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Anomaly   /ənˈɑməli/   Listen
Anomaly

noun
(pl. anomalies)
1.
Deviation from the normal or common order or form or rule.  Synonym: anomalousness.
2.
A person who is unusual.  Synonym: unusual person.
3.
(astronomy) position of a planet as defined by its angular distance from its perihelion (as observed from the sun).



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"Anomaly" Quotes from Famous Books



... be narrowed by the pressure of any periesophageal disease or anomaly. The lesions most frequently found are: 1. Goiter, cervical or thoracic. 2. Malignancy of any of the intrathoracic viscera. 3. Aneurysm. 4. Cardiac and aortic enlargement. 5. Lymphadenopathies. Hodgkins' disease. Leukemia. Lues. Tuberculosis. Simple infective ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson

... purchased in the town a little pamphlet by M. Marius Topin, who undertakes to explain this latter anomaly, and to show that there is water enough in the port, as we may call it by courtesy, to have sustained a fleet of crusaders. I was unable to trace the channel that he points out, but was glad to believe that, as he contends, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... Hatasu-Khnum-Ammon, thus identifying herself with two of the chief Egyptian gods. She often represented herself as crowned with the tall plumes of Ammon. She took the titles of "son of the sun," "the good god," "lord of the two lands," "beloved of Ammon, the protector of kings." A curious anomaly appears in some of her inscriptions, where masculine and feminine forms are inextricably mixed up; though spoken of consistently as "the king," and not "the queen," yet the personal and possessive pronouns which refer to her are feminine for the most part, while sometimes ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson

... visionary theory the work of the profound statesmen, the exalted patriots, to whom the task of constitutional reform was intrusted? Did the name of Washington sanction, did the States deliberately ratify, such an anomaly in the history of fundamental legislation? No. We were not mistaken. The letter of this great instrument is free from this radical fault; its language directly contradicts the imputation; its spirit, its evident intent, ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various

... the trees. I noticed one or two very ancient cottages, but no trace of the modern builder. This was a fragment of real Old England, and I was not sorry when presently we lost sight of the square tower; for amidst such scenery it was an anomaly and ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer

... with liveliness, mirth in double quantity, laughter almost as good as real, —little arts which showed themselves in her as naturally as the gift of tears and smiles. In fact, having no advantage of female intercourse, she could not well have learnt them unless from crusty Hannah, who was such an anomaly of a creature, with all her mixtures of race, that she struck you as having lost all sex as one result of it. Yet this little girl was truly feminine, and had all the manners and pre-eminently uncriticisable tenets proper to ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... with his misfortune of having married out of the family, and disapproval with the married state in general. Poor souls! How their hard, loving hearts would have been wrung could they but have known the true state of the case! And, strange anomaly, how much deeper would have been their antagonism toward poor, self-sacrificing, loving Marcia! Just because she had dared to think herself fit for David, belonging as she did to her renegade sister Kate. But ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... a droll sort of awakening. It was, indeed, a startling anomaly that this woman of the tribe without should be standing there beside him as his wife, if his sentiments were as he had said. In their travels together she had ranged so unerringly at his level in ideas, ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... it is as yet not much more than a supposition that the earlier skulls had been wrongly measured. But, further, the great French authority, M. Boule, who measured the capacity of the Chapelle-aux Saints skull, observes [*] that "the anomaly disappears" on careful study. He assures us that a modern skull of the same dimensions would have a capacity of 1800-1900 cubic centimetres, and warns us that we must take into account the robustness of the body of primitive man. He concludes that the real volume of the Neanderthal brain ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe

... examples of apparent exceptions to rules, which are afterwards found to be capable of explanation, or to be provided for by particular contrivances, that no one familiar with such contemplations will, by one anomaly, be driven from the persuasion that the end which the arrangements of the satellites seem suited to answer is really one of the ends ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... in their habits, and primitive in their ideas, they soon ceased to be objects of terror to the government; and being left to themselves, became, by degrees, at once the most industrious and honest portion of the population. Moreover, the anomaly in the constitution of their church, which at the outset, had been little thought of, began by degrees to make itself felt. They had no appointed teachers or ministers among them; and there was confusion in their very worship. Their chiefs determined ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig

... oak was speedily chilled to the bone by the northwest trade-winds that on those August afternoons swept through the defiles of the Coast Range, and even penetrated the pastoral valley of San Jose. The anomaly of straw hats and overcoats with the occupants of buggies and station wagons was thus accounted for, and even in the sheltered garden of "El Rosario" two young girls in light summer dresses had thrown wraps over their shoulders as they lounged down a broad ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte

... to be dissipated by a few days' rest. The hysteric stage which the wise old man had apprehended began to manifest itself by its usual signs, if anything can be called usual in a condition the natural order of which is disorder and anomaly. ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... stranger to the title. On the other hand, so far as the possessory actions are still allowed to bailors, it is not on the ground that they also have possession, but is probably by a survival, which [175] explained, and which in the modern form of the an anomaly. /1/ The reason usually given is, that a right of immediate possession is sufficient,—a reason which the notion that the bailor is ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

... King each time more doubtful, more timid than before. From these debates Jeanne was anxiously held back, while every silken fool gave his opinion. At last, one of the councillors was stirred by this strange anomaly. He declared among them all, that as it was by the advice of the Maid that the expedition had been undertaken, without her acquiescence it ought not to be abandoned. "When the King set out it was not because ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant

... promise of a new and higher life in all ways. So that even if those unforeseen economical events above spoken of were to happen, and put off for a while the end of our Capitalist system, the latter would drag itself along as an anomaly cursed by all, a mere clog ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris

... perfect as the Sanskrit to have survived alone, among all languages, it must have had its cycles of perfection and its cycles of degeneration. And, if one had any intuition, he might have seen that what they call a "dead language" being an anomaly, a useless thing in Nature, it would not have survived, even as a "dead" tongue, had it not its special purpose in the reign of immutable cyclic laws; and that Sanskrit, which came to be nearly lost to ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... virtue of his early culture, the scanty remains of his property, his fine-gentleman habits and traditions, and the anomaly of his situation, was the figure of most mark at the station, its ruling spirit was of far alien character. This was John Ronackstone, a stanch Indian fighter; a far-seeing frontier politician; a man of excellent native faculties, all sharpened by active use and frequent emergencies; skilled ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... main stream. Duck creek appears to be now the channel by which the floods of the Macquarie join the Darling, and in a course much more direct than that through the marshes. Hence the Bogan also, being still less opposed to that of the Darling, finally enters that river without presenting the anomaly of an invisible channel. In like manner, at a much lower point on the Darling, the course of the little stream named Shamrock ponds, so remarkable in this respect, may be understood. This forms a chain of ponds, or a flowing ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... his character was by no means the result of eccentricity, but the result of an exceptional assembly of rare qualities which met for the first time in one man, and which, shining in the midst of a most corrupt society, constituted almost more an anomaly which became a real defect, hurtful, however, to himself only. His ideal of the beautiful magnified weaknesses into crimes, and physical failings into deformities. Thus it is that with the saints the slightest transgression of the laws appears at once in the light of mortal sin. St. Augustin ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... she felt personal triumph and gratification in the progress he was making. It was as if she were definitely fighting for him against those malevolent wishes in which she had begun to believe, so that his continued improvement was "one up" for her side. Yet what an anomaly Lady Clifford presented! Why the elaborate pretence of caring for her husband, brought to the point of preparing his milk for him? It wasn't what one would have expected of her. Had she done it to throw dust in the eyes of his sister and ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell

... not refrain from sighing at the thought that grace and elegance like hers should be doomed to know the withering effect of Time; and that those agile limbs should one day become as stiff and helpless as those of others. An old danseuse is an anomaly. She is like an old rose, rendered more displeasing by the recollection of former attractions. Then to see the figure bounding in air, habit and effort effecting something like that which the agility peculiar ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner

... having read it twice from gilt cover to gilt cover. All the same, she would miss it sorely. The pawnbroker lived only round the corner, for like the publican he springs up wherever the conditions are favorable. He was a Christian; by a curious anomaly the Ghetto does not supply its own pawnbrokers, but sends them out to the provinces or the West End. Perhaps the business instinct dreads the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... "I grant the anomaly is not common," said the Rector. "But in Meadowsweet's case I make a correct statement. He was a perfect gentleman after the type of some of those who are mentioned in the Sacred Writings. He was honest, courteous, self-forgetful. His manners were delightful, because his object ever was to put the ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade

... conditions, and who are driven to perdition by society, are really "victims." Their whole history, when closely investigated, reveals this fact. They are hunted and neglected from babyhood. Incapable of making themselves beloved owing to mental deficiency, volitive disorders, to the anomaly of the affections and also to lack of physical attraction, they pass from maternal persecution to that of the school, and finally to that of society, bringing on themselves ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... state of the world, a man of creative genius who chanced to be a saint was an anomaly; there was no fit place for him but a monastery, and no field for his powers but that of Sacred Art. It was as natural that Angelico should turn monk as that Lippo Lippi, who had been made half a monk against ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... said, as Ben Jonson says of the true poet, that he is made as well as born. The finest natural faculties have never yet been known to avail without training and culture. But this is a problem which, in a great measure, takes care of itself and in time works out and submits its own solution. The anomaly, every day presented, of the young person who, knowing nothing, feeling nothing, and having nothing to communicate except the desire of communication, nevertheless rushes upon the stage, is felt to be absurd. Where the faculty as well as the instinct exists, however, impulse soon recognises ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter

... Adams, S.R.E.S., author of a book entitled, "The Pronunciation of the English Language vindicated from imputed Anomaly and Caprice; with an Appendix on the Dialects of Human Speech in all Countries, and an analytical Discussion and Vindication of the Dialect ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth

... circum-stances; it cannot be under them. I admit the commonness of the expression, but it is not the less a solecism. Can you inform me when it was introduced? I hope it is not old enough to be considered inveterate. The best authors write "in the circumstances;" and yet so prevalent is the anomaly, that in a very respectable periodical, not long since, the French "dans les circonstances presentes," given as a quotation, is rendered ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various

... oval, brown, smooth. In fields here, a wild strong smelling Umbellifera occurs, called Dhunnea, used as a potherb, and esteemed very fragrant by the natives. Besides the absence of an arillus, there is another anomaly about the above Colycynth, which is, that between each placenta a broad partition projects from the wall of the fruit, usually provided with 3-septa, so as to be divided into two chambers, these contain seeds, the funiculi passing completely through them; seeds are also contained between the outermost ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith

... are anomalous, the Factory being less than the Agricultural. In the instance of 20-33, the anomaly is double, because the sequence of the figures shows that neither of these can be correct; certainly not the first ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... himself exposed by law to the capricious violence of every turbulent man in the community. Mitigated as slavery is by the humanity of our laws, the refinement of manners, and by public opinion which revolts at every instance of cruelty towards them, it would be an anomaly in the system of police which affects them if the offense stated in the verdict [the striking of a slave] were not indictable."[20] Likewise the South Carolina Court of Appeals in 1850 endorsed the fining of a public patrol which had whipped the slaves at a quilting ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... important peculiarity is the fact of the oesophagus, in both species, running over or exteriorly to the adductor scutorum muscle, instead of, as in every other species, close under this muscle. I took great pains in ascertaining the truth of this singular anomaly: the course of the oesophagus is approximately represented in Pl. IV, fig. 8 a' by faint dotted lines. The stomach has no caeca; the biliary folds are longitudinal; there is a marked constriction at the line corresponding with the junction of ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin

... have felt, however. She supplied it in ten minutes by reminding him of their wisdom in keeping the secret of their relations. His engagement to the daughter of a prominent Conservative would not indeed have told in his favour with his party, to say nothing of the anomaly of Mr Milburn's unyielding opposition to the new policy. "I never knew Father so nearly bitter about anything," Dora said, a statement which left ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan

... concierge, nor actually a porter. The gate which admits the dead stands wide open; and though there are monuments and buildings to be cared for, he is not a care-taker. In short, he is an indefinable anomaly, an authority which participates in all, and yet is nothing,—an authority placed, like the dead on whom it is based, outside of all. Nevertheless, this exceptional man grows out of the city of Paris,—that chimerical creation like the ship which is its emblem, that creature ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac

... affords room for a deal of strutting and striding about on the part of an overpowering actor in the inevitable belt and boots of the melodramatic highwayman. The play represents certain startling passages in the career of one Claude Duval, formerly a running footman, afterwards—strange anomaly!—a robber on horseback, distinguished for polite manners ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville

... proved beyond a doubt by the observations of arctic explorers, who have seen immense icebergs drifting rapidly northward against a strong current. This apparent anomaly could only be accounted for by the fact that a powerful undercurrent carried them northward; and as at least seven times more of these bergs must have been under than above water, we can easily understand how the under-current, acting on the larger mass of each ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne

... She is remarkable for decency and propriety of conduct—and her delicacy, even in trifling minutiae, has been a trait of special remark by the females of my family. This trait, which is obviously quite unaffected, would be a most inexplicable anomaly, if her former habits had been so indecent and depraved as Mr. Wood alleges. Her chief faults, so far as we have discovered them, are, a somewhat violent and hasty temper, and a considerable share of natural pride and self-importance; but these defects have been but rarely and transiently manifested, ...
— The History of Mary Prince - A West Indian Slave • Mary Prince

... For one year, indeed, Cranmer remained legatus natus, and by a strange anomaly exercised a jurisdiction the source of which had been cut off. Stokesley objected to Cranmer's use of that style in order to escape a visitation of his see, and Gardiner thought it an infringement of the royal prerogative. It was abolished in ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard

... over colonial affairs. It is true that she retains a right of veto which is scarcely ever exercised except to prevent some intercolonial or international dispute, some act of violence, or some grave anomaly in the legislation of the Empire. It is true that colonial cases may be carried, on appeal, to an English tribunal, representing the very highest judicial capacity of the mother-country, and free from all possibility and suspicion of partiality; but I do not believe ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... of religion; our duty is also to possess ourselves of the facts of history and criticism so as to satisfy ourselves and others who may need such instruction, that sacerdotalism is not only not ethical, but is anti-Christian, and that the greatest anomaly the world presents to-day is that of the clergymen of the Eastern and Western Churches arrogating to themselves the possession of powers which the founder of their religion and his earliest followers not only never exercised, but of which they had ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... found in common with gray hairs, they are loathsome. If I seem to have given my mind largely up to fancies of love, consider that I was then at the age when such fancies rather adorn than deface. Indeed, a young man without thoughts of love is as much an anomaly as is an older man who gives himself ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens

... Greeks might have felt a natural objection to the forms which would have rendered deva with real exactness, Imean doios or deos, the former conveying the meaning of double, the latter of fear. Amere wish to keep the name for god distinct from these words might have produced the phonetic anomaly of which we complain; and, after all, though I do not like to use that excuse, there are exceptions to phonetic laws. No one can explain how ogdoos was derived from okt or hebdomos from hepta, yet the internal evidence is too strong to be shaken by phonetic ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... Him? it is almost a contradiction in terms. Hence even heathen religions have ever considered faith and reverence identical. To believe, and not to revere, to worship familiarly, and at one's ease, is an anomaly and a prodigy unknown even to false religions, to say nothing of the true one. Not only the Jewish and Christian religions, which are directly from God, inculcate the spirit of "reverence and godly fear," but those other religions which have existed, ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman

... Take some absurd anomaly in the British law—the fact, for instance, that a man ceasing to be an M. P. has to become Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds, an office which I believe was intended originally to keep down some wild robbers near Chiltern, wherever that is. Obviously ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton

... time has the stock of extra brands been equal to the inquiry, and hence we have seen the anomaly of a range in prices of from 80 cents to $1.40 per dozen. There is room for improvement in quality, as well as for methods of marketing the large production of Harford county. A move in the right direction has been started by the forming of associations, which seek to build ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... through life; and we may here add that he granted to Wesley the use of his hay loft at Raithby for religious services, further securing the use of it in perpetuity, by his will, to the Wesleyan body, so that the curious anomaly has occurred that, when the hall was bought in 1848, by the Rev. Edward Rawnsley, the house became the residence of an Anglican clergyman, yet bound to allow the loft over his stable to be used for nonconformist worship. In recent years the stable has been unused ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter

... I have pleasure in reminding you that a female satirist by profession is yet an anomaly in the history of our literature, as a female schismatic is yet unknown in the history of our religion. But to what do you attribute the number of satirical women we meet ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... but why men wished to kiss women was still a profound mystery. No matter how often she came across this phase in love stories, there was never anything explanatory: as if all human beings perfectly understood. It would not have been for her an anomaly to read a love story in which there were ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath

... whisperings of lofty parentage, and even royal names were hinted at, always, of course, in the strictest privacy. The fact that he hailed from France (though no one could say it for a certainty) and still had a Danish name and spoke Danish like a native, was in itself looked upon as an interesting anomaly. Then again, his easy, aristocratic bearing and his finely carved face suggested all manner of romantic possibilities; his long, delicate hands, the unobtrusive perfection of his toilet and the very texture of his handkerchiefs told plainly enough that he had been familiar ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... By a curious anomaly of Sark law, though a man may not mortgage his property without the consent of his next-in-succession, he can sell it outright and do what he chooses with the proceeds. His wife has a dower right of one-third of both real and personal estate, ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham

... Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Serbia, Spain, Bulgaria, Hungary, Roumania, Russia. These two lists, as will be seen, correspond very nearly with the scale of descending civilisation, the only notable exception being the low position of France in the second list. This anomaly is explained by the fact that France having a stationary population, the death-rate in that country corresponds nearly with the mean expectation of life, whereas in countries where the population is increasing ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... under foot, and scatter it in all ways of wild waste (not without conflagration), as heretofore! Light is the one thing wanted for the world. Put wisdom in the head of the world, the world will fight its battle victoriously, and be the best world man can make it. I call this anomaly of a disorganic Literary Class the heart of all other anomalies, at once product and parent; some good arrangement for that would be as the punctum saliens of a new vitality and just arrangement for all. Already, in some European countries, in France, in Prussia, one traces some beginnings ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... instance, and the singularly cold and colorless mind of the greatest thinker of modern times, Immanuel Kant, seems eminently Prussian in quality. Growing out of such traditions and antecedents as these, the genius of Heinrich von Kleist appears as a striking anomaly. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... Ethel thought, she was forced to admit that she never had, for Mrs. Hollister was a strange anomaly. Her snobbishness seemed to lie in the desire to rise socially—to take her place with the best—but she never had seemed to even take exception to Aunt Susan's appearance; in fact, she felt that people would consider it the eccentricity of a wealthy woman. She went with her everywhere ...
— How Ethel Hollister Became a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson

... shade not being deep, nor the darkness profound, under these domes of verdure, was that these trees presented a curious anomaly in the disposition of the leaves. Instead of presenting their broad surface to the sunlight, only the side is turned. Only the profile of the leaves is seen in this singular foliage. Consequently the sun's rays ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne

... dipper has never been known to alight on a tree, preferring a rock or a piece of driftwood beside the babbling stream; yet he has the digits and claws of the passeres, among which he is placed systematically. He is indeed an anomaly, though a very engaging one. Should he wish to go to another canyon, he will simply follow the devious stream he is on to its junction with the stream of the other valley; then up the second defile. His flight is exceedingly swift. His ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser

... were invented in the reign of Kwammu (A.D. 782-805), i.e., after the date of the compilation of the Records and the Chronicles. But they are in universal use by the Japanese, though to speak of a living sovereign by his posthumous name is a manifest anomaly. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... this anomaly of a candidate canvassing in his own behalf, the campaign was devoid of exciting incidents. The personal canvass of Douglas was indeed almost the only thing that kept the campaign from being dull and spiritless.[860] Republican politicians were somewhat at a loss to ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson

... taken, there is no difficulty under this head. If full "responsible" or colonial government is granted, clearly representation in the Imperial Parliament (I do not now speak of a federal assembly) is an anomaly. On the other hand, if nothing more is in question than the extension of local government generally known as Devolution, then adequate representation in the Imperial Parliament is a matter of course. If a federal ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various

... one goes in the scale of evolution, the greater becomes the distinction between the sexes. Anatomic hermaphroditism becomes a rare anomaly. Life appears to have perfected this trick of separate sexes, sex specialization, in short, for the sake of the efficiency which ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... futile his efforts seemed against the enormous coagulation of dullness, of folly, of slackness, of ignorance, of confusion that confronted him! He might have the strength or the ingenuity to make some small change for the better here or there—to rearrange some detail, to abolish some anomaly, to insist upon some obvious reform; but the heart of the appalling organism remained untouched. England lumbered on, impervious and self-satisfied, in her old intolerable course. He threw himself ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey

... refusing to be classified under the head of property, since it involved something he desired and could not buy? A woman who was not property, who resisted the attempt to be turned into property, was an anomaly in Ditmar's universe. He had not, of course, existed for more than forty years without having heard and read of and even encountered in an acquaintance or two the species of sex attraction sentimentally called love that sometimes made fools of men and played havoc with more important affairs, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... the world of the material, however, such a nature is almost invariably an anomaly. That other world of flesh into which has been woven pride and greed looks askance at the idealist, the dreamer. If one says it is sweet to look at the clouds, the answer is a warning against idleness. If one seeks to give ear to the winds, it shall ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser

... exaggeration, describing a human anomaly on the roll of attorneys? The fact shall be left to answer the question. Mr. Mool had made a mistake in his choice of a profession. The result of the ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins

... comprehend it to-day, and, on re-reading him, we find traces everywhere of his final malady. But it is exact to say that this wounded genius was, by a singular circumstance, the genius of a robust man. A physiologist would without doubt explain this anomaly by the coexistence of a nervous lesion, light at first, with a muscular, athletic temperament. Whatever the cause, the effect is undeniable. The skilled and dainty pessimism of De Maupassant was accompanied by a vigor and physique very unusual. His sensations are in ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant

... if a thousand stabs of personal insult never brought them one of personal pain, passing through all as if nothing but the serenest skies were above them. And, as I have said, right there is one explanation of the anomaly; there were the serenest skies above them—heaven's love perpetually shining. Why should it not shine? all the powers of the men were dedicated to rescuing the image of God on this earth,—not man as he suffered physically, but the moral instinct threatened with annihilation. ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... that our attention was drawn to the anomaly of the discharge rule. A man who had served for four years could take his discharge as a time-expired soldier. At the same time men were enlisting freely. One young man of under 21 was said to have claimed his discharge on the very day that his ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills

... ramble had enriched him. The stern dignity of Indian chiefs, the dusky loveliness of Indian girls, the domestic life of wigwams, the stealthy march, the battle beneath gloomy pine trees, the frontier fortress with its garrison, the anomaly of the old French partisan bred in courts, but grown gray in shaggy deserts,—such were the scenes and portraits that he had sketched. The glow of perilous moments, flashes of wild feeling, struggles of fierce power, love, hate, grief, frenzy—in a word, all the worn-out heart of ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... in a republic founded upon the declaration that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, is an anomaly so pregnant with evil that it is not strange that while it existed it was the chief cause of all the serious contentions that threatened the life of the republic. The framers of the constitution, finding slavery in existence in nearly all the states, ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... world over. Those are free governments, in which there is a government of just laws, whether wrought out through a mixed government, as in England, or wrought out as here by the people themselves, and cast into representative forms. And now we see before us the anomaly, the mortifying contradiction, that it is in Great Britain, and not in the republic of the United States, with our venerated Declaration of Independence, that the great principles of Liberty and Fraternity are practically carried out. I do not mean to reflect upon any person ...
— Report of the Proceedings at the Examination of Charles G. Davis, Esq., on the Charge of Aiding and Abetting in the Rescue of a Fugitive Slave • Various

... Gard offers an anomaly of the greatest historic interest. Here and here only throughout the length and breadth of France villages are found without a Catholic church, communities that have held fast to Protestantism and the right of private judgment ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... the Noun governed does in its turn govern another Noun in the Genitive, the former is often put in the Nominative instead of the Genitive case. The following instances of this anomaly occur in the Gaelic Scriptures:—Guth briathran an t-sluaigh, instead of, bhriathran, the voice of the words of the people, Deut. v. 28; do mheas craobhan a' gharaidh, instead of, chraobhan, of the fruit ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart

... Territories; and various conflicting opinions with regard to the best course to be pursued to allay this agitation were elicited in the course of this long conference. Extremists were not wanting on the one hand, who seemed inclined to construe the anomaly of slavery of the negro race, found in the Constitution of a free people, into a general rule; and who proposed or voted for propositions which they knew could not be accepted, that their assertion might aid in the remaining ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden

... disputes this view (as given in my "Journal"), and I admit that it is erroneous, though in some degree excusable, from their conformability and from both abounding with calcareous matter. It would, indeed, have been a great anomaly if there had been a true passage between a deposit contemporaneous with existing species of mollusca, and one in which all the mollusca appear to be extinct. Northward of Santa Fe, M. d'Orbigny met with ferruginous sandstones, ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin

... temples by the mere attraction of his eyes. To be watched into a sense of impatience and ingratitude, is a trial of life for which one is not prepared. My father and Sir Miles are very busy; I hang here an anomaly, sitting with them as being less in their way than in Lady Oakstead's, and wondering what I shall be twenty years hence. I am sick of the only course of life that will content my father, and I can see no sunshine likely to brighten it. But, at least, no one's ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge

... false fructification, the cob being deficient in kernels, which by some strange accident were transposed to the top feather or male blossoms. I leave botanists to explain the cause of this singular anomaly; I only state facts. I could not learn that the smut was a disease common to Indian corn, but last year smut or dust bran, as it is called by some, was very prevalent in the oat, barley and wheat crops. In this country especially, ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill

... to the truth; but so public had become the character she bore, that though she might swear to the truth of her own falsehood a thousand times, no one would believe her. It was curious to see the anomaly of my position; for while I could have poured out a flood of lamentations at the want of virtue in Congress, no one valued my own of sufficient weight to be recommended for an office. Congress, that had no virtue, or if it had, its quality was too hard for use, was for ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"

... authority, independent for a certain term of years of the legislative assembly, which has no accounts to render to it and which cannot be questioned or constitutionally overthrown, that authority is so strange, and, if the phrase may pass, so monstrous an anomaly, that it dares not exercise its power, and dreads the scandal which it would raise by acting on its rights, and seems as it were paralysed with terror at the very ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet

... The object to which, under these difficult circumstances, Lord Buckingham and Mr. Grenville directed their attention, was to assimilate, as nearly as possible, the Regency Bills in both countries, so as to prevent the occurrence of so great an anomaly as that of having a Regent whose powers should be strictly limited in the one kingdom, and who should, at the same time, be invested with unrestricted powers in the other. The Parliament of Ireland possessed the unquestionable right of deciding the Regency in their own way, leaving the ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham

... under the trees after the morning dressings were done, and the men lay gossiping and smoking when they could get tobacco. Outside visitors were rare. The Serbian ladies do not go round the hospitals with cigarettes and sweets, and to find a Serbian woman nursing is an anomaly. ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon

... Officer said: "Ha, ha, ha." He could not laugh; he merely uttered the phonetic equivalent of laughter. On harsh Irwadi, laughter would have been a cultural anomaly. "You make joketh. Well, nevertheleth, you have no ship." He expanded his scaly green barrel chest and declaimed: "At 0400 hours thith morning, the government of Irwadi hath ...
— Equation of Doom • Gerald Vance

... showing after a fashion the color of the tendons, the fat, and the muscles, wherever it rested directly upon them. It also had a rosy tint which is not ordinarily seen in embalmed corpses. Dr. Martout explained this anomaly by saying that if the colonel had actually been dried alive, the globules of the blood were not decomposed, but simply collected in the capillary vessels of the skin and subjacent tissues, where they still preserved their proper color, and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... at the old squire's heart in spite of the amenity of Mr. Brown's letter; but John Caldigate, who was approaching his house and his wife, and to whom, after his imprisonment even the flat fields and dykes were beautiful, did not at the moment much regard the anomaly of the machinery by which he ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope

... continent. It has given nothing to South America and received nothing thence. The northward expansion of Arawak and Carib tribes from Venezuela in historic times ceased at Cuba and Hayti. The Straits drew a dividing line. Local conditions in Florida itself probably furnish the explanation of this anomaly. Extensive swamps made the central and southern portion of the peninsula inhospitable to colonization from either direction, transformed it from a ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... illustrations and annotations along the margin of Lorenzo dei Medici's poems, has made my studies of rustic poetry more clear or more confused. But this much I know as a certainty, that never should I have tried to unravel the causes of the Renaissance's horrible anomaly of improvement and degradation, had not that anomaly returned and returned to make me wretched with its loathsome mixture of good and evil; its detestable alternative of endurance of vile solidarities in the souls of our intellectual ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... unaided by representative assemblies, the power which is secured perhaps to one of the weakest of men or women, perhaps to a child, has often struck the observer of human affairs as a strange anomaly. But the insecure and precarious foundation of the power of the great minister in such a monarchy, is scarcely less curious to contemplate. The sagacious counsellor, the long-experienced governor, who has for years wielded the powers of the state, may be reduced to obscurity and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... and acute biographer, Edmund Lodge, thus truly gives the character of Lord Herbert of Cherbury. "Of that anomaly of character by the abundance and variety of which foreigners are pleased to tell us that our country is distinguished, we meet with few examples more striking than in the subject of this memoir—wise and unsteady; ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton

... Even under Hyrcanus, however, they gained more prominence, and under Jannaeus their influence upon popular opinion was paramount. For under the last-named the secularisation of the hierocracy no longer presented any attractive aspects; it was wholly repellent. It was looked upon as a revolting anomaly that the king, who was usually in the field with his army, should once and again assume the sacred mantle in order to perform the sacrifice on some high festival, and that his officers, profane persons as they were, should at the same time be holders of the highest ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... the popular feeling in the North, on the subject of slavery, the two great parties approached the Presidential election of 1848. Each was under peculiar embarrassment in the selection of a candidate, and the presentation of the principles on which support was to be asked. The anomaly presented in the Congressional election of 1846, where an administration conducting a successful war was defeated before the people, promised to be repeated. The Democratic party had precipitated the war, had organized the military force that prosecuted it, had controlled its immense patronage, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... sameness, even tenor; invariability, regularity, equableness, conformity, consonance, consistency. Antonyms: diversity, variation, anomaly. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... man. He declared that therefore Congress could not interfere with it in the Territories. Before he was judge, he admitted the right of sojourn. There was but one step more,—the sacred right of slave property in Free States. It was involved in what he had already said, and was not so great an anomaly as he had already sanctioned; for if the Constitution guarantees this property in every State,—if the States do not reserve the power to interfere with it,—if, in case of escape, Congress has the power to reclaim it,—why is not the owner to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... from thy native place? What piercing influences of heaven have stirred Thy heart's last mansion all-corruptible to wake, To move, and in the sweets of wine and fire Sit tempting madness with unholy eyes? Begone, thou shuddering, pale anomaly! The dark presses without on yew and thorn; Stoops now the owl upon her lonely quest; The pomp runs high here, and our beauteous women Seek no cold witness—O, let murder cry, Too shrill for human ear, only to God. Come not in power to wreak so wild a vengeance! ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare

... French saying is, by heart; had lost and won plenty of five-franc pieces there, merely for amusement's sake, until it was amusement no longer, and was thoroughly tired, in fact, of all the ghastly respectabilities of such a social anomaly as a respectable gambling-house. "For Heaven's sake," said I to my friend, "let us go somewhere where we can see a little genuine, blackguard, poverty-stricken gaming with no false gingerbread glitter thrown over it all. Let us ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins

... now understood, is not exactly conducive to love. In this I do not think that I am stating an anomaly. Love in marriage is, as a rule, too much at his ease; he stretches himself with too great listlessness in armchairs too well cushioned. He assumes the unconstrained habits of dressing-gown and slippers; his digestion goes wrong, his appetite fails and of an evening, in the too-relaxing ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz

... He is bound to resist the emperor's authority if he "ceases to be a minister of God for the good of his people." Confucius distinctly teaches "the sacred right of rebellion," and the next highest authority, Mencius, puts it in even stronger terms. This seems a striking anomaly, for the whole theory of government to-day, as thousands of years ago, is the patriarchal one: as the emperor is the Son of Heaven, so his people are the sons of the emperor, and he alone can intercede between his children and heaven. It is his prayers and sacrifices to which ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie

... meets with an anomaly, he instinctively turns to the study of development to clear it up. The rationale of contradictory opinions may with equal confidence be ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... circumstances in the one case, as in the other—by political and local situation, by climate, and unequal progress. Thus, the Indian languages, says Prescott, in his "Conquest of Mexico," "present the strange anomaly of differing as widely in etymology, as they agree in organization;" but a key to the solution of the problem, is found in the latter part of the same sentence: "and, on the other hand," he continues,[2] "while they bear some slight affinity to the languages of the Old World, in ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel

... man was a disbelief in Christianity,—much more of an anomaly in that day than at present,—and a belief in the transmigration of souls, it being one of his fancies that, after death, his spiritual part was to return to this world in the form of a large ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... you, Mr. Armadale, that we are in luck's way so far. I asked the waterman to show me the regular men on the stand; and it turns out that one of the regular men drove Mrs. Mandeville. The waterman vouches for him; he's quite an anomaly—a respectable cabman; drives his own horse, and has never been in any trouble. These are the sort of men, sir, who sustain one's belief in human nature. I've had a look at our friend, and I agree with the waterman; I think ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... intestines were large, as in other herbivorous animals. The nature of this lizard's food, as well as the structure of its tail and feet, and the fact of its having been seen voluntarily swimming out at sea, absolutely prove its aquatic habits; yet there is in this respect one strange anomaly, namely, that when frightened it will not enter the water. Hence it is easy to drive these lizards down to any little point overhanging the sea, where they will sooner allow a person to catch hold of their tails than jump into the water. They ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin



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