"Vulgarism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... should not have noticed this squat vulgarism, had not the pen blazoned its own depravity by lifting it out of newspapers into bound volumes. The speech and page of every one, who would not be italicized for lingual looseness, should be forever closed against a phrase so shocking to ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... deep in water, the forlorn little company prayed together. I do not care to report such things—it verges on vulgarism; but I will tell you a word or two that came from the maimed man. "O Lord, give me a chance if you see fit; but let me go if any one is to go, and save my commerades. I've been a bad 'un, and I haven't no right to ask nothing. Save the others, and, if I have no chance in this ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... bloody wharf-side drinking-shops of Chili and Peru. The run of my ill-luck, the breach of my old friendship, this bubble fortune flaunted for a moment in my eyes and snatched again, had made me desperate and (in the expressive vulgarism) ugly. To drink vile spirits among vile companions by the flare of a pine-torch; to go burthened with my furtive treasure in a belt; to fight for it knife in hand, rolling on a clay floor; to flee perpetually in fresh ships and to be chased through the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... should make her any less unselfish to attend the best girls' school than to—to run with the boys." She brought out the little vulgarism with a faint curl of her ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... be observed that there is no vulgarity in this vulgarism: indeed, the gentlemanly good humour of the poem is uninterrupted. This, combined with neatness of handling, and the habit of not over-doing, produces that general facility of appearance which it is no disparagement, in speaking of a first canto, to term the chief ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... more favourably of the manner in which the notes are written than of the matter of which they consist. We find in every page words used in wrong senses, and constructions which violate the plainest rules of grammar. We have the vulgarism of "mutual friend," for "common friend." We have "fallacy" used as synonymous with "falsehood." We have many such inextricable labyrinths of pronouns as that which follows: "Lord Erskine was fond of this anecdote; he told it to the editor the first time that he had the honour of being in ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... saying "He is in trouble," or "He is in an awkward position," or "He is perplexed," or embarrassed, employ the vulgarism, "He is in a fix." Although Shakespeare may say, "This was the most unkindest cut of all," and De Quincey may write, "Poor Aroar cannot live and cannot die— so that he is in an almighty fix," we lesser mortals ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... good-natured simplicity of friends or associates. If, perchance, they possess any excellence above their society, they consider it as a redeeming grace for their importunities, and, calculating on the vulgarism ad captandum, that what is dearest bought is most prized, they make their friends pay freely for their admiration. Nor are such admirers willing to break the spell by which they are bound, since, by their unqualified ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 277, October 13, 1827 • Various
... mechanism, and the more pronounced his habit of introspection, the less capable is he of loving with vehemence and constancy. Heroes of passion are for the most part primitive natures, nobly tempered; in our time they tend to extinction. Growing vulgarism on the one hand, and on the other a development of the psychological conscience, are unfavourable to any relation between the sexes, save those which originate in pure animalism, or in reasoning less or more generous. Never having experienced any feeling which ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... fell into some of the bad habits of aristocratic sentimentalism. I know that he used the word "gentleman" as meaning good man. But all this only adds to the unholy joy with which I realise that the very title of one of his best books was a vulgarism. It is pleasant to contemplate this last unconscious knock in the eye for the gentility with which Dickens was half impressed. Dickens is the old self-made man; you may take him or leave him. He has its disadvantages and its merits. No university man would have written the title; no university ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... that of the mother country" by going through Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaisms and Provincialisms, and picking out 76 words which Halliwell regards as obsolete, but which in America are all alive and kicking. (The vulgarism is mine, not Mr. Tucker's.) Now as a matter of fact not one of these words is really obsolete in England, and most of them are in everyday use; for instance, adze, affectation, agape, to age, air (appearance), appellant, apple-pie order, baker's dozen, ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... than marrying. Nevertheless, I wish him joy in advance, and, in humble defiance of Mrs. Stanton and her brilliant companions in arms, hereby give it as my belief that the pretty Swede is a sensible girl—that, to use a California vulgarism, "her head ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... 'les manieres nobles' are only to be acquired in the very best companies. They are the distinguishing characteristics of men of fashion: people of low education never wear them so close, but that some part or other of the original vulgarism appears. 'Les manieres nobles' equally forbid insolent contempt, or low envy and jealousy. Low people, in good circumstances, fine clothes, and equipages, will insolently show contempt for all those who ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... that term," said Hubert, with calm dignity. "Master is a vulgarism that I dislike; so, in alluding to his lordship, take the trouble to ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... so far as to conceive it possible that Milton may have committed the vulgarism of leaving a t out of slep'st, "for ease of sound." Yet the poet could bear boast'st and—one stares and gasps at it—doat'dst. There is, by the way, a familiar passage in which the ch sound predominates, not without a touch of sh, in ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... other distinguished people were accustomed to use the same expression, I would fain hope that it was not meant for profanity, but was a sort of fashionable slang intended only to be emphatic. Fifty years have seen a great improvement in the use of language, and the vulgarism which then appeared to be of slight importance is now regarded, almost universally with gentlemen, to be at least in very bad taste. How far Byron transgressed beyond the frequent use of this expletive, does not appear either in his letters ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... (named the Creme-de-Menthe) ambled down the main street of the hitherto impregnable village of Flers, with hysterical British Tommies slapping her on the back, he appealed to the civilised world to step in and forbid the combination of vulgarism ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... antique, they studied it; they obtained through the fragments of antique sculpture a glimpse into the life of antiquity, and that glimpse served to correct the vulgarism and distortion of the mediaeval life of the fifteenth century. In the perfection of Italian painting, the union of antique and modern being consummated, it is perhaps difficult to disentangle what really is antique from what is modern; ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... attracted by Loerke. In both sisters he commanded a certain homage. But there were moments when to Ursula he seemed indescribably inferior, false, a vulgarism. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... is common, common even to vulgarism, to hear the remark that the same gallows-tree ought to bear as its fruit the arch-traitor and the leading champion of aggressive liberty. The mob of Jerusalem was not satisfied with its two crucified thieves; it must have a ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... is a Spanish vulgarism meaning "blunderhead," "bungler." Saragate (or zaragate) is a Mexican provincialism ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... young gentleman fresh from College, one maiden lady Understander teaching us our duty, life would be simpler. But there are so many young gentlemen from College, so many maiden lady Understanders, on the job—if I may be permitted a vulgarism; and as yet they are not all agreed. It is distracting for the parent anxious to do right. We put the little dears into sandals, and then at once other young gentlemen from College, other maiden lady ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... 6. The article is supplied at [Greek: panourgous], because the abstract word has just been used expressly in a bad sense. "Up to anything" is the nearest equivalent to [Greek: panourgos], but too nearly approaches to a colloquial vulgarism. ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... turn to the Quarterly upon Keats. Endymion, in spite of the noble self-criticism of its preface, is denounced as "Cockney poetry" [Footnote: The phrase was also employed by Blackwood, vol. iii. 519-524.]—a stupid and pointless vulgarism—and is branded as clothing "the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language". The author is dismissed with the following amenities: "Being bitten by Leigh Hunt's insane criticism, he more than rivals the insanity of his poetry"; and we are half-surprised not to find ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... a head, not only from the side itself being the coin or head, but from its being impressed most commonly with some head in contradistinction to the reverse, which, in latter times, was oftenest a cross. Thence the vulgarism, cross or pile, poll, head."—Cleland's Specimen of an Etymological Vocabulary, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... violent as expected. But there are pauses in storms, the moment before the coming of the most destructive blasts of all, and the temper of Judge Owen was gusty. Miss Emily fancied that the whole ought to be said while the subject was under discussion, and, to use a vulgarism, she "put her foot ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... into the vulgarism of 'mutual friend.' See his Correspondence, i. 196, ii. 251. Goldsmith also writes of 'mutual acquaintance.' Cunningham's Goldsmith's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the loathsome vulgarism as an insult to the first miracle wrought by the Founder of our religion! I address myself to the company.—I believe in temperance, nay, almost in abstinence, as a rule for healthy people. I trust that I practise ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... wore his hair long, and, though his conversation gradually sloughed off much of its idiom and vulgarism, enough of the mountaineer stood out to lend to his personality a savor of the ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... "previously to," not "previous to." Also, do not say, "He was too previous"—it is a pure vulgarism. ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... Punning is a vulgarism that should be scrupulously avoided. An inveterate punster, though his play upon words may rise to the keenest wit, is yet an insufferable bore. No one feels secure in his society, or can guess what word may be torn out of a serious or brilliant remark to be tortured into ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost |
