"Transposition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be placed near the nouns that they define.* In the very common sentence "The death is announced of Mr. John Smith, an author whose works &c.," the transposition is probably made from a feeling that, if we write "The death of Mr. John Smith is announced," we shall be obliged to begin a new sentence, "He was an author whose works &c." But the difficulty can be removed by writing "We regret to announce, or, we are informed ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... avails himself of the supposed license of transposition, merely for the metre. There is always some logic either of thought ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... for more than a minute; and so soon as I was quite myself again, I struck my revising pen across the monstrous sentence, with uncompromising decision, referring it to a clerical blunder, or some unlucky transposition, and I wondered how any polite person could have made so gross a slip. But see how authentication waits upon truth! Three years afterwards, I picked up in the parlour of the 'Cat and Fiddle,' on the ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... in her not his wife but Warwick's lover. Oppressed by the old fear, now augmented by a measureless regret, she could only look up at him feeling that her husband had become her judge. Yet as she looked she was conscious of a momentary wonder at the seeming transposition of character in the two so near and dear to her. Strong-hearted Warwick wept like any child, but accepted his disappointment without complaint and bore it manfully. Moor, from whom she would sooner have expected such demonstration, grew stormy first, then stern, as she once believed his friend ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... proud of this expression, which she must have newly caught from some grown person. She considered a reply, but, nothing sufficiently crushing occurring, she ignored the other in a difficult transposition of her hands. Camilla left; the clock above struck a second quarter; the third, while she honestly continued her efforts up until the first actual note ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of the identity of 'niggot' and 'nugget'; all the consonants, the stamina of a word, being the same; while this early form 'niggot' makes more plausible their suggestion that 'nugget' is only 'ingot' disguised, seeing that there wants nothing but the very common transposition of the first two letters to bring ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... "I have conceived in my mind." Sir R. Burton is apparently inclined to read tallectu by transposition, as he translates, "I depend ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... hypotheses, but in regarding them as final, or as more than an attempt to throw light upon our observation of the phenomena. In doing what he did, Descartes actually exemplified that reduction of the processes of nature to mere transposition of the particles of matter, which in different ways was a leading idea in the minds of Bacon, Hobbes and Gassendi. The defects of Descartes lie rather in his apparently imperfect apprehension of the principle of movements uniformly accelerated which his contemporary Galileo had illustrated ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... words as an instance of Hypallage as being used for 'corpora mutata in novas formas,' 'bodies changed into new forms;' and they fancy that there is a certain beauty in the circumstance that the proposition of a subject which treats of the changes and variations of bodies should be framed with a transposition of words. This supposition is perhaps based rather on the exuberance of a fanciful imagination than on solid grounds, as if it is an instance of Hypallage, it is most probably quite accidental; while the passage ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... them is exceeded. As the passage of the current through the gas seems to be always connected with chemical action, the phenomenon of glow may be explained in the same way as in flame, by oscillating transposition of the ether envelopes, by which the passage of electricity is effected. In that case the light of flame may be called electric light by the same light as the light of the ozone tube or the Geissler tube, which is mainly to be distinguished from the former in that it contains a dielectric of an extremely ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... task is laid upon the nymph of the Anthrax. It is the nymph that has to toil, to strive, to exhaust itself in efforts to burst the wall and open the way out. To the embryo falls the desperate duty, which shows no mercy to the nascent flesh; to the adult insect the joy of resting in the sun. This transposition of functions has as its result a well sinker's equipment in the nymph, an eccentric, complicated equipment which nothing suggested in the larva and which nothing recalls in the perfect insect. The set of tools includes an assortment of plowshares, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... followed by Watad majmu' the Latin Creticus (-U-). The primary Fa'u.lun becomes by transposition Lun.fa'u. To bring this into conformity with a current derivative of fa'l, the initial Sabab must be made to contain the first letter of the root, and the Watad the two remaining ones in their proper order. Fa is therefore substituted for lun, and 'ilun for fa'u, forming ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... of all things; it is the mother of all the elements; it is, in short, the substance whose existence has been recently surmised by a leading chemist, and which has been christened protyle by him. I am the discoverer of the great law of the electrical transposition of the metals, and I am the first to demonstrate protyle, so that, I think, Robert, if all my schemes in other directions come to nothing, my name is at least likely to live ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a joint action, information shall be provided in time to allow, if necessary, for prior consultations within the Council. The obligation to provide prior information shall not apply to measures which are merely a national transposition of Council decisions. 6. In cases of imperative need arising from changes in the situation and failing a Council decision, Member States may take the necessary measures as a matter of urgency having regard to the general objectives of the joint action. The Member State ...
— The Treaty of the European Union, Maastricht Treaty, 7th February, 1992 • European Union
... prefer Blomfield's transposition to Dindorf's correction, [Greek: blapsiphronos], which, though repudiated in the notes, is ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... have not noted. Another remarkable fact is the disposition to invert the order of some consonants in some words; as the r in thrush, brush, rush, run, &c., pronouncing them dirsh, birsh, hirsh, hirn; also transposition of p and s in such words as clasp, hasp, asp, &c., sounded claps, haps, aps, &c. I have not inserted all these words in the Glossary, as these general remarks will enable the student to detect the words which are so inverted. It is ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... yet it seems to me, if I should speak, Your silent step must wake across the hall; If I should turn my head, that your sweet eyes Would kiss me from the door.—So short a time To teach my life its transposition to This difficult and unaccustomed key!— The room is as you left it; your last touch— A thoughtless pressure, knowing not itself As saintly—hallows now each simple thing; Hallows and glorifies, and glows between The dust's grey ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... forward, drew the paper nervously toward him, and stared at the figures. He began at the first item and went over the whole paper, line by line, testing every extension, proving every addition, noting if possibly any transposition of figures had been made and overlooked, if something was added that should have been subtracted, or subtracted that should have been added. It was like a prisoner trying the bars ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... narrowly passed through this intricate difficulty, the reader will, I am sure, agree with me in the conclusion that, if the moderns mean by madness only a disturbance or transposition of the brain, by force of certain vapours issuing up from the lower faculties, then has this madness been the parent of all those mighty revolutions that have happened in empire, in philosophy, and in religion. For the brain in its natural ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... meaning), strings them together, and makes them point towards what object he pleases; he interprets them figuratively, typically, analogically, hyperbolically; he calls in the aid of emendation, transposition, ellipsis, metonymy, and every other figure of rhetoric; the name of one man is taken for another, one place for another, days and weeks for months and years; and finally he avails himself of all his advantage over his adversaries ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... unity; in fact, the principle of restatement after contrast is at the foundation of any large work, and supplies the connecting link between the structure of the Folk-Song and that of the most elaborate modern music. A convincing illustration of the use of Transposition may be found ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... The same transposition of these stanzas is made by Dr. Thirlby, in a copy containing some notes on the margin, which I have perused by the favour of Sir Edward Walpole. ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... unfold the order of this Epistle; insomuch, that SCALIGER [Footnote: Praef. i x LIB. POET. ct 1. vi. p. 338] hath boldly pronounced, the conduct of it to be vicious; and HEINSIUS had no other way to evade the charge, than by recurring to the forced and uncritical expedient of a licentious transposition The truth is, they were both in one common error, that the Poet's purpose had been to write a criticism of the Art of Poetry at large, and not, as is here shewn of the Roman ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... name of Voltaire; his name formed by an ingenious transposition he made of the letters of his ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... promota," not only communicated very many remarkable discoveries, but added, that he was in possession of the inverse problem of the tangents, and that he employed two methods which he did not choose to make public, for which reason he concealed them by anagrammatical transposition, so effectual as completely to extinguish the faint glimmer of light which shone through his scanty explanation.[B] The reference is obviously to what was afterwards known as the Method of Fluxions and Fluents. This method he derived from the consideration ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... and set along the floor in front of the curtain as foot-lights, leaving the company in a darkness which Mrs. Brinkley pronounced sepulchral. She made her reproaches to the master of the house, who had effected this transposition of the lamps. "I was just thinking some very pretty and valuable things about your charming cottage, Mr. Trevor: a rug on a bare floor, a trim of varnished pine, a wall with half a dozen simple etchings on it, an open fire, and a mantelpiece without bric-a-brac, how entirely ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to see the most refined persons of the British nation dying away and languishing to notes that were filled with a spirit of rage and indignation. It happened also very frequently, where the sense was rightly translated, the necessary transposition of words, which were drawn out of the phrase of one tongue into that of another, made the music appear very absurd in one tongue that was very natural in the other. I remember an Italian verse that ran thus, ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... They lead to undue anxiety as to success, violate the principle of reserve force, to which reference has several times been made, and may lead to vocal failure, if not to injury to the throat. Though it is true that occasionally a song suffers by transposition to a lower key, if the vocalist is determined to sing a composition even slightly beyond his easy range, it is better to resort to it than to risk the possibilities mentioned above and ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... Tom's Cabin' her syntax was such a snare to her that it sometimes needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the assistant editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction of solecisms, in transposition of phrases, the text was largely rewritten on the margin of her proofs. The soul of her art was present, but the form was so often absent, that when it was clothed on anew, it would have been hard to say whose cut the garment ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... talking over the matter which caused his visit, I told him of the Lodhi woman's burning herself with the Brahman banker at Sihora, and asked him what he thought of it. He said that 'In all probability this woman had really been the wife of the Brahman in some former birth—of which transposition a singular case had ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... of both; the first is general, being a mere transposition or change of syllables; and the second apparently, a systematic conversion of a few letters; but which will be best elucidated by the following ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... vertebrate animals, and lead to the suspicion that their appearance may in some manner be connected with reversion. But I shall have to recur, in the chapter on pangenesis, to the abnormal multiplication of organs, and likewise to their occasional transposition. The occasional development in man of the coccygeal vertebrae into a short and free tail, though it thus becomes in one sense more perfectly developed, may at the same time be considered as an arrest of development, and as a case of reversion. The greater frequency ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... and with the vast influence which the Association of Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations will wield, both in Congress and in the different States, there is great danger of transposition, in this agricultural body politic, of those parts which in the animal body are denominated head and tail, and the old saw to the effect that "the dog wags the tail because the tail cannot wag the dog," will find another application. So far as the law goes, the national ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... the fourth word of the proverb). You will thus have in a group all the letters that the fourth word contains, and you then will have only to transpose those letters in order to form the word itself. Follow the same process of grouping and transposition in forming each of the remaining words of the proverb. Of course, the transposition need not be begun until all the letters are set apart in their ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... around him, while with hands of skill and taste he placed everything artistically. The effect of a little transposition was marvellous, and Mr. Schwartz acknowledged that the groups looked doubly pretty and inviting. Dennis stood at a respectful distance, but was a close observer. He was the only one who gained much benefit from the lesson, because the only one capable of receiving ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... wondered if chance would ever bring them together. Unlikely. Because he had nothing else to do at the moment, he amused himself by a process of transposition, of transmigration. He imagined Clyde Burnaby in Sheila's place, riding Beaver Boy over the brown swells, along the narrow trails and abrupt rises of the foothills, raising several hundred chickens, ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... lives go on for the most part in two worlds, the world of mechanical transposition and the world of chemical transformations, but we are usually conscious only of the former. This is the visible, palpable world of motion and change that rushes and roars around us in the winds, the storms, the floods, the moving and falling bodies, and the whole panorama of our ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... is whether the programming of the McMurdo waypoint into the 'false' position before the commencement of the 1978 flights was the result of accident or design. On balance, it seems likely that this transposition of the ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... division between day and night, between not only dreams and intuitions, but dreams and pure reason. And we find him, in almost all his great poems, frankly taking not only his substance but his manner from dreams, as he dramatizes them after a logic and a passion of their own. His technique is the transposition into his waking hours of the unconscious technique of dreams. It is a kind of verified inspiration, something which came and went, and was as little to be relied upon as the inspiration itself. On one side it was ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... heavier taxes on the people. The experiment was represented as the less justifiable, as not one shilling was included in the budget as being applicable to the diminution of the national debt. It was always believed by some that the budget was not one of reduction, but of mere transposition. Some taxes were reduced, but others were imposed to make up the loss. At all events, it was said, the budget was merely a pretext of doing something, while in truth it did nothing, or did mischief. An attack was especially made on ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... other Liquors are manifestly both Agitated, and likewise Dispos'd after another manner than they were before such Affusion. And in some Chymical Oyls, as particularly that of Lemmon Pills, by barely Shaking the Glass, that holds it, into Bubbles, that Transposition of the Parts which is consequent to the Shaking, will shew you on the Surfaces of the Bubbles exceeding Orient and Lively Colours, which when the Bubbles relapse into the rest of the ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... which are intended to be answered in German, afford excellent practice work in the transposition of tenses or persons, and the changing from direct to indirect discourse, etc. As the selections increase in length, the questions are omitted, and in the latter portion only English material ...
— Contes et lgendes - 1re Partie • H. A. Guerber
... writer of this volume many years ago pointed out to Browning his transposition of the chronological places of Fra Lippo Lippi and Masaccio ("Hulking Tom") in the history of Italian art. Browning vigorously maintained that he was in the right; but recent students do not support his contention. At the same time an error ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... corresponding amount of matter and energy from time-frame B to time-frame A. Unless you keep the amount of matter and energy unchanged in each. Unless you exchange. So you came to here and now from there and then—your home time-frame, let's say—by a process of swapping. By transposition. By replacement. Transposition's the best word. The effect was time-travel but the process wasn't, like a telephone has the effect of talking at a distance but the method is ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... look, my son, in a moved sort. Seymour suggests a transposition: 'you do, my son, look in a moved sort.' This line however can scarcely have come from Shakespeare's pen. Perhaps the writer who composed the Masque was allowed to join it, as best he might, to Shakespeare's words, which ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... expenditures; and he had come to the conclusion about the time of our visit that what he needed was a fine lens, although, as a matter of fact, he had never learned to use his cheap one. He had recently become acquainted with sensitive film and had ordered a supply. By a transposition of letters, which the nature of the substance doubtless confirmed in his mind when it arrived, he always spoke of these convenient strips of celluloid as "flims," and was just now most eloquently indignant that, although he had broken utterly with ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... graceful convention which all felt bound not to transcend. It was some surprising flavor in the salad, or some touch of color appealing to the eye only; or it was some touch in the ice-cream, or some daring substitution of a native dish for it, as strawberry or peach shortcake; or some bold transposition in the order of the courses; or some capricious arrangement of the decoration, or the use of wild flowers, or even weeds (as meadow-rue or field-lilies), for the local florist's flowers, which set the ladies screaming ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... which gives harshness and strangeness, where the matter would at all events have been surprising enough. Secondly, I object, with the same qualification, to the frequent use of inversion; which generally appears as a transposition of the two members of a clause, in a way which would not have been practiced in conversation. It certainly gives emphasis and force, and often serves to point the meaning. But a style may be fatiguing and faulty precisely by being too emphatic, forcible and pointed; and so straining the attention ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... its division into parts which are superabundant, or from some disturbance in the motion, or else that there is an error by a lapse into an unsuitable receptacle; and thus he presumes he hath given all the causes of monstrous conceptions. Strato, that it comes through addition, subtraction, or transposition of the seed, or the distension or inflation of the matrix. And some physicians say that the matrix suffers distortion, being distended ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the Fromonts', the same comedy was being played, but with a transposition of parts. There it was the young wife who sat by the fire. Every evening, half an hour after Sidonie's departure, the great gate swung open to give passage to the Fromont coupe conveying Monsieur ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... under different disguises of colour and smell, although to the physician, who regards the power of them, they are the same, and he is not put out by the addition; and in like manner the etymologist is not put out by the addition or transposition or subtraction of a letter or two, or indeed by the change of all the letters, for this need not interfere with the meaning. As was just now said, the names of Hector and Astyanax have only one letter alike, which is tau, and yet they have the same meaning. ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... Hooker and Slocum are not such as to promise good, if their present relative positions remain. Therefore, let me beg—almost enjoin upon you—that on their reaching you, you will make a transposition by which General Slocum with his Corps, may pass from under the command of General Hooker, and General Hooker, in turn receive some other equal force. It is important for this to be done, though we could not well arrange it ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... a long distance is near a high-tension transmission line may have electrostatic or electromagnetic potentials, or both, induced upon it. If the line be balanced in its properties, including balance by transposition of its wires, the electrostatic induction may neutralize itself. The electromagnetic induction still ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... to believe that such text is by no means to be taken very literally. On the contrary, it is quite probable that weights and measures are not correct: they are quite likely to be of an artful and studied unreliability. A secret private code is often employed, necessitating the elimination or transposition of certain words, figures or letters before the whole will become intelligible and useful. If by any chance an uninitiated hand should attempt to grasp such veiled directions, failure would be certain. We confess to have employed at ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... her benefit the same season, the opera being "Otello," Mme. Pasta essayed the daring experiment of singing and playing the role of the Moor, Mile. Sontag singing Desdemona. Though the transposition of the music from a tenor to a mezzo-soprano voice injured the effect of the concerted pieces, the passionate acting redeemed the innovation. In the last act, where she, as Otello, seized Desdemona and dragged her by the hair to the bed that she might stab her, the effect was one of ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... in 1534, and settled at Lyons, where he published a new and highly esteemed edition of the Geography of Ptolemy, inscribing himself as Michael Villanovanus, from the name of his birthplace. His former works had been published under the name of Reves, formed by the transposition of the letters of his family name. In Paris he studied medicine, and began to set forth novel opinions which led him into conflict with other members of the faculty. In one of his treatises he is said to have suggested the theory of the circulation ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... Brinon was afterwards translated into English, and words and music became, by a singular transposition, the national hymn ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby |
