"Idiom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... consequence, to go over the whole translation with Mr. Greenfield, the Editor of the Bible Society Translations. Mr. Greenfield is a very clever man, and has an extensive knowledge of languages. He very soon acquired the idiom of the Chippewa language so that he became better able to judge of the faithfulness of the translation. Mr. Greenfield went cheerfully through every sentence with Mr. Jones, and made some unimportant alterations, expressed himself much pleased with the translation, and thinks ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... as well as they. Could I have been instructed even in their phrases and speeches, I might have made valuable conjectures. But even their language, on these occasions, seems, by their own admission, beyond the learning of the 'linkisters.' It is a poetical, mystical idiom, varying essentially from that of trading and of familiar intercommunication, and utterly incomprehensible to the literal minds of mere trafficking explainers. Even were it otherwise, the persons hovering upon the frontier most ingenuously own, when pressed for interpretations ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of Schiller's History of the Thirty Years' War diminished the motives thereto. In the translation I endeavoured to render my Author literally wherever I was not prevented by absolute differences of idiom; but I am conscious that in two or three short passages I have been guilty of dilating the original; and, from anxiety to give the full meaning, have weakened the force. In the metre I have availed myself of no other liberties than those which Schiller had permitted ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... bubbles up into this basin, and the name "Ojo de Agua," is a general term applied to such fountain-heads. When one looks down from a high hill upon one of these Eyes of Water, one sees how the name came to be given, and indeed, the idiom is thousands of years older than the Spanish tongue, and belongs as well to the Hebrew and Arabic. A Mexican calls a lake atezcatl, Water-Mirror, an expressive word, which reminds one ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... no doubt that some of these days Sappho will be translated into the idiom of modern Greece and acted in that country. The actress, who did the part of Sappho, gave it full effect, and the part of the young Melitta was fairly performed; but I did not approve of the acting of the ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... which cared only for what was nicely said, or rather what was out of the common. Instead of using an elegant and refined diction, they employed only a pretentious and conceitedly affected style, which became highly ridiculous; instead of improving the national idiom they completely spoilt it. Where formerly D'Urfe, Malherbe, Racan, Balzac, and Voiture reigned, Chapelain, Scudery, Menage, and the Abbe Cotin, "the father of the French Riddle," ruled in their stead. Moreover, ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... written to me, sending a cutting of an advertisement of a month back of a spiritualist from Abville, which he thinks may be my husband's. I am sure it is, I know the Greek idiom put into English. It decides me on what I had thought of before. I shall offer my services as nurse or physician, or whatever they will let me be in that stress of need. I may find him, or if he have fled, I may, if I live, trace him. At any rate, by God's ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... aware of the existence of such a word as pander in old French; but I believe that it was by no means an unusual practice among the writers of Chaucer's time to adapt Latin words to their own idiom. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... conscientiously followed, is such a key to a treasury of interest as no other city has ever possessed. To Mrs. Audrey Richardson's Doges of Venice I am greatly indebted, and Herr Baedeker has been here as elsewhere (in the Arab idiom) ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... as sympathy for others; and a prejudice in favor of the good and bad of one personality against the virtue of many personalities. It may be that when a poet or a whistler becomes conscious that he is in the easy path of any particular idiom,—that he is helplessly prejudiced in favor of any particular means of expression,—that his manner can be catalogued as modern or classic,—that he favors a contrapuntal groove, a sound-coloring one, a sensuous one, a successful one, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... into the vulgar idiom, "you make me sweat with your stupid pride. Is it that that you call friendship? Go away now. How do you wish that I should succeed with this cake while you station yourself there ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... your leave, we won't "can" the sentiment,—to use an idiom in which you are the master-artist on this continent,—but I, at least, will luxuriate in retrospect, as I write your name by way of dedication to this volume of essays, for some of which your quick-firing mind is somewhat more than editorially responsible. You ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... Anglicism, which has become an idiom in all languages, so gracefully does it depict the nuptial season which is so fugitive, and during which life is nothing but sweetness and rapture; the expression survives as illusions and errors survive, for it contains the most ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... without invitation, that is 'not called upon;' and as mistresses are 'called upon' that their names so invoked may make their lovers throw the dice with success; still, according to the double sense of the word, they may be compared to each other, as they are both, according to the Latin idiom, 'invocati.'"] ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... driven out by the Dorians. By the sixth century B. C. the Greek colonies were well established on the west and south-west coasts of Asia Minor, and had evolved their own characteristic architectural idiom in the Ionic order and its column, more slender than the Doric, with its moulded base and its strange characteristic capital, unsuitable from the constructional point of view in stone or marble, yet ultimately attaining the exquisite beauty of line and modelling ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... at her uncomprehendingly. Primmie's equipment of Cape Cod slang and idiom, rather full and complete of itself, had of late been amplified and complicated by a growing acquaintance with the new driver of the grocery cart, a young man of the world who had spent two hectic years in Brockton, where, for a portion of the ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... spirit of Roman institutions still survived in the civilization of Spain, France, Italy, Britain, even in Greece and Asia. Roman law had become the code of the world. Iberian, Gaul, and Italian had modified in varying degree their native dialects in conformity with the more copious and logical idiom ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... of the Buonapartes, into English verse. I believe that engagement never was carried into effect, notwithstanding the erudite pains Mr —- took to qualify himself to perform it successfully. No man could have laboured more to make himself master of the niceties of the Gallic idiom, and the right use of its ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... it till it was finished. It is not all written in these pages, for portions may have been forgotten, or put aside as irrelevant. Neither has it been possible for the writer of it to render the full force of the Zulu idiom nor to convey a picture of the teller. For, in truth, he acted rather than told his story. Was the death of a warrior in question, he stabbed with his stick, showing how the blow fell and where; did the ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... repetition, almost verse for verse and line for line, of the license and the abuses of the last years of the Athenian democracy. It was then demonstrated that the impoverishing of the rich could not enrich the poor, and that a state without wealth will soon be a state without liberty. In the idiom of the gallery gods, it ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... is pure when he uses such words only as belong to the idiom of the language. The only standard of purity is the practice of the best writers and speakers. A violation of purity is ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... what Idiom you will one day answer my last. {163a} Meanwhile, I have to thank you for Lady Pollock's Article on American Literature: which I like, as all of hers. Only, I cannot understand her Admiration of Emerson's 'Humble Bee'; which, without her Comment, I should have taken for a Burlesque ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... foreign parts to be coined goold in the silver mines. Mrs. Madison's pretty face was all blushes, smiles, and tears. Mr. Madison rose to reply with unexpected alacrity, and Louis was soon relieved from anxiety, at least, as far as regarded his eloquence, for he thought in the majestic Spanish idiom, and translated as ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... unpopular person, and among the rest, for Lord Braxfield, than to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation against his abstract vices. He was the last judge on the Scots bench to employ the pure Scots idiom. His opinions, thus given in Doric, and conceived in a lively, rugged, conversational style, were full of point and authority. Out of the bar, or off the bench, he was a convivial man, a lover of wine, and one who "shone perculiarly" ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... edify his readers. He has, however, or should have, another aim wherein is displayed the acme of hermeneutic art. Every language can profitably lend something to and borrow somewhat from its neighbours, near or far, an epithet, a metaphor, a turn of phrase, a naive idiom and the translator of original mind will not neglect the frequent opportunities of enriching his mother tongue with alien and novel ornaments, which will justly be accounted barbarisms until formally adopted and naturalised. Such are the "peoples" of Kossuth ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... for a clever Indian girl, who understands Spanish as well as her native idiom, and who translated various Castilian words for us into the original Tarrascan, which sounds very liquid and harmonious. To-morrow we shall leave Uruapa and this hospitable family, whose kindness and attention to us we never can forget. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... which those who knew him in his hours of relaxation and familiarity will not easily forget. His mind was stored with quaint and pithy phrases, and apt illustrations, which he not unfrequently seasoned with his native idiom, the broad Barnsley dialect. His north-country pronunciation, indeed, never entirely forsook him; and the singular graft of German which he made upon it during his residence abroad, caused it to be commonly supposed, by those who were strangers to his history, that he ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... exclusive use of the latter was inflexibly maintained in the administration of civil as well as military government. [45] The two languages exercised at the same time their separate jurisdiction throughout the empire: the former, as the natural idiom of science; the latter, as the legal dialect of public transactions. Those who united letters with business were equally conversant with both; and it was almost impossible, in any province, to find a Roman subject, of a liberal education, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... coupling a man and woman together as partners in the labors of the harvest. In my fifteenth summer my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her justice in that language, but you know the Scottish idiom. She was a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which in spite of acid disappointment, gin-house prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold to be the first of ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... chapter also assigns to Sheba a different origin. It couples him with Dedan, and sees in him a descendant of Ham, a kinsman of Egypt and Canaan. Both genealogies are right. They are geographical, not ethnic, and denote, in accordance with Semitic idiom, the geographical relationships of the races and nations of the ancient world. Sheba belonged not only to south Arabia but to northern Arabia as well. The rule of the Sabaean princes extended to the borders of Egypt and Canaan, and Sheba ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... being very red, his eyes very blue, and his hair very white. After having pump-handled Benson's arm for some time, he made an attack on Le Roi, whom he just knew by name, and inquired if he had just come de l'autre cote, meaning the other side of the Atlantic, according to a common New-York idiom; but the Vicomte not unnaturally took it to mean from the other side of the road, and gave a corresponding answer in English as felicitous as Mr. Simpson's French. Then he digressed upon Ashburner, whom he saw to be an Englishman, in so pointed ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... of mace-bearer to his Holiness. When my brethren see, moreover, that I force from them no pension nor moneys, not even a white farthing, that I even preach to them without wage, verily for the love of Heaven, as your idiom hath it, when they see that I live pure and lonely, then they will listen to me. Perchance their hearts will be touched and their eyes opened." His face shone with wan radiance. That was, indeed, the want, he felt sure. No Jew had ever stood before his ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the hand to it. It may be remarked, however, that this is a form of expression even in our own country; although there is certainly no trace of the singular custom in question having ever prevailed among our ancestors. Whatever may be the fact as to the Russian idiom, our own undoubtedly refers merely to the application of the hand with the pen in it. Each chief appears to be intimately acquainted with the peculiarities of ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... lost. A Latin idiom (as Keightley points out) male perditur: Prof. Masson, however, would regard it as equivalent to "there is little loss ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... is the largest and most thriving town between Manaos and Iquitos, a distance of twelve hundred miles. It is also one of the oldest settlements on the river, having been founded during the English revolution, or nearly two centuries ago. Tupi is the common idiom. The productions of the country are cacao, sarsaparilla, Brazil nuts, bast for caulking vessels, copaiba balsam, India-rubber, salt fish, turtle-oil, manati, grass hammocks, and tiles. Bates calculates the value of the annual exports at nearly forty ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... were born poets without being born versifiers, have contributed to adorn our language, even in its familiarities, with those riches and that pomp which until then had been the exclusive property of the poetic idiom." ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... long while together, Brangwen flushing like a girl when the other did not understand his idiom. Then they said good night, and shook hands. Again the foreigner bowed and repeated ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... merits of Gilbert and Dore, whose fecundity in their art was equal, and I ventured to assert the great artistic superiority of Gilbert. "You are right!" cried my enthusiastic friend, with more judgment of art than accuracy of English idiom; "Gilbert cocks Dore ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... was the lilt of a Gaelic song in these pages that brought a sorrow on me. That very sweet language will be gone soon, if not gone already, and no book learning will revive the suppleness of idiom, that haunting misty loveliness.... It is a very pathetic thing to see a literature and a ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... words—'for the simple reason that I never had a career to be ruined.' . . . Well, for the rest, Jack says he came straight to you as soon as he set foot back in England, and told you the whole story.—That's so, I guess?" Constantia, in her agitation, relapsed into her mother's idiom. ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the most amazing escapes is that of a soldier from Bordeaux, told partly in his own racy idiom, and fully vouched for by the author. After relating how he left the railway at Nanteuil and traversed a hamlet pillaged by the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Asia, which cultivated the language and manners of the Greeks, had deeply imbibed the venom of the Arian controversy. The familiar study of the Platonic system, a vain and argumentative disposition, a copious and flexible idiom, supplied the clergy and people of the East with an inexhaustible flow of words and distinctions; and, in the midst of their fierce contentions, they easily forgot the doubt which is recommended by philosophy, and the submission which is enjoined by religion. The ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... was when the Lord led him, and to make the whole a continuous expression of the one fact—'As for me, the Lord hath led me in the way to the house of my master's brethren.' The literal rendering is, 'I in the way, Jehovah led me.' No doubt the Hebrew idiom admits of the 'I' being thus emphatically premised, and then repeated as 'me' after the verb, and possibly no more is to be made of the words than that. But the fuller and more impressive meaning is possible, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Scriptures. Translations of portions of the Bible made by learned men in Latin may be used by scholars with permission of a bishop, provided it be understood that they are never appealed to as the inspired text. Translations into any vernacular idiom are strictly excluded from public use and circulation, but may, under exceptional circumstances, be allowed to students who have received license from a bishop or Inquisitor at the recommendation of their parish priest or confessor. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... fluency and facility, but not the strongest imagination. As a classic, he was admirable; and his prose themes upon different subjects displayed an acquaintance with the Latin idiom and phraseology seldom acquired even by scholastic life, and the practice of later years. Beyond this, he read much of everything that appeared, knew every thing, and was acquainted with every ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... natural frontiers, like Great Britain, France, Italy or Spain, nor the bond created by unity of language like Germany. Other European countries, it is true, like Holland or Poland, did not constitute strong geographical units and lacked definite boundaries but their people talked at least the same idiom and belonged, as far as the word may be used in a broad sense, to the same race. Others, like Switzerland, were divided between various languages, but possessed geographical unity. Belgium could not claim any of these distinctive features. Her boundaries remained widely open in all ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... intention to copy the sentiments of the lower orders, is implied in his resolution to make use of their style. Now, the different classes of society have each of them a distinct character, as well as a separate idiom; and the names of the various passions to which they are subject respectively, have a signification that varies essentially according to the condition of the persons to whom they are applied. The love, or grief, or indignation of an enlightened and refined character, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... relate the particulars without shedding tears. He had made himself acquainted with the language of that nation, the words of which, in his younger days, he used to recite, which, as the bishop often had informed me, were very conformable to the Greek idiom. When they asked for water, they said Ydor ydorum, which meant bring water, for Ydor in their language, as well as in the Greek, signifies water, from whence vessels for water are called {Greek text which cannot be reproduced}; and Dur also, in the British language, ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... influence, and the necessity of writing to please the gallery, perpetually held him back. The contours of the melodies are dictated from outside, consciously copied from alien models: in the later works they are shaped by the inner force of his own mind, and though the Weber idiom is prevalent, he used it unconsciously, as children in learning to speak acquire the accent of the elders about them or the dialect of the neighbourhood in which they are reared. I say the tunes lack external ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... as to their own adventure. And wherever music reappeared, whether under the hand of the Japanese or the semi-African or the Yankee, it seemed to be growing from Wagner as the bright shoots of the fir sprout from the dark ones grown the previous year. A whole world, for a period, came to use his idiom. His dream was recognized during his very lifetime as an integral portion of the consciousness of ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... miladi; a Frenchman who had no glass would rather say that it was milord who had probably taken his wife out to drown her, according to the national practice—a remark which an English skipper immediately commented on in our native idiom (as nonsense which—had undergone a mining operation), and further dismissed by the decision that the reclining figure was a woman. For Deronda, terribly excited by fluctuating fears, the strokes of the oars as he watched them were divided by swift visions of events, possible and impossible, which ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... restoration of Greek independence came within view, there were some who proposed to revive artificially each form used in the ancient language, and thus, without any real blending, to add the old to the new: others, seeing this to be impossible, desired that the common idiom, corrupt as it was, should be accepted as a literary language. Koraes chose the middle and the rational path. Taking the best written Greek of the day as his material, he recommended that the forms of classical Greek, where they ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... say, adapting her idiom to make the old man feel at home, as he was presently ushered in, chuntering and triumphant; "you don't mean to say it's Uncle Clegg. Well, we are glad to see you! I was just having a little nap, and so you must excuse ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... and oh! so delicious,—for fifty-five dollars a month for the entire family, although Jim hardly ranked as yet, economically speaking, as part of the consuming public. We drained Leipzig to the dregs—a good German idiom. Carl worked at his German steadily, almost frantically, with a lesson every day along with all his university work—a seven o'clock lecture by Buecher every morning being the cheery start for the day, and we blocks and blocks from the University. I think of Carl through those days with ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... while Bobbie was running on in his ridiculous fashion, in an idiom all his own that even Mr. Ade could not hope to rival, telling, I believe, about some escapade of his at Asbury Park, where he had "put the police force of two men and three niggers out of business" by asking the innocent and unsuspecting chief the difference between ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... "In the idiom of this country, Countess," he said, "I raise my hat to you. You preserve your mask of ignorance to the end. So much so, indeed, that I find myself asking do you really believe that Germany intends to ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... students come from small inland towns, far from any music center, and have a wrong attitude of mind. They crave the glamor of footlights, flowers and applause, not realizing that music is a speech, an idiom, which they must master in order to interpret the ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... uncorruptedly Manhattan. Enderby, large, high-colored, was naturally a bit of what we know as the "haw-haw type" of Englishman—a thoroughly good fellow, kindly, tolerant, brave, and generous, who could not possibly change his spots. He had failed utterly to acquire the American idiom, and his attempts at cowboy slang were often amusing—especially to Redfield, who prided himself on being quite ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... Church by bishops. No work of equal dignity and scope had yet been published in English prose. It was written in sonorous, stately and somewhat involved periods, in a Latin rather than an English idiom, and it influenced strongly the diction of later writers, such as Milton and Sir Thomas Browne. Had the Ecclesiastical Polity been written one hundred, or perhaps even fifty, {91} years earlier, it would doubtless ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... non veggono mai l'ora che di nuovo possano ritornarvi;" a curious Italian idiom. (See Vocab. It. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... honestly prefer to give it cannot give her these other things. And she concludes her bargain as composedly as any bonne who takes the basket to the shops and "makes its handle dance"—to use the French idiom—for her own best advantage. It does annoy her when she has to part from Des Grieux, and it does annoy her that Des Grieux should be annoyed at what she does. But she is made of no nun's flesh, and such soul as she has is filled with much desire for luxury and pleasure. The ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Penelope's intelligence raised her to the level of the other good servants; while they, on the other hand, had lowered themselves to the mute, submissive regularity of the beast —went and came daily in the same occupations with the infallible accuracy of mechanism. But, as they said in their idiom, they had eaten their white bread first. Mademoiselle Cormon, like all persons nervously agitated by a fixed idea, became hard to please, and nagging, less by nature than from the need of employing her activity. Having no husband ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... axiom, the law; the second indicates the order of generation of ideas. All our errors arise from the constant confusion of these two kinds of abstractions. In this particular, languages and philosophies are alike deficient. The less common an idiom is, and the more obscure its terms, the more prolific is it as a source of error: a philosopher is sophistical in proportion to his ignorance of any method of neutralizing this imperfection in language. If the art of correcting the errors of speech by scientific methods is ever discovered, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... for philosophers...I write above all things for the young. I want to make them love the natural story which you make them hate; and that is why, while keeping strictly to the domain of truth, I avoid your scientific prose, which too often, alas, seems borrowed from some Iroquois idiom!' ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... a desire to meet me, and that if I spent all my time within the Capital my impressions of the Island would necessarily be ill-balanced and deformed, he advanced a project that I should accompany him to a spot where, as far as I was competent to grasp the idiom, he was in the habit of sitting (doubtless in an abstruse reverie), in the country; and having assured myself by means of discreet innuendo that the seat referred to would be adequate for this person also, and that the occasion did not in any way involve a payment ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... other more eminent undertakings of his, as hath been oftentimes very fully mentioned by the said translator in several original treatises of his own penning, lately by him so numerously dispersed that there is scarce any, who being skilful in the English idiom, or curious of any new ingenious invention, hath not either read them ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... was to be found in India, not the ancient commentaries, but that the Sinhalese commentaries were genuine, having been composed in that language by Mahinda. He therefore bade Buddhaghosa repair to Ceylon and translate these Sinhalese works into the idiom of Magadha, by which Pali must be meant. Buddhaghosa took this advice and there is no reason to distrust the statement of the Mahavamsa that he arrived in the reign of Mahanama, who ruled according to ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... Monsieur Grignon began to play a whisper of a tune on his violin. I did not know what she meant by a letter, though I understood her. Madame Tank spoke the language as well as anybody. I thought then, as idiom after idiom rushed back on my memory, that it was an universal language, with the exception of ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... their dingles and dells. He makes no mention of yews and myrtles, nor echoes a single note of either bullfinch or chaffinch, but faithfully describes American objects, though not entirely in the American idiom." The following four stanzas from the "Rural Walk" may give a conception of Wilson's close observation and ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... translation is excellent. He understands French, and is able to do it into English elegantly and accurately without any trace of foreign idiom. This is no easy thing; for our general experience has been that translators read French like Englishmen and write ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... as literal in constructions, Master Skimmer, as a school-boy's version of his Virgil. There is an idiom in diplomacy, as well as in language, and one who treats so sensibly should not be ignorant of its phrases. Bless me, Sir; an hypothesis is not a conclusion, any more than a promise is a performance. That which is advanced by way of ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... Perhaps the new-comer objects to marrying the whole family, a prejudice not without parallel elsewhere. Certainly the opportunity is not appreciated. Indeed, to "go out as a son-in-law," as the Japanese idiom hath it, is considered demeaning to the matrimonial domestic. Like other household help he wears too patently the badge of servitude. "If you have three koku of rice to your name, don't do it," is the advice of the local proverb—a ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... Gerhard, in his quaint German idiom, "we will not quarrel, you and I. If I have been neglectful it was because edged tools were never a chosen plaything of mine. Perhaps your little Blackie realizes that he need have no fear of such things, for the Great ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... read again, as I approached the Plaza. "Can this man be Spanish, then? Surely not;—how could he have acquired his excellent English, without a trace of foreign accent, or the least eccentricity of idiom? His child, too, said nothing of that. English, no doubt, of Spanish parentage; or,—oh, patience! I shall know by-and-by, thanks to my merry Virginia jade, who shall be arrayed in resplendent hues, and throned in a golden frame, if she but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... thing. In the 'Idylls' of Theocritus it gave new life to Greek poetry in the third century before Christ, and it may render the same high service to English poetry to-day or to-morow. The rise of Provincial schools of literature, interpreting local life in local idiom, in all parts of the British Isles and in the Britain beyond the seas, is a goal worth striving for; such a literature, so far from impeding the progress of the literature in the standard tongue, would serve only to enrich it in spirit, ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... affectionate animal,' said Father Piret, dropping unconsciously into a French idiom to express his meaning. 'The little sprig had been kept as a talisman, and no saintly relic was ever more honored; the Emperor had ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... with rhetorical ornament.[5] Instead of unfamiliar terms, he uses "the pure and open words of the language of this people."[6] In connection with the translation of the Bible he lays down the principle that Latin must give way to English idiom.[7] For all these things Aelfric has definite reasons. Keeping always in mind a clear conception of the nature of his audience, he does whatever seems to him necessary to make his work attractive and, consequently, ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... of Francisco was heard, and all in that wide court started at the sound—deep, full, and melodious as the evening chimes. The ears of those present had, in the profound silence, but just recovered from the harsh, deep-toned, and barbarous idiom of Hawkhurst's address, when the clear, silvery, yet manly voice of Francisco riveted their attention. The jury stretched forth their heads, the counsel and all in court turned anxiously round towards the prisoner, ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... much to say on the points of resemblance between the Goidelic and Brythonic branches, and though no one who studies both can fail to be struck by their affinity in vocabulary, in grammar, and even in idiom, the speakers of different branches—a Welshman and a Highlander, for instance—are no more mutually intelligible than an Englishman and a German would be, if as much so. The three sets of Gaels, however, can understand one another ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... officers and all those persons of quality who liked music with their meat. The place was low-ceilinged, but roomy, and the ventilation was excellent, considering. The smoke never got so thick that one couldn't see the way to the door when the students started in to "clean up the place," to use the happy idiom of mine own country. There were marble tables and floors and arches and light, cane-bottomed chairs from Kohn's. It was at once Bohemian and cosmopolitan, and, once inside, it was easy to imagine oneself in Vienna. A Hungarian orchestra occupied an inclosed ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... enterprise miscarried, according to the proverb, "Between two stools the backside falls to the ground." Not that I would be thought to liken any public concern to that opprobrious part of the human body, though I might with truth assert, if I durst use such a vulgar idiom, that the nation did hang on arse at its disappointment on this occasion; neither would I presume to compare the capacity of our heroic leaders to any such wooden convenience as a joint-stool or a close-stool; but only to signify ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... opportunities by which I have profited,' he explained. 'Few men are better acquainted with the similarities and differences, whether of idiom or accent, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one. It is a mean and low contrivance on both sides, by which all the grand work of home-building, all the noble pains and heroic toils of home-education,—that education where the parents learn more than they teach,—shall be (let us use the expressive Yankee idiom) shirked. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... March 7; 1711, April 3, July 18, October 14 and 25, Swift visited or dined with Mrs. Barton at her lodgings. He was also at this time on good terms with Halifax, and dined with him November 28, 1710, and with Mrs. Barton on November 30. According to the idiom of the day, lodgings was a name for every kind of residence, and even for the apartments of a guest in the house of his host. For anything to the contrary in the mere word, the lodgings might have been in the house of Lord ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... from my usual custom, and take this fragment of a text because, in the forcible language of the original, it carries some very important lessons. The margin of our Bible gives the literal reading of the Hebrew; the sense, but not the vigorous idiom, of which is conveyed in the paraphrase in our version. 'At all times, as the matter shall require,' is, literally, 'the thing of a day in its day'; and that is the only limitation which this prayer of Solomon places upon the petition that God would ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the neighborhood believe that they sometimes see specters, and hear alarming sounds. The posterity of Damon, of whom some still remain, mostly in Phocis, near the town of Stiris, are called Asbolomeni, that is, in the Aeolian idiom, men daubed with soot; because Damon was thus besmeared when he ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... (if you will pardon my giving you his little sentiment in his own quite expressive idiom), 'Me for two fathers! Double money birthdays and Christmases. See?' That ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... which was made in choice Romaic—and which, doubtless, sounded much more heroic and elegant in that idiom than in simple English, was highly applauded by his followers—indeed, had they ever heard of Homer, they would have considered it equal in substance and talent to anything ever uttered by the most valiant ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... readable type, as much like any other book as possible. It is no evidence of grace to ruin the eyes over diamond-text Bibles. If possible, also provide separate books of the Bible, in modern literary form and some in the idiom ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... brothers!" Impossible to fool him, they were probably Spaniards and, if not, they were from Genoa or Naples,—in short, were compatriots accustomed to live and eat in all latitudes just as though they were in their own little inland sea. Soon they would begin a speech in the Mediterranean idiom, a mixture of Spanish, Provencal and Italian, invented by the hybrid peoples of the African coast from Egypt to Morocco. Sometimes they would send each other presents, like those that are exchanged between tribes,—fruits from distant ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... condition of your horses. They must, as a consequence, receive always your first consideration. As long as they have rest and food, you are sure of getting along; as soon as they fail, you are reduced to difficulties. So absolute is this truth that it has passed into an idiom. When a Westerner wants to tell you that he lacks a thing, he informs you he is "afoot" for it. "Give me a fill for my pipe," he begs; ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... should differ from those of another. But the native of every province can distinguish the foreigner; and when he himself travels, is struck with the aspect of a strange country, the moment he passes the bounds of his own. The air of the person, the tone of the voice, the idiom of language, and the strain of conversation, whether pathetic or languid, gay or severe, are ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... these new colonists have not forgotten their origin; they inherit the manners of their fathers; wear the same thick hair and long coats. Their drawling pronunciation, peculiar idiom, and the slowness of their movements, make them easily distinguished from the lively Gascons. A curious mixture of dialect resulted from the re-union of so many provinces with the patois of the country, and the language still heard there is ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... passed the back of her hand across the bridge of her nose. "I'll step over to the Castle," she announced, "for a drop of gin I keep against Treacher's attacks." (Let not Mrs. Treacher's idiom frighten the reader. She meant only that her husband suffered from an internal trouble which need not be specified, and that she kept the gin ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... it seems that these books must have been first written before Caesar's death. Caesar, at the time of Catiline's conspiracy, had endeavored to annul all debts—that is, to establish "new tables" according to the Roman idiom—but had failed by Cicero's efforts. He had since affected it, although he might have held his power without seeking for the assistance of such debtors. Who could that be but Caesar? In the beginning of the third book there is another passage declaring the same thing: "I have not strength enough ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... Father Montreuil's Vie de Jesus Christ, he would supply the English Catholic with the present desideratum of his library, an interesting and accurate life of Christ. A literary history of the gospels, showing the state of the text, and the grammatical peculiarities of their idiom, and containing a short account of the early versions, would be an invaluable work. The excellent translation by Mr. Combes, the professor of divinity in St. Edmund's College, of selected parts of St. Basil and ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... idiom everything is savage. The syllables which begin or end the words are harsh and curiously startling. A woman is a trip or a moll (une largue). And it is poetical too: straw is la plume de Beauce, a farmyard feather bed. The word midnight is paraphrased by twelve leads striking—it makes one shiver! ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... know her well; I go to her parties; receives Wednesdays; highly creditable house."—Madame Firmiani is metamorphosed into a house! but the house is not a pile of stones architecturally superposed, of course not, the word presents in Lounger's language an indescribable idiom.—Here the Lounger, a spare man with an agreeable smile, a sayer of pretty nothings with more acquired cleverness than native wit, stoops to your ear and adds, with a shrewd glance: "I have never seen Monsieur Firmiani. His social position is that of looking after property ...
— Madame Firmiani • Honore de Balzac
... they are so old and grown so dear! The backs of tarnished gold, the faded boards, The slightly yellowing page, the strange old type, All speak the fashion of another age; The thoughts peculiar to the man who wrote Arrayed in garb peculiar to the time; As though the idiom of a man were caught Imprisoned in the idiom of a race. A nothing truly, yet a link that binds All ages to their own inheritance, And stretching backward, dim and dimmer still, Is lost in a remote antiquity. Grapes do not come of thorns nor figs of thistles, And even a great poet's divinest ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... The Texan Indian, whether Comanche, Kiowa, or Lipan, likes his fire-water as much as a white man, and as constantly carries it along with him. The only peculiarity about these is that, while quaffing, they do not talk in the Indian tongue, but English of the Texan idiom, ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... say, through, a track of mud and ruts impossible to picture. The stage fare amounted to $6, or 4s. for 34 miles. An extra dollar reserved the box-seat and gave me the double advantage of knowing what was coming in the rut line and taking another lesson in the idiom of the American stage-driver. This idiom consists of the smallest possible amount of dictionary words, a few Scriptural names rather irreverently used, a very large intermixture of "git-ups" and ejaculatory "his," ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... shows a noticeable freedom from the usual heavy negro dialect and idiom of the deep south. "Yes, Ma'am, yes, Sir, come in. Pull a chair to the fire. You'll have to 'scuse me. I can't get around much, 'cause my feet and legs bother me, but I got good eyes an' good ears an' all my own teeth. I aint never had a bad tooth ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... dreamed of the Hebrew stories, and his head had been full of Hebrew poetry and Gospel ethics; until they had struck deep root into his heart, and the very expressions had become a part of him; so that he rarely spoke without some antique idiom or Scripture mannerism that gave a raciness to the merest trivialities of talk. But the influence of the Bible did not stop here. There was more in Robert than quaint phrase and ready store of reference. He was imbued with a spirit of peace and love: he interposed ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in exploring paths hitherto untrodden, but in developing existing materials to the highest conceivable pitch of beauty and completeness. His music has nothing to do with theories, it is the voice of nature speaking in the idiom ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... is it; I see you understand me. Now, an idiom that belongs to nearly all conditions—for there are some that are common to all countries and all times, just as there are follies that are universal—a common idiom, is to procure for one's self as many customers ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... 1485, he promulgated a decree to the effect that, whereas the divine art of printing had been abused for the sake of lucre and whereas by this means even Christ's books, missals and other works on religion, were thumbed by the vulgar, and whereas the German idiom was too poor to express such mysteries, and common persons too ignorant to understand them, therefore every work translated into German must be approved by the doctors of the university ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Morris Woolridge, who had been giving the native lessons in English, for he mixed with it the German idiom. ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... revolutionary period, have distinguished as philosophism, and the philosophers themselves as philosophistes. He would have designated them as literators, but few exotic words will circulate; new words must be the coinage of our own language to blend with the vernacular idiom. Many new words are still wanted. We have no word by which we could translate the otium of the Latins, the dillettante of the Italians, the alembique of the French, as an epithet to describe that sublimated ingenuity ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... not accustomed to sitting on chairs, begins to fidget, and shows signs of a desire to gather up his feet into the seat and nurse them. At last drowsiness overtakes him. His eyes are open, but his mind is asleep, and I may do as I please with grammar and idiom: even when I yawn, he omits to snap his fingers and lets the devil skip down my throat. When he awakes he suggests that it is time to stop, and asks leave for the next day, as he has to renew his sacred thread. Poor old Ragunath! I fear he has gone long since to the burning ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... however, the validity of my objection is practically admitted in the fullest way by Dr. Lightfoot himself. "Tischendorf's words," he says, "are 'und deshalb, sagen sie, habe der Herr den Ausspruch gethan.' He might have spared the 'sagen sie,' because the German idiom 'habe' enables him to express the main fact that the words were not Irenaeus's own without this addition." Writing of a brother apologist of course he apologetically adds: "But he has not altered any idea which the original contains." [9:1] I affirm, on the contrary, that he has very ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... language. After the expulsion of all the adult male Japanese Lake settlers in the 17th century, it is feasible to suppose that the language of the males who took their place in the Lake district and intermarried there, should prevail over the idiom of the primitive settlers, and possibly this amalgamation of speech accounts for the difference between the Tagalog dialect and others of these ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... language was transforming itself from Anglo-Saxon into English, has still lovers who are willing for his sake to master what is to them almost a foreign tongue, and yet other lovers who ask for new translations of his works into our modern idiom; while Shakespeare, who wrote almost as soon as that transformation had been accomplished, is universally reckoned one of the greatest of world poets. There have, indeed, been true poets at almost all stages of the world's history, but the pre-eminence of such masters as ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... while he has been the means of attracting others to the study of that interesting tongue, his own command of it was of the slightest. He never mastered 'deep' (or inflected) Romani, and even his broken gypsy is a curious Borrovian variety, distinct from the idiom of the tents. No gypsy ever uses chal or engro as a separate word, or talks of the dukkering dook or of penning a dukkerin. His genders are perversely incorrect, as in the title of the present book; and his 'Romano Lavo-Lil: Word ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... run out; acabo de hacerlo I have just done it (this idiom is used only with the present and imperfect of acabar); acaba por rendirse in the ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.") The absence of a love affair will deprive him of the only "human interest" he can be really sure of. The Chestertonian idiom, above all, will soon lead him to expect nothing, because he can never get any idea of what he is to receive, and will bring him to a proper submissiveness. The later stages are simple. The reader will wonder why it never before ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... confirmed and enlarged in its progress. As some apology for them, it may not be improper to observe here, that the English language seems to owe a great portion of that energy for which it is remarked, to the old Anglo Saxon idiom, which still forms its basis. It was enriched and softened by the introduction of the French, though some are of opinion that most of its foreign words, were adopted immediately from the Latin and not from any modern ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... education; Mignon's refusal to go on with his interrogations as to the cause of the enmity made them, they said, suspect that, knowing he had reached the end of Ashtaroth's classical knowledge, he felt it useless to try to continue the dialogue in the Ciceronian idiom. Moreover, it was well known that only a few days before all Urbain's worst enemies had met in conclave in the village of Puidardane; and besides, how stupidly Mignon had shown his hand by mentioning Gaufredi, the priest who ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... herrin' to his dejeune, but a scholar's book open against the ale-jug." A poor Baron (of a vastly different state from the Baron of France), English spoken too, with not much of the tang of the heather in his utterance though droll of his idiom, hospitable (to judge from the proffered glass still being fumbled for in the cupboard), a man who had been in France on the right side, a reader of the beau langage, and a student of the lore of arme blanche—come, here ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... and a peculiar grin wreathed itself around his lips. "I've seen no white man here," he said. "Except myself. They call me a white man." He spoke English without a trace of the red man's clipped idiom. ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... possess: he spoke English well, although with a foreign accent: in this last respect, he resembled some of those around him, more especially the Duke of Perth, who, having been long abroad, in vain endeavoured to conceal the French idiom and pronunciation by affecting a ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... boy whose fresh, cheerful face was crossed with just a hint of sadness, but to Roscoe Button his presence was a source of torment. In the idiom of his generation Roscoe did not consider the matter "efficient." It seemed to him that his father, in refusing to look sixty, had not behaved like a "red-blooded he-man"—this was Roscoe's favourite expression—but in a curious ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... not ignorant, how tiresome and difficult a Piece of Work it is to translate, nor how little valued in the World. My Experience has convinced me, that 'tis more troublesome and teazing than to write and invent at once. The Idiom of the Language out of which one translates, runs so in the Head, that 'tis next to impossible not to fall frequently into it. And the more bald and incorrect the Stile of the Original is, the more shall that of the Translation ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... of chiefs,"—literally, "yea, having horns." The custom of wearing horns as part of the head-dress of a chief has been long disused among the Iroquois; but the idiom remains in the language, and the horns, in common parlance, indicate the chief, as the coronet suggests the nobleman in England. Among the western Indians, as is well known, the usage still survives. "No one," says Catlin, "wears the head-dress surmounted with horns except the dignitaries ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... language is being made more copious, and fluency of speech or written discourse acquired. The discipline of translating accurately is next in value to that obtained from the study of numbers. The difficulty of turning this accurate translation into the idiom of one's own language is ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... the orchids of which one hears," he answered, with pronounced French accent and idiom; adding, with a slight smile, "I did not overlook you, but you were so busily contemplating other ground that it would have been cruelty to disturb you." He spoke the language slowly, as a ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... pewee (Contopus virens), the Tl[)a]niw[)a] or mythic hawk, the Gul[)i][']sgul[)i]['] or great crested flycatcher (Myiarchus crinitus), the Ts[^u]ts[^u] or martin (Progne subis), and the A[']nig[^a]sta[']ya or chimney swift (Chaetura pelasgia). In the idiom of the formulas it is said that these "have just come and are sticking to them" (the players), the same word (dan[^u]tsg[^u][']lani'ga) being used to express the devoted attention of a lover to his mistress. The Watatuga, a small species of dragon-fly, ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... voice was gentle, the child had caught the idiom and pronunciation of the fisherman's family; but even in that respect there was a natural refinement in the tone of her voice; and as Adam was a God-fearing man, and had brought up his sons to fear God also, no coarse language or objectionable expressions were ever ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... pagan political philosopher might do, than as one intimately acquainted with it by a personal experience of his own. His spirit, however, is humane and liberal. It is the spirit of Montaigne, it is the spirit of Voltaire, speaking in the idiom of this different man, and of this different man as influenced by his different circumstances. Montesquieu had had practical proof of the importance to himself of ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... note that I have not made the boatman say "whateffer," because he doesn't. The occasional use of the imperfect is almost his only Gaelic idiom. It is a great comfort and pleasure, when the trout do not rise, to meet a skilled and unaffected narrator of the old beliefs, old legends, as ancient as the hills that girdle and guard the loch, or as antique, at least, as man's dwelling among the mountains—the Yellow Hill, the Calf Hill, ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... Abyssinia who had fallen into the hands of the natives of an archipelago of the Pacific, it might be that he could speak English or one or two words of the European languages which Godfrey understood. But it was soon apparent that the unhappy man only used an idiom that was absolutely incomprehensible—probably the language of the aborigines among whom he had doubtless arrived when very young. In fact, Godfrey had immediately interrogated him in English, and had obtained no ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... arranged on a common plan of alphabetical notation, they would generally be found to the eye, as they are to the ear, nearly identical. The discrepancies would be rendered less in cases in which they appear to be considerable, and the peculiarities of idiom, as they exist, would be made more striking and instructive. I have heard both idioms spoken by the natives, and therefore have more confidence in speaking of their nearness and affinity, than I could have had from mere book comparison. I ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... a somewhat fuller technical familiarity with the Spanish military idiom. Undismayed, however, I resort to the sign language, and make gestures to signify ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... sich a person," and acutely divined that the book was a journalistic squib directed against my amiable garrulity. The most pleasing notice was that of Jean La Frette, some extracts from which I venture to append. It is true that competent judges have questioned the accuracy of M. La Frette's idiom, but his sentiments are unimpeachable. The necessary corrective was not wanting, for a weekly journal of high culture described my poor handiwork as "Snobbery and Snippets." There was a boisterousness—almost ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... Ones" were the object of universal detestation: John Psicharis, the well known Greek Professor in Paris, the author of many works and of the first complete Grammar of the people's idiom; Alexandros Pallis, the translator of the Iliad and of the New Testament; and Kostes Palamas, secretary of the University of Athens, the poet of this "anti-nationalistic" faction. Against them the bitterest invectives were cast. The University students and, with them, masses of people ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... story is at times almost startlingly American, as when the original betrayer of the heroine is excused on the ground that, being English, his morality would naturally not rise to native level (I swear I'm not laughing—see page 168); and so full of the idiom of the Transatlantic stage as to be a perfect vade mecum for visiting mimes from this side. For the rest, vivacious, wildly sentimental and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... "Cap'n" Kittredge and his wife, Miss Roxy and Miss Ruey, and Zephaniah Pennel, are incomparably good. Each affords matter enough for a long dissertation on New England and human character. Miss Roxy, especially, is the typical old maid of Yankee-land, and is so thoroughly lovable, in spite of her idiom, her crusty manners, and her eccentricities, that the only wonder is that she should have been allowed to remain single. But the same wonder is often expressed, in actual life, in regard to old maids superior to Miss Roxy in education, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... George Ade. (Doubleday, Page & Company.) Mr. Ade's new series of thirty fables are a valuable record of the war years in American life. They are written in a unique idiom full of color, if unintelligible to the foreigner. I think one may fairly say that Mr. Ade's work is thoroughly characteristic of a large section of American culture, and this section he has portrayed admirably. Undoubtedly he is our ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the priest, as if continuing a sentence he was running over in his mind. "Casse! Pauvre Pierre, un peu casse, le pauvre bonhomme, but then, he's good for several years yet; cracked he is, but only cracked like a good old basin, and (in the idiom) he'll still hold well his ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... procured from the Sailor's Snug Harbor in San Francisco, on trial. But the unfortunate seaman was more or less diseased, was not always presentable, through a weakness for ardent spirits, and finally, to use the powerful idiom of one of his disappointed foster-children, "up and died in a ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... Reading relate to the history and literature of King Alfred's day, and are sufficient to give the student a first-hand, though brief, acquaintance with the native style and idiom of Early West Saxon prose in its golden age. Most of the words and constructions contained in them will be already familiar to the student through their intentional employment ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... was no need to be so literal," returned Mrs. Challoner, reprovingly; for she was a gentlewoman of the old school, and nothing grieved her more than slipshod English or any idiom or idiotcy of modern parlance in the mouths of her bright young daughters: to speak of any young man except Dick without the ceremonious prefix was a heinous misdemeanor in her eyes. Dulce would occasionally trespass, and was always rebuked with much gravity. "You could have said ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... "right," "wrong," "pity," "hope," and other irrational and emotional conceptions, which have no existence, and the fiction of which has no object except to control feminine exuberances; but among ourselves, and in our books, we have an entirely different vocabulary and I may also say, idiom. "Love" them becomes "the anticipation of benefits"; "duty" becomes "necessity" or "fitness"; and other words are correspondingly transmuted. Moreover, among Women, we use language implying the utmost deference for their Sex; and they fully believe that the Chief Circle Himself is not more devoutly ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... process of instructing his intended confessor. For Mezzofanti's marvellous and almost instinctive power of grasping and systematising the leading characteristics even of the most original language, the names of a few prominent ideas in the new idiom sufficed to open a first means of communication. His prodigious memory retained with iron tenacity every word or phrase once acquired; his power of methodising, by the very exercise, became more ready and more perfect with each new advance in the study; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... theme; but still the theme is there, a precise and definite dogma for fancy to embroider. It is only in Hellas that Shelley's power of narrative (in Hassan's story), his irrepressible lyrical gift, and his passion which at length could speak in its own idiom, combine to make a masterpiece which owes to Godwin only some general ideas. If the transcript became less literal, it was not that the influence had waned. It was rather that Shelley was gaining the full mastery of his own native powers of expression. In these poems he assumes or ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... has its idiom—everything has an idiom and tongue; He resolves all tongues into his own, and bestows it upon men, and any man translates, and any man translates himself also; One part does not counteract another part—he is the ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... ever so inclined. Not that he asked her to do so. He had only reached the point of inviting her to dine with him at Monte Carlo and look in at the gaming afterward. She declined this invitation gently and without rancor toward him; but, in the idiom she used in talking with him, it gave her ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... running nastily over a catalogue of the books kept for circulation, as an elderly lady, of foreign accent and dress, entered; and depositing a couple of religious works on the counter, she inquired for the remainder of the set. The peculiarity of her idiom and her proximity to the sisters caused them both to look up at the moment, and, to the surprise of Jane, her sister uttered a slight exclamation of pleasure. The foreigner was attracted by the sound, and after a moment's ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... were, not to!" cried the Arab with the bound of a wild beast, springing up, flashing the blade out, and uttering the taunt, which in his own idiom was but a ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... prison, and is on his way to join the Writer, and the two may hope to visit the Hebrews together again. Then follows the greeting to the pastors through the Church; and then a message of love sent by "those from Italy," that is to say, as the familiar idiom suggests, brethren resident in Italy who send their greeting from it; an allusion over which endless conjectures may gather but which must always remain uncertain. The last word is the blessing of grace. "Grace"—the holy effect upon the ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... instantia, the scholastic term for an argument not latent merely, or merely having the office of sustaining a truth, but urged as an objection, having the polemic office of contradicting an opponent) is in Shakespeare's idiom, when viewed as against a substantial ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... might have been: but I feel that I am not. The first right of man, ay and, to talk in your own idiom, the first moral duty too, is to be happy; and he is an idiot that, having a banquet spread before him, forbears to taste because he himself is not the purveyor. What matters it to me how it came there? Why am I to be ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... working in her brain, the spirit of Elspat rose to its usual pitch, or, rather, to one which seemed higher. In the emphatic language of Scripture, which in that idiom does not greatly differ from her own, she arose, she washed and changed her apparel, and ate bread, ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott |
