] though this change alone will not establish the grammatical completeness ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... the plain speech customary with Quakers was very pleasant to me. I had had but little acquaintance with it, and at first its independence of grammatical rules struck upon me unpleasantly; but I soon began to enjoy Mrs. Crowder's speech, when she was addressing her husband, much more than I did the remarks she made to me, the latter being always couched in the most correct English. There was a sweetness about her "thee" ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... desire to escape the consequences. These were the worst, but there were others utterly unfit,—men who not only spoke no other language used in diplomatic intercourse, but could not even speak with fairly grammatical decency their own. As to the early days of Mr. Lincoln's administration, there is a well-authenticated story that, a gentleman having expostulated with the Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, for sending to a very important diplomatic post a man whose ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... good, the sermon grammatical and well delivered, and yet Jimmy left the church with a feeling of dissatisfaction. He had expected that this, his first service in England after ten years, would have carried him back to the days when he knew nothing of the Tree of ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... fruitless is it for sovereigns to watch with a rigid care over orthodoxy, and to employ the sword in religious controversy, that the work, perpetually renewed, is perpetually to begin; and a garb, a gesture, nay, a metaphysical or grammatical distinction, when rendered important by the disputes of theologians and the zeal of the magistrate, is sufficient to destroy the unity of the church, and even the peace of society. These controversies had already excited such ferment among the people, that in some ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... rhetorician in the first century after Christ; tutor of Tiberius, first in Rome, afterwards in Rhodes, from which town he called himself a Rhodian, and where Tiberius during his exile diligently attended his instruction. He was the author of various grammatical and other works, but his fame chiefly rested on his abilities as a teacher, in which capacity he seems to have had great influence (Pauly). He was the author of that famous description of Tiberius which is given by Suetonius (Tib. ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... purpose of its composition, as far as these are known, must be considered; no changes made in the text save through critical emendation, nor any translations offered not supported by accepted texts, nor any liberties be taken with grammatical constructions. By such plain tests as these Mrs. Eddy's use of the Scriptures will not bear examination. She violates all recognized canons of Biblical ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... shares. The editors of the Second Folio made only such alterations in the text of the First Folio as they thought necessary to make it more "correct." The vast majority of the changes are unimportant grammatical corrections, some of them obviously ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... fortunate incident. Every State will certainly concede the power; and this will be a national confirmation of the grounds of appeal to them, and will settle for ever the meaning of this phrase, which, by a mere grammatical quibble, has countenanced the General Government in a claim of universal power. For in the phrase, 'to lay taxes, to pay the debts and provide for the general welfare,' it is a mere question of syntax, whether the two last infinitives ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... life." "God so loved the world;" "that is," say they, the "elect world." And what proof do they bring for such an interpretation? None; nay, that is a circumstance which is often forgotten. But we need go no farther than the text itself, to confute that rugged interpretation; only let the grammatical sense of the words be attended unto,—"God so loved the elect world, that whosoever of the elect world believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life." Then what is become of the elect world which do not believe in him? According to this scheme, there are some of the elect ...
— A Solemn Caution Against the Ten Horns of Calvinism • Thomas Taylor
... dight: is in apposition to the preceding, by a grammatical license not uncommon ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Flaccus, tutor to the grandsons of Augustus (Sueton. Gramm. 17), was the author of Fasti, fragments of which have been discovered near Praeneste, and which were used by Ovid for his poem of that name. Of Verrius' grammatical works, the greatest was that entitled De verborum significatu (Gell. v. 17, 1), arranged alphabetically. It is lost, but we possess part of an abridgment (nine out of sixteen Books) made by Sex. Pompeius Festus before the third century A.D. The abridgment ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... and my situation were soon disclosed to the father and daughter; and the former seeing how entranced we were with each other's company, like a prudent parent, left us to ourselves. My French was much purer and more grammatical than hers, hers much more fluent than mine. Yet, notwithstanding this deficiency on both sides, we understood each other perfectly, and we had not been above two hours together alone, before I told her that I loved her for her very ignorance, and she had confessed to me that she ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... of listening to the oratory of the writer. Mrs. Moodie! he had a shocking delivery, a drawling, vulgar voice; and he spoke with such a nasal twang that I could not bear to look at him, or listen to him. He made such grammatical blunders, that my sides ached with laughing at him. Oh, I wish you could have seen the wretch! But here is the document, written in the same style in which it was spoken. Read it; you have a rich ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the following words without the assistance of a dictionary: College, university, grammatical, town-meeting. ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... Gujarathi translation differs from Spiegel's, and this latter differs very slightly from what is here given. Yet in the present translation there has been made no addition to, or omission from, the original wording of the Zend text. The grammatical construction also has been preserved intact. The only difference, therefore, between the current translations and the one here given is that ours is in accordance with the modern corrections of philological research ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... that the common, rude form of the English language, as it is spoken by the uneducated everywhere, without reference to provincial idioms, might possibly be the best medium. It offers, at least, the advantage of simplicity, of a directness of expression which overlooks grammatical rules, of natural pathos, even,—and therefore, so far as these traits go, may reproduce them without detracting seriously from the original. Those other qualities of the poems which spring from the character of the people of whom and for whom they were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... In adopting the profession of transport agents for the imperial troops they may have been amalgamated into a fresh caste with other Hindus and Muhammadans doing the same work, just as the camp language formed by the superposition of a Persian vocabulary on to a grammatical basis of Hindi became Urdu or Hindustani. The readiness of the Charans to commit suicide rather than give up property committed to their charge was not, however, copied by the Banjaras, and so far as I am aware there is no record of men of this caste taking their own ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... use of materials and tools, etc., must be applied "without thinking" before skill is attained. The same holds in the fine arts. In grammar, knowledge of the rules must be carried over into habit before one's speech is safely grammatical. Knowledge of the political and moral truths contained in history and literature must likewise be converted into habit before proper conduct is assured. In learning how to study one must fall into ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... present century nothing was known of the works of Fronto, except a grammatical treatise; but in 1815 Cardinal Mai published a number of letters and some short essays of Fronto, which he had discovered in a palimpsest at Milan. Other parts of the same MS. he found later in the ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... a female hand, and probably the original letter; there are, however, no traces of sealing-wax or wax upon it, whence I infer that it was sent open, which, from its being written in a foreign language, would have been perfectly safe. I have purposely left the few grammatical errors it contains, as the smallest alteration of this gem would appear to me in the light of a treason against the character of ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... vigilance, bringing to the office every morning as much as the printers could set up during the day, and taking it away in the evening, forbidding also any alteration. The foreman, John H. Gilbert, found the manuscript so poorly prepared as regards grammatical construction, spelling, punctuation, etc., that he told them that some corrections must be made, and to this they ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... down to us, that Madame de Longueville's style bore the reflex of her conversation: there are some passages very remarkable in their force, some phrases altogether trite and insignificant. This opinion is quite beside the consideration of her diction in a grammatical point of view. In her written as in her spoken language, she seems to have been impassive or to have kindled into animation according as her thoughts were "dead or living," to use her own phrase. Speaking and writing, however, are two very ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... to their primitives, with an accuracy sometimes needless; for who does not see that remoteness comes from remote, lovely from love, concavity from concave, and demonstrative from demonstrate? But this grammatical exuberance the scheme of my work did not allow me to repress. It is of great importance, in examining the general fabric of a language, to trace one word from another, by noting the usual modes of derivation and inflection; and uniformity must be preserved in systematical works; though sometimes ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... time for strictly grammatical negatives, and I am afraid that the girl's characteristically familiar speech, even when pathetically corrected here and there by the influence of the convent, endeared her the more to him. And when she said, "And now, Mr. Edward Brice, sit over ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... Crane Court, ostensibly to take up the position of Good Humour's office-boy; in reality, and without his being aware of it, to act as its literary taster. Stories in which Flipp became absorbed were accepted. Peter groaned, but contented himself with correcting only their grosser grammatical blunders; the experiment should be tried in all good faith. Humour at which Flipp laughed was printed. Peter tried to ease his conscience by increasing his subscription to the fund for destitute compositors, but only partially succeeded. Poetry that brought a tear to the ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... have been busy under the roof of St. Martin, in dispensing to some the honey of the Holy Scriptures. Others I strive to inebriate with the old wine of ancient studies; these I nourish with the fruit of grammatical knowledge; in the eyes of these again I seek to make bright the courses of the stars.... But I have need of the most excellent books of scholastic learning, which I had procured in my own country, either by the devoted care of my master, or by my own labours. I therefore beseech your ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... has a kind of superficial polish put upon his Hyperboreanisms; he has been in foreign countries, doing legations, diplomacies, for which, at least for the vulpine parts of which, he has a turn. He writes and speaks articulate grammatical French; but neither in that, nor in native Pommerish Platt-Deutsch, does he show us much, except the depths of his own greed, of his own astucities and stealthy audacities. Of which we shall hear more than ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... members of the Maya linguistic stock, and differ from that language, as it is spoken in its purity in Yucatan, more in phonetic modifications than in grammatical structure or lexical roots. Such, however, is the fixedness of this linguistic family in its peculiarities, that a most competent student of the Cakchiquel has named the period of two thousand years as the shortest required to explain the ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... woman with a kindly face, a cousin of Captain Tiago, received the ladies. She spoke Spanish regardless of all the grammatical rules, and her courtesies consisted in offering to the Spanish ladies cigarettes and betel nut (neither of which they use) and in kissing the hands of the native women after the manner of the friars. Finally the ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... duties. When I looked, he says, into the works composed by the early writers after the Talmud on the commandments, I found that their writings can be classified under three heads. First, exposition of the Torah and the Prophets, like the grammatical and lexicographical treatises of Ibn Janah, or the exegetical works of Saadia. Second, brief compilations of precepts, like the works of Hefez ben Yazliah and the responsa of some geonim. Third, works of a philosophico-apologetic character, ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... words in the passage, and in selecting, arranging, and substituting others in their place; the child still keeping to the precise meaning of the author, and studying and practising, as far as possible, simplicity, brevity, elegance, and grammatical accuracy. It may be asked, "What child will ever be able to do this?" We answer with confidence, that every sane pupil, by using the proper means, may attain it. This is no hypothesis, but a fact, of which the experiment in Leith gives good collateral proof, and of which long and uniform ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... had now placed all the wisdom of the past at a common man's disposal, that scarcely a field of endeavour remained in which modern work had not long since passed beyond the ancient achievement. He disclaimed any utility. But there was, he said, a peculiar magic in these grammatical exercises no other subjects of instruction possessed. Nothing else provided the same strengthening and orderly discipline for ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... to which his patron never obtained the key. The shrunken little capitalist repeated his visit more than once. He seemed oppressed by a humiliating sense of having been overpaid, and wished apparently to redeem his debt by the offer of grammatical and statistical information in small installments. He wore the same decently melancholy aspect as a few months before; a few months more or less of brushing could make little difference in the antique lustre of his coat and hat. But the poor old man's spirit was a trifle more ...
— The American • Henry James
... the composition work, letter writing, and other written work of the pupil. Similarly in language and grammar, it is not sufficient to instruct in rules of syntax. This is but the initial process. Grammatical rules function effectively only when they function automatically. So long as one must think and judge and reflect upon the form of one's expression, the expression is necessarily ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... in getting it. But——Please don't think I'm unsympathetic if I ask one question: Will the teachers in the hygienic new building go on informing the children that Persia is a yellow spot on the map, and 'Caesar' the title of a book of grammatical puzzles?" ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... made such steady and rapid progress that by the time the ship rounded the Cape he could "work a lunar," solve a quadratic equation or any problem in the first two books of Euclid, and write an intelligently expressed, correctly spelt, and grammatical letter, in addition to possessing a large store of knowledge on everyday subjects. Nor was this all. The majority of the passengers, moved by Captain Staunton's frequent references to Bob's exploit on the Gunfleet, ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... But granting the grammatical right, that Moses might speak of himself in the third person, because any man might speak of himself in that manner, it cannot be admitted as a fact in those books, that it is Moses who speaks, without rendering Moses truly ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... evident carelessness with which this poem was constructed, I have italicized an identical rhyme (of about the same force in versification as an identical proposition in logic) and two grammatical improprieties. To lean is a neuter verb, and 'seizing on' is not properly to be called a pleonasm, merely because it is—nothing at all. The concluding line is difficult of pronunciation through excess of consonants. I should ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... rapid writer, and even grammatical faults are not infrequent in his papers. He explicitly declares that 'Elegance, purity, and correctness were not so much my purpose, as in any intelligible manner as I could to rally all those singularities of human life ... which obstruct anything that was really good and great'. [Footnote: ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... was one of the first writers of great popularity and influence (for the Arcadia was very widely read) to introduce what may be called the sentence-and-paragraph-heap, in which clause is linked on to clause till not merely the grammatical but the philosophical integer is hopelessly lost sight of in a tangle of jointings and appendices. It is not that he could not do better; but that he seems to have taken no trouble not to do worse. His youth, his numerous avocations, and the certainty that he never formally prepared any of his work ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... forms of speech there are openings for specious amendments, sometimes for real ones, especially in ironical expressions. But as in pronunciation we regard usage rather than etymology, so in sense the true meaning is not the literal or grammatical, but the conventional. Much indifferent humour is made of question and answer;—the reply being given falsely, as if the interrogation were put in a different sense from that intended, an occasion for the quibble being ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... boys humble-minded? No, indeed; he's grammatical, that's all; he prefers 'isn't.' ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... and he must go on till she was, so to speak, all gloves. He must cover up her coarse speech, as he had covered up her coarse hands. He owed that to the gloves; it was the least he could do for them. So, whenever Mary Ann made a mistake, Lancelot corrected her. He found these grammatical dialogues not uninteresting, and a vent for his ill-humour against publishers to boot. Very often his verbal corrections sounded astonishingly like reprimands. Here, again, Mary Ann was forearmed by her feeling that she deserved ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... expression is perfectly simple and well known by which a fact is affirmed to exist up to a certain time without any implication as to what happens after. And the meaning of the passage which is not at all necessitated by its grammatical construction is utterly intolerable in Catholic teaching. The constant teaching of the Church is the perpetual virginity of Mary—that she was a virgin "before and in and after her child-bearing." There was to be sure an heretic named Helvidius who taught otherwise, ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... At the same time I learned Chaldee and Syriac and just began to read Arabic' This seems easy in the telling, but in reality it was a long, a monotonous, an exhausting process. Think of the expenditure of hours and eyesight over barbarous alphabets and horrid grammatical details. One must needs have had a mind of leather to endure such philological and linguistic wear and tear. Priestley's mind not only cheerfully endured it but actually toughened under it. The man was never afraid ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... letters have been translated, to the best of my ability, verbatim. In the not infrequent instances where I have been unable to extract any intelligible meaning, on grammatical principles, from the words of my author, I have put in the text the nearest approximation that I could discover to his meaning, and placed the unintelligible words in a note, hoping that my readers may be more fortunate in their interpretation than ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... point of literary or grammatical form is under discussion in a leading American newspaper to-day, the dominant note is that of a purism more strict than will appear in a similar discussion in England. In many American newspaper offices the rules of "style" forbid the use of certain words and phrases which are ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... The bright and sparkling French appears as if submitted to great heat and just on the point of running together. There is a great family of African dialects in which a principal sound, or the chief sound of a leading word, appears in all the words of a sentence, from no grammatical reason at all, but to satisfy a sweetish ear. It is like the charming gabble of children, who love to follow the first key that the tongue strikes. Mr. Grout[L] and other missionaries note examples of this: Abantu bake bonke abakoluayo ba hlala ba de ba be ba quedile, is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... commentator of Corneille, is freezingly cold. It is difficult not to feel that at heart he was unfriendly to the great tragedist's fame. His notes often are remorselessly grammatical. "This is not French;" "This is not the right word;" "According to the construction, this should mean so and so—according to the sense, it must mean so and so;" "This is hardly intelligible;" "It is a pity that such or such a fault should mar these fine verses;" "An expression for comedy ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... cogent truths when they are really giving us the babble of Bedlam. If ladies and gentlemen who rant about freedom would try to emancipate themselves from the dominion of meaningless words, we should all fare better; but we find a large number of public personages using perfectly grammatical series of phrases without dreaming for a moment that their grave sentences are pure gibberish. A few simple questions addressed in the Socratic manner to certain lights of thought might do much good. ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... eventually rejected both. He was as full of sex—mysterious, sub-conscious sex—as Rossetti himself. In Christ's life there is the Magdalen, but how naturally harmonious, how implicit in the idea, are their relations, how concentric; but how excentric (using the word in its grammatical sense) are the relations of Parsifal to Kundry.... A redeemer is chaste, but he does not speak of his chastity nor does he think of it; he passes the question by. The figure of Christ is so noble, that whether God or man or both, it ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... Hindu words, first used by the Mongols, after the conquest, in their intercourse with the natives. Many of the principal languages of Asia are totally unconnected with the Sanscrit, both in words and grammatical structure; these are mostly of the great Tartar family, at the head of which there is good reason for placing the ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow |
