"Colloquial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... desires—those of a young marrying man—(where, alas, is that time!) have seen their richly laden gondolas go to pieces there: the flower of the cargo went to the bottom, the ballast of the marriage remained. In short, to make use of a colloquial expression, as you talk over your marriage with yourself you say, as you look at Caroline, "She is not what ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... to a brief out-line of the tragic story, leaving all details to be developed by the witnesses, who were allowed to give their evidence with colloquial freedom ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... a rising man. He was by no means diffident. With strong native sense, imperturbable self-confidence, a memory almost miraculously stored with rude anecdotes, and an astonishing command of colloquial and slang language, he was never embarrassed, and never at a loss as to what to ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... European cities. Inasmuch as there are no letters in the Chinese language, the difficulties in using the Morse code of telegraphy are very great. In some cases the messages are translated into a foreign language before they are transmitted; in others, a thousand or more words in colloquial and commercial use are numbered, and the number is telegraphed instead ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... if used with the Arte as a simplified restatement of the basic structure of the language, Collado's Grammar offers to the student of the Japanese language an invaluable ancillary tool for the study of the colloquial language of the ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... transient workmen, she found life, running swift and eager and many-colored; and it seemed to her that back in the house of four-posters and walls of subdued gray, life was smothered in the very best pink cotton-batting. Milt's delight in every picturesque dark corner, and the colloquial eloquence of the street-orators, stirred her. And when she saw a shopgirl caress the hand of a slouching beau in threadbare brown, her own hand slipped ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... I have thought it worthwhile to vary the interpretation of this word, because though "habitus" may be equivalent to all the senses of [Greek: exis], "habit" is not, at least according to our colloquial usage we commonly denote by "habit" a ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... to hear people talking of the Chinese language as if it were a single tongue spoken all over China after a more or less uniform standard. But the fact is that the colloquial is broken up into at least eight dialects, each so strongly marked as to constitute eight languages as different to the ear, one from another, as English, Dutch and German, or French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. A Shanghai man, for instance, is unintelligible ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... the Senator. "He used the word tote in the African sense, to carry, to bear. Tote in this sense is defined in our standard dictionaries as a colloquial word of the Southern States, used ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... For the colloquial style of the letters cf. ad Fam. ix. 21, 1 (to Paetus), 'Quid tibi ego in epistulis videor? nonne plebeio sermone agere tecum? nec enim semper eodem modo: quid enim simile habet epistula aut iudicio aut contioni? ... epistulas ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... say, at this time he, who afterwards became most eloquent, had an impediment in his speech, which it took much labour to overcome. To improve his knowledge of French, he spent some months with a French family in Madawaska, among the descendants of the ancient Acadians. In this way he acquired a colloquial knowledge of ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... later than '62. At any rate, Tims is at least eighty-five, and possibly older. Here again we have a definite conviction of the use of the word Ku Klux before the War. The way he talks of it, the term might have been a colloquial term applied to a jayhawker or a patroller. He doesn't mean Ku Klux Klan when he says ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... las necesidades y sus remedios."—"Relation de las Cosas de Yucatan," page 160. Like much of Landa's Spanish, this use of the word "necesidad" is colloquial, ...
— The Books of Chilan Balam, the Prophetic and Historic Records of the Mayas of Yucatan • Daniel G. Brinton
... be necessary to explain here that Pesca prided himself on being a perfect Englishman in his language, as well as in his dress, manners, and amusements. Having picked up a few of our most familiar colloquial expressions, he scattered them about over his conversation whenever they happened to occur to him, turning them, in his high relish for their sound and his general ignorance of their sense, into compound words and repetitions of his own, and always running them into each other, ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... chocolate-colored steps. In one or two places these young ladies were conversing across the street with other young ladies seated in similar postures and costumes in front of the opposite houses, and in the warm night air their colloquial tones sounded strange in the ears of the young Englishmen. One of our friends, nevertheless—the younger one—intimated that he felt a disposition to interrupt a few of these soft familiarities; but his companion observed, pertinently enough, that he had better ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... life and addressed to Mr. Symington. Most of these letters were written in poor health from the Isle of Wight or Jersey, to which places he was sent by the doctors. They are not of the brilliant or gossipy order, but they are admirable in their good colloquial English and cheerful, unaffected style. Lover was a man of great activity of mind, combined with warm affections. His life-story was not very romantic, but it was a wholesome and pleasant one. When young he was deeply attached ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... without affirming his holding the same view at the time of speaking. Madvig, 357, a, Obs. 1. A 341, d, Rem. — ODIOSA: this word is not so strong as our 'hateful', but rather means 'wearisome', 'annoying'. In Plautus the frequent expression odiosus es means, in colloquial English, 'you bore me'. Cf. 47 odiosum et molestum; 65 odiosa offensio. — ONUS AETNA GRAVIUS: a proverbial expression with an allusion to Enceladus, who, after the defeat of the Giants by Juppiter, was said to have been imprisoned under Mt. Aetna. Cf. Eurip. Hercules Furens, 637; also Longfellow's ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... in assigning a more definite value to the terms in question—a proceeding in which we have the countenance of nearly every modern historian—we do not detach them from their original acceptation; at most we give them more constancy and precision than the colloquial language of the Greeks and Romans demanded.[12] The expressions Khasdim and Chaldaei were used in the Bible and by classic authors mainly to denote the inhabitants of Babylon and its neighbourhood; and we find Strabo attaching with precision the ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... along the lines of natural aptitude, and to encourage the existing native industries peculiar to certain tribes, such as the various kinds of basket weaving, canoe building, smith work, and blanket work. Above all, the Indian boys and girls should be given confident command of colloquial English, and should ordinarily be prepared for a vigorous struggle with the conditions under which their people live, rather than for immediate absorption into some more highly ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... changes as occurred in the French and English of America were, for the most part, separate and distinct (as exampled by such Creole words as "banquette" for "sidewalk," in place of the French word trottoir, and the word "baire," whence comes the American term "mosquito bar.") The influence of colloquial French from Canada may also be traced in New Orleans, and the language there was further affected by the strange jargon spoken by the Creole negro—precisely as the English dialect of negroes in other parts of the South may be ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... have contented themselves with devoting a part of certain courses to exercises designed to show the students that the classical languages were at one time in daily use among living people and were the media of ordinary conversation[74]. Students in such courses commonly memorize certain colloquial phrases and take part in simple conversations in which these phrases can be used. Such methods, skillfully employed, undoubtedly relieve the tedium of the familiar drill in grammar and "prose composition," and may help materially in imparting both a knowledge of the ancient languages and a ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... Michael was her chief delight, and she could hardly be detached from him. She refreshed her colloquial German (or rather Austrian) with his nurse, who had much to say of the goodness of die Gnadigen Frauen. Poor thing, she was the youthful widow of a guide, and the efforts of the two Frauen had been in vain to keep alive her only child, after whose death she had found some consolation in taking ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had repeated the assumption with every successive opportunity. He had no wish whatever to allude to Mrs. Osmond; he was NOT always thinking of her; he was perfectly sure of that. He was the most reserved, the least colloquial of men, and this enquiring authoress was constantly flashing her lantern into the quiet darkness of his soul. He wished she didn't care so much; he even wished, though it might seem rather brutal of him, that she would leave him alone. In spite of ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... at each other in the whites of their eyes, if we may use a phrase so colloquial. Sitting back in the vehicle was a third traveller who took no part in the discussion, and preserved a deep silence. The driver and the patriot and even Gudin paid no attention to this mute individual; he was, in truth, one of those ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... to join her daughter, Farrel knew that at all events he had earned the approval of the influential member of the Parker family. Mrs. Parker, on her part, was far more excited than her colloquial humor indicated. ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... the sallies of egotism and vanity, even when they were in so slight a degree that strict politeness would rather tolerate than ridicule them. Dr. Darwin seldom failed to present their caricature in jocose but wounding irony. If these ingredients of colloquial despotism were discernible in unworn existence, they increased as it advanced, fed by an ever growing reputation within and without ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... first visited Coburg, in October, 1852, I was very anxious to make Rueckert's acquaintance. My interest in Oriental literature had been refreshed, at that time, by nearly ten months of travel in Eastern lands, and some knowledge of modern colloquial Arabic. I had read his wonderful translation of the Makamat of Hariri, and felt sure that he would share in my enthusiasm for the people to whose treasures of song he had given so many years of his life. I found, however, that very few families in the town were familiarly acquainted with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... for the more unrestrained and rousing declamation of another class. The singular success of Chalmers, seems to be in a considerable measure owing to his attention to this fact. He has abandoned the pure and measured style, and adopted a heterogeneous mixture of the gaudy, pompous, and colloquial, offensive indeed to the ears of literary men, but highly acceptable to those who are less biassed by the authority of a standard taste and established models. We need not go to the extreme of Chalmers,—for there is no necessity for inaccuracy, bombast, or false taste—but ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... first topic is his really famous "obscurity." This obscurity is variously ascribed to a diction unduly learned, or almost unintelligibly colloquial, or grotesquely inventive; to figures of speech drawn from sources too unfamiliar or elaborated to the point of confusion; to sentences complicated by startling inversions, by double parentheses, by broken constructions, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... the reader will bear with me through these alphabetical fluctuations. Many people, I know from colloquial experiences, do at about this stage fly into a passion. But if you will exercise self-control, then I think you will see my point that, according to the method of voting, almost any sort of result may be got out of ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... philosophical part of a language, is useful only for the niceties and perfection of that language, and not a subject for boys. In all instances, perhaps, where the language to be learned is made the common colloquial language of the pupil, the objections stated against the use of the grammar may have some weight. But as this is not the case with regard to the Greek and Latin languages in Europe, nor to the written character in China, which differs ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... however, suffered under the delusion that something other than fact can be the best substance of history. According to his tastes, many of Washington's letters were not sufficiently dignified; they were too colloquial, they even let slip expressions which no man conscious that he was the model of propriety, the embodiment of the dignity of history, could have used. So Mr. Sparks without blushing went through Washington's letters and substituted for the originals words which ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... nicest-looking waitresses. Of course, he positively refuses to speak a word of his own native language, but gives his orders in English, Spanish, and Russian, to the despair of all the attendants, with the exception of the pretty waiting-maid, to whom he addresses himself in colloquial French. She quite enters into the joke; can give and take as pleasantly as possible; can also fetch and carry; and when, finally, DAUBINET en bon prince rewards her intelligence with a two-franc piece, her bright smile, and her courteous "Merci beaucoup, Monsieur," ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 29, 1891 • Various
... glad you write the word "lunch," and not "luncheon." I told FRED that—but he went to Johnson's Dictionary, and read out something about "Lunch" being only a colloquial form of "luncheon." Still, I don't care a little bit. Dr. JOHNSON lived so long ago, and couldn't ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... a handkerchief as brilliant. Coming straight from the glare out of doors, he was not aware of the stranger in the salon till his eyes were used to the gloom. Then madame and Bessie effected Harry's introduction, and as Harry, with a rare wisdom, had practised colloquial French, he and the canon were soon acquainted. Once only had the old man visited England, a visit for ever memorable on account of the guinea he had paid for ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... CENT, 'As crazy as a loon.' It is difficult to preserve the figure in an idiomatic translation. Compare the colloquial English, "You ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... Paine, as well as Mendelssohn, has been a devoted student of Bach, whose characteristics are so strong that they may well have left their mark upon the works of both composers. But especially it would seem that there is some real, though very general resemblance between this colloquial chorus, "Behold," etc., and some choruses in "St. Paul," as, for example Nos. 29 and 36-38. In the same way the scene in the high-priest's hall might distantly suggest either of these passages, or others in ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... conversation that I wondered whether a change had not come over the spirit of the people. They seemed to me as silent as Americans when Americans have not been "introduced," and infinitely less addicted to exchanging remarks in railway trains and at tables d'hote than the colloquial and cursory English; a fact perhaps not worth mentioning were it not at variance with that reputation which the French have long enjoyed of being a pre-eminently sociable nation. The common report of the character of a people is, however, an indefinable ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... should have more; but then the Turks would demand more, so our spirits are broken, and we are eaten up. We have no heart to work for our oppressors." Continue to read the Arabic New Testament, which aids me in colloquial disquisitions with the people. The Ghadamsee people persist in not taking medicines during the fast. One told me, "Even if a man dies, and medicine could save him, he must not take it." I have therefore ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... here apologize for the imperfect manner in which I am obliged to exhibit Johnson's conversation at this period. In the early part of my acquaintance with him, I was so wrapt in admiration of his extraordinary colloquial talents, and so little accustomed to his peculiar mode of expression, that I found it extremely difficult to recollect and record his conversation with its genuine vigour and vivacity. In progress of time, when my mind was, as it were, strongly impregnated—with ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... difficult vernacular mastered; the would-be student discovers that literary works, even newspapers and ordinary correspondence, are not composed in it, but in another dialect, partly antiquated, partly artificial, differing as widely from the colloquial speech as Latin does from Italian. Make a second hazardous supposition. Assume that the grammar and vocabulary of this second indispensable Japanese language have been learnt, in addition to the first. You are still but at the threshold of your task, Japanese thought having barricaded ...
— The Invention of a New Religion • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... severely flayed Tagore for introducing a new style into Bengali poetry," I began. "He mixed colloquial and classical expressions, ignoring all the prescribed limitations dear to the pundits' hearts. His songs embody deep philosophic truth in emotionally appealing terms, with little regard for the accepted ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... all but a few gestures, and told the stories sitting down. I also used less colloquial English; and from then on, until the end, when I told the stories from Van Dyke in his own words, there was a steady growth in literary style. I append the programs in the ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... audience, or pictures or lights and shades; a far more potent charm entirely sway'd me. In the course of the sermon, (there was no sign of any MS., or reading from notes,) some of the parts would be in the highest degree majestic and picturesque. Colloquial in a severe sense, it often lean'd to Biblical and Oriental forms. Especially were all allusions to ships and the ocean and sailors' lives, of unrival'd ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... no person, and it is almost more appropriate to the colloquial jocularity of the great Lexicographer's bombast than if the enunciation had been more strictly according to rule. Besides, the correctness of the expression, even as it stand, is capable of defence. Let the third and fourth terms be understood ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.15 • Various
... by clothing those promises in language as magnificent as his own. It is much less easy to catch the subtle graces of Addison. At the conclusion of the Rambler, he boasts that "he has laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... multitude of readers who, being, like all multitude, mediocre, demand the mediocre in literature. And I know that it is equally foolish to neglect the popular elements in the developing American genius—that genius which is so colloquial now, and yet so inventive; so vulgar sometimes, and yet, when sophistication is not forced upon it, so fresh. I have no wish to evade the necessity for consulting the wishes and the taste of the public, which good sense and commercial necessity alike impose upon the editor. I would ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... retrace which were utterly impossible—they invariably arrived at old times again. Having in course of the evening pretty well exhausted their powers, both mental and physical, they went to sleep on it, and resumed the colloquial melange ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... school days will be recognized as truthful pictures of every-day occurrence. The style is colloquial and pleasant, and therefore well suited to those for whose ...
— Cat and Dog - Memoirs of Puss and the Captain • Julia Charlotte Maitland
... need to learn Latin anyway, why not kill two birds with one stone, and make Latin our universal language? Why not have a colloquial, every-day Latin, such as the Romans used to speak in Italy? In point of fact, Latin was the universal language with travelers and educated people all through the Middle Ages. We need to learn it anyhow, so why not make it our ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... there was to be still much missionary activity, though printing presses had been brought from Europe for the proper diffusion of Christian literature in the Romanized colloquial,[8] though there were yet to be built more church edifices and monasteries, and Christian schools to be established, a sad change was nigh. Much seed which was yet to grow in secret had been planted,—like the exotic flowers which even yet blossom and shed their perfume ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... The vivid colloquial scenes in prose have much of that pungent semi-satirical humour of which Browning had shown the first glimpse in Sordello. Besides these, there is one intermediate scene in verse, the talk of the "poor girls" on the Duomo steps, which seems to me one of the most pathetic things ever ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... shuttlecock, should not be suffered to remain with one person, but ought to pass in turn to all. But as few people think for themselves, so few people talk for themselves, and a colloquial monopoly is as common and as disagreeable as any other. Yet when we observe how much these rattles are caressed, 'tis wonderful there are so few. Talent is by no means indispensable, and is the more valuable ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... this half-philosophical literature will most easily be understood by a few examples. But, before these are given, it will be necessary to emphasize the colloquial and scrappy nature of the teaching. Legend, parable, ritualistic absurdities, belief in gods, denial of gods, belief in heaven, denial of heaven, are all mingled, and for a purpose. For some men are able, and some are unable, to receive the true light of knowledge. But man's fate depends ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... school-room, with my left hand thrust oratorically into the breast of my frock, and my right loftily waving, "I wish to collect your suffrages on a certain subject. Tell me," sitting down on a hard chair, and suddenly declining into a familiar and colloquial tone, "have you seen any signs of ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... are nice people," I assented to my wife's observation, using the colloquial phrase with a consciousness that it was anything but "nice" English, "and I'll bet that their three children are better brought up than ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... philosophy and politics rather than the weather, or the cost of things, or the question of how long the train stopped and when it would start, or the dishes at table, or clothes at the tailor's, or the forms of greeting and parting. If he did not equip me with the useful colloquial phrases, the fault was mine; and the misfortune was doubly mine when from my old acquaintance with Italian (glib half-sister of the statelier Spanish) the Italian phrases would thrust forward as the equivalent of the ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... the contractor again, and then he said something in Spanish to the aged Mexican. What it was Tom could not catch, for Delazes spoke rapidly and seemed to use some colloquial, or slang phrases with which our hero was not familiar. The old Mexican assented by a nod, and then he brought out some corn meal which Eradicate took. The woman with the golden image had gone into ...
— Tom Swift in the City of Gold, or, Marvelous Adventures Underground • Victor Appleton
... though the author of such promising novels as Our Mr. Wrenn and The Job, had been forced by the neglect of his more serious work to earn a living with the smarter set among American novelists, writing bright, colloquial, amusing chatter for popular magazines. If it seems a notable achievement for a temper like Mr. Masters's to have helped pave the way to popularity for Mr. Lewis, it seems yet more notable to have performed a similar service for Zona Gale, who for something like a ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... that can take our minds from our business. We discuss the ghastly particulars of a steamboat explosion, or the evidence in a trial for murder; or if the chief magistrate addresses his fellow-citizens in his colloquial, yet dignified way, we dispute whether he was not, at the time of the speech, a martyr to those life-long habits of abstinence from which he is known to have once suffered calamities spared the confirmed wine-bibber. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... different selections from his Benvenuto Cellini, while Berlioz sang to them in his peculiarly monotonous style. I also met the journalist, Jules Janin, who was quite a celebrity in Paris, although it took me a long time to realise this; the only thing that impressed me about him was his colloquial Parisian French, which ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... man who co-operated with Scott in such frivolities, let me say a word or two more about Sir Alexander. He was the son, observe, of Johnson's Jamie Boswell, but he was about as like his father as an eagle might be to a peacock. To use a common colloquial phrase, he was a man of genius, if ever there was one. Had he been a poorer and socially humbler man than he was—had he had his bread and his position to make—he would probably have achieved immortality. ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... Japan, the spoken and written language was identical, but with the study of the Chinese literature and the composition of native works almost exclusively in that language, there grew up differences between the colloquial and literary idiom, and the infusion of Chinese words steadily increased. In writing, the Chinese characters occupy the most important place. But all those words which express the wants, feelings, and concerns of everyday life, all that is deepest in the human heart, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... on the front seat, ready to pour breathless confidences into her ear the moment she appeared. They spoke with a curious mingling of tongues, but had apparently no difficulty in understanding her when she replied in rapid, colloquial French, so that it was evident that the hours of play had not been wasted, but had ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... of her existence she had not time to master our language as Blanco White did, or as Chamisso mastered German. To the end of her days, fluent and graceful as she was, she was not entirely conversant with English, especially with the colloquial turns of modern speech. Often a very fine thought is spoiled for hypercritical ears by the queer turn of expression which she has innocently given to it. These faults are found to a much smaller degree in her miscellaneous poems. Her sonnets, here printed for the first time, seem to me to ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... impossible for you even to foresee the year in which you could repay it; but,"—here Duplessis paused a minute, and then lowering the tone of his voice, which had been somewhat vehement and enthusiastic, into that of a colloquial good-fellowship, equally rare to the measured reserve of the financier, he asked, with a lively twinkle of his grey eye, "Did you never hear, Marquis, of a little encounter between ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... or containing 'strange things'? Were ever such vague puerilities collected into one short paragraph? This is pure impertinence, and Phil. deserves to be privately reprimanded for quoting such windy chaff without noting and protesting it as colloquial. But what I wish the reader to mark—the [Greek: tho hepimhythion]—is, that suppose the two Scaligers amongst the Christian Fathers engaged in fixing the canon: greater learning you cannot have; neither was there, to a dead certainty, one tenth part as much amongst the canon-settlers. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... reopened under the name of the Portola-Louvre, where now crowds assemble nightly to listen to music and witness cabaret performances. Here, as well as in a number of other places, one can well appreciate the colloquial definition of "cabaret." That which takes the rest out of restaurant and puts the din in dinner. If one likes noise and distraction while eating such places ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... of the Letters is colloquial but thoroughly accurate. 'The art of letter-writing suddenly rose in Cicero's hands ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... sentiments of nature are grasped with imaginative insight and denoted and interpreted with a free, delicate, and luminous touch. He has also addressed the public as an author. He has written an easy, colloquial account of his own life, and that breezy, off-hand, expeditious work,—after passing it as a serial through their Century Magazine,—the Century Company has published in a beautiful volume. It is a work that, for the sake of the writer, will be welcomed everywhere, and, for its own ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... and compasses as symbols of moral rectitude, which forms such a striking feature of European masonry, finds no place in the ceremonial of the Triad Society, although recognized as such in Chinese literature from the days of Confucius, and still so employed in the every-day colloquial of China. ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... own slow Southwestern, half musical intonation. This languid deliberation was particularly noticeable in her reading aloud, and gave the studied and measured rhetoric a charm of which her careless colloquial speech was incapable. Even the "Fifth Reader," with its imposing passages from the English classics carefully selected with a view of paralyzing small, hesitating, or hurried voices, in Cressy's hands became no longer an unintelligible incantation. She had quietly ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... says just what ought to be said, and that in style colloquial, short, sharp, and ...
— Publisher's Advertising (1872) • Anonymous
... uttered now were not of classic heroism. They were simple, colloquial, inelegant. For Stern, ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... a pessimist in the colloquial sense admits of little question. Nor is it surprising; it is rather difficult not to be. Not a few persons are pessimists and won't tell. They preserve a fair exterior, but secretly hold that all flesh is grass. Some people escape the disease by virtue of much philosophy ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... he stood on a nail in the carpenter's shop, or could not button his robe when he was in a hurry, or whether he laughed over the repartees by which he baffled the priests when they tried to trap him into sedition and blasphemy, or even if you tell any part of his story in the vivid terms of modern colloquial slang, you will produce an extraordinary dismay and horror among the iconolaters. You will have made the picture come out of its frame, the statue descend from its pedestal, the story become real, with all the incalculable consequences that may flow from ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... who live around the corner are discussed in this volume, there will be no chance for painful misunderstandings. I have no desire to rub the wrong way anyone who proves his true friendship by purchasing a copy of this Work. It may be advisable to explain that these Fables are written in the colloquial American language. The vocabulary employed is one that has become familiar to the ear, although it is seldom seen on the printed page. In other words, this volume contains a shameless amount of slang. If any part of it is unintelligible to the reader, he should be glad that he has escaped ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... reasons, English-speaking hackers almost never use double negatives, even if they live in a region where colloquial usage allows them. The thought of uttering something that logically ought to be an affirmative knowing it will be misparsed as a negative tends to ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... elevation of voices kept pace with the noise and confusion. At one end of the table Cornelia Graham stood talking to a distinguished foreigner who was spending a few days in the city. He was a handsome man, with fine colloquial powers, and seemed much interested in a discussion which he and Cornelia carried on, relative to the society of American cities as compared with European. A temporary lull in the hum of voices allowed Cornelia to hear a remark made by a ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... colloquial phrase implies, in a seamanlike manner; as, "That mast is not rigged ship-shape;" "Put her about ship-shape," &c. (See ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... this letter, for it is omitted often when a following syllable contains it; as pejero for perjero; and grammarians have noticed that the genitive plural of the future participle is of rare occurrence. In the colloquial and provincial Latin, r is often dulled into l. Thus on one of the walls at Pompeii a part of the first line of the Aeneid was found written, "ALMA VILVMQVE CANO TLO"—a rendering which might have been produced by a modern Chinese. ...
— Latin Pronunciation - A Short Exposition of the Roman Method • Harry Thurston Peck
... Australia?" After I had finished the Lord Mayor made a few remarks with reference to the subject at issue and concluded by moving a vote of thanks. This was really outside our practice at the institute. I thanked the Lord Mayor for his kind remarks, and in quite a colloquial way said that it was distressing to go round the public parks about Sydney on holidays and Saturday afternoons and see thousands of young men sitting on fences smoking cigarettes, content to loaf and look on while a few men played ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... long as there is left of Plymouth Rock a piece large enough to make a gunflint of!" "This," Professor Phelps says, "is purest idiomatic English." He adds, "The old Scotch interrogative, 'What for?' is as pure English in written as in colloquial speech." ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... number of marsupial species of the genus Wallabia, etc., related to the kangaroo, but smaller; (colloquial) "on the wallaby (track)", on the ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... Ibsen could have carried through. As it is, there are palpable fluctuations, discrepancies of manner; the realism of treatment often provokes a realism of style out of keeping with the lyric afflatus of the verse; and we pass with little warning from the barest colloquial prose to the strains of high-wrought poetic fancy. Nevertheless, the style, with all its inequalities, becomes in Ibsen's hands a singularly plastic medium of dramatic expression. The marble is too richly veined ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... I heard a woman say that she had got to begin banting. A nice verb, to bant, though not approved of by the dictionary, which scornfully terms it "humorous and colloquial". The humor, to be sure, is usually for other people, not for the person banting. Do you know, I wonder, the derivation of this word? It means, of course, to induce this too, too solid flesh to melt, by the careful ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... philosophy against deism, atheism, and David Hume. They loved to see him, as Goldsmith said, wind into his subject like a serpent. Everybody felt at the Literary Club that he had no superior in knowledge, and in colloquial dialectics only one equal. Garrick was there, and of all the names of the time he is the man whom one would perhaps most willingly have seen, because the gifts which threw not only Englishmen, but Frenchmen like ...
— Burke • John Morley
... rather a luxury to be a little fatigued. She moreover half suspected that Deborah might, and would do better, if not embarrassed with that feeling of hurry and perplexity, which so many of what in colloquial phrase are sometimes termed slow-moulded people, experience when obliged to divide their attention among a ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... to feel the absolute necessity for writing decent dialogue—not mere stage dialect that may be scamped and ranted ad libitum by the "star" to suit his own taste, or want of it, but real dialogue, which, while ideally reflecting the colloquial language of the day, taxes the intelligence and feeling of the actor ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... it did. If anybody spoke the language so, or in prose wrote it so, they would certainly be a fool; but the Muses wished the sister to observe that every art existed by its convention, or by what in the moral world Ibsen would call its life-lie. If you looked at it from the colloquial standpoint, music was the absurdest thing in the world. In the orchestral part of an opera, for instance, there were more repetitions than in the scolding of the worst kind of shrew, and if you were to go about singing what you had to say, and singing ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... actor: "Kean is original; but he copies from himself. His rapid descent from the hyper-tragic to the infra-colloquial, though sometimes productive of great effect, are often unreasonable. To see him act, is like reading 'Shakespeare' by flashes of lightning. I do not think him thorough-bred gentleman ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... his companions; and took occasion to speak a few words in praise of young Milnwood, of whom, as of a champion of the Covenant, he augured great things. The second part he applied to the punishments which were about to fall upon the persecuting government. At times he was familiar and colloquial; now he was loud, energetic, and boisterous;—some parts of his discourse might be called sublime, and others sunk below burlesque. Occasionally he vindicated with great animation the right of every freeman to worship God according to his own conscience; and presently he charged the ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... commencements, dedications, eulogies, and all the train of special public gatherings, offer rare opportunities for the display of tact and good sense in handling occasion, theme, and audience. When to be dignified and when colloquial, when to soar and when to ramble arm in arm with your hearers, when to flame and when to soothe, when to instruct and when to amuse—in a word, the whole matter of APPROPRIATENESS must constantly be in mind lest you write your ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... countless volumes of confessions! Whose daily task is to wrestle hour by hour with a living Comedie Humaine! Has the constant spectacle of so many books been astringent in its effect upon any latent creative impulse? Or has he been dumb in the colloquial sense, forsooth; a figure like Mr. Whistler's guard in the British Museum? Sundry "lettered booksellers" of England have, indeed, given us some reminiscences of bookselling and its humours. But they were the old boys. They belonged to an old order and reflected another day. "As physicians ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... at my declining to kneel before him, addressed me in words that sounded violent; but, as he spoke classical Tibetan, and I only the colloquial language, I could not understand a word he said. I meekly asked him not to use such fine words, as they ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... Vernon, adopting the free and easy style, which had formerly distinguished his colloquial efforts. "Where did you pick up ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... mirth? In him, all extremes appeared to meet; the man was a contradiction to himself. Tom was a person of few words, and so intensely lazy that it required a strong effort of will to enable him to answer the questions of inquiring friends; and when at length aroused to exercise his colloquial powers, he performed the task in so original a manner that it never failed to upset the gravity of the interrogator. When he raised his large, prominent, leaden-coloured eyes from the ground, and looked the inquirer steadily in the ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... prototype of Stevenson's "Weir of Hermiston," was known as the "hanging judge"—the Judge Jeffreys of Scotland; but he was a sound judge. He argued a point in a colloquial style, asking a question, and himself supplying the answer in his clear, abrupt manner. But he was illiterate, and without the least desire for refined enjoyment, holding in disdain natures less coarse than his own; he shocked the feelings of those even of ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... passed saluted me with the words, 'Bon soir!' although the hour was eight in the morning. In these parts, however, bon soir is frequently said at all hours. It is a colloquial peculiarity. Another is to address or speak of a gentleman and a lady as ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... already been in Contalmaison, but did not stay. "Too many German machine guns and too much artillery fire and not enough men," to put it with colloquial army brevity. It often happened that a village was entered and parts of it held during a day, then evacuated at night, leaving the British guns full play for the final "softening." These initial efforts had the result of reconnaissances in force. They ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... "Blueskin; Colloquial term for a person recovered from a plague which left large patches of blue pigment irregularly distributed over the body. Especially, inhabitants of Dara. The condition is said to be caused by a chronic, non-fatal form of ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... revised by him. It has all the freshness and vigour, but also a full measure of the faults, of a hasty production. It is often very literal—barbarously literal frequently—but just as often very loose. He had evidently a good colloquial knowledge of Spanish, but apparently not much more. It never seems to occur to him that the same translation of a word will not suit in ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... was colloquial, but quite good, showing here and there what we often notice in the speech of those who have been educated in isolated places far from that babel of polite energies which we call the world; something that may be described ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... remain deservedly popular in this country's literature. 'The sonnet shining in the eyes' has been fixed by Mr. Dennis in what is certainly a classic of its class, and he secures an effect of true poetry without straining a simile or defying the canons of Australia's colloquial speech." ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... Zanga, the inequality of Mr. Cooper's acting is strikingly conspicuous. Of the great distinction between the colloquial familiarity suitable to ordinary dialogue, and the solemn, dignified, and lofty delivery becoming the orator in a great public assembly, Mr. Cooper seems to have entirely lost sight in the celebrated speech to the senate, the first lines of which may serve ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... may perhaps enjoy the distinction of having added words or expressions to colloquial English. The name 'Collins' is almost established as the description of a letter of thanks after a visit; and we have heard of a highly intelligent family among whom a guinea is always alluded to as 'something considerable' in memory of the sum believed ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... the revolt; no slight act of devotion, when one considers that the obligations of the contracting parties reposed rather on expediency than on moral principles. Here he made the acquaintance of all the leading personages at the Ottoman Porte, and learned colloquial Turkish in perfection. Petronievitch is astute by education and position, but he has a good heart and a capacious intellect, and his defects belong not to the man, but to the man's education and circumstances. Although placable ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... if we recollect rightly, said that by so many more languages as a man knows, by so many more times is he a man—an apophthegm of but a shallow kind if all he meant to convey was that an Englishman who can speak French is also a Frenchman by virtue of his knowledge of the colloquial. The opening up of new fields of thought through the medium of a new literature, is a result more worthy the effort of acquiring a foreign language than sparkling in a salon with the purest imaginable accent; and herein Sir W. Hamilton counted without ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... instance, how easily distinguished, even by an English alien, from the western dialects of Ayrshire, &c.! And I have heard it said, by Scottish purists in this matter, that even Sir Walter Scott is chargeable with considerable licentiousness in the management of his colloquial Scotch. Yet, generally speaking, it bears the strongest impress of truthfulness. But, on the other hand, how false and powerless does this same Sir Walter become, when the necessities of his tale oblige him at any ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... "My boy," he said, (colloquial ways,—the vast, broad-hatted man,) "Come dine with us on Thursday next,—you must, you know you can; We're going to have a roaring time, with lots of fun and noise, Distinguished guests, et cetera, the JUDGE, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... nor could he speak it himself with propriety. For the rest of the evening the talk was in Latin. Boscovich had a ready current flow of that flimsy phraseology, with which a priest may travel through Italy, Spain, and Germany. Johnson scorned what he called colloquial barbarisms. It was his pride to speak his best. He went on, after a little practice, with as much facility as if it was his native tongue. One sentence this writer well remembers. Observing that Fontenelle, at first, opposed the Newtonian philosophy, and embraced it afterwards, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... hundreds have deceived themselves in trying to catch the trick of phrase peculiar tn some distinguished contemporary. In vain do they imitate the Latinisms and antitheses of Johnson, the epigrammatic sentences of Macaulay, the colloquial ease of Thackeray, the cumulative pomp of Milton, the diffusive play of De Quincey: a few friendly or ignorant reviewers may applaud it as "brilliant writing," but the public remains unmoved. It is imitation, and as such ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... is to be gained by attributing beauties which it does not possess, while obscuring its true merits, which are not few. For the same reason, while keeping the Irish second person singular in verses and formal speech, I have in ordinary dialogue substituted the pronoun you, which suggests the colloquial style of the original better ...
— The Cattle-Raid of Cualnge (Tain Bo Cualnge) • Unknown
... passages, abundant everywhere in his work, relating to his own life with an intimacy which was always-more rather than less. His rhetoric there, and in certain of his historical studies, had a sort of luminous richness, without losing its colloquial ease. I keenly enjoyed this subtle spirit, and the play of that brilliant intelligence which lighted up so many ways of literature with its lambent glow or its tricksy glimmer, and I had a deep sympathy with certain morbid moods and experiences so like my own, as I was pleased to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that touch the heart by their familiarity. He is no disciple of the gaunt and famished school of simplicity. He uses the ornaments which must always distinguish true poetry from prose; and when he adopts colloquial plainness, it is with the utmost skill to avoid a vulgar humility. There is more of this sustained simplicity, of this chaste economy and choice of words, in Goldsmith than in any other modern poet, or, perhaps, than would be attainable or desirable as a standard for every writer of rhyme. ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... medium for a satire on the social crudity of Norway. In writing satire, it is all-important that the form should be adequate, and at this time Ibsen had not reached the impeccable perfection of his later colloquial prose. He started Love's Comedy, therefore, anew, and he wrote it as a pamphlet in rhyme. It is not certain that he had any very definite idea of the line which his attack should take. He was very poor, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... battle of Antietam was fought Wednesday, but I could not find out until Saturday whether we had won a victory or lost a battle. It was then too late to issue it that day, and on Sunday I fixed it up a little, and on Monday I let them have it." This colloquial style was characteristic of Mr. Lincoln, and the frankness with which it was spoken disposes utterly of the claims made in behalf of Mr. Chase and Mr. Sumner that they contributed to the text of the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... formula which they had conceived as final. It was not given to them to realize their ambition—to write novels which should not contain a single bookish expression, plays which should reveal that hitherto undiscoverable quantity—colloquial speech, raised to the level of consummate art. The famous ecriture artiste remained an unfulfilled ideal. The expression, first used in the preface to Les Freres Zemganno, merely foreshadows a possible ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... the colonel—in colloquial phrase at least—went everywhere. After the six months of comparative seclusion which decency exacted of his widowerhood—and thereby afforded him ample leisure to complete and publish his Lichfield Legislative Papers prior to 1800—the colonel, be it repeated, went everywhere; ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... votes for Old Mortality, The Antiquary or Rob Roy because of the rich humor of those romances. Scott's dialect, although true to nature, is not difficult, as he did not consider it necessary to give all the colloquial terms, like the ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... to become so, she tried to seem it. The desire was partly sincere, partly an affectation, as we discern in such little trifles as her suddenly using the word "thou" in a letter to Hookham where she had previously been using the ordinary colloquial "you." That she was not quite ingenuous we also detect in the fast-and-loose conduct which enabled her, while affecting to become what Shelley deemed her to be, also to play into the hands of very inferior people, who must sometimes have counselled her against him behind his back; and this, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... Alexander McKenzie. Boston: D. Lothrop & Co. This neatly and strongly got up volume consists of sixteen fresh, vigorous, chatty, colloquial sermons. The author has the solidity of the Scotch teacher, and the polish and beauty of the English preacher combined with the freedom, the raciness, interest, and the freshness of the American pulpit ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... sitting down into unexpected laps. Expostulations, apologies, and so on. Somebody had gnawed a piece from one of the wheels, and we lurched through the scenery with a banging metallic clangour which made conversation difficult, in spite of which Jo astonished the natives by her colloquial and fluent Serbian. We had an enormous director of a sanitary department and a plump wife, evidently risen, but fat people rise in Serbia automatically like balloons. We had three meagre old gentlemen, one unshaven for a week, ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... called Baciccio, one of the most eminent Genoese painters, was no less celebrated for portraits than for history. Pascoli says he painted no less than seven different Pontiffs, besides many illustrious personages. Possessing great colloquial powers, he engaged his sitters in the most animated conversation, and thus transferred their features to his canvas, so full of life and expression, that they looked as though they were about to speak to the beholder. He also had a remarkable talent of painting ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner |
