"Provincialism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... atmosphere, life there is city life raised to the highest limit. Last of all, its size—and personally I think there should be a federal law forbidding cities to grow any bigger than San Francisco—makes it an engaging combination of provincialism and cosmopolitanism. ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... were admitted into the general stock; and were since all collected and bound up by one Mr Webster. With the exception of a few words coined for local uses (such as snags and sawyers, on the Mississippi,) I do not recollect a word which I have not traced to be either a provincialism of some English county, or else to be obsolete English. There are a few from the Dutch, such as stoup, for the porch of a door, etcetera. I was once talking with an American about Webster's dictionary, and he observed, "Well now, sir, I understand ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... recognised school. America has become too great, and its influence abroad too large, for us to afford to have recourse to that ancient and easy method of criticism which decries the American and extols the foreign. That is one of those last remnants of colonialism and provincialism ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... than a geographical expression for a number of petty feudal states, practically independent and almost always at strife. Henceforward there was peace; and throughout the whole of this northern part of his domains it was the constant policy of Philip gradually to abolish provincialism and to establish a centralised government. He was far too wise a statesman to attempt to abolish suddenly or arbitrarily the various rights and privileges, which the Flemings, Brabanters and Hollanders had wrung from their sovereigns, and to which they were deeply attached; ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... such as Colonel Byrd or Governor Thomas Hutchinson, was proud to have it thought that his mind as well as his house was furnished after the best English fashion. Even more than others, those who were condemned to be provincials of the province consciously endeavored, to avoid provincialism of the spirit; to be mistaken in London for an English gentleman of parts was a much-sought compensation for being, at Williamsburg or Boston, no more than the first gentleman of America. In the middle ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... Frederick the Great, were incessant travellers, they will reply that their kings had to be so at a time when the Empire was not yet established, when rebellious nobles had to be subdued, and when the spirit of provincialism and particularism had to be counteracted. Hence, they say, former Hohenzollerns had to exercise personal control in all parts of their dominions, see that their military dispositions were carried out, and study social and ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... West still keeps the American inheritance of open hearted hospitality and its provincialism. The West has inherited some of the finest virtues of our country, and if it is not bitten by Back Bay, Philadelphia, Virginia, or Charleston, it will grow up ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... delightful in either case, but the suddenness of the transition makes the stranger guest a little dizzy at first. There are handsome buildings in Denver—blocks that would do credit to any city under the sun; but there was for years an upstart air, a palpable provincialism, a kind of ill-disguised "previousness," noticeable that made her seem like the brisk suburb of some other place, and that other place, alas! invisible to mortal eye. Rectangular blocks make a checker-board ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... make them minister to his perfection. The one most cultured may come out of a factory, and the man of least culture may be found in a university. Indeed colleges and universities, not infrequently, are haunts of provincialism and of dread of enthusiasm. The object of culture is the perfection of the spirit to the end that all that hinders, or limits, may disappear and only pure power, clear vision, and full self-realization remain. ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... and not unfrequently their own works show an uncouth attempt to adopt that greatness, which comes out in exaggeration of colour even more than of form, and speaks for that want of taste which is the indelible stamp of provincialism. But there were Venetian towns without the traditions even of the schools of Vicenza and Brescia, where, if you wanted to learn painting, you had to apprentice yourself to somebody who had been taught by somebody who ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... passed on up the line of a dozen cars, loudly proclaimed their admiration of the entire arrangement. "They are just like prairie schooners," said one young man, to Lily's huge delight, for she had never before seen so much provincialism all at once. The platform was thick with people rushing to find their cars at the last minute. All was hurry and excitement and colour and laughter. The orange of Woodbridge and the olive of Hartley were everywhere. Each person boldly displayed his colours, whether with flowers ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... Laurence, who had a keen ear for that sort of thing, could not help noticing the other's voice. It was a pleasing voice, a cultured voice, and refined withal, nor could his fastidious ear detect the faintest trace of provincialism or vulgarity about it. The intonation was perfect. There is nothing so quick to betray to the sensitive ear any strain of plebeian descent as the voice, and of this no one was more thoroughly aware than ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... evidence of a broad pronunciation which, at the present time, is said to be a characteristic of the northwestern division of Lancashire, but I think that there is good evidence for asserting that this strong provincialism was not confined, formerly, to the West-Midland dialect, much less to a division of any particular county. We find traces of it in Audelay's Poems (Shropshire), the Romance of William and the Werwolf,[35] and even in the Wickliffite version ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature that inspired us. We could not give her over to a lumberman, doubly accursed by wealth and provincialism. We shuddered to think of Milly, with her voice modulated and her elbows covered, pouring tea in the marble teepee of a tree murderer. No! In Cypher's she belonged—in the bacon smoke, the cabbage perfume, the ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... between me and my intentions; until one day, upon arranging my toilet hastily before dinner, I suddenly made the discovery that I had no waistcoat (or vest, as it is now called, through conceit or provincialism), which was not torn or otherwise dilapidated; whereupon, buttoning up my coat to the throat, and drawing my gown as close about me as possible, I went into the public "hall" (so is called in Oxford the public eating-room) with no misgiving. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... forces that were moving me. My Polotzk I knew well before I began to judge it and experiment with it. America was bewilderingly strange, unimaginably complex, delightfully unexplored. I rushed impetuously out of the cage of my provincialism and looked eagerly about the brilliant universe. My question was, What have we here?—not, What does this mean? That query came much later. When I now become retrospectively introspective, I fall into the predicament of the centipede in the rhyme, who ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... seems to be a diminutive of 'grome', a serving-man, whence the modern groom. The provincialism grummet, much used in Sussex to designate a clumsy, awkward youth, has doubtless some relation to this ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... the various elements that contributed to the development of the national spirit, to the destruction of that provincialism so marked in the colonies before 1750, and to the creation in each of breadth of thought and clearness of vision, trade and commerce had their part. Because of them, came increasing knowledge of the widely different habits of life in the thirteen colonies. It came also from the association ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... a collection of knowledge. Thus, Bronchlemmitis is not Polypus bronchialis, but Croup.—The accent of laryngeal and pharyngeal is incorrectly placed on the third syllable. In this wilderness of words we look in vain for the New York provincialism "Sprue." The work has a right to some scores, perhaps hundreds, of such errors, without forfeiting its character. If the Elzevirs could not print the "Corpus Juris Civilis" without a false heading ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... top of a rounded hill; the head of a bank, or the most elevated part of a submarine shoal. [Perhaps derived from nowl, a provincialism for head.] ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... on the part of the, younger men in the legs of a horse. Decidedly, it is at the Overseas Club all the world over that you get to know some little of the life of the community. London is egoistical, and the world for her ends with the four-mile cab radius. There is no provincialism like the provincialism of London. That big slack-water coated with the drift and rubbish of a thousand men's thoughts esteems itself the open sea because the waves of all the oceans break on her borders. To those in her midst she is terribly imposing, ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... anxiety lest he go too far, lest he himself act fantastically, and now he simultaneously begins battle against commonplace reality. He opposes everything which we are accustomed to understand under the name Philistinism—musty pedantry, provincialism, petty etiquette, narrow criticism, false prudery, smug complacency, arrogant dignity, and whatever names may be applied to all these unclean ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... rugged, traditional, stage type of American business man, and Babbitt, the plump, smooth, efficient, up-to-the-minute and otherwise perfected modern. Whenever Thompson twanged, "Put your John Hancock on that line," Babbitt was as much amused by the antiquated provincialism as any proper Englishman by any American. He knew himself to be of a breeding altogether more esthetic and sensitive than Thompson's. He was a college graduate, he played golf, he often smoked cigarettes instead of cigars, and when he went ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... fence or stone wall is a "mound." The Cotswold folk do not talk about houses; they stick to the old Saxon termination, and call their dwellings "housen"; they also use the Anglo-Saxon "hire" for hear. The word "bowssen," too, is very frequently heard in these parts; it is a provincialism for a stall or shed where oxen are kept. "Boose" is the word from which it originally sprang. A very expressive phrase in common use is to "quad" or "quat"; it is equivalent to the word "squat." Other ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... residence in Jackson, Miss., whence you hail, and you will not be set upon. But in New York you must be either a New Yorker or an invader of a modern Troy, concealed in the wooden horse of your conceited provincialism. And this dreary preamble is only to introduce to you the unimportant ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... the real manhood of a country is distributed over its surface. And then, just as we are beginning to think our own soil has a monopoly of heroes as well as of cotton, up turns a regiment of gallant Irishmen, like the Sixty-ninth, to show us that continental provincialism is as bad as that of Coos County, New Hampshire, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Jewry. Representing the common longings of the Jewish people throughout the world, Zionism should serve as a leaven, quickening and stimulating the Jewish activities of this country, and rescue them from the greatest danger of Diaspora Judaism, the danger of provincialism, of falling away from the main body of universal Israel. In the particular situation confronting us Zionism ought to assert the claims of Palestine, in addition to those of the Diaspora. But the Zionists cannot replace the present agencies of American ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... his clear eye, ruddy cheek, and grey hair. He used the Scottish idiom in his first address, but in such a manner that it could hardly be distinguished whether he was passing upon his friend a sort of jocose mockery, or whether it was his own native dialect, for his ordinary discourse had little provincialism. ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... the lively patriotism that makes heroes of the Japanese, these fine big fellows are not machines, but animals. To the mistaken efforts recently made to instil that sentiment at the expense of the foreigner, I shall refer in another chapter. A less objectionable phase of the sentiment is provincialism, which makes it easy for an invader to employ the troops of one province to conquer another. In history these provinces appear as kingdoms, and their mutual wars form the staple subject. What feeling of unity can exist so long as the people are divided by a ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... it is equally one and the other, and always has been. Even were we rash enough to pronounce progress to be on the whole prevalent within the narrow field of our own experience, surely it were nothing but the inevitable "provincialism" of the human mind to pass per saltum from that, to a generalization for all possible experience. Our optimism, our faith that right, truth, and order will eventually prevail, can find only a delusive ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... present conditions, and because the majority of those who do elect it never have an opportunity to continue the study of government, it is thought that the selection of American government for the beginning subject has the tendency to foster provincialism. When but one course is taken this one, it is contended, should deal with foreign governments, to supply a broader basis for the comparison of political institutions. As the study of government is introduced in ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... wreaths on the battlefields; of the other it was the prophetic smoke of the factories. From where she stood in High Street, she could see this incense to Mammon rising above the spires of the churches, above the houses and the hovels, above the charm and the provincialism which made the Dinwiddie of the eighties. And this charm, as well as this provincialism, appeared to her to be so inalienable a part of the old order, with its intrepid faith in itself, with its militant enthusiasm, with its ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... which had been derived from the institution where he had been taught. In the classics I was much the strongest, particularly in the quantities, but Jason had the best of it in mathematics. In spite of his conceit, his vulgarity, his English, his provincialism, and the awkwardness with which he wore his tardily acquired information, this man had strong points about him, and a native shrewdness that would have told much more in his favour had it not been accompanied by a certain evasive manner, that caused one constantly ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... the character and disposition of him who acquires it, or it is a thin disguise of vanity and idleness. To what, then, may we attribute this passion for the lecture hall? Perhaps it is partly due to the provincialism characteristic of America, and partly to an invincible energy, which quickens the popular ambition and urges men to acquire information as they acquire wealth, by the shortest route, and with ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the first time. Provincialism has no scale of excellence in man or vegetable; it never knows a first-rate article of either kind when it has it, and is constantly taking second and third rate ones for Nature's best. I have often fancied the tree was afraid of me, and that a sort of shiver came over it as over a betrothed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... into the English Shop to see whether I might buy something warm for Nina. Here, indeed, I could fancy that I was in the High Street in Chester, or Leicester, or Truro, or Canterbury. A demure English provincialism was over everything, and a young man in a high white collar and a shiny black coat, washed his hands as he told me that "they hadn't any in stock at the moment, but they were expecting a delivery of goods at any minute." ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... that Grayson will make a display of provincialism to-night," he said. "America will have to blush for herself. I have copies of the Monitor, and all our London cables show the greatest amazement in Great Britain and on the Continent that we should put up such an outre Western character ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... are, M. Mauperin!" said Mme. Mauperin, blushing at being convicted of the most flagrant provincialism; and then, turning upon her daughter, she exclaimed, "Oh, dear, Renee, how you stoop! Do sit ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... an old fool, as I do now," said he. "Sit thee down, lad! and hold that soft tongue o' thine. I can stand a fair flyting [scolding: still a Northern provincialism] or a fustigation [beating], but I never can one of those soft ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... that time, as it served to increase existing jealousies between the troops from the different States, and so far impair the morale of the army. It excites a smile to-day to read that men from New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland charged New Englanders generally with provincialism and cowardice, and that the charge was resented; but such was the fact. The feeling between them grew to such an extent that Washington was obliged to issue orders condemning its indulgence. The Kip's Bay panic offered a favorable opportunity for emphasizing these charges, and the ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... inarticulate "million hall-room boys who want to be geniuses," the ordinary, unshaved, not over-bathed, ungrammatical young men of any American city, so nearly transcend provincialism as in an enthusiasm over their favorite minor cynic, Elbert Hubbard or John Kendrick Bangs, or, in Walter Babson's case, Mr. Fitzgerald's variations on Omar. Una had read Omar as a pretty poem about roses and murmurous courts, ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... It was taken for granted that he, who had spoken so many eloquent words, all pointing to the magnificent future of British North America, all tending to inspire its youth with love of country as something far higher than mere provincialism, would now be among the advocates of federation, and the wise and loving critic of the scheme to be submitted to the legislatures. Though his ideal had ever looked beyond to a wider Imperial federation, he had at his best ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... the notion of a number, as in early English: it is also spelt anow, and in Chaucer ynowe, and is the plural of enough. It still occurs as a provincialism in England. On lines 780-799 Masson says: "A recurrence, by the sister, with much more mystic fervour, to that Platonic and Miltonic doctrine which had already been propounded by the Elder ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... rely on the Frenchman, who only wants to make the most of his own without encroaching on anybody's else property and is disinterested in human incubation for the purpose of overwhelming his neighbors. True internationalism will spring from the provincialism that holds fast to its own home and does not interfere with the worship by other countries ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... he was more provincial than he had to be; for that matter, there is no provincialism so rampant as that of the thronging, striving, self-sufficient city. But isolation in any sort is a thing to be reckoned with. The two pioneering years in the Rockies had done their work,—of narrowing, as well as of broadening,—and ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... time out here?" asked John, to conceal the fact that he was somewhat hurt by this remark. It seemed an unkind allusion to his provincialism. ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... white-spotted green leaves of "Our Lady's thistle" were caused by some drops of her milk falling upon them, and in Cheshire we find the same idea connected with the pulmonaria or "lady's milk sile," the word "sile" being a provincialism for "soil," or "stain." A German tradition makes the common fern (Polypodium vulgare) to have sprung ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... Strong and peculiar individuals and families were often developed at the expense of a friendly community life: neighbourhood feuds were common. Country life was marked with the rigidity of a hard provincialism. All this, however, is rapidly changing. The closer settlement of the land, the rural delivery of mails (the morning newspaper reaches the tin box at the end of my lane at noon), the farmer's telephone, the spreading country ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... birds. The soil is a rich dark loam, yielding good crops, with very little manure, and the surface is level. There are sixty-three tenants occupying plots varying in size, according to circumstances, from 48 "lug" downwards—25, 30, 16, &c. A "lug" is a provincialism for perch. The rent is 5d. per "lug" or perch, and each occupier on becoming a tenant receives a card on which the following rules are ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... means so popular as Tom, I got along fairly well. I had escaped from provincialism, from the obscure purgatory of the wholesale grocery business; new vistas, exciting and stimulating, had been opened up; nor did I offend the sensibilities and prejudices of the new friends I made, but gave a hearty consent to a code I found congenial. I recognized ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... "That's their insular provincialism, then. I don't care a cent. The old man would have wrecked the Great Buchonian before breakfast for a pipe-opener. My God, I'll do it in dead earnest! I'll show 'em that they can't bulldoze a foreigner for flagging one of their little tinpot trains, ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... of new-comers in the hall below. We saw not their hue, but we recognized their cry as that of our countrypeople. We are not madly enamoured of our countryman in foreign climes. There his least adorable qualities—his bumptiousness, his provincialism, his strident tones and "costume de Yank"—are always more strikingly conspicuous than the chivalry toward women and the self-respecting manliness we always recognize so emphatically in him when we return to our own land after a prolonged absence. Hence we panted not for the dinner-hour, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... manly—Mr. Hugh Roger Littlepage, Senior, then, had a system of his own, in the way of aiding the scales to fall from American eyes, by means of seeing more clearly than one does, or can, at home, let him belong where he may, and in clearing the specks of provincialism from off the diamond of republican water. He had already seen enough to ascertain that while "our country," as this blessed nation is very apt on all occasions, appropriate or not, to be called by all who belong to it, as well as by a good many who do not, could teach a great ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... time, we strolled about the city. Munich is a fine, handsome, open town, full of noble streets and splendid buildings; but in spite of this and of its hundred and seventy thousand inhabitants, an atmosphere of quiet and provincialism hovers over it. There is but little traffic on ordinary occasions along its broad ways, and customers in its well-stocked shops are few and far between. This day being Sunday, it was busier than usual, and its promenades ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... writers and cultural bohemians in the group that has since come to be called the "Chicago Renaissance." Anderson soon adopted the posture of a free, liberated spirit, and like many writers of the time, he presented himself as a sardonic critic of American provincialism and materialism. It was in the freedom of the city, in its readiness to put up with deviant styles of life, that Anderson found the strength to settle accounts with—but also to release his affection for—the world of small-town America. The dream of ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... literary entertainment, as well as for instruction. Works like those of Irving and Cooper gained wide circulation only because of the new demands, due to the increasing population, to the decline in colonial provincialism, and to the growth of the new national spirit. Probably no one would have been inspired, twenty-five years earlier, to write a work like Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York. Even if it had been produced earlier, the country ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... too much diffused everywhere, to make head against the advances of an overwhelming mediocrity. Of society there was but little; for what it suited the caprice of certain people to call such was little more than the noisy, screeching, hoydenish romping of both sexes. The taint of provincialism was diffused over all feelings and beliefs. Of arts and letters the country possessed none or next to none. Moreover, there was no genuine sympathy with either. To all this dismal prospect there was slight ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... parliamentary battle between Webster and Hayne, the broad nationalism of the former stands out in splendid contrast with the narrow provincialism of the latter. Hayne's theme was small and sectional—it wanted bulk; hence, he continually intrudes himself in his subject: the subject is half, and Hayne and Webster the other and more important half. Webster, on the contrary, is completely absorbed in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... vigorous local life which Provincial institutions intensified was in itself an admirable thing. But it engendered a mild edition of the feelings which set Greek States and Italian cities at each others' throats. From the first many colonists were convinced that Provincialism was unnatural and must go. But for twenty years the friends of the Provinces were usually ready to forego quarrelling with each other when the Centralists in Parliament threatened the Councils. There were able men in the Colony who devoted their ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... knowledge of another's success. Margaret Edes was inwardly writhing. To think that Annie Eustace, little Annie Eustace, who had worshipped at her own shrine, whom she had regarded with a lazy, scarcely concealed contempt, for her incredible lack of wordly knowledge, her provincialism, her ill-fitting attire, should have achieved a triumph which she herself could never achieve. A cold hatred of the girl swept over the woman. She forced her lips into a smile, but ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... example of legal or judicial difficulties was ever before presented as has been illustrated in the history of California. There was no general or common source of jurisprudence. Law was to be administered almost without a standard. There was the civil law, as adulterated or modified by Mexican provincialism, usages, and habitudes, for a great part of the litigation; and there was the common law for another part, but what that was was to be decided from the conflicting decisions of any number of courts in America and England, and the various and diverse ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... ennui, a gloomy ennui, the ennui of seeing the same faces always in the same places, with their defects or their poses, that uniformity of fashionable gatherings which ends by establishing in Paris each winter a spiteful and gossiping provincialism more petty than that of ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... of Lancashire, and indeed throughout the North of England, and it appears Scotland also, the term "sneck the door" is used indiscriminately with "shut the door" or "toin't dur." And there can be little doubt but that this provincialism was known to Shakspeare, as his works are full of such; many of which have either been passed over by his commentators, or have been wrongly noted, as the one ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... force of incalculable power, in the era which ended with the Civil War. The New Englander of the Middle West, however, ceased to be altogether a Yankee. The lake and prairie plains bred a spirit which contrasted strongly with the smug provincialism of rock-ribbed and sterile New England. The exultation born of wide, unbroken, horizon lines and broad, teeming, prairie landscapes, found expression in the often-quoted saying, "Vermont is the most glorious spot on the face of this globe for a man to be born ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... her appreciate the whole manner of being at the Hall. By her dear old friends the Miss Brownings she was petted and caressed so much that she became ashamed of noticing the coarser and louder tones in which they spoke, the provincialism of their pronunciation, the absence of interest in things, and their greediness of details about persons. They asked her questions which she was puzzled enough to answer about her future stepmother; her loyalty to her father forbidding her to reply fully and truthfully. She was always ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... have to be content for a good while yet with our provincialism, and must strive to make the best of it. In it lies the germ of nationality, and that is, after all, the prime condition of all thorough-bred greatness of character. To this choicest fruit of a healthy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... change into to-morrow's issue as they go, picking up literary criticism here, financial intelligence there, here to-morrow's story, and there to-morrow's scandal, and, like some vast intellectual garden-roller, rolling out local provincialism at every revolution. This, for papers in English, at any rate, is merely a question of how long it will be before the price of the best writing (for journalistic purposes) rises actually or relatively above the falling cost of long distance ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... the Senora's provincialism. What a great world lay outside that of her own, of which ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the first time. Provincialism has no SCALE of excellence in man or vegetable; it never knows a first-rate article of either kind when it has it, and is constantly taking second and third rate ones for Nature's best. I have often fancied the tree was afraid of me, and that a sort ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... of ratification. The former went so far in the direction of local autonomy that he exalted the state above the nation in the Kentucky resolutions of 1798, declaring the Constitution to be a mere compact and the states competent to interpret and nullify federal law. This was provincialism with a vengeance. "It is jealousy, not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions," wrote Jefferson for the Kentucky legislature. Jealousy of the national government, not confidence in it—this is the ideal that reflected the provincial ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... over-respectfully referred to as the counting of noses; and, moreover, by an unwritten law more binding than any in the Statute Book, that counting of noses is with us localized. In other words, when it comes to the choice of our law-makers, reducing provincialism to a system we make the local numerical majority supreme, and any one is considered competent to legislate. He can do that, even if by common knowledge he is incompetent or untrustworthy in every other capacity. Localization ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... heard a dog called a fice. She feared it might be something very terrible. Afterwards she learned that it was a Southern provincialism for a common dog. ...
— A Little Florida Lady • Dorothy C. Paine
... previous one. The colonists had become more prosperous, a little more worldly, and certainly far less afraid of the wrath of God and the judges. As travel to Europe became safer and more common, visitors brought new fashions, and provincialism in manner, style, and costume became much less apparent. Madame Knight, who wrote an account of her journey from Boston to New York in 1704, has left some record of dress in the different colonies. Of the country women in Connecticut she says: "They are very plain in their dress, throughout all ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... Commerce, secure in the knowledge its city suffered from nothing worse than fires, earthquakes, a miserable climate, and an invincible provincialism, invited displaced businessmen to resettle themselves in an area where improbable happenings were less likely; and the state of Oklahoma organized a border ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... could show their title to be regarded as members of the common race of humanity. As the special features of Greek civilization faded, the lineaments of this common humanity emerged more clearly into view, and the Greek, when he was compelled to give up his parochialism and provincialism, found himself already in spirit prepared to take his place as a citizen of the world. He had learned his lesson, and to him the whole world went to school, first to learn of him what civilization meant and then to better ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... lives to the Revolution; though it must be conceded that he did unusual work, especially in his elaboration and interpretation of working-class philosophy. "Proletarian science" and "proletarian philosophy" were his phrases for it, and therein he shows the provincialism of his mind—a defect, however, that was due to the times and that none in that ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... only in a limited part of the country is called a provincialism. It must be known and recognized for what it is worth, but not obtruded ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... we can hope to have our dreams come true. It is a far cry from society as a strictly American affair to society as a world affair. The teaching of our schools has had a distinct tendency to restrict our notion of society to that within our own national boundaries. In this we convict ourselves of provincialism. Society is far larger than America, or China, or Russia, or all the islands of the sea in combination. It may entail some straining at the mental leash to win this concept of society, but it must be won as a condition precedent to a fair and just estimate of what the function ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... indulge our traditional provincialism. We are to play a leading part in the world drama whether we wish it or not. We shall lend, not borrow; act for ourselves, not imitate or follow; organize and initiate, not peep about merely to see where ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... can do away with the mutual dislike of Americans and Englishmen. It is a thing which cannot be eradicated in a day, but will die the sooner for exposure to the light, being an ugly growth of swampy prejudice and evil-smelling provincialism that needs the darkness and ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... from the Lyapinsky house, I related my impressions to a friend. The friend, an inhabitant of the city, began to tell me, not without satisfaction, that this was the most natural phenomenon of town life possible, that I only saw something extraordinary in it because of my provincialism, that it had always been so, and always would be so, and that such must be and is the inevitable condition of civilization. In London it is even worse. Of course there is nothing wrong about it, and ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... reason of this undeniable provincialism of the English Puritans and Protestant Nonconformists, a provincialism which has two main types,—a bitter type and a smug type,—but which in both its types is vulgarising, and thwarts the full perfection of our humanity? Men of genius and character ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... of the plays is pure and classical. There is no trace of provincialism, nothing to suggest that Seneca was a Spaniard. Its vices proceed from the false mould in which it has been cast. There is a lack of connecting particles, and we proceed by a series of short rhetorical jerks.[202] It is the style that Seneca himself condemns in his letters (114. 1). Its ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... To prejudiced provincialism, on the one side, they may appear too lukewarm; by stupid fanaticism on the other, they may be called treasonable. But—written without prejudice, and equally without fear, or favor—they have aimed only at impartial ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... commonplace. They have seen the great in the little, and ennobled the humbler ways of existence with spiritual insight. They have set to music the homely service and simple enjoyments of common life. They have touched the chords that speak to the universal heart. The very provincialism of our poets endears them to us. Their work, as some foreign critic said, has been done in a corner. We do not deny it. But, verily we believe, that New England is the corner lot of our national estate. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... This anxiety of man to know the aim and the end is essentially human; it is a kind of infirmity or provincialism of the mind, and has nothing in common with universal reality. Have things an aim? Why should they have; and what aim or end can there be, in an ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... country"—bird-nature and rock scenery being his favourite but by no means his only subjects. For "Scenes of Clerical Life" he stands admittedly alone in France, and has naturally been dealt with most often from this point of view. Of that intense provincialism, in the good sense, which is characteristic of French literature, there have been few better representatives. Wordsworth himself is scarcely more the poet of our Lake and Hill country than Fabre is the novelist of the Cevennes. Peasant life ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... the moment that Leddy had approached her on the pass till a stranger, whom she never expected to see again, walked away into the night. What folly! What folly to keep awake over an incident of desert life! But was it folly? What sublime egoism of isolated provincialism to imagine that it had been anything but a great event! Naturally, quiet, desert nerves must still be quivering after the strain. Inevitably, they would not calm instantly, particularly as she had taken coffee for supper. She was wroth about the coffee, though ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... be any question concerning the origin of the well-known sobriquet of "Yankees." Nearly all the old writers who speak of the Indians first known to the colonists make them pronounce the word "English" as "Yengeese." Even at this day, it is a provincialism of New England to say "Anglish" instead of "Inglish," and there is a close conformity of sound between "Anglish" and "yengeese," more especially if the latter word, as was probably the case, be pronounced short. The transition from "Yengeese," thus pronounced, to "Yankees" is quite ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... of meeting many types. In Mrs. Wayland she had a useful mentor. This lady in her younger days had been familiar with the best phases of metropolitan society, and she counteracted in Madge all tendencies toward provincialism. Thus it gradually became recognized that the "shy, sickly little girl," as she had been characterized at first, was growing into a very attractive young woman. Indeed, after an absence of only a year her own sister ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... "Provincialism of intellect is a calamity. All men of great achievements have had to know what others achieved. The highest monuments are always built with the spoils of the past. Any single genius, if not an infinitesimal, counts at most but a digit in the vast notation of humanity. ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... years. He was less a dreamer than Yancey. A man big of brain and warm of heart he had gone from the ironclad provincialism of South Carolina to the windswept vagaries of Texas. He believed wholly the Yancey confession of faith; that secession was a constitutional right; that African slavery was ordained of God; that the South was paramount, the North inferior. Yet in worldly knowledge he had learned more than Yancey—was ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... closely similar inheritance and environment, we find marked divergence in moral judgment. And when we compare widely different times and places we are apt to wonder if there is any common ground. It is only a very smug provincialism that can attribute the alien standards of other races and nations to a disregard of the light. Mohammedans and Buddhists have believed as firmly in, and fought as passionately for, their moral convictions ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Amiens of a Russian father and an English mother, Paul Bourget inherited Anglo-Saxon as well as Gallic intuitions. He is very proud of the cosmopolitan spirit which exempts him from the usual French provincialism, and has sought to develop it by travel and study. He endeavors to know intimately the phases of life which he wishes to describe, and then to treat them in the light of a large knowledge of many ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... humanitarianism, industrial prosperity the inveterate foe of the graces of life. To use Lanier's words, he "failed to perceive the deeper movements underrunning the times." Defeated in a long war and inheriting the provincialism and sensitiveness of a feudal order, he remained proud in his isolation. He went to work with a stubborn and unconquered spirit, with the idea that sometime in the future all the principles for which he ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... the introduction of competition in any society is to break up all types of isolation and provincialism based upon lack of communication and contact. But as competition continues, natural and social selection comes into play. Successful types emerge in the process of competitive struggle while variant individuals who fail to maintain the pace or conform ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... that is obsolete or too new to have gained a place in the language, or that is a provincialism, should ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... This business of moving regiments about from one garrison to another is a good cure for provincialism," ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... my time, at least, has always had an active and swift communication with the rest of the world. As a people, we are, beyond a question, decidedly provincial; but our provincialism is not exactly one of external appearance. The men are negligent of dress, for they are much occupied, have few servants, and clothes are expensive; but the women dress remarkably near the Parisian modes. We have not sufficient ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper |
