"Ungrammatical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... filled her with amazement, repulsion and disgust. There was nothing in any modern magazine that at all resembled the delicate, pointed and picturesque phraseology of the Sieur Amadis! Strange, coarse slang-words were used,—and the news of the day was slung together in loose ungrammatical sentences and chopped-up paragraphs of clumsy construction, lacking all pith and eloquence. So, repelled by the horror of twentieth-century "style," she had hidden her manuscripts deeper than ever in the old bureau, under little silk sachets of dried rose-leaves and lavender, ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... everyday experience, which deals with the whole matter of a life, and yet is rarely wearisome, which condescends to the most fastidious particulars, and yet sweeps all away in the forthright current of the narrative,—such a style may be ungrammatical, it may be inelegant, it may be one tissue of mistakes, but it can never be devoid of merit. The first and the true function of the writer has been thoroughly performed throughout; and though the manner of his utterance may ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... painful fact is, that it is conscious idiocy. The man's words are asinine, and he knows they are asinine. His wits have entirely abandoned him: he is an idiot for the time. Have you sat next a man unused to speaking at a public dinner? have you seen him nervously rise and utter an incoherent, ungrammatical, and unintelligible sentence or two, and then sit down with a ghastly smile? Have you heard him say to his friend on the other side, in bitterness, "I have made a fool of myself"? And have you seen him sit moodily through the remainder of the feast, evidently ruminating on what he said, seeing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... Ridge in 1748, another of his trip to Barbadoes with his brother Lawrence in 1751-52, another of his trip to Fort Le Boeuf to warn out the French, and yet another of his Fort Necessity campaign. The words are often misspelled, many expressions are ungrammatical, but the handwriting is good and the judgments expressed, even those set down when he was only sixteen, are the ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... beginning of utter poverty. But in his last years he came to a sense of its worthlessness, such as few men who have made their money ever have. He was a common man, in a great many ways; he was imperfectly educated, and he was ungrammatical, and he never was at home in society; but he had a tender heart and an honest nature, and I revere his memory, as no one would believe I could without knowing him as I did. His money became a burden and a terror to him; he did not know what to do ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... not by Johnson. It contains more than one ungrammatical passage. It is impossible to believe that he wrote such a sentence as the following:—'Another having a cask of wine sealed up at the top, but his servant boring a hole at the bottom stole the greatest part of it away; sometime after, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... ungrammatical candor. "Your Irvings and your Terrys, your Mary Andersons and your Langtrys,—they're good enough for your fine drawing-rooms, and get more invitations out than they can accept. And none of them have got half my talent, I tell you! Lord bless my soul! if they're ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... upon him. The policeman who had struck the blow testified that the prisoner had resisted arrest; a second policeman testified, "I seen the prisoner hit him first, your Honour,"—which caused Comrade Mabel Smith to cry out, "Oh, the ungrammatical prevaricator!" The upshot of the trial was that each of the defendants was fined ten dollars. Comrade Gerrity led off with an indignant refusal to pay the fine; the rest of them followed suit—even Comrade Mabel! This caused evident distress of mind to the judge, for Comrade Mabel with her indignant ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... would have thought this uneducated but strenuous partisan an extremely intelligent woman. He hurried away now with an uncomfortable smile. If an opinion is the right opinion, why should it have an air of absurdity thrown upon it by being thus uttered in ungrammatical language by a poulterer's wife? Truth is the same by whomsoever stated; but yet, was not dogmatism on any subject the sign of an inexperienced and uncultivated, or a rude and untutored mind? What did this woman know ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... sentences and what we call style are in literature. Even if a writer has good and beautiful ideas, much of the pleasure we might derive is lost when the words are ill chosen, the sentences are bungling, perhaps even ungrammatical, and the whole expression is commonplace ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... may be abrupt, badly constructed, ungrammatical—never mind. Grace of expression counts for nothing; sincerity alone is of value. It is the expression, however clumsily put, of a personal something which was loved, and will ever be missed, that alone brings solace to those who are left. Your message may speak merely ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... his tongue was real. As he lay upon his death-bed making his confession after so vigorous a life, he heard his nurse say something to herself which sounded ungrammatical and, turning round from the priest, he put her right in a manner most violent and sudden. His confessor, startled, said: "The time is not relevant". "All times are relevant!" he answered, sinking back. ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... money; his skin has got to be the exact colour of Munz. He has the greenish-yellow eyes of those elective, thrice-abhorred vampyres who feed on patriot-blood. He is condemned without trial by his villainous countenance, like an ungrammatical preface to a book. His tongue refuses to confess, but nature is stronger:—observe his knees. Now this is guilt. It is execrable guilt. He is a nasty object. Nature has in her wisdom shortened his stature to indicate that it is left to us to shorten the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... captivates London and Paris as the reincarnate Notre Dame de Bruges. So much of the tale I indicate; the rest is your affair. It is told in a pleasant haphazard fashion, enriched with flashes of caustic wit and disfigured with a good deal of ungrammatical and slovenly writing. I think I never met a novelist who did more execution among the infinitives. Also I suspect that Mrs. SAUNDERS' zeal for theatrical setting outran her knowledge of it, otherwise she would hardly have permitted a dramatist to speak of his "caste," or the leading lady to ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... coincident with the introduction of Watts's psalms and hymns, and was attended with like agitations. The singing-school for winter evenings became an almost universal social institution; and there actually grew up an American school of composition, quaint, rude, and ungrammatical, which had great vogue toward the end of the last century, and is even now remembered by some with admiration and regret. It was devoted mainly to psalmody tunes of an elaborate sort, in which the first half-stanza would be sung in ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... deserve the ridicule bestowed on them; but that which in this comedy is portrayed as the correct way of wisdom falls nearly into the same error. All the reasonable persons of the piece, the father and his brother, the lover and the daughter, nay, even the ungrammatical maid, are all proud of what they are not, have not, and know not, and even what they do not seek to be, to have, or to know. Chyrsale's limited view of the destination of the female sex, Clitander's opinion on the inutility of learning, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... by mutual concessions.' [628] Pax conventa, 'the peace which is agreed upon.' Observe the rare use of the passive participle; for convenire is commonly intransitive—as pax convenit, a 'peace is concluded.' [629] In potestatem habere is ungrammatical for in potestate habere, but is found now and then. See Zumpt, S 316. [630] The expression is somewhat contorted; for the inserted clause non sua ignavia sed ob rem publicam should have a verb of its own, which, however, would be a part of the leading verb—namely, ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... wonderful realistic effects by the freest and most copious use of this detailed knowledge in his works of imagination; and thirdly, that he possessed a vocabulary of the most wonderful wealth. His style is strong, homely, and vigorous, but the sentences are long, loose, clumsy, and sometimes ungrammatical. Like Sir Walter Scott, he was too eager to produce large and broad effects to take time to balance his clauses or to polish his sentences. Like Sir Walter Scott, again, he possesses in the highest ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... to me that were I a ghost I would float about on cloud banks and bathe in the splendors of the morning, instead of hiding in bat-caves all day and snooping about all night seeking an unsalaried situation at some dark-lantern seance. When America's greatest lexicographer writes me an ungrammatical message on a double-barreled slate, signs it "noeh webstur," and instructs his terrestial to deliver it to me on payment of one cart-wheel dollar, I suspect that there's something sphacelated in the psychological Denmark. Of course they ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... and that conveys a meaning, is a telegram. [Footnote: This word is of American coinage, and first appeared in the Albany Evening Journal, in 1852. It avoids the use of two words, as "Telegraphic Message," or "Telegraphic Dispatch," and the ungrammatical use of "Telegraph," for a message by telegraph. The new word was at once adopted.] Our plains Indians used columns of smoke, or fires, and are the actual inventors of the heliograph, now so called, though formerly meaning the making of a picture by the aid of the sun—photography. ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... Coquelin in a nice little French speech, John Drew did the like for me in English, & then the fun began. Coquelin did some excellent French monologues—one of them an ungrammatical Englishman telling a colorless historiette in French. It nearly killed the fifteen or twenty people ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... nobility of sex, accept the allegiance! The citizeness may "follow him," certainly,—so long as she is not in the way,—and she must "love him always;" but he is not bound. Why should he be? It would be quite ungrammatical. ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... their work of butchery; and in all parts of the Netherlands the executioners were busy. It was of no use for the accused to appeal to the charters and privileges of their provinces. All alike were summoned to Brussels; non curamus privilegios vestros declared Vargas in his ungrammatical Latin. Hand in hand with the wholesale sentences of death went the confiscation of property. Vast sums went into the treasury. The whole land for awhile was terror-stricken. All organised opposition was crushed, and no one dared to raise his voice ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... I was astonished at the little woman's indignation. She said just those things which make you feel as if somebody had been calling you names or kicking you—Was I really a doctor? and so on. It did not gain by being put in the ungrammatical tongue of Quakers. However, I never did fancy smallpox, and what could a fellow get by doctoring wretches like these? So I held my tongue and went away. About a week afterwards I met Evans, the dispensary man, a very common fellow, who was said to ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... he did not tell himself that it was nothing less than the disconnected and ungrammatical remarks of the lady of the feathers which prompted this consideration, this prophetic movement of his mind. Yet so it was. And when Valentine replied he, the saint, was fighting against her, the sinner, and surely in the cause of evil. For he ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... "Gracious! It's him!" an ungrammatical sentence which indicated sufficiently how wide a niche in the temple of his mind was filled with the image of his ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard |
